Haven: Coastal Ruins

On May 15th, Year 12, adventurers decide to try to track down some of the locations indicated on the map Rovert has made available to Citadel House. They want to focus on the coastal cities on the map, though Rovert has warned that many of them may be under water:

• Gorg (HuS): Level 6 Orc Thief
• Victor (TrS): Level 5 Elf Thief
• Harold (MiM): Level 3 Halfing Thief

The three of them decide to save a couple days by paying for passage on the Midnight Queen to Hope where they set out along the shore to the east on the 16th, looking out for Bareport as they go.

They soon break out of the forest ubiquitous surrounding the Vale and bordering the river all the way to Hope on the coast. Jackals pick u their trail on the open plain, but  By midafternoon, they believe they have passed where Bareport should be and assuming it to be under the waterline continue on toward Wetshore, which they expect to be similarly lost to the ocean.

They soon find themselves making camp near the coast in the open plain, the forest still an hour or so ahead as the sun sets. They plan to each get a full night sleep with 4 hour watches, putting Gorg’s watch well past sunrise. However, as Gorg watches, he sees a cloud of dust approaching from the north and wakes the others. They soon ascertain that it is a herd of large animals approaching. Victor and Harold make for the wood line while Gorg conceals himself in a pile of kelp to see what the animals are.

They arrive and turn out to be elephants, a creature he can only conceive of as larger, quadrupedal ogres with a tentacle and spears on their face and massive ears. They soon surround his pile of kelp and stretch along the coast and he is afraid to move out. For hours, they sand bathe and eat kelp, though the smell of Gorg spooks the ones that go for his pile and they leave it alone. Eventually, they move away and he is able to rejoin the others near noon, where they have been waiting and making up for lost sleep at the wood line.

The forest quickly gives way to marshland as they continue toward where Wetshore is marked on the map. The going is miserable, but they encounter no threats and see statues and other ruins that promise more in the area.  Searching a bit more, they see an overgrown ziggurat on a hill emerging from the water.

They rush toward the ziggurat, but as Victor takes the lead slogging through the bog, he trips headlong into deep water. While Gorg helps him out to a nearby tree and Harold catches up, they see an eye stalk in the water and a Froghemoth soon emerges and attacks. In a desperate battle using the tree for cover (or having climbed it in the case of Harold), they mostly blind the froghemoth before it tears the tree down, pulling it down on itself and throwing Harold into the water where he catches himself by the banks with his magic ring shield made massive, but below the water.

The froghemoth having vanished in the aftermath, Gorg and Victor retrieve Harold and they start to think more carefully about how to reach the ziggurat. Finding it bounded by a moat of murky water, they have Harold use his magical expanding shield to again make a bridge across. They circle the ziggurat before climbing up and searching tier by tier, coming upon an entrance at the top covered in vines.

Victor looks for traps as they descend, finding none on the stairs, but finding one on the first door that seems to be designed to collapse the roof on the stairs above. With his Infiltrator’s Intuition still recovering, he doesn’t dare try to disarm that trap and they continue downward to find another door with a trapped lock he and Gorg are able to disarm. Inside they find priestly quarters of ancient date and scrolls too aged to touch them. A thorough search turns up a vial of blood in a hidden compartment.

A door at the back of the residence shows no trap, but when Victor opens it he gets bad feeling, an explosion of flames coming to mind. With no way to disarm a magical trap, they move on to descend further and Victor is struck by an acid trap at the bottom of the stairs. They find a room with four statues turned to face a corner passage that leads to a sarcophagus which Victor is hesitant to open after stories from other adventurers of opening such tombs.

They open it anyway and find a lizardfolk with a gold inlaid wooden stake in its heart and its head missing. Victor thoroughly searches the room to find a hidden door and they find it opens by turning the statues in the adjacent chamber. The secret door leads into a space full of bat bones and dirt (and a silver mirrot) and a stair up to a hidden exit from the ziggurat at ground level.

They head back up and open the first door with Victor’s Infiltrator’s Intuition to fall back on. Inside they find a study for two with some trinkets, coins, and more ancient scrolls they dare not touch. They spend the rest of the day chipping at mortar and carefully removing blocks to get into the trapped closet in the priest’s quarters where they find a number of scrolls in high quality cases. They hesitate to open them and risk compromising any seal in place before leaving the swamp, but pack them up and pass the night in the study.

During his watch, Victor hears pounding on the ziggurat from outside and goes up to see the froghemoth has returned and has a tentacle in the upper passage. He goes out through the lower secret door and attempts to shoot another eye out before escaping back into the secret passage. The froghemoth leaves by morning.

In the morning, they return to the Vale without incident where they sell the scrolls to Rovert for a generous sum (they still aren’t sure what they say other than what Rovert tells them, as they are written in Dragon Empire and an ancient dialect at that).

Gorg and Harold level up and they consider another trip to other destinations on the map soon.

These spaces are large enough that I can only have so much planned. In the case of Wetshore, mostly an encounter table. Once they were seeing statues, I was envisioning a Mayan style, so a step pyramid followed, after that it was quickly looking up a map and seeing where that led me. The scrolls they found did contain information I intended to be found in these ruins somewhere.