abstract
| - I. Storage Room. The only staircase up was in the northwest corner. It is no longer identifiable. The rubble is too high to allow sight or passage to the southern part of the room. 2. Rubble. Most ofthe ceiling has collapsed here, burying the remains of the staircase and the stored goods. No useful trace of them survives. 3. Drainage. Water from the depression on the surface seeps in through this corner of the storage room; by digging down, adventurers can effect a very narrow entrance through the collapsed ceiling. The air in the basement seems to be okay, but it is not. Relatively little air has seeped in with the water, and the oxygen content is low. After a while everyone will begin to feel lightheaded, and a bit later they will begin to take a penalty each round, cumulative, to all activities. If light is provided by torches, this process begins almost immediately, and the penalty is doubled. The torches will flicker out, by which point the explorers could be in deep trouble. 4. Central Corridor. All the doors have rotted to dust. 5. Storage. Another section of the storage room, blocked from the first by the fall of the ceiling. There are two amphora in the corner. Their wine evaporated long ago, but they would be worth 20-30 gp apiece to the right collector. 6. Armory. The ceiling is partially collapsed. The armory was looted millennia ago, but some lesser weapons were pinned behind the debris and not felt to be worth the effort of excavating. It is only Hard to note the glint of High Steel in the debris. A dagger may be recovered with little trouble, but roughly 2 tons of stone must be very carefully removed to get at the 6 spear heads, 4 axe heads, and the broadsword behind the rubble. If this is done by hand, it is likely that the workers will become infested with sand fleas. The fleas will cause a painful and very distracting rash on the morrow. 7. Side Passage. Served the servant quarters. 8. Servant Quarters. Now quite bare. Very diligent searching will reveal a small cache of 12 sp under a tile near the far corner of the center room. 9. Cold Storage Room. A few bones (cow and pig) remain scattered about the floor. 10. Shaft for Secret Elevator. An emergency exit into the doorway is Sheer Folly to detect. If the shaft is suspected (from the use of magic or from tapping on the walls), the difficulty goes down to Very Hard . The mechanical spear trap, now rusted and inoperable, on the opposite side of the doorway is only Hard to detect because of its rust; this may be the best clue. The magical trap on the entrance still works just fine. It is Hard to detect and quite deadly, as no one was intended to operate the elevator from this level. Anyone in the doorway takes a triple damage Lightening Bolt that repeats four rounds after it is set off. The bolt operates from a warding spell, so it cannot be manually disarmed without destroying the surface of the wall opposite the door. If the party lacks the means to dispel this magic, it may be best to try to break down the wall in the corridor. Another problem occurs when the elevator shaft is breached. The sub-basement has been the home of many generations of anaerobic nematodes (little worms) who give off oxygen as a waste product. The air from the two basements mixes in about three rounds, and the upper level will become hyper-oxygenated. There is a chance per round thereafter (non-cumulative) that a lightening bolt or any open flame will ignite the atmosphere; there is a chance that a random spark could do this. also make the air in the sub-basement unfit as described above (#3). If the explorers are already suffering from the effects of bad air, the hyper-oxygenation will immediately begin to reverse the process. However, once the characters have returned to normal they will begin to get silly and have impaired judgement.
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