The Menagoles Mines

The old tin mines of the Menagoles, dug into the Middle Tor north of town. The official story — pushed by Laewendas's guards, the local news and rumour alike — is that an orc, Vara'nak Gar-Galdar, burnt the mines from the inside ~a decade ago, killing the workers, after which they were sealed off; the town's economy never recovered. Eldrich the Elder distrusts that account and tasks the party with learning the truth. A competing story, from the ~600-year-dead mountaineer Ulda Golgain (Session 47), holds that monsters were kept sealed beneath the mines and that digging would let them out.

In truth the site is not a derelict ruin but a heavily fortified, forbidden Laewendas installation: barricades with out-turned spikes, palisades, a small guarded mine entrance with 5–10 troops, a dangling prisoner-cage for trespassers, a riverside ore route, and — tellingly — a fresh-ish path running toward Lambert's Crossing, strange for an abandoned mine.

The Helmnack family anciently claimed ownership of one of the Tors (Little, Middle, or a possibly-mythical "Greater" Tor) but never knew which; if they held the Middle Tor and this tin mine, they'd be rich — tying the mine to the missing blacksmith Horonir Helmnack.

The operation, in its own paperwork

Three pages of the eight-page Menagoles Mine Journal (GM handouts, 2026-07-26) describe the mine as a going concern in the years before the fire — the only record the vault has of these people alive.

• The chain of command was military. The site's Foreman was Brent Pallwath, "Sergeant of Laewendas' Army, Born of Lambert's Crossing" (p.5). The dig was run by a serving officer of the Queen's army under a civilian job title, which recasts the fortifications, the guard detail and the fresh Lambert's-Crossing path (Session 49) as a military installation with a mining cover rather than a mine that happened to be guarded.
• There was a staff mage doing survey work. Dillbert kept logs, readings and proportions of crystals by depth, layer and sediment (p.6). His two findings: crystals are found more often the deeper you go, and small pockets appear anywhere in the mountains at times. The Middle Tor was the best site, not the only possible one.
• There was a labour union, and it argued about the depth. BAWMU — the Bi-Monthly Assorted Workers of Mining Union — met, took minutes, and used them to rebuke its own members for striking, to answer the workers' safety concerns about the Queen's digging machines with "the adages of digging too deep are but myth," and to carry the Queen's bounty to the floor: nobility, a manor and land for whoever dug until they found "something of note" (p.7). Three committee members resigned that same day.
• The tooling came from the crown. The boring machine was "sent from her finest machinists" by the Queen (p.7); Vara'nak Gar-Galdar records that it "barely even fit its individual parts down the second shaft" and then went through stone "like butter" — "They didn't stop for veins, they dug deep for something" (p.5). Compare the Cathalon-made lantern at the fire's origin (Session 52).
• The purpose was written down. "If it is possible to reproduce the material known as 'Shards of the Autarch' it is theoretically possible to emulate the power of a woman who killed a god that hunted gods" (p.6). The mine existed to manufacture the god-killing shard so Laewendas could emulate The Autarch.

And the same paperwork records the end. The deep dig woke something that "screamed an unholy noise" (p.5) — Dillbert, higher up, wrote that "one scream, unlike the others, was made by no lungs of flesh" (p.6). Vara'nak broke the lift behind himself and burned the bridges to seal the deep; Brent Pallwath then put him and his fellow orcs in the pit and lit a fire of his own, killing the workforce below; Dillbert saw smoke billowing from the lower shaft and went down to save whoever he could. The mine's own records make the disaster a containment followed by a murder — not an orc's arson — and the story that reached Menagoles was the cover for it.

Session 49 (reached)

• Set as Eldrich the Elder's top investigation priority (he names it four times). The party marches north on the 21st of New Summer (Lash threading the right trail on a 19 Survival).
• Found fortified and guarded, not derelict — barricades, spikes, a prisoner in a hanging cage, two smoke-break sentries on the road, and the suspicious Lambert's-Crossing path.
• The party slips past the sentries (Fenric half-spotted, then doubles back) and takes the south-east forest approach, fighting a silent battle against the cliff's badeedle brood before scaling the 50-ft cliff (partly via a fossil "dragon tail" embedded in the wall).
• They crest the rim beside a lone, miserable guard the GM dubbed "Private Thunt," who hates the posting and seems easy to slip past or turn. Entry into the mine proper is next session.

