Down on the third level, we play with wind, water, fungus and fire, while suspicion grows as more heroes begin acting strangely.

When last we left our heroes, we started the session on the 2^nd floor landing in the Grand Staircase and as usual, ended the session in the same spot. We explored the tombs of I’jin and Papazotl but we didn’t solve either one. Instead, we wasted a ton of time trying to get through a hole in the floor and a door stuffed with zombies. We got ambushed by more Tomb Guardian golems, but did finally kill and collect our first Skeleton Key. These are literal skeletons that run around the dungeon, trying to avoid us. Their skulls have been carved into various geometric shapes and presumably unlock something on a lower level.

But the most important development is the one that 75% of the players know nothing about. At one point, Gwen, our pivotal cleric, got separated from the group. She was waylaid and possibly killed by a rogue doppelgänger that is the last surviving member of the previous adventuring party that just recently perished here in the tomb. The doppelgänger has now assumed Gwen’s identity and has joined the rest of the group. The player, Ian, is on board with this plan, in fact, it was his idea. It will be interesting to watch how long we can keep up this ruse. The doppelgänger, Pox, cares only about one thing; getting out of this dungeon alive. Privately, I gave Ian a stat block card for the doppelgänger’s abilities and skills. His biggest challenge is that Pox may look like Gwen, but he does not have any of her clerical abilities. This should be fun.

At the end of last session, several heroes were injured, especially Bag of Nails, from their fight with the Tomb Guardians. They all looked to Gwen crying, “I need heals!” Right away Pox’s lack of healing spells is posing a problem and “Gwen” plays that she is totally frustrated with her companions. “Is that all I’m good for? Gwen, heal me, heal me. Hey, here’s an idea. Dodge better!” Fortunately, Gwen (and now Pox) owns a staff of healing. “Gwen” used the staff to heal Bag of Nails a little bit. Yeah, I know the staff requires attunement, but I ignored that rule. Sue me. Thames asked why Gwen doesn’t cast her spells. Once again, “Gwen” got defensive and claimed that she used up her healing spells on the party all ready and recommended that they take a short rest to heal further. The others could not remember if this was true or not and they had no reason to doubt their stalwart companion of two years. Not yet, anyway.

The group was worried about roaming packs of Tomb Dwarves, so they barricaded themselves in the room with the Green Devil Face on the floor (Area 18). They set an alarm and hunkered down. I gave them a 60% chance to avoid any patrols. Thankfully, nothing disturbed their rest, but when they came back out onto the Grand staircase, the golems they had just killed had been removed. The Tomb Dwarves are still on the job. Not wanting to stick around on this level, our heroes moved on to Level 3.

On the landing, they read Acererak’s Third Warning and moved down the north hall. The Jackal Mask in Area 29 is not a trap or anything dangerous. They got a good glimpse into I’jin’s Tomb, which confirmed what they already knew about it from Martic’s drop into the room last session. They moved on to the west corridor to Area 41 – Tomb Guardians. The only change I made was that the Guardians won’t enter the stairwell, mostly because they just fought these guys and I don’t want to repeat myself right away. Martic tried to limbo under the chain and got mercilessly beat down for his effort. Martic retreated down the hall and the Tomb Guardians returned to their alcoves. Martic needed some healing so “Gwen” begrudgingly used some more charges from his staff of healing. Thames did not approve.

Maybe the third corridor will be the charm. Heading south, the hallway split. They turned right and ended up crawling through a narrow corridor that ended at Area 30 – Iron Barrier. They easily solved this by lifting it up and jamming iron pitons to wedge it in place, exactly as recommended in the book. Next, they crawled into the corridor and had their first true encounter with the alien spores infecting this level.

A purple fungal growth can be found clinging to the walls, floors, and ceilings of the entire level. This fungus has polyps that resemble tiny eyestalks. The group has been careful to avoid touching any of these creepy spores, but this hallway is more heavily coated than the others. The fire from the torch they carry burns the fungus on the ceiling. Suddenly, an actual eyestalk pokes out of the fungus, looks around the room, and blasts the torch bearer with a beam of green light from its eye. The torch bearer happens to be Grum. Luckily, he makes his save and takes only 6 points of poison damage. They debate for a while about what this all means, and the general consensus is that there’s a beholder nearby.

