Sky Wagon Relic

The Sky Wagon Relic is all that is left from a project originally proposed by the Giants. Those Genesis Creatures had planned to build a railway resp. maglev that could reach the stars and the abode of the gods. Since this was shortly before the Giants openly declared war on the gods, it is safe to assume that the Sky Wagon project had been a strategic move, apparently built so that the Giants could easier come and worship their masters, in reality intended to facilitate troop movements, making it possible to ship soldiers and supplies quickly to the front.

However that may have been, the Sky Wagon was still in the planning stage when war broke out. The Giants suffered a total defeat, the remnants fleeing eastward, while their former slave races were suddenly free. The Dwarves were the first among them who got organized, establishing the Dwarven Kingdom in the north of the continent. During the Age of the Giants, several Dwarves had been employed on the Sky Wagon project, making calculations and drawing blueprints. After the Dwarven Kingdom was fairly well settled in, the engineers of the Gray Pillar Guild dug up those old blueprints and proceeded with the project.

As site for the Sky Wagon, a place in the hills east of Schuttgart had already been chosen by the Giants. Schuttgart was at that time a rather wealthy province of the Dwarven Kingdom, but a lot of the construction material had to be brought in from the Spine Mountains Mining Area. Transporting tons of coal and iron ore by mule caravan over the dangerous passes to the foundries at Schuttgart was no solution, so the Dwarves, experienced miners that they were, simply dug a tunnel through the mountains - what is now known as "Mining Zone Passage" - and laid a railroad track from Dwarven Village to Schuttgart. In the center of the plains northeast of Schuttgart they built a Railway Station with a marshalling yard from where the reinforcement rods for the maglev track supports and all other material could be ferried via a branch railway to the construction site.

But then the Human armies took Schuttgart, Mlan fell under the Orcish onslaught, and the Dwarven Kingdom came to an end. A lot of the Dwarves from the former capital could escape to Dwarven Village, where the temporary government set up by the guild Elders first of all had to provide accomodation for the refugees, think about ways to feed them in the snow covered mountains, build up a new society from scratch. In those days there were lots of more urgent things to do, and under the pressure of their colleagues in the Elder Council, the Gray Pillar Guild had to shelve the Sky Wagon project.

The Dwarves working at the construction site did not want to give up, though. They had a dream of building something great, of reaching the abode of the gods, and simply continued with the work. Without supplies regularly brought in from Schuttgart they could not hold out for long in the frozen wilderness. One by one they starved to death. But even in death they clung to their mission. They refused Shilen's call to the Underworld and remained in the area, translucent ghosts roaming the former construction site. As they realized that as ghosts they could no longer hold tools, could no longer work, they gradually went insane, mindlessly attacking anybody who wants to have a closer look at the Sky Wagon Relic. Only one among them, the ghost of a former railroad engineer, has enough wits left to realize what is happening. Since, being a ghost, he can not hold a weapon himself, he asks adventurers sent over by a spectral colleague at the Railway Station to put the forgotten crewmen out of their misery.

Quests

The Ocean of Distant Stars
A Broken Dream