Tomb of Horrors, Session 10: "Are You Acererak?"

Knowing that desperate times call for desperate measures, Kurson ran toward the jeweled skull and launched himself into the air. A successful Athletics check allowed the deva invoker to jump high enough to reach the skull, which was floating in midair ten feet above the floor. If he could just grab the blasted thing, they could stuff it in their handy haversack and see what happened. Unfortunately, Kurson failed on his grab attack (Strength vs. Reflex, and the Acererak construct’s reflex was 26). As the deva landed empty-handed, the skull slowly turned toward him and then its blood-red ruby eyes glowed with terrible power as it blasted Kurson with its Drain Soul attack power (+18 vs. Fortitude; when a victim of the drain soul attack fails its second saving throw, the victim’s soul is trapped in one of the construct’s soul gems).

Session 10 of our Tomb of Horrors adventure took place this past Thursday night at Total Escape Games. By this last session of play, Acererak’s tricks & traps and the Tomb’s various monster guardians had all taken a fearsome toll on the party and everyone was on their second or third characters. The final version of the adventuring party would consist of Adaka (githzerai shaman), Drek (drow ranger), “Jeff” (drow warlock), and Kurson (deva invoker).

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Session 9 actually ended with the party exploring beyond the False Treasure Room (where they fought the efreet urn slaves) and discovering a section of passageway that led to a large, empty chamber. The PCs found that two portals on the far wall of the chamber could not be activated, no matter what they tried. Literally finding themselves trapped between a rock and hard place (the stone plug beneath the statue in the False Treasure Room had closed behind them), Jeff suggested they try using his Hand of Fate ritual. As the warlock performed the ritual, a translucent blue hand appeared and, with a gesture, it “answered” the PCs three questions about possible courses of action in finding Acererak. The Hand of Fate’s answers allowed our heroes to discover a secret door that opened onto a small, empty room. Upon closer examination, they found a single hidden keyhole that was set at the center of the room’s far wall.

Jeff had his devil lackey insert Key #1 (from the Ruined Laboratory) into the keyhole. With a rumble, the entire wall sank down into the floor, revealing a burial vault whose arched ceiling rose 25 feet overhead. The room appeared to be empty of everything but dust. Upon closer examination, though, Drek found another hidden keyhole beneath a thin layer of painted plaster in the center of the room. Jeff again had his devil lackey try Key #1, but this resulted in the lackey being blown 20 feet into the air (2d6 necrotic and radiant damage), then taking falling damage as normal (2d10 damage). After that, Mr. Lackey could safely insert Key #2 (from the staircase outside the Mithral Gates). Inserting that key and turning it to the right more than once caused the floor of the empty crypt to begin to slowly rise. Once the floor began to rise, each character in the room had one action with which to leave. Everyone was able to skeedaddle safely out of the room just before the slowly rising floor suddenly slammed upward at high speed.

A new wall of gleaming mithral stood where the old wall had sunk down. A door was set in the wall, and an inset ring hung at its center. As depicted in the photo you see above, after Adaka (with assists from Drek and Jeff) rolled a sufficient Strength check to open the door, the party found that the true crypt had risen from beneath the floor. A stone dais on the far side of the chamber holds a jeweled skull that sat amid bone shards and dust. Its eyes were blood-red rubies, and its teeth were set with diamonds. (I used a little Lego Stormtrooper helmet to represent the Acererak construct.) Treasure lay scattered across the floor of the crypt. There were many gems, as well as a couple of magic items and several potions or elixirs.

After everyone eventually (cautiously) entered the chamber, there was much eyeballing of the various treasure items, especially the potions and elixirs. They also thoroughly checked the small room for secret doors. An Aracana check on the skull didn’t tell them very much. Finally, Adaka decided he would pick up two of the potions. As he did so, dust swirled on the far side of the crypt as the jeweled skull ominously rose into the air. Slowly, it turned from side to side, as if appraising the members of the party, and then it attacked!

The Acererak construct used its drain soul power as often as it could (recharge on 5 or 6, and it could use it in the crypt even if it hadn’t recharged). On the initial hit, the target was dazed and restrained (save ended both). After that, on the first failed saving throw, the target was instead stunned and restrained (save ended both). With the target’s second failed saving throw, they died and their soul was trapped in one of the skull’s soul gems. The soul’s former body crumbled into dust at the end of their next turn.

Each round at the start of the construct’s turn, I was supposed to roll a d6 to determine if teleportation magic moved the fight to another chamber in the Tomb. That sounded like a huge pain to me, but I went ahead and did it. As you can see from the photos that accompany this post, the fight eventually moved from the crypt to the Chamber of Mists to the False Treasure Room to the Chapel of Evil and then back to the crypt, where it remained for the duration of the encounter after the skull was bloodied.

Adaka ended up being the only PC to succumb to the construct’s nasty drain soul power. Korsun was hit with it a whopping four times, but he managed to succeed on his first saving throw each and every time he was hit. Wanting to spread around the love, I made certain that Drek and Jeff were also hit, but they too managed to succeed on their saving throws.

I reduced the Acererak Construct’s hit point total to reflect the four member adventuring party, but otherwise I chose not to mess around with its stats. In the midst of the encounter, I also made a decision not to use its consume soul power (as a minor action, the construct could expend a consumed soul to regain a quarter of its hit points). I made that decision for a couple of reasons. One, even without using the power, the encounter was proving to be difficult enough for the party… and since I had already racked up a TPK previously (see the post on Session 9), I didn’t feel the need to annihilate everyone in this fight. Second, I wanted to leave open the possibility that Adaka’s trapped soul could be rescued at the end of the encounter. Anyway, even with reducing the construct’s hit point total and not using consume soul, the fight still lasted an astounding sixteen rounds.

At one point during the encounter, Drek’s player was questioning whether they were really in the midst of the big boss fight or if it was simply another example of Acererak yanking their chain, so he decided to use a free action to ask the skull, “Are you Acererak?” Hence the title of this post. The skull didn’t answer, but after the fight I told the players that the skull construct wasn’t really Acererak. As a demilich, Acererak’s soul now resides on another plane of existence where he nurtures an insidious plan to make himself into a god. Acererak built the Tomb of Horrors as an altar where countless adventurers would sacrifice themselves for his purposes. Each group of adventurers destroyed in the Tomb would generate spiritual energy, which the demilich could siphon to a hidden phylactery in preparation for turning himself into a deity.

Although they ultimately failed to break Acererak’s power, as Drek, Jeff, and Kurson defeated the powerful construct and left the Tomb (toting a soul gem that glowed with an inner light, revealing an image of a tiny figure inside it), they could take satisfaction in the fact that word of their accomplishment in surviving the infamous Tomb of Horrors will spread into the wider world and garner them lasting fame.

“This ends the expedition to The Tomb of Horrors. We hope you and your players will have found it exciting, challenging, and rewarding.”

Tomb of Horrors, Session 9: The One with the TPK

Since many of you have been waiting with bated breath to find out what happened to our heroes in the Pillared Throne Room, let’s cut right to the chase: No one walked out of there alive, dear readers. Zerbitt attempted to escape the Chamber of Hopelessness by nimbly tumbling, dodging, and weaving his way through the Cursed Armory, but the thief was quickly cut down by the slashing swords and battering shields that flew off the walls and attacked him. Back out in the huge throne room, Laramie and Marrak both eventually succumbed to the mummy crypt master’s relentless rotting slam (double attack) and stunning strike attacks.

After having to miss a week of play because of an unavoidable work obligation on my part, we returned to our Tomb of Horrors adventure this past Thursday evening with the surviving characters in a tight spot. Going into Session #9, I really debated with myself about whether to throw the PCs a rope, especially Zerbitt and Marrak since they were the only two surviving original members of the party. But in the end, I decided to show no mercy. In previous encounters, I had cut them some slack, but before going into the Pillared Throne Room a couple of weeks ago, I had made a resolution to not do that any longer and instead let the chips fall where they may. This— I told myself— is the dread and legendary Tomb of Horrors, after all.

Still, this past Thursday night was my first TPK as a DM and I did feel kind of badly about it. From sitting on the other side of the screen, I know what it’s like to be a player and get attached to your character, so my first TPK isn’t something I approached lightly. But still, I only felt kind of badly about it… This is the dread and legendary Tomb of Horrors, after all, and not a Sunday School picnic.

So after the bodies were cleared away and the blood was cleaned up, I let the guys start over there in the Pillared Throne Room with four new characters. I told them they could think of the huge chamber as their last save point. Their new characters were Adaka (githzerai shaman), Drek (drow ranger), Jeff (drow warlock), and Kurson (deva invoker). Jeff’s character sheet looked suspiciously like Elric’s, but you didn’t hear it from me.

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This iteration of the party had an easier time passing beyond the Pillared Throne Room since they quickly homed in on the throne as the key to the exit. When Jeff touched the silver knob on the scepter to the front of the throne where a replica of the crown was inlaid in silver, the throne sank down and revealed a hidden 5-foot-wide passageway leading south.

Mithral Gates

Making their way through the hidden passageway, the party found that a wide landing opened up ahead of them. The landing’s walls and ceiling were untarnished silver and copper, inlaid with ivory. A rising staircase was carved of multicolored semiprecious stone, and two massive mithral gates stood closed above it. Upon the fourth step was a large, cylindrical bronze key. Upon closer examination of the mithral gates, they saw that where the gates met, a hemispherical cavity with a hole at its center was set at waist height.

After picking up the bronze key on the steps, the party decided it would just be a little too convenient for it to be the key that opened the gates. Then Adaka noticed that the hemispherical cavity looked like it would be a perfect fit for the scepter from the Pillared Throne Room. Sure enough, when the gold ball on the scepter was placed within the cavity, the mithral gates swung silently open.

