Into the Tomb Lands, Encounters 17, 18, & 19 (Patreon)

Encounters 17, 18, & 19 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 17 and 18... this may just happen every 2-3 days rather than every day.)

17. The Mushroom Grove is a rough natural cavern with an uneven floor roughly 24 feet x 25 feet. Water seeps from cracks in the walls all around it, forming a constant thin stream that runs down The Fungal Ladder (Area 11) and across the Runnoff (Area 12) into the Silty Pool (Area 10). It has a 50-foot high ceiling and is open to the Rune Wall (Area 19), though unless a character has the ability to see in total darkness or shines a light on the Rune Wall it's not obvious from here.

The center of the area is dominated by a 10 foot x 10 foot area that is densely packed with a wide variety of fungus, ranging from small edible whitecaps to 10-foot tall screaming fungus that shrieks if touched. Each time characters investigate the fungus, roll on the table below to see what they interact with.

1. Shrieking fungus. Screams extremely loudly if touched, and attracts the Crawler from Area 18. 2. Glow fungus. Identical to the Fungal Ladder (Area 11) except is it mildly poisonous to touch, and may sicken characters that collect it. 3. Poisonpuff fungus. Emits a cloud of fungal spores if disturbed, causing characters who have not taken precautions to cover their mouths to have to save or be fatigued until they are cured of disease. The spores grow in the lungs, and once per day an infected character can breathe out spores in an attempt to infect adjacent character. 4. Edible fungus. Can produce enough food for 1-6 people every day. 5. Tomb fungus. If planted on a corpse, that corpse cannot become an undead. Can be harvested and kept alive in the same way as the glow fungus from Fungal Ladder (Area 11), and then can be transplanted onto 1-4 corpses per day. Only dead, helpless, inert corpses can be infected. 6. Inert fungus: Doesn't taste good, isn't poisonous, has no nutritional value, doesn't do anything. It is kinda pretty rippling pink and azure waves, though.

18. The Crawler's Cave is a rough natural cave, roughly 15 feet deep and ten feet wide, with a 15-foot high ceiling. Movement is difficult, and characters risk tripping if they go above half speed.

This is the dwelling of the Crawler, which is a large spiderlike creature the size of a horse that can climb walls. It does not spin webs, but instead has a long scorpionlike tail that can paralyze those it hits. The tail is treated as its own creature, moving and attacking on its own turn and being able to be targeted and killed separately from the Crawler. If severed and taken, the long stinger on the tail acts as a minor magical dagger that can hold up to 4 doses of poison the wielder can inject in any order, one injection per successful attack.

Possessing at-best animal intelligence, the Crawler attacks anyone that it notices messing with the fungus in the Mushroom Grove (Area 17), as that is its primary food source, as well as anyone that enters its cave or attacks it.

19. The Rune Wall is written in dozens of ancient and lost languages, but also numerous older languages still spoken by dwarves, dragons, fey beings, and genies. Languages are collected into sets of geometric shapes that graph out their relationship to one another. (For example, the ancient Primordial Speech is in a loop that then goes to Draconic, then Dwarven, then overlaps with the Elemental Speech that evolved into Fey, and where the two overlap it is written in Gnomish.)

The writing all states, over and over, "The Guardian of the Tomb. The Tomb of the Guardian. You have acted in this place. This place shall act on you."

While the letters and runes are carved into the wall in letters 6 inches deep, they are not particularly easy to read (though some of the runes are already written on the First Landing, Area 15). But if someone does manage to record all the writing, they have an amazing tool for translating ancient languages. The information could be sold to a linguist for the same value as a major low-level treasure item... but only if the PCs promise not to sell it to anyone else. Nothing stops them from breaking this promise, but if they keep selling it, they eventually attract the attention of numerous sects and cults that believe some of the languages this can translate are too dangerous to allow mortals access to, and those sects attempt to kill the PCs and destroy any written materials they have.