Height

The ninjas cautiously circled the balloon. The gnomes had all left for the river and were industriously splashing around in the water. A few people were walking around the area pretending to be on guard. The place was wide open.

Suddenly barking could be heard as one of the travellers discovered the ninjas' riding dogs. Time to act. Quanalarn and Ilwen started to run for one of the baskets with the box. Enncil and Palrion, left by the dogs, started hurling poison-tipped shirukens to bring down their targets. Ealodiel and Filurwen also hurled missiles at those around the balloon to distract from the bomb smugglers.

Enncil sadly met his death at the hand of a cruel magic caster that felled him with bolts of force and then roasted his fallen body with arcane fire. Ealodiel died in equally sick circumstances; in hand-to-hand combat, a plate-armoured fighter struck him a fair blow but a weird, sneaky creature leapt past and dragged Ealodiel to the ground to devour his brains. Was there no end to their evil practices?

Soon the bomb was placed and the surviving halflings retreated to their dogs and escaped. Looking down from the top of the valley side, the ninjas realised that the deaths were in vain. The balloonists had somehow found the box and taken it to the riverside where they set it off. A cloud of roiling smoke shot through with white-hot embers expanded from the riverside with burning travellers running out of it.

[[Six halfling ninjas - CR 9; 170 xp for partial success]]
[[Incendiary Cloud trap - CR 9: 130 xp for safe disposal]]

Not many leagues above the sea

The windghost spotted the strange floating object in the distance and drifted towards it. What could it be? Its size was colossal - 60 feet in length at least - and surely a construct of some kind. Slowly it cruised in to investigate, its tentacles reaching forward to feel the textures of the fascinating thing before it.

Before getting too close, shrieking, unharmonious noises could be faintly heard coming from little hanging cubes below the shape before it. Strange. What could be the source?

Flashes of energy appeared nearby. Could these be anything to do with the little creatures peering out of the boxes? Before it could investigate, three hippogriffs and an eagle appeared from nowhere and raked their claws across its skin, biting chunks of flesh as they did so. Purple waves of pain rolled across the windghost's skin as blood poured from the ever-increasing number of wounds. In self-defence, it bit the flying terrors to make them stop.

Searing pain made it shake as magically summoned energies blasted it. With a moment's concentration, a reflective field was summoned and the tiny spellcasters instead felt the damage they were doing to the creature.

Feeling its life energies bleeding away, the creature still continued to fight back and eventually the air was cleared of opponents. Banking away, the windghost headed for clearer skies.

[[Windghost - CR 15; 1,000 xp for partial success]]

The Party

Female adventurers

Cherlyndria "Cherry" Tallbottle


Traya - a tall, slim blonde with brown eyes. She has as much of a tan as you can get in this climate and her skin is lightly scaled with brass.

Princess - mid-twenties, fair-skinned and girly with thick long brightly blonde hair (often tied in bunches with pink bows) and brown eyes. She dresses in Bright colours like yellows, orange or every shade imaginable of pink and she carries a rather considerable wardrobe with her (just in case). When armoured up she wears breastplate (at the moment) which will have lots of etched sun-symbols and preferably a yellow/golden sheen. She's almost always happy, twirling her hair and munching on something sickly sweet. She is not naive or helplessly stupid but she isn't the brightest spark either which can be obvious enough when her eyes glaze over when Big Complicate Concepts are being discussed.

Adriana Nightfern


Male adventurers

Banaar - A short and wiry hobbit. The sides of his head are shaved, leaving only a blond pony tail. He is plainly dressed and carries a much worn wooden symbol of St. Cuthbert around his neck. While Banaar was basically born to be a sadist, he doesn't really have a crazy look. He is quite bland and plain looking, his only oddity being the network of scars lining his back. He has dark eyes and seems to be aged around 20.

Parry Hotter - a 5 foot 11, very thin 24-year-old wizard. He usually wears light blue robes with a silver trim. He has black shoulder-length hair that is very straight and always appears wet. He has a hooked nose that drops down steeply over his upper lip. This, combined with a downturned mouth and deep nose to mouth grooves makes him look older than he actually is. He might seem unattractive but he has a good charisma and stiking blue eyes that make up for his nose. He always looks as if he's concentrating, even when he isn't but has a very genuine smile. Parry speaks with an accent similar to Russian.

His close relationship with his raven familiar Jed does frighten some people - Jed is usually perched on Parry's arm or shoulder. It can appear very conspiratory and spying but this is usually more due to Jed's nosiness than Parry actually ordering him to spy.

Benedict Aengristian - tall and straight, with broad shoulders an axe-handle wide and topping out at nearly 6’ 4”. His eyes are heterochromatic; the left is a deep emerald green, but the right is a limpid, washed out blue. Pale skinned, almost to the point of albinoism, Benedict’s hair is long, thick, and very blond, as are his well-groomed moustaches. He refuses to cut either, even though it would make wearing his thick warhelm considerably more comfortable.

Benedict works hard at many things. The most important being his skill with Caladbolg, his enchanted bastard swords who’s runes flare red when he smites his foes. The thick furrows in Benedict’s brow betray the second thing that he must practise hard; thinking. Unfortunately, his thought processes are usually less successful than his swordplay.