They end up crawling through another small corridor that opens up on to Area 37 – Winds of Pandemonium. A great title for a meh room. I made one change to the room. Oddly the book states that when the hurricane winds blow it only affects the people standing on the two balconies, not the floating platforms. Well, that’s silly, so I have the winds affect everyone in the room. Also, if the PC fails his save by more than five points, then they are knocked back ten feet. If this knocks them off a floating platform, I would allow a DC 15 Athletic/Acrobatics check to grab onto the edge, leaving them dangling over the long drop down. I also did something extra the first time this happened, but I’ll explain that soon enough.

In addition, this isn’t mentioned in the book, but the little crawlway that the heroes are crouched in is about five feet away and fifteen feet above the western balcony. Our more athletic heroes jumped the gap easily and landed on the balcony with a DC 12 check. They began to make preparations to rig an elaborate rope system to pull over Gwen, who has never passed a single Athletics check in the entire campaign. Suddenly, she leaped from the alcove, landing square in middle of the balcony with a graceful tuck and roll. Her companions were speechless, and Grum was aghast, but Gwen shrugged it off. We moved on without further inquiries.

In the room proper, with no visual clues, Trickster possession insights, or Acererak Warnings to guide them, they pulled the lever located on the wall. The winged statue on the far balcony opened it hands, howling winds burst forth from everywhere, and everyone failed their save, taking damage. Worse still, most everyone failed by more than five points. Everyone was knocked backward, some against the wall, others spilling onto the stairs behind them. Thanks to the balcony, they were all protected from fall damage and since they were taking psychic damage, I had them roll on the short-term madness table. Gwen and Savash were incapacitated, babbling gibberish, Bag and Thames began hallucinating, and Martic was knocked unconscious. Only Grum withstood the onslaught, fought off the madness and turned off the lever, calming the winds and ending the insanity.

After this, the room was a cake walk, or rather a bug float. Martic slowly levitated on his swarm to the other balcony. He lashed himself to the statue with some rope and yelled back for Grum to pull the lever again while the rest hid in the stairwell away from the wind’s wrath. Both Martic and Grum passed this save. Martic collected two more crystals from the open palms of the statue. (He got his first two last session, but no one else knows about them yet.) The winds were turned off once more. The party tied a rope to the west balcony, climbed down to the floor 60’ below, walked to the east balcony, where Martic lowered a rope and pulled them all back up. A surprisingly simple trap.

Nah, I’m kidding. They actually did the entire room as written, jumping from platform to platform while each member was tied to another member in a crazy daisy chain of tedious athletics rolls. “Gwen” passed hers with flying colors and it was actually Grum who failed and nearly dragged everyone else to their doom. Again it was Gwen who was able to hold on and stop this domino effect from killing everyone. When did she become an Olympic athlete? What is up with her lately? Once they all reached the far balcony, they crawled their way over to Area 36 – Chamber of Respite. Despite the fact that everyone was injured and the fact that this room is designed to be the single safe space to rest within the entire dungeon, our heroes did not trust this room and moved on to:

Area 31 – Curtain of Water. I didn’t make any changes to the room, but my players came up with a better solution than the one presented in the book, so I went with that. My players were just happy to finally have a room that they had a clue for, courtesy of Acererak’s Warnings; “Walk through water with weapon in hand.” The only question was which weapon? There are six murals on the walls each holding a different weapon, though technically there are five since one of the murals is weaponless. The book states that only the trident will solve this puzzle and allow you to pass through the wall of water, presumably because the trident is the only water-based weapon, but there is zero confirmation of this fact.

My group came up with a more elegant solution. There happen to be six “members” in the group and six murals on the wall. The weaponless mural was tricky because that mural is unarmed and the Acererak clue demands that you carry a weapon. Thank the gods that Bag of Nails is in our group, because as a tabaxi he was the only one with a natural unarmed weapon, his claws. The party lined up as depicted on the murals, Martic first with the trident, Thames with the sickle, unarmed Bag with his claws out, Gwen with a blowgun, Grum with the mace, and finally Savash with the handaxe. This was such a good solution that I didn’t have the heart to tell them that they were wrong!

