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Background
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The wizard
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A dark evil energy exists in the caves below the mountains.

A few centuries ago, when rivals fought for control of the region, one
king built a watchtower at the peak of the mountains to watch for
invasions from neighboring kingdoms.

The king picked a brave warrior and a close friend to be the watchtower captain.

After a few months at the stronghold, the captain saw signs of madness
in his troops.

A few guards at night saw apparitions.  Some became catatonic.  Others
had occasional fits of babbling gibberish.  Others wandered away from
the stronghold.

Soldiers became violent and undisciplined.

He ordered some of his men flogged after they attacked and killed all a
caravan of merchants passing by.  The captain was shocked by the degree
of barbarity.  He sent a message to the king saying that the mountains
were bewitched.

Most had wandered away, speaking gibberish.  Others had become violent
and animalistic.  They attacked their own comrades and fought like
animals.

The king received the message and sent his mage with eight of his
royal guard and to investigate.

When the mage arrived, the captain remained with his assistant All
the remaining garrison of nearly 40 soldiers had disappeared.

The mage explored the caves below the stronghold and found a huge
cavern littered with the decaying remains of the deserters.  They all
seemed to have diead of dehydration and starvation.

All the corpses were near a huge boulder that blocked a tunnel.

The mage, a mage himself, detected dark magic; deeper and more
ancient than he had ever sensed before.

The mage sent news back to the king that he found signs of great
magical power and he needed workers to dig it out.

The king, trusting his mage, sent engineers and diggers to the
mage.

Afters days and days, they broke through the boulder and found a small
open chamber and a little natural spring trickling across the floor and
then disappearing through some other cracks in the rock.

The mage was a secret scholar of necromancy and he recognized what his
miners had dug up.  A fragment of an old one's remains must be buried
deep down in this mountain.  The presense of that fragment corrupted the
natural spring.

The mage ordered the works to plug all the cracks in the chamber and
make a pit.

Then once the pit was finished and had filled with the unholy spring
water, the mage performed a ritual that transformed himself into a wraith
and transformed the eight royal guards into his undead slaves.

Then the wraith mage transformed all the workers into ghouls and ghasts
and reanimated the corpses of the dead garrison into skeleton and zombie
slaves.

The garrison's captain escaped and returned back to the king.

So the king, with his best warriors, rode to the mountain stronghold.
He found that the stronghold had been rebuilt and made stronger with all
the undead slaves.  The mage said he would not bow to the king.  He said
"let us baptize you or die".

The king decided to fight, but the mage's horde of undead were far too
powerful, and the king and a few of his surviving warriors fled.

In the next few months and years, ghouls and ghasts rode through the
region, raiding farms and kidnapping villagers to take back to the wraith
to be transformed into more undead slaves.

The mage used his undead slaves to dig deeper into the mountains and
search for the remains of the old one.  He converted the underground
caverns into a necropolis of mines and forges to arm his undead
warriors.

He built a huge laboratory where he performed more necromantic rituals.

Word spread of the wraith stronghold and its army of undead.  Eventually,
the kings of the land could no longer ignore the menace and they all
united to defeat the wraith.  One king sent his greatest paladins and holy
clerics with an ancient holy relic.

The paladins and holy clerics, armed with the relic, forced the undead
army deep into the caves of the mountain and trapped them there and
sealed off the entrance to their necropolis.

Then the paladins and clerics converted the stronghold into a holy
chapel and installed the relic there, to keep the undread hordes trapped
below.  Then they suppressed all the news and legends of the evil
mountain and now the undead army trapped within.

The forces of good decided they needed to keep the undead army trapped
inside a secret, because too many other forces would want to ally with
the undead in order to gain power.


The corrupt cleric
==================

This is the guy that hires the party to retrieve the relic.


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