Hellrock Campaign

The Hellrock Campaign was a year long roleplay campaign that ran from January 2015 until February 2016, shortly before the founding of The Lamplighters. It developed and expanded in size across the time period, beginning as an election fixing scheme orchestrated by an incognito criminal mastermind, transitioning into the rising threat of a new, insidious and malevolent metal named Hellrock (from which derived the Campaign's namesake) and the elaborate plan to assassinate a disguised dreadlord, a crime syndicate and nearly one hundred prominent faces within Stormwind's nobility at the same time, before culminating in a climactic battle between two Dwarven brothers and a gathered army against a nascent Old God with the fate of Azeroth at stake.

While the campaign pre-dates the formation of The Lamplighters, the main players involved with the storyline became the core membership of Agents shortly thereafter, and the ramifications and consequences of the campaign carried forwards to affect the major decisions made in the guild's foundation. For these reasons, the Hellrock Campaign is documented in this Wiki for proper context to all events that occurred thereafter.

## Background

Prior to the beginning of the campaign, Gladnar's younger brother Duncan Brightfist had been missing for thirteen years, over which time the elder Brightfist had made it his personal mission to find him. Without success across Kalimdor and a deadly encounter in Northrend only known as "The Snowhold Incident" that left Gladnar in disgrace, the old Dwarf returned to Stormwind penniless and dishonourably discharged from the Silver Hand. Falling through several less-than-glamorous jobs, Gladnar eventually found employ among an order of world-traversing assassins and began to ingratiate himself while he used their resources to aid in his search.

Shortly before his disappearance, Duncan had fallen in with an organised gang of criminals headed by the infamous, charismatic outlaw John Mead. Mead's gang comprised of six specialists dedicated towards high risk-high reward robberies, of which Duncan became the seventh member due to his magical talents. The Gang never stayed still for long and they often made their getaways through the clever use of winged mounts and flying contraptions. They made use of this tactic so much that Stormwind Investigators eventually dubbed them, "The Flying Gang".

After Duncan disappeared, the Flying Gang left the Stormwind area to perform a covert job in the frozen wastes of Northrend which by all accounts was on behalf of a Warlock coven called the Red Priests. The job was to harvest fallen pieces of Deathwing the Destroyer whose magical elementium shell (which contained traces of his immense power) splintered to earth after being attacked by the Dragon Soul. The job was a success but whether it was the success the Flying Gang sought after is unknown. When Mead and his fellows returned many months later, their methods and targets changed vastly. Mead switched tracks from jobs for gold and coin to heists specifically to gain high-end spell reagents and arcane tomes, however their behaviour had become more erratic and sloppy compared to the subtle brilliance of Mead's schemes prior. Several members were captured and imprisoned during their final job to steal an illusory sceptre from the Stormwind Bank in the Dwarven District, causing the others fled into obscurity. John Mead himself led the law on a tense chase from his home in Lakeshire, through Redridge and Duskwood until he was cornered at Raven Hill by an unassuming clerk and militiaman, Gregon Weeks. Mead was imprisoned in the depths of The Stockade to await his execution while Weeks, as his reward, was offered a cushy position in the lower tier of Stormwind Bank's management. However during his encounter with Weeks, Mead, knowing that his end was near, defeated the man and used all of the stolen sceptre's magic at once to switch visages with the clerk. The effect worked and while "John Mead" was carted away to be thrown into the deepest depths of The Stockades, "Gregon Weeks" began to move into his new office and began his defences against his former master and associates.

Finally, although unknown to the world at large, Duncan Brightfist's body was transported to Blackrock Mountain at the same time John Mead was being incarcerated, attended to by the remaining Flying Gang members and a small group of the Red Priests. Although barely alive and barely even mortal when he arrived, his powers of the Fel and Shadow were still immense. His attendants built him a throne room in the deepest depths of the Molten Core, and subjugated elementals and mortals that dwelled there to fuel their master's recovery from the ritual. Over time, Duncan reawakened as his mortal body further merged to the suit of armour, and began to move again under his own weight. All who came into contact with his armour were transformed by his touch into mind-controlled Golems: still conscious but their bodies warped into humanoid homunculi made of Fel-infused elementium and fully controlled by the creature's will. The other denizens of the mountain and the surroundings stayed well clear of the Core and its wandering Red Priests and Golems, and took to calling the armoured Dwarf, "The King Beneath the Mountain" as it was the only name which the Red Priests used to refer to him.