Session 50 (infiltrated)

• Not a ruin — a live crystal-mining facility. Over the rim the party finds a busy, guarded Laewendas operation: 4–5 buildings, a smithy (a half-giant and a badger-man under a whip-cracking overseer), an alchemy shed, a barracks, minecart tracks and an artificial ore-flume/panning line — all presided over by the noble Montague Fitzburg, who holds a public trial-and-beating of a cheating miner. There are no orcs here (fitting the "orcs burned it" cover).
• The disguise infiltration. Unable to fight or sneak past ~30+ guards, the party poses as labourers (miner/hauler clothes Lash steals from the barracks; Magra disguised out of her orc features; Jex hidden in a backpack) and simply walks in with the returning shift through the mine's three great doors.
• The intact upper mine & the deep shaft. The upper level is untouched by any fire and actively worked. A colossal cage-hoist (a 20×20-ft platform on a winch) drops a shaft Lash judges could run 10–30 miles deep, toward the Underdark — into the burned lower mine where the disaster actually happened. Descending needs Fitzburg's written orders.
• The glowing crystal, and what was actually said about it. The faintly glowing ore hauled by the ton is not metal but a natural crystal growth. Fenric floats that it looks like what Dr. Provostinalkov makes and the GM allows only "similar colour, similar energy" — no identification is made here. The link to the Shard of the Autarch is established later, by Dilbert's journal (Session 51) and the refined green panache (Session 52). The mine exists to dig and refine it, with the kidnapped alchemist Snuffles trying (and failing) to cook it in the shed. This is what Laewendas is really after.
• The fire was set to trap them. Silithane buys the real, sealed decree of punishment off the beaten miner (40 gold), forges it into descent-orders, and the guards lower the hoist. It comes up fire-scorched — proof the blaze happened below, set to seal everyone in; the party may be the first to go back down since. Thalia's Primeval Awareness has already read the depths: burned undead miners and a wall-passing ghost below, plus fae, and — at the forge — an undead "giant" puppet (face replaced with a screen, an anvil driven through its ribs). The party rides the platform down.
• The burned lower mine. Below is a fire-gutted ruin, its dead swept into one pile — which animates into a trivial fight of charred miner-skeletons and a bull-skeleton (silver disintegrates them, hammers crush them; the party is far over-levelled). Past it, a flooded cavern — ~50,000 gallons fed by two springfalls, slowly drowning the mine — holds a whole ecosystem (blind cave-fish, tiny crabs, a shark, cave-birds) crossed on jury-rigged burnt-wood-and-rope bridges. An underwater aqueduct links it to a nearby city, reachable only by water.
• The cave hermits. Two friendly squatters live in the flooded deep: the pipe-smoking hermit-crab man Pentuckle and the bubble-speaking gilman Walter Gilman. They lay out the layout: a locked cage, the drowned Mage-Man's "office" and ghost (blamed for the fire), the "scary hole" at the very end of the track, and the underwater city.
• The scapegoat's grave. At the lowest level, past a fire-wrecked crane, Silithane picks a padlock into a cage guarded by the first orc skeleton the party has seen. It stands aside for Magra's Orcish mourning-rites and reveals the fire's real victims: Vara'nak Gar-Galdar and his fellow orcs, burned alive in a pit as scapegoats. His body yields his journal (naming a "banshee machine") and a machine key; the guardian passes its charge to Magra and finally dies. A "scary hole" at the track's end waits, unexplored. Session ends here. Still level 7.

Session 51 (delved deeper)

• The buried lower structure. Between the burned levels the party maps the mine's drowned interior: the office of the mine's mage (a ghost — see Dilbert the Mage); a collapsed square fire-escape stairwell dug out over four hours down to servants' and officers' living quarters; and a waterfall-fed chroma-bird cavern. In the sealed bottom quarters lie ~40 mummified miners who survived the fire only to die trapped in the dark — the atrocity that explains the savage punishment of the scapegoated orcs.
• The sabotaged maxi-lift. The great deep-shaft lift (~15×15 ft) was deliberately disabled: its drive pin (and the spare) were stripped so no one could descend. The axolotl key fits the operating handle but the gears won't engage without the pin. Deducing the saboteur pitched both pins down the shaft, Jex rides a jury-rigged bucket-lift ~6 miles down to recover the buried drive pin (sniping reanimating ash-dead on the way up); the party reassembles the lift into a working two-way elevator. (That ~6 miles is the length of the bucket shaft, not the party's depth beneath the mountain — the GM puts that at least 20 to 30 miles in Session 53.)
• Dilbert's journal — the god-weapon confirmed. Fenric decodes the office ghost's spectral writing: Dilbert the Mage's journal, revealing that Laewendas is hunting the "Godkiller Shard" — the Shard of the Autarch. The dig is her god-weapon operation.
• The deep mine ("The Mine"). The repaired lift drops into the true dig: a burned, sandbag-fortified base-chamber holding 50+ primed undead (immune to fire, weak to thunder), threaded past on a group stealth check; a heavy-machine corridor storing barrels of explosive red powder — the same "red crystal" ore the party has hauled by the ton is revealed as high explosive fuel, not treasure — and the giant boring machine (the likely "banshee machine"), watched by a second, hate-filled spectre.
• The blue-crystal vein. Deeper still, past a mining colony hollowing the mountain, a cordoned light-blue/cyan crystal vein (distinct from the red, reading as far more magical) sits in a lava-layered chamber where the boring head was once melted by something harder than itself. Lash's attempt to harvest one wakes a crystal creature — combat opens next session. Still level 7.

