I was recently part of an epic adventure into orga lands, an adventure that ended up surprising just about ever single one of us. The exploration was done by the combined exploration groups of EAT and PAG, as well as a few guests (such as I). The goal: to penetrate the Orga Stronghold and reach the pathfinder Trillbane, who was last spotted hiding deep within the Stronghold.
Instead of going the more direct route through the OS "front door," we chose a backdoor approach. It is quite a bit longer in distance, and requires us to have teleporting mystics, but the path is not anywhere near as hard. Going through the front door sometimes requires hours of runs, killing 'lock after 'lock only to have orga reinforcements arrive and negate all our progress. Going through the back door is much more reliable - we can take and hold those snells much more readily, and advance quicker even though we are going a longer distance.
We made quick work of the Slate Caves, and soon were rushing through the Stronghold. We were almost to where we planned to go, when something strange and unusual happened! Bartok appeared, and chained several of our group away!
Soon it was found out that Bartok also was chaining away the fallen body of Trillbane! What a discovery!
Bartok dragged Trillbane and the others deeper into the Stronghold, up atop a heavily guarded platau. We changed our goal, and started working towards that point.
It took several tries, but we eventually managed to secure a hut located on top of the platau. Thankfully for us, Trillbane was fallen right nearby! After a bit of prodding, our healers finally managed to raise the famed Trillbane, and he followed us back into our secured hut.
There, before we could even talk much to him, people were already clamoring to train in his pathfinding ways. He ended up with quite a few new students!
While the rest of us went out to vanquish more orga and rescue several other fallens, the mystics talked quite a bit with Trillbane. You can probably find a more complete transcript of the talks elsewhere, but I can summarize what he said: The Stronghold used to be a large city, the city that he lived in. It was destroyed and taken over by the Orga some time ago. Trillbane had a huge library there, far greater than our puny ones in Puddleby. The library too was mostly destroyed, and the few pathfinding books we've found are remnants that survived.
Trillbane knows a lot of paths around the Stronghold area, and showed us one of them - a path from the Stronghold to the Orga Village. Trillbane agreed to come visit Puddleby, where he found a few more willing students. He was not very impressed with Puddleby, though he was modest and didn't say too many bad things about our little outpost town.
A large group of people then took Trillbane to visit one of his books - the third pathfinding book, the "Tao of Trillbane." Apparently Trillbane himself didn't write it, but his most gifted student did.
By that time, I (and most others!) were extremely tired. It had been almost an entire day of exploration for us! We trod off to our library, and Trillbane disappeared into the forest around Camp Dred.
All in all, an amazing day!
