Zoom 2022-10-04 21:00

One in - All Four In
The party decides to go on a picnic to the old Royal Palace. (Apart from Quercuis who stays behind at the Wildwood shrine.)
We arrive first at the old tourney grounds - a roughly circular field with some benches around it and a covered stand for the big-wigs. It is deserted, but still in good nick and pretty much as Caradoc remembers it.
To the east of it is what appears to be a practice-field, with training dummies and semi-permanent tents to serve as make-shift barracks - all new to Caradoc. We start investigating them - wondering if it would be appropriate to use them ourselves. However, Kirsten can only smell the scent of Elves (not even Dark Elves), so we quickly decide that this is not a place for us, and depart for the palace proper.
As we approach the palace wall, we notice that the lead character (Caradoc) is surrounded by a shimmering effect - we immediate call a halt and investigate this phenomenon. It turns out to be massive magical one-way barrier forming a hemisphere (though presumably a sphere going underground as well) surrounding the whole palace. We discover this by first Francis, and then Joshua, Dougal and Brokev going through it - for reasons ranging from curiosity, duty, and nobility through to downright stupidity. 
We decide to start circumnavigating the barrier (going clockwise), with four characters inside and the rest of the party outside the barrier.  After a while we find a skeleton of a lizardman slumped forward on the inside of the barrier. It has a magical ring (that we keep) and a magical Garm holy symbol (which we leave), and Wun determines that the cadaver is about 3 months old.  We continue on until we reach the road leading to the main entrance of the palace - the palace gates are open: one is off its hinges, broken outwards. We decide to camp down for the night near the road.
We are able to determine the following properties of the barrier:
* It is a one-way barrier allowing living creatures and magic to pass through it towards the palace, but not out.
* You can go half through and still come back, but once completely though the barrier, you can't come back (even if roped to someone outside.)
* 'magic' includes magical items and effects: A 'mend' spell cast from outside onto on an item inside the barrier works. We surmise it would not work the other way around. A 'detect magic' spell cast from outside the barrier could not detect magic inside - we take this as the information not getting back through the barrier. A cont-light shines through to the other side from outside, but not from inside. 
* Animal tracks appear to veer away from the barrier - so there is some basic animal re-direction/deterrence effect . A gorse bushing growing at the barrier is neatly bisected by it, with the bush growing either side of it, but with a small, clear gap between it's two halves.
* A Dispel Magic spell had no effect- though we intuit that it could have had very bad consequences for the caster/party if we had been unlucky.
The party will have to wait a while to see how they will get out of this pickle, as there will be no session next Tuesday (11th Oct).