The As Yet Untitled Campaign

Heeding the Call

A call to all adventurers has been broadcast throughout the land. A powerful and eccentric wizard, Lady Stoatris Wyvernjack the Great, seeks an exceedingly rare ingredient for an experimental spell, a spell which will change the nature of our understanding of magic itself.  But this ingredient proves especially challenging to acquire and our wizard cannot afford to spend time away from her studies.  Her representative has screened through the rabble and has come down to 12.  The rewards are enormous.  The legends will be told for centuries.  Fame will be instant and lasting.  Each of you want this and some of you need it.

After selecting you four, you are given your destination and vague instructions. 

• The ruined villa of Lord Noraver Pegason the Traveler, also known as The Charlatan
• There should be a gate or a passage or doorway to a larger vault
• There will be traps, monsters, and puzzles. Be prepared

After equipping themselves, the party sets out for the villa. It doesn’t take long, no more than two days on foot, but the party encounters a farmer and his son bringing grain to the market in Wyvernjack. They know of the Villa, but not much more than its existence. It’s reputed to be cursed, or haunted, and very few who go in have ever returned. The farmer and son advise staying on the trail and have little else to offer in way of  information. They recommend a good spot to rest for the night.

Once inside the Villa, the rooms are mostly barren and picked over, the walls and the floors showing little of its former grandeur, save for occasional patches of painted fresco or rotting carpet. The walls and ceiling are crumbling and show signs of the elements. From the foyer, a staircase hugs the wall to the gallery above. Holes in the roof let the sky show through and created rot in the floorboards. (Dexterity check or fall through the floor suffering 1d4 fall damage). Another stairwell descends to the basement.  As the party descends, 

There is no treasure to be found with decades of people and animals picking through the rubble. But there looks like there’s been a scuffle recently with numerous foot prints in the dust and drag marks leading to and disappearing at a wall. There is a secret door in the wall, long since exposed and broken open, which leads to a storeroom and a wine cellar. 

Just inside the broken secret door lies a humanoid figure, beaten bound and gagged.  Upon closer inspection, the figure is half-orc. Tnarg Lemonbutter.

 The storeroom and wine cellar are of tiled stone floors and rough stone walls.  Moss and fungus grow in the cracks from the musty conditions. The storeroom has broken, rotting shelving and small pieces of broken property littering the floor.  The wine cellar is similar but smaller with more rotting shelves and a central stone column. A perception check (10) will reveal that the column is non weight bearing, therefore has another purpose. A close inspection (perception check of 15) will show a loose stone which can be removed, revealing a lever within. Flipping the lever gives an audible click and the sound of mechanical workings in the floor and through the wall.  A gasp of air indicates a seal has opened but no door is obvious. Following the sound, and moving shelving debris allows for a door to open a little and can pulled open.  

Within, a rough hewn tunnel runs for about 300ft, and squeezing through a very narrow bottleneck, opening into a cave with a black bear and 2 cubs.  Beyond opens to the woods.  (The bear will aggressively defend her cubs.)

Within the cavern, a Detect Magic spell will show a glimmer in the wall. A minor dispel magic will open the passage. Alternately, past the bears and up the hill is another cave entrance, opened by a recent rockslide. It will return the party exactly where they were but on the other side of the door.

The tunnel is dark and musty, growing more and more slippery and wet.  It rapidly grows devoid of all light.  There seems to be a slight downward slope and the air grows heavier.  

At a fork, the a) left path seems to slope upward again, while the b) right continues downward.