"Other" adventurers

Squick - He has a kind of feral look with slightly green and rubbery skin. Althouygh he wears dirty, ill-fitting (but functional) armour, he carries no obvious weaponry. Squick tries to keep his mouth hidden but people will probably spot the tentacles. He talks awkwardly - common does not seem to be his first language - and his mouth is mutating.
He knows a lot about Psionics but little else. He does not know quite how he was made but rocks squashed the home of those who created him so now he will never know. he was probably the reject from some experiment. The place he orginated from was probably on one of the big "don't live here" areas but squick still wants someone to blame...

The Gnome Crew

Gnome Crew (by their nicknames-for-communicating-with-non-gnomes and with University departmental associations)

Male Crew:
• Chokablock (Architecture),
• Jaget (Kinetics),
• Meriado (Thermodynamics),
• Richie (Aerodynamics),
• Zindig (Communication)

Female Crew:
• Gliich (Defence),
• Lotus (Chemistry),
• Marjoritops (Biology),
• Ratchet (Zoology),
• Wegrecks (Transportation)

Balloon defences

Q "does the balloon have any added protection? e.g. ballistas, throwing nets against aerial creatures, grappling ropes, pikes etc...."

A "No. The weight of crew, adventurers, supplies and equipment is already considerable. The Prototype Gnomic Airless Balloon is not designed to mount heavy armanents"

Snakes on a Balloon

The party settled into their creaky whicker basket rooms for the flight. Initially, the men chose one room and the women a different one, leaving the remaining two to the gnomes and more storage of equipement.

During the night a surprise woke the druid's canine animal companion - a handful of poisonous vipers escaped from a chest of tools to bite the sleepers. Inflicting minimal damage, the snakes were dispatched by Adriana's Magic Missile as soon as a lantern was lit to illuminate the threat.

Timeline

Day	Event
0	Zumcan destroyed	News travels across the step at different speeds. The cities and large towns are informed quickly through divine and arcane methods; the majority of people will only hear as news filters out into the countryside at bard speed.
1	Week of mourning	Zumcan and the surrounding area (up to 10 miles out) are evacuated and the people moved to neighbouring villages and towns.
2	Call for action	Political groups demand “something be done” but King vacillates. What that ‘something’ should be ranges wildly from ‘declaring war on the occupants of the 5th step who are obviously at fault’ to ‘checking that the 5th step is safe and not about to collapse onto Escona’.
5	King’s hand is forced	News reaches the capital city of many thousands of people fleeing the area in the shadow of the 5th step. Inaction is no longer an option.
6	Army dispatched	The military are sent to the shadow’s border area to ensure law and order are maintained, both in the refugee camps that are starting to appear and in the increasingly empty lands left behind where rumours of looting and arson are rife. Forces will be stretched along the 500 mile border and take some days to get into position.
10	King declares plan	Volunteers are requested to form an exploration team to travel up into the sky and investigate the source of the rock fall. Two weeks is allowed for people to travel to Snowcastle.
13	Churches busy	Fear of Armageddon is driving people to the churches in numbers never seen before.  The bishops provide mixed messages – talking down the risks to reduce panic whilst encouraging the populace to devoutly attend church services ‘just in case’.
24-26	Exploration team formed	Over three days, the small army of volunteers is narrowed down to a handful of elite.
25	Food stocks low	The strain put on food supplies by refugees is causing riots along the shadow’s border. Prices are rising as supply dwindles, forcing near-penniless refugees to go hungry.
29	Bedsdon falls	The small city of Bedsdon, 80 miles from the massive inward wall, had emptied over the last three weeks. Enterprising bands of brigands have moved in from the wilderness and taken over. The local lord demands troops to retake the town but the King says there are none to spare.
31	Anti-monarchy riots	The lack of trade with Bedsdon and the influx of refugees to the city have caused the citizens of Habrigtol to demonstrate in the streets.
32	Prototype Gnomic Airless Balloon delivered	The University has spent the last 3 weeks fitting out the Prototype Gnomic Airless Balloon with all things necessary for a long journey – accommodation, fuel and propulsion systems – whilst also selecting a crew to support the exploration team.
32	Active embassies	There is heightened diplomatic activity from the rulers of the neighbouring steps. The embassies in Snowcastle are now occupied by more senior diplomatic staff, offering help in ‘these troubled times.’
33	Air-worthiness tests	The crew and team work together to understand how the Prototype Gnomic Airless Balloon works
35	Launch day	Massive crowds bid farewell to the exploration team as it floats away.

Map of Escona

The realm of Escona

The 13th step occupies half a million square miles with a surface population of 25 million souls. There are 7 major cities and 60 towns (over 1,000 inhabitants).

• Snowcastle (75,000 people) and location of the University
• Habrigtol (40,000 people)
• Wilddale (30,000 people)
• Brasecaster (24,000 people)
• Zumcan (18,000 people although currently much less)
• Woodmarsh (13,500 people)
• Bedsdon (9,000 people)

In total, half a million people, or 2% of the total population, live in urban environments. The vast majority live in villages and other smaller dwellings throughout the realm.