False Treasure Room

Through the open gates, the party could see an imposing chamber. A ceiling of untarnished silver rose above the polished stone floor. The room’s ivory walls were inlaid with gold. Across the way, two iron chests stood to either side of a granite sarcophagus graven with ancient glyphs. A thin stream of smoke rose from a large brass urn set with filigreed gold. In all four corners stand 9-foot-tall statues of fierce demonic warriors cast in black iron, and their fearsome weapons were raised. As the PCs cautiously edged into the chamber, Kurson was able to read some of the ancient glyphs on the sarcophagus. The glyphs across the front of the sarcophagus spelled “ACERERAK”!

The PCs spent quite a bit of time examining everything in the chamber. They decided that Acererak was either in the urn (huh?) or in the sarcophagus, so Drek’s player suggested rolling a die and on an odd number the party would remove the brass topper from the urn, while on an even number they’d open the sarcophagus. Everyone agreed, so he rolled a die and it came up a 1. Now as you know, dear reader, a 1 is always the absolute worst result you can ever roll in 4e D&D, so you’re probably as surprised as I was that— rather than roll again— they still went through with the plan and took the topper off the urn. Ah, well, I had been patiently waiting ten weeks to scare the crap out of them with the cool Efreet Fireblade minis I had purchased just for this encounter, so when they went for the urn, it was fine with me.

As they removed the brass stopper from the urn, it shuddered as two large humanoid forms burst from the top— efreet warrior slaves, howling in murderous rage. Once I explained to them that the appearance of the fierce efreets was part of a skill challenge that involved the party attempting to disrupt the urn’s summoning magic (either through Arcana, Athletics, or Thievery), it was a round or two before anyone actually attacked the monsters. When someone hit an efreet and the party found out it was “just” a minion, a massive sigh of relief could be heard. Adaka, Drek, and Jeff focused on taking down the efreets, while Kurson did Arcana checks on the urn to disrupt its summoning magic. They racked up an impressive number of successes that way, but also a couple of failures, so it came to the point where the next success or failure would determine the outcome of the skill challenge. Kurson arcana’d it up once again and rolled with good results, so the urn cracked and collapsed.

After that, this current version of the party proved that it has just as much trouble opening sacrophagi as the previous version of the party had opening doors. Drek tried to open the sarcophagus and failed, so then all four of them tried to open it with simultaneous Strength checks. And they failed three times. Giving up on the sarcophagus (at least for the moment), Drek turned his attention to the chests. He opened the first one with no problem, but he fumbled the check on the second one so a poison needle jabbed him and he took ongoing 5 poison damage (save ends). And then, quite amazingly, he didn’t save for five rounds! Wow. Anyway, he ended up getting both chests open and found an impressive amount of loot.

After they took a short rest, the party was ready to tackle the sarcophagus again. And again they failed with the simultaneous Strength checks. I let Kurson try to blast it with some invoker-thingy, but nothing happened. So again they tried the Strength checks… and succeeded! Okay, not really, but I had pity on them and there was nothing important in there anyway, so I let them open it on their fifth try. Inside the sarcophagus were bones, ruined jewelry, a broken staff, and a shattered skull. And there was nothing magical or particularly remarkable about any of it. Bummer.

After much searching for secret doors, skull punting, standing in the sarcophagus, and frustration, they finally figured out that the iron statues could move. Of course, it was the last statue they tried that was the one with the ring pull underneath it. The ring pull raised a small plug of stone, and under the plug was a narrow chute that dropped 10 feet down to a corridor to the west.

What will happen as Tomb of Horrors adventuring party #2 explores the corridor to the west? Will Adaka, Drek, “Jeff”, and Kurson succeed in finally coming to grips with and defeating Acererak, or will they be destroyed like those who came before them?

Tomb of Horrors, Session 8: The Waste Matter Hits the Fan

As Jack turned to make her way toward the dais, she reached out to touch one of the columns that filled the throne room. Scores of the massive columns, each carved of colorful pastel stone, supported the ceiling of the huge chamber. As soon as Jack’s fingers came into contact with the pillar, she started to float quickly upward toward the ceiling 20 feet above. The columns in the throne room were actually Pillars of Levitation! Jack found herself helplessly bouncing along the ceiling, heading directly for the mosaic of the green devil face in the chamber’s northwest corner. She desperately reached out to try and grab onto one of the other pillars, but she found that a sinister magic imbued the columns and ceiling with an icy slickness. Laramie, seeing his floating comrade’s predicament, ran below Jack and attempted to throw her a rope, but the well intentioned druid rolled a 1 on his Acrobatics check. Doh! Zerbitt, rapidly positioning himself below the green devil face, held up his 10-foot pole so that Jack could grab onto it, but by that time the magical breeze propelling Jack was too strong to be resisted. Zerbitt and Laramie watched helplessly as Jack was sucked into the devil’s mouth and disappeared from sight. Uh oh.

As you’ll recall, at the end of Session #7 of our Tomb of Horrors adventure we left our four heroes trapped in the Juggernaut Corridor. A terrifying magical construct (played by a plastic baby elephant that I picked up at Hobby Lobby) was advancing, then suddenly retreating, charting an erratic course along the corridor on its heavy bloodstained wheels. At the start of our most recent session, Jack (revenant human assassin), Zerbitt (human thief), and Laramie (eladrin druid) breathed a sigh of relief as the construct rolled past them, heading back east toward its start area. (Unfortunately, Marrak’s player wasn’t able to join us for Session #8 because of a family emergency. We missed you, Steve!)

Once the construct was past them, Jack was the first of the group to make a break southward toward safety. As she neared the doorway at the end of the hallway, though, the floor suddenly collapsed underneath her. She fell straight down about ten feet and then the pit turned into a slide-like chute that deposited her in a 5-foot-diameter crawlspace. She could see that the crawlspace went off to the north. After Laramie and Zerbitt jumped into the pit and slid down the chute to join her, the party made their way through the crawlspace. Another corridor and a wondrous door lay beyond the narrow crawlspace.

Pillared Throne Room

After exiting the crawlspace, the group saw that an enormous door filled the corridor from floor to ceiling, gleaming with the dull sheen of adamantine. Once they pushed through the door, the party was in a huge chamber. A gentle breeze was blowing through the room. The ceiling of the room was supported by scores of massive columns, each carved of colorful pastel stone. In the northwest and northeast corners, just below the ceiling, the walls were set with mosaics of green and blue devil faces. Other than being set up so high, they appeared to be exactly the same as that first seen in the entrance hall to the tomb. Jack also found three doors (two blue and the other a faint lilac color) set at different points along the chamber’s north wall. Meanwhile, across the room, Zerbitt and Laramie discovered a huge dais to the south. Atop the dais rested an obsidian throne inlaid with silver and ivory skulls. A gold crown and a scepter of gold and silver rested innocently upon the throne. (The crown was solid gold and set with white diamonds while the scepter was crafted of a silver-gold alloy, with a golden ball at one end and a silver knob at the other.) The front of the throne was set with silver panel featuring a replica of the crown. In the farthest corner of the room, Zerbitt and Laramie also came across the charred remains of a half-dozen adventurers circled around a huge, glowing orange gem.

After Zerbitt used his 10 foot pole to carefully push the crown and scepter into his pack, he and Laramie spent a while messing around with the throne. They tried to push it, sat on it, and tried to push it again. Nothing happened. Giving up on the throne for the time being, they moved north to join Jack. Zerbitt and Jack both tied rope to two shovels and tossed them up into the devils’ mouths. Both shovels, along with the rope, were sucked into the mouths and disappeared. It was after this little experiment that Jack decided to touch one of the pillars as she made her way across the room. After disappearing into the green devil’s mouth, Jack was teleported nude to the Tomb’s entrance hall. Standing next to the 'original' green devil face in the hallway, she found a shovel and some rope at her feet. Picking them up, she made her way back to the Chapel of Evil, hoping to find her gear laid out on the altar(like had happened before), but nothing was there. Heading back out into the Great Hall of Spheres, she decided to go through the misty archway. The archway teleported her to the top of the hill above the entrance to the Tomb. Discouraged, she slowly made her way back down into the entrance hall…

Meanwhile, back in the Pillared Throne Room, Zerbitt and Laramie once again set to pushing the throne. It once again wouldn’t budge, not even a bit. Stumped by the throne, Laramie decided to pick up the gem. With a successful Arcana check, the druid found that the gem was a powerful magic item that allowed a creature to make a single wish for anything it desired. Not realizing it was actually a Cursed Wishing Gem that reverses or perverts the wish, bringing doom to that character and all named in the wish, Laramie wished that Jack would appear and be standing next to him.

At that exact moment back out in the entrance hall, poor Jack— still nude and still pitifully clutching her shovel and rope— found herself being drawn irresistibly toward the evil-looking face of the great green devil. Unable to stop herself, she was swept into the devil’s dead black mouth. The mouth, a sphere of annihilation, instantly and completely and forever destroyed her.

In the Pillared Throne Room, Laramie wasn’t exactly sure what had just happened, except that it probably wasn’t anything good. Jack hadn’t appeared, and the gem he was holding had begun to pulse with a sinister red glow. A second later, it exploded in his hand.

Careful what you wish for! Wish magic was a popular part of older editions of D&D— not just for the power it offered players, but for the fun a DM could have twisting the wishes in amusing ways. This gem in the Tomb takes that concept to its worst level.

Apparently deciding that he didn’t have much to lose after the gem exploded in his hand, Laramie boldly put on the crown and sat on the throne. Nothing happened. Well he could see within the darkened room as if in normal daylight, and he suspected that while wearing the crown he would be immune to the effect of the pillars of levitation… but other than that, nothing happened.

