4 Eleint 2993
In the morning, Nubbins, Uffda, Wooshhh, and Tippletoe head up to the plateau of Arden Vul intent on exploring east of the Pyramid of Thoth. At the third switchback, the party encounters the entrance that others had seen with trash on the floor and two rooms heading off to either side choked with cobwebs. Nubbins fashions a cotton candy ball of cobwebs with a stick as Uffda burns away the remaining webs, only to find a dead dwarf slouched against a wall. Finding a vial with silvery blue powder inside, Wooshhh adds water and tastes some and determines the reconstituted fluid is healing potion of unknown strength, two doses worth. Nubbins notices that the dead dwarf wears fancy boots, tries them on, and immediately thinks that the boots are the most comfortable that he has ever worn as they mold to his feet.
Continuing up to Arden Vul, the party, excluding Tippletoe, visits the sun obelisk for the first time and notes the exactness in form to the stub of the moon obelisk in the walled garden of the Palace of the Archon. Visiting the main plaza, Tippletoe tells the rest about Tuftwillig. Nubbins tries to communicate with the awakened tree, even gathering up the courage to yell, but the tree takes minimal notice and falls back asleep. Uffda, in a foolhardy attempt to wake the tree, bounds on Tuftwillig’s trunk only to have the tree sleepily brush her twenty feet back with a low branch.
East of the Pyramid of Thoth, the party finds a worn path to the south ending in a small plaza with a well in the center. Approaching the well, they see that the inside is covered with convex mirrors and shards of mirrored glass. Hearing faint sounds echoing up from the well that sound like animal grunts and hoots, Nubbins wild-shapes into a spider and crawls down, more than 200 feet, to the well’s terminus 25 feet above a floor in a large, diamond-shaped room. Remembering the scrap of map that Tippletoe found in the rubble of the Plaza of the Priests of Thoth, Nubbins heads north despite that map’s notation that north of the Well of Light lay “Ruby Throne, Torture, & Death. I can hear captives.” Before leaving the Well of Light room, Nubbins realizes that the beam of light directed down to this level must be able to be harnessed somehow as he notes many fixed and movable mirrors in the halls around the Well. Continuing north, Nubbins encounters a room to the east with an open door. Inside it is a mess of wood fragments, excrement, and bones. Leaving quickly, he goes further north and sees a lit room dominated on the north end by a throne seemingly made out of a single giant ruby. In the throne sits an older man dressed in clothes that match those worn by Fael Valdorsdot of the Circle of Druids of the Old Forest. The man yells at someone unseen by Nubbins, “You lie! You will tell us everything. How did you get in here?” Then when no response was given, the man calls to someone named Trefko; Nubbins hears a thud, like something heavy hitting bare flesh; and another man screams. Scared and knowing he was running out of time with the wild-shape, Nubbins retreats up the Well of Light to the remaining party of the R3C above.
Taking stock and hearing no pursuit or signs of discovery, the party continues on the main boulevard east until they encounter another ruined plaza, this one with a large empty basin in the center that would have held a fountain in the past. Looking inside, the party sees a right arm that would be a match for the ruined statue of Arden to the east of the plaza before the Palace of the Archon. Believing themselves too weak to retrieve and carry such a large item made of stone, the party demurs hopping into the basin and makes note of the find for later extraction.
Arriving at the eastern gates to the city of Arden Vul, the party notes that both towers’ top ⅔ have fallen into rubble. Searching the south tower for an hour, the party locates a leather satchel saved by two fallen beams and find inside two potions that upon testing allow the imbiber to breath fire. At the north tower the party finds tracks of seven humanoids leading into a small safe area containing a fire pit and wood. Searching under the wood pile, the party locates a trap door to a chamber with seven bedrolls and locked chest. Tippletoe unlocks the chest, and inside the party finds three 50-foot coils of rope, a set of climbing pitons, two hammers, fifteen torches, a broom, six flasks of oil, and three bronze medallions about 2 inches in diameter. The medallions show an Archontean cestus on the obverse and the initials “SF” on the reverse in Archontean. In the back of this room, a crack leads to a tunnel that descends 350 feet to a low, 7-foot high room with three sarcophagi carved with gisants of thin, tall humanoid creatures about 8 feet tall with small fangs and horns coming out of their skulls. Each sarcophagus is bound with rusted metal bands, which prevent them from being opened, and have carved upon them in Mithric, “Old One. Do not open.” The party, making noise and discussing what they have found and whether to open one of the sarcophagi, notice that from within the sarcophagi they can hear scraping and pounding and the strain of metal straps under tension. At any moment the bands may break.
Noting a 10-foot corridor south from this room, the party proceeds a short distance before entering a large room dominated by a huge stone chair and with two openings into a chasm ending in a black void. Approaching the chasm, Nubbins drops a stick into the void but does not hear any sound returning from below. Looking across the chasm about 40 feet, the party notices another chair facing them, sized for a human, and an open low porch about 30 or so feet on the chasm wall south of the room with the chair.
