Dungeon 23, Week Two

 

Week 2: The Second Floor

 This week we climb higher to the second floor of the Fortress of Ytrigall. What dangers will players find hiding in the feast hall? What bizarre baubles can be found in the Alchemist's lab? All these questions and more will be answered in the room descriptions below. enjoy! 

-OS

1/8: The Keep entrance and feast hall.

An elevated entrance wraps around the keep to a small drawbridge used to access the keep’s entrance. The wooden bridge has long since been pulled down, but the raised entrance on the other side is still intact.

The massive iron-shod oaken door here is nearly 8 feet across and almost twice the height. It looms like a sentry, daring those outside to enter. Through the door, an entry hall with plaster painted in jolly hunting scenes with hunting dogs nipping at horsemen’s feet can still be seen. It is quite vividly rendered even after so many years of disrepair. The faint smell of sour wine can be whiffed from a half-empty bottle sitting on the long table across from the entrance. A watchman’s lonely chair is the only other thing in this room. The northern wall is beautifully arched with another large door set in it to allow access out of the room.

-There is a secret door to the south that will reveal itself if pressed hard enough and allow entry to the hallway that runs through the fortress’s main wall. Some bored guard long ago carved the words “By all the gods, may my shift end swiftly!” into the left arm of the chair.

Through the arched door a small sitting area with a table, chair, and a moldering divan can be found. A tapestry on the western side of this room blocks the view from here into the feast hall proper. Though the tapestry is a bit dusty and moth-eaten, its depiction of the armies of Nogash in a large battle against what look like monstrous snakes, giants, and a host of other horrors is quite impressive (900 gp.)

The feast hall was once a place of impressive size. Three massive tables occupy most of the room, with an assortment of old chairs of disparate styles placed around them. The humongous fireplace, now cold and empty, must have filled this hall with prodigious warmth and light. Now it lies as dead as a grave. Two stone pillars, carved to look like various intertwining vines, show signs of swordplay, their bottom quarters having been hacked and slashed repeatedly.  Blood stains can be found on most of the tabletops, and a pitiful handful of torch stubs have been thrown into the fireplace. In the southeastern corner of the hall, a dried and dirty chamber pot (15gp) can be found near a threadbare pillow.

-2d4 Giant Cockroaches nest here near the fireplace, which they use to get back and forth between floors.

-A search of the fireplace reveals a small carved wooden box. It has been skillfully carved out of ironwood with repeating geometric patterns of dancing triangles and squares. Inside of the box there is a fetish item, chiseled from pink marble in the shape of the Ouroboros. Anyone who sleeps within 5’ of the fetish will have pleasant dreams of being a part of a giant warm ball of writhing snakes.

On the eastern side of the hall, two large stone staircases allow access to the kitchen on the ground floor and from the second floor to the third. On the southwestern side of the fireplace, a stuck wooden door leads to the walkway inside the fortress’s southern curtain wall.

 

1/9: The Gatehouse

 The second story of the gate house is divided into three rooms. The northern room can be accessed through either of the corridors in the curtain walls to the east and west, and through the spiral staircase from the room below. The stone walls here have been scrawled with names, curses, and phrases from at least 20 different languages in over seven separate scripts. A large open pit in the floor here looks down on the entrance gate below, allowing defenders to dump hot sand or oil over besiegers. At the head of the pit a large winch can be found, having once been used to open and close the missing trap door. On the eastern side of the room, a burned and oxidized brass brasier stands amidst heaps of ashen mud.

Doors on the western wall lead to a storeroom and a small office respectively. The storeroom is filled with rotting, soggy barrels and crates, and a broken window frame opens to the courtyard below. An arched doorway allows access between this room and the office, and although it looks like a door stood here once, no trace now remains. The office has a small table with some scattered papers on it, a chair, and two wooden chests with iron locks on them. The window in this room is still intact.

-The table contains a handful of papers, their ink reduced to smears. The only legible paper is a half-smeared reprimand from a High Priest named Ashtet to a Paladin Captain-Commander Ekkis. The letter details the High Priest’s admonishment to the Captain Commander for coming to the Crucible with his company “seeking glory” and ignoring his holy duties to the pantheon. He seems especially angry that the captain absconded with some sort of holy relic, though he doesn’t say what it is. The letter only refers to the item as The Radiance.