Heading back up to the north end of the Pillared Throne Room, Zerbitt and Laramie checked out the lilac door. Opening the door, they found a small, bare chamber that had another door on the opposite wall. Pairs of swords crossed behind shields hung there— three such sets were on each of the side walls. When Zerbitt entered the chamber, shields and weapons flew off the walls of their own accord, battering and slashing the thief until he dropped to the ground, unconscious and dying. Stunned by the speed and ferocity of the trap’s attack on his ally, Laramie quickly rallied and reached into the chamber, grabbed Zerbitt, and dragged him back through the doorway to safety. After the druid healed his gravely wounded companion, the pair of adventurers took a short rest.

Undaunted by their experience with the Cursed Armory, Laramie and Zerbitt decided to open one of the blue doors. They chose the one to the west. Behind it, they found an empty chamber. Empty, that is, except for an unconscious drow lying on the dusty floor. After rousing the mysterious figure by poking it with Zerbitt’s handy 10 foot pole, they discovered that the drow was Jack’s “brother” (don’t ask), Rylan! Welcome to the Tomb of Horrors, Rylan! As Zerbitt and Laramie introduced themselves and invited Rylan to join their quest against Acererak, they studiously avoided mentioning what had just happened to Jack.

Wondering what and/or who they might find behind the second blue door just across the way, the trio of adventurers opened it and discovered a large wooden sarcophagus resting upon a low stone table. Piling into the small chamber, Zerbitt, Laramie, and Rylan attempted to lift the sarcophagus and carry it out into the Pillared Throne Room. Their plan (are you ready for this?) was to throw the sarcophagus against one of the pillars, breaking it open in that way so that if there just happened to be anything scary in it, the scary thing would touch the pillar and float up the ceiling. Yeah, I know… but I didn’t say it was a good plan, I just said it was a plan.

It will probably come as no surprise to you that in attempting to lift the sarcophagus off the table, our heroes dropped it. The lid slid off, revealing the mummified remains of a human, its tattered wrappings partially undone. A huge gem was barely visible in the corpse’s left eye socket. Zerbitt lit a torch and tried to set the mummy on fire, but unbeknownst to the thief, the corpse’s wrappings were imbued with resistance magic that overcame its normal vulnerability to fire. Doh! Good try, though, Zerbitt. Next, Laramie and Zerbitt synchronizingly stabbed the mummy with their swords. (By that point, Rylan was slowly edging backward out of the chamber, wondering just what he’d gotten himself into by teaming up with these two crazy loons.) When stabbing the mummy didn’t provoke any sort of reaction from it, Zerbitt decided he’d use his sword to pop the gem out of its eye. And that, dear reader, is when the shite well and truly hit the fan.

As soon as the gem popped out of its eye socket, the corpse animated as a Mummy Crypt Master. It hit Zerbitt with stunning strike, sliding the thief 3 squares out the doorway and into one of the pillars. Up Zerbitt went, levitated out of the fight. As Laramie and Rylan scrambled out of the small chamber, the mummy crypt master pursued them. While trying to dodge the monster’s relentless attacks, the druid and drow watched as Zerbitt was sucked into the blue devil face’s gaping maw and disappeared from sight. Zerbitt was teleported into the Chamber of Hopelessness. That small chamber was strewn with numerous skeletons and it was foul with the scent of rot. A small fountain spilled water into a basin that overflowed and drained away through side holes along the floor. In glowing letters, a grim warning was set along one wall: “You who dared to violate my tomb now pay the price. Stay here and die slowly of starvation, or open the door to the south and enter where certain but quick death awaits.”

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, deciding quite rightly that the two of them were no match for the vicious mummy, Laramie and Rylan hatched a desperate plan— they’d make their way over to the blue devil face and follow Zerbitt through it. Yeah, I know… but I didn’t say it was a good plan, I just said it was a plan.

Well, Rylan was able to make his way past the crypt master by doing some kind of acrobatic spider climb deal up along the walls, so he had no problem getting sucked into the devil’s mouth. He was duly teleported into the Chamber of Hopelessness. After giving the bewildered drow a moment to take in his dismal surroundings, Zerbitt walked over to him and said, “Hey, have you seen this cool gem I got back there?”

Out in the Pillared Throne Room, Laramie didn’t have any nifty move that would allow him to zip along the walls past the mummy and up to the devil’s face in the corner, so he’d have to do it the old fashioned way: touch a pillar and float over to the devil’s mouth. But first he’d have to take off the crown, right? Right. (Because wearing it made the PC immune to the effect of the pillars of levitation, remember?) But when Laramie tried to take off the crown, he found that he couldn’t remove it from his head. Uh oh.

In the Chamber of Hopelessness, Rylan pooh-poohed the grim warning on the wall and opened the door to the south. Beyond it lay the Cursed Armory! Just as Zerbitt was starting to say, “You know, just before we found you, I almost died in that…”, Rylan dashed out into the armory, running as quickly as he could for the closed door to the south. As the drow entered the first space, two pairs of shields and weapons animated, flew off the walls, and attacked him. Those attacks bloodied him, but still he pressed on. Two more pairs of shields and swords flew off the walls and attacked him. In the blink of an eye, the drow was dead-dead, knocked down to -66 hit points. Zerbitt, still back in the Chamber of Hopelessness, stood with his mouth hanging open, unable to believe how quickly he had just seen Rylan battered and slashed to little bloody pieces before his eyes.

And that, boys and girls, is where we had to end our eighth session of Tomb of Horrors. Laramie is out in the Pillared Throne Room all by his lonesome, getting pummelled by the mummy crypt master. Zerbitt is trapped in the Chamber of Hopelessness. Will Marrak rejoin them just in time for a TPK?? Will another “brother” of Jack and Rylan’s (don’t ask) somehow appear in the Tomb and tip the balance of power in the party’s favor, averting the disaster that is unfolding???

Tomb of Horrors, Session 7: Of Sirens and Constructs

Since I’m a week behind in posting our Tomb of Horrors sessions, I’m going to fly through this write up (hey, it’s not like anyone died-died in this session) and mostly let the photos tell the story. But I promise I’ll make it up with a super-duper write up for our most recent session (in which PCs were dropping left and right).

In the photo above you can see Zerbitt checking out the dead end southern corridor. Prior to that, back at the intersection, Marrak had taken point and triggered the pit trap that lay there. With an impressive move (for a dwarf), he managed to fling himself backward and avoid falling into the pit. Of course, then he (and Jack) would clumsily fall into the trap several times just trying to jump over it while exploring the corridors.

Anyway, back to Zerbitt… The canny thief was actually able to disable a cave in trap at the end of the southern corridor after Laramie spotted that the ceiling was unstable. After Zerbitt disabled the trap and made certain that the blank wall at the end of the corridor was really just a blank wall (and not, say, a secret door), the party headed back up to the intersection. That was when Jack, with all of 4 hit points and 0 surges, attempted to jump over the pit trap and failed his Athletics check. Oops. It took a healing potion and a bit of mercy from your humble DM to save the unconscious and dying Jack (I let Laramie give Jack the potion and use one of his own surges for the 10 hp buff since Jack didn’t have surges left). Once that was all sorted out, our heroes explored the eastern hallway. They found that the last four squares before a door were made up of glowing blue floor tiles… an electrified floor trap! Zerbitt was able to disable the trap (although he might have been zapped once or twice in the process, but I won’t mention that). Beyond the door, the corridor started to fill with a strange silvery mist. As the party bravely made their way through the mist, they discovered that the corridor led to the…

Cavern of Mists

From out of the mists steps a regal human female. As she prepares to attack, her voice rings out like music: “Forgive me…”

Once they discerned that the siren’s heart wasn’t in the battle, but that she was under some sort of compulsion to fight, the party spent a bit of time trying to break Acererak’s control over her. But while they racked up four failures during that skill challenge and only one success, the siren was pounding them but good and they finally (wisely) decided just forget the skill challenge and take her out the old fashioned way: through combat.

It took them quite a long while, but our heroes were eventually victorious. During the fight, Zerbitt and Laramie ended up taking dirt naps but they were both saved by Marrak (it’s always nice to have a cleric in the party). The party came out of the battle against the cavern siren with more than a few bumps and bruises, and also one silver sword with some mysterious runes etched into the blade.

After taking an extended rest (the last one they’ll be able to take in the Tomb??), the intrepid adventurers went back out to the intersection of the corridors and headed north. At the end of that hallway, they discovered a secret doorway which opened for them only after they slid the aforementioned sword into a slot hidden in the door. Beyond the doorway they found the…

Juggernaut Corridor

From ahead comes a dull rumbling. Bursting through the swinging stone doors, a massive construct fills the corridor as it advances on heavy bloodstained wheels.

This encounter was pretty funny, mostly because of Marrak’s almost paralyzing fear of the construct. And because, after the construct had rolled past where they stood safely on the stairs, the entire party took off behind it because they were convinced that what they needed to do was find an exit somewhere up the corridor to the north. But as they all went sprinting up the corridor and turned the corner, they were confronted with a dead end! And that was when the construct reversed course and started back toward them. Well, of course, at that point they were trapped in the dead end. Between Jack’s earnest protests that the hallway just couldn’t be a dead end and Marrak’s curling up into the fetal position as the construct drew ever nearer, I could hardly keep from laughing out loud.

But everyone except Jack actually managed to make it past the construct and back to the safety of the stairs, and then it was closing time at Total Escape Games so that’s where we had to end our seventh session of Tomb of Horrors.

