A journey through a land of fantasy…

On the morning after the encounter on the walls of the remains of Fort Jaron, the party conferred about how to locate a long lost tomb of which they only knew the general location.  After some consideration of skills and abilities, the final plan was to have Osiris and Vryn use wind walk and find the path to locate the tomb.  The others were to make their way northward with the horses.

As a side note, for this search, I did not design it with any particular solution in mind.  The tomb was built into an already-existing cave and covered with a landslide to hide it naturally.  The battle site itself was below the mountain in smooth, rolling hills, near a tiny village called Marreling Downs (which was destroyed during this time period).  There was no puzzle or anything to solve to find the place.  In these situations, I leave the solution open, and accept any reasonable attempt at locating it (giving them chances at locating it, depending on the method, as well as determining how long it would take).

Osiris and Vryn were led by the spell to rocky slope on the side of one of the mountains.  While Osiris went back to fetch the others, Vryn started digging, moving rocks one by one.  When the party joined him, hours later, Mahdi sent earth elementals to scout the rock pile, and they determined it was nearly 15-20 feet thick.  As the party began to to realize that it would take hours to dig through it and make an opening, Mahdi fired a green jet at the pile to disintegrate a large portion of the work.

The next day, after regaining spells, the party ventured into the cave.  It was obvious from the rough walls that the cave was altered from its original shape slightly, smoothed and cleaned.  In it were three bronze statues of soldiers with great axes, one in front of the single door that led out of the cave and two to the sides.  When the party entered, the first statue stated, “You have entered the tomb of the soldiers who fought in the Battle of Marreling Downs.  Leave here and let the dead rest in peace.” 

Sparrow stepped forward and proclaimed, “I am Johnathan Thirmondas, descendant of King Ristophe III, who created this place.  I must enter this tomb, and I will not disturb the remains of those interred here.  Please let us pass.”

The statue stated, “We are charged with protecting the final resting place of these valiant soldiers.  You shall not pass.”  With further prompting, the statue continued to say its two lines. 

Expecting a battle, the party prepared: The fighters moved up to surround one statue while Mahdi set up a wall of ice to block off the other two statues.  The battle began with the fighters attacking the one they had surrounded.

The statues were modified bronze golems, which had a 1/day power word stun attack instead of a maze (mostly because I had already used unmodified bronze golems once before and I wanted these to be slightly different).  The fighters made short work of first statue; the extra electrical damage on Sparrow’s rapier served to keep it slowed while the rest of the party learned not to use fire attacks on it.  The other two statues broke a hole in the ice wall very quickly, then used their power word stun attacks.  They were both resisted, but it forced the party to move through the ice wall (and take the residual cold damage) because they didn’t know for sure that the ability was only 1/day. 

It didn’t take long for the party to dispatch the other two golems, but not without taking quite a bit of damage themselves.  The battle also demonstrated that Kyle and Mac, at least, haven’t learned that it’s ok to sit out a few rounds of battle when they’re not able to really help.  Kyle kept shooting at the statues even though his max-roll arrow did no damage to them, and Mac kept casting spells at them, even though it was apparent that the fighters had the situation well in hand.  (At least it helped reduce his resources for later battles!  Muahahaha!)

After checking the ruined statues, the party moved into the next room.  This was a large (about 40×40) room with a single, narrow, straight path down the middle of it to the door on the opposite end.  On either side of the path were bodies, laid out side by side, neatly and rather densely packed.  Osiris surmised that these were regular soldiers, once laid out here under cerement cloths which had long rotted away.  The bodies themselves were rotted but still somewhat intact, indicating that they had been preserved somehow, though that preservation was giving way to time.  She also noted that they were laid out on soil, rather than stone, and guessed that these were the tops of pits, in which many layers of bodies had been buried.  Using her arcane sight, she noticed one magical aura located on the right, among the bodies near the right wall, as well as an aura on the far door.

Vryn and Falco entered the room carefully, but received no response from the bodies lying there.  They attempted to peer at the area where Osiris had seen the aura, but could not see anything there.  Vryn then left the room while Falco went to the door to investigate what he suspected was a magical trap.  As he stepped onto the last five-foot square, bodies rose up on either side of him and began to attack.

The last five-foot square wasn’t actually trapped.  The cleric that consecrated the grave instructed that the soldiers rest until someone attempted to breach the door by stepping up to it.  At that point, the bodies became undead and rose, though the magics were only able to raise less than half of the corpses  They were charged to defend the tomb as best as they could.

“As best they could,” though, wasn’t particularly good — the thousand-year-gone cleric had not foreseen the power level that Sparrow had brought to this tomb.  Though Falco screamed and ran from the room, the party regrouped and quickly slew the undead as they emerged from the door.  This, however, allowed them to approach and investigate the magical aura without fear of disturbing the bodies.  They found a ebony staff, approximately six feet long, with an ebony ring about a foot across as the head.  Within the ring was a network of silver wires which obviously, at one time, else something within them; Vryn immediately guess that the Heart of the Fallen, the ruby in Japrilis, was meant to be placed within the silver wires.

Falco then turned his attention to the trap on the door, while the rest of the party again retreated to the statue room. He examined it, then attempted to disarm it, but failed miserably, causing a jet of lightning to erupt down the pathway and out the other door.  Falco dodged easily and called out, “It’s ok!  I’m all right!”   Then, assuming that the trap was spent, he opened the door, sending another jet of lightning down the pathway and out the door.  (If the door closes, opening it will trigger it again.)  The door opened into a cross-shaped room with three doors at each arm end.

The session ended at this point, which is fortuitous, because I decided to change the next part of the tomb.  The three doors led to a set of elven sarcophagi (left), a set of human sarcophagi (right), and a room with one sarcophagus and an elaborate mosaic map on the ground (forward).  I had planned not to have any more encounters in the tomb, but I think the party is actually pretty exhausted and need to be pushed a little more to their limits, so I am going to change it to have one more encounter, probably incorporeal undead.  Or maybe a golem and some incorporeal undead.