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Rashid grunts and makes a face at the mention of 'a taste for flesh,' strapping one of the two climbing kits onto his pack and helping to stow the other gear on the pack horse they've been given. "Well, I don't relish the idea of just running in swinging, but it sounds like any cyclopes wouldn't give us the chance to do otherwise. Still, these are ruins, not an actual city or village. Hopefully we won't run into one at all."
After checking everything is carefully stowed, he says, "I am ready when you are."
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Quartermaster Aram bin-Kaleel his eyes full of mischief as he gives your party the items on the requisition order. "Another lot off to your death!" he laughs as his eyes open in wide feigned shock. Seeing your faces, he laughs some more, "Don't look so! Gotta take a joke. By the way, if you need any more items to help you on your mission, I've got them here." Smiling he continues as he picks items from the racks behind him, "See I've got this 10ft pole, can be used for lots of exciting things, keeping animals at bay, jumping over pits! Or these antidotes against the poisonous snake or spider that lurks in the darkness!" He claps his hands in joy, "As you know, we quarter-masters know everything!" emphasising the last words as his voice rises in tone.
..........
...........
With Tonraq's pack horse loaded with goods, he leads it towards Min-Khadaim.
After about a quarter-hour walk - the mild cold wind biting those whose clothing is insufficient to weather it! - a large stone wall looms out of the trees ahead. Made of titanic stone blocks cut and fitted with precision, it feels ancient in a way that surpasses mere age. Creeping vines and moss cover most of the surfaces, but here and there bare stone reveals carved symbols along the wall’s surface. A massive entrance archway a hundred feet wide is the only break visible in the wall as it stretches between stands of the fiery bruorsivi pines. Above the archway, looking down on all who would enter, is a carving of a single gigantic eye...
...as the party approaches, Pooka darts around through the trees, scouting for dangers that lurk, the other three approach steadily looking to discover all they can about their section of Min-Khadaim, Rashid unrolls the Survey Maps, and discovers a note tucked inside, sharing it with the party:
Pathfinders,
These maps are incomplete. As part of your Archaeological Study, please take time to correct any inconsistencies you discover. When we reconvene, we will pool our collected notes together, and make needed revisions.
Explore, Report, Cooperate,
VC Jorsal of Lauterbury
West to East: A 60-foot District Wall with a steep 75 degree incline stretches far and disappears into the westward trees; Straight ahead, enormous stacked blocks form a District Entrance archway into an area further obscured by overgrowth; Eastward, a 80-foot tall Watch Tower juts up from the extended wall, seemingly standing tall and defiantly against the erosion of time...
You notice from here that the Watch Tower that juts up from the wall is missing significant chunks of stone which would make accessing it a matter of first climbing the wall then crossing along very thin and/or slippery stone platforms, but you think spending time here studying it would yield Important Archaeological Insights!
You spot above the District Entrance what looks to be eroded carvings currently obscured by the vines and moss, as well as some bruorsivi pines whose branches extend to touch down near those areas, and you think spending time here studying it would yield Important Archaeological Insights!
It strikes you that the District Wall spanning westward seems to be of a special construction material and/or technique, and you think spending time here studying it would yield Important Archaeological Insights!
[spoiler=GM Screen]
You are in exploration mode for the Archaeological Study (mapping and exploring) of the city, there will be a series of skill checks at each location for which you get Exploration Points. For each exploration location, each character may make a skill check or aid another with a DC=15. You are encouraged to think of creative solutions and explanations when using the nominated skill or a different skill check to than that given for a location. You may want to use a different skill, if you think that it will be better than using the nominated skill, the DC may be different than the nominated skill (easier or harder). Each location takes 2 hours to map and document.
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Rangi limps towards the site, as he walks he uses his club to give him support. When they get to the site he stows his club and gets his shield.
He looks at the District Wall
"This construction seems different than the ones that I've seen before. Do we have any engineers with us? Huh, no. Ok." Rangi goes to have a look.
Rangi analyze how the wall interacts with its surrounding if the plants grow on it. How it is secured from devastating forces of nature.
Rangi then analyzes how effective the wall could be when defending the place. How hard it would be to breach the wall, and fight its defenders.
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"Heys...there's carvings up theres," Pooka suddenly says, pointing upward at the District Entrance. "Coulds maybes use the climbing gear to gets up those trees right theres and then gets close enoughs using those branches theres to takes a looks," she suggests.
