Monster Mash Test Drive - The Tunnel Under the Tundra

 

A Dwarven exploratory mining expedition disappears beneath the permafrost layer of the ancient tundra.

THE ANCIENT TUNDRA

Beyond the ruins of the Giant Kingdoms is the Ancient Tundra. Though they considered it part of their domain, the harsh climate and low potential for agriculture deterred the ever-starving Giants from expanding into the frozen wastes. They extracted a tithe of meat and fur from the handful of inhabitants, periodically venturing out to devour anything and anyone they could get their hands on when even that was not enough to satisfy their ravening hunger.

With the death of the last Giant claimant to the throne, there's nobody stopping adventurers from claiming the riches buried beneath the frozen steppe.

THE STORY SO FAR

Undeterred by the cold and the hostile wildlife, a group of seven Dwarves set out into the Ancient Tundra to search for mineral wealth. They brought a Basilisk trained to hunt for delicious ore in hopes that it would lead them straight to the goods. It led them to an unassuming hillock where a hutch of Wererabbits made their burrow. When the racist and insular lagomorphs refused to give the Dwarves directions, they shrugged and set up a mining operation under the opposite mound.

The Basilisk led the Dwarves straight to a Dirt Giant Hibernaculum. The Giants woke up and attacked the expedition. The survivors are now trapped in the mine, hunted by the enormous clicking horrors.

DIRT GIANT HIBERNACULUM

SURFACE

The frigid flatlands of the Ancient Tundra are covered with grass, lichen, scraggly bushes, purple prairie flowers and very rarely, trees. The most dangerous creature in this part of the Tundra is the BOGGLIN BEAST, anyone who camps on the surface is likely to encounter one.

S1: Spring loaded crush trap activated by pressure plate. Anything larger than a Halfling sets it off. The trap is easy to spot but instantly kills anyone crushed unless they have superhuman strength to hold the crusher up. Hand crank resets trap.

 

Staircase down to U1.

S2: Surface entrance to Wererabbit warren. Keep out sign and dangling lantern, chimney piled with flowers that grow in the always-warm soil. Door has knob but no lock, preventing wild animals but not people from opening it.

S3: Dwarven surface base. Exterior stone structure with reinforced puzzle door (depress carved stones of locking mechanism in correct order) and firing loops for projectile weapons. Rooms inside cut out of hillside and reinforced with locally harvested stone. Mud room with unbarred interior door and firing loops. Ready room with equipment, weapons (bows and short swords, no gunpowder), rubber coats for surviving Bogglin Beast attacks. 

 

Shaft down to U3 with winch and cable. Careful search of outdoor area reveals hidden escape hatch down to U3.

UNDERGROUND
The underground area gets colder further down. Temperature below the permafrost line is below freezing.

U1: Rabbit hearth lit by vegetable oil lamp. Burrow carved from dirt with minimal reinforcements. Handsome wooden furniture. Peat burning fireplace and kitchen with chimney up to surface. Ladders up to shelves holding food, spices, exotic treats. Paintings of Rabbit ancestors. Rugs (purchased or stolen) worth 500 SP total. Two WERERABBITS guard a hole in the ground against the DIRT GIANT below.

U2: Three rabbit bedrooms. Beds stuffed with down, grass and rabbits' own shed fur. One has barrel aged rabbit beer worth 100 SP. One has "ambergris" formed inside Bogglin Beasts worth 500 SP. Last one has spice rack with Lost World herbs worth 450 SP, jars painted with Bogglin Beast slime to give thieves a nasty shock.

U3: Dwarf dormitory. Bedframes of local stone, chest with personal effects. Unlit blubber lamps for viewing things in color (Darkvision hides fine gradations). 200 SP grasping hand idol of Open Veins, Dwarf God of prosperity and luck. Escape tunnel leads up to buried hatch outside entrance.

U4: Impromptu masonry workshop for stonecrafting. Rack with two pairs of mirror goggles for safe Basilisk handling. Hatch in wall leads to magazine with barrels of powder and pails of shot. Ladder down to permafrost layer gives off ominous chill.

U5: Rabbit brewery for making beer from local plants, distilling into stronger stuff. Stacked peat for brewing and fireplace. Flammable. 250 SP barrel of carrot liquor. Grate over hole in floor used as drain and garbage chute (actually Dirt Giant ventilation shaft leading down to hibernaculum at U7).

U6: Geology room. Piles of rocks split to assess ore contents, heavy silver mallet for cracking stone. Table with logbook. Stone but no good metal so far. Discovery of giant stone block, enormous stone room a day later. Some rocks gnawed. Spare basilisk hood discarded under desk.

U7: Dirt Giant Hibernaculum. Smooth walls of dark resin. Six coffin-like tubs made of black stone, one holds dessicated Giant corpse covered in strange slime. Trash heap of frozen Rabbit waste below shaft up to U5.

The room is piled with objects which the Dirt Giants understand are important but whose meaning they have forgotten.

• Pile of coins from the Giant Kingdoms (1,450 SP)
  
• Giant scale native aluminum dinner set (750 SP)
• Huge mammoth hide buffcoat with ivory fastenings (550 SP)
  
• Frozen banner of a castle on a cloud (500 SP)
• Signet ring with a woman suplexing a dragon (750 SP)
• Nonmagical giant sword, rusted but set with emeralds (500 SP)
• Massive crown with image of the God King, God of Civilized Giants (1,000 SP)
• Heavy quartz crystal statue of the Gnasher, God of Precivilized Giants (1,000 SP)
  
• Oversized +3 Shield with image of giant woman nursing baby with blood.
• Frostbitten scrolls
• (phantom steed, detect magic, chromatic orb, massmorph, shadowcast)
• (contact higher plane, protection from evil (mu), wall of stone, hold monster, protection from evil (mu)
• (pass-wall, hallucinatory terrain, wall of fire, hold portal, clairvoyance)

U8: Rocks, broken down for hauling upstairs and feeding basilisks.

