We ended up with another delay and had the session this last weekend instead of the week preceding. I was starting to wonder if there was a real conspiracy against my players showing up. The party made its way to the ziggurat and overcame its challenges with ease. The multiweek hiatus gave the players so much time to prepare, they repeatedly surprised me with tricks they had brought along to handle any situation.
The constables made the journey through the bayou without any difficulty. The offering to the Voice of Rot warded off trouble from wild animals, and Irony's ritual to ward off vermin made the journey much more tolerable.
GM: | I lowered the endurance DC to 10 since the Banish Vermin ritual protected them from any bloodsucking parasites native to the area. | |
Upon reaching the ziggurat, the party searched the base camp outside and found it had been ransacked already (likely by the mysterious group the townsfolk had spoken of). With no obvious signs of trauma, they performed a brief autopsy on one of the corpses and found it to be riddled with tumors and strange growths. While the autopsy was underway, Irony performed a Speak With Dead ritual on an other corpse. Unfortunately, this person had not witnessed what killed them but was able to provide a brief description of the looters that came later.
Inside the temple, the constables were already becoming keenly aware of the ziggurat's ability to warp perception (or perhaps space and time itself given the connection to Apet). Finding two more corpses inside, Irony lacked enough components for another Speak With Dead ritual and settled for a Last Sight Vision ritual on the dead halfling. This time the constables were in luck. The halfling's last moments revealed a ritual disrupted by a startled worker and the desperate attempt to flee of the halfling and her human friend.
[sblock=Last Sight Vision]The halfling and human fled from the ritual chamber using the easternmost passages. Irony quickly deduced that the concentric circle patterns they passed must be very important, because even in fleeing for their lives, they stopped to interact with them in some way (flowers in the large room and using their torch in the halls). The vision also revealed the spear traps as the human rolled to avoid them and the halfling simply ran under them.[/sblock]
GM: | Since the players were now looking specifically for those symbols, I lowered the DC to spot them. The party's combined religion checks also let them figure out each of the symbols pretty easily. | |
The constables decided to follow the path of the unfortunate archaeologists. The vision had given them invaluable insight into avoiding the traps left by the Ancients. When the group reached the large chamber in the vision, they found it infested with monsters. The constables were so intent on looking for traps, they were slow to react and the monsters struck while they were still in the hallway. The creatures were able to land a few blows before they themselves triggered the rooms trap sealing them inside and cutting the constables off from their intended travel path.
GM: | None of the constables acted before the monsters in this encounter, so the monsters tripped the trap before any PC actually entered the room. I could have had the monsters pull some of the PCs into the room first, but that would have trapped half the party inside while the other half looked on helplessly. While that would have been pretty dramatic, I don't think it would have been very fun for the people stuck outside the room. I settled for forcing the players to choose a new path through the temple. | |
The constables came upon a hallway marked with a symbol denoting Urim. Kirk sprinkled some nearby pebbles on the symbol and tentatively stepped into the hallway. After nearly being concussed, Kirk quickly retreated back to the group. Irony and Rai then spent several minutes examining the magic of the trap and comparing it to what they learned from the halfling's vision to learn they needed a very heavy stone to disable the trap. Kirk went back to the nearby roughly excavated tunnel and used the pick he brought to obtain just such a stone.
GM: | I wanted to reward the PCs for being so prepared and their clever use of divination rituals, so I allowed them to figure out what the disarming mechanic for a trap was with a DC 30 arcana check. The cost of obviating the danger was time though (each check took several minutes and sometimes they had to make multiple checks). I did do a double take when Kirk said he had brought a mining pick though. They really had thought of everything. | |
The constables made their way through the ziggurat at a painstakingly slow pace. The Avilona trap gave them pause since they didn't have a thin reed, but Bellicose's smoking habit came to the rescue and they used his pipe. The final chamber gave them pause when they saw the golden tablet still in place. The vision had clearly shown it moved, and the constables were sure the looters that came later had taken it. In a burst of inspiration, Rai moved the welcome mat revealing the sigil of Nem. After some time of studying it, they discovered they would need an orc skull and immediately thought back to the mummies at the entrance.