So, they passed through the waterfall to the other side. In this new room that mirrored the old room they found a hallway going left and a crawlway going right. They must really like tight spaces, because they picked the crawlway. By the way, they did not find the illusory walls nor the requisite crystals behind them. I considered just allowing them to find these items, because I hate backtracking, but I decided to let it play out and see how they react when they come up two crystals short later on. For now, it’s on to:

Area 32 – Rotating Crawlways. I did not change this room, but we did solve it in a hilarious manner and we learned some interesting facts along the way. Since Roland is no longer our front-line fighter, Martic has been leading the way. He has darkvision and good perception, though not good enough for this trap. Fortunately, they also keep a 5’ distance between party members in case something triggers in a hallway like this. Martic triggered the trap and the whole hallway corkscrewed away. I like the ingenuity of this trap; that it doesn’t just rotate, but also rises or falls to reveal a whole new passageway. Thames was next in the party order and which placed him in the affected area of the trap. He quickly cast misty step. I made him roll a Dex save to do this in time. He passed and escaped the tunnel to join the rest of the group before it was too late. Sadly, Martic had no such luck.

As the new tunnel spun into place, Thames saw the skeletal corpse in the new hallway and for a brief second, he was concerned that Martic had been killed. This was understandable. I described the hallway as just rotating away, then when the new hallway (which looks identical to the old hallway) came back into view, there was a dead body right where they last saw Martic. Then suddenly, Thames and the rest of the group felt an irresistible urge to eat. Everyone was inexplicably hungry.

This was actually a secret code that Martic and the group had worked out beforehand. Martic has a telepathic connection to his faerie dragon, Summerwise, who joined the group back in Session 30. Martic can “talk” to it in full sentences using just their minds, but the faerie dragon can only communicate with the rest off the group using feelings or emotions. Since Martic is often out of sight in front of the group, they decided that if he ever got in trouble or incapacitated, then the dragon would send out a sudden wave of craving or hunger (as we described it) to let the others know. It was a huge sigh of relief to know that Martic was alive and not the dead body before them. But who is this guy?

No one dared to re-enter this hallway, so they used a grappling hook to drag the skeleton back to the group. I texted Gwen/Pox and said that he recognizes the corpse as that of Sephirius, the dragonborn paladin from the Company of the Yellow Banner. “Gwen” played her part perfectly, and proclaimed, “By the gods, It’s Sephirius!”

Predictably, her confused companions cried in unison, “Who? How do you know?”

Hastily, Gwen made excuses. “Unh, he was in that, um, letter that the, ah, goat-guy wrote. It must be him” Our heroes accepted this answer without question even though that letter only refers to the paladin as “Seph” and not by his full name. Ha ha ha. They don’t suspect a thing. Even when they asked Gwen to cast speak with the dead to interrogate the skeleton, and she claimed that she didn’t have the spell prepared. That may have been true, but I just assumed that it was another lie.

Even without the spell, they deduced that some weight must trigger the trap. If only they had something heavy to set it off, and some way to get it into the center of the trap, then maybe it would rotate again. But what do we have that we don’t need? Everyone checked their inventory, when suddenly Gwen exclaimed, “Apparently, I’m carrying this sack of useless skulls for some reason!” Useless Skulls? Are you mad? That has been your whole gimmick from the very beginning! Are you feeling okay? Quickly Gwen deflected, “If it’s to save Martic, I’ll do it!” Yes, the ruse is still in play. Pox survives another day. We spend the next few minutes rummaging through Gwen’s skull sack.

There are so many skulls to choose from. First, they got a couple of Yuan-ti heads from Session 13 that they hid from Savash, the hags from Session 21, and seven (7!) ghoul heads that have been rotting in her bag since Session 24. The first named skulls came from the Red wizard Atticus Sheffield Smythe III and the traitorous Xandala from Session 30. They have the skull of a pterafolk named Scarbeak from Session 31, a couple of Star Wars battle droids from Session 33, and two of the three pirate captains from Session 34. Finally, they have the deceptive Yuna-ti guide, Salida from Session 35, a couple more unimportant red wizards from Session 39, and even the skull of Thames’ dead brother that Atticus was using as his spell focus. The only skull they wished they had is that of Ras Nsi, but only because Gwen was not present when he was killed. Still, that’s a lot of skulls. So how many do we need?

