Four adventurers, each for their own reasons, sat inside a modest inn on a dark night. Aren the human monk, Raina the eladrin ranger, Sellion Lithviel the elvish thief, and Captain Thorstein the old washed up dwarf warlord. During the night Raina approaches the good Captain with a proposition, seeing how his reputation proceeds him. The two begin to talk about recovering a lost artifact, a book, said to hold power and magics the world hasn’t seen in years. Sellion and Aren overhear the conversation and the four agree that to retrieve the book, which is reportedly somewhere up in the mountains near the city’s edge, it would be safer for them to travel together.
Early the next morning, the members of the impromptu group are woken by the acrid smell of smoke and shouting coming from town. A massive fire had broken out in the town’s market district, and the group quickly rushed to aid the townsfolk in putting out the fire. Which included Sellion managing to steal a poor man’s bucket of water in the blink of an eye.
Once the fire was extinguished, the group wonders what might have caused such an event. Figuring they need more arcane information, they head to the Wizard’s College to investigate what might have created the fire. They arrive and ask after the headmistress of the college, only to discover that she isn’t in and Neverwart has taken her position for the moment. While they’re speaking, a large, intimidating, black scaled dragonborn strides across the grounds and enters the college, shouting demands for information on dragons. The four adventurers manage to talk the dragonborn out of abducting the secretary gnome Barry, and the reptilian agrees to join them.
Now with Kavar Ofdio joining their party, they explore the Wizard’s College in search of a library. They stumble on what appears to be a magical food fight in the dining hall where the students are simultaneously practicing magic, eating breakfast, and making a huge mess. Sellion decides to take part in breakfast and the others continue the search for the library. Before long, the entire group makes it’s way to the basement, only to encounter a talking door which refuses to grant them passage to the library. At least, until Kavar breaks the door down. Now in the library, they find Halrog, the blind tiefling librarian, who helps them as best he can and gives Raina an old, old map which shows the upper mountains and three ancient caves, believed to house dragons. The lowest cave being rumored to house a green dragon, the middle a golden, and the upper a black. Of course, dragons haven’t been seen in lifetimes, so that’s impossible, right?
Leaving the Wizard’s College, the group returns to town to sleep for the night, at a much cheaper rate thanks to their new dragonborn compatriot, and leave at dawn the next morning for the mountains. They begin a climb, managing to reach a cave before the night sets in. As the sun begins to set, they explore the small cave they discovered, and the Captain, possibly due to his dwarfish nature, discovers a hole in the side of the cave. Sellion decides to throw a rock in the hole, causing a swarm of bats to shoot forth and attack the group. They manage to survive by the skin of their teeth in the dark and cramped combat conditions, though Aren nearly perished.
Exhausted from the battle and sure that nothing else would be arriving in the middle of the night after that racket, they settle in for an uneventful night’s rest. Early the next morning saw Raina and Aren awake first, the latter of which went down to the foothills to do his daily training and meditation outside the confines of the shallow cave. While there, a herd of deer wanders into the area to graze. Through hand motions Aren and Raina coordinate a kill on the largest stag, and they manage to bring the buck down, though the rest of the herd flees. The others slowly awaken, and Raina guts the kill before her, Aren, and Sellion pull the carcass up to cook it. After a hearty breakfast of deer meat the group sets out climbing the mountain once more.
After a number of close calls and Sellion stealing the antlered skull that Kavar had kept from the kill and stashing it in Aren’s bag during the climb, they reach a more evened out area of the mountain where they can catch their breaths. While there, Kavar leafs through one of the books he’d gotten from the library and informs the group that they are in the Spineback Mountains, a large mountain range which not too long ago suffered a massive earthquake, which shifted the mountains. Captain Thorstein throws in that the dwarves had built and then rebuilt the trade route through the mountains so that neighboring cities could conduct business with one another regardless of the mountain range. Meanwhile Raina is reexamining the map, which is in elvish, and the group realizes that in light of this information their map may no longer be accurate.
Noting a path to either side and not too keen to begin the climb again, Sellion and Aren head down the left path while Raina and Captain Thorstein go right, leaving Kavar in the middle where the group had originally climbed up. Raina and the Captain discover what they believe to be a cairn leading up the mountain farther. Meanwhile, Aren and Sellion find their exploration interrupted by an orc charging at them from down the path!