Tomb of Annihilation - Session 39
General Summary
Before they proceed, Chibuzo returns to the room with the rusted statue. From the pile of the skeleton's bones, he retrieves the sack it was carrying, finding it full of creepers and moss, and brings it back to the others. Dunch throws it in his Bag of Holding.
They decide to enter Obo'laka's tomb, with Ixtli taking the lead. In the monk's head, the voice of I'jin scoffs: "That scaredy bear won't be of any use. We should just leave her alone." Ignoring the voice, he peers cautiously around the high-backed wooden chair into the vaulted room beyond. At the room's centre, a stone sarcophagus rests on a stepped dais, while on the back wall, two large statues of bear-like creatures hold aloft a bronze disc, five feet in diameter and embossed with dozens of eyes. In the chair next to him sits a humanoid corpse in nondescript clothing, wearing a mask of black papier-mâché decorated with feathers.
Ixtli picks up the mask and puts it on, though it sits awkwardly on his nonhuman face. When he steps into the room, he can see that the eyes embossed on the bronze disc are all focused on the niche behind him, where his companions wait to enter the room. Five other niches are set in the room's walls, containing five more masked humanoid corpses. From them Ixtli retrieves masks for the other adventurers. Once all four are masked, the eyes on the disc no longer focus on the niche but dart around the room, constantly scanning the space.
Ixtli examines the sarcophagus, which is made of simple unengraved stone. The top seems made to simply slide off. I'jin's voice tells him: "Listen, I don't even want to be here. But I don't think two of us can inhabit you at the same time."
Dunch steps forward and pushes the top of the sarcophagus aside, revealing the bones of a bear-like creature in a dusty pile. Lying amid the bones is a ring with a metal shield as its centrepiece. When Dunch touches it, a feral bear-like creature appears, emitting a ghostly roar. Welcoming the spirit, Dunch finds himself inhabited by the spirit of Obo'laka the zorbo.
"Who are you?" a timid female voice asks Dunch. "What are you doing here? How did you get here? Something needs to be done about Lar'lenek. He killed me and my friends." The voice suddenly stops, then resumes in a different tone. "You brought her in here? Why did you bring her here? Find some way to get rid of her! Just stick with me, I'll keep you safe." At the same time, the voice of I'jin tells Ixtli, "I told you about her! This is no good at all."
From Atsu's Lance, Chibuzo feels a sense of unease from his grandfather, as if Atsu is unsure whether this spirit possession is such a good thing.
Ixtli searches the rest of the room more thoroughly, and finds another secret door in the niche opposite the one where they entered. Through the door he smells rotten eggs. When he cautiously pushes open the door, he sees sparks flashing underneath it before the built-up gas behind the door ignites. The monk avoids the explosive force, while the rest of the party takes minor damage.
The gas apparently having dissipated, Ixtli pushes the door open the rest of the way. A staircase descends fifteen feet to a stream flowing to the left, while vestiges of mist or gas cling to the ceiling overhead.
The party decides to take another passage instead: the downward stairs they found just before the entrance to Obo'laka's tomb. Chibuzo takes the lead, as Dunch has been risk-averse since the spirit of Obo'laka possessed him.
As Chibuzo descends, he sees a figure pass by through the firelit room below, moving from right to left. Sneaking down to the bottom of the stairs, he spies a room some twenty-five feet wide and sixty feet from left to right, lit by braziers hanging from chains in the ceiling. To his right, the room contains benches and shelves filled with gears, trap components, and small cages containing rats. A doorway leads south. To his left, a stepped dais on the room's far wall bears a bulky contraption like a closed coffin attached by tubes and hoses to bubbling vats and other alchemical apparatus. Five masked dwarves are busy turning gears and making other adjustments to the mechanism.
Chibuzo sneaks into the room behind the dwarves, his approach concealed by a belch of steam from the machine. But when he brings his warhammer down on one of them, he feels a coldness radiating from it that numbs his arm. Stepping away from the dwarvish wight, he withholds the rest of his melee attacks.
