After resting up from their encounter with the flail snail, the party crossed the stone bridge over the chasm and found a chamber abutting a stone wall, featuring a door flanked by two dwarven statues. After dispatching a trio of cave scorpions, they were able to make out a dwarfish inscription above the door that read:
Into this place let no enemy creep
douse all lamps and into darkness leap
Into this place let no enemy creep
douse all lamps and into darkness leap
After their dancing lights were extinguished, the party members with darkvision saw two further inscriptions glowing near the statues. Next to a statue of a dwarf resting on a pickaxe and holding one hand palm up in front of him, it read:
Harvest of the mountain's fruit sustains civilization,
though we never eat of them.
It never falls from leafy bough like fruits that grow in sun,
but stays where it grew, inside stone, ever ripe, never rotting,
until we find it, harvest it, peel it.
Give me fruit and enter.
Harvest of the mountain's fruit sustains civilization,
though we never eat of them.
It never falls from leafy bough like fruits that grow in sun,
but stays where it grew, inside stone, ever ripe, never rotting,
until we find it, harvest it, peel it.
Give me fruit and enter.
Next to the other statue, bearing a shield but holding its right hand out as if clasping something that isn't there, it read:
The art of the dwarves is fair to behold
and none fairer than that precious work,
hammered and crafted with love and fire,
which separates bone and breaks flesh
with the power of its artistry.
Give me art and enter.
After trying to put various coins and weapons in the statues' hands, the party discovered that they required a gem and a masterwork weapon, respectively. Monty sacrificed his dwarven waraxe for the cause, and a fine amethyst discovered earlier in the dungeon was taken out of the party loot for the other statue. The stone doors swung open and the party, still in total darkness, leapt over a pit trap immediately inside the doorway and found themselves in a funerary hall featuring statues and sarcophagi of great dwarven heroes.
The chamber beyond was a catacomb patrolled by dwarven skeletons and a few necrophidii. While the party bashed their way through the skeletons fairly easily, the bone-snake constructs were more challenging and managed to entrance a couple players with their dance of death ability.
After looting the catacombs, including a secret chamber hidden behind a burial alcove, the party discovered a room protected by a stout, slightly rusty, iron door. The door opened easily enough - though with an obvious grinding of gears - and the party discovered a large octagonal room. The door opened onto a stairway down to the floor 10 ft. below, and there were three other such stairways and doors, one in every cardinal direction. The doorless faces of the octagon featured huge relief carvings of dwarves from the shoulder up, 20 ft. high. Up near the ceiling, several chains hung, stretching across the room. An octagonal iron grate was set in the center of the floor. Doors, chains, and grate were all pitted with rust.
A few rounds after entering the chamber, the doors were driven shut by gearwork. a few rounds after that, the other doors of the room opened, revealing dwarven draugar. The party leapt eagerly into the fight, only to discover that a few rounds later, the giant dwarven carvings opened their mouths and began to shoot huge gouts of water into the chamber and an iron door beneath the grate began to close. Kat, who was standing right on the grate, shoved her new bastard sword down into it to try to keep the doors from closing, but they snapped the sword, leaving her with only a sickle to keep fighting.
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| I should have known that the 1st Ed DMG would have something like this. |
With water filling the room at a rate of 4 ft. per round, the feel of the battle quickly changed as half the party abandoned the draugar and began to grapple onto the ceiling chains or clamber up the dwarven statues, looking for a mechanism to shut down the water spouts. It was Rikkit who first spotted the metal knob on the top of a statue's helmet, and within a few rounds all the statues were scaled and their secret knobs pushed, ending the water hazard and re-opening the drain grate.
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| Dun-dun-dun... geon. |
In a later room full of sarcophagi, the party found a couple magic items: a +1 throwing axe and a Cairn Blade (a homebrew weapon I outlined in a previous post). In the next room, the party fought a hammer-fisted iron dwarven sentinel supported by two metallic tinkerers. The tinkerers' ability to repair 1d10 points of damage to themselves or the iron sentinel startled the party and forced them to alter their tactics and focus their damage on the "heal-bots" (I quite like creating encounters that make the players do more than run in and swing at the nearest monster until all its health is gone). The tinkerers further complicated matters by firing nets out of their chests (and, when they died, exploding in a shower of nets). Both tinkerers were finished off by Rikkit with his wand of magic missile, coincidentally right after they had been reduced to 1hp.
