Session 23: Love You to Death

General Summary

Session 29 JUN 2019: There are four doors besides the one we entered from, so we try the door to the NW. Upon opening, the door releases a flood of putrid water that knocks a few of us over before settling to ankle height. Brought with the deluge is a corpse in robes. Lorin investigates the corpse, which is totally disgusting, and finds 25g of arcane materials, some waterlogged books, and a glass wand. Using arcana and nature skills, we determine that there is no way that this water occurs naturally, so the corpse (before becoming a corpse) cast a spell that brought water and drowned himself. Shoulda had a spotter, dude!   All but the SW door connects to existing tunnels, and the last (SW) door leads to a room with an altar covered in poured gold, with eyes and mouths carved into the walls, all adorned with poured gold. The altar has an inscription that reads, “A gift of flesh, willingly given, will satisfy our endless hunger.” Lorin gets the impression that the gold is alive, and not simply metal. We put it a pin in this thing.   The room to the south is partially collapsed and seems to be an old site for mining, with no other obvious significance. We continue further south, and break into a regular dungeon tunnel. Pressing east, we encounter wall carvings of Nothics and Gibbering Mouthers. Art Deco, very nice.   Pressing NE, we start to see some light coming from an unexplored room, and hear things moving around. Pepperdrop and I stealth up and see a woman in a chair giving orders to moving tableware, but we cannot tell any other real details. So, we enter like we own the place.   The woman has a necklace with two symbols, one a gold coin, and the other a black circle. One is a Symbol of Shar God of Darkness and Loss/Death and the other of Juaquim God of Trade(?), wto symbols of religious significance. She is less than impressed with our efforts at diplomacy, so we backtrack to the “crossroads” and explore south. We fill in a previously unexplored room in a cul-de-sac, that has blacksmithing equipment. Also, it has one of the travel teleport gates that we can’t use yet. So we continue looping SE.   As we explore, we find a passageway with lots of evidence of foot traffic, and many Zanathar eyeball carvings decorate the walls. We send Pepperdrop to investigate, and she hears sounds of combat from the distance. The room she finds seems to be an antechamber for further rooms. The walls are covered in blood smears, graffiti, and other vandalism, but no actual language. We start combat with an AoE Fireball!   We kill a (literal) Zombie Beholder! As if the regular kind weren’t enough, already! After its death, we hear the continued sounds of mock combat from the next room. We recon our way over and scope the room. There’s a group of fighters in/around a circle of blood drawn on the floor, along with our Barbarian lady.   (Jared Detalosi) After we find the entrance to the 3rd floor and seeing it locked Detalosi goes into the isolated incoherent stage, turns out that his parents are on the 3rd and goes into detail about why he is here. Turns out that he is hunting down his parents to get more information on the gaurding of the entrance from the calamity wars of the gods tomb of hidden items/weapons. He wants to free them and make sure his temple is gaurded and that he can get weapon but currently torn between protecting children and pushing quickly to finding his parents to make sure these items/weapons dont get released onto the world. Then realized that this speech was happening that Lorin played with a random temple/ goo thing that lead into a fight.     We kill the Barbarian lady and take her head. We find a secret room with another teleport gate inside, adorned with an animal symbol, specifically a Rust Monster. The gate shows us the face of the nice lady from the mirror, who tells us we’re still not ready.   We find about 100g, and the Barbarian’s +2 Great Axe, which goes to a distraught Feng. We also short rest, and continue our explorations.   We eventually find the stairs to Lvl3, which is blocked by a stone gate that takes a key to open, which we expected. So, we decide to backtrack and take care of the Goblin King human-guy that curses ghost kids and then turn in the heads. But first, a long rest.   As we start the rest, Lorin takes a piece of her own severed flesh, harvested during previous combats, and places it on the Gold altar. This action immediately spawns a golden monster amorphous blob thing, which is predictably hostile. Feng swings his newly acquired axe and splits it into three smaller monsters. Ugh. However, non-slashing damage seems to work just fine, and we subdue the monsters. Underneath, we find a religious object worth 150gp.