No risk, no reward!

The air here, once thick with dust and the ring of steel on stone, now hangs silently, The abandoned quarry far below, a mist-shrouded puncture wound in the Earth, roiling with unknown menace.

Doom arrived for the Quarryfolk through a hole struck in the quarry wall from which a sinuous mist issued forth settling like a caul on the stoneworks. Masons piled rocks as the rent widened but tendrils seeped through any gap, dislodging stone, and crumbling the mortar set to bar its way.

Under this clutching mist, slick fungal carpets soon grew on everything, dangerous jobs turned deadly, and one by one the Quarryfolk departed. The most skilled, lured by safer work elsewhere, while those who persevered were consumed by a rheumy putrescence and driven out leaving only the most desperate and unskilled of a once proud people huddling in a shanty at the quarry’s lip.

At first the quarrymaster’s promise of gold for vanquishing the mist lured adventurers from far and wide. Many entered the mist and none have yet returned. The reward was doubled, then redoubled but word spread and it has been weeks since the last brave soul ventured forth.

Now with winter and starvation drawing in necessity has overcome fear and the last of the Quarryfolk, armed with little more than the clothes on your back, have resolved to vanquish the mist and claim the quarrymaster’s reward.