“If you don’t like snakes, replace them with goats.”
- from page 1 of Tomb of the Serpent Kings, by Skerples
Previous Session: Into the Tumulheights
Evening on the 17th of Iggwyld, in the Fading of Spring
Our Troupe today features ...
Glimmering-of-Sun’s-Turning-Tide, the bird-footed elf. Abandoned the eternal realms in favor of exploring Dolmenwood and beyond, relishing the flow of time and entropy. Has a few spell tomes of divination and discernment, of varying reliability.
Gerund, the white-furred longhorn goman. Grew up at an orphanage outside Castle Brackenwold, and uses his goal of mapping the world (yes, the whole thing) to search for answers about his lost past. Can bend the wills of the weak-minded.
Portobello Toadstool, the red-capped gnome. Helps those in need across the land, alongside his dependable bullfrog Funderburker. Carries a sturdy fishing rod and line. Gnomes in this world are 1 foot tall, making them very good at evading the big folk.
Yegor, the bespectacled ratling. The sole survivor of his home warren’s tragic - and quite literal - downfall, which spurred him to seek out the power to save other ratlings from such calamitous fates. Uses a mystic eye spell tome for scouting.
(This is an open-table game, so players will drop in and out from session to session. We can usually explain it away in the moment, but for truly jarring absences I wrote this random table, which hasn’t helped at all.)
The four companions crept into the crypt. In this chamber - by far the largest one yet - the walls bore mosaics and frescoes of ancient goman lords at the height of their power. Against the North wall were three large coffins of gilded stone, and Gerund’s lantern revealed a dark passage to the South.
The orphaned longhorn hardly had time to take in the scene, though, before the grating of stone jolted everyone’s nerves. One coffin’s lid was shoved open from within, followed by a second, and their occupants emerged; two skeletal gomans, each with long twisting horns, and red flame sparking within their eye sockets. They both gave throatless screams and charged.
Everyone stood their ground and fought for their lives. Glimmering and Yegor were closest, and immediately engaged in a panicked melee with the undead. Neither Yegor’s nor Glimmering’s blades were effective against bone. Glimmering was gored by one skeleton’s horns, and hit back with their brass sword’s pommel. Yegor got knocked down and badly trampled by the other skeleton, but switched to his hammer (which wasn’t meant for this sort of ruckus) and bashed at his foe’s shins.
Gerund tried using his inherited powers with a commanding voice, but the mindless monsters were unfazed. As for Portobello, he reasoned that his slingstones would be of little help, so instead he cast his fishing rod’s line into the fray and managed to perfectly ensnare the legs of Glimmering’s assailant, which toppled to the floor when it next tried to lunge. The same stunt failed to work on the other skeleton. But with a few more well-placed pommel strikes and hammer blows, the skeletons were returned to proper death, leaving our tomb raiders winded and wounded. Glimmering’s gut was bleeding badly, and the other three volunteered torn bits of clothing as makeshift bandages. Yegor was bruised and battered, too, and so was his poor hammer; but the party was safe again, for the moment. The third, central coffin remained undisturbed.
Despite their wounds, they all agreed to press on through the Southern passageway. It led to the source of the humidity; a domed chamber eroded by water. The lantern revealed a figure sitting cross-legged on a pedestal, and everyone prepared for danger - until they saw it for what it was, a simple statue. But a sinister one. The statue’s head was a bulbous monstrosity, a giant egg bearing many lidded eyes, with the central eye peeled open in a piercing stare. The body was carved to be emaciated and deformed. On the pedestal were runes of Ancient Caprice that Gerund was able to roughly translate:
JALE GOD, DANCER IN DARKNESS
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| Illustration by Paul Gallagher |
At the base of this dark shrine, water had split the stonework over many years to reveal a space beneath the statue, a passage that was once secret. It seemed to lead down into a deeper hallway. Curiosity was running wild, and Gerund dropped down first, reaching back up to help each of his companions descend further into the tomb. From beneath they could see the ruined mechanism that would have once allowed the statue to trundle aside and open the way.
Everybody noticed that the stonework down here was much better than up above, with walls carved evenly and floors free of gravel. Alcoves along the hallway held six statues of goman warriors that seemed to glare imperiously at our troupe as they passed.
You know how sometimes, in tales like these, the heroes will pass by a statue which then turns its head ominously to follow them? Spooky stuff. Anyway, that didn’t happen at all, but Glimmering’s elfin eyes did spot a secret passage behind an out-of-alignment statue. Squeezing past the stone guard led the party into a hidden guardroom littered with furnishings long since lost to rot. A wall rack held a pair of ancient halberds which were still decent enough to wield, so Gerund took one for himself, feeling some security in having a polearm. Glimmering was also plenty strong enough for one, but the gut wound made them less eager to lug a halberd around. Portobello was beginning to wonder if it was right to take anything from this place at all. His frog Funderburker wasn’t fazed.
