Ok, moving on...
The four of you, Stralor, Shroom, Ridcully, and Fargrim head out of west via the front gate by late afternoon. You can't help but look up at the gate as you pass beneath it and see the empty ring where the old lantern used to hang.
The road splits and goes a number of different directions, but Fargrim guides you west on a recently-blazed trail that runs parallel to the blight zone, without entering it. Within an hour or so, you are close enough to at least see the edge of the blight-- blackened earth, dead vegetation, and the occasional withered tree, stripped of leaves stretches as far as you can see, as if a gigantic shadow had been cast across the valley. You also notice pools of a black oily substance, perhaps tar, that seem to reflect the light and dot the blight zone in various areas. Nothing seems to move out on the blight area but you get the sense that something is out there, just out of sight.
The trail leads away from the blight for a while- a safer route, that heads back towards the edge of the mountain and eventually to the mountain tunnel that leads to Copperpot Hold. Fargrim switches back towards the old trail, now, and leads you back towards the northern edge of the blight. Within another hour, the trail has curved back to cut across the blight, where an old tea-tree orchard once stood.
Now just the withered husks of trees, and the occasional blasted chunk of stone remains, dotting the earth. This was the old battleground where (as the legends goes) 12 dwarves held off a force of nearly a hundred orcish raiders for a day while a strategic gate was repaired. They were all buried just beyond the grove...behind a crumbling section of stone wall.
You guys enter the blight zone at last.
The earth is soft and damp here, but strangely stained black and streaked with gray. The four of you cross the orchard towards the area of the burial ground, when Ridcully points out a group of 5 hunched figures-- dwarven skeletons.. all of them still with the dried and mudcaked remnant of a beard.
Two of them are clad in their coppery chainmail armor, now ragged and falling to shreds. They are armed with warhammers and the battered shields they carried in life. The other three skeletons are literally falling apart.. but their armor seems to have disintegrated entirely. They have managed to pull their shields along with them. One of the unarmored ones carries a rusted crossbow.
The skeletons seem preternaturally aware, and turn towards you as you get closer.
There are several dead trees, a fallen log, and the crumbling fragment of a wall on the battlefield, as well as a crumbling section of low wall.
OCC: Roll for initiative!