Encounter 4: The Chamber of Sighs

The tunnel beneath the barn extends for nearly one hundred feet before it turns and begins to spiral steadily downward. As you descend, a soft moaning can be heard in the distance. The oddly fresh air here tickles the nose, evoking memories of dew-soaked mornings. After what seems to be nearly an hour of travel without any branching or intersections, the tunnel finally opens into a sizable room with a long narrow hole in the floor. The moaning sound has grown much louder here, and a variety of tones seem to be emanating from all four walls.   Be sure to describe the tunnel in terms of black and white for PCs with darkvision if there is no light source present. 

• PCs with normal or Low-light vision will need a light source of some kind to see at all.

  Dwarven PCs will note that although they have descended many hundred feet they are now only about forty feet below the surface.    PCs investigating the walls will note that the tones are coming from many porous shafts no wider than a mans finger.    The room has a vaulted ceiling nearly fifteen feet in height and is approximately twenty feet wide and sixty feet long, making it seem very tall and narrow.    The hole in the floor is rectangular, three feet wide and nine feet long. 

• Examination reveals a twenty-foot drop to a dark room below. 
• Several large rectangular shapes can be made out in the shadows. 
• The only real obstacle here is for the PCs to safely traverse the twentyfoot drop to the floor of the room below. 
• As soon as any living character reaches the floor, the skeletons in the vault attack. 
• Characters jumping into the hole take falling damage, characters who hang from the edge of the hole will need to make a Strength check, suffering 1d6 points of falling damage if they succeed in holding on and dropping. 
• Creative PCs will find a way to use rope to carefully lower themselves to the floor below, but remember there is nothing in the Chamber of Sighs to which they can easily tie a rope. 
• Keep in mind that the attacking skeletons may make their creative solution even more challenging if they lower their group one PC at a time, but also gives them an opportunity for good combat tactics (e.g., lowering the fighters into melee while keeping the spellcasters safely above).