But noticing that Rangi seems to have found something to investigate that doesn't involve climbing up the entrance archway or the watchtower, Pooka decides to first amble over to see what he's looking at.
"Oh heys, I dunno if I would've thoughts of thats," Pooka whistles after the orc briefly explains what he's doing. "Peoples usually thinks abouts, like, keeping other peoples outs and not as much abouts keeping nature and stuffs out. But maybe the cyclopseses dids, since theys were super-smarts! Especiallys since this place apparently catches on fires at randoms or somethings?"
As Rangi continues his investigations, Pooka can't help but offer a little encouragement in the form of a song...
~Don't stop believin'
Hold on to that feelin'
Streetlight, people
Don't stop, believin'
Hold on
Streetlights, people~
______________
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The party led by Rangi, who points to the collapsed wall with his club, make the journey over to the gigantic wall. Tonraq leads the horse over, laden with the equipment required for the survey work. Unpacking the tools, you start to investigate the wall and the area around it. Rangi assigns roles to everyone, taking careful measurements of the stones used in building the walls. Tonraq and his bear starts by surveying the the flora and fauna that inhabit this area of Min-Khadim. The bear even finding an anthill, full of tasty grubs.
Jak joins Rangi in an intimate study of the ancient walls and how they might have collapsed. Meanwhile deep in prayer Rashid ponders the powers granted by Chamidu that would destroy these walls so easily. Pooka starts his songs of inspiration, which disturbs Rashid's thoughts, but inspire Rangi to remember times from long ago.
Rangi's mind is transported back to those hard times, the times of a mercenary before the green placated his mind. Those times when death came out of the sky, in the form of a red dragon, when even the stones of the castle wall melted in the dread fire that splurged from it's maw. Did not those stones as they melted and reformed take on the shape of these .... Yes, these stones, though huge in comparison have been melted by some great fire, some enormous depth of heat, the shaping are so similar.
Gate Performance (Aid Another) - 1:
Gate Performance (Aid Another) - 2:
Gate Performance (Aid Another) - 3:
Watchtower Performance (Aid Another) - 1:
Watchtower Performance (Aid Another) - 2:
Watchtower Performance (Aid Another) - 3:
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Rashid nods in approval at the portions of the map the party managed to fill out thanks to Rangi's leadership. "Not bad! Never thought of going in for cartography. Perhaps I missed my calling!" He chuckles at the thought of doing literally anything else with his life than adventuring.
He points to the district's entrance that he and Pooka scouted out. "Pooka was right about the climb, it's a tough slope to get up, but with the climbing gear it shouldn't be too bad. Once up there, someone can see what there is to see."
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Webny lags a bit behind at first, awestruck at finally being out in the field. She does eventually begin to pull her weight, though, or at least attempt to.
Unfortunately, she has trouble keeping her focus on any one task long enough to be of serious use.
”Man, you guys! This is amazing!” she observes loudly, frequently, and pretty unhelpfully.
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After the initial success with the Wall, he limps towards Watchtower. Rangi hangs his shield on his back and takes out the climbing kit.
"Long time ago I was not that bad at it." Despite his mauled hand and hurting knees he begin to climb
When he made it up, he ties a rope and throws it down to his allies.
When looking at the next challenge to balance on a narrow surface he is a bit concerned.
He puts his shield and club down and begins speaking in Orcish. Soon his skin is beginning to cover in thick fur as his body morphs into an old and scarred rat. He begins to make his way through the narrow places, jumping slowly forwards.
When on the other side he transforms back into an Orc breathing heavily.
"When you are tiny that distance is way longer than it looks now!" He again ties his rope and tosses it to others
Then he tries to analyze the Watch tower using his fighting experience.
Then he sits and looks at the birds.
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Webny follows Rangi up, impressed by her orcish companion's deftness in scaling the tower. She finds it tough to find purchase herself, and is grateful he threw down a rope for the rest of them.
Once up the wall, she attempts to balance on the precarious surface.
And, like Rangi, she observes the tower to see how useful it might be in a fight (or how many fights it may have already seen).
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Rashid waits below, shield still out but spear stowed, watching his companions nervously. "Careful up there!" he calls, for all the world looking like a fretful mother watching her children climb a tree that's not even that tall. Still, a broken leg from a fall this early in the mission could be disastrous. He waits with bated breath and several healing spells, should someone take a nasty tumble off the tower.
