Location: The Shivering Obelisk

In the mountains north of Guran, there stands an obelisk of dark metal with a surface as iridescent as a beetle's shell. While difficult to reach, as no trails last for long in the region due to a combination of violent storms and the effects of the obelisk itself, it can easily be detected from nearly half a day's journey away, as the entire landscape gently trembles.

Up close, the structure visibly vibrates at a continual rate, the motion trembling through the rocky structure of the Black Riage like ripples on a still lake. Over time, these vibrations are wearing down the mountain range within 16 kilometers or so of the obelisk, causing carved paths to crumble and sending avalanches tumbling down the slopes.

Those who have braved the hazards of the region to study the structure claim that it is ever so slowly working itself downward into the mountains, at the ponderously slow speed of a millimeter or two a year. What the obelisk is digging toward, if indeed it digs toward anything at all, is a mystery. Some think that it serves to ward some other threat from the location, and would pay handsomely for any proof that the shivering obelisk is some manner of marker or defense for something the ancients buried beneath the Black Riage.

Seeds for the Shivering Obelisk:

The people of Guran are getting concerned at the increasing frequency of earthquakes affecting their settlement, and as such are offering a reward of a handful of oddities, cyphers, and even an artifact to anyone brave enough to seek out the cause of these events. Investigation leads adventurers to the Shiver Obelisk, whose descent into the earth has reached an previously unknown faultline that extends south to near the edge of Guran. It may be possible to shore up this fault, but the risk exists of releasing all the pressure along it at once, which would devastate the town and kill many innocent people.

Reports of strange lights in the vicinity draw the group to the Obelisk, where a strange religious group has gathered to pay homage to the structure, which they see as a manifestation of their deity, the Trembling One. They'd be harmless enough if it weren't for the fact that they feel that the Obelisk must be appeased with a living sacrifice, and none of them want to volunteer since the Trembling One's promised afterlife is less than pleasant.

Storms gather over the Shivering Obelisk more frequently than anywhere else in the Black Riage, unleashing torrential rains and heavy lightning; the former sweeps away any attempts to carve safe paths to the site, while the later seems to be drawn into the Obelisk itself. An enterprising scholar wants someone on site during a storm, based on a half-rotted report of a maddened explorer who claimed the structure opened like a flower during one storm, drinking in the lightning with delicate-seeming petals.

Artifact: Gate of Lost Dreams

Level: 1d6+4
Form: A hoop of thin metallic wire, easily twisted and curled into a small bundle that can be carried in a pocket; when active, the loop stiffens and becomes immobile, with a swirling prismatic mist filling it.
Effect: This numenera artifact gives access to a pocket universe built from the merged subconscious dream-state of everyone within a short range at the moment of activation. Passing through the portal provides physical access to this realm, where the rules of physics often take their leave completely, in ways that not even the strangest ruins of the past worlds permit.
The world has both risks and rewards - all the fear, worry, and hatred of a person who gave shape to the world is manifest here, in some form; fighting and defeating these things will cause a corresponding change in the mental state of that person for the next week; repeated destruction of these negative aspects can, over time, create a permanent change. Given their nature, however, none of them are easy to defeat - the level of the artifact determines the level of the creatures found in the pocket dimension.
Items found in this space can be taken back out through the portal, functioning as numenera devices in their own right; when used, they discorporate into thin slime, their essence returning to the awareness of the person from whom they were harvested.
One final risk/reward of this altered realm is the ability to relive memories and even transform them - a powerful tool for therapy, as events that cause grief can be mitigated in memory while positive memories can be reinforced. It serves as an equally powerful tool for those seeking hidden information, however, as the ability to step bodily into a memory and search it for secrets is not to be underestimated.
No one knows what happens if the Gate of Lost Dreams is deactivated while someone lingers in the dreamworld on the other side; none lost in such a way have ever been seen again.

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