Level 5

After four full levels of this shit, the crew grew tired of all these weird chaos shards and mutant goblins and mammoths bred for eating not riding. They wanted some goddamn answers, and the place to find those answers was the laboratory of Al-Hazred, the mad mage, the first person to reach the center of the Scar and come back alive. But how to find a place known only in whispered rumor and fable? Duh, they went to a bar. At the orc bar in the Crossroads, they found a couple of goblins willing to deal. They were none too happy with the crew's prior treachery over the black dragon eggs, but they were impressed with the way the crew had cleaned up their mutated cousins. The goblins led them to an entrance to their fey tunnels, which happened to be in the storeroom in the basement of Vanguard Tower. Travelling through the fey tunnels turned out to be very unpleasant, much like tripping on mushrooms while riding a rollercoaster and being beaten with a sack of doorknobs. It was over soon, and the goblins dropped them off a little ways from entrance, a tunnel cut in the side of a mountain.

Heading downwards, they arrived in a hallway with magical torches that snapped to life as they entered. The crew discovered the torches could be taken out of their holders and would float in the air and follow them as they walked. After a pain in the ass trap involving several mimics and a gelatinous cube in a pit, and finding a door locked by a magical logic puzzle, the crew realized, they didn't call this guy the mad mage for nothing. The crew ran up on a bound devil named The Chessmaster, who challenged them to a game of Asmodean chess for their souls. After Low Rent mopped the floor with him and taunted him very unsportsmanlike, the Chessmaster summoned a pack of devils and attacked. The crew killed his body, releasing his spirit back to Hell, possibly to return and bedevil the party again. Our heroes ransacked his personal belongings, smashing his potted plants and tossing his record collection around, looking for valuables.

The next hallway included a weird trap that sprayed the party with salmon oil and dropped the skeleton of a bear on them. It probably would have been more terrifying back before the bear died of old age. The next room was a workshop, filled with weird machines and workbenches and a glass tube with a little girl in it. They cut open the tube and freed the little girl, Rebecca, who had been in stasis for centuries after being sold to the mad wizard by down on their luck parents. They got the machinery going, which just ended up powering some killer robots who wanted to EXTERMINATE our heroes. The crew reduced them to clocksprings and gears and moved on.

The crew headed to the east wing, where they found the lounge. As soon as they walked in, little invisible butlers in coats and white gloves started uncovering furniture, lighting the fireplace and bringing round trays of food long ago rotted to dust and wine that was mostly vinegar. Two tapestries caught our heroes eyes, one of a group of adventurers standing on a battlement, looking with wonder and fear at something in the distance, and another depicting the fiery tortures of hell. This put the crew in a napping mood, and they curled up on the ancient couches for a snooze. When they awoke, they found themselves in the hospital ward of an unknown castle, stuck inside the bodies of the adventurers in the tapestry. After a quick confab with the locals, they discovered they were about 400 years back in time, at the keep in the Crossroads, back when it was a duchy of Nerath. Apparently, their host bodies had come to this area for hush-hush reasons, and were on their way back out, when something fell from the sky, creating the Scar. These adventurers were knocked clean off the battlements, hit their heads and had been in a coma for two weeks before waking up. Naturally, a feast was called for their miraculous recovery, and at the feast, our heroes met the little red-headed boy that would one day grow up to become the evil vampire Red Duke of the Crossroads, as well as the mad mage himself, Al-Hazred. Al-Hazred quizzed them about their experience, but when they could not remember what they had seen, he ignored them. The next morning they were awoken before dawn with shocking news: a nearby village was under attack from orcs! Our heroes saddled up and rode out, encountering lines of refugees on the way. Two of those refugees turned out to be Rebecca's parents. A bag of gold and some angry threats later, they promised to never sell their baby, no matter what evil wizards promised them. The crew mopped up the orcs, only to find it was just bait, to lure them out. The orcs were sent by a bigass red dragon, who accused our heroes of stealing a priceless heirloom from her. The crew tried to explain, they had only had these bodies for less than a day, they didn't know anything about what the original owners had done. Confused and pissed off, the dragon attacked. The dwarf Emer was inhabiting was eaten, and Emer awoke back in the lounge to see the tapestry had changed to show the adventurers fighting a red dragon. She tried to stab the tapestry, which woke up a few more of the crew, and the rest forced the dragon to retreat. Al-Hazred showed up shortly, and finished what the dragon started, murdering the rest of the crew with powerful magic spells. Before waking up, the crew had a vision of the adventurers spirits, who showed them what they had stolen from the dragon's lair: The Last Breath of Io. It's a lozenge-shaped crystal, twinkling with a thousand tiny stars. When the dragon-god Io was killed, his last breath was coughed up as this crystal, which contains all the power of his breath weapon. After awakening, they discovered Rebecca had been replaced by a young orc, but no other changes were evident.

Our heroes proceeded to the last remaining room, the Library. They fought with nasty gargoyles and the spirit of the evil librarian on top of the bones of all her long-dead cats and thousands of empty wine bottles. They found the last few clues they needed for the puzzle door, and Low Rent discovered a treasure he hid from the rest of the party. A nearly complete set of the white books of Vecna, that detail the ritual to turn the caster into a powerful lich. To the right person, these would be priceless, but the acolytes of Vecna would hunt down and kill anyone who shared their forbidden knowledge. Surely, Low Rent only wants these as a retirement fund.

Finally, our heroes are able to unlock the puzzle door and travel down the the bottom level, Al-Hazred's main lab. Inside, they found the mad wizard, killed by an out of control spell, has become an arcanian, an almost mindless undead. They put him and his mummy bodyguards to rest, and started digging through his lab notes:

The thing in the center of the Scar came from the Far Realm, a place of alien horror and madness. It is sending out these crystal shards which are simultaneously making the landscape more hospitable for it, and incubating its babies. The babies are able to dissolve any organic material, almost instantly, by touch, and convert it to a highly flammable gas. Once this thing releases its spawn, the world would be reduced to a flaming ball of rock in less than a week. The only thing that can kill it would be an epic-level burst of cold magic, or a titanic burst of divine radiant energy. Al-Hazred was attempting to research such a spell when he died.

This news came as quite a shock to our crew, who, for the most part, liked the world and did not want to see it burn. They trudged their way out of the dungeon, knowing they'd have to find a way to put a stop to this shit.