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In the last post, the party travelled to the Sunken Citadel and descended through a ravine down to a crumbling courtyard where they could enter the citadel itself. Now it was time to go inside and see what they find....
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At the bottom of the ravine, there was one obvious entrance to the citadel, a wooden door from the courtyard into a tower.
It didn't take much investigation for our intrepid heroes to discover that the courtyard was originally the roof of a battlement area, so they were effectively going to be entering the tower about halfway up.
The party rogue, Reaswe, was also lucky enough to find the trap, a hidden pit just in front of the door. Rather than investigating, he jammed the trapdoor shut. Effective, but not investigating the pit meant that that party missed out on a small amount of treasure on the corpse of a goblin who had fallen in and died sometime previously.
With the pit trap disarmed, the party's fighter, Gorwin, impetuously pushed through the door into the tower. They found themselves in the tower's circular interior, with two other doors (one on the left, the other on the right), and the corpses of four goblins, obviously slain in combat.
A sensible party would have checked this room over carefully. But these were no sensible party, they were heroes ! So Gorwin picked a door at random and chose to barge straight on through the right hand one.
Very brave. Very dumb. It meant the party didn't search the bodies, and didn't check the rest of the room over.
Thus, they missed a few clues that might have been useful, and didn't even look for the secret door that hid a trio of animated skeletons and some useful magic arrows. Because they never went back and re-visited the left hand door, they missed a whole section of the citadel that led to the tomb of a dragon-priest which contained some very substantial treasure and magic items.
This impetuosity was to be a hallmark of this group of adventurers throughout the adventure. It probably won't surprise you to learn that it had consequences !
Our heroes advanced a little further through the citadel and then burst in on a room containing their first true encounter. It was a kobold by the name of Meepo, imprisoned by his tribe for the crime of losing their pet dragon.
Meepo had a profusion of clues to give them, including a secret password which could be used to let any other kobolds they met know they were friends. If freed by our heroes, he'd have made a useful guide and friend for them.
So did the party benefit from all this helpful stuff. Of course not ! Like the murderhobos they turned out to be they slaughtered poor, defenceless Meepo out of hand without even giving him the chance to talk.
Then they stepped out of the room straight into an ambush by a small party of kobold guards who shot at them from cover with bows. This was quite a surprise for them, they'd already started to get the idea that the place was mostly empty.
Ducking down a side corridor to avoid the withering (and accurate - I rolled a couple of 20's 😁) kobold archery, they advanced to it's end a few short feet away.
Stepping out, they found themselves in a great hall lined with pillars, with a dais and throne at the far end. And rather a lot of annoyed-looking kobolds.
Next post, I'll tell you what happened to them....
Previous posts in this series;
@alonicus/the-second-dandd-tarak-campaign-introduction
@alonicus/the-second-dandd-tarak-campaign-lets-meet-our-characters-
@alonicus/the-second-dandd-tarak-campaign-arrival-at-oakhurst
@alonicus/the-second-dandd-tarak-campaign-to-the-sunless-citadel