To save time, I told them that they need 50 pounds of skull. How many skulls is that? We looked it up. A human head weights 10-11 pounds, with 2.2 pounds going to the skull, 3 pounds for the brain, and about 5 pounds for the skin, muscle and blood. And now you know. I decreed that each rotting head weighs about five pounds so they need ten heads to trigger the trap. The quickly choose the 7 ghouls (they were never going to collect the bounty on them) and the three red wizards (yeah, screw those guys; though I would have liked to have saved Atticus if I could). Then Thames finally used mage hand in a proper way, and one by one, shoved the skulls down the hall until it re- triggered the trap and Martic spun back to safety. In all the excitement, Seph’s treasure ended up in Savash’s hands. Now this Yuan-ti spy has one of the plot-necessary crystal gems hidden in his possession. And in just a little while, he’ll get his hands on a true item of power. What could go wrong?

On to Area 33 – Chamber of Opposition and the quickest room of the entire dungeon. The only real mystery here is the use of the word font to mean fountain in Acererak’s Warning. But when the box description uses the exact same word, Thames solved it immediately. Thames backed into the room, “drank” from the font and was rewarded with a nice shiny orange crystal. That’s six down, but the party only knows about 3 of them. Also fortunately, no one looked at the shadow in the room which would have triggered its Save or Die Death Gaze. Next!

Area 35 – I’jin’s Tomb. We’re back here again, but finally we arrived at the proper starting point. The only change I made was to remove the telepathic link between a PC standing at Area 34 and a PC standing inside the tomb. One of our heroes already has this ability and I want to see if they will utilize it to solve this puzzle. They do. Between this room and the last room, I was really proud of my players, but I began to fear that these traps might prove too easy for them thanks to the clues given in Acererak’s Warning. Now that they’ve seen how this dungeon works and thinks, I’m worried that our heroes could easily dismantle all the carefully constructed traps. I imagined that a certain architect would be pretty angry with this group of do-gooders coming in here and destroying his life’s work. This architect’s whole persona was borne out of this frustartion. And no, the architect is not Acererak.

Anywho, our heroes quickly figured out this puzzle pretty quick. They learned that the peephole reveals a hieroglyph that is on the door to the tomb. They can see that the first glyph is a vulture and thanks to the Acererak’s clues, they know that the vulture is the first step. The found the button that opens the door and realized that one hero would have to be sealed into the room while another stood outside viewing the next glyph in the puzzle. The only problem was how to communicate with each other.

They couldn’t use the sending stones for this trap; there would be too much back and forth conversation. I was curious to see if they would come up with another solution, but they just relied on Martic’s telepathic bond with Summerwise. Martic will go in the tomb, Gwen (and the rest) will stay outside. The plan worked perfectly. Martic stepped into the room onto the vulture tile, as Acererak’s clue stated. Via the peephole, Gwen called out the next hieroglyph to Summerwise, who told Martic via telepathy; vulture, serpent, door, reed, scarab, scepter, foot, and urn. The only flaw with this design is that there are two scarabs side by side to choose from, but it doesn’t affect the solving of the puzzle, so I made both a valid option.

With the puzzle solved, the sarcophagus opened and Martic looked inside. The bones of I’jin the Almiraj lay entombed along with his magical horn (as in unicorn, not bugle.) Even better, Thames is not in the room, so mage hand cannot be used to touch this possessed treasure. And touch it Martic does. Finally, I have my second PC possessed by a Trickster God. And this one is perfect for this player. I’jin is fickle and unpredictable, who’s flaw is that he never follows a plan. This will create countless moments of chaos into the rest of the adventure, much to the annoyance of the very straight-forward Thames, who always follows the plan. And the horn function as the perfect item in enact this chaos. It is a wand of wonder, whose tremendous (and ridiculous) magic is determined by the random roll of the dice. I also got the perfect prop for it.