Ixtli joins the attack, drawing his short bow and loosing a couple of non-magical arrows into a dwarf to limited effect. The undead creature turns, saying something in dwarvish to the others. Drawing a battleaxe, it moves to attack Chibuzo, joined by two more of the wights. Their axes miss, but one reaches out to grasp the ranger's leg while another clutches his face. Chibuzo feels some of his life force drain away at their necrotic touch.
The other two dwarves work swiftly at the machine, until the doors of the coffin open. Through a cloud of steam appears an armoured figure with a bucket helm bolted to its head and spiked gauntlets on its hands: a golem!
Dunch charges forward and attacks one of the undead dwarves with the Maul of Disruption, shrugging off the cold damage he incurs. After he sends the wight flying backwards onto the dais, Chibuzo finishes it with his warhammer, then hurls his yklwa at close range into another dwarf. An arrow from Ixtli ends its unnatural semblance of life. From the stairway, Dolan casts Slow on most of the remaining dwarves.
But the golem is unaffected. It lumbers down the steps of the dais, hammering heavily at Chibuzo with its spiked gauntlets. Retaliating, Chibuzo hurls Atsu's Lance at it, invoking its power to fire a bolt of lightning—but finds that the electricity heals the golem's wounds. While Dolan splashes the golem with acid, and the lethargic dwarves make futile attacks, the door to the south opens and a desiccated human wight enters, calling "what is all this noise?!?" But it stops abruptly when it sees the battle in progress: "Fascinating." Half a dozen severed hands crawl over and around the figure, who wears a bronze mask sculpted to look like a frowning face.
Dunch crushes another dwarf, and the newcomer cries angrily: "You should not be here!" Raising its hands, it fires a lightning bolt that strikes Dolan, Dunch, Chibuzo, and the golem, healing almost all of the construct's wounds. Dolan fires back another lightning bolt, disintegrating a few of the severed hands. The rest fall to the ground, unmoving, and the wight recoils: "The aboleth underemphasized your ability."
Chibuzo attacks the golem again, this time summoning his weapon's thunder to greater effect. But when he tries to disengage, the golem smashes him in the back, and he falls insensate to the ground. The creature moves on to hammer at Dolan, but Dunch strikes back in retaliation, then hits it another savage blow that rips off its bucket helm and part of its face. What's left looks Asturian, stitched onto a torso wearing a yellow tunic.
Ixtli finishes one of the dwarvish wights, then moves on to the human one, kicking its head off and sending the bronze mask flying across the room. The golem maintains its focus on Dolan, striking two more heavy blows, while Dunch hammers it repeatedly. Finally the barbarian smashes it in the back and it falls to the floor, its neck snapping as it hits the step of the dais. Ixtli dispatches the last dwarf with a few strikes of the Blood Spear and a kick, then revives Chibuzo with his Hand of Healing.
In the aftermath they search the room, finding an adamantine chain shirt on a table. When Dolan scans for magic using the Sceptre of the Honored Voice, it points him to a black, skull-shaped amulet with emerald eyes on the corpse of the human wight. One of the canisters in the alchemical apparatus also detects as magical; when Ixtli cautiously sips from it, he finds that it has the effect of a Potion of Superior Healing. The others drink it as well, and there is enough left over to fill two potion flasks.
A few moments later, though, Dunch begins to feel odd, and then shaggy fur grows out all over his body. The adventurers speculate that this is the effect of the magical fountain he drank from earlier.
They open the door to the south, finding a ten-foot hallway that opens into a circular chamber some fifteen feet across, with alcoves in its walls containing bones and shrivelled corpses. A spiral staircase in its centre leads downward, and two more passages run east and west.
The fifteen-foot passage to the east ends abruptly. Searching, they find another secret door that opens into a ten-foot-square room, with another short passage beyond it. In the middle of this room is a four-foot-tall font of water that radiates divination magic.