Session 52 (the Foredweller stratum)

• The blue-crystal guardian falls. The vein's guardian is a spellcasting crystal golem (see Blue Crystal Creature) — immovable, dropping the ceiling and flooding the chamber with reverse gravity before Silithane shatters it. It leaves a watermelon-sized "epic" crystal core with gravity/immovable properties.
• A buried civilization. Beneath the mine's burned workings the party maps a whole Foredweller stratum: where the boring machine mulched through hand-laid brickwork (oversized, uniform, maker's-mark-free bricks), a brick canal system of reversible flowing water, a Foredweller pipe/lever room, and a drowned overflow-filter pool (a suction grate 40 ft down, choked with skeletons and adventuring gear — yielding a spare set of tunneling-machine keys).
• The mine's kneeling shades. A recurring motif surfaces: black spectral "shades" — "the remnants of the safety inspectors" — kneel at each of the mine's tragedies (the pipes, the fire's origin, a sabotage barrel, a deep pit) and silently scream when the party repeats a fatal mistake, serving as living warnings.
• The arson, confirmed and repeated. The supply storeroom is the fire's origin — set from multiple points deliberately, thoroughly enough that even bridges ten miles up burned, to seal the deep forever; a fresh explosive barrel dragged to an old cave-in shows the deep was sabotaged, sealed and re-opened more than once. A Cathalon-made lantern (~5 years old) dates the mining as recent.
• The screaming alarm room. At the end of the digging tracks, a Foredweller metal chamber holds the last boring machine, strange chained cylinders/uncrackable tubs, three sealed doors, and five magical Alarm-sirens that psychically blast intruders (DC 20 Cha / ~20 psychic / flee for an hour, beaming "leave, leave, leave") — the very torment that drove the lone orc survivor to burn the mine. The party destroys all five.
• The dragon pit. A burned dormitory (~30–40 dead, a collapsed upper storey) sits over a ~220-ft pit; Lash is lowered down and finds a titanic undead skeleton dragon (see Deep Skeleton Dragon), wakes it, and escapes — the party barricades the pit with a door.
• The doors open onto a research facility. The alarm room's three sealed doors hide a research facility of 17 scientists who dug in from the mountain's north face to study the Foredwellers. Their gemologist names the mine's green crystal the "panache" — both the immortality elixir and the god-slaying Shard of the Autarch substance, refined here as the Ancients once refined the shards the Autarch wielded. Session ends mid-tour, 22nd of New Summer. Still level 7.

Session 53 (the deep, finished)

• The bone dragon's lair, from the other side. The hole Lash blew in the old cave-in drops through a stair of 15–20 ft ledges into deep water and then a flooded stomach-crawl — too narrow for the dragon to follow, which makes it both the way in and the way out. The dragon sleeps through the visit. Buried in its skull, driven up through the jaw and out the forehead, is the +2 dragon-slaying short sword that killed it.
• The water tunnels finished. The mine's flooded "sewers" end in two collapsed dead ends and a chamber holding two giant spiders phased into the ethereal — silhouettes only, invisible to magic-sight, squatting on bodies and possible loot. One phases in to snap at Silithane's bat and gets nothing but air. Left unfought.
• The digging shade. In the last unexplored passage stands the mine's first helpful shade, holding a spectral pick and trying to dig through a blocked wall. Its rule, per the GM: it screams if nobody is near or digging, mimes digging when someone is close, and digs alongside anyone who picks up a pickaxe.
• The buried meeting room. Past that wall (a d20 roll decides whether the dig collapses the room; the party rolls 16) is a miners' meeting and sleeping room — chest of drawers, a large table, letters, journals, instructions, meeting notes and a BAWMU union agenda. This crew died in a rockfall tunnelling south toward the lab, stopping a few feet short of the water tunnels' first bricks. A wooden strut here holds the whole water system up; burning it would re-trigger the collapse that killed them.
• The water room's levers — a standing do-not-touch. Marge, the facility's water purifier, hears the party's account of the Foredweller pipe room and rules on it without leaving her lab: the green lever being lit means the system is running correctly. When Silithane floats switching the green off and throwing the problem levers as a signalling relay, she cuts him off — "I cannot begin to say how bad of an idea that is." The party has raised the idea more than once; the lever bank is to be left alone.
• Where the party stands. The mine's deep is now mapped end to end. Three fights remain worth a pip — the bone dragon, the spiders, and the boss of the mining camp back up top. Rolls over to the 23rd of New Summer, ~1 AM, ~25–30 hours underground. Still level 7.

