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Log Chute & Hoist
The Machinery That Gives the Secret Away
A massive timber hoist stands at the edge of the bluff above Profit's Flow. Chains descend beside the log chute toward the lower landing. Brake drums, pulleys, and counterweights are built to handle loads far heavier than a few cut trunks.
Crafting or Engineering Lore DC 16: The wear pattern is wrong for a mechanism used mainly to lower timber. The hoist has repeatedly hauled very heavy loads up the bluff.
Critical Success: Stone dust and fine gray clay are embedded in the lower chain links and brake housings. The machinery has been moving material from somewhere below or inside the bluff.
A deliberate search of the hoist platform with Perception DC 16 reveals that part of the timber sheathing conceals a secondary chain run and narrow service access cut into the bluff. The opening has been disguised as maintenance storage from the yard.
Beyond it are the first unmistakable signs of the clandestine excavation: shoring timbers, lamp brackets, drainage channels, hauling tracks, picks, and the same gray clay found elsewhere.
Several narrow side cuts do not follow useful stone, drainage, or a natural passage. Instead, they terminate in packed soil where mature roots were deliberately exposed, cut aside, and then covered again. Nature, Crafting, or Mining Lore DC 16: these side cuts were made to reach the living root layer rather than to extract material. On a critical success, the character notices several small backfilled pockets just large enough for an object to have been lowered among the roots and buried.
If the characters already concluded that Reiver's Right was hiding prohibited underground work, do not require this check to prove them right. Reward the deduction and let the physical evidence confirm it.
If the players deduced the existence of the excavation before directly finding this entrance, award the established 10 XP minor accomplishment. The important discovery in Act 1 is that someone has been digging where older agreements specifically forbade deep excavation.