The Drow War Book Two. The Dying Of - RoseRed

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3. Desalinator Coils
The air in this area smells strangely acrid, like the
aftermath of a lightning strike. There is a gurgling all
around you as water flows through a complicated array
of pipes, spiralling round several tall metal cones in the
room’s centre.
This machinery uses alchemical filtration to remove the
salt from seawater, making it usable on board ship for
drinking and washing. Sabotaging these devices would
cripple the Celebration in a far more drastic way than
would shutting down the engine, as it would leave the
crew without any drinkable water. Sabotaging the coils
requires a Disable Device check (DC 25) or a total of
60 points of damage dealt to them. The coils have a
hardness of 8.
4. Alchemy Workshop
A workbench has been set up here, with dozens of
carefully labelled jars stacked on shelves beside it. The
jars have labels like ‘sulphur granules’, ‘tincture of
elastium’ and ‘ground draconic enamel extract’. On
the bench is a metal bowl filled with brown crystals,
like Demerara sugar.
Anyone with any skill ranks in Craft (alchemy)
recognises this immediately as an alchemical laboratory.
Dunstan has been working on an alchemical means to
dry out food, so that it can be kept longer. The brown
crystals are his first steps toward success.
5. Reducing Cauldrons
In this part of the ship, fifteen-foot-high wooden vats
have been installed. A noisome bubbling sound comes
from them. You smell a strong reek of fish.
The cauldrons are used to reduce whale parts into usable
oil. The vats have a hardness of 5 and can sustain 30
points of damage before breaking open. If any of the
vats is ruptured, steaming whale oil gushes out and
floods the area, making the floor slippery in an 80-footradius
spread.
6. Pump Controls
A bank of levers has been built into the wall here, with
the word PUMPS scrawled above them. Beside the
levers is a diagram showing to which parts of the ship
they correspond.
There are six levers in total. Pulling one of them starts
the bilge pumps going in that part of the ship. This
lowers the water level from five feet to two feet in that
area.
7. Fog Vents
At this point on the deck a thrumming metal pipe, five
feet across, leads out through the hull. This must be the
source of the fog that shrouds the ship. There is a hatch
in the side of the pipe.
The hatch is there so that blockages in the vents can be
found and removed. Characters can attempt to enter the
ship through the fog vents. The continuous blast of hot
steam gives total concealment and deals 3d6 points of
fire damage per round to any character exposed to it,
with a Reflex saving throw (DC 20) for half damage.
Immediately inside the vent is an iron grille, bolted in
place, to prevent creatures from clambering into the
works. Beyond the grille is the access hatch, which is
locked from within. Beyond the hatch, the pipe narrows
to two feet.
8. Brig
This part of the ship is unlike any other that you have
seen. To the west is the head of an enormous catfish,
whiskered and goggling, made of some greenish metal.
It is as if a fish-shaped construct had rammed the ship
here and forced its way through the hull. As you watch,
the metal eyes swivel slightly and puffs of steam come
from the nostrils. It is either alive or made to look that
way!
The quality of workmanship is astonishing; each scale
of the fish head seems to have been manufactured
separately. A character who examines the fish’s
mouth and succeeds at a Knowledge (architecture
and engineering) check (DC 20) or Search check (DC
25) notices that the fish’s mouth is hinged and can
be opened. A further Search check (DC 25) locates
a steam pipe concealed among the detail of the fish’s
scales, which is apparently the power source for the
opening mechanism. This runs down into the floor and
eventually connects with the boiler. A character can
sabotage Gugglehatch’s breath weapon by tampering
with this pipe. A Disable Device check (DC 25) or a
total of 40 points of damage dealt to the pipe (Hardness
10) will render the breath weapon unusable.
In fact, the brig is a sentient prison and has the name
of Gugglehatch. Instead of locks and keys, whoever
created the Celebration decided to make the prison
and the guard the same thing. Locks can be picked,
traps can be disarmed and guards can be killed, but a
mechanical fish head is harder to bypass.
Gugglehatch can only do three things: open and close
its mouth (including making attacks), use its breath
weapon and communicate. It speaks in a slow monotone,
Ibon Presno Gonzalez (order #73006) 8