U9: Tunnel network, mixed Dirt Giant and Dwarven work. Dwarf tunnels supported by wood and rock, strewn with pebbles marking path to surface. Giant tunnels carven irregularly with claws. Adventurers moving here are stalked by DIRT GIANTS and attacked from behind to prevent them retreating to surface.
 

U10: Dirt cave atop enormous stone block. Excavated to investigate carvings, now three DWARVES are holed up here with their BASILISK. The Dirt Giants can't burrow underneath the stone and the Dwarves have supported the roof to stop it caving in. The Giants can't get in without being stoned, the Dwarves can't leave without being crushed in the tunnels or yanked into the maws of the Giants.

 

The Dwarves can tell you the "block" is actually a single huge crystal of an unknown oxide mineral. They're not sure if it's a natural formation or was deliberately seeded, they'd need to excavate the whole thing.

 

MEN AND MONSTERS

BOGGLIN BEASTS (CC2 Creature Cache)
These strange electrical slimes were introduced as a failed attempt by a Giant's court wizard to populate the Tundra with edible megafauna. Normally content to slowly hoover up vegetation like giant slugs, they sometimes confuse the electrical field of intelligent nervous systems for other Bogglin Beasts. They chase the "intruder" out of their territory, moving slowly but pecking with lethal electrical damage if they get close.

DIRT GIANTS (CC1 Creature Compendium)
If you're only familiar with the House of Arminius and his Daughter Morwenna, or with the Fire Giants at the Shrine of Saint Mamacona, you might think the decline of giantkind was greatly exaggerated. Sure their civilization is in decline, but they're not ravenous feral morons driven to madness by poor nutrition. The Dirt Giants under the Tundra are a more typical example of what became of Giantkind.

Half-intelligent, they build underground structures and hoard artifacts whose meaning they can't recall. They sleep in tubs of black stone filled with an ooze they secrete, waiting to be awoken by delicious prey animals. Of the six Giants that carved the Hibernaculum, five survived hibernation. They played dead until the Dwarves backed off then burst out, tunneling into the earth and cutting off the miners' escape. They tried to attack the Wererabbits but lacked magic damage to get through their immunity, forced back by flurries of blows from the hasted lycanthropes.

The Giants wait for adventurers to venture below the permafrost layer, then cut off their escape, burrowing to attack from behind. They fight like Bullettes or Umber Hulks, bursting through surfaces from ambush. They coordinate with a horrible clicking sound they use instead of language. They can't burrow through stone. They're burning calories every second they're awake but they can't hibernate again until the Dwarves are dead or the little bastards will kill them in their sleep. One Giant's right arm is turned to stone, negating one of its claw attacks. It tried to grab the Basilisk and immediately learned why that was a bad idea.

Firing a gunpowder weapon provokes the Giants to attack but scrambles their hearing, sending them bursting out of the walls but debuffing their chance to hit.

DWARF EXPEDITION (OSE)
The Dwarves asked the Rabbits three times for permission to dig near their burrow, plans for their tunnel system to avoid undermining their warren... The Rabbits refused to even acknowledge their existence. The Undermen considered their obligation fulfilled and dug anyway. They are followers of Open Veins and believe in making their own luck through daring rather than cautious and careful engineering. 

 

There are three surviving Dwarves of the original seven. The other four were devoured by Dirt Giants. They wear mail shirts and carry short swords for tunnel fighting, along with picks and hammers. Each one has a pair of spectacles with two mirrors, letting them safely view their basilisk without being stoned. Their wool outfits leave no skin exposed except for the nose and mouth, keeping them warm and preventing accidental stoning. They have two blunderbusses but no ammunition left.

Fergumund Whipvine, Level 1. Basilisk handler made obsolete in the Mountainhomes by magic and mechanization.

Brickrick Paperwithered, Level 1. Lost his family to a tantrum spiral, spent his meager inheritance to fund the expedition.

 
Agatha Towercapped, Level 1. Family disgraced in the uprising against the Slave King, uninterested in doing endless penance to obtain grudging readmittance into Dwarven society.

Angel Eyes
Angel Eyes is the Dwarves' trained Basilisk. Basilisks eat statues made from people they stone, they have a great nose for rock and can be trained to hunt down different metal ores. Shes' the reason they're still alive, the Dirt Giants learned fast that they can't touch her or survive in her line of sight. If she leaves the safety of U10 they'll collapse the ceiling on her.

WERERABBITS (CC2 Creature Cache)
There are three Wererabbits in the burrow on the left side of the map. Insular and racist, they hate "strangers who stink of potatoes" enough that they didn't even tell the Dwarves "no" when asked if they could dig near their burrow, just insulted and ignored them. They did so at their peril, the Dwarves woke up the Dirt Giants and one of them tried to burrow into the Rabbit warren. The Giants' jaws couldn't get through the Rabbits' immunity to nonmagical/nonsilver weapons, allowing the Rabbits to force it back.

The Rabbits switch freely between their Halfling and Giant Rabbit forms based on whatever is most advantageous. They swarm intruders to their burrow using their Haste ability to pile on extra attacks, summoning Giant Rabbits to tarpit foes when outnumbered. They're cowards who sing a different tune if threatened with weapons that can actually harm them. Threats or bribery can persuade them to explain the situation below.