Toil and Trouble
Much of Lac Dinneshere is covered with ice. Only the hardiest anglers venture out to fish for knucklehead trout. To wrangle such a catch, fishers must drag their boats across the ice to open water and wait patiently out on the lake in the freezing cold for hours at a time. To fend off the chill, they often bring bottles of ale to keep warm. Imbibing too much is dangerous, for it makes the anglers more susceptible to being pulled overboard by stubborn knuckleheads. Too much ale also leads to foolhardy decisions.
The characters borrow a Skiff, and set along the coast to find the missing fishers.
A rowboat bobs untethered in the water amid some small ice floes, not far from the eighty-foot-high cliffs that abut the shoreline. The mouths of four caves dot the snowy cliffside. One of these caves is at water level, and the others are elevated twenty to thirty feet above the frozen lake. The wind tearing through these icy caves sounds like moaning.
The party searches the abandoned rowboat and finds four oars, four sets of fishing tackle, and a dozen empty bottles lying in it. They can also see faint tracks on the ice leading from the boat to the southernmost cave, which is where the four missing anglers went.
As the party proceeds toward the caves, they're attacked by two harpies!
After one is defeated, the other flies away.
Walking into the cave, on the frozen river, the party is tries to climb a frozen waterfall, after Atala fails her strength check, they release a dormant water weird, but take care of it, no problem. Found frozen in the waterfall is an explorers pack and a miner's pick.
Continuing forward, they get off the frozen river and follow the tunnels towards an ossuary. This cave is higher in elevation than the tunnels leading to it, but it's easily reached by climbing one of two flights of crudely carved stairs.
Moonlight enters the cave through natural fissures in the ceiling. Fresh blood paints the icy floor, indicating that one or more creatures were butchered here recently. (This is where the fishers from Easthaven met their end.) More obvious than the blood are all the bones: knucklehead trout spines, humanoid skeletons in pieces, and bones of small animals and birds, along with scraps of clothing and armor and a few rusty weapons.
Sitting among the bones in the middle of the cave is a frost giant skeleton partially encased in ice. It remains inanimate until the party enters the ossuary. The skeleton spends its first two turns in combat doing nothing other than breaking out of the ice and getting to its feet, which gives the characters time to flee or get in a few hits before the skeleton attacks. But naturally, these goober's never have a problem with anything I throw at them, and demolish the giant in like two rounds.
The lake hag, Maud Chiselbone, and her will-o'-wisp companion await the party in the middle of the next cave. Maud stands between her cauldron of plenty and a stone block atop which she butchers whatever meat is destined for her stew. Heaped around this block are rusty hatchets and the flayed corpses of the four fishers from Easthaven. The will-o'-wisp is normally invisible when its light is extinguished, but it brightens when it wants intruders to behold Maud's true, hideous form.
Maud disguises herself as a decrepit old woman. In this form, she wears tattered furs to stave off the cold. In her natural form, Maud has sickly grayish-purple flesh, bulging eyes that seldom blink, and stringy black hair interwoven with fingerbones. She knows that the giant has been destroyed and Maud assumes her true form and takes on the characters herself. She won't give up her lair or the magic cauldron without a fight.
After the party knocks her down a healthy chunk of hit points, Maud tries to make a deal. She agrees to surrender the cauldron and promises to deliver a chest filled with gold coins that lies in the muck at the bottom of Lac Dinneshere. The party releases her as promised, and Maud returns to the lake to make good on her end of the bargain. As she departs, she tells the characters to wait in the caves until midnight, then head north along the shore for a mile. When they follow her instructions, they find a waterlogged wooden chest on the icy shore, its lock broken off.
The piping-hot stew created by the cauldron of plenty is too bland for Maud's tastes, so she has added skinned meat and fresh human organs to the latest batch. The party examines the stew and sees lumps of flesh and organs floating in the spicy broth. They dump the stew before trying to move the cauldron. Even empty, the cauldron requires some effort to transport, given its awkward size.
The chest that Maud pulls from the depths of Lac Dinneshere contains 600 gp. Buried under the gold coins are four crawling claws that leap out and attack when the gold is removed. They're promptly stomped on.
The party returns to Easthaven, where Captain Arlaggath is saddened by the news that the missing fishers are dead, yet eager to hear a full account of the characters' visit to the Cauldron Caves.
As payment, she gives the party a gray bag of tricks.
The party then decides to find someone to sell the cauldron too, which leads us to the next plot line, Town Hall Capers.
Completion Date
October 23, 2022
October 23, 2022
Plot type
Side quest
Parent Plot
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