Home

Sword Labyrinth Index

Poison Maze

Overview

A giant cube made of purple metal. Its inside is full of tunnels. The air inside the tunnels is poisonous. There are 12 "stations" inside. Each station is primarily corrupted by one sort of poison. There are four "lines" between the stations. The stations are connected by the lines, at least indirectly.

The stations are spaced about half a mile apart, but the tunnels are cluttered with deep puddles of mud, and heaps of rubble, equating to the time and effort of 2 miles of "cross country trail" between stations, if walking. The temperature in the tunnels is between 10F and 40F.

Routes

Station List

Mid-route Encounters

If you want to roll random encounters while the party is in one of the tunnels, additionally roll for the circumstances of the monsters' positioning, which may block line-of-sight and affect observation checks:

  1. top of a 50' staircase
  2. bottom of a 50' staircase
  3. middle of a 200' straight stretch of open hallway
  4. behind a 5'x5'x5' heap of rubble

The following treasures can be discovered in secret closets, under rubble, in alcoves, and in locked trunks along the routes.

Station Details and Dressing

sulfur (goes out to elephant sorcerer lake and also the fallen jungle)
The room is mostly flat. The purple-steel ceiling is bowing a bit in the center. A vast rectangular pool contains sulfuric acid to 1' depth. It gives off blue fumes.
The rest of the floor is broken up by 3' holes, also full of acid. The holes have paths between them a few inches wide.
The floor that has not been eaten-through has sulfuric acid slopped-over onto it, which will melt boots and eat through boots/feet.
The air is damaging to breathe (d12p damage every 10 seconds).
There are no living creatures in here.
A four-wheeled wagon with two spare tires is here. It is in good shape; it stopped between the lake exit and all the holes filled with acid in here.
 The wagon contains a warg pelt (w 50sp), 12 rolls of goat leather (w 30sp ea), and 402 muskrat furs (w 1sp ea).
In the bottom of one random pool of acid, Rogvimel's Helm of Clear Thinking is undissolved and quite clean-looking.
(exits to the elephant sorcerer lake)
(also exits to the fallen jungle)
spores
A vast humid room, its floor coated in green-black slop. The walls are thick with funguses. Most of the mildewy mass is in the form of puffballs 4' around. Patches of the air are painted with long trails of black spores.
If a character inhales spores they suffer muscheron-like effects with a similar VF (from hob2).
Anyone shooting a puffball will release a 10'-radius spore cloud from it.
possible inhabitants (d6 roll)
1: fungal rabbits
2: d6 fungal baboons (hob dog stats)
3: subnivians
4: 1d4 large spiders
5: d6 leaping fungal boars
6: 1 imp
arsenic
Curved pillars of blue and pink crystals (cobaltite, erythrite) are all over the place.
The atmosphere is enervating. Every ten minutes spent in this room will expose characters to a bone-weakening vapor; failing a save against a VF 8 poison will lower a character's strength by d4 for six months.
There is a velvet tapestry wrapped around a green crystal. The tapestry depicts a tunnelscape of an ant colony (w 312sp).
scab
Room of enormous multicolored scabs, which are congealed into small hillocks. Some are quite loose, and are slippery to walk upon.
Half-sunken into one hillock is a golden chalice with bone decorations of grovelers (w 480sp).
There are 17 loose silver pieces thrown around in the blood.
possible inhabitants
1: fishmen eating a flayer
2: flayers carving a fishman
3: a simple lost vagrant
4: one harpy
5: one zombie caught in a scab that congealed around it
6: one obese ghoul
dysentery
A flat room flagstoned with square granite tiles. A few stout pillars support the ceiling, in the northeast and southeast corners.
The air is taken up with several thick swarms of houseflies. Each swarm has a 6' diameter and blocks light.
There are many heaps of rotten wet corpses, slopped together into various jellified states. Heaps and heaps of these piled up in mangled positions.
The majority of the corpses are thin and between four and five feet tall. There are a couple outliers.
There are six clothed ghouls in the northeast corner, wearing scrounged leather clothes that are overdone with steel buckles. The leather-clad ghouls are sucking casually on disinterred phalanges.
One clothed ghoul is wearing Peasor's Greaves of Trollkin Control and she is feeding dismembered arms to a troll who is biting the skin off like chicken wings.
