13 January 2002

My Tomb of Horrors

We played a most heinous module call the Tomb of Horrors.  This adventure is legendary in Dungeons and Dragons gaming circles because of its incredible player character fatality rate.  Basically the adventurers delve into the crypt of a very evil living dead creature (called a lich) named Azerack, or as my four doughty and later fewer adventurers called him @$$-crack.  I played four high level explorers:

  • The brilliant witch Vaeriel
  • The holy priest Muril, servant of Wee Jas, goddess of Death and Magic
  • The noble paladin and Heironius' Thunderous Fist, Ileis Adlund, and
  • The dwarven dungeon- and wise-cracker Durgan, "I've seen this play, the dwarf dies first"
The first choice the adventurers faced were three passageways into the horrendous crypt, one was chosen after safely tripping the traps in the other two false passageways.  We discovered a poem of clues about the crypt which helped guide us through and narrowly missed jumping into a hole in space-time called a sphere of annihilation.  Vaeriel and Muril dispatched a mutant gargoyle with spells and Vaeriel wisely used arcane arts to obtain a valuable magical item for the dungeon. Durgan daringly defeated trap after trap as we explored deeper and deeper within the tom.  We came upon a creature that appeared to be Azerack, but turned out to be a facsimile, which we destroyed anyway.  Further exploration and the poem brought us down a trapdoor, into a mummy preparation room.  Here Vaeriel brilliantly coupled her and Muriel's spells to pump acid from one vat to another.  We drilled holes in the two vats with Muril's heat metal spell and then used a cylindrical wall of force as a pipe between the two.  Lastly Vaeriel used a Tenser's floating disk and the combined weight of the dwarf and paladin to act as a pump and push the acid to the other vat.  This allowed us to retrieve a piece of a key needed to get to Azerack's crypt.
From here we entered a room with mystical tapestries and a trembling floor, that spelled the undoing of brother Muril.  When he clutched a tapestry to prevent a fall, he unleashed green slime which devoured him in seconds.  We recovered a small of piece of him for later resurrection.  Saddened we travelled on finding the lich's funereal throne room, and using his crown and scepter we passed through the secret door behind the dais.  Below we found a false sarcophagus and under one of the statue guards we found a passageway to the undercrypt.  Here, after recovering some treasure of mystical and mundane value as well as some blatantly foolish trial and error, did we manage to rouse the demilich.  It husked Vaeriel's soul from her body and trapped it within the diamond in its right orbital socket.  Enraged, Sir Ileis did smite the foul undead into tiny little pieces.  We recovered the diamond with Vaeriel's soul and left behind the evils of the Tomb of Horrors.
Thus did Ileis and Durgan return to Vendare and at the Temple of Wee Jas get Muril resurrected.  They now seek a way to restore Vaeriel to body (or a clone thereof)...