Player version: Town Malachite Flesh to Dust Incident Player Version
Prerequisite
Brave adventurers looking for adventure, arriving in or passing through Malachite.
Quest Content
Quest Giver: Dwargon Malachite Reward: 75gp total (15gp + 60gp upon completion)
The docks are abuzz with a newsboy’s headline: a man turned to crystal, Chrysalis Lab experiment gone wrong. Dwargon Malachite — master smith and Speaker of Malachite Forges, his own skin already marked with black crystal growth — sizes the party up and asks for a favour. Recent rumours suggest originium research has gone dangerously wrong, and public opinion is turning against the forges. He needs outsiders, not forge employees, to find out how bad it really is.
Dwargon needs the party to:
- Investigate the goblin camp to the north, where stolen originium samples were taken
- Question the farmer in the western outskirts about strange growths reported there
- Report back on the true dangers of originium
Hooks:
- Characters concerned about the oripathy outbreak
- Those sympathetic to the dwarven community
- Investigators and information gatherers
- Anyone who has witnessed the crystalline disease firsthand
Starting Point:
Dwargon’s smithy in Copper Ward, where he works despite his condition. A large originium crystal sits on display nearby — one spikey, one refined as a d12, and one formed as a sphere.
En route to the goblin camp the party may run into an Ettin on the outskirts of town, and a shady drow watching from a distance. Magallan, a Rhine Lab mineral researcher, is found hiding near the goblin camp itself, taking notes on the goblins’ stolen loot — Dwargon may ask the party to look after her once they learn she’s out there alone.
At the camp: the goblins are dead or petrified, crystal dust still floating in the air, a goblin corpse mid-crumble. Active originium is contagious within a 10ft range — DC 10 Con save on entering, or be afflicted with one stage of Oripathy. A stolen wagon carrying originium crystal can be recovered here.
DM-Notes:
This quest is the players’ first hands-on contact with originium and Oripathy, well before the disease becomes a citywide political crisis. It functions as the prologue to The Public Health Crisis — the public petrification death outside Chrysalis Labs that triggers that later quest is the same incident the newsboy is shouting about here, just escalated and further along.
Useful NPC conversations for clues on what originium actually is:
- Magallan (Rhine Lab) — originium is a mineral found only on Terra, grows on biological material, and is found in clusters in the tunnels connecting to the deepdark.
- Daeloth and L’oriel(l) Al’ar — the rock is found in the tunnels below and feeds on flesh; it also has useful magical properties.
This quest connects directly into Outbreak on the Farm — the farmer interviewed here may be the same case (see Notes below), and the originium vein under the farm is the same source as the goblin camp’s stolen crystal.
Side stories available if the table wants more: an Ogre Ettin mob (“Hob”) on the road.