Against the Cult: Getting Away with It (1.8a)

Myrtha, Reptile, and Theran each gain 25 XP.


Reptile shines the dim light of the hooded lantern up the ladder to illuminate the trapdoor so that he and Myrtha can see. There is no lock on this side, and the hinges are above. They have a pretty fair idea that it leads up to one of the back rooms of the Inn on the ground floor. Casting the light around, they see that this area was used as a lounge or possibly secret meeting place; there are two long benches and a table with chairs around it; at least sixteen people could meet and have a place to sit in this room.

Theran, meanwhile, has glanced at these things with his darkvision. His attention is drawn to what they haven't seen yet: a sturdy oak door in the southern wall, that has been barred on this side. Like the bar on the Wine Cellar Door, the bar for this door is held in place by metal brackets on the door and the wall on either side.Edited to correct "bullseye lantern" with "hooded lantern"

As Myrtha heads back into the basement and Wine Cellar to retrieve the torture victim's body, Reptile advances on the barred door. The door is quite solid, made from thick lumber and reinforced with iron bands. He bends down and puts his ear to the seam between two heavy timbers...

...after a few long moments of silence during which he almost stops listening, Reptile does, faintly, hear a noise: a scrape, as of a leather sole scuffing on a dirt or stone floor. Then there is a rapid scuttling, scampering noise intermixed with footfalls that quickly recedes. Then nothing again.

He doesn't think you've gone so far east that it would be beyond the Inn itself; he's pretty confident it comes up somewhere in the eastern part of the building. Maybe the trap door wasn't obvious or was somehow concealed from view when he was viewing the rooms as a spider?

While Reptile listens at the barred door and Myrtha returns with the stiffening dead body, Theran cautiously inches up the ladder. The trapdoor is not locked and opens upward, but there is something heavy on top of the door. Theran steadily applies more and more force to gauge whether the object is too heavy to lift from beneath...and slowly the trapdoor rises enough for him to peer through the gap. He can't see anything.

After a moment, the druid realizes that there is a rug thrown over the trapdoor. Theran figures that the trapdoor must be in the bedroom where he saw Bertram in bed yesterday, covered by one of the many carpets in that room. That he was able to open the trap door at all means that the carpet isn't too large, and the party could open it fully...but they won't be able to tell anything about the current state of the room above until they push it all the way open and shift the carpet.

Myrtha sets down the dead body somewhere in the secret room in time to see and hear this from Theran. Reptile continues listening at the barred door.

Unlike the bar on the door above the Wine Cellar, this bar is held in place by iron rings in the back of the door and on either side of it, so that the bar cannot be lifted out. The only way to open it is to slide the bar out sideways: a much more secure way of barring a door (to be fair, there isn't space to do it that way in that narrow stairwell but there is space here in this secret room, which is much larger).

Theran slides the hefty wooden bar out of the metal rings and opens the door a crack. It is dark on the other side, but his eyes can see that the passage beyond is unfinished: it is a tunnel that has been dug out of the dirt, with no stone or wood laid in for floors or walls. Heavy wooden timbers shore up the walls and ceiling 5' in from the doorway, and Theran sees a startled rat scamper away out of view on the hard-packed dirt floor. The air is cold and musty with the smell of decay. He's no expert, but to him this passage looks like a mineshaft. Unfortunately, the passage leads southwest, so he cannot see far without opening the door further and sticking his head through the doorway to look around the jamb.