D14: Eastern Courtyard

 

Today I'm kind of 'cheating' by filling in some negative space, rather than drawing a whole new room. This is the courtyard the party has been skirting around; it's important because it allows access to the west side of level 1, and eventually to the heart of the tower and the areas underneath.

The door in the Northeast is opened by Key 1A. The door in the Southeast, from 1-06, is opened by a key which hasn't been discovered yet (would I surprise you if I said it was opened by Key 1B? Maybe not, though). The wall between this courtyard and Room 1-06 can be climbed over, as described in that entry. The western door, to 1-04, isn't locked.

Incidentally, if a party rushes through the wall of fire in 1-02, they may find themselves locked into the second-level content I'm putting on the west side of this floor, since they can't easily get out of this courtyard or back through the Cobra trap. Reminder to myself to make the west side via 1-04 survivable (or actually, give them a way to disable the trap in 1-02, get back to 1-01, and then don't let them go further west until they find Key 1A).

Oh, I've decided the conditions outside are a blizzard, too. So the party will have to deal with that in this space (and anywhere else open to the elements, like 1-06, 1-12, etc.). Most surfaces here are difficult terrain and there are patches of uneven ground (ice). The wind and driving snow provide a -2 penalty to perception checks and ranged attacks

Encounter (Severe 1)

A trio of skeletons are buried beneath the snowdrifts, remnants from the ancient war. These should clearly be non-human skeletons (society or nature DC 19 to recognize them as serpentfolk?)

Treat the skeletons as a pair of skeleton guards and a single skeleton champion, except they have neither weapons, shields, nor armor, but gain a bite attack (+6 attack, 1d6+2 piercing for the guards, +10 attack, 1d8+4 piercing to the champion), and the champion's AC falls to 18 without armor.

Celebration time

Two weeks done! Appropriately enough, we've finished the east half of this level. I need to go through the encounters we've laid out and see how much xp the party should get, and how much I need to add in the parts of floors 2 and 3 they can access via the towers. And I'll have to figure out the treasure budget for level 2 (behind the curtain: I've already 'given out' most of the treasure for level 1, so the stuff in the towers is probably going to be plot-centric rather than mechanical).

Side note: I know I'm making things more confusing than they need to be by referring both to the whole construction and separate parts of it as "towers." I might have to come up with synonyms. The simplest idea would be to rename this whole project the "Keep in Thunder Rift," but I like the alliteration. And it's paralleled between the difficulty in distinguishing between floor in the dungeon, character advancement, and spell potency. But I'm not the first one to complain about that.

To celebrate, here's the full map of what we've drawn so far. If you go compare it to the map in D7, you'll see that this floor is really taking shape!



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