Coldwater Crater

Coldwater Crater is the old and dried-out mine in Coldwater, that was once supposed to bring wealth to the town.

## Description

The whole mine was taken roughly out of the rock, and is pretty dark. The entrance is not very well closed off, it was just assumed that the only people going there would be people from around the town, who would know about the mine being closed and dangerous.

### Entry

Behind the entrance to the mine, there is a spatious area that includes tables, chairs, and cabinets. It is a place where people put their personal belongings before they descend into the actual mine, which they can do through a lift at the end of the room. The lift is a small-ish box, just big enough to stand in, behind a metal grate. On its back wall, there are five ropes and a few pulleys with which the lift can be operated.

The room at the bottom of the lift is a kind of hallway. Its ceiling is about 10 feet high, and it is 20 feet wide, but it gets narrower and slopes lower as it goes on. Right at the base shaft of the elevator, there are trails of blood, in which the smear of a handprint can be made out, and more smears on the floor are leading down the hallway. About 30 feet from the exit of the lift, there is an overturned cart that has been completely pushed off from the tracks it was supposed to run on.

### Hallway and Junction 1

Down the hallway, there are many remnants of what would have been corridors to the side, but the miners caved them in when they were dried out. After some time, the forward direction of the hallway is also caved in, so continuing in that direction would necessitate a lot of diggging through rubble and rocks. Instead, there is an open corridor to the right, and one to the left, with a faint breeze coming from the right. (For later reference, this is junction 1).

### To the Right

The corridor to the right starts very narrow, but widens up eventually. Shortly after entering this corridor, there comes a straight incline up ahead, about 80 feet up, and the only way that is not back to Junction 1 is to follow a corridor to the left at the bottom of that incline. Fifty feet down that corridor comes a rectangular room, from the far end of which the draft is coming. The room is about thirty or forty feet long, and at the end of it, there is a drop over the last few feet, at the bottom of which is a five feet wide vent where poisoned air is coming from.
When turning back to leave the room, a pressure plate activates a large boulder rolling down the incline. After the boulder rolled down, a doorway opens up on the other side of the vent in the room. The doorway was not there before, and reveals another hallway.

The hallway is about 100 feet long, very narrow, and has some clearly visible clawmarks. Halfway down it, there is another pressure plate. In the wall, a somewhat polished metal stud can be found that is connected to a bigger mechanism on the other side of the wall. This metal stud belongs to the trap connected to the pressure plate, but should not actually be visible from the hallway, whoever constructed the trap made a mistake there.

At first, the hallway might seem like a dead end, but there is a shaft with a ladder going further down for about forty feet, until it ends in a fifteen feet times fifteen feet big room. There is something like a well in it, the water of which has turned gross over time, and on the far wall is a statue of a woman. The woman has her opened hands hanging at her sides, and her mouth opened like she is drinking something. When she is given water, the stone shifts and her mouth closes. There is a section in each of her hands that seems more concave, and when given a gold coin, each hand closes around it. When she has two gold coins and some water, the statue sinks into the wall and reveals an opening.

Behind the opening is an L-shaped hallway. Right at the beginning of the hallway, there is a poisoned dart trap that can be avoided with a successful DEX save. About thirty feet into the hallway, there is a trap door going down. Opening it reveals a rope ladder leading to a big, furnitured room in which the people of Coldwater hide during their attempt at deceiving people about the "Coldwater Crater Creature".

### To the Left

This does not, however, mean that there is no creature in Coldwater Crater. When going back to Junction 1, the left hallway leads to another system of tunnels, through which rattling groans can be heard. Down one of the corridors, there is a suspended bridge with no railings, under which water is flowing. Standing over the water is an 8 foot tall humanoid figure with bone white skin, long skeletal limbs, and clawed hands. It is some kind of troll, with milky white eyes and dark ichor dropping out of its mouth.

A few years before the mine closed, the troll ate a miner once. During the adventures of The Curious Case of Coldwater Crater, Buckminster and his friends allow the troll to be free.