Elder Scrolls DnD/Wildlife Trouble

===Hasenfeld's Logging Camp===
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Description=
After leaving the city walls behind, you follow the road east and sidestep the sporadic trains of packmules and horse-drawn wagons coming down from their passage over the Velothi Mountains, bringing rare goods from the Great Houses of Morrowind. You find you don't have far to go, as a pair of muddy wagon-ruts turn north through the sparse forest before you've even reached Torygg's Stream. Not a mile beyond that, the forest opens abruptly into a clearing that wouldn't have been here a week ago.
Woodchips and sawdust cover the dirt churned up by wagon wheels and workmens' boots, and wooden posts stick up from the ground for a handful of heavy draft horses to stand idly tethered to. Most everything here is the pale yellow of fresh-cut wood, from the long, skeletal wagons sitting empty to the knee-high sawhorses waiting to shave more logs into usable beams. The odd thing is, despite the spring rains having let up for a time, they still lay waiting. Giant saws and the handles of long axes sit propped up the same as their owners do, a cluster of tough, tall men and women sitting around on the logs they've hauled here.
To a druid's eyes, however, the forest is more telling. Depressions in the ground tell where the roots of some leftover stump fought hard against being dug out, and low brush grows from the long-dead detritus of the forest floor, faster than it should have in so short a time. The woodsmen seem to eye the edge of the trees with suspicion. One, a tall Nord with shaggy blond hair, stands and walks up wearing a relieved smile.
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NPCs=
*Horst Hasenfeld
**Nord male, late 40s. Owns the Hasenfeld Logging Company, based at Heartwood Mill on the west side of Lake Honrich by the Treva River's mouth. He hopes the party are there to rid him of a particularly aggressive bear which has repeatedly killed loggers and left the body, likely for its territory rather than food, and is willing to pay 100 Gold Septims to anyone who can kill or drive it off for good. If they accept, he points them into the woods where the last logger, Bashuk, was killed. If they don't bring him back a trophy as proof of killing it, he may ask to wait a week to pay, just to be sure he isn't being cheated.
*Loggers
**A collection of strong men and women willing to bend their backs to earn half-decent coin. Hasenfeld's three sons (Arn, Balmun, and Leifnarr) are among them, along with several Nords, two Orsimer, and a Dunmer.
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===In the Forest===
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Description=
Traipsing into the brush beyond the camp, you have to kick through a layer of leaves rotted black through the winter they spent under snows which have finally melted. Overhead, however, the trees which shed them show new signs of life, abundant in fact, as the bright green buds of new leaves sprout from every joint of their skeletal branches, shading your path through the forest floor. Birdsongs constantly fill your ears with chatter, only for the unseen sources to fall quiet as you near.
Passing between the smaller trees unfit for real lumber, marked with paint for cutting away later, you arrive at the trunk of a great alder tree wider across than Hasenfeld's shoulders. A gash in its black bark has been left unfinished, only barely revealing the bright pulp inside. Beneath this gash, however, the tree's roots have been stained dark red with cured blood.''
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Interaction=
Hasenfeld answers any questions the party has about the attack; that it took place two days ago, the logger--an Orsimer woman--was a good worker named Bashuk who'd been with them for years without a problem, hard drinker but never on the job. The last was a week before with a Nord named Durnam, and the first a week before that to another named Hasgrund; both were strong, but inexperienced foresters, which Hasenfeld chalked their deaths up to. After the third, however, his workers weren't willing to risk their lives with the bear clearly still around, and neither is he. He hurries back to the camp after they're satisfied.
Lead into tracking. To successfully track the bear away from the site of the killing is a Nature check of DC 13. If failed, the party must come up with another way to find the bear. Luring it with meat would be very successful, for example.
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NPCs=
*Bear
**If the party can communicate with it, the brown bear is amiable once it understands they are no threat. It tells the party it attacked the loggers to protect the "plant-tender", a spriggan which grew berries to feed it after a winter hibernating. The spriggan has wandered aimlessly (and putting itself in danger) after a rock (one with pieces as clear as water) was stolen from its glade by human bandits with torches. The bear knows where the humans who took the rock are, and can take the party to them.
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===Cave===
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Exterior=
The bear leads on north, taking the winding paths of least immediate resistance that game in the area have worn into the brush. Several hours before evening, however, it breaks from the trail just before you come to the lip of a small ravine, a snowberry thicket between the trunks of evergreens providing you plenty of cover. Thirty feet away, at the gully's bottom, wisps of smoke rise from a crackling fire beside the entrance to a large fissure in the other wall. A grey-furred Khajiit wearing buckskin clothes with an axe hung at his belt leans idly against the rock face.
One Khajiit bandit guards the entry. His Passive Perception is 11; if he sees the party coming, he'll retreat inside. If the party sends the bear in alone, he will fend it off with a burning branch from the fire and it will retreat.
