Battlemap
Survey Cut 4
The first thing you notice is the red pulse shining through the cracks beneath the laboratory floor.
The cave begins as a rough mountain passage and gradually becomes a cramped laboratory carved into the stone. Crude benches, copper piping, sealed niches, and old survey marks surround broad fighting spaces where the former occupants expected dangerous experiments to go wrong.
Cold mineral air carries vinegar, lamp oil, wet stone, and the sharp bite of mercury. Blue witch-lamps glow from iron hooks, while distant drips, glass chimes, and the muffled scrape of something heavy moving through the rock echo along the corridors.
☠ Threat
Tamas Kerek survives as a fused alchemical entity beneath the laboratory, part living wizard, part crystal growth, and part furnace mechanism. He commands the cave through copper conduits and can awaken failed experiments, vent poisonous vapors, or seal doors. His goal is to complete a transmutation that will turn the entire mountain fault into a self-repairing body.
History
The cave was first recorded as Survey Cut 4 by miners mapping a pass through the mountain. Decades later, the alchemist Tamas Kerek rented the abandoned workings and expanded them into a laboratory, using the natural fault below the cave to amplify transmutation magic. His assistants vanished during an experiment, but the furnaces and containment chambers continued operating without them.
Encounter Table
CRA pale cave predator with glassy teeth and strips of copper wire tangled through its hide.
A hovering cluster of reagent bottles, animated by a trapped storm elemental and leaking sparks.
A blind former assistant carrying a lantern in its ribcage and muttering fragments of formulas.
Rumours & Whispers
Survey Cut 4 was abandoned after a miner returned with a second shadow that moved before he did.
Blue lamps still burn in the mountain even when the road is buried in snow.
The old laboratory can turn a dead animal into living stone, but the result remembers being hungry.
A scholar vanished while seeking a cure for petrification and left boot prints leading out of the cave.
Something below the pass knocks three times whenever a storm reaches the ridge.
Quest Hooks
Quest giver: Boros Vale, a road foreman with a bandaged left hand
A mountain road crew has found animals with glassy bones and asks the party to trace the sickness to the cave.
A deed granting rights to recovered ore and 4,000 gp from the road authority
Quest giver: Nelli Sarkan, a soft-spoken archivist from the nearest university
A scholar wants the laboratory's notes recovered before a rival academy destroys them as unsafe.
A scroll of greater dispel magic and formal access to the university's restricted stacks
Quest giver: Jorun Kett, a grieving hunter who has seen the laboratory lamps burning at night
The party hears that Tamas Kerek can restore a dead body, but only by replacing its blood with living mercury.
A resurrection service, if the party preserves the binding apparatus intact
Corridor Notes
Copper tubes run along the walls between rooms, carrying colored vapors from the laboratory. Several joints hiss and leave green stains on the stone.
Old survey marks are cut into the cave walls, showing distances, arrows, and tally strokes from the first excavation.
Shallow drainage grooves carry thin streams of reddish water toward the entrance. Footprints sometimes appear in the sediment without a visible source.
Iron brackets hold cracked alchemical lamps. Their flames dim whenever the deeper laboratory detects living creatures nearby.
Turn Survey Cut 4 into a sheet
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