When Dolan gazes into the font, the water swirls, and the basin glows with light. He sees an image, all in shades of grey, that gives him the sense he is looking through the eyes of someone moving down a narrow hallway. The viewpoint moves past a crumpled object that seems to be a corpse holding something that burns.
The viewpoint enters a large chamber, its floor in a checkerboard pattern, with a coffin in its centre illuminated by light from above. In the corners of the room are four huge stone gargoyle heads, their mouths agape. The adventurers realize that the room matches the description of one of the tomb's traps that Musharib told them of back in Port Nyanzaru.
The image in the font focuses on another skeleton with an oddly shaped skull, tinkering at one of the gargoyle heads in the back of the room. Suddenly the viewpoint turns around, as if the figure has heard something, then rushes towards them.
The next moment the surface of the font erupts, and another golem rises up out of the water to attack them. The adventurers pile on with spear, maul, yklwa, and a splash of acid, driving the construct into a berserk frenzy, but it fails to land any blows before Ixtli's kick ends its existence. It collapses face down into the font with a splash. After they pull the corpse out of the font, Chibuzo tries standing in the water but without effect.
At the end of the short five-foot passage to the east, they find another secret door which opens onto the balcony that surrounds the central shaft on the second level. Straight ahead and to their right is the still-closed door to the room with the chained zombies they passed earlier.
Approaching, they find that the now-inanimate zombies have not yet been replaced. Chibuzo persuades Bapoto to climb through one of the holes in the door, casting Beast Sense to let himself look through the lizard's eyes. After a short hallway, he sees a large room with a chariot bearing a bronze sarcophagus. The chariot is piled with treasures, and decorated with paintings showing a bird with a long beak: an eblis. Behind the chariot, a great shield is mounted on the wall, depicting a Marakuran warrior holding a spear, while below the shield is an inscription: "Bow before no one." On either side of the shield stand two statues of Marakuran warriors; two are armed with swords and one with a shield. The fourth carries no weapons but has no face. Along the walls to the left and right stand six glass cauldrons filled with humanoid bones. When Bapoto returns outside the room, Chibuzo rewards him with a treat.
Summoning his Mage Hand, Dolan carries a rope through one of the holes in the door, loops it around the two outermost zombie chains, then brings the rope back through the hole. With their combined efforts, Chibuzo and Dunch are able to haul the rope sufficiently to start raising the door off the floor, even though this means dragging the chained zombie corpses as well. They hear a ratcheting sound as they pull, and eventually the door has been raised enough that they can crawl underneath.
Inside the room, Dolan determines that the cauldrons and the shield both radiate conjuration magic. He bows before the statue with no face, but his action doesn't seem to have any effect. Within Dunch, Obo'laka's voice tells him: "The cauldrons contain the bones of Papazotl's most devoted servants, who will protect the god even in death."
After some debate, the adventurers leave the room. They decide to take another exit from the second floor balcony, this time the narrow passage leading east. They soon realize that this is the same hallway they saw in the font's vision. After some forty feet, they come upon the crumpled, desiccated corpse of a half-human, half-goat figure, clad in yellow robes and clutching a staff of crimson wood that burns continuously at one end. "I think this guy's name was Devlin," Bapoto says.
He looks to have been dead for months. Searching the body, they recover writing supplies, a wizard's spellbook, and a journal describing the exploits of the Company of the Yellow Banner. Ixtli takes the staff, and Dolan says a prayer for the dead man.
The narrow hallway continues another forty feet to the checkerboard room that they saw earlier, some thirty-five feet wide and fifty foot deep. The room smells of wine. The skeleton is still here, puttering at one of the five-foot-high devil faces in a far corner. It collapses after a single strike from Chibuzo's spear; when they retrieve its square-shaped skull, they find it was also carrying a sack with vials of wine. Once more using the sceptre of his faith, Dolan finds that the strangely sunlit coffin emits an aura of abjuration magic. Above the room's only entrance is a block of stone that looks like it could drop down to block the exit, just as Musharib told them.