He waits until he's sure Webny's safely across before trying to climb the rope Rangi dropped down.
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First Webny steadfastly marches over to the Watch Tower. Webny all enthusiasm attempts to climb, but each time he tries to grab a solid hold, the sweat on his hands make him slip down. Jak finds a hole at the bottom of the tower allowing entry into the massive round fortification. On the inside a staircase in disrepair going up into the sky, Whilst in the centre a huge pile of stone bricks, broken and fallen from further up the tower. Rangi starts the climb, finding it quite pleasing to have such a stroll with Rashid, Webny, Tonraq (without bear), Jak and Pooka.
All is easy, until there are missing portions of stairway and platforms without direct access. Rangi makes a sudden change into an old flea bitten rat making him able to climb around the tower from platform to platform. Finding some timber debris he is able to create a makeshift bridge, enabling the rest of the party to climb up. They reach the top and are able to see the surrounding area.
Looking down you all see the red bruorsivi pines, various interesting shapes of buildings and clearings. Taking your time, you map the area, drawing the areas of interest. An oval building hidden in the pines, the walkway from the gate through the encroaching forest to another large ruined building, built with stepped layers like a pyramid. Another building with oval roofs near a number of small squat buildings.
You make your way back to the gate and all eyes rest on Rashid, hoping he can find a way up this grand archway, almost 100ft up, made of enormous blocks of basalt set together without mortar. Strange symbols are carved into the blocks high above.
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Rangi looks at Rashid and yells
"Keep on trying Coffeedrinker!"
Yells Orc.
The orc uses his climbing kit and begins to ascendt. His old body gets in the way, but he tries to be methodical in his doing. First feet than hands, hands, feet, etc. Until you get to the top
"Once I liked climbing, once..."
Then he attempts to assess the gate
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Rashid climbs up a tree close to the wall, hoping to get higher before he has to climb the stone blocks. He jumps, but not allowing for gravity, he misses a ledge and starts to slide down. His hands reach out in desperation, as they clatter against the stone, gripping onto the ledge with his fingertips.
Rangi, quickly gets out a rope and starts the climb up the sides of the gate, close to Rashid. Securing the rope, Rangi is able to rescue Rashid and they both ascend noting the patterns etched into the walls. Finding a reliable path to Climb the archway they get higher without damaging any of the carved documents the finer details of the astronomical images.
Pooka, not wanting to be left out climbs the rope left by Rangi and starts to interpret the rubbings of the decorative carvings taken by Rangi and Rashid.
Pooka looks at the rubbings to see the exterior faces of the gateway are carved with astronomical images, with sun and moon symbols dominating.
With the afternoon now getting on, there is time for only one or two more areas that can be explored before the light fades to darkness and exploration and surveying would be very difficult, if not impossible.
Straight north is a once a broad paved roadway leading from the archway to the great building in the distance. The edges of the plaza are defined by decorative stone pillars and fragments of statuary. The road surface itself is covered with grass and a thick layer of soil, requiring some digging to expose the original paving stones.
To the north-east on the way to some interesting squat buildings, through the flora of Min-Khadaim, you see the outline of an oval shaped building hidden and surrounded by bruorsivi pines.
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Rashid pats Rangi on the back upon reaching the top of the archway. "Thank you. I try to stay in shape, but climbing is not my forte. Not many mountains in the jungles of Vudra," he chuckles.
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The young cleric looks over the two areas they can see and points to the squat buildings. "There's something behind the pines," he says. "There, see it? I'm curious as to what it is. I say we go there."
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The Pathfinders battle through the thick undergrowth, cutting back through brambles and fallen boughs of the Broursivi pines. Until eventually you chop a path to the oval-shaped building. A thick layer of fallen pine needles and other organic matter has coated the stonework. This was once an open-air theatre with stone bench seating in the round.
An amphitheatre to rival any gladiatorial theatre, though the arena area is large enough to be used for team sports too, though what sports that might be is something that would require further study and research. But enough of that you don't have time to speculate the sports of the cyclops civilisation that once inhabited Min-Khadaim.
You recognize that a layer of ash on the stone, is evidence of a massive fire on the arena floor. As you research this more and look at the ash more closely, you deduce that there’s no way that ash would have remained here for thousands of years; whoever or whatever caused the fire must have done so fairly recently.