-The two chests are locked and require a skeleton key to open them. One contains 100 gp, and the other contains 200 sp.

1/10: The Priest’s Cell

Entrance to this cell can be made through a ladder in the floor below. This small windowless room once housed the temple priest and still contains some meager accommodations. A dusty wooden cot, a chest, and the priest’s personal altar are the only things here. There is a ladder to the bell tower on the northern wall.

-The chest contains chalk, a crumbling holy text, and 10 candles. The alter has a small statue of Lilii, the frog goddess and protector of those caught travelling in inclement weather, as well as a bronze holy symbol and some unburned incense. If the cot is moved, runes can be found drawn on the floorboards. They are written in blood and chalk. No scrying can be done in or into this room as long as the runes are left undisturbed.

1/11: The Barracks

The northeastern corner of the roof here is missing, and a small plum tree is growing out of the hole that is left. Half-rotten bunk beds line the walls here. There is a small, locked chest on the south wall and a much longer, unlocked chest on the other side of the western wall against the staircase. The floor is covered in bird guano and mold, making the room rank. There are two Zombies dressed in adventuring gear here. They are listlessly stumbling about and trying to open the small chest.

-The locked chest contains a Potion of Cure Light Wounds, and a sack of garnets (10 stones at 20gp a piece.) The long, unlocked chest contains a large collection of rusted weapons - mostly swords, spears, and battleaxes. They are unrecoverable.

1/12: The Alchemist’s Tower

The southeastern tower is the largest of the three. The room on this floor has the trappings of an alchemist’s laboratory, and the tables that ring the room are cluttered with all manner of alchemical equipment. Clearly visible are two anatomical models of a human and a goblin respectively, a scattering of small burners and brasiers, broken glassware, a large brass distilling beaker, and empty herb pots. There is a trap door in the southeastern corner for access to the storeroom below. In the southwestern corner there is a spiral stone staircase that gives entry to the third floor of the tower. The door on the western wall has been melted off its hinges by some sort of acid, and lies disused on the floor in the southern passageway.

-With methodical searching among the contents of the table, a Scroll of Detect Magic, a Potion of Giant Strength, and three vials of acid can be discovered. 

1/13: The Northern Towers and the Curtain Wall

The northeastern fortress tower is ringed with arrow loops. Torch stubs, broken ration crocks, and remnants of charcoal are the only things here. There are two doorways in the southern wall. One of the doors leads to a gallery inside the curtain wall, and the other doorless frame opens to a staircase that leads to the courtyard below. The room is currently occupied by eight Kobolds arguing over whether to kill and eat the unconscious Elf captive they’ve seized or sell her to “The Troll.” They are too engrossed in their argument to notice PCs at first. There is a passageway that runs through the curtain wall on the second floor. The eastern and western passages were once separated by an iron gate. The western gate has been pulled down, but the rusty and decrepit eastern gate still stands. A small pull-bar on the southern side of each passageway allows defenders to lock the gates and fall back to the keep.

 

1/14: The Library

This cramped southern tower is lined in dusty bookshelves. The northern door to this room has been taken off its hinges and lies in the hallway beyond. There is an entrance on the eastern wall that leads to an outside staircase, and next to that, a door that allows access to the corridor in the southern curtain wall. This room had clearly been built for defensive purposes originally, as arrow loops are visible behind bookshelves. Most of the books are either missing or moldering, and the damp smell here is almost unbearable.

-A careful search of the shelves yields six books and two scrolls. The books include one with an invisible cover called Maladies of the Demonic Wastes, a third of its pages have been glued together; an inexplicably heavy Gnoll-skin book titled Dungeonous Fungi; a book with a mica cover titled Arigarvi’s Encyclopedia of Astral Domains with Pull-Out Illustrations; a folio kept in a hammered metal case titled Blood of the Demon; and a spellbook covered in tanned human skin containing Protection from Normal Missiles, Levitate, and Locate Object. There is a Scroll of Invisibility and a Scroll of Phantasmal Force here as well.