It was only a matter of time before these disparate groups and their activities crashed headlong into each other.

### Act I

#### Gregon Weeks, the Dreadlord and the Lord of Stormwind Bank

During the Iron Horde's attempted invasion of Azeroth, thirteen years after his appointment to the job, unassuming bank clerk Gregon Weeks had grown tired of how the nobility ran the Bank of Stormwind and, more importantly, how much money he was making in his current position. Though he had a modest office in the City's outskirts and a capable manservant in August "Quilly" Quillbert, Weeks saw the Lords above him driven in their horse-drawn cabs, their private airships and seasonal manor houses, as well as all their clandestine perversions covered up. He would never find himself so rich as they, even when he was an outlaw, and found he couldn't stand it any longer.

A fateful day in midwinter, Weeks discovered that one of the premiere Lords of Stormwind Bank and his direct overseer, The Honourable Lord Hattersby, was planning a private dalliance with his Blood Elven mistress at a party in Eversong Woods. He had Quilly make contact with a group of assassins and hired them to infiltrate the party in disguise and kill his boss without any witnesses or word reaching back to the Alliance. The hirelings (many of whom would go on to become Lamplighter Agents) completed the job quickly but not quietly as the party was alerted to the bloodbath almost at once, prompting a very narrow escape. Word reached Stormwind of Hattersby's demise, though due to the political atmosphere and the location of where he died, the circumstances of how it had happened were never deeply scrutinised.

Lord Hattersby had no heir or groomed successor to his title, and thus an election was called for the choosing of the next Lord of Stormwind Bank. Though the votes would be cast by the citizenry whose money was held by the institution, only the veteran ladies and gentleman in the Bank's management were eligible for entry. Gregon Weeks quickly put his hat into the ring along with four others. Three of these names were far richer and better connected than Weeks and had arguably led a more corrupt life than he had over his tenure. Weeks knew that he would never be chosen among these candidates, and so kept the assassins on retainer to perform election sabotage to improve his dismal chances. The fourth name, however, was entered by Obadiah Crawford; a modest politician and family man from Westfall and though the most easily handled candidate, Weeks chose instead to leave Crawdford entirely alone, even to the point of having his hired hands defend him on one occasion. Gregon's motives for not attacking the man as he had with his other competitors was never established, and whether it was out of good sportsmanship, a quiet respect for Crawford himself, or if Weeks was merely toying with his prey, remains a mystery.

Under Quilly's recommendations, Week's agents uncovered guarded secrets and blackmail material to strongarm the other prospects into withdrawing their candidacy, and one by one each candidate capitulated, save for Crawford who Weeks outmatched in the polls consistently. During the course of their work however, the agents uncovered a darker secret within the nobility of Stormwind Bank that they did not expect; one of the candidates had managed to partner with a captured Nath'rezim named Terror'gar. Previously masquerading as the noblewoman Lady Pudding, Terror'gar had been forced to put its own considerable influence in getting their candidate elected. However, the dreadlord manipulated the High Elf Lannael Ven'Renn into releasing the Nath'rezim from its bindings, and in thanks the dreadlord offered to change allegiances in exchange for a favour owed. However, the Worgen Tanya Rein took Lannael's place in the deal, and became magically bound to owing the demon the favour.

#### The Rise of John Mead

With three of his opponents dropping out and the power of a Nathrezim at his back, Gregon Weeks went from a dark horse candidate to the favourite for the title of Lordship. But before the ballots had all been counted, Weeks received some startling news from abroad. Grant Darby, his former right hand man and primarily known by his moniker, "The Elf Butcher", had returned from his self-imposed exile and had supplanted him as the head of the reformed Flying Gang. His informants told Weeks that he planned to break "John Mead" out of jail in a brazen assault on The Stockades. If The Elf Butcher's assault was successful, Week's ruse would be uncovered, but he could not be seen to have too great a hand in the proceedings. On the eve of the vote tally, Gregon Weeks dispatched his agents to the lower levels of the Stormwind Stockade to dispose of "John Mead" before his secret could be outed. He knew that the mercenaries would discover his duplicity, he would rather face them as adversaries than let his former gang members know that he still lived.

