#robert wiese

The seas of Faerûn possess many dangers. Rock shoals, underwater monsters, surface monsters (including the ones that use ships), and weather can cause the wreck of any sailing vessel. 

Add to this list the whim of deities and one can sometimes wonder why anyone chooses the life of a sailor at all. 

Beshaba, mistress of unluck, can visit her attentions on a crew without any provocation. Auril the Frostmaiden sometimes brings chilling winds to batter ships. And Umberlee, goddess of the sea, is known to be a danger to all on, or under, the water. Umberlee is among the most malevolent and unpredictable gods, accepting offerings from a crew for safety and then visiting misfortune on them a day later if someone on the ship says something to displease her. 

Sailors are very careful when speaking of her, but no crew can be too careful.

Many disasters at sea are blamed on the Queen of the Deeps, some of which are not even her fault. The active presence of the gods in Faerûn, however, leads many to attribute natural occurrences, or even stupidity on the part of mortals, to the designs of a god.

Sailors and wizards alike report that somewhere in the seas of Faerûn there exists a giant whirlpool called Umberlee's Fist. 

The name refers to its ability to crush ships with ease, and once a ship sights the Fist it does not survive. Some seagoing captains believe that its currents reach much further outward from its center than the surface currents would indicate, and that ships can be caught in its deadly grip from miles away. To the common sailor, it is a sign of doom, and the despair at seeing it may freeze sailors on their decks and contribute to the loss of ships.

The reasons this whirlpool is attributed to the Queen of the Deeps are twofold. Firstly, it is not in a fixed location. Reports have come back from ships in its grip (through spells or teleportation) of it being in one place, but a ship passing that same place the next day won't see it anywhere. Then it appears in another part of the seas. It has been reported in the Sea of Fallen Stars, the Sea of Swords, and even in the Shining Sea.

Secondly, the great mystery surrounding Umberlee's Fist is where the ships go. Adventurers and others have explored the depths beneath the locations of reported sightings, but no ships have been found. It's as if they disappear when they are pulled down, and indeed they do. For Umberlee's Fist is a huge portal as well as a navigation hazard. 

Ships pulled under the water are sent through the portal to other places in Faerûn -- sometimes places on land. Farmers have been amazed to wake to the sudden presence of a wrecked ship in the midst of their fields, and sailors have reported coming upon derelict ships just disappearing beneath the waves where no cause for the destruction could be found. Most strangely, some of these ships have not existed; no record of a registry in any port anywhere could be found, and sometimes no record of the existence of the captain could be found.

Created by some deity, the portal is a circle about 200 feet in diameter that sits 20 feet below the surface of the water under the whirlpool. It is constantly active and has no fixed destination. It selects a random location in Faerûn every time something passes through the portal's interface. Because of this randomness, it is not anchored well in time either.

Sometimes, but not always, it sends its prey backward through time as well as across space. 

Thus, shipwrecks have been found hundreds of years ago that involve ships from the present, and occasionally a ship from the future is discovered wrecked in the present. No one has studied the temporal aspects of the portal, and anyone trying would find it frustrating because of the randomness. 

A great many portals in Faerûn transport people from one place to another. 

Very few transport through the fourth dimension, however. 

Time travel is nearly unknown to most residents of Faerûn, and those who have thought of it have, for the most part, decided against pursuing any means of traveling in time.

A few temporal anomalies exist, however. Explore the edge of possibility, and possibly madness, by seeking out these strange anomalies. 

Besides the ruins and the portals in the lost civilization they found, the Bandits of the Iron Wind have their own treasure hunt going on. 

They raid and collect the wealth of others, but something they found in the ruins indicates that there is a pile of treasure just waiting for them to lay their hands on it, if only they could.

The records that they discovered in one of the wizard's towers in the ruins have shown them a number of portals and the secrets for using them. 

However, the journal that they found in what was once the house of a minor official (or so they think) has caused the most stir among them. 