150,000 square miles of the step, nearly a third of the total area, are dedicated to agriculture. The rest is wilderness, rivers and lakes.

The politics of the realm of Escona are unstable. There is a young king on the throne but he is not of strong enough character to keep the lords and the churches in control. There are several dynamic alliances in place which oppose each other and, through a balance of power, keep the king in place for the moment.

The destruction of Zumcan has been seen by all as an opportunity to gain the advantage. The group that destroys the threat from above will win the support of the populace. King Udogeon has put his backing behind an exploratory expedition using transportation supplied by the University’s experimental science department. The King’s explorers are given a civic welcome and feted until the prototype gnomic airless balloon is ready to launch.

Up, Up and Away!

The game world is of a non-standard construction as shown by the following diagrams:

• Diagram 1
• Diagram 2

The concept is of a spiral staircase around a cone. The steps get progressively smaller in surface area as you rise up the staircase. Each step is 60 miles thick with a 10 mile overlap with the step above so the cliff wall is 50 miles from ground to top and the 15-step diagram is 750 miles high. This should give you an idea of the surface area of each step. There are numerous creation myths for the staircase, most of which will be step-specific.

There are no magnetic directions – instead you have:

• Downward (down the staircase), a drop of 50 miles to the next land
• Upward, a 50 mile cliff that reaches up to the next land
  
• Outward is a drop to oblivion, as far as anyone knows
  
• Inward is a colossal wall extended up for hundreds and hundreds of miles.

The earth is under your feet but the elements of air, water and fire are provided from above. Every day the sun traverses the steps from top to bottom, bringing with it rainfall and winds. There are no celestial bodies so night time is dark except for man-made sources of illumination. Additionally, there are no seasons and no concept of years in the cyclic sense. Plants grow all the time except when there are fluctuations in the amount of elements available. It is possible for there to be colder, drier or calmer periods (for unknown reasons) which will affect those that live on the surface.

The sun’s altitude is midway between the ground and the bottom of the step that is above it). The sun passes down the middle of step. Sunlight is direct and indirect. Direct sunlight is from the sun itself when it is over a step; indirect sunlight is reflected from the sides of the central cone and the step bottom above. At the top level, rainfall occurs every sunrise. The water cascades and falls down the steps. At lower levels, the falling water becomes rivers and the rain becomes spread out to create a more random weather system. Clouds will form and drop rain at different times. Lower levels may encounter drought even though rain is regularly created higher up due to the way air moves around the steps.

The current adventure will be on the 13th step (with the much smaller 5th step directly above it). The climate will be similar to spring/summer in the North Scandinavian (sub-Polar) region. The step is around 500,000 square miles (1.25 million square km), the same size as South Africa or, coincidentally, SE+NO+FI+DK squashed together. Gravity is "down" - perpendicular to the top of each step, even when on the cone surface. Vast trade networks rise up and down the cliffs or through the air with Spelljammer vessels, wall climbing, staircases, ramps, parachutes, balloons, gliders, winged birds and dragons, magic carpets, tunnels, teleportation, baskets on winches, dwarven railways, gnomic clockwork engines, featherfalls, cloud castles, floating rocks and a host of other exotic methods.

Certain areas of steps are uninhabited due to the risk of objects falling from above:

• The bottom of the cliff where one step meets the next
• The land where the step meets the central cone
• The thin arc of land directly under the outward edge of the step above (where there is one)

See Diagram 3 for an example. Objects range from household refuse, cattle and trees all the way up to badly located castles.

Plot
During the night, the major town of Zumcan was devastated by an explosion. A large rock-strewn crater in the centre of the town marks where a few thousand people were killed. A wider area beyond that – buildings, trees, animals - was shredded by shards of glass, ranging in size from grains of sand to a few feet long. A further few thousand of those that survived the blast were killed by the shrapnel. The remainder can only talk about the ‘singing of angels’ after the thunder, with a lost look in their eyes.

The surviving local officials are at a loss to explain what happened as Zumcan is not in any of the danger areas where devastating rock falls could be expected. Although the town is (or was) in the shadow of a step high above, the empty lands are a number of miles outward, upward and inward.

Concern has been raised that there may be more destruction to come and the source needs to be found and neutralised. There has not been a shortage of relatives of the deceased volunteering to form an attack force to investigate. Unfortunately, the wealth of the realm is not that of some of the other steps so it has not been possible to rent a Spelljammer ship. Instead a prototype gnomic airless balloon has been loaned from the University.

The mission is simple:
• Find out what caused the destruction to happen
• Punish those responsible
• Ensure it doesn’t happen again

The reward? The dead will be able to sleep avenged. And fame. Lots of fame. And treasure. Bound to be lots of treasure.

Characters
The bereaved characters can be of any class. The step is Frostburn territory so any content of that book can be used.
Level is 9th.
Stats are 15/14/13/12/10/8 + 2 pts.
Wealth is 30,000gp per character – the step is not as wealthy or magic-rich as others and so individual wealth is lower. To compensate for this, a number of items are on loan:

• Gloves of the Uldra Savant
• Ring of the White Wyrm
• Staff of Winter