Halls of the Mountain King was the second 4th Edition Open Design project from Kobold Press. I ran the adventure in 2010 as part of the same Parsantium campaign as Wrath of the River King. Here’s the write up from the eighth session.
Begin here with Session 1 – Alarm in the Dead of Night.
15th Quintilis (contd.)
Following the battle with the xorn and the fever-crazed dwarves, the adventurers decide to rest. Bolval tends to Krivinn who has greed fever, while Ella ministers to Khuma.
While Sharden is on watch, he hears a voice calling to him from the ventilation holes above the door to the south. The voice is that of Abelard the Fire Shepherd, the azer the party have been sent down here to find; he explains that he is trapped behind a complex mechanical door and that the gears needed to open it are missing. Will the party please help him get out?
Sharden wakes up Ella who also asks Abelard some questions, learning that an elemental of stone and fire persuaded the fire elementals to abandon their posts after the dwarves had caught greed fever, and that an old gearworker and his journeyman Carod had been asking suspicious questions about the ventshafts and how they connect to the Shank which powers the mines. Abelard sent them off in the wrong direction deliberately.
16th Quintilis
Krivinn and Khuma both recover from greed fever. Heading out of the entrance chamber, the character explore the Hearthforges, looking for the missing gears they need to open the door trapping Abelard. They search a number of rooms, finding five gears and the key handle to open the door.
In the cistern chamber, Ella dives bravely down into the two wells, finding a bloated corpse of a dead dwarf, weighed down with iron bars, but no gears. Mutilated bodies in the maintenance forge freak everyone out – Krivinn and Bolval spend a bit of time rearranging the dead dwarves so they are at peace.
As the characters search the dormitories, Krivinn grabs an old cloak hanging on a peg – unfortunately, this turns out to be a goldveined cloaker which immediately wraps itself around the dragonborn. The others rush in to help, attacking the monster, but their attacks damage Krivinn as much as they do the cloaker. Krivinn escapes, only to become enveloped again and again. Sharden casts trumpet the star’s fall which complicates things by creating a zone of smoke. The dwarf invoker then charges in to rescue his comrade but ends up getting slapped by the cloaker’s tail and bloodied. Finally Krivinn gets out and stays out as the cloaker flees. Sharden’s grasping shards slow it down, and Bolval finishes off the creature with lance of faith.
Having now found a sixth gear in the sleeping quarters upstairs, the adventurers figure out the lock to the door holding Abelard prisoner and let the azer out. He thanks the party but tells them they need to hurry to the Ventshafts in case the would-be saboteurs have found their way there. Meanwhile Abelard will round up the fire elementals.
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Richard Green | Game Designer 