Ettin Mountain Cave

One of my favorite things about Weapons of Legacy (WOTC 2005) is the adventure seeds that they put in for every legacy item. I find myself skimming through the book every now and again and every time these give me great ideas. For example, just last night I was reading through trying to find the entry for Trimeg's Puzzle Room, since I'd downloaded the map from the WOTC website a while back and wanted to read the description.

While looking through, I stumbled upon this awesome adventure seed for a weapon called Fiendkiller's Flail (pg. 83 I think). The seed is that this Ettin has the flail in a cave waaaaayyyy up at the top of this mountain crag. What I really liked about it is the idea of the ascent to get to his cave. The mountain has different tiers of difficulty. The first 50ft are climb DC 5, followed by 150ft of climb DC 15, then 100ft of climb DC 10, and a last staggering 500ft of climb DC 20.

Now, an ascent like this could be pretty boring. Like traps, I find climbing is often not very interactive unless there's something to make it more interesting. What's more interesting about this climb is that at the top of the hill there's an ettin pitching boulders and javelins at you while you do it.

I dont use legacy items in my current campaigns, and since I'm already using the sanity rules variant, I'd rather not clutter the game with another subsystem. That being said, I'd love to introduce this little mini-adventure into one of my campaigns, even if just to see how the PCs decide to handle it.