Adventure for Level 2 Characters
Situation. After miners dug into an Underdark tunnel, a Hook Horror found its way into the mine and became trapped. It has eaten a few miners, and the others are too terrified of the echoing clicks in the mine to hunt down the predator.
Hook. The mayor of the village of Blackstone, Kristryd Splitanvil (a Lawful Good, dwarf Tough), hires the adventurers—perhaps because of how adeptly they handled the situation in “The Fouled Stream”—to deal with the monster in the mines. She offers a precious topaz worth 500 GP to adventurers who kill the creature or drive it away.
The adventure consists of these encounters.
Exploring the Mine. Use the Mine map in appendix B. In the weeks since the miners abandoned the place, pests have flourished in the tunnels. Each time the characters enter a distinct area of the mine, roll on the following table.
| 1d6 | Encounter |
|---|---|
| 1 | Four Violet Fungi and one Rust Monster |
| 2 | One Giant Spider and two Swarms of Insects (spiders) |
| 3 | One Darkmantle and three Piercers |
| 4 | A patch of yellow mold (see “Hazards” in chapter 3) on a miner’s remains |
| 5 | One Gelatinous Cube |
| 6 | Sounds of Terror (see below) |
Sounds of Terror. The first time this encounter occurs, the characters hear eerie clacking and scraping noises echoing in the mine shafts and notice gouges in the walls. The second time, they find the source of those sounds and markings—the Hook Horror. The creature is hungry, but what it really wants is to find its way back to the Underdark. It retreats from a fight that is going badly for it.
Underdark Connection. The tunnel in the southeast corner of the bottom level of the mine is where the miners accidentally connected to an Underdark tunnel. The hook horror entered the mine through a hole in the wall, but the hole closed behind it in a cascade of rubble. If the characters clear away the rubble from the hole, they hear clacking and scraping from the other side. The hook horror hears it too and hurries here to rejoin its kin. As long as the characters stay out of its way, it ignores them as it scrambles back through the hole, never to plague the mine again. Each character then earns a bonus 200 XP.