Further down the hallway was a large octagonal chamber ringed with eight more glaring goman statues and seven stone doorways between them. The sunken floor of the chamber had a few centimeters of water, and towards the center the water went pitch black, revealing a pit beneath the ripples.
It took some tip-toeing about and brandishing of Gerund’s lantern for the party to get a good look at everything. They had entered from the West; to the East was the most ornate door, which was painted with a perplexing scene of goats raining down from the sky upon the world. Neat. The three doors to the South were unadorned, and one was already opened. But the three doors to the North each had an elegant brass placard above them, each embossed with a name in Ancient Caprice. From left to right, Gerund read them as:
KING XISOR THE GREEN, KING SPARAMUNTAR, and KING FRANBINZAR
Nobody had heard of these blokes before, but the spirit of discovery lingered. Yegor had spotted something glinting at him from the watery pit, as well as a possible movement down there. So Portobello employed his trusty fishing rod again, this time for its intended purpose. Sort of. After a few failed attempts and a bit of tugging, he reeled up a silver ring, different to the one they got from the tomb above; this one had an eyeball motif on it, similar to the central eye of the Jale God’s statue. Glimmering had a spell tome that could test these silver rings a bit, but decided to wait until later. It was pocketed, and the line cast again. Everyone else had their weapons readied while the gnome fished.
His next catch justified their caution, as Portobello reeled up a twitching and quite foul-smelling severed hand, still wrapped in burial silks. It was caught on the hook by the pinky, and was clearly trying to murder whatever it could get its undead grasp on. With all his might Portobello ran from the pool and slammed the hand against the wall, and Gerund pierced it with his halberd’s spear-tip. Glimmering gave it an additional stab with their brass sword, just to be certain the thing was dead.
They had all been standing with their backs to an unexplored corridor for some time, now, so Glimmering decided to investigate while Portobello made another attempt at fishing. They only had the one lantern (which was currently hanging from one of Gerund’s horns), but Glimmering was a moonchild, and could see about 5 feet in total darkness. That was enough to scout. The corridor led to a chamber that seemed to be full of clay goman warriors, similar to the ones in the upper tomb. Glimmering suspected that they were also full of poison, and rejoined the group swiftly.
Portobello’s third catch was too heavy for him, and the rest of the party aided in hauling it up. It was a thick golden chain, too thick to make a necklace. That didn’t stop Yegor from wearing it like one. It complemented his green spectacles, and made him look proper regal. He reckoned it was worth more than everything else the troupe owned combined.
“Are we absolutely sure,” Portobello asked, “that we should be robbing graves down here? Like, what if the spirits of the dead get even more restless than they already are, or something?”
“Ribbit,” offered Funderburker. No one else had qualms about claiming forgotten relics. In fact, Gerund was keen to investigate the three kings’ tombs, if only to learn more about them. What if he was their great-several-times-over-grandson?
They started by opening the door to King Franbinzar, and the lantern revealed things nobody liked seeing. A short hall led to a small chamber and coffin, both of which were tainted by some kind of black oozing sludge. It undulated in the faint lantern light. Unanimously, without further investigation, the party reclosed the door, because no thank you creepy slime room. Surely the tomb of Xisor the Green would prove better.
It didn’t. Gerund ventured down the hall first, stepped right on a pressure plate, and was almost immediately stricken by a blinding lightning bolt that split the air and deafened everyone. The goman staggered back into his teammate’s arms. Suddenly everything stank of burnt goat fur.
Gerund’s whole body felt fried by the electric shock; it would take him a very long time to fully recover from that. Yegor and Glimmering stayed with him while Portobello crept past the pressure plate and investigated the devious tomb. The lantern was placed on a ten-foot-pole to give the gnome a bit of light from down the hallway.
Behind the stone sarcophagus, a large metallic plate was hanging from a peg high up on the wall. The plate bore strange discolorations, as if it had been the origin of the lightning. Yet again, a fishing rod was the perfect solution, and the trap was safely disarmed, assuming it hadn’t already blown its only charge. Once it was hanging in front of him, Portobello could guess that the plate was electrum. Another treasure, but paid for in full by Gerund. After some strenuous work, the gnome was able to pry the coffin lid open just enough to see that it was empty inside. Perhaps that was for the best.
The troupe wrapped the plate in a rucksack to take with them, but lingered for one last act of curiosity. They gathered warily at the Eastern double doors, and once again admired its goat-pocalypse mural. Together they pulled it open. A frigid wind crept from the dark stairway beyond, chilling our brave adventurers to their cores. The stairs led down, down, deep into the echoing dark below.
Whatever may have lain in wait for them down there, none of our troupe wished to know. With the exception of Portobello and Funderburker, everyone was in pretty poor health, especially Gerund. They left the passageway open, packed what treasures they had found, and headed back to the surface world where their allies awaited them. This perilous venture had proven, once again, quadruply so, beyond any tangible possibility of speculation, that the only ratling graverobber to have ever been down here in any way whatsoever was assuredly, decidedly named Yegor. The ratling children’s father was still missing.
Next Session: Another foray into the dark below ...