It mentions a portal that leads to the city's treasury, which is a secure cavern from which trusted (hopefully) officials could take such wealth as was needed. The location was secure from theft because, according to the journal, it was warded by detection-foiling spells and permanent dimensional anchors that prevented teleport access except through one portal. 

The cavern was sealed with no mundane way out, and it was protected from digging by transmute rock to steel spells. The bandits found the portal easily enough, but it does not work.

The reason that the portal does not work is that a shift in the earth when the chasm was filled in caused the ledge on which the arrival point was set to crumble away, so the arrival point no longer meets the criteria for a safe arrival point. The bandits don't know this, of course, and they cannot find the cavern by scrying.

They have been puzzling for months on how to make the portal work, and they think that they are missing a key (since most of the portals they have found have been keyed). They are partly right, but the secret of the key is in the journal they found.

The key is a simple incantation in the ancient language of the lost civilization, and they have translated and tried it without success.

The portal has one other problem; it is shrinking. 

Some magic that washed over this place ages ago has caused this one portal to malfunction and begin to collapse on itself. 

It was created as a human-size portal set within an arch, but it is now a Tiny portal only 2 feet across. 

As time passes, it gets smaller and smaller as its magic leaks away somehow. Right now only Tiny creatures can pass through it, assuming they could get it to work at all.

 Within 10 years, it will close completely.

One thing that bandits need is a secure place to store their loot, and the portals from the lost civilization have provided the Bandits of the Iron Wind with a very secure place indeed. 

It is, however, a problematic place in that the bandits rely too much on one person to retrieve their stored treasure.

While Jaida Goldspun was exploring the ruins, she came across what was obviously a portal in the basement of a building. 

The records that the bandits found at a wizard's tower indicated that the building was once part of the government center, but no mention was made of the portal. After some experimentation and magical analysis, they determined that the continuously active human-sized portal was a one-way gateway. Strangely, the portal transported its user to a spot about 10 feet beyond it. The user's possessions went elsewhere. 

Through magic, they found that the possessions of any user went to a cavern deep beneath the earth. The cavern is located about a mile north of the ruins, and it is entirely natural. They were puzzled by why anyone would make such a thing, but they found an immediate use for it. 

They would send bandits carrying loot through the portal and the loot would all end up in the cave.

In the cavern, the bandits found three tunnel exits from the portal, but a one-way portal covers each of the ways out. They could enter, but when they tried to leave, they activated the portal and found themselves back in the ruined basement -- naked. Anything they carried was found in the cavern again. Thus, while people could enter and leave, any objects that ended up in the cave stayed there.

The bandits' wizard, Kinon Perray, can use dimension door to bypass the portals and remove items, but that is the only means that the bandits have of removing anything (since the dispel magic option rarely works for Kinon). 

They continue to use the portal, because if they cannot take anything out easily, then anyone else trying to steal from them would not be able to either. But, the reliance on Kinon makes some of the bandits, especially Jaida, very nervous. 

One of the strange items in the records from the city's old library was reference to a continuously active portal located just outside the city limits. 

The records stated that it was positioned next to a great chasm and that the portal allowed quick travel across the chasm. The portal, a two-way construction marked by a simple arch, was paired with a portal on the other side of the chasm.

When Kaldrav and his bandits went looking for this portal, they had a great deal of trouble finding it. 

The reason for this is that they could not find any great chasm or even evidence that one existed. 

If it did exist, they first theorized, it must have been a very long time ago, because it filled in completely and left no trace. Eventually, though, they discovered the first portal in a woods nearby, but when they discovered the portal described as the twin for the first one, it was in a location far remote from these woods in another woods a few hundred miles away.

The effect when using the portal is that one appears not to have gone anywhere after stepping through either of the portals, at least not at first glance. A careful look reveals that the two places are not the same (different moss patterns, different tracks in the ground, different root placements), but if one is in a hurry, the effect can be quite deceptive.