Around the southeast corner, are nine naked ghouls, a bit thinner than the clothed ones.
The 'shirts' ghouls are in competition with the 'skins' ghouls. They both have the goal of eating the other group. If a ghoul from either group drags off too juicy of a meal, ghouls from the opposite group will try bite one of their enemies. They first attempt verbal threats.
In addition to exposure to normal corpse diseases, and the threat of the ghouls, there are also slushies, gougers, and crawling claws here.
scourges
In this vast open room, there are about twenty pop-up stations set that are for torturing people.
The torture machines include a heated spike thing and a pile of broken glass. There is a wireframe iron maiden.
There are six giant screws on chains, fastened by manacles to iron loops in the floor.
Stuck between the floor and a manacle is a worsted purse with 39 SP.
Furthermore, this room is the territory of a troupe of golden monkeys (8+d4p). The golden monkeys wield scourges and swing from the ceiling on black dungeon chains. They use the stats of killer apes from the ape page in the hob.
 One ape ("snappy") wears Daltharr's Helm of Concentration
Tied to a cord on the wall is a black leather scourge with prongs carved like talons (w 215sp).
bardiches
A room with 10,000 broken handaxes, battleaxes, halberds, throwing axes, and bardiches. They are heaped into disorganized piles. Most hafts are splintered up or missing entirely. Occasionally there is a stone axe, most of which are broken. There is one usable weapon buried in the piles, for every 50 pieces of junk.
There are no inhabitants. To traverse the room, the party has to explain how they are navigating through the piles of rusty axe parts without getting cut, or they each take d6p hacking damage. A flimsy reason warrants d4p hacking damage.
On the wall is a painting of a plaintive crowd of soldiers gathered around a woman with an axe (w 380sp)
goiter flies
This mildewy room is taken up almost entirely by a gory swimming pool. There is a six-foot walkable poolside border made of porous rock.
A pair of boots is floating atop the pool (Rastur's Woodland Boots)
There are also 148 SP scattered around the entire bottom of the pool.
inhabitants
fetid swimming pool containing 14 leech men
big annoying horse flies
1 giant tick on the wall
12 giant flies (hob2)
d6 strices
1 giant wasp
rust dust
A big room covered wall to wall in dunes of rust. Some dunes reach the ceiling (20'). They churn every few minutes with bubbling noises underneath. Corrosive oozes are in the room's bottom layers. Digging into the dunes will get you oozed. Peglegged characters will be slowed significantly while traversing the dunes, if they are walking on their own.
Just outside this room are six coursers (worth 225sp ea) and four foals.
There is a bit of a risk of being trapped under many tons of iron dust. One character traversing slower than jogging pace will be "targeted" randomly by an avalanche.
A shifting dune attacks at +7 vs the character's defense. (Inanimate dunes do not use combat maneuvers.)
A hit indicates that the character is buried up to their waist.
A crit indicates that the character is completely submerged by 2d4 * 100 lbs of rust.
Buried characters are immobilized until dug out (with shovels etc), unless they have a magical way to leave.
gangsaws
The floor here is made of sawblades. The walls are made of sawblades. The whole setup is clogged with mutilated gristle, and the room-sized saw trap has long been corroded into inaction.
A few blades still oscillate sluggishly. Some internal levers growl and clunk. A couple loose blades are whipping around slowly, producing a musical yodel.
amoeba
A room with 24 regularly-spaced pools of "water". Every single one is a dormant giant amoeba. Touching an amoeba will awaken it, and the amoeba will attempt to slay the toucher.
Violence against one amoeba will rouse eight nearby ones toward the aggressor.
Inside one amoeba is a very large reflective white pearl (w 2000sp). Inside another amoeba is an elephant tusk (w 90sp). Within a third amoeba is Ghanim's Ring of Hindsight.
lacquer (goes out to failed golem laboratory)
A room with some furniture, all covered wall to wall in hardened pools of black liquid.
Statues made of cast lacquer
model of a castle
grimacing baby doll
pot with a sour face
smug old man. there is an Elvish Cloak draped around this statue
Other furniture
wooden benches
rubbery broken-off greyish spikes
antler-like black lacquer structure, 10' tall
slowly-bubbling pool of boiling plastic-like slop