Tulgey Barrow
From Praemal
This ancient burial mound in the woods between Foxton on Moss and Maidensbridge predates the dwarves settling in Green Mountain, who only found ruins of an ancient human settlement in the Tulgey Wood when they first visited the area.
The Tulgey Barrow has long had a haunted reputation, and with good reason: Over the centuries, adventurers have found various entrances into the barrow, and while they have found only a little treasure, they have often found death at the claws of the restless dead. These ancient undead seem content to remain in their barrow when undisturbed and, as a result, they mostly have been.
Fibber's Cairn
A group of adventurers from Maidensbridge set out to explore a cairn discovered by Fibber Bridger in Birth 721. Its mouth was hidden by brush and scrub. Fibber claimed to have found a strange owl-faced helmet there.
Inside the cairn, the Hall of Guardians, a 15 foot wide passageway -- littered with rotting leaves at its mouth - was flanked on either side by alcoves, each containing a stone sarcophagus with a strange statue of a bare-chested owl-headed man bearing a sword behind each. The sarcophagi contained skeletons, wearing the owl-faced helms, who attacked when one of the sarcophagi were disturbed. A broken sarcophagus in the second set of alcoves included some broken bits of mirror.
Prior to the attack, the ranger Hazel Sawyer had discovered some small claw-footed tracks leading into the cairn, but not back out. These were soon determined to belong to four now-dead kobolds. Each had been hacked to death with swords, presumably by the sarcophagi skeletons. Three of the kobolds appeared to have some sort of cyst growing in their torsos at the time of their deaths.
Past the four sets of alcoves was a staircase which rose to an octagonal room, filled with feces and mostly eaten corpses of animals, neither of which appeared fresh. The room also had four strangely carved columns, which featured some hollowed out sections with openings carved in them. Within each was some sort of cup to hold fluid.
Three staircases lead off the octagonal room, with passages heading northwest, north and northeast.
The northwest one headed to a rectangular room smelling heavily of urine and musk. A hole had been visibly clawed through the rocks on the northwest wall of the room by something with massive claws. Two statues faced each other in this hall, one of an owl-headed man kneeling in fealty before the other figure. All that remained of the other figure are sandaled feet and a hint of a robe on the floor. The rest had been broken off ages ago and the rest of the statue is gone, with no hint as to its whereabouts.
The north staircase exited into a room is massive, a 65-foot wide semicirclular rooms with the tunnel mouth angling out to meet the diameter of the semicircle. The room likewise arched upwards, the ribbed ceiling reaching a height of 30 feet in the middle of the room. Debris at the top of the stairs suggested a great stone seal once stood here, locking off this room, but it was long ago shattered inwards. Five alcoves the size of the ones lining the Hall of Guardians were equally spaced along the edge of the semicircular wall. Each statue depicted a robed figure holding a different mask to its face. In the middle of the room, atop a tall stepped dias, rested a single ornate sarcophagus carved in the shape of an enormous nesting owl of singularly sinister aspect.
The northeast staircase led to a long, slightly damp corridor. At the end was an oddly shaped pentagonal room, with a large pentagonal basin filling almost the entire room. This pool rippled with drops that fall occasionally from above. The liquid was dark and a little fetid, but an almost perfect reflective surface, like a grimy liquid mirror. Water dripped from above here, from a carved bas-relief of storm clouds above. It appeared that, once, the drips would come at a steady rate of flow, but now, whatever mechanism powered this reverse fountain had all but worn down, and drops only came fitfully from one or two nozzles.
