First descent into Barrowmaze. I didn’t take notes, so this may be a bit sketchy. Also, there were two brave adventurers who made the 0th descent into the maze, but their names have been lost to history. Four brave adventurers went to seek their fortune, Boris the Unkempt, a fighting-man; Roman the Forceful, also a fighting-man; Beradin the Dwarf, a vaultguard; and Eponymous the Nameless, an elven spellsword. Eponymous hired a mercenary named Wasyl as a henchman, and the five of them left for the moors.
They elected to start their graverobbing with the tombs above the surface. The first one looked promising, with four sarcophagi. However, as they moved to pry them open, 6 giant centipedes dropped from the ceiling. Sadly, the centipedes were unable to penetrate their armor, and they fell to the swords of the brave adventurers. After looting the tomb, they left, and were surprised by 3 giant toads. The toads also fell, but not before wounding Beradin. They looted a second tomb, which contained nothing but some amphorae, but in a third tomb, they found a secret set of stairs into the barrow.
The stairs led into a long hallway, at the end of which was a room with a number of statues and an altar. They cautious approached the statues, and when nothing jumped out at them, Roman went over to the altar. He didn’t notice the pit, and fell in, breaking one of his legs badly enough that he’ll be lame for life (or until he can find a restore life and limb spell). The party decided they should rest, and in a fit of generosity, I only rolled for six random encounters. Three were hits, but they were able to deal with the relatively easy encounters I rolled up.
So, I think I need to be harder on them if they’re resting in the Barrowmaze itself. At the very least, make them set up watches, and if no one sleeps, they take a -1 the next day from fatigue. Otherwise, they’ve generally been the beneficiaries of some pretty bad rolling on my part. With the centipedes, I rolled no higher than a 10 in their surprise round!
With respect to the pit trap, is there some check I should have made to see if the PC noticed it before he fell in?