Tomb of Horrors, Session 6: "Most Likely to Become a Lich"

Another blast of fire erupted from the shimmering elemental gate, hitting Zerbitt as he desperately fought to climb up the slanting corridor using the rope that Jack had thrown down from the doorway. The attack (+12 vs. Fortitude; for every 2 squares closer the target is to the elemental vent, the trap gains a +1 to the attack roll) hit the bloodied thief and knocked him down to 1 hit point (2d10 + 5 fire damage, and the target takes ongoing 5 fire damage and is dazed— save ends both). Realizing that he was gravely wounded and in danger of losing consciousness, Zerbitt used the last of his quickly ebbing strength to wrap the rope around his forearm. Just a moment later, when he took the ongoing 5 fire damage at the beginning of his turn, Zerbitt fell unconscious and was dying. Only his foresight in wrapping the rope around his arm kept the thief’s body from tumbling down the steeply sloping corridor and into the vast pit of flames and molten lava. But would Zerbitt’s companions, already safe beyond the doorway to the south, somehow be able to rescue him before the deadly planar vent claimed the Tomb of Horrors’ next victim?

---

Geez, Who’s the Clumsy Newb?

Our sixth session of Tomb of Horrors at our FLGS, Total Escape Games in Broomfield, Colorado, started with Jack (revenant human assassin), Marrak (dwarf warpriest), and Zerbitt (human thief) in the Ruined Laboratory where they had battled the vat oozes and found a golden skeleton key. At the end of the last session, they had just discovered a secret door behind the bookcase that stood against the chamber’s western wall. At the beginning of this session, they discovered they had a new companion! Laramie, an eladrin druid, suddenly popped into existence there in the Ruined Laboratory and joined the adventuring party. Welcome to the Tomb of Horrors, Laramie. (Insert evil chuckle here.)

Exploring the corridor beyond the secret doorway, our heroes came across a 10-foot deep pit that completely filled 30 feet of passageway. The pit’s floor was a mass of wide-set rusted iron spikes. Climbing down into the pit didn’t look all that hard (a DC 17 Athletics check) and walking through the wide-set spikes appeared as if it would be easy enough, but Zerbitt decided to bypass all of that and use Spider Climb to get to the other side. No one else in the party could do anything half as nifty so they’d actually have to negotiate the pit. Jack climbed down into the pit with no problem, carefully moved through the spikes, but then triggered the Pit Spike Barrage (the two easternmost squares of the pit were a magic trap) before she could exit the pit. The rusted iron spikes set across the floor suddenly launched upward in a deadly barrage (+13 vs. Reflex), hitting Jack (3d6 damage, and the target is stunned until the end of its next turn) but missing Zerbitt. Marrak made it across without incident, but Laramie proved to be a bit of a klutz. The druid tumbled down onto the spikes as he was trying to climb down into the pit and then he fell again on the other side while he was attempting to jump over the trapped squares and grab the lip of the floor above. The other three PCs kind of glanced at each other with a look that clearly said, “Geez, who exactly is this clumsy newb?!”

Past the pit, the hallway continued on for quite a long stretch before it dead ended at a blank stone wall. Everyone checked the dead end in every way possible, but they couldn’t detect that it was anything except a blank stone wall. They backtracked to the pit, checking the corridor as they went, but they failed to find the secret door that was hidden along the north wall of the hallway. Stymied by their failure to find anything of interest beyond the pit, they decided to head back over to the other side of the passageway. They all made it over the pit safely, but then Jack decided she wanted to check the walls down along the bottom of the pit. So she started to scramble back down but lost her balance and fell onto the spikes (2d10 damage and the target falls prone). Geez.

Anyway, once they were all back up and on their way, they decided to go all the way back to the Great Hall of Spheres and belatedly check out the statue of the four-armed gargoyle. But a funny thing happened when our heroes returned to the spot where the wall (the ring portal) in the Chapel of Evil had dropped down and let them access the corridor beyond— they now discovered that the huge block of stone had risen up again and blocked their way back into the chapel! Faster than you can say, “Oh no, we’re trapped in the Tomb of Horrors!” the players had d20s in their hands wanting to roll checks to see if there was any way to get the stone to drop down again, but I nipped that in the bud right quick by saying, “I’ll save you guys a lot of time and just tell you that you can roll checks ’til the cows come home and you won’t find any way past this block of stone.”

“Is it hot in here or is it just me?”

Pretty much the only unexplored area still available to the party at that point was whatever might be beyond the door at the end of the long corridor past the three pit traps (where they’d found the secret door at the bottom of the third pit trap which took them south into the Corridor of Fear). They had went up to that door before, but after hearing the sound of music and singing from the other side, they grew suspicious and decided not to check it out at that time. This time, though, with nowhere else left to go, they figured they’d have to bite the bullet and see what was on the other side of that mysterious door.

The door didn’t appear to be locked or trapped, but it still took Marrak a few minutes to strong-arm it open. As the dwarf shouldered the stubborn door open, the sounds of music and singing from the other side were replaced by cries of dismay. When the door finally popped wide open, our heroes could see another long passageway lay beyond, its floor a highly polished smoke-gray marble. Shouts of alarm and the sound of running feet accompanied the faint glow of torchlight receding down the passageway. Without a moment’s hesitation, Zerbitt and Laramie took off down the corridor at a sprint. Jack followed a second later, but wise and cautious Marrak held back.

When Zerbitt and Laramie reached a point thirty feet from the doorway (with Jack pelting along 10 feet behind them), the magically counterweighted passageway suddenly lurched to slope steeply downward from the door. At the far end of the hallway, a planar vent opened up to the Elemental Chaos. The vent manifested itself as a vast pit of flames and molten lava, ready to consume anything that fell into it. Needless to say, dear reader, it’s that type of moment that every Tomb of Horrors DM lives for.

The scene at the top of the post played out after Jack and Laramie had reached the safety of the doorway. The unconscious and dying Zerbitt was indeed saved when Marrak threw (literally) some healing his way (it’s always nice to have a cleric in the party). So in the end, the party managed to escape the Perilous Hallway without suffering a fatality… although I did feel a little better when I found out that both Jack and Zerbitt emerged from the encounter with zero healing surges remaining.

“We’re looking, we're looking, we're looking, we're looking…”

After that, the characters embarked upon a long and tedious and ultimately successful search for the secret door they’d missed their first time around down in the corridor past the Pit Spike Barrage trap. In the midst of searching literally every square they came across, they went back through the Ruined Laboratory and gave it another thorough going over. Overlooked before, some of Acererak’s old high school yearbooks were discovered tucked away on the bottom shelf of a bookcase. While paging through them, the adventurers saw that Acererak had been voted “Most Likely to Become a Lich.”

As their meticulous search took them back down into the corridor with the big ass pit trap, Laramie cemented his reputation as the klutzy newb by once again tumbling into the pit and impaling himself on the rusty spikes. After that, though, Jack finally (FINALLY!) discovered the secret door on the north wall of the passageway. The secret doorway led them into…

The Churning Chamber

There was actually some discussion among the players about whether to continue past the secret doorway since the PCs were in a pretty sorry state by that point (not having any healing surges left is a problem) and they knew they wouldn’t survive any kind of intense encounter. They wanted to know how much time had elapsed since their last extended rest and how much time would still have to pass before they could take another one. I told them they still had about twelve hours to go before they could take their second extended rest. I told them that if they didn’t think they’d survive whatever was on the other side of the door, they could always just sit around twiddling their thumbs or playing charades or something for twelve hours. The only thing they’d lose by doing that would be more time from their 48-hour time limit. After thinking it over, they decided they’d crack the door open just a teeny bit and peek in the room, and then assess the situation.

Well, just peeking in the room quickly turned into a full blown tussle with a couple of Green Slime Horrors. The slime horrors started off as unassuming tapestries hanging on the chamber’s east and west walls. When Jack decided to handle the tapestry on the western wall, she failed the resulting Dexterity check (DC 19), and it transformed into a monster. Jack somehow escaped the slime’s Engulf attack (+10 vs. Reflex), but Laramie’s wolf companion wasn’t so lucky (1d10 +4 acid damage, and the target is engulfed— save ends. While engulfed, the target takes ongoing 5 acid damage and is restrained.).

About that same time, a violent magical churning began to shake the entire chamber, sliding everyone around as if they were on some crazy carnival ride. Jack found herself slid across the chamber and over toward the tapestry on the eastern wall. Operating on the logic that both tapestries surely couldn’t be traps, she went right over to it to get a closer look at it. Whereupon the room churned crazily again and she was slid right into the tapestry. The slime hit her and engulfed her. The attack knocked her down to 4 hit points, so the ongoing 5 acid damage would’ve killed her at the beginning of her turn… but before that could happen, Marrak once again saved the day when he used Soothing Light and gave Jack an immediate saving throw with a +2 power bonus. And of course Jack saved, thereby managing to cheat death. (Insert sad DM sigh here.)

That was the closest call during our heroes’ encounter with the green slime horrors in the Churning Chamber, so they all survived to discover a secret door that had been hidden behind the tapestry on the room’s west wall. They sent Mr. Wolf Companion through the 5-foot diameter crawlspace beyond the door and it found that, after a short distance, the crawlspace opened up into a long corridor that ran eastward. The weary and battered adventurers had just started to cautiously explore the corridor, finding that it led to a four-way intersection where another long passageway ran north and south, when I said, “And I think that’s where we’ll end tonight.”

Tomb of Horrors: Session 3

Marrak watched with growing dismay as, one-by-one, his companions disappeared through the swirling white mist within the archway. Zanfire had gone through first, Jack-style (that is, with a rope tied around his waist). After Zanfire stepped into the mist and disappeared, the rope had gone ominously slack. But pulling the rope back into the hallway minus one longtooth shifter didn’t stop Elric from quickly following Zanfire’s lead. Marrak’s words of caution also failed to dissuade Jack and Zerbitt from marching through the archway. After the last of his companions disappeared, Marrak moved up adjacent to the archway. He closed his eyes and slowly shook his head back and forth. A long-suffering sigh escaped the dwarf’s lips. After a moment’s hesitation, and with his eyes still closed, Marrak also stepped through the mist.

