A CROWN RETURNED GAMEPLAY THREAD

Jayne, on that Athletics roll of 15, the door shatters and what remains of it skitters across the floor of the small cottage, its rusted hinges now hanging uselessly from the wood of the door.

Inside, the cottage is dank, reeking, and filled with shadows. Haphazardly hung shelves line the walls, covered in all manner of clay jugs, clouded bottles, strangely cut rocks, rotted bunches of herbs, and a museum of other crude curios and remnants of a bone grinder’s artifice. A rusted iron cauldron, with a hinged lid built to resemble a frog’s jaws and a depth of almost 3 feet, occupies the centre of the hut’s single room, its ash-covered surface shaped with a relief of capering fiends and leering devils. A high-back chair stands against the far walls across the door, made of wicker, the gigantic curved tusks of some monstrous beast, and thousands of humanoid teeth. In the chair sits what looks like a corpse wrapped in filthy burial linens, its form padded with pungent herbs and sprouting patches of thick white mould.

"Phew..." Utterly unfazed by the smell, Fira steps into the house, hands sweeping past the rotting herbs and pausing to peer into the mouth of the cauldron. Straightening up, she scans the other end of the shack, finally noticing..."Ugh...don't suppose that's anyone we care about, is it?"

Sapphira, as you enter the cottage, the mindless cauldron construct lurches to life and attacks, hot smoke billowing out of the now open lid. It "bites" at you by snapping at them with its hinged lid while its inner surfaces swiftly heat up to cook anything small enough it can "gulp" down.

For the second time this excursion,Fira is the first to stumble headlong into danger. As the cauldron snaps at her,she flinches back. "Oh,come on! Can't you leave me alone?!"