Some sort of sickness has descended upon a small farmstead. Everyone there suffers a pounding headache, and they wake up everyday dazed with an unbearable ache in their forehead. Consulting leeches and healers yield no help while even sorcerers and mystics fail to find a magical explanation. Eventually, if the adventurers stay long enough, they will succumb to the headaches as well. What is going on here?
- In the darkness of caves within the nearby hills a breed of gigantic bats have taken up residence. They use their echoes to detect preys – and that is usually harmless to the human ears. However, due to the strange ways the tunnels wind inside the cave, and a certain properties of the rock that made up the hills, the echoes become powerful enough to cause havoc within a human’s system, causing the headache. Chasing off the bats or finding a solution to deflect their echoes will solve the problem.
- The screecher is a thing that is either animal or insect, a being which belongs to more primitive lifeform of the world. It uses sound waves to knock out its prey, and usually only those weak in constitution will succumb to it. However, it seems that this particular one has became large enough such that its sound waves are powerful enoough even to stun the average human. Now it has yet to feast on a human being but the screecher has already devoured much of the wild-life within the hills. It may eventually move on to humans…though there is a mystery. How did this get so large? Who understands these lifeforms? Perhaps the adventurers would need the help of someone who understand those more primitive creatures…
- While sorcerers and mystics would not be able to find what cause the headaches, if they head off to a quiet, isolated spot, they would be able to hear the sound of faint chantings on the wind. They are of an ancient language, and seems to have the power to affect human’s minds. Curiously, the chantings are supposedly more than 500 years extinct. Following the direction of the wind, the adventurers would come to a series of caves and as they get closer, the chantings would become louder and louder. Eventually, they will chance upon a hidden monastery, all its inhabitants slain — but it is not the ghosts who do the chanting. Any spirits who linger about will tell of this story. In the final stand of the monastery, the abbot led the worshipers to recite a spell which would drive the invaders mad. Alas, they failed to realise that the shape of the caves and hills, and the strange properties of the rock, would cause the echoes of their chant to resonate and not fade away. They have created a barrier which they themselves could not escape and all have starved to death…a recent landslide may have change the topography of the hills slightly, allowing a faint echo to escape. The only way now is to find a way to silence the echoes. How do you kill an echo?
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