A journey through a land of fantasy…

Session date:  April 14, 2008

After searching the room thoroughly, Falco allowed the rest of the party to enter, after spiking the entry door so that it would not close.  The room was roughly cross-shaped, with convex walls, as shown in the image (please ignore the letters for now).  I ruled that players could occupy any square that was at least 50% white. 

Falco found that all the doors were locked, and the top one (which happens to be the western door) was trapped.  Thus, the party decided to investigate the rooms to the right and left first.

The right room contained five sarcophagi, and murals on the wall depicted scenes from city life: a panorama of buildings, a busy marketplace, soldiers drilling.  There were no inscriptions or identifications on the sarcophagi.  Vryn and Sparrow began systematically opening each sarcophagus to see what was inside, while Falco and Mahdi looked on.  Osiris shook her head and returned to the cross-shaped room, where she knelt in prayer.

Prying open all five sarcophagi, they found that the remains within were decomposed beyond recognition.  Most of their weapons and armor were rusted away, though there were a few items that were in pristine shape, which Mahdi identified as magical in nature.  These items, Vryn quickly stowed in a bag of holding.  The party (sans Osiris) then moved to the left room, which contained two sarcophagi and murals of naturals scenes, of trees and animals.  Again, the sarcophagi were opened and looted, though one of the items, a chain shirt, was pristine though not magical.

Falco then moved to disable the trap on the final door.  Unfortunately, he failed, setting off a straight-line force effect that he evaded.  (As a side note, if they had let the original door close, the force effect would have hit the door, triggering the lightning trap again.)  He finally disabled it, and when he opened the door, the party heard shrieks from coming from the two side rooms.  Mahdi and Vryn immediately closed the two doors and prepared for the coming battle.

(I did not count the summoning of these undead as a trap.  The undead were commanded to rest until that door was opened or someone entered the final room, so it wasn’t really a trap, per se, and Falco could not have “disarmed” it.)

Closing the doors, while a good idea, could not stop the advance of incorporeal undead.  Five greater wraiths — two from the left and three from the right — swooped in through the walls.  (The image above shows the starting positions of the party.)  Two closed with Vryn and Sparrow, while the other three stayed high in the air and swooped down at Osiris, Falco, and Mahdi.  (These wraiths were Dread Wraiths from Monster Manual 3.5, though deleveled to about a CR of 8.  There were supposed to be seven of them, but it was very apparent at the beginning of the combat that five were enough; I decided that the spell degraded over time and only roused five of the available spirits.  Also, the MM 3.5 lists them as having Spring Attack, but I decided that it really meant Fly-By Attack.)

Mahdi was immediately hit and drained of Constitution, so he cast greater invisibility to protect himself.  Vryn pulled out a mace of disruption and attacked the wraiths with it, though it never managed to disrupt one.  Osiris managed to turn one wraith, and, going incorporeal, hurt one very badly with some well-aimed spells.  However, she became the focus of the swooping wraith attacks, and while her high Fortitude save served her well for a while, she critically failed a save against the Constitution drain and started to succumb to later attacks.

Falco, however, was the big loser.  He tumbled to the bottom door and began shooting the wraith that was attacking Sparrow, but that put him just below one of the wraiths, who began to attack him repeatedly.  After losing most of his Constitution, he tumbled back to his starting position, which was next to the wraith attacking Sparrow (the wraith was floating above Sparrow’s head).  That wraith knew a good thing when it saw it and drained the last bit of Falco’s Constitution, and he collapsed.

Soon after the fight ended, a new wraith appeared, issuing from Falco’s body.  I had Kyle play his wraith, letting him read the entry for the creature in the Monster Manual and telling him that he is no longer Falco, but an intelligent undead.  Kyle, who seemed to be  having fun with it, decided that he knew he was no match for the party, and had it immediately flee the room, circling around to the entrance of the tomb, where it found it couldn’t proceed because of the bright daylight (though it did manage to scatter the horses due to its unnatural aura).  Osiris told the others that the wraith needed to be defeated before Falco could be resurrected, so they chased it around the tomb.  While it fled, It beseeched them to leave it alone, but they eventually caught up to it and defeated it.

After stuffing Falco’s body into a bag of holding, the party proceeded to examine the last room in the tomb.  On the far side of the room was a single sarcophagus bearing a very old version of the Thirmondas coat of arms.  In the very center of the room, on the floor, was a mosaic depicting a map of the continent.  Each region was formed of chips of semi-precious stone, and rubies and a sapphire indicated the capitals.  At each of the eight cardinal directions, about two inches from the edge of the map square, was a hole about two inches across and about three inches deep.

On each of the three walls (not including the one with the door) were murals, painted in the style of the Bayeux Tapestry.  The left wall showed the army of Chorenn, many in Japrilian colors, marching to battle, and a scene of a figure in green and a figure in blue meeting with seven generals in a tent.  On the middle wall, a crescent moon in the upper left corner shone on a tent in which the figure in blue raised a dagger over the sleeping form of the figure in green, while on the right, a morning sun illuminated the figure in green on a throne watching the execution, by beheading, of the figure in blue.  On the left wall, the rays of a noon sun shone over a battlefield scene, with the army of Chorenn, led by the figure in green holding his sword high, on the right.

The party immediately decided that the Heart of the Fallen needed to be inserted into the ebony staff, and that the staff needed to be stood in one of the eight holes around the map, though they wondered whether it needed to be done at a particular time of day or year so that the sun would shine into the cave to illuminate the ruby (a la “Stand by the gray stone when the thrush knocks…”).  None noticed, or at least commented on, the differences in names on the map.

They then inspected the sarcophagus, opening it to find the corpse of a man in full armor.  The corpse was somewhat decayed, indicating that it had been preserved for a while, and most of its clothing had rotted away, but the shield laid on top of it had a rampant lion on a blue field, and, though rusted, had not been damaged in battle.  Vryn moved the helm enough to verify that the head was not attached to the body.  Though Mahdi had verified that items in the sarcophagus were magical, the party did not remove any of the items.

They decided then that they needed to head to Valuria, as it was one of the few places they might be able to find a cleric that could cast resurrect (because of the nature of Falco’s death, a raise dead wouldn’t work), then to Tal Sabronus to borrow the Heart of the Fallen.  They exited the tomb to begin setting up a camp, but Osiris stayed behind.  She began laying the corpses back to rest, and spent the entire night in ceremony. 

Sparrow didn’t have a good night of it either.  As he is a neutral good character (with lawful good tendencies), as well as a person with personal, ancestral ties to this place, I decided that it was against his alignment and his character to actively loot the tomb.  That evening, he had nightmares that repeatedly woke him up and prevented him from sleeping well. Nathan filled in the details later, which Sparrow shared with the party – he dreamed that he was a captain in the battle, leading a division of foot soldiers which got decimated, ending in his own death with a sword through his chest.   Sparrow decided that it was still for the greater good that he disturbed the tomb, but said prayers for the fallen for the rest of the night.

(I decided that none of the other party members had a problem with it.  Falco is chaotic good, but has never shown a concern for such matters.  All the others are various flavors of neutral, though Osiris, on her own, decided that, though opening the sarcophagi was ok, disturbing their contents was not, and chose to not participate.)

I had planned something else for the next day, after they had explored the tomb, but I didn’t want to do it without Falco there, so I postponed it until they returned to the tomb.