Session 54 (the last two rooms, and the dragon)

• The mine has its own map, and the party found it last. A chamber near the living quarters holds the dig crew's Miner's Expedition Journal — every tunnel cut, every accidental collapse, and every branch annotated stop going this way. The party had already been to all but two rooms on it. One passage they never entered is logged as a worm skeleton the crew dug up, which rose, killed several miners, and had its tunnel blown down on top of it. Dr. Xiao Li reads the map as a dating tool: her team's north tunnel is nowhere on it, and the miners' routes wander like people who didn't know where they were going, which places the scientists after the fire.
• The supply store (north). Almost the only room in the deep that the fire never touched — a year or two of perishables rotting in the cold, mould creeping across the crates. Candle-holder helmets, hooded lanterns, barrels of oil, dozens of shovels and pickaxes, about twenty crowbars, pitons, spare shoes, 5–10 healer's kits, and one set of archaeology brushes: the crew went down not knowing whether they were digging for a single buried shard or nothing at all. Also one crate pried open with a crowbar, its packed straw still holding the hollows of two missing gauntlets.
• The living quarters (south-east). A drilled, egg-shaped chamber with a domed roof and fire pits sunk into the floor, triple bunk beds, and small chests of personal effects. Off it runs a hobby side-dig — a miner tunnelling in his own time in a direction his crew didn't believe in — where a shade kneels over a pair of crushed skeletal legs. The gauntlets were under the rubble with the rest of him.
• The last passage sealed for good. Lash dug the side-tunnel out, recovered the gauntlets by touch, and brought the roof down — burying the miner, his shade and the map's final blank. Silithane pulled her clear by the ankles.
• The bone dragon is dead. The party went back through the flooded crawl and killed it (see Session 54), freeing the +2 short sword and a +3 arrow from the body, and hit level 8. Behind the lair, past where Lash originally came down her rope, are mushrooms and greenery around a still pool; the 220-ft shaft above is the top of the hole, not a way further down.
• What is left in the mountain. The deep is finished. Only the two ethereal spiders in the flooded water tunnels and the mining camp above — which has had two days to notice something happening below — remain. The party is walking away from both: the exit is the scientists' north tunnel out the far side, a bored corridor nobody has used in a year, which the GM has all but promised is now occupied.

Session 55 (the party leaves the mountain)

• The north tunnel, measured. About two hexes long, on a slight-to-moderate incline the entire way up out of the earth: 15–20 hours of walking with nowhere restable to stop. Fairly direct — the diggers bent around a couple of harder rocks and otherwise cut a single passage. Its one tenant was a Morkid, killed at the mouth.
• Coming out. The party emerges on the 24th of New Summer at around 9–9:30 AM, having been underground roughly 100 hours, and cannot simply walk out: they set up in the half-light and shuffle 100 feet closer to the entrance every hour for two hours, stepping outside at about 11 AM under heavy overcast with everyone's eyes still hurting.
• The mountain's back side. The scientists' abandoned staging camp sits at the base of their dig. Across the plains stand the burned-out ruins of Oldham; some fifteen miles further, a second great wood, briefly mistaken for the one the party came from.
• Forty crossbows, aimed at an empty shaft. The GM's parting image of the south-side camp: the mine's garrison is still massed around the elevator, barricaded, prepared, waiting for a boss fight. "They gotta come back up sometime." They will eventually decide the party starved or turned on each other, and go back to business as usual at the tin mine.
• The way home. Two days through known woods rather than the shorter road past Lambert's Crossing and Knucklebones's warband, with two civilian scientists in tow. Two undisturbed long rests; moon visible on the nights of the 25th and 26th, four days short of the full moon on the 30th. The party reaches the mine's outskirts overland from the far side.