D3: The Web-Covered Winch

 

Another room done. This room is very dusty, and mostly covered with the rubble from the collapsed rubble in the SW corner. This exposes a small room which apparently held the mechanism to open the portcullis between 1-01 and 1-02. The wall collapse damaged it badly, however, as shown by the length of chain decaying on the floor sticking out of the rubble. 'pipes' in the ceiling show where it once descended from, but nothing remains within reach by the party.

The north end of the room (within 10 ft of the north wall) is filled floor-to-ceiling with spider webs (as the web spell, Reflex DC 18), although slashing damage only cuts away enough of the web to "suppress" the effect for a day (assuming the spiders survive to re-spin it). The corpse of a bandit is caught in the web; he carries a lesser drakeheart mutagen, 8 sp, a club and leather armor.

If the players cut or burn away enough of the webs, they can access the winch mechanism. It needs force to get started (total strength modifier of +6 worth of characters, or thievery DC 19 to trip the mechanism); once the mechanism is engaged, something below starts winding the winch and pulling the chain down below, lifting the portcullis in the north wall of 1-02.

A door leads out to the east, into room 1-04.

Encounter (Moderate 1)

A spider swarm is clearly visible in the webs, and will attack anyone disturbing them. The hunting spider is camouflaged more deeply in (perception DC 17 to notice), but hopes to ambush anyone blundering into the web. If faced with ranged attacks, however, the spiders will rush out to try to defeat the attacker. If wounded, they retreat into the webs, but will fight anyone among the webs to the death.

Thoughts and other updates

The trap in the previous room, and the fact that this room only lets the party disable one obstacle preventing them from moving north from the Spitting Cobra Chamber (1-02) is my first hint that exploration and backtracking will be part of this dungeon adventure.

I was able to switch DungeonScroll so I'm drawing the positive space (i.e. the walls, structures) rather than the negative space, which makes more sense to me while building construction. I also remembered that, in a constructed stone building like this, thick walls and unused space is the exception rather than the rule, since it would have to be filled in deliberately. So the small space to the bottom left, obscured by rubble, was initially just solid. At some point, the party may have to realize that that there's a secret door somewhere because I break this rule, so it's important to stick to it unless there's a clear reason.

I've sketched out the rough shape of the constructed portion of the fortress (L1 and L2, with some of L3 and maybe even L4). I'm realizing that, since I only have about 30 rooms to work with on each level, my imagination of this tower may be a little too big, but we'll see when we get there.

Oh, and this is the introduction of the second major threat the party will face in low levels: nasty creepy-crawlies that want to eat them. I'd like the party to do something or find something that causes them to not be a significant threat after a certain point, but I'm not certain what that is. Big cans of Raid?

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