Dwarven Vault 3

As his vision clears, Galthia feels hardened fingernails clawing at his face. Out of pure reflex, he jerks his head backwards, and the nails only graze his chin. Nevertheless, he feels a familiar shuddering cold suffuse his body, and he fights to resist it. An eerie voice speaks in Dwarvish.

"So hungry!" The three adventurers (well, two adventurers and one accidental explorer) look up to find themselves standing in another vast room, this one filled with hundreds of thousands of loose coins all slipping and sliding under their feet in a clinking golden carpet. Torches on the walls cast thousands of gleaming reflections across the room. In front of them, though, squats King Horox IX. His crown has been jammed down into the flesh of his head, piercing the hair and skin to be kept on by a bloody scab. The King's armor and robe are in disarray, and the bloody signs of his late squire stain the front of the King's robes and his tangled beard. "So... hungry!" A long pointed tongue snakes out of his mouth, licks the dry and lifeless lips, and squirms back inside like a crawling worm.

"Nolin, we have trouble!" Glancing behind him, Galthia sees that the portal is deactivated from this side. The monk punches the former King solidly in the face, feeling the ghoul's nose breaking beneath his fist, and roughly shoves Glibstone in front of him as he moves off to the left. Galthia feels a piece of flesh ripped off of his shoulder, but resists the cold paralysis as he continues to move away from the ghoul. "Glibstone, get out of the way!" The dwarf stumbles on the slippery coins as he scrambles desperately away from his former King. "How do we reactivate the portal from this side?"

"Your Majesty?" Instead of answering Galthia, Glibstone gasps in horror at his sovereign while tears beginning to slide down his face. The Loremaster seems frozen by the sight of the hideous, darting tongue that seems to be savoring a chunk of Galthia's shoulder. With a start, he focuses on Galthia. "The portal? Err, to activate it from this side..." Galthia can almost see him reviewing the Lore in his head, trying to come up with the answer.

"The King is dead," pronounces Nolin with a sad shake of his head. "Long live the King." He casts mass haste, and follows it up with a powerful flame strike drawn from the phoenix inside of him. Whoomp! Holy fire slams down into the floor, catching the King and turning some of the coins beneath his feet into bubbling golden slag. The dwarven King ignores Nolin and follows the smell of fresh blood, staggering towards Galthia and Glibstone as his skin smokes and chars.

The ghoul dodges the monk and lashes a claw out towards the near helpless Loremaster. Catching his chest with a clawed hand, the ghoulish King pulls the twitching, paralyzed Glibstone close. "You served me in life," whispers the undead dwarf. "Now, you may again serve me in death." He giggles insanely. "Or perhaps I'll just serve myself! Oh, I'm so sorry, Glibstone. But I'm so very hungry." The long tongue rasps against Glibstone's paralyzed cheek, tasting.

"I don't think so." Irritated because the paralyzed dwarf never told him how to reopen the portal from this side, Galthia begins to hammer the ghoulish king with fists like sledgehammers. He can hear bones crack. Nolin takes a second to survey the battlefield and then uses his hasted action to unleash a second flame strike with pinpoint accuracy. The King screams with a bubbling voice, clearly in pain, but neither Galthia nor Glibstone are touched. As Nolin begins to cast a summoning spell, he notices the charred coins in front of him suddenly sliding and shifting.

With a musical sound, the gold coins rise like a fountain into the air, forming a roughly man-shaped form 12 feet tall in front of the bard. The coin golem lazily swings one densely packed arm and Nolin is knocked backwards by the force of the blow, only barely retaining concentration on his summoning spell. Loose coins slide down the front of his shirt, still warm from the spell's heat. Nolin can feel a rasping in his chest, where some sharpened bit of bone pokes him every time he draws a breath. Ouch, he thinks. That hurt.

Galthia looks quickly from the coin golem to the ghoul to the coins under Nolin's second flame strike zone, and is appalled to see those coins starting to rock and slide about as well. He raises his voice. "Nolin? No more flame strikes or fireballs!" He shakes his head grimly. "I think we just learned what they meant by the treasure defending itself."

Piratecat:

Design Note

What you're seeing here, folks, is an adventuring oddity. Why is this a room virtually carpeted with gold (and silver, and platinum) coins? Six reasons:

1. Verisimillitude. Mrid is known for its wealth. Sometimes, ancient vaults should damn well be full of money! Nothing cleans a dirty hero better than a treasure bath.

2. Logistics. If the PCs did want to haul away hundreds of thousands of coins out of a vault where teleport doesn't work (and where for all they know monsters are waiting for them outside), they'd have to be clever! Also, one major reason is that gold isn't very useful on their current quest. Who are they going to buy things from? And there's no time to make magical items with the wealth.

3. Roleplaying. The PCs are largely honorable, and the dwarves asked them to take what they need from the vault and nothing else. The dwarves let them make the decision as to what was appropriate; that means that the onus is on the players to decide what is greedy for their characters. It's a good character test!

4. Balance. The group isn't especially rich, and recent tough monsters haven't had much treasure.

5. The rat bastard reason. Nolin and Galthia have to survive by themselves for a whole minute against two coin golems. If Nolin drops unconscious, a fireball goes off. If Nolin gets killed, a fire storm erupts. Anyone want to guess how many coin golems THOSE will create? *grin*

6. The true reason. The discerning adventurer is doubtlessly waiting for the room with the jewels! :)

I take no credit for the jokes, by the way. They're an EN World contribution! I'll eventually post a pdf of his Collected Hilarities, just so you can tortu- err, impress your players with them too.

For getting through the deathtrap (which immediately made the players think of that scene in Galaxy Quest, when the captain has to jump through the pistons in the middle of the ship), I allowed either a super-easy perform check for dwarves, a middling perform check for other people who knew the secret, or a quite difficult reflex save for the foolhardy and nimble.