Role

Chapter 2

Oxias started at the beginning, explaining to the old dwarf about how he worked on a crew as a tunneler
in the under led by his older brother, Olaf. Their family going back for generations were some of the
finest stonecutters in the underdark. They, like many svirfnebli, had an affinity with the earth. He told
him how he had a relationship with the stone. He would feel it, and smell it and listen to it and the stone
would tell him its secrets. Oxias could tell where the stone was strongest and weakest. He could tell
where the stone was hollow or would change from one type of rock to another. He was so good at it he
would often breaks rocks with his fists, amazing people and making it look like he had hands made of
iron. It was a skill passed down through his family, many using it for all sorts of different trades, but his
brother had found a use for it in creating tunnels and he as a young svirf had just begun working for his
brother when the councilman from Cragstone that oversaw all the exterior construction operations died
suddenly.

The dead councilman was replaced by a no-nonsense council woman, named Doritea. She was very
ambitious in the tunnel system she intended to create and began demanding near impossible
workloads. Not long after that, cave-ins started happening in the tunnel system regularly. Because of
that, Doritea surprised them all by publicly denouncing the quality of the tunnelers work, calling it
ineffective and outdated. There was a better way she claimed. She proposed giving all the tunneling
contracts to the earth invokers, saying their magic has proven to be more efficient and less dangerous.
As it were currently, invokers did assist on some crews but the bulk of the work was done by laborers.
The tunnel crew leaders became upset and suspicious over this, because they knew that Doriteas family
had close tied to the invokers guild in Cragstone and so to settle the matter a meeting was called before
King and council to determine who would get the tunneling duties going forward.

Olaf left the worksite and went to attend the meeting. There, he watched as before the council Doritea
gave a very convincing speech pointing to all the cave-ins that had been happening recently and the
deaths that accompanied them. She gave evidence that, while flimsy and circumstantial, seemed to
prove that all this was a result of the current mining practices and went to further show that in the areas
the invokers did help the work had been more successful and less accident prone. Convinced by her
arguments, the council decided to turn all the contracts over to the invokers.