Session 47: A Bone Swarm and a Flooded Tomb

The party continues exploring the ruins of the old temple.

This write up is based on our Sunday, November 3, 2024 session and was written by our scribe Carl with a few additions from myself. Thanks to our mapper Jimmy for the screen shot.  Since we are scattered around the country, we use Discord for voice communications and the Roll20 online tabletop to connect with each other.

Continued from: Doppelgangers and the Old Temple Ruins

Location: Inside Tegel Manor

8 AM
We had dealt with the dopplegangers and were talking with Lenral, a kid we had found along with his dog, Chompers.

He was an orphan, who's family had mysteriously disappeared from their home on the edge of Tegel Village. He had been surviving by selling items he had found in the ruins on the old temple.

We started searching the piles of mostly decayed books. Their condition hadn't been helped by Lenral's emptying the bookcases on to the floor while looking for valuables. It hadn't occurred to him that the books themselves might be valuable.

Arkhelm cast detect magic and it revealed a magic spell book.

More searching found another book in fairly good condition. It was titled Yezud’s Book of Silken Sheets. The text included detailed renderings of various sensual arrangements, including the dreaded “Eight-Legged Embrace”. Reebo said it was worth about 250 GP to a collector, but he would be lucky to get 10% of that from Halaf Fec in Tegel Village.

Someone found a journal that has been damaged from fire, smoke, and time, several legible pages in the first part of the book reference the story of the Arch Priest Gornax and his failed attempts to use a magical artifact in his possession. The name of the artifact is never mentioned within the journal, although it is referenced often. The journal’s owner, a high priest of Tsathoggua, questions the arch priest’s loyalty to the order, instead supposing his greedy lust for individual power. Most of the middle of the book was destroyed, but the last entries in the journal theorized that the arch priest hid the artifact away before his death so that no other priest would be able to use it. The high priests suspected it was hidden somewhere under the temple.

Inside the back cover of one of the decaying books we found a map. Sorta looks like where we are wandering around, but maybe only a little bit.

 

Slow progress checking for secret doors kept us busy as we walked. Steadfast led the exploration ahead, room by room. Most had been thoroughly looted, but we found one unopened (but not for long). The lock was in surprisingly good condition for the area, and resisted Reebo for a while.

We did a cursory search and found some ink and parchment, but nothing of any real value.

Down a hall, we opened a door and saw a swirling wind lifting bones off the floor and forming them into an entity. It turns out a REALLY hard hitting entity. 

A tornado of bones beat the bejabbers out of Aefir - lucky hits, but SOLID hits. Super solid... of all the things we would NEVER expect to see, Aefir down on the ground unconscious was probably on the top of the list.

But finally that swirling bone windstorm went down under our blows and spells, and we got Aefir stabilized and then back up.  WOWZA.

That room, after we had one of our toughest fights, only had a lot of bones and shattered furniture.  Terror for toothpicks.

It was time to get back out of that place, time to wait out a day and rest up, recovering hit points and spell slots. The kid showed us the entry to another dungeon area before we left the clearing area. We would have to move some stones, and make the entry much more apparent to anyone else who comes near it, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

We decided to stay the night in town, and as we passed by the Temple of Frigga we stopped in and told them about the dopplegangers we killed. Their guise as we killed them was as priests, fully robed. We suggested they look in the ruins to see if their priests (turned out some were missing) had been killed.  Maybe they should check for dopplegangers in their temple too. This alarmed them greatly.

We purchased equipment to excavate the area we will need to dig out the entry to the part we have not explored, and allow us to dig into anything else that seems good.

Aefir's plate armor had finally been resized to fit Natalie, so that got taken care of too.

May 12th  9 AM
Heading back to the ruins the way we came, we saw another group, but they headed off over a hill. We thought they might be from the pirate base.

9:30 AM
Back in the clearing, we decided to finish off the side of the underground we had started before checking out the unexplored area.

This looked like it had been chambers for a high priest or other officer of the Frog God's cult. The room was in a shambles, not just from the ravages of moisture and time, but also from Lenral's searching. He had thrown books and scrolls to the side as he searched for gold and silver. Drawers have been emptied, the bed mattress has been opened up, and tapestries torn down to search for hidden areas in the walls.

We began to search the piles of books and scrolls and found that most of the written work referenced service to the frog-god; simple rituals, daily prayers, important calendar dates, and acolyte performance notes are found in hundreds of tomes and scrolls in the room. Much of the work however, had been ruined by time’s decaying hand.

Shadow found something interesting: The High Priest's Diary. It would require more reading than we wanted of do right now, so Shadow handed the book off to Paraselene with the idea that another cleric might make some sense of what was in it.

That, as it turned out, finished off the first side of the underground, and we went back up and prepared to excavate the entry to the other side. Not all of us are tiny enough to fit through the rocky blockage.

Once the blockage was cleared, it was fairly easy going down several flights of stairs.  At the bottom, there was some flooding and a bad smell. The smell was familiar to most of us, it reminded us of some exploding zombies we had encountered before.

Steadfast cast Walk on Water so we did not have to be exposed to whatever the water had in it. Something noxious for sure.

Some of the passages had collapsed, but shadow found an opening and we continued, turning north when we came to a t-intersection.

Beneddar spotted two zombies who seemed to be chanting.  They hadn't noticed us, so we got into position and attacked them at range.

It turns out that there were four zombies and a mummy. We eventually killed them all, despite some trouble with our crossbow mechanics and bowstrings. Being able to walk on the water instead of wading though it, gave us a speed advantage even better than we would have anyway against the slow-moving zombies, who had to slog through the water to get to us.

To our surprise, these zombies didn't explode when killed. With the alchemical smell in the water, we thought they would be like the ones that have been terrorizing the village. 

Continued in Session 48: The Mummys' Tomb