Into the Tomb Lands, Encounters 12 & 13 (Patreon)

Encounters 12 & 13 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 already up there.

(But I forgot to do this for 12, yesterday. It's... it's been a heck of a week.)

12. The Runoff is an area between the Fungal ladder (Area 11) and the Silty Pool (Area 10). A very thin layer of water flows from the ladder to the pool, less than a 16th of an inch thick, and the area is so muddy movement is at half rate when walking through it. Characters that stand it in for a long time find they very slowly sink into it. It would take two or three hours to sink down completely, but the Runoff mud is 10 feet thick, so most characters could completely disappear. Once a character has sunk in for a few minutes stepping out of the Runoff takes a round, and a character must make a Dexterity-themed skill check or saving throw or lose a boot, but there's no chance of failing to get out unless a character slides down to waste depth or more.

Searching through the Runoff has a 10% chance per minute of finding something. 99% of the time it's a minor price of starting equipment (a bag, a dagger, a candleholder, and so on), but these items remain preserved and functional if cleaned. Searching for an hour finds 30 such items, at which point everything that can be recovered without dredging the whole area has been. Each item has a 1% chance to be a single magic boot (which is too low in the silt to be detected by abilities that detect magical things), until the one boot is found, or if all 30 items are found an another 10 minutes is spent searching the boot is found automatically if it hadn't been yet.

While most pairs of magic boots don't work if you only have 1 of them, this lone, preserved boot in the Runoff is an exception. One part of a pair of Boots of Running and Jumping and Climbing and Swimming (or RAJ-CAS boots), not it has much less power than half of what it once was... but not none. Once per day, at any point during their turn, the wearer of this boot can take one additional move of the walk/climb/jump/swim category, and gain a significant bonus (+4 on a d20, +20% on %, roll twice and keep the best result for other systems). Also, the lone Raj-Cas boot morphs to look like any other footware worn at the same time as it. But the raj-Cas boot does not work if another magic boot is worn, or the wearer has benefited from magic footware that day.

It may be alone, but Raj-Cas has standards.

13. The Ladder Down is an apparently all-basalt ladder, with roughly one rung in 12 cracked or broken, going down into the darkness. If you can see *while* you climb using both hands and feet (so holding a lantern doesn't cut it), climbing down it is easy. Otherwise, it takes an easy skill check to not slip, though only a critical failure results in falling.

The Ladder goes down 50 feet in a 10 ft. x 10 ft. shaft, then stops at a clearly magical locked trap door. The key is in Area 23. Without it, low-level characters aren't getting through.