The assassins did their duty, sneaking past Darby as he recruited the now-freed prisoners into the Flying Gang, and in the process discovered that they had played a major role in letting the criminal mastermind be elected to a Lord of Stormwind with significant political and financial power. The real Gregon Weeks, malnourished, exhausted and barely able to stand, said that he would be unable to sneak past Darby without compromising them all, and bid that the group kill him and put him at rest. However, he asked that they ensure that Mead pay for his transgressions. The agents agreed and mercy killed the transfigured clerk but by the time they returned to the surface, it was too late and "Lord Gregon Weeks" was sworn into service by King Varian Wrynn with all the powers and privileges that came with it. Backed by a demon's hidden powers, in an influential office and physically and politically untouchable, Mead seemed suddenly like a very powerful created enemy.

Were it not for the developments happening elsewhere in the world, perhaps they would have met a similar fate to the unfortunate Weeks in due course.

#### Hellrock's Discovery

Mead's hired agents were not only intertwined with his machinations for the title of Lordship. At the same time that the election was drawing to a close, they were contracted to assassinate the leader of a nefarious cult growing out of the old Ogre mound north-east of Loch Modan. On the surface, these two jobs seemed entirely unrelated to one another. The "Red Priests" appeared to be little more than elemental fanatics obsessed with collecting sculptures and metallic craftmanship made from the fallen pieces of the Bastion of Twilight, but their sudden swell of converts coupled with a surge of disappearances had the local trappers concerned. With the Mountaineers focused on the Iron Horde incursion into Blackrock Mountain in the south, they turned to the band of mercenaries for aid.

The assassination was a success but the group uncovered two important pieces of information; the first being that the Red Priests and their former leader was only a small operation which answered to a figure they referred to as, "The King Beneath the Mountain". The second discovery was a small chunk of fiery metal that appeared to be molten even when it was a solid block. The agents witnessed one of the captives the Red Priests transfigured upon contact with the metal, their body replicating more of the substance until they became a monster that the cult called a Golem. Though they were able to kill the creature and bury the metal through the use of a cave-in, they were able to take magical readings of the substance and recover research notes about the creation and make-up of this magical metal: Hellrock.

In the months following John Mead's ascension to Lordship, the agents became pre-occupied with finding new conclaves of the Red Priest cult as well as sightings of further Golems and pieces of Hellrock across the Eastern Kingdoms, with each one appearing to be testing grounds in isolated parts of the continent. All the while, Mead's silence left the assassins nervous, and they prepared for him to strike back against them.

### Act II

#### The King's Gambit

Unknown to his hirelings at the time, Mead's ascension to Lordship had not gone unnoticed by his former gang. Though Darby reached the cell and believed his former master to be truly dead, The King Beneath the Mountain was able to see through the Elf Butcher's eyes and unbound the careful magics Mead had used to hide Week's true form. His ruse uncovered, The King sent an envoy of his Red Priests to meet with "Lord Gregon" to declare that even in his high office, he would be unable to evade his grasp. He blackmailed Mead into cooperating with him again, and the charlatan Lord agreed. Secretly, Mead saw the madness that his old friend had become and had no intentions of complying with his wishes if he could avoid it. Once again, he reached out to the agents once more.

Mead's response took them by surprise, expecting the Lord to have no love for them now they knew his secret. However, he revealed his own knowledge of the Hellrock substance and the plan that The King Beneath the Mountain had for it. Mead told them that the King plotted to gather enough magical material to imbue the molten lava residing within Blackrock Mountain with the full properties of Hellrock. That done, the King would then perform a ritual that would cause the Mountain to erupt at a radius that would cover all the lands around it, and its range would eclipse Stormwind City, Ironforge, the remnants of Gnomeregan as well as all the lands in-between, converting all touched by the lava flow into Golems entirely under the King's mental control. An army of such a size and able to convert others at a mere touch would be, at best, an incredible threat to Azeroth, and at worst a potentially apocalyptic event.

