deathmtn

The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the
world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, because he has no real effect in the world. But the tradesman must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one's failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away. His well-founded
pride is far from the gratuitous "self-esteem" that educators would impart to students, as though by magic.

The drawbridge creaks and groans under any weight but is relatively sturdy. Each time anyone except Strahd crosses the drawbridge, there is a 5% chance of a cross board breaking. If a cross
board breaks, the character on it must make a dexterity check or fall to the bottom of the cliffs, 1,000 feet below.

A small aperture at the kiln's base, just large enough for someone to crawl inside when it was fully open, controlled the amount of air reaching the flames and enabled the adding of more fuel. Once the structure had been completed, men would crawl through the opening to tightly stacked firewood in the pit and then place pieces of limestone- usually the size of a small fist or smaller-over the wood. More wood was then stacked on top of the layer of limestone. The
reason the limestone was no more than fist-size was to allow the heat to completely permeate the stone and fully calcify it. The wood stacking and limestone placement alone usually required a day to complete. The kiln workers would then carefully crawl out of the oven, set the wood alight, and
then close the opening with a flat rock, leaving it ajar enough to permit a
steady flow of air to feed the fire. Once the fire was started, it needed to be
worked regularly; men would poke the embers, fan the flames, and contin-
ually add more wood every hour or so.