GM: | I was a tad disappointed Rai thought to move the rug. I had hoped they would get to see the final trap in all its glory, but I wasn't going to punish them for being clever. | |
The constables were faced with a mild dilemma; the time spent studying the traps meant that all the traps behind them would have reset and they no longer had access to a large rock for the crushing hallway. They ruled out following the path of the dead archaeologists since that path was still infested with monsters, and they weren't willing to risk the pit trap without access to flowers. The group decided to brave the third and final path through the ziggurat. In the chamber pillaged of all its artifacts, they left a cup of water on the sigil of Mavisha after studying it (they didn't have a bowl) and entered the map room.
The officers quickly realized what the map device did and made note of the location indicated off the coast of Ber. Irony was also suitably infuriated after studying the sigil on the wall and realized the looters had made off with the means of remotely disabling all the traps in the temple.
The rainbow room gave the team pause. They could clearly see the monsters on the other side of the veils and were unsure what would happen if they touched the white orb before them. After discussing for a time, Bellicose lost patience and touched the orb himself. He was rewarded with a vision of the past, and the trap vanquished the monsters for them. Bellicose relayed the information about the psychic monsters to the rest of the constables, and they hurried back to the entrance chamber where Kirk brandished a hacksaw to quickly part one of the mummies from its head.
GM: | I was really surprised when Kirk said he had a hacksaw and demanded to see his character sheet. The party inventory looked like a hardware store, but all of the items were mundane and easy to requisition. The next time we have such a long downtime between sessions, I'm going to have to cook up extra challenges to keep their prep from completely overpowering the content. | |
The constables went back through the rainbow room to reach the final chamber. After disabling the trap, they discovered the slab was a fake and decided to see what was behind it. Bellicose threw a lit sunrod into the void to illuminate it. The constables retrieved the body within and were repulsed to find it missing its face. Irony theorized that the temple was some kind of ancient prison since there was nothing behind the gate (except the monsters that had already left). The constables made a rubbing of the false seal and decided to leave.
Upon exiting the temple, The constables were confronted by the Voice of Rot itself. The Voice revealed that one of the entities released from the seal was intelligent and demanded they hunt it down. The constables pushed themselves following the trail through the swamp all night. After it lead them straight back to Agate, they decided to rest at the inn and continue the next day. Before they had settled for sleep, they were contacted by Delft using the scroll of sending they had left behind.
"I need you back here now! How many words do I get with this thing again? SHOOT! I'll fill you in when you get back."
GM: | The party had circumvented all the traps, but they payed for it in time. All the PCs have stage one Distant Madness except Doran who already has stage 3 (he has the lowest will save and insight check). They'll have to figure out how to deal with that in the next session. I used the sending from Delft to leave the session with a sort of amusing cliffhanger. They know something bad is waiting for them back home. | |
Oops, I forgot to mention the visions each constable had in the temple. Kirk and Bellicose shared a vision since they had a common backstory element of the Yerasol Wars.
[sblock=Irony]Irony had a vision of a bustling city of Eladrin. When a cloud passes before the sun, the scene is plunged into darkness, and when the light returns, the city was empty and looked as though it had been abandoned for centuries.[/sblock]
[sblock=Bellicose & Kirk]The war vets had a vision that they were back on the Yerasol islands fighting during the war, but the ground cracked and buckled during the middle of the fight. Shadowy monsters spilled forth from the cracks and began killing everyone, Danoran and Risuri alike.[/sblock]
[sblock=Doran]Doran saw his mother dancing through the halls of the ziggurat with a man masked by shadows[/sblock]
[sblock=Rai]Rai had a vision of himself standing on a mountainside overlooking a city he didn't recognize. The mountain erupted in flame and ash. The pyroclastic flow racing towards the city below resolved itself into a flaming dragon that laid waste to the helpless metropolis[/sblock]