From here, the party decides to get back to the upper floors and clear out the parts of the dungeons they skipped. FOMO! But not before everyone needs a little healing. So, Gwen begrudgingly whips out her trusty staff of healing and used up all the charges, which infuriated Thames. “Just cast a spell. What is wrong with you?” Oh, if you only knew. This is the first time ever that I had a player drain a magic item to empty. Fortunately Gwen rolls well on the item’s saving throw. The staff was not destroyed and it will regain new charges at dawn. Of course no one knows when dawn will be. We have lost all track of time in this cursed dungeon.

Back up on Level 1, our heroes pass by the original Green Devil Face and move straight on to Area 10 which is still has the broken window. (Yet another failure that frustrates our architect.) Our heroes clambered inside to tackle the secret door they were afraid to open earlier. They rolled really high on their Perception check, so I allowed that they could see bits of flint on the underside of the door. This led our heroes to surmise that there was some fire trap on the other side of the door. In a flash of creative brilliance, they used the alchemy jug that they found way back in Session 17 to spread mayonnaise (yes, this is a real thing) under the door to prevent it from making a spark. And it works. They open the door ever so slowly, avoiding the otherwise unavoidable explosion in Area 11.

For Area 12 – Trapped Chest Martic got to show off a skill that he has kept hidden from the rest of the group for two years. In his backstory, he grew up a street urchin and thus has been proficient in thieves’ tools the whole time. Incredibly, this is the first locked anything that we have come upon as a group. Coupled with his new fickle and flighty personality, the group was convinced that Martic has somehow morphed from an earnest fighter into a batty thief.

Sadly, the DC on the lock is really high. Martic failed and the jaws of the locked clamped down and broke his shiny unused picks and broke them. Maybe he’s not a very good thief. Hey, he’s lucky he didn’t fail so bad that he got sucked into the chest and suffocated to death, as listed in the book. Luckily, Thames had an extra set of picks because he is an artificier and of course he does. Then the group (Gwen abstained) cast every buff they could to give Martic an advantage on the lockpocking. It worked and they gained some moderate treasure, including a scroll of remove curse. I would allow that this spell could expelled a possessing Trickster spirit, if necessary. If only we had a cleric who could cast it.

Our heroes continued down this strange underground river. The first time Martic was down here in Session 41, he discovered the first of several skeleton keys roaming around these halls. It’s still here, and this time, Martic is not going to let it get away. Martic whips out his new wand of wonder, while Ian (the player) in a rare moment of breaking character yells out, “No!” He knows they need these skeletons and he is terrified of the possible outcome.

It’s about as good and as bad as you might expect. Rolling a 74 on the wonderous effects chart, a beam of light streaked from the wand, striking the poor defenseless skeleton with a tremendous fireball! The blast killed the skeleton instantly and threw it backward to land with a splash in the flowing river. The current quickly swept this unknowingly vital plot device downstream. “Gwen” yelled, “Don’t let it get away!” Our heroes sprinted after this thing all the while complaining. “Who cares? It’s a stupid skeleton.” Oh, if they only knew.

The river picked up speed. Our heroes were unable to catch it, and could only watch helplessly as one of five very important keys surged over the precipice of a roaring waterfall and plummeted into the inky abyss. The fall was so deep, that our heroes could not hear the splash at the bottom. They considered jumping after it (Thames does know feather fall), but they were terrified of being trapped in a lower level with no way out. They’ll have to find another way.

Fortunately, there is another chest on the far side of this small chasm to distract our heroes. Momentarily forgetting that he is possessed by the cowardly spirit of Obo’laka, Bag of Nails scaled the walls over to the chest to investigate. It’s a mimic. Bag is quickly engulfed by the mucilaginous styloglossus (sticky tongue) while the rest of the party hurls bolts, arrows, and spells at the duplicitous monstrosity. Except for Gwen who could do nothing and was frankly sad to see a fellow polymorph be destroyed. All under the watchful eye of a suspicious Thames. Martic decided that the wand of wonder will solve all their problem. Well, it doesn’t. This time, it cast stinking cloud which keeps Bag just as sticky and now he smells like rotten eggs as well. But Bag survived and spent the rest of the session trying to get super glue saliva and skunk musk out of his fur. By the way, Andrew has told me that he is no longer having fun playing this scaredy-cat spirit. We’ll have to fix this in the next session.

