Chapter Three: The Last Dream of Mirza Horgul

Zangua was the first to rise, before the sun, and the party made swift progress on a brisk and cloudy morning toward the hills west of Five Stones. They did not wake the Pulras, having said their goodbyes to the goat farmers, Saad, and little Aylie the night before.

"Please don't get killed by the metal man," she said as she gave Mordred a farewell hug.

The party stands now on a brown and windswept hill crowned by a cluster of jagged boulders, half-buried in the ground, leaning in toward each other. It seems to some of you more suggestive of a grasping, short-fingered hand than a cradle.

It takes a bit of searching to find the promised entrance to the Badgerways, but at the base of one of the boulders, partly hidden under a protrusion of stone, you find a hole going straight down, hardly more than two feet wide. Some piled earth and large stones nearby suggest that this entrance may have been sealed off until somewhat recently.

(Bumping to let you all know the post has been updated and the thread is unlocked!)

It's dark down there, and it looks like quite a drop from here. If you hold a light to the entrance, you can see a narrow shaft going straight down.

There's plenty of rock to secure a rope to near the hole. The shaft seems to run about 30', opening to a larger chamber with a floor at about 40' down.

It's a tight squeeze for Shamush, but he manages to get himself down through the shaft to drop into an ovoid subterranean chamber, about 30' long from east-west and 20' wide, made of smooth, hard-packed earth. He picks up the torch burning on the floor.

A narrow passage, about 5' wide, leads west, with a steep decline.

Tell me how you'd do that with the rope!

Mordred slips a little but makes it down in one piece.

Don't adventurers just know these things? I'm thinking we can use two ropes, one tied to the rock to climb down and another tied to the knot that secures that first rope, such that when we pull on the second rope, the first rope unties, and they both drop down into the hole. Does that make any sense? I'm not a rock climber.

Mordred: your rope trick would require a difficult Sleight of Hand check and if it fails, you're out two ropes. Otherwise, you're just out the one.

Felor has a rough landing, falling the last ten feet from the end of the shaft to the floor of the chamber, but suffers no more than having the wind knocked out of him. Recovering, he examines the ground, warning Shamush and Mordred against making any more fresh tracks.

There are faint, muddy bootprints on the ground, leading out toward the west passage.