2022/11/02: Halloween Special Part 2 Report

General Summary

Union, Ruby, Et-Kehri, Buzz, Eldrin, Altruenth, Moyshanna When we left off, we were in a cave full of lots and lots of cooked bug. Exploration revealed yet more of the weird crystals that are psionically activated. The party retrieved a few. Moyshanna led us onward. We found another cavern, this one containing some pools of water and a large, intricate stone tomb door. ~100x100 room. There are two sconces outside the door, and a variety of intricate statues in the corners. Some of the statues, in one direction, seem demonic, while those in the other direction were made to look like knights. Buzz's goggles detected that an area in front of the door was magical (abjuration/evocation), and there's something magical in the pool. Eldrin used a short-ranged far-seeing to look in the pool from the entrance. There's something alive down there. Whatever it is, it has far too many eyes and far too little coherent anatomy. Union volunteered to step inside the room. As everyone expected, the two gargoyles, two iron golems, and gibbering mouther promptly attacked. Eldrin, reacting first, skipped past trying magic on iron golems and used a psionic power named "Mind Explosion" to try to blow all the enemies apart at the atomic level. This mostly hit the gibbering mouther, simultaneously revealing more of it to the party; they managed to avoid going insane just from looking at it. Ruby went for the golems. She rapidly realized that these were not, in fact, iron golems. They were iron and stone golems. Fortunately, she learned this largely by disassembling them in seconds. Buzz hasted the party. The gargoyles swooped down on the rest of the party; while their attacks were largely ineffective, their spikes scratched at everyone nearby. Altruenth broke free from the melee and charged the gibbering mouther, tearing it apart before it could do more than sweep a despair-flavored eye laser across the room. At the same time, Union began stabbing at the nearest gargoyle, nearly breaking it, and Et-Kehri's subsequent friendly fireball killed it. Moyshanna stepped in, taking advantage of the magical haste to bring the other gargoyle down, and thus ended the fight. While Buzz harvested some of the gibbering mouther's eyes, Union got to work disarming the magical trap in front of the tomb door. He and Ruby located a hidden switch that deactivated it. The door was locked, but Ruby smacked it perfectly, as monks are wont to do, and it opened nicely. Inside the tomb, there are a couple of large, imposing statues, and piles of skeletons scattered everywhere. Eldrin used his special sight to check the expiration dates of the things in the room: There are several large undead in the piles. There is also a large obelisk in the back of the room flashing with necromantic lightning. After some debate, the group heads in, Buzz tossing a light grenade into the room ahead of them. Two ten-foot-tall skeletons with giant bony claws lunged out of the bone piles in response. Eldrin's first death bullet passed through one skeleton's ribcage, but after a moment of aiming, his shot against the other went dead center. The death effect went ignored, revealing that these were constructs, not undead. The skeletons reached Altruenth moments later. Altruenth stood his ground, parrying and using his armor to good effect. In a sudden lunge a pair of snakelike masses of ribs and spines (necrophidiuses) launched themselves off the tops of nearby piles and wrapped around Ruby and Union, immobilizing them. Ruby's struggles proved fruitless, but her fiery breath weapon was not; it didn't kill the monster, but it certainly hurt it. Buzz pulled a magic missile Uzi. A stream of force and soulfire smashed into the necrophidius wrapped around Ruby, nearly destroying it but not quite breaking it. Et-Kehri followed up with shrieking teeth, taking off the last of that necrophidius's structural integrity and beginning to stab at the other. Altruenth smashed the two boneclaws to pieces. Union, still trapped, struggled against his captor without success. Moyshanna slashed at the necrophidius, gouging it but not breaking it. Then necrotic lightning lashed out from the two obelisks hidden at the back of the room. Et-Kehri was able to absorb the lightning targeting him with a ring, but the rest took some pain, and Union was hit badly enough to be stunned by the shock. Eldrin, seeing that only one enemy remained, pulled his purple two-handed sword and started hacking away in hopes of freeing Union. It was slow going. Ruby, seeing that the party's main trap disarmer was incapacitated, ran for the obelisks to try to disable them. Behind her, the necrophidius continued crushing Union and put its teeth into him; he wasn't dead yet, but his silent internal narrative was very displeased. As Ruby successfully picked the keyhole on one obelisk and disabled it, Buzz shot the remaining necrophidius to pieces with his Uzi. Altruenth dashed over and applied his healing hands to the still-immobile Union. Et-Kehri set the teeth to further disassembling the enemy remains and ran over to help Ruby; he's no thief, but he was able to initiate a contest of wills, failing to dispel the magic of the second obelisk entirely but succeeding in resetting its charge. Moyshanna ran to the obelisk and tried (unsuccessfully) to match Ruby's lockpicking. Eldrin, seeing the attempt failing, tried to pull a panel off the obelisk with his mind, but the obelisk proved resilient; it simply shook in place momentarily. Fortunately, Ruby was able to reach the second obelisk, push Moyshanna out of the way, and flip the lock before the charge could build up a second time. With that, the battle was over, and the group was left standing in a room full of bones. Ruby attempted to repeat her trick of granting the party regeneration, but that was when the party discovered they'd been subjected to some form of magical field; all regeneration has been disabled. Unable to do anything about this, the party set themselves to trying to find the route forward; there seemed to be no new exits from the room. A minute later, Union finally became mobile again, and promptly staggered onto a section of floor supported only by brittle bones; he proceeded to fall 15 feet into yet more crypt. After a bit of banter, the realization that there was something sniffing around down there, and some confirmations for Et-Kehri as to what wolves are, Ruby and Altruenth dropped down to join the hiding Union. Out of the shadows, a veritable tide of abyssal ghoul hungerers lunged. Ruby screamed. Union hunkered. Altruenth swung his holy sword. Standing in a pile of severed