A side tunnel from the river led them to Area 14 – Moa’s Tomb. I made no changes to this room, but it is a very unpredictable room, especially if any of your player forget the clue regarding it. Everyone except Thames remembered that the last Acererak Warning for this level says, “Speak no truth to the doomed child.” It was great fun playing the lost, confused severed head that is Nepartak, princess of Omu, and aunt of Princess Mwaxanare, whom the real Gwen once assaulted in the monastery of Kir Sabal back in Session 36. Maybe don’t lead with this detail when talking to this easily provoked child.

Martic and Thames attempted to keep the child at ease. This led to a hilarious comedy routine as Martic constantly lied to the poor child and Thames kept trying to tell her the truth. Martic’s first line was, “Hello, my name is Thames Dasow.” To which Thames immediately cried, “What are you talking about? I’m Thames Dasow!” And it all went downhill from there. Conveniently, Martic kept passing his Deception checks while Thames kept failed his Persuasion ones. Much to the chagrin of Thames, Nepartak completely believed Martic.

Meanwhile “Gwen” and Bag stayed out of it. Gwen, I suspect, remembered this room, and Bag stayed in a corner grooming his fur. This left the NPCs, Savash and Grum, to deal with the sarcophagus. As far as Thames was concerned, everyone was acting “weird”. It did not help that I was sending private texts to the three possessed players with secret ideas and knowledge and none to him. For this room, the book allows three failures to gain the child’s trust. When a frustrated Thames finally cried out, “Why am I the only one not being weird and actually telling the truth?” I counted that as one automatic fail.

Turns out the sarcophagus is not locked or trapped. Grum and Savash easily lift the lid. Grum collects the serpentine bones of a Jaculi, Moa’s animal form. Since Thames can’t ruin the fun, Savash grabs the staff of the python and is immediately possessed by the honorable and honest Moa. For an evil and despicable Yuan-ti snakeman, this is a very unwelcomed experience. Now, I swear to you, I only had Savash take the item because he had the opportunity to do so, and he is a snake man in a snake tomb with a snake magic item. It was a spur of the moment thing. The magic item is nothing great but Moa’s possession ability is game-altering ridiculous. It is so good that I can’t even share it with Andrew, the player running Savash. He’ll just have to wait for the surprise.

Unfortunately for our immediate concerns, Savash’s new-found honor presents itself right away. “I think it is beneath contempt the way you so gleefully lie to that poor maligned child.” Two strikes. Nepartak is livid. “What! You’ve been lying to me? Explain yourself!” Martic tried to salvage the scene with more lying, but he hemmed and hawed and it wasn’t very convincing. Give me a DC12 Deception check. Is a 7 good? No, it is not. Strike Three! Thames is beside himself. “Now the Yuan-ti is a good guy?!”

A furious Nepartak bursts from her crystal cage and our heroes learn that this creature is essentially a flame skull. I give everyone a DC15 History/Arcana check to recall some old fable or tall tale that would tell them that these creatures can explode. Thames is the only one who passes and I get to text him his first secret text. It reads, “Run.” Thames does exactly that just as a half dozen swarm of spiders burst forth from the hundred tiny holes around the walls. At least he did warn the others before he fled, so everyone ran for the nearest exit. Nepartak flew to the center of the room and exploded!

Our heroes made it out of the room but not out of the blast radius. Fortunately, everyone made their save and only took 20 points of damage. Each. (I rolled high). More fortunately, I ruled that the spiders were all killed and Nepartak does not pursue our fleeing heroes. Unfortunately, Thames and Savash ran out via the west hallway and everyone else ran out the south hall back to the river. We’ve managed to split the party again. Thames used his sending stone to speak with the other group. “We are safe. Meet up at the green devil face.” “Gwen” who has never used a sending stone is freaked out. She replies, “Who is this? Is this Thames? How are we talking right now?” Nobody calls her out on this. It’s at this point that I realize that I think the group thinks that Ian may have touched a Trickster God treasure, perhaps Nangnang’s pearl of power, and that she may be possessed by a forgetful spirit or she has amnesia.

