Squares on Cubes Part 1: Campaign Diary

Arriving in Acheron, our heroes felt the chill of cold iron underfoot. A metal landscape surrounded them. Above the small canyon they stood in – more of a pitted scar than a canyon, really – an orange sky glowed with an anaemic light. Scanning his surroundings, something appeared in the corner of 12-Bar’s eye. From out of a rift on far side of the canyon, he saw two figures. One was Renik, who vanished behind a cliff of jagged metal. The other was some kind of ethereal monster, sickly in pallor, with a white mask covering its face. The thing headed south, out of the canyon. But 12-Bar didn’t have much time to think his discovery over at that point, as he and his friends were about to be jumped by three orcs. One of them blew a horn and muttered into a stone that he whipped from his pocket. The orcs then sang praises to their god Gruumsh as they fought, their chanting guiding their strikes. The biggest orc got some serious hits in, including consecutive crits, but 12-Bar had cast bane at the start of the fight and the orcs just didn’t have the means of countering the planewalkers’ abilities. In a matter of moments, all three orcs lay dead.

Healing up and searching the bodies, M’narr found some odd black cake (he threw it to 12-Bar) and a sending stone. Company was imminent. Very imminent, in fact. As the heroes headed out of the canyon to pursue the monster, a squad of orcs, armed but unaggressive, approached the heroes and asked that they follow them to speak with Ironskull. They nervously agreed.

After marching for several hours, the group arrived at a war camp around an imposing fortress of black metal. The fortress’s walls were of an unsettling composition, in places looking like a grotesque compaction of body parts. Oddest of all was that the fortress – Istvarhan, the orcs called it – was teetering on the edge of an orange void. Hundreds of slaves stood at the walls of the castle, pushing it towards the precipice. The air filled with a low grinding sound as slowly, slowly, the balance of the fortress shifted and its walls tipped into the air. A moment of quiet suspension was followed by screams. The castle’s balance shifted back to earth, landing with a deafening clang. Screams were cut short as the slower slaves were minced. Then, a redoubling of whips. The effort to push the castle restarted, and before long it’d risen into the air again. This time, it’d been pushed hard enough. Its balance shifted, and tipped over the precipice. Rather than vanishing, the fortress’s underbelly rose skyward. Heading to the precipice, our heroes saw Acheron’s iron plains continue straight downwards, the gravity shifting to match the face of the colossal cube they found themselves standing on.

As the party waited for their hearing to return to normal, they saw an orcish figure approach them from Istvarhan. The figure was tall, with alert eyes and a dull metal plate covering half of their skull. That’d be Ironskull then. But what did he want with them?

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