Will had to take a break from running. So I ran Against the Giants out of Tales From the Yawning Portal.
Holy shit. Ghost of Gygax, it's called box-text. It's okay to write it for a DM running your adventure. Plus, they just killed so many giants. It was satisfying. So being a glutton for punishment, and having players eager to see their characters die, I am running Tomb of Horrors out of that same book. So here are our
Tathora, half-elf cleric, being played by Kyla.
Remy, halfling monk, being played by Shannon.
Maveith, goliath fighter, being played by Calvin.
Glawen, human cleric/wizard, being played by Alec.
Ghesh, dragonborn sorcerer, being played Blake.
Pusheen, human druid, being played by Hillary.
Jornath, tiefling warlock, being played by Jeff.
Grom, human fighter, being played by Lazaro.
Yves, human rogue, being played by Will.
Tathora was
I decided to put the Tomb on the outskirts of the desert of Anauroch, linking Acererak to the long dead magical civilization of Netheril. So they came to a lonely, flat-stopped hill, covered by nothing but scrub and dry grass. Black rocks rested on the top. Investigating, they found a cliff of loosely packed sand and gravel under a stone overhang on the north side of the hill. Upon closer inspection Yves found someone scratched "Parzival and Art3mis 4 eva" into the hillside.
They dug through the loose dirt, finding three possible entry corridors: two relatively short ones, and longer, highly colorful one. Because players are players, they went into first the shorter one on the east side, triggering a trap in the form of a huge stone slab meant to seal them in. Maveith wedged it open with a crowbar. Then they went to the short one of the west side, using mage hand to try and open some false doors, triggering a collapsing ceiling trap. That one wouldn't have been fatal, but it would have hurt.
So they (finally!) went down the right path, a hallway covered in frescoes with mosaic tiling, mostly green with a narrow path of red winding through it. Some of the party avoided walking on the red path, others walked along it.
So, as I kinda forgot, Tathora found a tome of understanding at the end of Curse of Strahd. So she is now walking around with 22 Wisdom, and proficiency with Perception with a +5 proficiency bonus. She found all the pit traps. They're ten feet deep and lined with poisonous spikes. Although in 5th edition falling damage gives you a "grace height" of 10 feet, I decided to rescind that for this adventure. Gravity may have changed in new editions, but it now works different in this dungeon, dammit! (This will matter later)
And then there's Maveith. Maxed out Strength (in this edition, at 20), proficiency in Athletics and with a class feature that gives him advantage on Strength (athletics) checks. And the party has approximately all the pitons between them. So they were able to wedge those pit traps shut.
That done, walking along the red path reveals a poem written with all the skill of middle-school creative writing student (sorry Ghost of Gygax, you just aren't that good at poetry):
Acererak congratulates you on your powers of observation, so make of this whatever you wish, for you will be mine in the end no matter what!
Go back to the tormentor or through the arch, and the second great hall you'll discover.
Shun green if you can, but night's good color is for those of great valor.
If shades of red stand for blood, the wise will not need sacrifice aught but a loop of magical metal-you're well along your march.
Two pits along the way will be found to lead to a fortuitous fall, so check the wall.
These keys and those are most important of all, and beware of trembling hands and what will maul.
If you find the false you find the true, and into the columned hall you'll come, and there the throne that's key and keyed.
The iron men of visage grim do more than meets the viewer's eye.
You've left and left and found my tomb, and now your souls will die.
Toward the entrance of this hall, there is a fresco of jackal-headed humanoids holding a bronze chest coming out of the wall. Yves fooled around with it, finding a catch to open it with an obvious poison needle trap. He had a caster use mage hand to press the catch, opening the bottom of the chest. He found it empty, except for a lever, which he left alone. Dang it!
They followed the red path to the arch, cloudy and with three stones along it lighting yellow (left base stone), orange (right base stone), and blue (keystone) in that order. They messed around with the stones, but had no apparent effect. They left the arch alone. Dang it!
The red path also forked, leading a green mosaic of a leering green devil face, it's mouth gaping. Blake started messing around with it, sending a mage hand into the mouth, where it vanished. Then the others had to be buzzkills and told him to leave it alone. Blake actually listened. Dang it!
They purposefully triggered a pit trap, and found a hidden door at the bottom of one, but found it was one-way, so they re-wedged it.
Since no one likes it when things stall, I had Kyla roll a "get a clue" check for Tathora, leading them back to a fresco of a monstrous creature trapped behind an iron prison door. They started breaking away the stucco, finding a door.
