[This session the players finally got a glimpse and taste of the actual Barrowmaze.]
[Also? SPOILERS! This series will spoil what’s in Barrowmaze, so take that into consideration before reading.]
PCs
Tunrock Shadowfury – male-ish Elven Spellsword [he’s an elf – what do you want?], exploring Barrowmaze for the loot
Harkyn – gender fluid Elven Nightblade, also exploring Barrowmaze for the loot
Tripp – male human Thief, exploring Barrowmaze for the loot
Marcus the Black, of House Dunsmore – male human Assassin, seeking wealth to restore his family lands to his family [Read: “exploring Barrowmaze for the loot”]
NPCs
Norman – male human guide, hired to lead the adventurers to Barrowmaze but not fight
Chick-Magnet – female war dog (0-level), actually a male man-at-arms cursed into a different form [that's the war dog's story anyway]
Magusday, April 10, 23rd year of the reign of King Shurik the Nimble
Brock was back in Ironguard Motte healing from the loss of his arms. Brother Thaddeus was permanently dead. Radagast was off acting as a caravan guard for a Silver Standard Caravan Company caravan heading to Bogtown and back. To replace these losses and missing people, Harkyn talked up two adventurers that were travelling to Helix while Harkyn was returning the previous day. Both decided to hitch their stars to adventurers with experience at the barrows. [Radagast’s player is heavily involved in choir, both teaching and singing, and could not make the session – again. (I’m busting his chops here.)]
Tripp made an early stop at the Mercenaries Guild to hire Norman again and asked for another man-at-arms to supplement the group’s fighting capacity. Hiring Norman again was no problem, but with the Silver Standard Caravan Company having just cleaned out the available men-at-arms, Osen only had one available and it was a special case. The “man-at-arms” was actually a talking war dog who claimed to be a human male under a curse. Osen has never used him before and was willing to give Tripp a 10% discount for this first time. Tripp decided to take the chance and hired Chick-Magnet at 9 sp a day. [ACKS uses a base-10 currency exchange. When I do my Holy Roman Empire campaign, I’ll use something a bit more historic – read: confusing to the players 😈.]
On the way south to the barrows, the group ran across that same crocodile pack from last week, now only 3-strong in numbers. They decided to avoid this fight again and quickly evaded the crocs.
At Noon, the group arrived at the field of barrows. Harkyn had brought the rest of the group up to speed as to what had happened last week on the trip here, so the group went to barrow #6 to finish exploring it. They reviewed the rat corpses in the side room before opening the secret door behind the back statue in the first room.
Behind the secret door was a short hallway to a round chamber. A black altar at the back of this room had two golden statues that brightly reflected the light from Tripp’s lantern. Tripp suspected the altar was trapped somehow and approached it with Chick-Magnet at his side. Tunrock followed Tripp across the floor, but triggered a pit trap in the center of the room that Tripp had not [the trap only triggered on a 1-in-6 chance]. Tunrock landed well despite the fall [only took 1 hp damage] and spotted a clockwork cobra in the pit and killed it before the device fully activated. While Tunrock was helped out of the pit trap, Tripp checked the altar and idols on it for traps. There were none and Tripp bagged up the two solid gold couchant jackal statues.
Finished with this barrow, the group moved over to the next closest barrow [#7]. This barrow had a huge bronze door inscribed with a skull face and dozens of pentacles inscribed upon it. Tripp pulled out his sledgehammer and started hammering on the bronze door for 10 minutes to no effect…except the arrival of 5 zombies. The group of adventurers tried to shoot down the zombies on their approach, but their accuracy is off and Harkyn’s bowstring broke on the second shot. They switched over to their melee weapon, which convinced Marcus to do the same. Chick-Magnet asked if he had to really bite the walking corpses and Tripp replied, “Only if they close for melee.” They did and Chick-Magnet did and complained about the taste for a while afterward. Once the zombies had been dispatched, Tunrock checked the bronze door for magic and found it was strong with divine magic with an underworld vibe and not likely to yield to the sledgehammer. The group decided to move on.
The next closest barrow [#13] was collapsed, with some stone rubble jutting out of it. Harkyn and Tunrock looked it over in case the rubble was a disguise, but found no entrances into the collapsed barrow, secret or otherwise.
The next closest barrow [#8] was completely covered in dirt and grass, with no obvious entrance. The adventurers spent 10 minutes investigating the mound, prodding the soil with their blades. The confidently locate the entrance, but realized that it would take a day or so of excavation to clear away enough dirt to access the sealing slab. Not wanting to expend that amount of effort right then, they marked their map and moved on to the next closest mound [#12], the largest barrow in the immediate area.
The group had been ignoring this barrow as the entrance had been clearly forced already. Out of a sense of completeness, the group entered the barrow and were surprised to find an old, rusty six-foot high tripod with a block and tackle suspended over a hole in the floor of the large chamber. This was unexpected.
Tunrock checked the rope while the rest spread out and check the chamber. The chamber was empty, with a large number of tracks in the debris on the floor, some in boots and others not. One of the sets of bootprints looked familiar to Tripp, but he could not quite place them. Tunrock found the rope to new, with a knot in it that allowed the rope to go down the hole but not fall down the hole.
Harkyn dropped one of their candles down the hole to check its depth. The candle dropped 40 to 45 feet before landing on a floor covered in bones and skulls. With little treasure in the bag so far, the group decided to go down the rope and explore further.