The party soon found themselves on a stout stone bridge going back over the same chasm they had crossed earlier. This bridge was lined with dwarven statues bearing ever-burning braziers. One statue belched hot coals at the party as they passed, and another bullrushed Monty off the bridge. Fortunately, Monty landed on some suspiciously sticky "ropes" stretched 30 ft. under the bridge, actually the web of a giant black widow. The party barely had time to haul Monty up with a rope before they were divebombed by mobats. Much of the party was staggered by the mobats' screeching, but Rikkit turned the tables on the bats with color spray, leaving them stunned and fabulously colored. Kat managed to ensnare the giant black widow with her new net (thanks, dwarf-bots!) but was almost pulled down with it when it got killed by an enlarged Monty in the next round.
On the other side of the bridge, the party found another octagonal room, this one featuring a large mound of rusted weapons and glittering gems! Monty easily recognized his dwarven waraxe on the top of the pile, and ignoring the orangish, paddle-ended tails poking out from behind the 15-foot pile, rushed in to retrieve it. Unfortunately, as he stepped into the room, a blaring alarm rang out and four doors slid open, revealing four more hammer-fisted iron sentinels. The party rushed into the room to take on the constructs, splitting into three groups: Chernyx and Zel cornered one sentinel in its doorway, Daphne and Kat did the same to another, and Sigrid took on a third while Monty and Rikkit scaled the rusty weapon pile. The tails behind the pile were revealed to belong to a group of four rust monsters, which made quick work of the other iron sentinel.
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| (source: Wizards) |
I fully expected the party to sit back and let the metal monsters fight the metal-eating monsters, but they pretty much did the opposite, cornering the iron constructs and fighting them separately, sometimes even standing between a rust monster and a dwarven sentinel. In the course of the fight, Sigrid's armour and Daphne's mace were damaged by the rust monsters' antennae, and Monty's half plate was completely reduced to powder, leaving him to scrounge up some chainmail from one of the dwarven skeletons killed earlier.
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I figure I should touch briefly on puzzles, riddles, and traps. These are iconic elements of any dungeon crawl, and one of the things that make dungeons more than just a series of combat encounters. That said, there is a right way and a wrong way to do them.
Puzzles are interesting, but should never be allowed to bring a session to a grinding halt. There should be multiple ways around each one. In the case of my water-room, if the party failed to find the shut-off mechanisms, they could have simply pried the door open (the brute-force method). I had another puzzle in another dungeon where there was a treasure chest in the center of several rings of different-colored tiles. Stepping on any colour but blue (the dungeon itself was inside a blue ziggurat) triggered a spray of needles. The party could have figured that out, or they could have made an exceptional jump onto the treasure chest, or (as they actually did) lay a large piece of wood across the floor and walk on that.
Traps should be used sparingly. If you trap every door and every chest, you slow things down by creating a situation where the now-paranoid party spends 75% of their time on perception and disable device rolls, and you also slow things down by doing extra damage to the party between combats, draining their resources quickly. I love the Tomb of Horrors as much as the next GM, but that dungeon was designed as a meat-grinder, not your typical delving experience. I tend to use traps to protect important areas (where it makes sense to have a trap) or to create a more interesting battlefield (as in the case of the trapped bridge where the party fought the mobats). It is important to have some traps, at least enough to keep the party rogue happy, but don't go overboard or your players will hate you.
Riddles can be a real tricky area. They should never rely on out-of-character knowledge, and they only feel right if they have been crafted specifically for that dungeon. If I see one more dungeon use the Riddle of the Sphinx or anything from The Hobbit, I swear I will... well, I'm not sure, but it'll be bad.
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| If it plagiarizes, we eats it whole! (source) |
I prefer riddles that are part of puzzles, hence the dwarven statue riddle at the entrance to the Halls of the Dead. The party should have a reasonable chance of solving it quickly based on the information given, and they should have more than one opportunity to get it right. This particular riddle/puzzle required a sacrifice from the players - I made sure that it would be a real sacrifice, but one that they could indeed make.
Riddles can also be used to provide clues about the dungeon to come. This sort of riddle can be harder to solve because it is not mandatory; the information it reveals should be a reward for clever players, possibly warning them of the dangers to come or tipping them off about hidden treasures.
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-your puzzling d20 despot
My dwarven war axe... That was a real sacrifice.
ReplyDelete-Monty