ghoul parts, Ruby and Union agreed to never speak of this again. The rest of the party climbed down after them, Altruenth's sword providing a sort of watery light around him. Beyond that radius, the darkness was pressing in, apparently angry that we'd brought light inside. Eldrin guided the party down the path deeper into the crypt. They found an area with two large double doors to the east and west. Altruenth detected a greater evil to the east. The doors in that direction were barred from our side. Inside the vaulted hallways on the other side, Altruenth directed the party south. The party paused to let Moyshanna switch to a set of sea beast armor Ruby had been carrying. (Ruby provided a changing screen with her wings.) Finally, the party came across the evil: what looked like a blast shadow burned or melted into the wall, what looks like the silhouette of a man bracing against an explosion. It appears this is the result of an extraordinarily evil magical blast: Shards of the target's soul are still embedded in the wall, and the blast shadow is permanently tainted by evil. The party found no way to immediately remove or fix the shadow, and there was no sign of whatever launched the attack, so the party moved on. Exploring north again, the party found a sturdy pair of doors with an angelic theme. Union and Ruby set to work. After some picking and tapping, the doors swung open to reveal a large temple area, with an almost gothic cathedral aesthetic. There are four subrooms off to the sides. In the center of the room, there is a pool of water, with drips falling periodically from the ceiling. And then there was a loud VWHOOOM, and a small army of death angel creatures (10 of them) were summoned in, led by Malthiel's understudy. "MORTALS ARE NOT MEANT FOR THIS PLACE. DIE." The death angel leading the pack opened with some variant of a power word: death. Those adventurers who resisted the effect were weakened; Union and Moyshanna were not so lucky. Union died, but the five hit points of life energy dropped into the crystal earlier meant he left his body as a ghost. Moyshanna simply died. Eldrin responded by shooting the leader in the head. Death Strike and True Strike together didn't quite kill him, but they did... something. A ghostly image of the monster fell and began to dissipate. His body remained, but greatly weakened, no longer glowing, no longer floating. It's unclear what he was before, but now he was very clearly undead. The squad of lesser death angels charged, and Ruby charged to meet them. Their attacks proved ineffective; hers did not. Six angels died in three seconds. Altruenth took the opening in the guard. He dashed forward, lodged his blade in the death angel's chest, and cut him in two. Et-Kehri, left to suddenly switch targets with the death angel's death, elected to toss a friendly fireball at the surviving ghostly guards. The guards ignored this and went to beat on Altruenth for killing their boss. He ignored them in turn and continued chopping the leader's corpse into pieces. Eldrin tossed an omnibeam across the remaining opposition. They went "piff". With the enemies dead, the party reviewed their losses. They had no means of resurrecting Union and Moyshanna at the time, but they were able to fit their bodies into an earthy bag of holding for later. Taking a look around, they found a giant mystical circle of humming energy in the back of the cathedral, and off to the east there is a giant stinking hole full of skulls and corpses. Ruby detected that some of the skulls in the pit/pile were treasure of some sort. Buzz talked to one of the skulls, that of a half-orc: He identified himself as Thagash, an adventuring barbarian. He and his party were killed by the death angel boss. He says the skulls were taken across the room to whatever was on the other side, and they would never come back. On the other side of the room is the magical circle. It appears to be some sort of locked teleportation circle with a necromantic bent. It seems the skulls are like coins in a vending machine. Fortunately, it looks like the skulls aren't consumed by the process, they're just used as keys to get to the other side. There was some further conversation. Thagash told them that his party had come to this place in search of the "Sword of Radiance", which was supposedly stored in the Tomb of Sartine. They never made it; the death angel in the cathedral killed them all. After some investigation, the party determined that the circle was used with some regularity and the people who went through did come back by the main entrance sometimes, so it was probably safe to use. They gathered a collection of skulls and stepped through. All but Union vanished. Union was left floating there, with a pull towards the crystal housing his animating chunk of life essence, which was now some five hundred feet below him. Fortunately, it turned out that the floor was not tangible to incorporeal creatures like the walls were, and he began to cautiously descend. The rest of the party reappeared in a bland 40x40 room with rickety double doors and a giant pile of skulls in the corner. On the other side of the door was giant pit. The floor of the 20-foot-wide hallway had completely collapsed into a 200-foot-deep pit, and Eldrin could see that there were spiky bits and corpses down there. The party collected themselves and got everybody access to magical flight (with Et-Kehri taking the dead Union's jetpack), and then they searched the room. Several of them detected a hidden room on the left side of the hallway. Ruby opened the secret door, and inside the temple room on the other side (the floor of which was some 80 feet down) the group found a roaring firestorm encapsulating a blackened skull on a pedestal. Ruby, cheerfully immune to fire, stepped in and pulled the skull out. It turns out that the black crystal skull is actually the skull of Sartine herself. She is now an intelligent artifact wizard implement and can communicate telepathically. She has been down here for... a while. She warned the group of traps and a group of undead fire-using efreet, but it seems some of her warnings are out-of-date; by the time the group arrived, the traps and guardians are nothing but wreckage. The efreet were still there, but Ruby and Buzz cheerfully went in on their own, completely ignored the huge swathes of fire, and respectively beat and shot every single efreet to death. And so the Tomb of Sartine was complete. (Sartine is disinterested in remaining in the wrecked temple and is willing to give the party a shot. As long as they take potshots at followers of Orcus whenever they get the chance, they should get along just fine.)