Tomb of Annihilation: Episode 27
You can usually sense the desire of your players. My players were eager to reach the end of the adventure. They’d been in this big dungeon for a long time in the real world. Being in tune with your players’ desires can help you understand what’s important for the next encounter. If getting stuck in some puzzle would kill the momentum, then it can be beneficial to do some hand-waving and keep the pace going. You might lose some interesting encounters, but if those encounters wouldn’t be fun for the group anyway, then no harm was done.
The Party:
(Jon) Alathar, inhabited by Shagambi — Half-Elf Bard
(Terry) Harden, inhabited by Unkh— Dwarf Barbarian
(Matt) Hexton, inhabited by I’jin — Gnome Wizard
(Stacy) Torven, inhabited by Wongo — Lizardfolk Monk/Druid
The Path:
Tomb of the Nine Gods — Gears of Hate
“For lo, all the days of man are as a leaf that is fallen and as the grass that withereth.”
Marion Zimmer Bradley — The Mists of Avalon
Discovering a secret passageway that safely connected almost the whole tomb was a fortuitous boon. Before descending one level to the bottom of the staircase though, they decided to head back up and see if this secret passageway uncovered any hidden gems. Most levels didn’t, except for the second level.
On that level, the party exited the stairway to find a small hallway with two doors that they hadn’t seen before. One was loud with what sounded like mechanical machinery behind it, while the other was serene and silent. They opted to check the quiet room first.
Candles dimly illuminated a cluttered office. A skeletal songbird rasped at the group from a filthy cage in one corner. Anatomical drawings sketched in charcoal hung on the wall behind a writing desk. Seated in a chair was the shrivelled corpse of a humanoid wearing moldy robes and a bronze mask sculpted to look like a frowning visage. Around the figure’s neck hung a black, skull-shaped amulet. A number of severed hands crawled on the desk and floor around him.
What followed was a rather cordial conversation between the party and this man, who introduced himself as Withers. He relayed that he was the caretaker of the tomb, and quite a studious one at that. Alathar tried to peek at some of his journals, while Hexton did most of the talking. Withers and the party interrogated each other back and forth on what they were doing in the tomb. Torven and Alathar kept having to swat away the crawling claws, until finally they got fed up. Withers was prepared though, and all-out battle commenced. Withers was powerful, but he was just one man. He was soon overwhelmed, but managed to teleport to safety before he could succumb to his wounds.
The party checked his journals quickly, but didn’t stay for too long. Next they went to the loud room and opened the door. Old wooden benches and shelves along the walls of the chamber were covered with gears, chains, trap components, and cages filled with rats. Lit iron braziers hung by chains from the ceiling. Along the north wall, a stepped dais was set with a bulky contraption: an iron maiden of sorts, attached to a network of steaming pistons, tubes, and bubbling vats of blood. Five masked dwarves operated the contraption.
They’d encountered the tomb dwarves enough times to know how dangerous they were. A litany of spells poured out from the party to prevent the dwarves from working their machine, but it was of no use. The iron contraption shuddered as it opened, releasing a hissing cloud of steam. Through the rolling vapour, an armoured figure wearing a bucket helm stomped into view.
Harden sprinted to this huge new enemy and smashed it with his maul. The tomb guardian slammed him right back. Harden’s attacks weren’t doing much, as only adamantine weapons could hurt him. Hexton aimed a Fire Bolt spell at the guardian, and the construct let out a devastating scream. It panicked while it burned, but managed to regain its composure.
So it hates fire, Hexton realized. This gave him an idea. Alathar used a Command spell to get a tomb dwarf to duck behind the tomb guardian while Harden would grapple it in place. Finally, Hexton let out a gigantic Fireball that fried the tomb dwarf, and the tomb guardian resumed its panic. Hexton kept up the burning until all the enemies were down.
As they searched the workshop, they found that this tomb guardian had been made with the salvaged parts of a Company of the Yellow Banner member. Nearby, they found a strange lantern. The spirit of a moon elf was trapped inside. She spoke with Torven and Hexton, and found out that she had been slain 1,000 years ago. The Company of the Yellow Banner had travelled to the tomb to find the Eye of Zaltec, hoping its magic could bring her back to life. The spirit was weak, but wanted to help the party. The party took a long rest as Hexton spoke for much longer with her. He cast an Identify spell on the ghost lantern, and learned that if any member fell unconscious while close to it, the spirit would be able to magically wake them up. It sounded like a good idea to keep her close.
“Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, a potting shed, a wall where peaches ripen, than to burn like meteor and leave no dust.”
Virginia Woolf — Orlando: A Biography
Finally it was time to head down to the fifth level of the tomb. At the bottom of the staircase they could see strange pools of viscid grey slime. They avoided it and found a hallway where they were certain a secret door was, but couldn’t uncover it. Alas, they headed in the other direction and opened a door.
A dark underground lake opened up before the party, its ceiling festooned with chains and gears — some of which appeared to have dwarves dangling from them. A gigantic motionless stone cog rose from the water, with two matching cogs connected to it. Rusty metal conduits stretched from the cavern walls to the cogs. The water of the lake was slimy, with pinpricks of phosphorescent light twinkling in the murk.
This level was very different from the rest of the tomb. No longer a dungeon, it seemed like one gigantic puzzle piece. They discussed what to do as they stood on a stone dock connected to the door. Torven turned into a spider and crawled up high to get a better view of the surrounding area.
Ropes lashed a pair of rowboats to the dock post, and a rusty iron cage wallowed in the slime, held afloat by chain and winch. Phosphorescent crabs gathered at the bottom of the lake below the cage. Hexton and Alathar checked out the rowboats, noting that one was named Predator and the other Prey. Harden wanted to examine these crabs. He hopped into the cage as Alathar cranked the winch to send him down.
The creaking descent of the cage drew the attention of a nearby creature. G’lyh’rul, an aboleth who called these waters home, came to investigate. It was utterly insane, and had an equal chance of being in the mindset of a harmless child or an aggressive follower of a death god. Unfortunately, the dice determined that it was feeling aggressive.
It whipped out its tentacles at Alathar and Hexton, as they dove for safety. Harden, below the surface, managed to get the attention of the aboleth. It slashed him with its tail, and tried to enslave him under the its probing mind powers. Harden shook it off, and Hexton unleashed his most powerful spell, Disintegrate. A thin green ray sprung from his finger straight at the monster. This would have killed most creatures they’d come across, but the aboleth was immensely powerful. Alathar finally got to use his Ring of Water Walking and walked out onto the water. He cast Bestow Curse on the aboleth, and Harden continued attacking from his cage. They both endured painful tentacle swipes as they chipped away at its health.
Torven watched from above as Harden managed to grapple the aboleth, and the team finally slew the beast. Alathar winched Harden back up, a little worse for wear, but alive. The three members on the dock took care of their wounds, and Torven did some more exploring while he was in his spider form. He squeezed into a crevasse to get inside the gigantic gears. Each contained their own distinct room. He couldn’t discern their purpose, nor how to control them.
He scurried westward and found a small room attached to one of the giant gears. He spotted an iron lectern in the middle of the rusty, iron-plated room which was topped by a slanted control panel. He could see a gold lever, two dials in red and blue, and two buttons of the same colours. Wall engravings behind the control panel showed five different orientations of circles. Wongo urged Torven to smash the controls. Torven knew this was a bad idea, so compromised on just blindly switching all the controls on and off to see what happened. He spun the dials, pulled the levers, and smacked the buttons. Soon the gears were slowly re-orienting themselves into new configurations.
Harden, Hexton, and Alathar saw the gears grind, revealing an entrance into the westernmost gear’s room. They paddled their canoe up to it and climbed in. An acidic stench filled this pentagonal chamber, which had two exits. The walls were covered with riveted sheets of iron, and the pockmarked stone floor had a large puddle of grey slime in the middle of it. Friezes along each wall just beneath the ceiling depicted five black dragons. They surveyed the area, as the gears shifted once more, revealing new exits and entrances.
Torven was having a grand time shifting the gears and hitting buttons, seeing what would happen. As he hit the red button, a six-inch-thick wall of iron dropped from the doorway, sealing him inside. He shrugged, and went back to hitting buttons and pull the gold lever down. Slime began pouring into the room. He frantically began hitting every switch to make it stop, but was unable. With the door sealed, he was getting less and less space to work in. Nothing was stopping the flow of slime — soon he would drown in it. He began smashing the lever back into the up position. He heaved his body into it and broke the lever straight off the console, stopping the slime. It had filled nearly half the room. He crouched on the console to avoid its poisonous, slimy touch, and decided to wait for the door to unseal itself.
