Dungeons and Dinosaurs

The dinosaur clerics up north have hollowed out their mountain and filled it with a complex series of oil wells, with pumps, pipes and control structures that are mostly scavenged from ancient ruins.  They use fracking to harvest vast supplies of oil needed to power their time machine.  Oil is a perfect fuel, as it can supply the mechanical and psychic power needed.

Oil, ancient compressed ferns, dinosaurs, trilobites and trees, remembers what it once was, and yearns to return to itself.  That vast longing is a source of fuel as surely as the complex hydrocarbons are. If not properly managed, that longing can also be an explosive, dangerous force.

There is a T-Rex ghost inside the mountain. It staggers between the ghostly world and our own, confused, betrayed and ravenous.  After months of rumors and attacks, the complex has been shut down, and requires adventures to put the T-Rex ghost to rest.

Pastor Ian asks the adventurers to delve into the mountain, slay the T-Rex and minimize damage to the archaic machinery. The dungeon is dirt simple in layout, but the description of the rooms should be a confusing haze of anachronisms.  The awakening of the oil means that ghosts of half remembered ferns, giant dragonflies, and trilobites flitter about anachronistic metal machined pipes and simple steam driven computers.

Pastor Ian gives them directions, so the party can go on a direct line through the three encounters and find the T-Rex den quickly.  They can also wander down unlighted corridors, roll on wandering monsters if they do.  The idea is that the actual dungeon layout is insanely complex and could be a megadungeon, but the party is there for a surgical strike.

First Room simply contains a weird piece of machinery that produces a high pitched noise that knocks humans (and demihumans) unconscious when within 30 feet (no save).  The first person in marching order sees the machinery first, then falls unconscious presumably.  They have to get past this machine or else take a long detour, remember Ian told them not to damage machinery.  

Second Room contains velociraptors, which emerge from caves holes in the wall and leap down on the party. Inside the bellies of the ghostly velociraptors is a ghost of a miner who was devoured before they shut it down. He asks the party to take the money off his corpse (nearby) and use it to pay his debt to the Bowery Boys, or else they will come after his family.  He also says the afterlife is horrible.

This thing is awesome

Third room has the T-rex, which, similar to the oil all mixed together, is more properly described as an amalgam of thousands of different creatures, with contrarily shifting skin boundaries and appendages.



Wandering Monsters
1) Minotaur
2) Ghostly Giant Insects  
3) Ghostly Triceratops
4) Ghostly Trilobites
5) Mind Flayer gone insane by psychic reverberations
6) Lost miners