#### The Black Dinner

Mead hatched a plan along with the assassins to perform an event that would become known as The Black Dinner. Ostensibly, Mead's task by the King was to use his assets to sway the House of Nobles to support his efforts by coercion or force, enabling him to gather the vast amount of resources far quicker than the Red Priests were currently able. Instead, Mead plotted that the agents would gather all the members of the Flying Gang, the leaders of the Red Priest cult, his dreadlord benefactor along with a vast collection of the members of the House of Nobles, and bring them to his inherited noble estate in Duskwood. Gathered together, the group would then lay a trap that would bring about the death of everyone involved and set the King back long enough to rally an army, as well as research a cure for Hellrock itself.

The agents dispatched across the world, finding the members of the Flying Gang and as many of the cult heads as they could find. On their travels, they found that the Gang had been tasked with securing new specimens to infect with Hellrock and create new Golem creatures from. These included the Silithid and Qiraji from the Temple of Ahn'Qiraj, as well as Dragon eggs stolen from Northrend. Nevertheless, at the insistence of their old gang leader, every surviving member of the Flying Gang agreed to attend.

There were two exceptions to this. The first was The Elf Butcher, Grant Darby. In their first encounter with him, Mead kept up the façade and dispatched his hirelings to accompany Darby to Stranglethorn where he attempted to create a pool of molten Hellrock to infect the Sea Giants on the coast. However, Darby's boorish attitude and aggressive demeanour pushed the agents past their point of patience and they attacked him, hurling the Elf Butcher into the vat he was preparing. Darby survived, just barely, and transfigured into a Golem moments before his death. The second was "Torch", one of the Flying Gang members who was able to figure out Mead's plan and attempted to kill his agents and escape to warn his master. They were able to catch up to the man and swiftly dispose of him.

The assassins were positioned inside Lord Week's estate for hours before. The nobles believed that this dinner was to be the wedding feast between Lord Weeks and the Lady Pudding, and so the agents were disguised as waiters, serving staff and, for the non-Humans, exotic guests of honour. Their disguises picked, they spent hours prior transforming the estate and the dining hall into a secret death trap. Bombs, wires, shattering windows, fast-release poisons, detonating chairs and paving tiles, wards to prevent teleportation and nullification fields for mages; every measure that was able to kill or injure a person was cleverly woven into the room and out of sight. They even managed to secure a Lightbound Orb, which had the power to overwhelm the Nathrezim that would be in their midst.

Not even Terror'gar was suspicious when the guests arrived and the dinner began. Only two uninvited guests were present that Mead did not expect; Grant Darby, coated in a heavy suit of armour, and "Torch", who arrived wrapped in his usual mask and full robed garb, and did not speak the entire night. The agents and Mead himself were apprehensive about their attendance but as it worked well with their intentions, accepted their presence regardless.

At the height of his wedding speech, "Lord Weeks" raised his glass and gave a toast to 'the legacy of John Mead' before giving the signal. The estate turned into a bloodbath. The Black Dinner decimated the ranks of the nobility; not one escaped alive. The agents sprang from their guises to attack and finish off those that the varied traps did not outright murder. Terror'gar himself was overwhelmed and banished back to the Nether, but not before he swore to have his revenge upon the agents responsible. Even the cult heads and the members of the Flying Gang were quickly obliterated in the rage of the assault. When the dust settled, only the hirelings, Mead and "Torch" remained within the room.

