Memories of Connor's Adventures

Orlando the Adventurer pulled a Scimitar from beneath his Robes and smiled...

Saturday 15 June 2019

Dungeon Delve: The Cave with the Iron Door

A Local Disaster
A million cubic feet of all-devouring gelatine washed down river eating boats, timber docks. If not for the quick and brutally efficient actions of the local Magic-user it would have eaten the villagers. Unfortunately the use of  numerous fireballs has devastated the village.

Revenge
The Village elders gather a band of warriors and instruct you all to follow the trail of carnage back to its source and bring the bastard responsible to justice.
At a point a days march up river a thousand feet wide path has been consumed by something terrible. The very obvious trail leads back into the hills where you find a small white limestone hill.

C1 The Cave with the Iron Door
A search around the base of the hill reveals a cave entrance (1 Turn). The Iron door and its frame is protected by a curse turning the fool who tries to remove any of the torches in the sconces into a gelatinous cube and causes them to grow 10× size. An adventurer found the door and even survived a band of orcs who were using the cave. Of course the rest of the Orcs (one per character) will return six turns after the PCs and demand to know where their murdered kinfolk are.

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1. The recently cleaned White Limestone hill has a cave entrance has the appearance of having been enlarged by corrosion. Indeed you see the remnants of the passage of the gelationous devourer attempting to still devour the stone, the mix of gelatinous residue and limestone still bubbling. The tunnel itself descends into the dark, though somewhere ahead is a flickering lightsource.

For the DM: using burning torches against the limestone rockface kills the remnant gelatinous cube otherwise it will all coalesce into a gelatinous cube and pursue the PCs into the inner cave after a turn (10 minutes).

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2. Twenty five feet in around a tunnel bend you stand atop a five foot high ledge that drops down into a large cave. From here you can see most of the cave all the way down over a second, ten feet wide ledge that drops into a lower cave that is being lit by flickering torchlight comming from somewhere off to the right.

For the DM: the limestone in this area is also being eaten by gelatinous remnants (Wisdom Check on a close inspection).

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3. This rough, limestone cave is a beautiful white limestone that is being eaten here and there by patches of something bubbling away on the stone. The ledge further in drops off another five feet into the lower cave. From the lower ledge you can see what looks like a great iron door to the right of the lower cave illuminated by lit torches in iron ring sconces half way up each side of the door frame. The light casting your shadow on the limestone wall of the cave.

For the DM: the cave here is slightly higher than the tunnel even though the PCs have dropped down five feet from the tunnel level. It does however drop much lower over the second ledge into the lower cave.

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4. From this cave you can barely make out the cave tunnel that glows white thanks to sunlight hitting the tunnel wall. The caves themselves flicker with the torchlight that causes your shadow to move along the rockface.
The Iron door is parted down the middle by what appears to be a tight beveled seam. The iron door frame and hinges on frame and door are held by large rounded rivets. The corrosion is minor and it is obvious that the door and frame are well made. Each door, left and right are dominated be an iron ring door knocker.

For the DM: the curse on the door only affects those who attempt to remove one of the torches in the sconces, so it wont affect the PCs until they mess with those. The Torches appear to be perpetually burning, the sconces have tiny dwarf runes engraved in a groove that are the words 'fire' and 'furnace' in dwarven (wisdom check to notice the runes). The door will open if the PCs use another unused torch to transfer fire from the fire sconce into the furnace sconce causing the torch in the furnace sconce to burn with a blue flame and the torch in the fire sconce to burn with a white flame. They can then use the knockers to pull the door open on a combined strength of 20. Otherwise the iron door will prove unmoving, and not even magic will bypass the iron door.

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5. The Cave beyond the door is dominated by a heavy stone sarcophagus with heavy stone lid. The Lid of the Sarcophagus is engraved with the following poem in common:

Dainin, wielding Spike-driver, 
did rain Hel's fury on the Worm
that plagued a land accursed.
And mighty were his blows,
Driving rivet after rivet deep
While Taranshar bled tears.

For the DM: opening the sarcophagus requires a cumulative fifty strength, Its lid can however be lifted on a first level floating disc spell cast by a magic-user. Within the Sarcophagus is the remains of a Dwarf Warrior of great renown, the tomb created by his friend and fellow adventurer, a Wizard named Zenopus.
Non-Lawful PCs will take a curse for desecrating the poem on the lid, permanently taking an alignment shift to lawful. The Sarcophagus contains the remains of Dainin and his Warhammer+1 Spike-driver. Any Non-Dwarf seen in posession of Spike-driver will be seen by any Dwarf recognizing the weapon (wisdom check at -2 penalty) as an enemy of all dwarves attacking in a rage to seize the weapon.

The Orcs return: the Orcs return to their cave finding the PCs either studying the iron door or inside the Tomb of Dainin. So they attack. If the Orcs arrive, as the PCs open the sarcophagus Dainin joins the PCs (as a 1HD dwarf skeleton) in the battle with the Orcs.
The Gelatinous cube: the gelatinous cube reforms from scraps in the cave and ambushes the PCs as the attempt to leave.


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