Kaldrav, always on the lookout for useful deceptions, has found a way to make use of this portal thanks to another piece of lore in the old records. The wizards (or so it seems) of the lost civilization wrote of creating a device called a portal interruption key, which is a small round necklace that would cause continuously active portals not to function for the wearer. Thus, the wearer could pass through a portal without being transported, and anyone passing in at the same time would not be transported because the portal's function was suspended. However, the portal would reactivate in the following moments and work normally.

Kaldrav had his wizard create a number of these portal interruption keys and gave them to his bandits. He then ordered that they create a path from the road through the portal and on into the woods, but away from the base area. 

This path comes very close to the base, but passes by and goes elsewhere. Further down, the bandits using this path change to another one and make their way back to the base. This path seems like one of many small game paths in the woods. The bandits then dismantled and removed the arch that marks the portal, so that it was not apparent that the portal was present.

This portal is now used as one-way portal to elude pursuit. 

When bandits return to the forest with law enforcement or adventurers after them, they use the escape path and ride through the portal. Since they are all wearing portal interruption keys, the portal does not activate for them. The pursuing guards or adventurers then pass through the portal unawares and end up hundreds of miles away, with no bandits in sight anywhere.

This trick has worked a few times, but Kaldrav is careful not to use it very often. 

Of the many portals that the Bandits of the Iron Wind discovered in the ruins of the lost civilization, the most useful have been the network they call the Raiding Portals. 

According to the records, this network of six portals was used by farmers so that they could be spread out over great distances and still work as a community. 

Five portals linked the farming regions to each other and to a central portal in the city. Each portal is about 6 feet in diameter, and they were all marked by unassuming arches. The arches have long since crumbled, but the portals remain. 

They are keyed; to activate one, the user must wear a symbol to the lost civilization's agricultural god (not Chauntea; a drawing of the symbol was in the records). Further, the portals were numbered on their arches, and saying the number of the portal at which you wished to arrive keyed the portal to that destination. 

Since the arches are gone, it took some time for the bandits to figure out which portal was which.

The five portals in the countryside are all within twenty miles of the ruined city, and no two are separated by more than ten miles. They form a kind of gentle curve stretching across the countryside, and the curve now parallels the road. The center two are but two miles apart.

These portals have made the bandits much more successful than they otherwise would have been. They can scout caravans coming from both ends, and they move quickly to outmaneuver them and attack from wherever they choose within the portal strip. 

Their favorite tactic is to catch the caravan in the center and use the two closest portals to attack from two sides at once. To encourage caravans to stop within their reach, the bandits built two large campsite areas within the spread of their portals. These camp areas seem defensible with good views that allow one to see anyone approaching. 

However, one of the portals actually is located in one of the campsites, and the other campsite is a mere 300 yards from the portal at the other end of the portal chain. Thus, the bandits can get very close and attack before caravan guards can mount a suitable defense.

Deep in the forests there lies a lost and ruined civilization. 

Where it came from, or what caused its demise, is unknown because no one has studied it. Scattered references to the inhabitants may exist in the documents of other lands, but that is all.

Could their fate be tied to powerful magic, as is so often the case in Faerûn? Could their fate be tied to orc hordes or rampaging demons?

The ruins of this civilization encompass a single large city, built on the site where the forest now grows. Ruins of buildings can be found throughout the central part of the forest, and a number of animals and monsters live in these ruins. 

Only one group, the Bandits of the Iron Wind, knows whether the ruins contain vast wealth or just monsters. 

Dwarves are known to prefer more straightforward methods of doing things to magical ones. They mine, they fight, they feast, they uphold their honor. They use magic, but as a supplement to their activities rather than as a primary means of accomplishing them. 

Those who practice magic among the dwarves are not common.

Those who can make portals are even rarer, and with good reason. 

Portals among the dwarves usually have some unusual feature or meet some unusual need; you just don't find them everywhere.