The chamber they landed in was covered in bones and partially collapsed. After poking around in the room a bit, the group headed out into the long hallway that was the only exit. Implementing the Left-Hand Rule, the group turned left 20 feet down the hallway to explore the first side passage they came to. This led to a wooden door. Tripp looked the door over thoroughly while the elves examined the area around it [including specifically checking the ceiling 😉].The door was did not appear to be trapped, but one of the paving stones near it was loose. Tripp carefully pried it up with a crowbar and found what was obviously the reset mechanism for a trap. This was puzzling as no traps had been found so far. The group consensus was to put the paving stone back and proceed through the door.
The door opened on a 20-foot square chamber with a door on the far wall. Assuming that was the door that was trapped, Tripp and Chick-Magnet entered the room [Tripp rolled a 5 on Detect Traps]. Before anyone else could follow him into the room, Tripp heard a “click” sound at his feet and a stone wall dropped down out of the ceiling behind him, isolating him and Chick-Magnet in the room. Then the door on the opposite wall popped open and Tripp could see a number of skeletons in the hallway beyond animating. Tripp called out for help and then rushed forward to hold the skeletons at the doorway. Chick-Magnet scrambled forward to follow and the two of them faced off against the attacking skeletons.
Back outside the room, Harkyn quickly pulled out their own crowbar and leveraged the paving stone off the reset mechanism, quickly understanding what it was for. Marcus reset the mechanism once Harkyn had exposed it – the stone wall started ratcheting back up into the ceiling. The next round Tunrock rushed in to assist Tripp against the skeletons. “Click,” said the floor as he triggered the trap, dropping the stone wall in Harkyn and Marcus’ faces.
Marcus reset the mechanism again, his sword and shield at the ready. When the stone wall was back up in the ceiling again, Marcus and Harkyn could see that a number of the skeletons were down, but Tripp was bleeding profusely [he was down to 1 hp] and stepping back so Tunrock could step in and fight. Harkyn wanted to acrobatically leap the trigger mechanism and then tumble into position behind the last three skeletons so they could use their backstab ability. Instead, they mis-stepped and rolled across the trigger ["Click"], slamming the wall down in front of Marcus a third time, and landed in front of the skeletons, shutting out Tunrock from the fight. [Harkyn’s player rolled a 1 for the acrobatics roll and this is what I came up with as the result of the critical failure.]
Marcus sighed and triggered the reset mechanism yet again. By the time the wall was up this time, the fight was over. Chick-Magnet had destroyed five of the seven skeletons while Tripp, Harkyn, and Tunrock accounted for only two total.
The group took a rest and bandaged up Tripp as best they could. They discussed what to do next. They decided that heading back to Helix to heal up a day or so would be the best course of action before returning to explore further.
On the way out of the area, they investigated a standing stone [#11 on the map] and found it covered in Dark Tongue runes. Tunrock knew that writing and was able to translate those parts that were still legible. It exalted Nergal and mentioned his Chosen. Choosing not to ask the elf why he knew the language of necromancers, the group moved on and checked the next barrow on their way out of the area [#9]. It was another completely covered barrow mound. They spent 10 minutes locating the entrance and then planted an iron spike on the opposite side of the barrow from where they estimated the entrance was. This was to help them locate the entrance spot again on a later trip but not give anyone else a useful signpost.
While hiking back through the Barrowmoor, the group drew the attention of a flight of five pterodactyls looking for a snack before the sun went down. The adventurers shot down three of the pterodactyls before the last two closed and attacked. One of the pterodactyls slammed into Tripp and savaged one of his knees before being killed. The last one decided this meal was too tough and tried to fly away, but was killed before escaping. [Tripp went into negative hit points and rolled “One of your knees is damaged (carrying capacity reduced by 6 stone, cannot force march).” on the Mortality table. This gave him a day to get back to 1 hit point before dying.]
The group carried Tripp back to Helix and woke Brother Othar to get some healing. One 100 gp donation to the Shrine of St. Ygg later and Tripp was healed, but now had a bum knee and needed a week’s bed rest to fully recover. The group decided they could wait a week before returning to the barrows, especially after selling off the solid gold jackal statues and splitting the money. Harkyn spent the week studying the shield spell scroll they bought in Ironguard Motte. [Harkyn made second level, even on the sparse experience for this trip.]
End of Session
[There was a pause in the game about midway through. I needed to print out the map section of Barrowmaze they were on, but my printer suddenly decided to stop talking over the WiFi. I spent more time than I should have trying to troubleshoot the issue before just attaching a USB cable and doing it the old fashioned way. Unfortunately, by that point we'd lost 30 minutes of play time. Next time I'll be a little more prepared and/or ready to go immediately to the printer cable.]
[Days of the week: I think I’ve settled on the names of the days of the week for the campaign. This is what I am going with:
Sunday Sunday
Moonday Monday
Hernesday Tuesday
Magusday Wednesday
Cromsday Thursday
Freysday Friday
Yggsday Saturday
This is a mix of things that include the names of deities listed in the Barrowmaze book (Herne, Magus – the “Latin” name for Arcantryl, Crom, and Ygg) and some borrowing (Sun, Moon, Frey). I’ll go back later and update the previous two entries to bring their days match this list of names. I wanted something that sounded vaguely similar so it was possible to tell where in the week a day was but “local” sounding. Let me know in the comments if this is too distracting and/or you have any recommendations. I promise to read them, even if I choose to not make use of the recommendations.]
Session 1
Session 2
Session 4
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