S10E07 - Treasure Chests and Skulls

The episode starts with a flashback to Avilos’s childhood, where he’s about to start his first Church of the Licking meeting. Despite all the ads posted throughout the town of Fallcrest, no one shows up. When he’s about to leave, a young and very beautiful woman called Eloisse arrives. She shows intense interest in the cult and is very welcoming to Avilos’s subtle physical contact as he explains the Church’s teachings to her. The attraction intensifies, and they end up kissing. Sadly for Avilos, Eloisse turns out to be a polymorphed succubus that almost kills him by draining his soul. A saciated Eloisse has pity and spares the nearly dead but “I regret nothing” bard.

Back to the present, the heroes are in the dungeon room with the magnetic statue in it. While some of the heroes are inspecting the area, Krariak goes into the next room, which contains a fountain. Wongo, still inside his head, entices him to drink from the fountain and see what happens, which he does. He finds the water tasting sour and mineral, but otherwise doesn’t notice anything strange and goes back to the main room.

Not finding anything else of interest, the heroes then go back to the large open balcony area and follow one of the two corridors they had left behind. At the end of the corridor, they find a huge stone skull on the wall with flames lit in its eye sockets and an open jaw, big enough for them to go through it. Behind the skull wall, they find a room with a sarcophagus, a marble pedestal with a crystal jar on top, and a floating skull inside.

Avilos and Sophi cast mage hands into the room from behind the skull wall to explore it by touch, but they don’t find anything interactive. Sophi then climbs on Krariak’s back, and they both enter the room, causing the two eye flames to extinguish. Once inside, Sophi hears a childish voice in his head. It sounds like a confused little girl who doesn’t know where she is or why she can’t see anything. Sophi asks her questions that make the little girl increasingly stressed until she turns angry. With a shattering sound, the skull breaks the crystal jar containing it, but before she can act, Krariak stuns her using his recently acquired psionic attack. After Krariak, the rest of the heroes attack with ranged attacks and destroy the poor soul before it has a chance to do anything.

Krariak then opens the sarcophagus’s lid, takes a staff with a python-shaped head that was lying inside, and becomes possessed by a different trickster god, Moa. The previous trickster god that inhabited him, Wongo, goes back into its ring, which he was still carrying.

Right after taking the staff, swarms of spiders come out of the walls and attack the two heroes in the room, Krariak and Sophi. Sophi tries to leave the room, but the jaw closes while she’s trying to cross it, causing excruciating pain to her and locking her in an indecorous position. Through a confusing sequence of events, Chos manages to break Sophi free with his strength, Avilos goes into the room next with Krariak, then Krariak turns invisible thanks to being possessed by Moa, directing the swarm of spiders to Avilos. That’s followed by Falkor, who enters the room to help, helping Krariak and Avilos leave the room. But then Falkor gets caught in the skull jaw. The spiders bite him everywhere, turning him unconscious and bringing him one roll away from death.

Luckily, the party unlocks the jaw, freeing him at the very last minute, and then heads to Wongo’s room to take a long rest and recover.

During the night, a flesh golem stumbles upon their Tiny Hut sleeping quarters, but he can’t get in and, after fumbling around for a while, leaves.

The next day, the heroes first encounter a skeleton with a triangle-shaped, oversized key, which they promptly kill and decapitate. Then they head to the last corridor they haven’t explored. When they arrive, they see an adamantine propeller, which Krariak successfully jams with the lid of Wongo’s sarcophagus, and then they safely cross the room to find three chests, one made of onyx, one made of rusted iron, and one made of silver, and a sarcophagus down in a pit by the entrance. After much exploration and trial and error, Chos, Silas, and Avilos climb into the chests and close the lids, locking themselves in willingly. Outside, Krariak finds three buttons that jut out from the sarcophagus. He presses one of them, triggering a massive force damage trap and unlocking the chest where Avilos had hid, and, unbelievably, the lucky halfling survives it thanks to an ace up his sleeve.

After much deliberation, the heroes press the rest of the buttons, which trigger the traps in Silas’s chest and Chos’s. Silas, who was hiding in his usual extraplanar rope trick cavity, was relaxedly waiting for something to happen and avoided the cold, deadly blast from his chest’s trap. Chos didn’t have a place to escape, but the chest he was in hadn’t hurt him, it had only destroyed all his metal gear.

With the treasure chests unlocked after being locked, our heroes manage to open the sarcophagus’s lid, which has turned transparent, revealing a pile of su-monster bones and a mace. Sophi takes the mace, gets possessed by the spirit of Obo’laka, and then hands the mace to Krariak.

The party then heads back to the grand balcony room, casts Light on Krariak’s now rusted greatsword, and throws the sword into the center of the balcony to try to ascertain how deep the tomb goes. At least 5 levels.

The episode ends as the party then takes the stairs down to level two.