How to Defend Your Lair by Keith Ammann

Author:Keith Ammann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery / Saga Press
Published: 2022-11-29T00:00:00+00:00

All messages also go through the guards. The guard sergeant (see appendix B), who is on duty during the day only, takes messages from the gate to the tower, speaking a special password that bypasses the arcane lock on the tower door for 1 minute. She leaves the message in Gúlwelch’s parlor, tugs on a bell pull to let him know it’s there, then returns to her post. As she does, the gate and wall guards train their attention on the tower door, ready to sound the alarm if they see any intruder slip in while their sergeant is inside. When Gúlwelch wants to send a message, he notifies the guard sergeant using the message cantrip, and the process is reversed. The guards ring a special code on the alarm bell—one ring, then two, repeated after a long pause—which the couriers in the village market recognize as their cue to fetch a message from the gate.

Whenever an alarm bell sounds, Gúlwelch sends out his owl familiar to make a sweep of the area, seeing through its eyes and hearing through its ears, in order to get a bead on the situation. When he’s satisfied that he knows what’s happening, he recalls his familiar. If anyone draws a weapon against the owl, he dismisses it immediately to avoid the inconvenience of having to recast find familiar.

The bailey contains a number of wooden outbuildings left over from the castle’s earlier days. Gúlwelch doesn’t use them, and they’re somewhat dilapidated. The guards don’t use them, either: They have a barracks in one of the gatehouse towers and a farmhouse kitchen in the other. To prevent intruders from hiding in the outbuildings, Gúlwelch had the idea of placing glyphs of warding with thunder-dealing explosive runes in them, but he decided against it: It was too expensive a measure to take to protect an area that didn’t matter to him all that much. Instead, he had the floors of all the buildings covered with straw and buried a few ordinary hunting traps (A) in it (DC 14 to notice them).

The tower door is made of sturdy wood, reinforced at night with a sliding bar, and inscribed with an arcane lock. Only Gúlwelch can open the door freely; only the guard sergeant knows the password that opens it temporarily. When anyone other than Gúlwelch or the sergeant comes within 5 feet of the door unaccompanied by one of the two, a magic mouth spell activates and says in Common, “You trespass upon the property of Gúlwelch i Rúwiston. Leave now and do not return. I will not warn you again.” The entire tower is enclosed within a permanent private sanctum spell, customized to cover a cylindrical area of effect, which precludes divination magic, teleportation, and planar travel.

The tower’s floors are hardwood. The first floor, which is one story above ground level, is Gúlwelch’s parlor, where he meets with visitors. The second floor is his residence. The third floor, once an armory, is now his library; the fourth floor, once a prison, is his laboratory.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.