Either way, the separation is short. The party joins back up and head down to Area 22 – Papazotl’s Tomb. Again. There are still just two active zombies at the door and one dead one tied to its chain. Not enough to open the door. Beyond, it appears that the skeletons that nearly killed Bag of Nails last time have returned to their respective cauldrons. No one is willing to volunteer to get inside the door and act as the third porter to pull the door open. Martic, Gwen, Savash, and Bag of Nails all have inner turmoil and a million excuses, so an exasperated Thames cries out, “Fine. I’ll do it.” He misty steps inside the door, grabs the chain with the dead zombie and runs to the far side off the room, the two other zombies chasing after him and biting him the whole time.

The door opens up and everyone else sneaks inside. Thames lets go of his chain, sending the zombies flying across the room, crashing into the closing door, but sealing our heroes inside. For his bravery, Gwen tells Thames, “Sephirius, I am glad to have you as a travelling companion.” Thames doesn’t even realize that “Gwen” just called him the name of the dragonborn of the Yellow Banner adventuring company. Instead, Thames snarkly replies, “Yeah, well that makes one of us.”

Apparently, “Gwen” has never been to this tomb because she took an active roll in solving it. She realized that to “Bow to no one”, meant to bow to the statue with no face. Not the most challenging puzzle, but they can’t be all impossible head-scratchers. Everyone takes turns bowing to the blank faced statue that allows them to freely loot the sarcophagus. The book doesn’t specifically state this, but I would add that bowing to the correct statue also turns off the skeleton-churning cauldrons.

More importantly and ignoring Thames’ advice, “Gwen” grabs the amulet of health lying atop the coffin. She is immediately possessed by the spirit of this overbearing Eblis. So, now we have the body of Gwen taken over by an evil doppelgänger named Pox, who himself is possessed by the evil spirit of a selfish, bossy god. In addition, upon each possession, I read (text) each player the little blurb written for that trickster god. This one ends with, “You will do as I command!” This cannot end well.

Before leaving the room, Bag takes it upon himself to destroy the spear-chucking bronze shield that kicked his ass earlier. With its destruction, the party swears they can hear an audible, “Argh!” as the closer-than-they-realize builder of this dungeon vents his raging frustration with this reckless, unkillable group of heroes.

But how will they get out? One hero must stay behind to open the door with the zombies. (They failed to spot the secret door in this room as well, meaning that the genie beyond that secret door will forever be unfound.) Also, the group is all out of teleport/gaseous form magic. Whomever opens the door will be trapped on the wrong side. Luckily, Martic has the answer.

In Session 36, I gave my players a present/reward for two years of campaigning. I gave them a real-world pendant with in-game properties. Martic’s can summon a hero, Skuld, from Valhalla once per day. It’s designed to be an extra attack for the player during an important combat, but apparently it can also save the group in one epic sacrifice. Calling upon his pendant, Martic summons Skuld who appears in a flash of lightning from the sky. Without question or worry, Skuld grabs the door-opening chain, withstands the zombie bites, and the door lifts once more into the hallway beyond. Once the heroes are safe, Skuld releases the chain, trapping this expendable heroe inside. He kills the two zombies for good measure, and with a roar of thunderous, disappears back to Valhalla.

Our heroes are hurt and exhausted. They’re all out of spells and Gwen used up the last of her staff of healing. They need to rest. The barricade themselves back in the Devil Face of the Floor room (Area 18). They set their alarm then use the single scroll of Leomund’s Tiny Hut that they received back in Session 30 for this set of circumstances. Good night, everybody. Although Bag won’t be getting any sleep.

Next week, with half the party possessed by trickster spirits, we explore more Tomb, and meet the architect of all our pain.

As always, give in to the chaos, and Game On!

What do you mean, you don’t want Papazotl’s skull? What the hell is wrong with you Gwen? – A very suspicious Thames

Don’t forget to check out my Tomb of Annihilation Resources Page, filled with all the stuff I use to make this epic campaign even more epicier: My full Campaign Diary, plus Handouts, Maps, Charts, PDFs, Images, and more to use, abuse, or ignore at your peril. All the templates and instructions for my Trickster Cubes are found here as well.

And written specifically for this adventure, read my Explorer’s Guide to Chult to delve into all the legends, lore, history, religion, and culture that I used to bring even more life to this adventure.