When Marrak opened his eyes, he noticed four things. The first thing he noticed was that he was standing in the bright sunshine on top of the barren, rocky hilltop somewhere above the tomb’s entrance. The second thing he noticed was that Zanfire, Elric, Jack, and Zerbitt were also there on the hilltop. The third thing he noticed was that all of them were buck naked. And I’m sure you can guess the fourth thing Marrak noticed.

When Marrak realized that he too was naked as the day he was born, the warpriest let loose with some salty dwarven epithets that aren’t fit to print here, dear reader.

For our third session of Tomb of Horrors, we once again met at Total Escape Games in Broomfield, CO. Ready, willing, and (maybe) able to tackle whatever Acererak threw at them were…

• Elric (drow warlock)


• Jack (revenant human assassin)


• Marrak (dwarf warpriest)


• Zanfire (longtooth shifter warden)


• Zerbitt (human thief)

(You Make Me Feel) Like A Natural Woman
At the close of our second session, we ended with our heroes in an odd chapel they had discovered at the end of a long crawlspace off of the Great Hall of Spheres. Jack and Elric went through an archway filled with luminous orange mist and found out a little something about Acererak’s sick sense of humor when they were changed into Jacqueline and Elrika. So our third session opened with the party still there in the chapel, pondering what should/could be done about Jack and Elric’s dilemma. After much debating and theorizing, Jack went back through the archway. Yes, with a rope tied around her waist. Nothing happened except she took 5 damage (1d6 damage), so she took the opportunity to investigate the small room she was standing in. She didn’t perceive anything except that she was standing in a small room beyond the orange mists of the archway. After Jack returned from her second journey beyond the orange mist, there was once again much debating and theorizing, after which Elric also went back through the archway. Nothing happened except that she too took 5 damage (1d6 damage), so she also took the opportunity to investigate the small room she was standing in. Elric didn’t perceive anything except that she was standing in a small room beyond the orange mists of the archway.

With Jack and Elric back in the chapel, everyone got down to the business of actually looking up the Remove Affliction ritual to see exactly how it’d undo the curse afflicting the drow and revenant. I told them that I’d let both Jack and Elric be the target of the ritual, but everyone was dismayed to see how physically taxing the ritual would be on the characters. In fact, there was a chance one or the other might not survive the ritual. Once they realized that, both Jack and Elric decided to just continue play as chicks.

On a brighter note, the party’s systematic looting of the pews in the chapel had resulted in the discovery of an astounding 11,000sp and 7,000gp. After rolling around in the coins like Scrooge McDuck, the party decided to take a short rest and then head back out to the Great Hall of Spheres. Before they left the chapel, Elric decided to do one more close sweep of the walls in the room. Up near the southeast corner of the room, she found a circle had been carefully scribed in the stone wall behind the plaster. It was a large-ish circle, like perhaps where a large-ish magic ring might be placed.

Cruel But Most Entertaining…

Once they were back out in the Great Hall of Spheres, our heroes gave their attention to the archway at the southern end of the hallway. They checked it out, but couldn’t tell anything beyond what they’d found out about it in the last session (it was imbued with powerful teleportation magic; when someone moved adjacent to it, three of its stones began to glow). After another round of discussion (I’ll say one thing for this group: they’ve definitely taken to heart Gary Gygax’s admonition that ToH “is a thinking person’s module…”), the events you read at the top of the post unfolded. After I told the group what had happened after they stepped through the swirling white mist within the archway, I wrote “LOL” in big letters in my notebook. Gary Gygax famously described this cursed archway’s teleportation of the characters to one destination while all their gear is taken to another spot as, “Cruel but most entertaining for the DM…”

Fool Me Once, Shame On You. Fool Me Twice, Shame On… Hey, look! Another archway!

Once our nekkid heroes scrambled down off the hilltop and made their way back to the entrance to the Tomb, they decided to spend some time trying to figure out the very first mist-filled archway. On a successful Arcana check, they found out that not only was the archway imbued with powerful teleportation magic, but that safely working the arch involved touching its glowing stones in a particular order. In no time at all, they’d pressed the stones in the proper sequence (yellow, blue, orange) and the mist disappeared. Beyond the archway, they could see a smooth-walled stone chamber, and the red mosaic path ended at the far wall. Zanfire once again volunteered to be the first one through, but he passed through off the red tile path and was teleported to the north end of the entrance hall. Hmm… Marrak went through next, but he also passed through off the red path and so he too found himself standing at the north end of the hallway. Oops. After that, the adventurers realized their mistake and they all passed through the arch on the mosaic path.

Three-Armed Statue

Our nekkid heroes found themselves in uncomfortably close proximity to one another when they were all teleported into a small, utterly dark chamber. After a few moments of awkwardly bumping into one another (since Elric was the only one with darkvision), someone cast light on something (maybe the stick Zerbitt had found outside and been carrying around because it made him feel less naked and defenseless) and they saw that they were in a small room that contained an 8-foot tall statue of a four-armed gargoyle. One of its arms had been broken off, and it rested on the floor. They also noticed there didn’t seem to be any visible means of exit from the small chamber. Uh oh.

Not to worry, though. A successful Perception check uncovered a secret door in the room’s east wall. Opening the door revealed a 5-foot diameter crawlspace. Our heroes could see that after a short distance the crawlspace appeared to dead end at a stone wall with a 3-foot diameter gold sphere set in it. With a sigh of relief, they realized they were just off the Great Hall of Spheres. The successful Perception check had also revealed that each of the gargoyle’s three intact hands were carved with an indentation, as if some object were meant to be placed there. The fourth arm had no such indentation. The PCs could also tell that some rubble around the base of the statue contained traces of diamond dust and pulverized gems. A successful Thievery check revealed that both the statue and its broken arm were imbued with powerful magic and that activating the statue’s magic required a series of repeated actions. The PCs realized that they’d need to place the gems they’d discovered into the statue’s hands in order to activate it, but… but they no longer had the gems! The gems were in some unknown location, along with all the rest of their missing gear. Knowing there was nothing else they could do in the room with the three-armed statue, our heroes scrambled through the crawlspace and back out into the Great Hall of Sphere.

Once More, With Feeling…

Now knowing that pressing the colored stones of the entrance hall arch in a certain order had let them safely work it, our heroes now decided to try the same thing with the misty archway in the Great Hall of Spheres. They tried every possible combination, but the archway remained clouded and veiled with a haze that couldn’t be seen through. Based on the “oh-well-what’s-the-worst-that-could-happen?” line of reasoning, Zanfire then went through the cursed archway again. After a short while, he crawled back into the hall through the gold sphere and reported that the archway had once again teleported him to the top of the hill outside the entrance. Not knowing what else to do and not necessarily wanting to explore anywhere new while feeling all nude and whatnot, they decided to visit the chapel again and at the very least say a few desperate prayers that they’d somehow be able to recover their gear.

Eureka!

It turned out that the prayers weren’t needed, after all. As soon as they exited the crawlspace, the PCs could see that all of their gear was piled on top of the altar at the front of the chapel. After heartfelt exclamations of joy, they very carefully retrieved their weapons, armor, and other stuff (the altar was pulsing an opalescent blue, which the PCs thought looked ominous and so everyone was careful not to touch the altar itself). With smiles on their faces, they once again headed back out to the Great Hall of Spheres.

“Hey, y’all! This sphere is… Ouch!”

Finally, on their… what?... fourth visit to the hall, our heroes decided to check all of the spheres on the east and west walls. They split up and went about methodically checking each sphere by touch (the only way to detect an illusory sphere). They used ten-foot poles, shovels, etc but still Elric found out the hard way that two of the spheres (orange and bronze) were illusions covering spear traps. As the buxom drow poked each trapped sphere, she was attacked by glowing spears that erupted from the wall (+10 vs. Reflex; 3d8 damage, and ongoing 5 damage—save ends. Miss: Ongoing 5 damage—save ends). After the attacks, the spears faded to mist and disappeared. All of the other spheres were simply part of the frescoes painted on the walls, except for the red sphere held by the skeleton. Zerbitt discovered that the red sphere was an illusion covering a 5-foot-diameter crawlspace. After a short rest, Jack led our brave band of heroes as they entered the red sphere and made their way through 40 feet of rough passage that came to an apparent dead end at a blank stone wall.

Knowing by this time that when a crawlspace in the Tomb of Horrors dead ends at a blank stone wall, there is often more to the story than meets the eye, Jack rolled a Perception check to see what he could see. With her roll, what she saw was a crawlspace that came to an apparent dead end at a blank stone wall. Zerbitt squeezed his way past Jack and gave it a try. Nada. Blank stone wall. Elric was sure she could do better, so she made her way past Jack and Zerbitt and gave the wall a good once-over. Alas, she also didn’t find anything. Zanfire managed to carefully maneuver past Zerbitt, Jack, and Elric and with his excellent Perception check the warden found a secret door. Yeah!

Since Zerbitt had the party’s best Thievery, Zanfire let the thief sneak past him and check the secret door for locks or traps. Zerbitt found that the door appeared to be neither locked nor trapped, so he slowly opened it. Opening the secret door (onto a blank stone wall) caused the end of the tunnel to collapse under Zerbitt, unceremoniously dropping him into…

The Chamber of Three Chests

Despite being caught by surprise when the crawlspace’s floor collapsed underneath him, Zerbitt’s cat-like reflexes and agility allowed him to safely drop 10 feet into an empty chamber. Well, empty except for some piles of rubble and three closed chests that were set across the stone floor. The thief saw that each chest was 4 feet long, 2 feet wide, and 3 feet high. The first chest gleamed gold. The second chest was untarnished silver. The third was oak bound with thick bronze bands. Looking up and seeing Zanfire’s face peering over the edge of the hole in the ceiling, Zerbitt called up that it appeared to be safe to come down and join him.

