The+Council+of+Lawful+Dragons

The Council of Lawful Dragons
We first met with a pair of lawful dragons in Politzania. We gave them the blue dragon orb and Whitey. We were teleported to an island south of our continent. It was a dead volcano, and very pleasant inside. Over a few days we were rewarded with 10kgp each and a choice of one stat point. We were also requested to do another mission to help the dragons. The original suggestion was to destroy the main temple in the Yuanti religious nest, a building from before the age of magic, but then they settled on us learning about the shadow beings, specifically the drow shadow paladins. They know of 3 pairs of shadow paladins, elven, human, and drow. We agreed to that mission.

Hillary, The Blue Bitch, daughter of Her Highness the Blue, was here in place of her mother. Her dislike and disdain for us was easy to see, as was ours for her. We all feel she will attempt to betray us somehow and lead us to our deaths, and that we must kill her at some point. Could she be a/the shadow dragon or at least hope to become one and now an agent?

Drow Shadow Paladins
We were given the name of a small town northeast of Gateway that had been mentioned once by someone close to a shadow paladin, but almost nothing else is known about the shadow paladins. We are the 4th group the dragon council has sent there. It is a small silvermining town, but the silver has been almost mined out, and the town has been in decline for a generation or more. Yuri did a commune with nature, finding a circle with no animal life north of the town. Nothing else was too interesting. We decided not to enter town at all, but to stay hidden outside. We flew as birds to the circle to find a clearing in the woods about 20 yards wide. Around the clearing, every tree had been neatly sliced off at waist-height and blown over away from the clearing center. The trees were dead, and Yuri estimated it to have happened around 15-30 years ago. The ground here is still slightly cool to the touch, and animals won't enter and new plants are growing at a very reduced rate. Endo recognized that the effect came from a portal to another plane had been opened here.

Near the center of the clearing was a dead body. It matched the description of the 3rd person the dragons sent (only 3 days ago). He had been shot with poisoned arrows by someone who had been "shadowing" him since he left town. He refused to be reincarnated, but he said that this was the hometown of the drow shadow paladins. A legend lore at the spot said that betrayal had happened here, with drow killing their own family members here.

We are now scouting the town. So far we have seen 2 things of interest: there seems to be a high percentage of citizenized ex-army here, all from the same regiment. We also saw three drow, a middle-aged female who acts very formal and dignified, a younger man who is probably her eldest son, and a young woman who acted unusually friendly and caring towards the beings in town. The new philosophy appears to be taking hold with some.

While following the young drow female, we saw her head out to parellel the silver shipment as some kind of secret guard. She appeared to be a paladin of Hel with a giant spider mount. We decided to confront her and speak with her. She finally came to trust us, using a detect lie spell, and told us that her older brother and sister were the shadow paladins and had been reported dead. She feared other drow learning of the betrayal and what other drow families would do to her family if it were known and she was having spies killed, assuming they were working for other drow families. We agreed to keep it secret. She then told us of a book her brother had had, detailing the creation of shadow beings and how and where to do it. It led him to a living building of Shadow Magic that was somewhere on the Sky Plains which would open the Gateway to the Shadow Plane. After the ceremony, the elder brother destroyed the book to hide the truth. The young paladiness also told us that three great library complexes existed which were dedicated to Shadow Magic. One is/was in the drow capital, and had probably been destroyed by the comet, if not protected by proximity to their mage's guild. Either way it's not accessable now. The second was on an island dedicated to the shadow, but the whole island was destroyed when the second empire fell. The third library is in Gateway, which is still heavily influenced by Shadow Magic and thus the enemy of the Paladiness of Hel and her kinder side. She will try to get us some official documents as citizens. We can contact her through the high priestess of Hel in Koin.