Wathabaska's page

I suppose it was an oversight; the best fix is to either make the iron balls ceramic or stone... or to make them magic. The builders of the tomb were elemental creatures; perhaps the iron balls are conjured from the elemental plane of earth, and if they're taken from the cairn they rust away.

Personally, I don't have a problem with the adventure as written; if the PCs want to harvest iron from the trap and "get rich" that's fine. They should find that the market bottoms out quick, and it should be a LOT of work not only to haul the iron out but to fight off claim jumpers and bandits (who might also be well-connected mine managers like Smenk).

It's a little unfortunate that there are certain things that the D&D economny won't let you easilly do in an adventure. Other examples are to have a low-level adventure where the PCs defeat a boatload of pirates (suddenly they own a ship that vastly exceeds the gp value they should have access to); encounter a bubbling lake of poison in which swim demons who can splash the poison on intruders (how many vials of poison is a lake, and how much is all that poison worth?); or defeat a group of goblins that have holed up in a mine that no one owns (how much is it worth?).

I also saw no problem with it. If the players want to mine the trap, then great. They will need to hire laborers to remove the iron, since there is way too much for them to do by themselves, in any timely manner. Diamond lake doesn't exactly have a lot of unemployed miners, so unless the players want to poach from the mine owners by paying premium they will have to import labor. They will need to hire teamsters to take it to market, as there is no market for iron in diamond lake. These employees will cost money, lowering their profit.

Then they will either have to purchase the cairn. I'm sure somebody owns the land and is likely to show up quick when it becomes apparent that there is something valuable there. If the land is unowned, then I'm sure Mayor Neff will show up with the proper paperwork showing his ownership pretty quick.

Assuming that they do all this then they sure can make money, but the curruption that is omnipresent in diamond lake will eat up a lot more of the bottom line.(a significant amount of their workforce will probably be on the payroll of Neff or Smenk) Also the money is not going to just show up immediately, it will filter in over time. A slow steady income is not going to make that big a difference. Especially with all the money they will have to layout to get the operation started.

A better option, if the players were real clever, would be to secure the rights to the cairn quietly, before anyone knows that it is valuable, then sell the rights to a developer. Again this probably wouldn't get them too much to ruin everything.

My group had the good sense to make him promise not to hurt anyone, then they told him that he works for them now.

"Um, uh, okay, can I have my spellbook and stuff back then?"

And they gave it to him, them reminded him that he "worked for them" and that he "promised not to kill or animate anyone without their permission." Then they left to continue the adventure.

Three day's later they wen't back to the observatory with some loot for "their magician" to identify.

Turns out Filge left town about twenty minutes after they left him alone. Go figure. He'll turn up for revenge in the free when they get to the free city.

Think of the labor involed in harvesting and selling these iron balls at 6 sp each.

They will probably have to hire someone to do this labor, which will cut their profits considerably.

It will be impossible to run an operation of this magnitude without it becoming known where these iron balls are coming from. And somebody probably owns an interest in the land that the Cairn is on.

So to realistically pull this off your characters need to do research and find out who owns this property, contact them, purchase the property, hire laboreres to gather and transport the material, and then find a market.

This is a lot of iron, Daimond lake probably isn't the best market, considering that it is a mining town it should be flush with product. They will need to transport the material to where there is a decent demand to get a fair price.

If your players really want to do this, then go for it. But it's not going to be fun, and it will not net them nearly as much profit as they think once they subtract their expenses.

My group found and lit all the lanterns before finding the tunnel with the face.

The rogue in my group's party was too cowardly to go up the chain, so the ranger and fighter went up there. The ranger noticed the pressure plate, and successfully identified the grooves in the floor as the result of something resisting being pushed towards the opening. As a result they started to carefully move along the hall, roped together, using the fighter's piton's in the wall to secure themselves. They were nearing the face when the rogue, downstairs, got bored and interrupted the action by investigating the area around the sarcophagus, where I told him he saw a few beetles scurrying, figuring they were left over from the earlier swarm. He decided that the light was making the few (5 or 6) beetles angry, so he started putting out the lanterns, activating the trap.