Mount Hotenow is a huge barely-dormant volcano on the southeast end of the Crags, in Neverwinter Wood. The heat it produces is the reason the region’s rivers never freeze, and therefore it’s at the root of Neverwinter’s prosperity. It was also the cause of its downfall 27 years ago, when a Thayan ritual caused it to erupt.

Even before the cataclysm Mount Hotenow was already the subject of many rumors and legends. It’s an opening to Hell; it’s an opening to the Elemental Chaos; demons live here; giants live here; dragons live here; and so on. The most recent tale is that anyone who enters one of Hotenow’s many caves is fated to die within a year, even if they make it out.

Fire Cultists

Though the original mountain in the middle world is back to its pre-cataclysm state, its reflection on the Shadowfell has been spewing a slow and steady stream of lava since the cataclysm. Some people believe that this shadow eruption could cause one in the middle world if the barriers between planes wear thin enough. Such a state of constant eruption would spell doom for Neverwinter.

Chief among these believers are the many elemental fire creatures that do indeed make Mount Hotenow their home. They’re led by the hunchbacked fire giant Gommoth, who has lived here since he was banished from his clan. The eruption 27 years ago was a major ecstatic experience to him and to every other fire creature who lived here, and since then Gommoth started a cult dedicated to making it happen again.

The ecstatic experience happened because it was Maegera’s near-awakening that caused the eruption, and her power tugged at the elementals’ primordial nature. Gommoth doesn’t know this, but the cult’s latest rising star probably does. This is Qualthus, the shadovar outcast. Remember him? He was banished from Xinlenal after being blamed for the accidental sabotage of their mythallar. True to the general disposition of his former buddies, Qualthus has decided that the best way to remedy this injustice is to cause Mount Hotenow to erupt again and bury Xinlenal in lava.

He’s confident he can do it. After all he’s an arcanist of the Netherese tradition (read: a megalomaniacal asshole). His actual chances are incredibly small, after all it took the full might of the Dread Ring to make it happen the first time. But he could get lucky, since Maegera’s bonds are weakened.

To represent Gommoth, the book suggests using an ogre mercenary stat block with added fire resistance, increased Charisma, and with attacks doing fire damage. You could also level down a standard fire giant stat block to make him fit with the campaign’s level range.

The River Of Flame

Deep underground, beneath the territory of the fire cultists, there is a river of liquid flame. This isn’t poetic language or a metaphor for magma, but a literal description. The river follows a winding subterranean path, and the important thing for player characters is that it passes by a tunnel that leads directly to Gauntlgrym.

PCs who know where to disembark could take some sort of fireproof boat or submersible through this river, and arrive at the lost city. Their main challenge here besides the hostile environment is Karrundax, the very territorial young red dragon who lairs in the area.

Seekers of the Way

One thing that happens repeatedly in this book is that a theme description in Chapter 2 will give us the impression that the PC in question is the only one doing something, and then a faction or location description further down the line will give us a whole group of NPCs with the same goal, and that’s going to be the first time we hear of these NPCs.

This might be a disconnect between different authors, or it might be a sort of soft “Player’s Guide/Campaign Setting” separation within the same book, since presumably you want PCs to choose a theme without seeing any spoilers about what they’ll encounter during the campaign. Whatever the case, we now run into the group that ties to the Heir of Delzoun, and it’s a genuine Dwarf Fortress expedition!

The Heir’s description actively lied to the player: they’re not one of the last dwarves who are still looking for the lost city. In reality there are so many that after their disparate teams and groups joined together to coordinate their efforts they had to elect a government to keep them organized. Their newly elected leader decided that Mount Hotenow was their best bet, since there were many stories connecting it to Gauntlgrym and a few confirmed Delzoun outposts on its slopes.

This extremely large expedition set out from Neverwinter before the Heir got here, and the litany of setbacks and tragedies they experienced along the way is what gives me that Fun (TM) Dwarf Fortress vibe.

First they bought a letter of safe passage from Neverember in order to pass through Many-Arrows territory unharmed, but the dwarves and orcs just couldn’t resist provoking each other until hostilities broke out.

Then they arrived at the Wood and lost yet more dwarves to eladrin arrows and miscellaneous monsters. Either Shandarar’s guardians were particularly trigger-happy or it was those old rivalries flaring up again.

Then they got to the volcano and lost a bunch more dwarves to Gommoth’s cult.

And now they’re stuck at the river of flame. Can’t forge ahead because no one packed a fireproof submersible, can’t retreat because the survivors aren’t sure they can make it back to Neverwinter alive. To say that morale is low is a massive understatement.

Morale would be even lower if the expedition’s leader, Vandra Hillborn, revealed the terrible secret she’s keeping. Many of the dwarves “lost” to the elementals actually defected to them, and now work together to bring about the volcano’s next eruption. Hillborn believes they cracked under the strain of the trip and went insane, but the truth is even worse: they were intentionally driven insane by the Gauntlgrym mind-flayers through remote telepathy. The flayers believe that a volcanic eruption is just the thing to permanently block access to Gauntlgrym and prevent any meddlers from finding it.

As we already know, the mind flayers are themselves being controlled by the aboleths, so we have a true conspiracy onion here.

Impressions

There are several ways to discover Gauntlgrym’s precise location elsewhere, but the River of Flame under Mount Hotenow appears to be the most viable path to actually go there. The fate of the dwarven expedition is a good blueprint of what an overland journey from Neverwinter to here would involve.

It’s possible to have an entire party of PCs who would be more interested in pursuing this journey than dealing with the other hooks in the setting: not just one or more Heirs of Delzoun but also perhaps one of Oghma’s Faithful who’s really into archaeology, a Dead Rat Deserter who’s after the score of the century, and even a Neverwinter Noble in a campaign where finding Gauntlgrym will give them the popular acclaim they need to take the throne. If there’s an extended detour to deal with the eladrin, then perhaps the Iliyanbruen Guardian can get into the mix too.