Caislen Campaign Notes

Located not far outside of Goldvale, the “Shelves Plateau” is named after the “people” living on top of it for an unspecified but long amount of time. It towers 1000 feet into the sky with no obvious way up, solid rock faces all around, and about 2 square miles in land at the top. The Goldvale Shelter is embedded into the base of it far below. As the story goes, a wizard long ago¹⁾ abducted an elf named Harthi²⁾, took him to the top of the plateau where the wizard's lair was³⁾ to run experiments. Harthi was cloned, but imprisoned in a suspended state so unaware of the scope of what was going on. The wizard made many clones, and for some reason unknown turned them all into sheep. Sheep with humanoid intelligence, who were all once Harthi. Think of them as “splinterlings”, all having splintered from the original Harthi.

The splinterlings, each originally being a clone of Harthi, with some magical tinkering to make both males and female, sharing his memories and all, because a people of cloned elves turned into sheep. The Wizard made an exit at some point in time, perhaps because an experiment was finished or of other causes. Yet the clones remained, and even in sheep bodies, with no opposable fingers and meager resources on the plateau, mostly sticks, small grasses, and obviously a lot of wool, they flourished. First they learned how to trap water in dew pits. Then they learned to work together in sheep form using rams horns to push rock around. After more than 1000 years they'd built up a low tech society full of ritual, now believing in a sheep deity⁴⁾, created terraced spaces and rotated crops amongst them for survival, long but low houses out of boulders, small branches from shrubs since trees were scare, grasses, muds and of course wool. Limited resources kept them at this level, as well as writing since the best they could do was scratch a broken version of elvish into surfaces with horns and hooves. They adopted the name “SHELVES”, a combination of the term “SH”eep & “ELVES”. Further that with them being on a plateau, which is itself a kind of “shelf.” As generations passed, each newborn took on the name Harthi with a # after it to represent themselves. e.g. “Harthi #5003”. The original elf they were all cloned from, Wizard, and links to the past faded. They had their own leaders, customs and existed as an isolated culture.

Eventually praying to their deity⁵⁾ for salvation, better known as the herd wanting to finally escape the plateau, their deity abducted a pair of adventurers: Eyrun & Urist. In the blink of an eye they:

• Broke into the metal dome that once housed the Wizard and hadn't been unsealed in the entire time the Shelf civilization had been around.
• Discovered the original elf Harthi in suspended state in there, and freed him.
• Found a symbol burned into Harthi's back not unlike a cattle brand, in the shape of a W with a strike through: W
• Learned from Harthi that the wizard had a thing for snakes, and there just happened to always be a giant constricting snake living on the plateau as well, an anomaly for seemingly all time threatening Shelves that got too close to the outer edges.
• Fought and defeated the snake, only to have it return to life unharmed the next day.
• Fought and defeated the snake AGAIN, to realize a magical ring was around its tail, with the same logo found on Harthi's back. Once removed from the snake corpse, it ceased regenerating. The ring according to Harthi is the Ring Of Snakerection.
• They learned that there was an underground area below the established community where the Shelves had buried their leaders over time and that within it was a hole going vertically further into the ground of the plateau. As Sheep they could not navigate this, but the PCs could, eventually fighting⁶⁾ their way out far below to emerge at a secret exit.

This for now is where the tale of the SHELVES stands, with the sheep forms stuck high on the plateau and the original Harthi remaining with them, for now. But the PCs walked away with the ring, and with the knowledge of the inhabitants up there. Ethically torn (or NOT?) to return and get everyone down.