The Journey Back to the Home You Forgot

Campaign record

The Journey Back to the Home You Forgot follows Jinpachi, a half-orc artificer raised by gnomes, and Norri, a halfling monk whose dependence on drink is matched by startling speed and loyalty. Their companion Telson, a symbologist and formidable spellcaster, had travelled beside them for at least five years.

The surviving record contains one completed chapter and the opening of a second. It ends after the party leaves Gren’s Hollow for Kittleton. The campaign’s precise position in the Grand Timeline has not yet been fixed.

The black river

While returning west from the Silvermoor Collective, the party was attacked by goblins and fled into the woods. The ground opened beneath them. Telson caught a ledge, but Jinpachi and Norri fell into a black liquid that muffled every sense, whispered inside their minds and searched through their memories.

Telson pulled them free. Both men remembered their names and abilities only in fragments; the farther they travelled from the fluid, the more of themselves returned. The black substance reached after them in thin strands and seemed to rise and fall like a breathing body.

Their escape route became an ancient engineered passage. Jinpachi restored its hanging orb-lights, revealing service tunnels, ruined inscriptions and a complex built around something far older than itself. Three starving goblins had also fallen into the structure. The attempted parley became a fight, leaving one goblin dying beside a shallow basin of the same black liquid.

The door marked Prison

At the top of the complex stood an immaculate black-green metal gate covered in an unknown script. Telson could translate only one repeated symbol: Prison. The dying goblin carried a green jewel that completed the lock, although a voice inside Norri’s mind urged him to use it.

When the jewel was fitted, the solid gate became passable. Beyond it lay a pristine reflection of the ruined corridor and an apparently warm study that gave off no heat. A tall, powerfully built man waited beside the fire. He was merely the speaking shape of the entity now catalogued as the Mountain Prisoner.

The Mountain Prisoner

The entity claimed that an ancient sorcerous order called the Venerated had trapped it in a pocket realm after objecting to its conquest of other worlds. Only minutes had passed for its body, while millennia had elapsed outside.

Later builders excavated around the gate in the hope of stealing power from it. Every creature crossing the threshold weakened the prison. Through the tears it sent part of itself into the mountain, rekindling the dormant volcano and opening fissures through which insects, goblins and adventurers could enter. It consumed their memories to reconstruct the state of Earin.

It stated its purpose without disguise: annihilate every living organism in the realm, consume all available knowledge and energy, and then pass to the next world as it had done countless times before.

Battle in the false study

Norri, Jinpachi and Telson attacked. Norri struck first; Telson engulfed the manifestation in fire; Jinpachi tore its own axe from a bookcase and buried the blade in its shoulder. The wound bled the same black tar that filled the caverns below.

Norri finally climbed the manifestation’s body and broke its neck. The false study vanished. The party found themselves on a circular balcony beneath a cathedral-sized dome, overlooking the Prisoner’s true visible body: a storming reservoir of black liquid filled with the bones of earlier victims. Killing the shape had not killed the god. It had only allowed the scattered fluid to rush back into the failing prison.

Telson’s last stand

The companions ran around the collapsing balcony and into a fissure leading toward daylight. Behind them the black fluid gathered speed. Goblins waiting near the exit were crushed by falling stone, but the parasite continued through their bodies and over the rubble.

Telson forced her satchel into Jinpachi’s hands, turned back and opened a blue spell scroll. A shield of blue light filled the passage and held the liquid at bay. Jinpachi and Norri tried to reach her, but saving her would have broken her concentration and allowed the charged parasite to overtake all three.

Her last clue was a name: the Bow of Arveria. She then condemned the mountain and sealed the way, buying the world only ‘a blink of hope’. Jinpachi and Norri escaped as the cave collapsed behind them and the long-dormant mountain erupted.

A road away from home

Outside, the survivors’ memories returned. They still carried Telson’s satchel and the Prisoner’s axe. They understood that the collapse had delayed the parasite rather than destroyed it.

After resting, they descended to Gren’s Hollow. Sinkholes were already swallowing livestock, houses and travellers, while refugees moved south beneath the glow of the erupting mountain. Gren knew nothing of the Venerated, but directed them toward either the Grand Archive of Vöartenstadt or a scholars’ dig near Kittleton.

They chose Kittleton even though the road led away from Foxgorn, the home they had originally been trying to reach. The record ends after Gren’s volunteer guard escorts them from the valley and the pair begin choosing their route east across the plains.

Record boundary

This article preserves events actually played in the WhatsApp campaign. Dice results are reflected where they changed the fiction; rules discussion, jokes and unrealised planning suggestions are not treated as world facts. Character backstories sent outside the group export remain to be incorporated from their original records.

Notes and record

This article combines campaign record, spoken lore and the mythic account preserved in the Earin archive.