Once the party was gathered in the 30’x30’ chamber, they examined the three chests. After Jack, Elric, Zanfire, and Zerbitt all failed to find anything fishy with their various Perception and Thievery checks, Marrak opened the oaken chest. And with a burst of bright light, an enormous skeletal figure erupted from the chest, its twin scimitars lashing out.

I’m not sure how it appeared to the players, but I thought they handled the fight with the Skeleton Blade Guardian (Level 12 Elite Brute) rather well. The monster bloodied several of them during the course of the encounter, but the issue was never really in doubt. However, that might have been because the players were pulling out Daily powers and action points and using them like there was no tomorrow. The very end of the fight was kind of interesting, though— at least from my standpoint. Zerbitt hit with some typically sneaky rogue-ish attack that did a ridiculous amount of damage and knocked the giant skeleton down to 1 hp. Now, all throughout the fight, the players had been doing this thing where they’d tell me the damage from their attacks, then ten seconds later go, “Oh wait, I forgot to add the bonus for Accurate Vampiric Strength of the Bear Clan, so add two more damage… oh, and three more for Shadow Kiss Wrath of the Sun…”, so I kind of waited for Zerbitt to do the same thing and belatedly take care of that one little lone hit point the skeleton had left. But he didn’t. And the skeleton was up next! Since Zerbitt was the last one to attack it, the skeleton targeted him with a scimitar attack. First, though, it had to weather a Warden’s Fury attack from Zanfire. When the longtooth shifter missed, the skeleton’s last gasp slash hit Zerbitt for 30 damage. Kaa-pow!

Okay, so anyway, that was the last of my fun with the skeleton because Marrak was up next and he got the kill on the party’s foe. There was then some debate about whether to take a short rest to heal up before opening the other chests (the oaken one turned out to be empty). I think it was Marrak that voiced a concern over there perhaps being more skeletons in the gold and silver chests and Elric who then said, “C’mon, what are the odds that’d happen?” Everyone laughed and agreed that was the line they’d put on Elric’s headstone.

After a short rest to lick their wounds, our heroes opened the other two chests. Elric opened the silver chest first. A pulse of shadow erupted as she opened it, and the air in the chamber was filled with a barrage of black darts (+15 vs. reflex; 4d10+1 force damage and the target is pushed 2 squares from the chest). The darts somehow missed Jack, but hit everyone else, even poor Marrak who by that point was standing inconspicuously over in the corner as far away from the chests as he could get. The dart attack caused Elric to stumble back into the gold chest and, as the chest popped open with a burst of green light, a swarm of hissing vipers poured forth. They immediately set about biting Elric (+18 vs. Reflex; ongoing 8 poison damage—save ends). Marrak charged over to smite the vipers, but he rolled a 1 and his attack went badly awry as the dwarf suddenly remembered he’s deathly afraid of snakes. Elric was up next and with her successful attack she discovered that the Horde of Vipers was a minion (Level 10 Minion Soldier). Scratch one mass of slithering, hissing snakes.

By that time the words “Extended Rest” were flying freely around the table. First, though, the PCs searched the two chests, and in the silver one they found a very large magic ring. Before heading to the chapel for their extended rest, Zerbitt decided to do one more check of the room. He rolled a nat 20 on his Perception check and darned if the thief didn’t find a crystal box with 3 gems hidden under some of the rubble. That discovery set off a flurry of “I also want to search” and “I want to search too,” but as everyone was grabbing for d20’s I assured them that there was absolutely positively nothing else to be found in the Chamber of Three Chests.

And so Session 3 of our most excellent Tomb of Horrors adventure ended with the heroes settling down in the chapel for some much needed R&R. Golly, after this extended rest, I sure hope nothing bad happens to them in the time before they can take another one. (Insert evil chuckle here.)

tomb of horrors: session 2

Elric took a firm grip on the rope, stepped past the skeleton lying on the floor, and followed Jack through the glowing orange mist of the archway. After passing through the mist, the drow found himself in a small room that was already occupied by a human revenant that looked a whole lot like Jack, except… except this human revenant was a chick! With a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, Elric looked down and saw that he was now sporting quite a large set of, ah… well, let’s just say the word “buxom” immediately popped into his head.

“Hi, I’m Jacqueline,” the revenant said.

“Hi, I’m… Elrika, I guess,” the well-endowed drow warlock replied.

* * * * *

It wasn’t until the party found a third mist-filled stone archway that someone finally mustered up the necessary courage (or foolishness) to pass through one, but when they did it was worth the wait (at least for me!) since hilarity and mayhem ensued.

But the second session of our Tomb of Horrors adventure actually began back in the Gargoyle Lair, so let’s start there, okay?

As you’ll recall, our five heroes had just defeated the Lesser Gargoyle Mauler and then taken a short rest in their fallen foe’s lair. Rather than head back out to the entrance corridor, they decided to check out the two doors they’d found in the gargoyle chamber. Session #2 began with Jack opening the wooden door in the east wall and peering inside. He saw a 10’x10’ room, empty of everything except a fine layer of dust and grit. From outside the room, he checked it for traps and whatnot, but didn’t find anything.

Going over to the wooden door in the south wall, Jack opened it and saw that it also opened onto 10’x10’ room. This room, though, was filled with the same nasty Grasping Rubble they’d found strewn across the floor of the Gargoyle Lair. However, Jack also spied another wooden door on the south wall of the small chamber. From outside the room, Jack prudently checked the chamber for traps and whatnot, but didn’t find anything.

After one or two others confirmed that the first 10’x10’ room was really just an empty room (although, like Jack, they didn’t actually go into the room), Zanfire decided to take one for the team, enter the second small chamber with the Grasping Rubble, and try the other door in there. So he went in, opened the door with no problem, and found that it opened onto yet another 10’x10’ chamber filled with the same nasty rubble. He could see that the new room had a door over on the west wall. And then the longtooth shifter was attacked by the Grasping Rubble (+13 vs. Reflex; 4d6+6 damage). After the rubble grasped and chomped on him but good, Zanfire decided to back out of the chamber and rejoin his comrades.

Gauntlet of Doors

Realizing that no one had actually entered the first room, Zerbitt decided to go in and check things out. Whereupon the thief promptly discovered a secret door set in the small room’s southern wall. And so began the party’s long, arduous journey through the gauntlet of doors.
Each of the seven rooms in this area contained a secret door that required a minimum of three standard actions to detect and open. It took one primary skill check (Perception) to locate a secret door, followed by two primary skill checks (Athletics or Thievery) to identify both of the door’s opening mechanisms. Rather than roll initiative, we went around in table order and each character had his normal allotment of actions for each round (standard, move, minor).

Oh, I forgot to mention that each of the rooms that made up this gauntlet of secret doors was protected by a magical bolt trap (+15 vs. Will; 4d8+2 force damage). On initiative count 0, characters in any part of the gauntlet were subject to attack by the magic trap that filled the area.

Like I said, it was a looong, arduous journey through the gauntlet. And every once in a while, with a pulse of white light, bolts of arcane force would lance out from the walls and ceiling of a room and zap a PC. Jack and Zanfire seemed to attract more than their fair share of the bolts and they were each bloodied, twice!, while making their way through the rooms. It got so bad that Marrak used a daily power, Stream of Life, so that his life force would flow into his badly wounded companions, granting them the vigor to press on through the gauntlet.

Finally, though, they all made it to the seventh secret door where they discovered 7 hidden studs lined up across the midpoint of the door. Someone figured out that the studs needed to be pressed in a particular order to open the door. After several unsuccessful attempts (during which the magical bolts were still zapping them), everyone was growing a bit discouraged. In fact, Elric and Zanfire had decided to retreat and were heading back out to the Gargoyle Lair.
Then Zerbitt pressed all of the studs in reverse order (7,6,5,4,3,2,1) and… the door opened! Well, actually it fell inward on top of Zerbitt, Jack, and Marrak, knocking all three of them prone. But, hey, the door was finally open!

Elric and Zanfire were still close enough to hear a loud crash, so they came a runnin’ to see what was up. They found Zerbitt, Jack, and Marrak picking themselves up from the floor. Zerbitt was muttering, “What? I meant to do that.”

Everyone gathered at the empty doorway, beyond which they could see that a crawlway (about 5’ in diameter) extended for ten feet beyond the room they were standing in. The end of the crawlway appeared to be a blank stone wall with a 3-foot-diameter silver sphere set in it. Hmm…

Great Hall of Spheres

After much messing around in the crawlspace, including someone “accidentally” poking Jack in the bum with their ten-foot pole (ahem), Zerbitt went through the illusory sphere and found himself in a broad hall that was similar to the tomb entrance. The hall’s floor was set with inlaid tiles and the walls and ceiling were covered with painted frescoes.

Once Zerbitt told everyone that it was safe to follow him, they all piled through into the Great Hall of Spheres. Looking at the frescoes, they saw that strange glyphs, symbols, and faces were set within two ranks of humanoid and monstrous figures standing along both walls. Each figure appeared to hold a colored sphere. Turning back to the silver sphere they had just crawled through, they realized that it was held at the feet of a four-armed gargoyle. (Besides the map laid out on the table, I also gave each of the players a handout which told them what creature was holding which sphere, etc.) They could also see that a mist-filled archway opened up at the southern end of the hall.

After taking a short rest to heal up after their grueling passage through the Gauntlet of Doors, our heroes spent quite a bit of time consulting the message from Acererak that they’d found set into the mosaic floor of the entrance corridor. They had already decided that the warning to “Shun green if you can…” was a reference to the great green devil face in the tomb entrance. Now they homed in on the next part of the message: “…but night’s good color is for those of great valor.” Based on this clue, they focused their attention on the black sphere, which was sitting at the feet of a hydra.

