[DnD] Tomb of Horrors (GFF D&D Adventure X)

Science had never really been my strong point but I had a look on the cluttered desk for any clue as to what the room's previous occupants had been trying to achieve here.

Given the corpse was pretty fresh and given that we hadn't passed anyone dripping in gore on our way in here, it seemed logical that there was another door forward around here somewhere. I had a look for it.

Search the desk for clues and the room for secret doors, other than the one we used to get in here.

FELIPE NO

Science is, indeed, not Beefi's strong suit. All the broken glassware and spilled chemicals are very fascinating in the abstract, but Beefi hasn't the faintest idea what any of them were for.

Secret doors, if any, continue to be infuriatingly non-obvious — save for the one hiding in the northwest corner of the room. Arguably one could stroll over to that and open it again, but it's hard to say what that might accomplish.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

I strolled over to the secret door we'd already found once and attempted to open it again.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Despite the evident fact that the recently-secret door was not in fact part of the wall it was cowering against, Beefi gives it a hearty shove anyway (ignoring the door's pitiful attempts to cower away). There is an odd sizzling sound as the door opens through a wall that was 100% solid a moment ago; the stone in the way is just being vaporized.

The room beyond is in an even worse state than the laboratory in which the Five currently stand. Splintered and shattered furniture is strewn over the entire floor, save a bilious green rug in the center of the room and a small clearing which the door swept aside in opening. Every inch of the room looks damp and clammy; even the bare stone floors are sporting an impressive crop of green mold. Five tapestries hang on the walls, depicting quiescent scenes of undersea fauna; despite the damp, these seem to be in pristine condition.

The secret-door-thing whimpers.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

If I was going to put a pit trap in a dungeon, I'd probably hide it under a green rug. I edged into the new room, grabbed the edge of the rug and pulled it aside to see what was underneath. I then turned my attention to the curiously un-rotted tapestries, examining them more closely and looking behind them.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

1 Die Roll Cousteau'n it up

Having no luck discerning anything of value from the dwarven tabletop game, Garold decides to wander into the newly discovered northern room. Upon seeing the tapestries he attempts to recall anything significant about the species of underwater life they depict.

Nature Check

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

I kept myself near the cow's side, glancing down at Murray.

"Balls. I thought we were done. It was time to get drunk and angry at inappropriate people for inappropriate reasons."

I had never been especially good with magic. Mechanical traps and the like, I was a master, but I was never good with magic. It made me curious, too, which was a bad combination. Very few things end with BZAAAAAP, yum. It's usually BZAAAAAP ow. Or BZAAAAAP dead. We lose more halflings that way, my mom used to say while woefully shaking her head. But she picked fistfights with Minotaurs, so what the fuck did she know.

"Right then, mates. This place looks like it is full of sea debris, and the tapestries are all underwater. Just so we're clear, if I fucking drown here, I will come back and haunt any survivors."

I was speaking idiomatically.

1 Dice Roll *5 DEX checks

Beefi rolls up the green carpet, revealing what looks to be a drainage grating hidden beneath. The same green mold infests the walls of the pit beneath. The pit below is only 15 feet deep or so, and has the same look of being sort of damp without actually containing standing water. Meanwhile, Garold examines the tapestries more carefully. None of the creatures depicted are particularly obscure.

On the west wall, a small basking shark lies dead in a shallow tide pool. A pair of hooved legs are immersed in the pool as well, but the angle of the image makes it hard to say what manner of creature the legs belong to.

Along the north wall are three scenes involving a kraken, possibly related: Garold has never encountered a kraken personally, so he's not sure if the same kraken appears in all three tapestries or they all more or less look the same. On the left, a kraken seems to be holding court with a clan of kuo-toa, or sea devils; they're presenting it with a group of sea elves in chains. In the center tapestry, a kraken lurks in the darkness beneath a ship's hull. In the third tapestry, a bruised and battered kraken broods in an undersea cavern; the broken bodies of a dozen or so kuo-toa litter the cave floor.

On the east wall there's a lovely picture of some dolphins providing an unconscious (and unaccountably nude) dwarf with an escort to the surface. Well, mostly lovely. There are some parts of the tapestry Garold could do without. Very small parts.

Beefi glances behind each of the tapestries in turn, only for them all to melt into heaps of foul-smelling orange sludge. The slimes, unaccountably, do not leap to the attack; they seem weak and listless, undulating pathetically on the floor.

"THAT'S what I was forgetting!" Murray suddenly remarks. "Feed the slimes! And that explains why there were so many extra rats in the rat pit, too! Damn, I'd forget my own head if it wasn't atta—" Murray cuts himself off mid-sentence.

On the upside, the dissolution of the tapestries has revealed an exit to the north; a narrow tunnel of rough-hewn rock about 60 feet long, then making a sharp turn to the east. The accessibility of said tunnel, however, is in doubt; the ex-tapestry that was blocking it off is still doing so now that it's resumed its natural shape. Weak, yes, but even a dead slime would be unpleasant to wade through.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

As I examined the tapestries, they turned to sludge in my hands. I really hoped that they hadn't been valuable and added their destruction to my ever-growing list of things I needed to apologise for should we ever find whoever it was who owned this tomb.

I'm sure someone had told me once that the best way to clear acidic slime out your path was to burn it off but I was loathe to waste my only source of light by throwing it at a slime.

I remembered however that there were three large cooking fires in the other room and an abundance of firewood. I returned to the first room and gathered up as much flammable debris as I could and threw it in the direction of the slime that was blocking our path. I then wrapped a rag around a plank and took a light from the nearest cooking fire before tossing the brand into my impromptu bonfire, thinking as I did that it was really lucky that these weren't sentient creatures or else this would be a pretty unkind thing to do.

