Gameplay Date 10-07-07
Players present: Mordek, Taneus, Brynn
Searching the Tomb for the Tome
The secret door turned out to be a block that pushed inward 5 feet and revealed a small hallway. The floor of the hallway slanted downward as we followed it and we came across a locked door on our left after about 15 feet. Ahead though, we can see a cross corridor and decide to take a look before taking a crack at the locked door. As we neared the intersection, the spider webs were a bit thicker than in the rest of the hallway. Looking left, right and forward revealed even more webbing, along with several webbed corpses and various desiccated remains littered all over the place. Loud clicking noises began to emanate from all around us and suddenly half a dozen, watermelon sized spiders started coming after us. I started using my hammer to pound 'em flat while Brynn was using her quarterstaff to do the same. Just as we finished squishing the last of them pesky bugs, their momma showed up at the far end of the left hand passageway. She was BIG and she was not happy!! Stepping in front of the others, I managed to quickly pull out a flask of oil, threw it at her and was relieved to see it smash open, coating her in oil. Taneus took quick advantage of what I had done and sent a blast of fire over my head and down the hallway at the big spider, setting it and the nearby webbing ablaze, screeching in pain and rage, but not killing it. It began charging at us, and I was able to dive into one of the other cross corridors. Taneus & Brynn weren't as close to the intersection and had no where to go but backwards into unexplored territory. Momma spider continued her charge straight on past me as I was getting back to my feet, and began attacking Brynn & Taneus. While they kept it's attention focused on them, I came up right behind it's burning butt and buried my hammer into its backside, dropping it to the ground where the legs continued to give off a few more twitches before stopping completely.
Looking back in the direction it had come from, there is a freshly web-wrapped body lying in the passage. Going over to check, I recognized Ragnat, the dwarf I had spoken with during our "prayer meeting." He's alive, but barely... probably from the spider's paralytic venom. We got him free of the webs holding him and gave him a few draugh leaves to help with his injuries. Then we checked out where momma had come from. The left hand passage opened right out onto the cliff face with the sea below us. So... this is where the workers have been disappearing to! Snatched up by a huge spider and brought back to it's cave to feed her little ones. Well, hopefully Ragnat will be the last worker to go missing, though the possibility of more big spiders lurking about is still there. Going back over to the dead spider, I borrowed a metal flask from Taneus and started collecting some of it's venom. Never know when you might need something like that.
Satisfied that we weren't going to be set upon by anything else, for a while at least, we returned to that locked door we had passed. We told Ragnat to continue on up this hallway and he'd come out below Helgar's Mausoleum. Once he had gone, I began using my thieves tools to pick the lock. But when I opened the door and took my first step inside, the floor crumbled out from under me. Fortunately, I was able to catch myself on the door frame before I fell into the spiked pit below. Probing the floor around the hole using Brynn's quarterstaff, we didn't reveal any more pit traps, so we made our way cautiously around the hole and to the far side of the room where there were two chests. They didn't appear to be trapped and when we opened them up, we discovered a whole lot of copper coins. But there was also a copper medallion with an image of a hummingbird carved into it. Taneus grabbed it to examine it, saying that it was giving off an aura of magic. We didn't find anything else in this room, so we made our way back to the 4-way intersection and tried going straight, but the hallway ended in a dead end full of spider dinner remnants. We headed down the right hand passage and pretty soon it made a turn to the left which opened up onto a 30' x 30' room.
We were on a ledge, the ceiling in here was 20' above us, while the floor of the room was 50' below us and covered in a yellowish mold. On the far side of the room was a raised platform about 10' higher than we were, with what looked like an altar and a sarcophagus upon it. Between us were rows and rows of wooden posts or columns spaced evenly about 4' apart from each other. The posts had flat tops about the size of a dinner plate. The row closest to our end was even with the height of our ledge, and each row farther away from us gained a little in height to form a precarious stairway up to the altar's platform. This was gonna be one hell of a balancing act, made even worse by the look of the rotting wood the pillars had become over the years. We dropped a small stone to the floor below, and the mold burst into a cloud of spores that covered about 10' in all directions... still well below us though, but not something we wanted to mess with. As we stood there, an idea sparked in my head, and I made my way back to the last room and used my tools to take the door off of it's hinges, leaving the 2 elves to discuss ways across the room. Hauling the door back to the ledge, I started taking the door apart into the planks it was made of. The elves were giving me strange looks as I laid one plank from our ledge out onto one of the nearest pillar. Grabbing another plank, I laid down on the ground and slid out onto the first one so that I could lay another plank from the first column to the second, saying to the others that I was distributing the weight across several posts. Taneus handed me a third plank as I continued to slide forward, but when I eased the far end of the 3rd plank out onto the next column in line, the column crumbled from rot and came crashing down to the floor below, setting off another cloud of spores. Ok... so maybe this wasn't the best idea!
Taneus had me crawl back to the ledge saying he had another idea. He had that copper medallion in hand and was giving it to Brynn, saying something about that it had been enchanted with "luck" and that she, as the lightest of the three of us, would probably benefit the most from it given the situation. I think Brynn was just as skeptical as I was, but she put the medallion around her neck and took a tentative step out onto the first pillar. It held, so she followed the outer edge of the room, looking for handholds along the walls by which to further lessen the pressure upon each column. Using a slow and steady pace, Brynn finally came to the platform on the far side of the room, and began telling us what she could see. She pushed open the lid of the sarcophagus and found the remains of a body buried along with a book... The Tome of Helgar? Stowing the book in her pack, Brynn retraced her steps until she was back on the ledge with us. Then we all gathered around to take a look at the book. It's written in a language I'm not familiar with. Taneus can't read it either, but he thinks it might be written in Celestial. We began making our way back above ground, taking the book with us. The priests were still there, waiting for us, as we climbed back up the rope and into the mausoleum. Taneus showed them the book, asking if either of them knew the Celestial language. They took a look. They admitted that neither of them could read the book, but there was a preface to it in a language that they were able to read. It stated that the book had to be read while within the High Temple in order to even out the religions in Nerom. The said that perhaps one of the priests of Pelor knew the Celestial language, then they mentioned a few by name that they thought might be able to help us. Odias (though apparently he had gone missing a while back), Agin, or Gohla, the current HIgh Priest of Pelor.
To be continued...
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