They didn’t bother examining the black sphere with a Perception check, or even poke it with a pole, before Jack just crawled right into it, so with a totally serious face I told Drew, “Okay, you crawl through it and you’re dead.” The look on Drew’s face was priceless. Hee hee.

Okay, anyway, so actually Jack found that there was a crawlspace behind the black sphere. There was some discussion about whether they’d be able to survive an encounter with a hydra if that’s what they discovered at the end of the crawlspace (based on the fact that a four-armed gargoyle was holding the silver sphere through which they’d come into the hall), but eventually our heroes decided to just all pile into the crawlspace and damn the torpedoes.

As they all snaked through the crawlspace, it turned twice but maintained a generally southward course. Then suddenly, around the last bend, it stopped dead at a blank wall of stone. Jack did a Perception check, but didn’t perceive anything except that they were all piled into a crawlspace that had suddenly dead-ended at a blank stone wall. Elric wanted to have a go at it, so he wiggled past Jack and did a Perception check. The drow also didn’t perceive anything except that they were all piled into a crawlspace that had suddenly dead-ended at a blank stone wall. Zerbitt wanted to try, so after much jostling and stepping on toes, he managed to get to the front of the line. The thief took one look at the blank wall of stone and located a secret door that opened into…

The Chapel

After opening the secret door, Zerbitt noticed a mosaic path like the one at the tomb entrance running from the secret door to pass between two rows of great wooden pews. He saw that the walls in the large chamber were painted with frescoes of everyday rural life. However, the figures depicted there had rotting flesh and skeletal limbs, their features eaten away by worms.

After Zerbitt cautiously stepped into the chamber and the others followed him, they saw that they seemed to be in some kind of chapel. A wooden railing divided the room, with the mosaic path leading through it to a tiered dais set with a pair of brass candelabra and a blue stone altar. On the floor on each side of the dais was a large ceramic urn. To the west of the dais was a stone archway filled with glowing orange mist.

Since each of the pews had a bench with a hinged seat, Jack decided to open one. Choosing the back pew, he found that the storage space beneath the seat contained 2,000sp. Woo hoo! Loot! Going forward, he next tried the front pew. As the revenant lifted the seat, a cloud of acrid gas (+11 vs. Fortitude; 4d8 poison damage) filled the air. Woo hoo! A trap! That still didn’t dissuade just about everyone from running around and checking pew after pew, throwing them open, and finding thousands more gold and silver pieces.

Meanwhile, Marrak seemed to be the only one of the party not obsessed with pews. The dwarf warpriest went cautiously up the central aisle and surveyed the blue altar from a safe distance. He could see that it had the symbols of Pelor, Avandra, Moradin, and Bahamut engraved on its front. Doing a Religion check, Marrak found that powerful magic filled the room, and that its arcane essence was inextricably consecrated to good. Everyone puzzled over this discovery, since it didn’t seem to fit with the disturbing frescoes painted on the chapel’s walls. Being a devoted follower of Pelor, Marrak decided to go up onto the dais and say a prayer to the god of sun and summer. As he knelt down and lifted up a fervent and heartfelt prayer, the altar began to glow an opalescent blue.

Several of the adventurers, after advancing toward the front of the room, saw a humanoid skeleton in badly rusted black chainmail lying on the floor with one of its bony hands pointing toward the stone archway filled with glowing orange mist. Marrak did a Heal check on the skeleton, but couldn’t discern anything about how its owner had met his/her end. The mysterious skeleton apparently held no secrets, nor did the large urns on either side of the dais. Jack and Zanfire had thoroughly investigated them, but they didn’t find out anything besides the fact that the urns were empty.

Perhaps to make up for the non-event that was the urn search, Jack suddenly announced that he was going to go through the stone archway filled with glowing orange mist. The chapel went silent at this announcement and heads swiveled toward the revenant to see if he was joking (even Zerbitt looked up momentarily from his systematic looting of the pews), but no, they could see Jack was serious.

At that point, as DM, I really had to struggle to keep a poker face because inside I was so chuckling maliciously and thinking, “Oh please please please, let him do it!” And sure enough, he did.

After tying a rope around his waist and having Marrak secure it to the wooden railing, Jack strode through the orange archway. With that, I took Drew away from the table for a minute and explained to him what had happened after Jack stepped through the archway. Jack had found he was in a small room beyond the orange mist, that he was suddenly a she, and that she had the uncontrollable urge to go back through the archway and attack her nearest ally.

After Drew and I got back to the table, Elric was up next and he also went through the orange archway. So I took Robert away from the table and explained to him what had happened after Elric stepped through the cursed archway.

No one else wanted to go through the archway after that. Go figure.

And so it came to pass that Jack/Jacqueline and Elric/Elrika emerged from the archway and— as Marrak and Zanfire exchanged stunned and puzzled glances— the drow and revenant attacked poor Marrak, who just happened to be standing nearest to the archway. Luckily, they both missed, but that didn’t stop Zanfire (who was obviously thoroughly discombobulated by the surreal turn of events) from charging forward and attacking Jack. Jack used Slayer’s Escape as an immediate reaction, so after being struck, he folded shadows around himself and disappeared. The way that worked mechanically is that he teleported 5 squares and became invisible until the start of his next turn. A nifty move, except he still had the rope tied around his waist. Oops.

It needs to be said that during all of this sex-changing mayhem and murderous raging, Zerbitt had barely paused in his looting of the pews. But, hey, isn’t that exactly what you’d expect from a 9th level thief?

Alright, so Elric saved from the murderous rage part of the curse right away, but Jack didn’t snap out of it until Marrak used Soothing Light to give the revenant an extra saving throw. Once Elric was back in his right mind, he did an Arcana check and determined that once the rage ends, the sex of a character can be restored only by a combination of a Remove Affliction ritual and the character entering the archway again. However, he didn’t know the sequence in which those two actions needed to be performed. The warlock must’ve skipped Arcana class the day that information was imparted.

By that point, it was almost closing time at our FLGS, Total Escape Games, so our second session of Tomb of Horrors ended with Jack and Elric wondering aloud if going through the rest of the adventure as chicks would really be such a bad thing...

tomb of horrors: session 1

The legend of the Tomb is an old story, with many parts, some of which are merely groundless rumors. The most reliable accounts relate that centuries ago a human magic user known throughout the Nentir Vale for his surpassing evil took the steps necessary to preserve his life force beyond the long ages he had already lived, and this creature became the lich Acererak. Over the scores of years that followed, the lich dwelled deep in the Witchlight Fens with hordes of wretched slaves and ghastly servants. For reasons unknown, Acererak eventually destroyed all of his slaves and servitors and hid the entrance to his halls under a lost and lonely hill of grim and foreboding aspect.

Since then, countless adventurers have been drawn to their doom by tales of rich treasures, both precious and magical, which fill the mad lich’s crypt. Other heroes, warriors of virtue and champions of righteousness, have arrived at the Tomb seeking to vanquish a legendary evil. Of all those brave or foolhardy adventurers who have entered Acererak’s final haunt, only a few broken souls have ever returned to spread the tales of dread which make up the legend of the Tomb.

Therefore be warned. The passages and rooms of the Tomb are fraught with deadly traps, poison gases, and magical protections. Furthermore, the demi-lich has so well hidden his lair that even those who enter the Tomb and avoid the many pitfalls will likely fail to locate their true goal. So only the most skilled and courageous parties should dare enter. Fame and fortune will be yours if you succeed in defeating Acererak… but if you fail, you will be destroyed like those who came before you.

* * * * *

Thursday night at Total Escape Games, five courageous (or foolhardy) players gathered to tackle the Tomb of Horrors. The original version of ToH was written by none other than Gary Gygax and first used as the official Dungeons & Dragons tournament adventure at Origins I in 1975. It used the original D&D rules, published just the year before the gaming convention. ToH has become a legend in gaming circles; its dark reputation built on the sense of ever-impending doom that dogs the footsteps of every adventurer who has ever braved the perils of Acererak’s crypt. In 2010 the classic dungeon crawl was faithfully recreated and updated for 4th Edition D&D rules by Scott Fitzgerald Gray, and then it was given out as part of the DM Rewards program. It’s the version that I’m using for our game.

One week before our game was set to begin, I emailed the adventure background you read at the beginning of this post to the five players who would be taking on the Tomb. Thursday night, however, at the beginning of our first session, I went old school and read them the famous introduction to ToH that was penned by Gary Gygax when the adventure was released to the public as Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Module S1 in 1978. And with that, we were off to the Tomb of Horrors…

* * * * *

The five 9th level PCs embarking upon the adventure were…

• Elric (drow warlock)


• Jack “Nobody” Owens (revenant human assassin)


• Marrak Sunhammer (dwarf warpriest)


• Zanfire (longtooth shifter warden)


• Zerbitt (human thief)

Knowing that it is all but impossible for outsiders to navigate through the Witchlight Fens (the vast and treacherous swamp at the confluence of the Nentir River and the White River), our heroes wisely hired a marsh guide to deliver them to the supposed location of the Tomb. The marsh guide and his cousin, quiet fellows but skilled boatmen, unerringly steered their craft through the swamp until the party arrived at a small, seasonal hunting camp just as darkness was falling. It was a miserable night filled with more mosquitoes than sleep, but when they did manage to drift off into a troubled slumber, they each had a troubling dream. In the dream, they were floating high above a lost and lonely hill surrounded by a great swamp which stretched for miles in every direction. From above, they could see that the hill’s distinctive black boulders formed the eyes, nose, and jagged teeth of a grinning human skull. When one-by-one they woke from this unsettling dream, they were loathe to fall back asleep and so they each lay awake, lost in their own thoughts, waiting for sunrise.

After spending a miserable night in those few ramshackle huts, the small expedition was back on its way as soon as it was light, and several more hours in the boats brought them to their destination.