#### Aftermath of The Black Dinner

Darby's attendance had not been a coincidence. The King Beneath the Mountain had never fully trusted the duplicitous John Mead and through his Golem's eyes, had been watching the entire event play out, and now knew of his former friend's betrayal. The agents removed "Torch's" mask to reveal Obadiah Crawford beneath. The King Beneath the Mountain had sent the Red Priests to compel Crawford to do his bidding by threatening to use the Hellrock on his teenage son unless he obeyed. Crawford delivered the King's message to Mead, "Your plan is known. I am coming," at which point, Crawford detonated the payload he had been carrying: a Hellrock Charge. The blast caught Mead and all of the assassins in its radius, infected them each with the transfiguring metal, destroyed one side of the estate's wall and killed Crawford instantly. It was then The King Beneath the Mountain arrived in person, bursting through the destroyed wall on the back of a Hellrock Dragon. Knowing that the agents were doomed to be his once the infection took hold, the Dragon grabbed Mead in its claws and flew away back to Blackrock Mountain.

### Act III

#### The Cure, the Deeplanterns, and the Druids

Time was now no longer a luxury the assassins could afford. Each day, their infection from the Hellrock worsened and the Druids among them believed that in less than two months, all of them would be mindless Golems. However, the Black Dinner had been a success and now The King Beneath the Mountain's plan had been set back considerably and his throne within the Molten Core was vulnerable. Mead had also managed to impart the end stage of his plan to the agents before his capture and incarceration: to transcend from a Void-infused abomination and become a nascent Old God. With Blackrock Mountain's eruption covering the Human, Dwarven and Gnomish cities, such widespread mind control over such vast populations would mean the ending of Azeroth itself. Still, he had a small army of Golems at his side of various creatures, as well as a new group that had seemingly emerged in the Searing Gorge whose motives remained unknown. Rumours were abound that these mysterious Druids there had made contact with a Dark Iron Dwarf who held a list of ingredients which could potentially cure Hellrock's infection.

The Agents set out to the Gorge only to find part of the land transformed into a lush, green oasis in the midst of the molten atmosphere. There they met with their leader, Archdruid Elonsius and his circle of fanatics. A meeting took place where Elonsius explained his desires to grow a new World Tree in the Searing Gorge and allow the power of the Emerald Dream to flow through the land, finally healing the scars left by Ragnaros centuries ago.

After the meeting's conclusion, the agents were contacted by the Deeplanterns; an arm of the Dark Iron Secret Police. The Deeplanterns had long been suspicious of the seeming benevolence of the Kaldorei and that one of their top agents, the person who held the cure's ingredient list, had gone missing investigating the circle. They bid the team investigate further while they helped with a distraction to draw Elonsius' eye. They ventured into the inner sanctum beneath the new World Tree when Gladnar discovered the top agent of the Deeplanterns was none other than his former wife, Bessica Brightfist.

Rescuing her from a cruel fate and teleporting away before the Red Priests could capture them, Bessica revealed the cure they had found and the terrible price it would inflict: combining essences of Light, Nature and Arcane magic, the cure would sacrifice the most precious memory of the afflicted before the cure could fully take effect. In this instance, she revealed that was her marriage to Gladnar. Should she be cured, she would no longer remember the years they had spent together. Sharing a final moment, Gladnar believed Bessica's life was more important to him and bid her to be cured. It was proven to work, and she left to return to Shadowforge City with the intent on rallying the army to fight the King, leaving Gladnar to mourn the loss she did not know had occurred.

#### Assembling the Army

The cure's formulae was passed to Vyrona "Robes" Swiftshade, one of the most prominent alchemists they knew, and she set to work on mass producing it before entering the battle. In the meanwhile, the agents set out across the world in search of those with the ability to fight back against the King. They began aboard the legendary Vrykul Fleet, home to the roaming Vrykul and Kvaldir that had left Northrend after the death of The Lich King. After the death of Drottinn Hrothgar, the Fleet required a new Drottinn to be able to enact an official mobilisation effort among all the clans, and the agents entered their own champion, Gladnar's former first mate Runt, in order to sway them to their side. They were pitted into a trial where the intended champion must hold aloft an enormous sword and never left it touch the ground before the combat was complete. During the trial however, Runt was injured and almost dropped the sword, but it was held aloft at the last moment by Lannael Ven'Renn. He managed to hold the sword until the end of the combat, and by a technicality ascended to the mantle of Drottinn himself. He bid the Fleet battle against The King Beneath the Mountain and the clans began to arm and sail to the Searing Gorge.