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Entry Chamber=
The fissure's rock walls are stained dark with rainwater, and the crack letting light in from the top closes up quickly as it winds into the hillside. There's just enough space for a person to squeeze through.
After thirty feet, the crevice opens up again into a high-ceilinged chamber. The floor only extends about five feet in any direction before dropping off steeply, and seems to be made of a dark, smooth, and glossy material. A pair of long boards extend out over the darkness.
Those who can see in the dark and makes a DC 15 Perception check sees that some feet away, outside the range of a torch, the Khajiit (if he escaped the party at the entrance) is waiting on the other side, crouched atop a rock outcropping like the first, ready to flip the board over should anyone try to cross. Behind him is a doorway carved into the stone.
Falling from the board causes 2d6 damage, and will have two Young Frost Spiders to contend with. A person can climb back up either slope, but they must move 4 squares on it. If a character enters or begins movement on the slope, they must make a DC 10 Athletics or Acrobatics check to avoid falling on the slick surface. A character who falls will slide back to the bottom of the slope and fall prone.
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When we left off, the Khajiit and the last of the spiders fell dead, and you're left in a cobwebbed cave with only the light of Velothis' sphere of flame to see by. A few of you stand on the rough-hewn planks stretched across the cavern from one small hill to another, the far ends of which lie at the foot of a stone double door, the firelight casting odd shadows between its ornate carvings.
*If they investigate the door, Dungeoneering Check (DC 10): The doors are each a solid piece of cut stone, engraved with swirling ornamentation. Fine as the work may be, however, they don't fit exactly, and you can see firelight coming from the other side. No hinges hold the doors in place from this side, so you know the doors must swing inward. IF CHECK SUCCEEDED: Stonework as old and detailed as this could only have come from one place: the ancient Nords who were said to worship dragons before the other races came to Skyrim.
*If they investigate the cave or spiders: Your flames, blades, and claws made short work of these creatures, and there's not much of the bodies worth salvaging. There are, however, several clam-like pods of web woven into the walls, and a number of humanoid remains scattered across the floor.
**Investigating the pods: 3d4 septims worth of spider egg spell components
**Investigating the bodies: While the bodies appear to have been stabbed several times, first with blades and then fangs, you notice belts and boots seem to be entirely missing from most of these desiccated corpses. Someone picked over these bodies at some point, but they did miss a silver hair clasp worth about a septim.
**Investigating the bandit: Many scars, and carries leather armor, an iron longsword, and a pouch on his belt holding 25 septims.
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Main Hall=
You notice the floor is no longer dirt, but well-laid cobblestone, as are the chamber's walls. The room stretches back for half a hundred feet, at least, and a fissure in the ceiling swallows the smoke coming from a crackling brazier. The scent of game spit-roasting over it fills the room, and one Nord woman in buckskin like the Khajiit you met earlier is keeping it evenly turned.
*2 Barbarians, 1 orc, 1 Nord
*2 Bandits, 1 Nord, 1 Breton
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Collapsed Room=
The warmth from the first hall's brazier doesn't seem to carry in here. It's dark, and before your eyes adjust the scent of fresh earth hits you. The first thing you see is the rubble covering the floor, piling up into a slope against the far side of the room where the wall has collapsed inward.
If investigating the rubble, DC 16 Perception Check: As you're rooting around in the rubble, you notice your hand slips through one of the larger rocks. If they stick a hand through it, they find a wood chest with a lock containing 700 septims.
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Barricaded Room=
As you come through the short corridor, you notice it's much cooler this way, a draft washing over the floor, but the air only smells more stale if anything. There's another corridor to your right, and there would be a third if not for a massive pile of rocks and wood shoved up to close off the top of a wide stairwell angling further down.
Door in the east corridor is locked, DC 10 Thievery to open.
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Sleeping Quarters=
A handful of candles have been left burning here, casting light over four piles of fur pelts and old blankets, and a single framed bed with much the same for coverings.
Investigating the room, DC 13 Perception Check: In or around the beddings, several sets of spare clothes lie strewn around or piled up, none of any uniform size, apparently, worth 20 septims altogether. Further, a bag of septims lies untended by the bed, holding 45 septims. IF CHECK SUCCEEDED: You notice a crude little noose made of fishing wire has been left on the floor in a corner, right outside a crack at the foot of the wall.
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Study=
Former embalming room, using table as desk. Give note.
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Mage's Summoning Room=
Two giant stone carvings of eagle heads rest on either side of a great stone altar. A sallow Altmer woman, her hair filthy yet still neatly braided and done up, chants an invocation.
Mage has Cloak of Resistance (PHB page 250), giving them Resist 5 to all damage until start of her next turn.
Loot: Cloak of Resistance, scroll containing copyable ritual Speak With Dead
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Dragon Key Room=
The tunnel leads you down for at least twenty feet, at the end of which you peer from under the ceiling's overhang into a dark chamber. Your light doesn't reach far enough back to see the other side, but it reaches the walls to either side, covered in dust-filled etchings in the stone. In front of them, however, sits a low stone table on either side. Something echoes from far beyond the chamber, a steady, humming cadence, almost like a voice.