After an hour, the door unsealed, and the group was reunited. They saw a pathway that connected into the second gear, and then down into a hallway to the south. They went down it, revealing a hall choked with dust and cobwebs. Up ahead, flickering lights dimly illuminated a larger hall running perpendicular to this one. Where the two halls met, words had been scrawled on the ceiling in dried blood — “Awaken Napaka.” An allusion to the final Queen of Omu that Acererak had slain, noted Hexton.
Large puddles of grey slime were spread across the floor of the larger hallway, which was gently sloping downwards from west to east. Candles flickered on riveted sconces, casting dim light across a sequence of sculpted reliefs depicting humanoids with bestial heads kneeling before a black star. At the lower end of the hall, a thick purple drape hung wall to wall.
Harden stressed to the party to exercise caution, but Torven was eager to explore. He bounded ahead looking for secret doors, as Alathar and Hexton hardly stepped a foot into the hallway. As Harden yelled at Torven to be careful, Torven indicated he’d already found something. He traced his fingers against the wall, and bade Harden to come near. Hidden behind a bas-relief depicting a crocodile-headed humanoid holding up a trapezoidal chest, Torven pointed out that the chest’s keyhole was real. Torven didn’t know what key they had that they hadn’t used yet. But Harden did. They’d found it in Napaka’s tomb — a small jade key. Harden took it out, and it fit perfectly in the keyhole.
This revealed a crawlspace that Torven and Harden shuffled through. It led to a room housing a massive stone juggernaut. They ran back and the party regrouped outside the hall. Clearly this was one of Acererak’s deadly traps. They debated whether to tempt fate, or head back to the gears. As much as they wanted to live, they felt like they were clever enough to survive Acererak’s tricks. Torven went back into the hall and pushed aside the purple drapes. He revealed a six-foot-tall statue of a leering four-armed gargoyle standing against the back wall. One of its arms had broken off and laid on the floor in front of it, its hand curled into a tight fist. The other three arms had their clawed hands open in such a way as to suggest they were meant to hold something. Carved into the wall above the statue was a riddle.
Three I need
Then three more
Three more still
Opens the door
They discussed what to put into the gargoyles hands. The previous gargoyles needed coins. They tried that, to no effect. The hands seemed to imply something bigger. Alathar wondered if magical weapons were needed. Hexton offered gems as the solution. Torven only had a couple, so the group had to cough up more to test out the theory. As three gems were placed in the gargoyle’s hands, it closed its fists and crushed them to powder. Gems were correct, shouted Torven. The group begrudgingly gave up the rest of their gems. As the final one was placed, the broken off arm opened up to reveal a fist-sized ruby inside of it. It was the Eye of Zaltec, and looked absolutely magnificent. Torven plucked it from the gargoyle’s hand.
The gargoyle responded by magically opening its mouth and exhaling a cloud of soporific gas that filled the hall. Torven wheezed, and rolled a Constitution saving throw. He failed, and fell unconscious as the door at the other end opened up revealing the stone juggernaut on rollers. The construct filled the height and width of the hall and barrelled towards Torven at an alarming speed.
Everyone rolled initiative. Harden rolled highest and got to act first. He didn’t have time to think. He raced toward Torven and threw him over his shoulder. The poison spray hardly registered to his dwarven lungs. The juggernaut raced toward them. It was a standoff. Harden eyed the juggernaut. There was no way he could break it by force — it was too big. He could see an adamantine slat on the juggernaut which reminded him of the adamantine scepter he’d taken from Queen Napaka’s corpse. She’d also exhaled gas, and they’d used a jade key from her room. It was too much to be a coincidence.
He brandished the scepter, holding it in front of his body. He gripped it tightly as the juggernaut came close. He would either die with Torven or… the stone juggernaut collided with the scepter’s head. It magically crumbled to dust in an instant. Alathar and Hexton cheered loudly. They were alive. In the wreckage, they even found another skeleton key. They revived Torven and planned what to do next.
They could feel in their bones that they were closing in on Acererak. They had their fifth skeleton key too. It could only be a few more rooms until their ultimate date with destiny. Their morale was high as they trudged on through the deadly dungeon.
Previous: Episode 26
Next: Episode 28
