What your players will do is generally a fifty-fifty proposition: half the time, they’ll go where you’re not ready, and half the time they’ll do what you didn’t expect. If your players have not yet been sufficiently inoculated against delving unprepared into unknown caverns when they’ve already been weakened, they might decide to cross the lake and head into the mountain instead of take the river and leave the underground.
This sort of reckless disregard for safety should be encouraged as much as possible. It gives the players time to practice their character creation skills.
Since this is a sacred area for the Karuat, the crab-men make an obvious encounter and adventure basis for anyone heading further into the mountains. It’s also a great place for any adventure that takes place in deep caverns. If the characters spend too much time here, they may meet some Karuat heroes who have come to investigate the noise or visit their shrine. Perhaps carrying booty from deeper in the underground…
Wandering Encounters
There is a 25% chance each day of encountering something from the deeper caverns.
| 01-58 | Giant Crickets (d6) | 58% |
| 59-87 | Carrion Worm | 29% |
| 88-99 | Tentamort | 12% |
| 00 | Karuat (2d6) | 1% |
Giant crickets: animal 2; move 6/12; legs d4; defense 5; chirping drowns out normal noise.
Carrion worms: fantastic 4; move 10; 8 tentacles (paralysis) or claws d8 or bite d6; defense 3; armored head +4 defense.
Karuat: fantastic 3; move 9/6; 2 claws d4/d4; defense +6.
Tentamort: fantastic 4; move 6; 2 tentacles d6/d6; defense 7 (tentacles), 9 (body).
The tentamort’s body is two feet in diameter, wide, bloated, and yellowish-purple. It’s tentacles are purplish, twelve feet long.
There are no wandering monsters past the grinning skulls unless you specifically decide that some Karuat are making a pilgrimage. The river moves the raft at 30 yards per minute, and the bottom of the river is covered with muck and clay. The river is three yards deep in the autumn, four yards deep in the spring. At shaded parts on the map, the ceiling of the cavern drops to within about three feet from the ceiling in the autumn, one to three inches from the ceiling in the spring.
One hundred and forty yards off of the map, the river exits the cliff below the now-destroyed castle.
The Lakeshore (1)
It is always raining in the lake cavern, as water condenses against the ceiling and then falls again to the ground.
The thundering echoes of falling rock fades. A misty rain slowly settles the clouds of dust. You hear a faint lap of waves against rock as you rekindle your lantern and find yourself on a dark beach in a light rain.
A small lake extends beyond the range of your light. Gray, sightless fish run from it. The lake pours into a small river that cuts into cavern walls. The lake extends nearly to the edges of the cavern, and the slimy cavern walls reflect the light of your lantern.
You are in a massive underground cavern. There is a raft, made from some woody root, drifting against the shoreline. Something, some plant or strange rock, hangs from the cavern wall to your left.
If they walk toward the something, it becomes apparent that it is a man stuck in the wall.
No, a man hangs against the wall, staring out, eyes empty, bones sticking from its torn and leathery jacket and gear.
He came out of the water after fighting the wyvern in the Black Lake (or out of the cavern if you aren’t using the Vale of the Azure Sun), and has a map of the valley on him. The Karuat killed him in the tomb of the hero then dragged him here and staked him to the cavern wall. Parts of him have dropped to the ground. The Karuat took his sword, the magic item that helped him find exits from other worlds, and his money. He was from Barcelas, a vaguely Roman world.
Yes, you’ve heard of the valley. It’s a fairy tale. The kind of literate children’s adventure made famous by Charles Dodgson. Like Alice in Wonderland, the Magic Garden, or the Butterfly Halls. Magical places, but dark, with beautiful mushrooms and things sure to eat you on the other side.
The lake is well over 300 yards diameter. The cavern extends fifteen to sixty yards beyond it. Gray, sightless fish run from any light. The ceiling is twenty to thirty yards up. The rock-fall tunnel, if they are here because they were dumped after an exorcism, comes out ten yards above ground, just to the west of the river’s tunnel. The lake extends nearly to the edges of the cavern on its east and west sides, and to within five yards of the cavern on the north side. The edges are rock, hard and slimy.
The hole from area five of the Misty Court is in the northwest, fifteen yards up.
There is a raft, made from an unknown woody root, drifting against the shoreline. If they look closely or have a means of seeing distant things, they will see similar rafts against the opposite shore. Those rafts are tied to stakes in the ground. This one was, once, but it came loose when a carrion crawler chewed through the rope.
For every ten pounds over 500 pounds that is placed on the raft, there is a 1% chance every ten minutes that it will break up. It will take d6 rounds to break up.
The river runs 140 yards past the end of the map to the waterfall that exits below the castle.
Grinning Skulls (2)
The river rushes you toward bony hands, reaching for you from the walls. Skills grin out at you with strange, contorted visage from the sides, from the water, from the stone rushing toward you. An opening on the right rushes toward you… then past. Another. A light—you are propelled into open air, then flop down into a pool, the current driving toward a second waterfall.
This is the entrance to an ancient tomb complex of the Karuat.
Court of the Skeleton King (3)
A skeleton sits on a dirt throne. It holds a rod of silver in its left hand, but your attention is drawn inexorably toward the odd, inhuman skull. The mouth extends crab-like, or beak-like, or something… else. The eye sockets are at angles you’ve never seen in a human or animal skull but are closest, perhaps to the eyes of a—well, nothing, really. You’ve never seen anything like this.
Two skeletons, embedded into the walls, flank the throne. Two braziers emerge from the walls at the skeletons’ sides.
This is an ancient Karuat king, from when the Karuat ruled this part of the world. The skeleton holds a rod of silver (350 shillings in Crosspoint, 400 in Black Stag) engraved with interlacing designs reminiscent of Celtic knotwork but nothing at all like it. Flanking the king are two guard skeletons, set in the walls. The two braziers on each wall are filled with a hallucinatory drug. If the braziers are lit, any characters in the room must make standard ailment rolls to avoid the effects, per brazier. The gas causes religious hallucinations. It has an action time of two rounds, and a strength of 1.
Tomb of the Hero (4)
On a dirt dais in the center of this damp, musty room is a skeleton laid out in chain mail, a sword gleaming at its side and an intricately carved metal shield lying against the mound of stone and dirt it lies upon.
On a dirt dais in the center is a skeleton Karuat hero, laid out in full splendor. It wears chain mail, though the leather is long gone, wears a sword at its side, and an intricately designed iron shield (also missing its leather). The designs on the shield are of snakes intertwining with snakes. The metal is clean, as the Karuat keep it well-cared for. It is worth 100 shillings.
