A Gentle Deep Carbon Observatory Nightmare

After spending a week to rest and rebuild the town of Pollnagollum the party ventured towards the dam

The first thing they saw was the rock outcrop with the golden boat, they spent some time investigating but they didn't conlude anything as they realized that it would've been almost an impossible feat to take it out of the water by themselves, then, they reached the dam. Here they saw the boats of all the previous inhabitants of the city that passed them by and an entrance to the rooms inside the dam.

Using a grappling hook they climbed the rock and entered the first room. They were scared and really took their time explroing everything, until they reached the trapped door. Here, they used a grappling hook to pull it from a safe distance and retreated in the traphole as the statues came to life. They got hit a couple of times and Cavell lost half of his hp but they managed to retreat to the first room and lure the statues just to elude them and run towrards the room with the rock and remove it from its concavity. This stopped the statues.

They then passed trough the next two rooms by jumping only on the black and white tiles respectively and finally they reached the outside. The profundal zone.

DM Notes

I didn't run the canopic jars as written, they were complicated and I didn't really understand how they were supposed to work. Maybe it was late, maybe we were tired, but this small dungeon felt kinda forced and not that fun. As with the rest of the adventure I had more fun reading it than playing it so far. Hopefully the observatory is gonna be better. I need to introduce the Crows again now that the party ignored their warnings and went trough the dam. God this is complicated, next time I'm gonna stick to a simple megadungeon again. In general I feel like this runs more like of an "adventure" than a "dungeon crawl" or "sandbox", and while this is not a bad thing per se, I feel it lacks a lot of treasures and XP hooks to keep the party interested. It's too late now, but it's something I'd recommend adding for future runs.