It lead to a room with an apparent statue of a four-armed gargoyle. It came to life an attacked. The poor thing stood no chance. It was dead in less than a round. Didn't even get to attack and do damage. Surprisingly enough, Kyla got a little murder-hoboin' on and asked if it had anything: it did! a color studded with ovular 100gp blue quartz gems and a hidden compartment with a small scrap of parchment with gibberish written on it. A casting of comprehend language on it revealed it to read "Look low and high for gold, and on your way you'll wend. -A"
One of the exits from that room lead through a series of 10-ft by 10-ft chambers that terminated at a false door.
The other exit lead to an apparently empty 10-ft by 10-ft room. Until Tathora looked in and found a secret door. This lead to a series of secret doors in chambers where bolts were constantly raining down on the group like the diseased fever dreams of a Nintendo-era platform game designer. But Tathora, with help from Maveith and Remy, eventually found all of the secret doors, each of which needed to be opened in a different fashion. The original intent of this was for the players end up doing this forever while the bolts chipped away at their hit points. Since most of the party were jerks, and Tathora was the one mostly getting chipped, I let her figure out pretty quickly how to open all the doors.
Except for the last one. It was a door with seven studs. Upon reaching it, Tathora called the rest over for help. Only Maveith responded. Calvin and Kyla are not allowed to play games with these kinds of puzzles. Calvin just had them press all the studs at once, opening the door. Then the rest of the party followed, Yves even doing a Megaman slide to try and avoid the bolts. They found another hallway lined with color frescoes, this time of figures holding orbs of various colors. The door closed behind them, being a one-way passage, but I reminded them they could disintegrate it or open it with knock.
I drew up the hall, indicating the color of the orbs along the walls, because I wasn't going to describe it 50 times. Anyways, any game designers wanting to make a retroclone of something like Zork or Myst, have Kyla playtest that thing. She will show you how laughably dumb your puzzles are.
She remembered the scrap of paper she just found, and examined an orb colored gold being held high up, discovering a crawlspace beyond it, which she went through. There she found another four-armed gargoyle statue, but one of it's arms was on the floor. After closely examining the other hands, she found that they had indents in them perfectly sized for those quartz gems she just found. She put one in, and the hand animated, crushing it into dust. No one objected when she did it with the rest of those things, probably remembering how she solved the dancing puzzle in Curse of Strahd. Once all 10 were crushed, a magic mouth on the gargoyle added more bad poetry: "Your sacrifice was not in vain. Look to the fourth to find your gain." So Kyla found a gem of seeing in the hand of the broken fourth arm, just covered in a substance rendering it invisible.
While she did that, the party found some more crawl spaces behind a black orb and a red orb. They also found another cloudy arch. This time the stones lit up in colors of olive, citron, and russet. Why use $5 color words when $125 ones are available. Once again, they left the arch alone. Dang it!
Kyla, correctly, went through the black crawlspace, arriving in a chapel. Alec went through the red. Glawen fell through the foor, taking a little falling damage and finding three chests: gold, silver, and wood. Alec fell for the schmuck bait and used mage hand to open the wooden chest, summoning a giant skeleton into the room. He had to fight it by himself for a round before Shannon, being a team players, had Remy show up and help. The rest of the team were hard on her heels, but by then the giant was dead. It was vulnerable to bludgeoning damage, something monks are good at dealing with fists.
Alec did not learn his lesson, and opened the other two chests. The silver one only held a crystal box containing a ring of protection. The gold one just had a swarm of poisonous snakes. The swarm didn't last long, getting, well, swarmed by the rest of the party. But getting the box out of the silver chest did trigger a dart trap.
Pressing on in the chapel, they found the pews were hinged, and some were trapped. Yves disabled that trap. They avoided the altar and yet another cloudy archway. Dang it!
They did find a section of wall containing a slot big enough for a magic ring. Ghesh put in his ring of fire resistance. Blake hoped he could retrieve the ring after using it for this. It was cute. The ring is gone. This opened a hidden door leading deeper in. They followed some steps down to another corridor. For some reason, Glawen lead the way and fell into a pit trap. Tathora gave him a heal, and they pressed on. They shimmed that pit trap and found another.
Then fricking Kyla remembered a line from the poem. They found a third pit trap, and found a secret door on one of it's walls. Thinking smart, Glawen sent an arcane eye with true seeing on it down that passage, finding a secret door. Pusheen had to use a dispel magic to open the door.
They found a room filled with stuff for preparing mummies. Yves examined the unguents and herbs, but found nothing of value. After learning a vat contained an acid, Ghesh decided to drink some. He learned that resistance is not the same as immunity. Then Jornath poked at another vat containing an opaque liquid that turned out to be an ochre jelly. Once again, this fight was very one-sided, and the jelly died. But there was half of a magic key in there. We broke for the night. They know there is something magical at the bottom of the acid vat. Who will brave putting an arm inside to grab the magic item within? Find out next time.
No comments:
Post a Comment