Returning to the chair in their room, the party notices an indecipherable glyph on the seat of this chair, which is sized to fit a much larger creature than a human. Removing an old piece of leather from the back of the chair, they discover another and different glyph carved into the stone. Nubbins makes a classic “nubbins rubbins” of the two glyphs but does not touch the one on the back with his hands. The party also notices a carved stele on the floor of a creature of the same type as those likely in the sarcophagi above, but this one is portrayed standing on reptiles similar to those carved on the obelisks of the sun and moon. Nubbins takes a rubbing of that carving as well. Going back and sitting in the chair but not leaning back onto the second glyph, Nubbins is immediately able to visually fly about the chasm at a speed hard to comprehend. He is barely able to process as he flies down 1,600 feet before encountering the chasm floor. Coming back up, he counts at least ten levels of openings and portals on the chasm faces. Feeling disoriented but strangely wanting more, Nubbins surmises that repeated use of this feature of the chair may, after a time, allow for much mapping of the chasm.
A little overwhelmed by what has occurred, the party goes back to the room with the three sarcophagi, searches, and finds a secret door to the north. Again disturbing the creatures in the sarcophagi but finding the metal bands holding, they descend.
At the end of the stairs, some 350 feet further down, the party eventually finds a secret door in an otherwise exitless room and comes out in the middle of a corridor. To the right it stretches off into darkness, and to the left there is a 5-foot barricade erected across the corridor. Another 30 feet beyond yawns a chasm. While the party discusses what to do, Uffda walks to the barricade, looks over, and yells, “Anyone there?”, followed by Tippletoe’s screamed admonition to Uffda to use her inside voice! In the blink of an eye, a monstrosity of a creature made up of a body that looks like a giant brain with a beaked maw and trailing tentacles with spikes rises from the chasm and moves to eat the party, which “unhesitatingly” runs back up the 350-foot stair to the sarcophagus room with barely a pause there and up the 250-foot stair to the room with bedrolls and then out into the sunshine.
The party then explores the northeast quadrant of Arden Vul, determined to locate any more large ruins with intact basements. After searching for about an hour, the party finds, surprise, a large foundation with tracks leading to cellar stairs. Descending below ground, they find a 30-by-60-foot room containing many large boxes of food stamped with the logo of victualers from Narsileon and eight bodies. As the party begins to look around, the eight bodies animate and attack. Tippletoe turns seven of the eight immediately, and the rest of the party focuses their ire on the zombie with the strongest will to sup on brains. Tippletoe then moves around the room counterclockwise to herd the remaining zombies into a corner. Wooshhh entangles many of the herded zombies while Nubbins finally unleashes the fury that is Ice Knife on the gathered horde. Nubbins then drinks one of the recently found potions of fire breath, and Wooshhh casts thunderwave on the gathered mob while the rest contributed to destroy the beleaguered foe, overall sustaining only one harmful hit from a zombie. Pausing only to surmise that eight animated corpses amongst fresh, modern boxes of food boded unfavorably towards others wielding necromantic arts, the party opens the only other door from this room, to the north, and sees a huge, columned room and hears moaning of more zombies in the dark, no doubt alerted by the sound of thunder down under.
That same morning, Fenpenny Copperleaf decides to head up to the Pyramid of Thoth, bringing Callum Rivers along with him. From the top of the pyramid, Fen and Callum spot their colleagues Tippletoe, Wooshhh, Nubbins, and Uffda heading down a nearby stairwell into a basement.
Fenpenny and Callum make their way down from the pyramid to meet them. Before they reach the stairs, they hear a loud boom. Upon reaching the bottom, they find the remains of a battle and their friends gathered by a door. When opened, it reveals a dark room from which the moaning of zombies emanates. A torch is thrown into the room, illuminating eight to ten zombies slowly ambling between floor-to-ceiling columns on their way towards the door. (The flickering of the torch on the floor and the movement of the zombies makes it look like there are twenty columns, but there are only nineteen.)
Fenpenny strides forward and casts Faerie Fire to give his comrades an advantage in the combat to come. With the doorway as a natural choke point, Uffda takes up a position to make sure that no zombies come through. Together Wooshhh and Uffda engage the undying creatures in melee combat, but several of the zombies prove extremely resilient. Only when Tippletoe channels the radiance of Nicetoreon do they stay down.
Even while engaged with this zombies, however, a deeper moaning reaches the party’s ears, as an ogre zombie strides out of the darkness. Wooshhh drives it away temporarily, and Fenpenny attempts to distract it, but ultimately Nubbins takes matters into his own hands–or rather this own paws–as he wild shapes into a badger and weasels his way behind the ogre zombie.
After the group finally dispenses with the zombies, they rest up and investigate a secret door Fenpenny found. Inserting one of Callum’s candles into a hole in the ceiling opens this door and reveals a staircase descending into the darkness. After some discussion about how to proceed, Fen slips down the stairs a ways unnoticed and calls to the rest of his friends. While Callum remains in the room with nineteen columns, the rest descend several hundred feet to what they estimate must be the 3rd Level. There they find a door to a small vaulted chamber. Directly across from them is another door, while to the east they see the north and south walls are each lined with three statues depicting kilted spearmen.
The door across the way reveals yet another stairway descending even deeper into the Halls of Arden Vul. Trying to pass the statues causes them to animate and assume a battle-ready stance. Uffda reacts quickly, pulling Fenpenny out of danger, and the group makes a hasty retreat back up to Callum.
With the day running out of hours, the group heads back to the Sign of the Broken Head, greeting Ephelred and Jimson along the way. At the inn, Fen buys the watchmen a drink and asks around about the statues. