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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nebulous" data-source="post: 4753667" data-attributes="member: 31465">Adventure #4: River TrapPART ONE<img src="http://www.zikadik.com/silverymoon/river0.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />The group is huddled in a small cramped room with only one apparent exit, an even smaller goblin tunnel.  They’ve already progressed deeper than anticipated and have seen no foes. <img src="http://www.zikadik.com/silverymoon/river1.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />“They begged for their lives, they did,” Blackjack grunts, almost as if musing over a fond memory.  “The ones I captured for Balthazar.  Never worked for ‘em, they all died in the end, but they begged anyways.  They told stories of a statue down here, some big statue of their dark god named… Mag…Mag…Mag something or other, I dunno…with ruby eyes as big as my fist!”  The grizzled ex-soldier balls his fist to show them.  “I never believed the bloody gobbers, until now…and now I wonder if it was true.  Tell you what; if we find this statue, one of those rubies is mine.  The other you can split.”<img src="http://www.zikadik.com/silverymoon/blackjack.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />The group doesn’t argue with Blackjack.  All they want is ten live goblins for Balthazar so he can finish his ritual, whatever that entails exactly, so it is decided that Merric should lead the way.  He’s the only one small enough to navigate the cramped tunnels with ease. Everburning torch in one hand, dagger in the other, Merric slinks into the tunnel. It’s small, four feet high and five feet wide and slightly claustrophobic even for him.  The narrow passage ends in a dead-end chamber high enough for the others to stand.  Dust, rocks and broken spear heads litter the floor, most of them crumbling from age.  Veins of silver used to be here too but have long since been stripped clean.A thorough search of the room uncovers a goblin door.  These round hatches are undetectable at a glance, blending so perfectly into the surrounding stone that even a dwarf would be proud of the craftsmanship.  Merric presses the door open, seeing a tiny tunnel stretching west around a bend.  He continues, beckoning for the others to squeeze in behind, but not too close. Fifty feet later the narrow tunnel ends in a small room.  Engraved on the wall to the west is a leering stone goblin.<img src="http://www.zikadik.com/silverymoon/leering.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />To the east is yet another narrow tunnel leaving this room.  Sand and small rocks cover the floor. Merric searches the large stone face but finds nothing.  Douvan Stahl, human ranger, steps into the room toward the small goblin tunnel, but just as his foot is about to set down, Jolen the Cleric of Tempus brusquely grips his shoulder.“No. Don’t move.  The floor is false.”Sure enough, the far corner is thin canvas covered by debris.  <img src="http://www.zikadik.com/silverymoon/river2.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />Merric searches for traps, and then carefully slices through the canvas with his dagger.  Dirt, sand and rocks fall through the growing crack, and then SUDDENLY a piercing shriek fills the room.  It is painfully loud, but not enough to inflict damage.  Ten feet down at the bottom of the pit are several colorful large mushrooms, quivering from vibrations.<img src="http://www.zikadik.com/silverymoon/shrieker.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />“Shriekers,” mutters Douvan.  “Early warning system. If gobs are nearby they know someone’s here.”More searching around the leering goblin reveals another hidden goblin tunnel, but Merric doesn’t want to leave the passage to the east over the pit unexplored.  He deftly jumps over the shrieker and finds a short dead-end corridor.  A few minutes of poking and prodding reveals nothing, so this was likely just a trap to make trespassers walk over the canvas to reach the tunnel.  Already they’re starting to see that this place is riddled with goblin tunnels, and they start to wonder how many they’ve already missed…Merric advances into the new goblin tunnel, light from his everburning torch revealing a narrow rough-hewn passage that bends sharply south. He peeks around and sees a half-raised portcullis, and a small room beyond with a wooden table and four wooden chairs.  A strange contraption of levers, pulleys, ropes and bones sits on the table.  And THEN…for just a hair of a second, Merric glimpses a green face and beady red eyes peeking at him from a tunnel on the far side of the room.  They make eye contact, but the goblin’s face is gone in a blink.Merric isn’t keen on leaping into the room alone, so he informs his friends of what he saw. Nari-lana the sword mage summons her bonded soulblade to the block the portcullis, and everyone quickly filters into the room. A few torches burn on the walls, their ruddy light glinting off copper pennies scattered across the table.  On the west wall is a wheel and pulley that raises and lowers the portcullis, which they carefully test. <img src="http://www.zikadik.com/silverymoon/river3.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />The contraption on the table seems to be a crude game.  Levers can be manipulated to drop rocks onto rat skulls, thoroughly crushing them, and the goblins have been betting on the outcome. The amount of coppers on the table is paltry and therefore ignored. There’s only one exit from this chamber, a small goblin tunnel, but Merric sees that it quickly expands into a ten-foot by –eight foot corridor of rough stone, extending well beyond the range of his torch.  They bring out Nari-lana’s magic lantern which sheds light in a much wider berth.  Some sixty feet away the passage seems to bend south.In fact, the whole tunnel stinks like a trap.  Merric muses as to how he would like to push a barrel down the whole hallway to set off anything lying in wait. The rogue prods the ground where the goblin tunnel becomes larger, even poking the nearby walls, but Douvan coughs quietly and points at a small goblin door the Halfling missed.   Reddening from embarrassment, Merric quietly pops the door open.  Yet again, another tiny passage extends left and right at a T-junction.  This goblin warren is suffused with winding and backtracking passages built just for the goblins.  But in a wise move, the party assumes that it is far LESS likely for the goblin tunnels to be trapped, so they elected to head this direction, squeezing uncomfortably inside, rather than navigating the larger route. Merric moves west, followed by Douvan and Nari-lana, and Blackjack remains to guard the opened goblin door.  The Halfling thief twists and turns a few times and then finds a dead end:  but there are goblin letters scrawled on the wall.  He can’t decipher them, but Blackjack the Pig Farmer is versed in goblin, so he squeezes in, crawling over the others until he stands in Merric’s torchlight beside the engraved runes.  He squints, reading them aloud:“Bone slappers. Knee breakers. Skin rakers.”“What’s that mean?” whispers Nari-lana.“A goblin warning,” the scarred man replies.  “Don’t go in here.”The group doesn’t need to be told twice.  It’s goblins they want, not vague warnings, and if the goblins aren’t going past that door then neither are they.   “The little bastards are known to have trouble keeping their minds focused,” Blackjack says.  “I heard that sometimes they gotta use drums to keep—”DOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM.DOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM.Somewhere in the depths drums begin, a deep rhythmic concussion that seeps through the rock from all directions.  The goblins, obviously, know intruders are here. They backtrack and continue down the east tunnel.  It widens yet again, large enough for the humans to stand, and the heroes sigh.  Wide tunnels are now getting scarier than small cramped tunnels.  <img src="http://www.zikadik.com/silverymoon/river4.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />They proceed very, very slowly, Merric and Douvan inspecting the walls, floor and ceiling every step at the way…and then Merric sees the goblin door. He pops it open, stretches east for about twenty feet and reaches a dead end…which is just another concealed goblin door.  Very carefully he opens it and sees a small chamber rigged with a boulder, a metal sheet drum, and a closed wooden door.  It is obviously another kind of warning system to make a loud sound, like the shrieker pit. Merric disables the trap and opens the door.  There’s a long hallway bearing north, which probably intersects with the hallway they skipped earlier.  Merric moves slowly down and finds another concealed pit of canvas and rocks.  He cuts through it carefully, making sure to scrape any sand or rocks away first so they don’t fall on the shrieker below…but twenty feet down there are only hundreds of rusty spikes.  Nearby, Nari-lana and Jolen use the lantern light and find a wide stairwell leading down.  A faint cool breeze wafts up.  Rather than investigate the trapped tunnel Merric found, the group leaves that area to investigate the stairwell.<img src="http://www.zikadik.com/silverymoon/river5.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />The stairs descend for twenty feet into inky darkness.  Merric and Nari-lana go first, and soon see another T-junction, but on the far side an identical stairwell rises to the south.  There is some water puddled on the floor, and the cool breeze emanates from the east.  Furthermore, they hear a strange whistling and dripping from that same direction.  A single set of goblin prints heads east. <img src="http://www.zikadik.com/silverymoon/river6.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />Merric, Douvan and Jolen carefully walk that direction, the others hanging back a short distance and keeping an eye out.  But Douvan has not proceeded very far when he hears a strange, liquid feminine voice in his head:“HELP ME…”He stops cold.  “HELP ME…”Oh yes indeed, that is strange, and he tells the others. They decide to advance and see what lies at the end of the tunnel, and Douvan and Jolen are the first to reach the basin-shaped room:<img src="http://www.zikadik.com/silverymoon/river8.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" /></blockquote>

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