Fardrimm Gate

The Fardrimm Gate is a massive adamantine double door in a cavern miles beneath Argentum, the passage to the deep road beyond.¹ It lies about three miles down, exactly the depth where the Underdark begins.² Its inscription names what lies behind it the farad-dûm, the root of the name Fardrimm.¹ The route given in a Tarnar Syndicate note through the tunnels beneath the city ends there.¹

Description

The cavern is too large to see across with darkvision, and natural apart from its carved work.¹ A carved stone pillar fifty feet high stands by the narrow passage that leads in.¹ Smooth stone ramps rise to a platform twenty or thirty feet high, with a large brass statue of an armored dwarf before them and unlit braziers about the platform. Near it the natural floor gives way to inlaid brick with gold filigree running through it.¹ Behind the platform, a great wall of carved stone with stone pillars set into it rises into the dark, and at the platform the wall meets the gate.¹

The doors are a dark metal, the same as the dwarven hand axes though less polished: adamantine. They are twenty feet across, and their trim adds ten more.¹ Set into them are smaller doors five feet high, so that people could come and go without opening the whole passage. Their keyholes take a four-pronged key, but of a different layout from the locks of the Guild of Sparks, and they are original to the adamantine rather than grafted on.¹ In the nearest pillar on each side is a massive four-pronged slot for a key the size of a mace, presumably to open the great doors.¹

Inscription

Across the top of the doors, seventy feet up, runs an inscription in Dwarvish:¹

Here lies the farad-dûm. May the Everfire light the way through the long dark.

Dûm literally means a mine or an excavation, and more commonly deep. Farad, a word no longer in common use among the dwarves of Argentum, means something like travel by road, specifically a road that runs underground. Farad-dûm is the deep road, and Fardrimm is its proper name.¹

Ward

A ward covers the doors. Anything that comes within about two inches sets off a ripple of silver light over sigils across their face, and is thrown back.¹ The sigils are silver arcane runes in Draconic, and probably the most complex spell Luma has ever encountered.¹

History

Session 13

The party reached the gate on the Vigil of Remembrance, 1714 PSF, by the Syndicate’s route.¹ Luma flew up to read the inscription and was bounced off the ward, and nobody tried the doors.¹ Hazel considered the ward and declined to try to dispel it: if Bahamut had set it there, she would trust him.¹ On the wall Luma found shards of brass around a circle of scorch marks, where someone had used up a Tarnar Turnstone.¹ Four phase spiders attacked the party in the cavern, and the party killed them beneath the gate.¹

Session 14

On 1 Nightdeep, 1714 PSF, the party reasoned that digging around the ward might let in whatever it kept out, and that to go through they would need a Tarnar Turnstone.²

References

Footnotes

1. Session 13 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶ ↩¹⁷ ↩¹⁸ ↩¹⁹

2. Session 14 ↩ ↩²