Investigating the voice, Perception Check: DC 12: It sounds like a woman's voice, chanting in something other than the common tongue. DC 14: It's definitely the incantations of a ritual, and from your understanding of magic, it doesn't sound like one of the benevolent ones.
Investigating the etchings: The carvings are of what appear to be war. Rank upon rank of men or mer with spears march to cliffs where they fall, or into the carven flames emitted from the maw of great serpents with bat-like wings. Dragons, undoubtedly.
Upon reaching middle of the room: Your boot scrapes over more fallen rubble as you find a great pile of rock and debris, fallen half upon one of the tables, cracking it near one corner. Above it, through the hole they fell away to open you can see the high ceiling of a chamber above, the crags in its stonework made all the sharper by a faint blue glow across its face.
To climb up into the hole, DC 14 Athletics or Acrobatics Check; can be assisted, and climbing tools can be used. If a player fails, however, they fall onto the cracked table, waking what's inside.
Upon reaching the far side of the room: At last, your torchlight falls on the far wall, covered with engravings like the other sides. The stonework here, however, is much different. Great concentric rings of stone sit in the center of the wall, reaching floor to ceiling, at the center of which sit a series of four small holes.
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Middle room=
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Rat's Nest=
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===Glade===
You leave the bear's cave behind as it guides you again into the forest,, but this time it's not long before even the game trails disappear, and you find you must follow in the bear's wake of crushed ferns and snapped twigs to cut through the heavy undergrowth. Soon, you crest a small bluff from which the bear points out where you're going: a break in the trees in the valley below. From your height, you can see down into not a clearing, but a sinkhole which has opened up the ground.
The bear leads a winding path down the bluff, telling you, "There is a cave below. It will take us to the bottom." Once you come to the foot of the bluff, however, Rufus stops short, wrinkling his nose. A man, who looks to be an Imperial and in his middle age, is sitting on a fallen log, staring with chin in palm at the ground sloping beneath an overhang and into a tunnel below.
If asked, the bear says he smells wrong.
If the man is approached, he calls himself Darren and says he's dropped his pack into the sinkhole below. He can't climb down, and though he found the cave, it's filled with vines too thick for him to push through on his own. He asks the party to help him get through the vines. An Insight Check (DC: 11) reveals the vines clearly shouldn't stop him.
If hit with an attack, a sort of black smoke pours from the wound and dissipates in the air, and the man teleports away.
The vines take no more than a hand for you to part, and while the tunnel is dark and slick, you soon find yourself looking up from the floor of the sinkhole. Sheer stone walls soar all around you, but fall short of closing the gap at their top through which light pours to feed the grove of tall evergreens. The cave is filled with the sound of thousands of glittering droplets running down the sun-bleached roots and clear tubers springing from one wall, delivering ground-filtered water to a tiny brook winding between the trees. It forks some distance from you at the base of a boulder, split neatly in half from when it must've fallen long ago. One half sits upturned, the flat side where it broke away sitting roughly level. The bear nods toward it. "Place it there."
"Now we hide, and wait."
Extended rest, setting a watch? Time change, light over rim of sinkhole. You spy a light moving between the brush and trunks, glowing softly green. It reaches the edge of the brook and lingers there, beneath the shadow of the lowest boughs. When it at last emerges, it seems to melt out of the forest, not from between the trees but slipping from the very trunk of a pine. It looks only approximately human as it takes cautious steps into the open, a patchwork skeleton of smooth limbs and gnarled bark. Motes of light like a swarm of fireflies circle in its chest, but they aren't the source of the glow, as you see when it turns its faceless head. The branches of its horns grow down into twisted shoots intertwining at the chin, leaving a faceless gap like an empty picture frame into the sourceless, verdant glow within. Turning away again, it at last seems secure enough to focus on the stone table.
It picks its way slowly across the brook, then sweeps an open hand across the stone as if blindly fumbling. Then its knotted fingers find the mask. The hand explores it for a moment, confirming. Then, it lifts the mask from the table, turning it over to cup in an open hand, and presses it back into place. It is still for a moment, then whirls, the glow now sharply illuminating its cut-out eyes. The pupil-less eyes seem to search motionlessly for a moment, then it turns back to the table. A clawed hand reaches to its chest, and a moment later you can just hear the snap of a twig breaking. Then, the spriggan stalks back into the trees, and is gone.
Item: Totem of Kyne
*+1 to attack and damage rolls of powers with Implement keyword
*On a Critical Hit, target is Restrained (can't move unless teleport, -2 to attack rolls, grant CA)
*Power (Daily): Minor Action. Each square within 5 squares of you is difficult terrain for your enemies until the end of your next turn.
Category:Elder Scrolls D&D