Battlemap
Saltshore Underworks
Saltwater drips through the old bones of Saltshore, and the city’s secrets sink deeper than the tide.
Beneath a shabby block in Saltshore lies a layered understructure of cisterns, smugglers' tunnels, and civic vaults that were never fully abandoned. What began as public works for water and grain now serves thieves, blackmailers, and something far older than the city's present corruption.
Cold salt air leaks up through cracked stone, mingling with mold, lamp oil, and the metallic tang of old blood. The understructure groans with distant surf and settling masonry, while guttering witchlight and drowned lanterns cast uneasy shadows across flooded floors and rusted civic machinery.
☠ Threat
A tidebound thing trapped beneath the oldest cistern has begun whispering through flooded stone, empowering the smugglers who feed it stolen goods and bodies. It is not yet fully free, but its influence warps the lower passages, draws predators to the water, and blackmails the criminal crews above into keeping the block quiet.
History
When Saltshore was prosperous, civic masons built this understructure to move fresh water, drain storm surge, and store grain during sieges. As the city decayed, smugglers found the forgotten access ways and expanded them into a private trade route beneath taverns and shops. In recent years, one crew forced open a sealed culvert below the oldest cistern and awakened a predatory presence that now shapes the dungeon's deeper workings.
Encounter Table
CRLean thieves carrying lantern hooks and rope, scouting for intruders or loose valuables.
Pale scavengers that feed on runoff and corpses, drawn by blood or open water.
A disciplined brute with a club and signal horn, sent to check on disturbed rooms.
A warped servant of the deep chambers, trailing brine and whispering in a wet voice.
Rumours & Whispers
The Gilded Gull tavern has a cellar door that opens for the right coin, but only after the third bell.
A spice merchant on the block is paying bribes twice a week and refusing to say why.
People near the old cistern hear chanting at low tide, even when the tunnels are supposed to be empty.
A missing magistrate's seal turned up in a dockside gambling house, damp with salt water.
The thieves in Saltshore are getting bolder because someone below the streets is buying silence.
Quest Hooks
Quest giver: Mara Venn, proprietor of the Gilded Gull tavern
A tavern owner begs the party to clear out the underworks before a city inspector notices the missing cargo and concealed bodies under his cellar.
200 gp, a private room at the tavern, and a favor with Saltshore's dockside contacts
Quest giver: Ila Ronn, shopkeeper
A nervous spice merchant claims someone has been using her cellar entrance to move contraband stamped with her family crest.
150 gp and access to her hidden stock of alchemical supplies
Quest giver: Kest the Fence
A dockside fence offers to pay well for a ledger rumored to be hidden below the block, but warns that his buyer wants every page intact.
250 gp or a rare magic item if the party returns the ledger
Quest giver: Lord Pell Veras, fallen minor noble
A desperate minor noble says the underworks contain proof that their family did not squander the old water rights, but that proof is now in criminal hands.
Legal claim papers, 300 gp, and renown in Saltshore
Corridor Notes
A knee-deep channel runs beside the passage, carrying briny seepwater past barnacle-stained bricks and snapped sewer grates.
Collapsed smugglers' niches line one corridor, some still holding wax-sealed parcels wrapped in tarred canvas.
A bronze wheel valve is jammed into the wall, forcing travelers to squeeze past when the tide rises.
Old stone distance markers are carved into the floor, but several have been deliberately chiselled out to hide a route deeper below.
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