Into the Tomb Lands, Encounter 11 (Patreon)

Encounter 11 of my "Into the Tomb Lands" #Dungeon23 project is up. It's still free for all to see at the original post at https://www.patreon.com/posts/76655396, but I decided to start posting each room by itself for Patreons, for people who just want to read the new content without having to scroll through everything that's alreay up there.

11. The Fungal Ladder is an inclined wall 20 feet wide and 15 feet tall. It's covered in densely-packed clay earth, which if examined is clearly runoff from a river of some kind, with bits of plant life, crushed bugs, and other detritus mixed into it. On the righthand side as viewed from the bottom, there is a series of stout, semicircular fungal growths growing in the runoff from Area 16. These can hold hundreds of pounds of weight, and form a natural ladder

Climbing the fungal ladder is easy, though it released glow spores (see below). Climbing the clay wall without the ladder is difficult-footholds are slippery, pitons slip out, grappling hooks thrown at the top are pulled free when any weight it put on them, and so on. However, while falling down the soft wall makes a PC extremely dirty, it doesn't do any damage (though they might fall on something sharp in the Runoff, see Area 12).

Touching the Fungal ladder causes the giant mushroom disks to release glow spores, tiny motes of fungal life that float in the air and glow like tiny rushlights. The glow spores are harmless, and clever PCs could gather them and place them in lanterns or similar containers for bright, heatless light. The Fungal ladder has enough spores to make 6 lanterns (though poor skill checks on any plan to collect them could reduce the number gathered), and is then out of spores. It grows 1 lantern worth of spores each month.

If just jarred and ignored, the spores glow for a month before fading. However, a successful skill related to nature, underground life, or gardening/farming allows a PC to feed the spores a few drops of water and crumbs of food every week, so they glow perpetually.