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Rashid runs his fingers along the mossy stone of the theatre, feeling the weight of millennia practically thrumming against his fingertips. Nothing mortal-made ever lasts; the stones are still piled up, but the energy that made it a place of congregation and spectatorship, a place of sport and entertainment, a shrine to violence, has long since dissipated, as have the cyclopes that made this place their home. Only the stones remain, the stones and the gathered force of time.
A sobering reminder, he thinks to himself.
Unable to concentrate through his reverie, he fails to see anything of note on the arena floor.
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"Hmm" grunts Rangi. He walks behind Rashid looking at the structures. Then he leans on one of the rocks and spots the ash
"How on Golarion is there ash here?" in his past he set on fire different buildings: forts, taverns, houses. Mostly made out of wood, but few out of stone. From his experience, ash did not last for long, blow by the wind or washed with the rain.
"I think it was set on fire fairly recently. "
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With time pressing on, the amphitheatre is mapped and surveyed, although traces of what or who caused the fire are nothing but ashes, left to be blown by the winds. Or by Pooka scooping up handfuls and looking at the ash intently, "It's definitely cold though!" he says disappointedly. Webny too takes her time, tracing her finger through the ash in patterns, spelling her name, before rubbing it out.
The sun is moving rapidly down from it's zenith, perhaps you have another four hours before you must either leave or set up camp, you hurry onwards.
Cutting your way out of the amphitheatre, you move to the north east. Amongst the undergrowth and in more of a clearing your come across several stone buildings. As you map out and survey these rows of low stone buildings, old cracked grains lie wedged into cracks in the stones. You surmise that they were once used to hold grain, but as the cyclopes abandoned their former way of life, they were turned to other purposes.
You find the odd bone, skull even, but not from just one kind of creature, but several. Elves, Humans, Gnomes and other creatures bones are scattered throughout the buildings, it reminds you that before Earthfall the buildings appear to have been used to hold prisoners at some time. Or could they be those captured or enslaved from the surrounding lands, by the might cyclops. What happened to make a great civilisation that created this city turn to such barbarism, leaving just the bones as evidence of a bloody history, were such captives used as food for the dominant cyclops, or something else.
Despite your attention taken by the bloody nature of your discoveries, you take stock of you knowledge. Refering back to the maps Rangi and the others made when atop the Watch Tower, you suddenly realises that these storehouses break the regular pattern of alignment of the rest of the buildings in the complex, suggesting that they were built later. Could these really have been built when the cyclopes culture was at its peak, or after when it was falling into some sort of brutal decline. The sort of decline that sees the populace worshipping the dark gods, the gods requiring blood sacrifices or cruel violent death as a spectator sport in the great amphitheatre.
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Pooka attempts to help with cataloguing and identifying some of the bones scattered about, but creature anatomy really isn't something she's studied up on much.
"Uh...I thinks this one's gotta be an elf skulls," she offers hesitantly as she picks up a skull and carefully turns it over in her hands. "Can tells by the shapes of the eye holes...I thinks."
With a shrug, she puts the skull back where she found it, taking a surprising amount of care for a goblin.
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Rushing a little through the survey and mapping of the storage buildings, the group of Pathfinders are soon ready to move on.
To the north east is a squat round building with a domed roof surrounded by the green ivy and other vegetation growing up the walls. On the roof is a large stone sphere half-set into the floor and perforated with thousands of tiny holes. The lower part of the sphere is supported by thousands of stone bearings. An entrance hatch in the southern end of the structure allows access to the inside of the sphere.
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The six Pathfinders enter the through the hatch at the south end into darkness, but it is not totally dark as you all see light entering through the holes in the dome. Jak ensures there is enough light to push away the darkness, as he follows the Pooka and the defensively minded Rangi into the large expanse of space inside. The survey begins, as measurements are taken, Pooka even measuring herself just to be sure.
Rashid looks up and starts to take note of the pinpricks of light entering the dome. With careful calculations and recourse to your training back in Absalom, you deduce that these holes are precisely located to recreate the constellations of Golarion’s night sky as seen 10,000 years ago. The sphere is perfectly balanced, so that cyclopes can walk in the sphere and rotate it under their weight, almost like a water wheel. A series of pictographs along the circumference of they sphere allowed the cyclopes astronomers to recreate the constellations for any time of the year.
You knowledge of the heavens allows you to uncover the fact that there are some stars shown on the dome that do not exist in the modern sky. Either these stars are no longer visible, or no longer exist, this is surely something for the astrologers of the Society to study.