They return to the central pit and take the remaining unexplored passage on this level. Another narrow hallway runs north from the balcony some thirty feet to a fifteen-foot square room. Its cracked walls are painted with images of terrified humans falling. Set in the floor is a large carving of another devil face painted green, its gaping mouth filled with an unnatural darkness.
Dunch uses the power of Rashaad's ring to summon a ball of lightning and send it down into the mouth, but when it reaches the darkness, the lightning simply disappears.
Chibuzo ties a torch to a rope and lowers it into the darkness, then brings it back up. The torch is still lit and seems unchanged. He lowers it a further distance, and feels it hit something in the darkness after about twenty feet.
He pulls up the rope, ties it around himself, and takes the torch in hand. "Lower me down," he commands. Dunch braces himself and gradually lets out the rope. In a few moments Chibuzo is swallowed by the darkness.
When he enters the dark, he sees nothing, not even the torch that he carries, but after some fifteen feet the light suddenly returns. The ranger finds himself dangling above the sarcophagus in I'jin's tomb, where Yollotl died. The room looks just as they left it. Signalling Dunch with pulls on the rope, Chibuzo has himself lowered the rest of the way, where he retrieves the sack that the pentagon-headed skeleton was carrying. The bag holds more of the weird purple fungus that they found earlier on this level.
After he ascends back to the others, they search the devil-face room but find nothing unusual.
They go back around the balcony, through the secret door, and then past the circular staircase to the west. After some fifteen feet they find themselves in a large, filthy office, dimly lit by candles, with four bookshelves and a wooden writing desk. In a hanging birdcage, a skeletal songbird sings feebly. The walls are hung with anatomical drawings of golems sketched in charcoal.
An ornate book radiates magic. When Dolan opens it, he finds that it contains sketches of humanoid figures, some sort of instructions, and incantations so powerful that even reading them causes him injury. He closes the book and stashes it in his Bag of Holding.
Another of the books proves to be a wizard's spellbook, which they also take. On the book's inside cover are two words written in Marakuran script: "Khomara" and "Blackfire".
Searching the rest of the room, they find one other object of note in a desk drawer: a fist-sized grey stone with an almost organic look to it. It radiates an aura of enchantment, and they seize it as well.
At one point during their search, Dunch feels his face tingling. The nubs of horns start to protrude from the top of his head, and his eyes change to display the horizontal, slit-shaped pupils of a goat.
The adventurers return to the central pit and climb back up to the first level, where they decide to explore the wide hallway to the east. After some thirty feet, the hallway ends in a giant stone skull encrusted with moss, flames flickering in its eye sockets. Through its jaws they can see into the roughly thirty-foot-square room beyond, whose walls are lined with mud-encrusted skulls. In the centre of the room is a stone sarcophagus, its lid carved with an image of a snakelike creature. Beyond the coffin is a pedestal bearing a crystal box, inside of which is a floating child-sized skull. The back wall of the room is riddled with small holes and tunnels.
Using the Sceptre of the Honored Voice, Dolan casts Detect Poison and Disease, but finds none. When he casts Detect Magic, he finds that the floating skull radiates transmutation magic. But when he casts Detect Evil and Good, he finds that there are thousands of undead within thirty feet of his location.
It looks like it would be possible to enter the room through the jaws of the skull. Dolan experimentally sends his Mage Hand into the room, but nothing happens.
They turn around and take the unexplored narrow passage to the north. After some thirty-five feet, it opens into a room thirty-five feet wide and thirty feet deep. Another stone sarcophagus rests in the room's centre, its lid carved with the image of a snarling monkey. Past the sarcophagus are three closed treasure chests on stone daises. The one on the left seems to be made of black onyx, the one in the centre of rusty iron that radiates warmth, and the one on the right of silver, glittering with frost and radiating cold. The walls of this tomb are devoid of markings. The chests look fastened to the floor, and show no obvious keyholes. When Dolan uses the Sceptre of the Honored Voice, only the sarcophagus detects as magic.