FELIPE NO

Happy to see the cowman getting into the spirit of things Slim helps out by throwing one of his pints of oil into the fire.

Can't have too much of a good thing can we my delicious friend?

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Garold retreated to the doorway to the southern room. He was fairly certain burning acidic slime goo would produce a cloud of acidic fumes. Even if it didn't, he was quite sure it would smell really bad. Either way he wanted access to relatively fresh air if he needed it.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Uxig's enthusiastically splashed oil is enough to make the fire spread to the rest of alarmingly-flammable slimes — and then the heaps of shattered furniture underfoot. The four of them flee the room to escape incineration. After the smoke clears, nothing is left within save scorch marks on the floor and a refreshing citrus scent.

Also, a small pile of gems and gold that was exposed by the incineration of the debris.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

The acid puddles suitably cleared, I picked my way across the smouldering room and peered into the new corridor. I had a nagging feeling that we'd probably missed something in the largely unexplored science room but whatever it was, it'd probably just be some trinket one of the lads would steal. What interested me was finding the liche, persuading him to stop raising an army of the undead and getting back to tracking down whoever murdered my parents.

I ventured into the tunnel, trusting in the others to cover my back should something nasty jump out at me.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

On the off chance that the tunnel is yet another dead end trap Slim checks to see how securely the drain grate is attached.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Well, more creepy dark tunnels to go down. Why couldn't tombs be a little more cheery? It would certainly help their reputation.

Garold lights his second sunrod and follows the cowman.

I was speaking idiomatically.

I shrugged as the others walked past, quickly pocketing the gems and gold before heading after Beefi and the others. I kept my eyes swinging around the hall to be sure I would at least -see- the giant slime about to drop on my head.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

A few sharp tugs on the grate produce some gratifying groans from the metal — it may be possible to pry it free. But Slim's darkvision easily allows him to see clear to the bottom of the pit; there doesn't look to be anything worth worrying about down there unless he really needs to resupply on dead fish.

Sam picks up 2,500 gold in treasure for himself since no one else much cares!

The foursome squeeze down the dark passageway, stumbling at last into a wider chamber. To the south, the angular corridors of the tomb are harshly interrupted by a natural cave. The cavern is utterly clotted with silvery mists — even with the sunrod, it is difficult to see much in the way of detail. A ring of heavy stones lies far within, and beyond that the light penetrates no further.

To the east, the chamber bends northward.

FELIPE NO

Satisfied that he could reach a resupply of fish at any moment Slim catches up to the group and looks around the northern corner.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Turning the corner, Slim encounters an unusual sight indeed. 20 feet ahead, the floor rises abruptly to a jagged ledge perhaps three feet above the rest of the floor. An enormous padlock, easily twice the size of Slim's entire body, sits atop the center of the ledge. Three extremely heavy chains secure the padlock to the surrounding walls.

A proportionally large keyhole is evident in the face of the padlock.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I was nearly vibrating with glee at the chance to explore a misty cave, and as I bounded around the corner, I nearly salivated at the sight of a giant lock. A lock I could pick using me. I was frozen with the sheer overwhelming joy of choice. One was almost certain death in a cave. The other was almost certain death in a lock.

"HEY. COW. Do you want to pick a giant death lock or get lost in an endless death fog? Because I'm not gonna lie. I sort of want to do both."

How ya doing, buddy?

1 Die Roll chains n' walls

Garold stared into the mist. "Well... that's creepy." Then he rounded the corner to see what the kobold and halfling were so excited about. "...and that's just... weird."

He had to admit though, he did kinda want to see what would happen when the lock was picked. Normally picking a lock opens something, but in this case the chains just went to the walls. Almost as if picking this lock would instead grant you the option to take the lock itself. Unless of course the walls were actually being held in place by the chains. Then things could get ugly.

Garold moved forward to get a better look at the end of the tunnel, but stayed south of the 3-foot ledge.

Perception check

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

I had never been any good at picking locks and frankly, I'd given up on the idea at a very young age. Sam was probably very good at it but given the riddle had specifically talked about keys and locks, I figured that looking for the keys might result in significantly less injury by nasty traps.

"Well dear boy", I replied to the Halfling "I do love exploring caves and the mist can only make it more exciting, I vote for spelunking"

Exploring caves was something I was good at and so as not to get lost in the mist, I started by following the wall, probing ahead with my toes so as not to fall in any big holes.

Work my way round the edge of the cave carefully until I find something or die horribly.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Garold approaches the giant lock more closely, attempting to determine its function. It's only then that the the ledge jumps a few inches, straining at the heavy chains. The lock isn't there to hold the walls. It's there to hold the floor.

Carefully exploring the misty cavern, Beefi gets close enough to the circle of stones to see it more clearly. A young elven girl is standing inside the circle, only her head visible above the tops of the stones.

"Oh, good sir!", she deadpans, sounding as bored as she possibly can. "The evil lich has chained me to these rocks, that a monstrous dragon may devour me. I cannot hope to free myself! Hurry and untie me, that we may escape before the dragon returns!"

The elf girl stifles a yawn.

I was speaking idiomatically.

"WAIT!" I yelled after the cow. More torn now than ever. I'd never picked a floor lock. I mean, what even happens? You could use it as a trap for evil doers. They try to get the drop on you, and WHAM. Mouth full of FLOOR! However, I was concerned for my cow friend. So I finished my sentence. "It's a trick. Get an axe!"



What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Slim hearing his cue walks up next to Beefi.

Food for a monstrous dragon eh? Don't mind if I do.


Pint of oil molotov upside the "elf's" head


What?! I prefer mine well done.

FELIPE NO