Session 18 - Into the Mines
General Summary
Woda sometimes goes into the woods alone on long excursions despite the general warnings that this is ill advised. She comes back seemingly a little woozy and unable to interact coherently with other people.
Klein, who is looking for someone to buy the silk cloth recovered from the rat tunnels, heads to the tannery outside of town with Ernst and Belak. The place smells of death, but that is not an unusual smell to the party anymore. The tannery is a large compound with few buildings in which the work of a tanner is done. Klein wanders through the compound to look for anyone interested in buying silk while Ernst and Belak stay near the entrance of a large building.
Belak is intrigued by the cow-like covers piled in a nearby cart. When a tanner appears, they ask him what they are for. The incredulous tanner indelicately explains, and Belak gets a little crazy. In a messianic panic, they run into the building looking for cows to save.
Two dogs follow them in before Ernst, who is following the group, can close it. Ernst is able to command Belak to flee, and somehow they get the dogs to leave, but only after they eat some of the meat cut away from the hides.
Ernst catches up to Belak and suggests they look for cows in the nearby meadows.
In the meantime, Klein is unable to sell the silks to the tanners. He concludes the only people we could sell them to are the folks we stole them from (the underground) or the folks who want to steal them from us. He meets Ernst and Belak in the meadows, and the three head back to the house where they meet the other three party members (Totengraber, Bertrand, and Woda). The next morning, they head to the mine.
The entrance to the mine is close to the abbey in the south. The place looks like an encampment with a few buildings, guard towers, and tents.
Totengraber is slightly familiar with mine mechanics: there should be shafts which lead down to lateral passages.
The tents covered the shafts, and spiral stairs lined the walls of the shafts, but they didn’t inspire trust. As we descend, each person used a rope to tether themselves should the stairs give way.
The mine is in various stages of decay. Soot lines the walls and floors in places. The stairs of some of the shafts collapsed, and sometimes there are no footholds in the shafts where a passage crosses.
In a shaft at the end of one gallery, the party encountered an enormous spider. Attacking it, Belak almost hit themself with a rock, but the party did manage to knock the spider off the wall. It fell down the shaft and lodged in cobwebs perhaps 30 feet below. We lit the cobwebs on fire to be sure we had killed it.
We came at last to one shaft which was particularly challenging to cross. We tied a rope around Belak and tossed them across so that they could fix the rope on the opposite side. They did, and we all crossed safely, but this was as far as we could go on that level.
This gallery ended in a cave-in which seemed impassable. The soot which we had seen throughout this gallery was especially thick here. Perhaps an explosion had blown this section closed. The party headed back out the way it had entered.
At the shaft of the dead spider, they looked down to see the bones of two other human beings. Where there are bones there may be treasure.
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