It was a hot and humid morning when the boats deposited the adventurers and their equipment on a large patch of dry ground that is surrounded by perilous marshland. Dominating this piece of ground is a barren hill. With a start, each of adventurer recognized it as the very hill that was in the dream the night before. Despite the warmth of the new day, cold chills ran up their spines.

The marsh guide and his cousin quickly took their leave, promising to return in 48 hours and immediately thereafter depart— whether or not our heroes are there to climb aboard the boats.

The party had been left off on the southern edge of the large patch of dry ground. Before them was the low, flat-topped hill, measuring about 200 yards wide by 300 yards long. Only ugly weeds and nasty thorn bushes grew upon the steep sides and top of the 60 foot high mound. While Elric, Marrak, and Zerbitt set off to make a circuit around the base of the hill, Jack decided he wanted to take a closer look at the massive black boulders crowning the hilltop. Zanfire accompanied the assassin and together they scrambled up to the top of the hill. The two of them inspected the boulders, but there was nothing noteworthy about the stones except that they did indeed seem to have been placed around the hilltop in a deliberate pattern. Neither Jack nor Zanfire doubted that if the boulders were seen from a viewpoint high above the hill, they would form the features of a grinning death’s head skull.

Meanwhile, the other three adventurers had found that the north side of the hill had a 20 foot high, 300 foot wide crumbling cliff of sand and gravel. While Elric poked around with his handy 10 foot wooden pole, Zerbitt started to dig in the middle of the cliff with a shovel. Marrak thought all of that looked too much like work and so the dwarf wandered off, saying he was going to check and see what was going on atop the hill.

After just a few minutes of digging, Zerbitt found some stonework under the sand and gravel. Calling over Elric, the two of them quickly uncovered what they believed to be the upper corner of some kind of gate or entryway. Yelling excitedly for the others, they shared the news of their discovery. Jack, Marrak, and Zanfire quickly came down from the hilltop, and together the five adventurers discussed what to do next. It was obvious they could dig out a narrow crawlspace through the sand and gravel in fairly short order (10 minutes), but completely clearing the entrance would take much longer (1 hour). Thinking that a larger opening would facilitate a fast exit if they needed to retreat out of the dungeon, the party elected to spend the time needed to completely clear the entryway.

An hour later, our dirty, sweaty heroes had uncovered the entrance to a corridor that led southward into the heart of the hill. The first light brought to bear on the corridor revealed that it was an unusual tunnel. Bright, brilliant colors were to be seen everywhere. The floor of the corridor was a colorful mosaic of stone, with a distinct winding path of red tiles about 2 feet wide snaking its way south from the entryway.

After cautiously edging a few feet into the corridor, the characters could see that the walls and ceiling (20 feet overhead) were smooth plaster frescoes illustrated with interior and exterior scenes. Several of the scenes had been painted so skillfully that they almost appeared to be in 3-D: a library stood filled with many books and scrolls; a fiendish creature in a torture chamber lurked behind a barred door; and— closest to where the adventurers were standing there gawping— a wizard’s workroom was guarded by two jackal-headed humanoids.

From where they stood, the characters could see that the jackal-headed figures had been painted so as to appear to be holding a real bronze chest that was jutting out from the wall. Jack made his way over to the spot and closely examined the chest. He discovered a hidden catch on top of it. After discussing whether they ought to attempt to open the chest or continue to explore the rest of the corridor, the group decided to check out the rest of the corridor. So Zerbitt boldly started off down the red tile path…

Whereupon he almost immediately claimed the honor of taking the party’s first damage in the Tomb when a 10’x10’ section of floor suddenly collapsed beneath him to reveal a deadly spiked pit. Zerbitt dropped into the trap, taking 2d10+1 damage, ongoing 5 poison damage (save ends), and falling prone.

After Zerbitt clambered out of the pit trap, Elric proposed that he summon his devil lackey (Summon Warlock’s Ally) and that the party use poor Mr. Lackey as a scout/trap detector. Everyone agreed that this was an excellent idea. So it was that a sudden gust of wind, the smell of brimstone, and a flash of light heralded the arrival of a foul-tempered creature, pulled from the planes to serve the drow warlock.

Making his surly way down the corridor, Mr. Lackey tripped two more pit traps. Following him down the hallway, the PCs noticed that faint runes set into the mosaic floor spelled out a message. “Acererak congratulates you on your powers of observation. So make of this whatever you wish, for you will be mine in the end no matter what!” The message then went on to offer obscure clues about the PCs journey through the Tomb. I gave each of the players a copy of the message. It’s up to them to decide whether the clues provided by Acererak are meant to help them or harm them.

The red tile pathway split at the southern end of the corridor. To the east stood a mist-filled archway and on the southern wall was the face of a great green devil. Carved of sickly green stone, the very sight of the evil-appearing devil face was enough to keep the heroes from investigating it too closely. Oh, did I mention that its mouth (about 3 feet in diameter— plenty of room for those who wish to leap in) is an impenetrable black haze?!

The misty archway garnered more attention, especially when three of its stones began to glow (bright yellow at lower left; blue at top; and orange at the lower right) whenever anyone moved adjacent to it. However, the party decided to steer clear of the archway after Elric found that it was imbued with powerful teleportation magic.

Going back to the bronze chest on the wall, Elric commanded Mr. Lackey to open it. Mr. Lackey found out the hard way that the catch which Jack had discovered not only opened the chest, but it was also a poisoned needle trap. The small sting didn’t improve the devil’s disposition. After the lid swung downward, though, he did gain some spiteful joy from informing the party that the chest appeared to be absolutely empty. Elric ordered him to feel around in the chest. Mr. Lackey rolled his eyes at such nonsense, but then his eyes popped open in surprise when he found an invisible lever. When the warlock ordered him to pull the lever, he did… which caused the floor underneath to collapse, revealing a 30 foot deep pit trap. This was of little concern to Mr. Lackey since he could fly, but Marrak just happened to be standing behind the devil and the stout dwarf dropped like a stone into the pit. After taking an ouch-inducing 5d10+2 damage and 5 ongoing poison damage (save ends), the cleric was lying prone amidst the spikes when he noticed a pouch with some gems spilling out of it. Taking up the pouch, Marrak found that it contained 6 gems (50 gp each).

After helping Marrak up and out of the pit trap, everyone decided to follow up on a couple of clues in Acererak’s message. One clue said that “two pits along the way will be found to lead to a fortuitous fall, so check the wall.” The party decided to check the walls in all the pit traps, but found nothing. The second clue they decided to follow up was the one which said, “Go back to the tormentor or through the arch, and the second great hall you’ll discover.” Checking out the fresco of the torture chamber a bit more closely, they could see that it did indeed show an iron door, behind which a demon was tormenting shackled prisoners. They also noticed a few chips and gaps in the plaster through which the underlying stonework of the corridor could be seen. Zanfire used a shovel to start pulling away great chunks of the plaster. The shifter’s work uncovered an iron-banded oak door hidden behind the fresco!

Just to be safe, the party decided to have Zanfire pull away the plaster across the corridor that showed the library filled with many books and scrolls, but there was nothing behind that fresco. Turning back to the secret door which they’d found behind the tormentor, everyone looked to Mr. Lackey with expectant expressions. With a long-suffering sigh, the devil tried the handle on the door and found that it wasn’t locked. As he pushed open the door, the adventurers could see that it opened onto a short, 20 foot long corridor which led to another oak door. Mr. Lackey found that the second door was also unlocked and that it led into a larger chamber.

Entering the chamber, Mr. Lackey suddenly found himself taking damage from some rubble that was strewn across the floor. As he looked down at the Grasping Rubble which was doing 4d6+6 damage and slowing him, the devil heard a horrible shriek erupt from somewhere above. Mr. Lackey looked up just in time to see an enormous four-armed gargoyle swooping down from the chamber’s ceiling. The gargoyle viciously and utterly annihilated poor Mr. Lackey with four claw attacks (Mauling Claws: each attack +15 vs AC; 4d6+4 damage). The gargoyle then flew back up to the ceiling, disappearing from sight (Flying Strike).

The adventurers, who had been hanging back in the short corridor, letting poor Mr. Lackey scout ahead and do all the dirty work, barely had time to register the devil’s sudden demise and think “Oh crap!” before I told them to roll initiative.

The heroes found the Lesser Gargoyle Mauler (I’d hate to meet the Greater one, considering that the Lesser version which the party faced here had 428 hit points and an AC of 24) within the chamber to be a tough opponent, especially since its Flying Strike power recharged each of the first few turns and it was able to swoop down, wreak havoc, then fly back up to the ceiling where it was well out of their melee reach. The gargoyle’s Mauling Claws power was devastating and soon enough Zanfire gained the distinction of being the first character in the party to be cut down in the Tomb. The unconscious and dying warden didn’t stay down for long, though. It’s always nice to have a cleric along on an adventure, and Marrak quickly proved his worth in this first monster battle by healing Zanfire and getting him right back into the fight.

The party took a looong time to wear the gargoyle down to its bloodied value, but by that time they’d got him down on ground level and their attacks really started to dish out some serious damage. On one memorable round, Jack dealt the monster a whopping 54 points of damage. Elric got in the final blow that KIAd the gargoyle. As the drow stood gloating over the party’s fallen foe, he noticed that around the gargoyle’s neck was a collar studded with 3 blue gems (worth 250 gp). While examining his loot, he noticed that hidden within the leather bands of the collar was a message. The message read: “Look low and high for gold, to hear a tale untold. The archway at the end, and on your way you’ll wend. —A.”

In the calm after the end of the fight, the PCs also noticed that there were two doors (besides the one through which they’d entered) inside the gargoyle’s lair. Both doors, one in the east wall and one to the south, were of the (soon-to-be-all-too-familiar) iron-banded oak variety. While deciding what to do next, the adventurers took a short rest.

And it was there that our first Tomb of Horrors session ended.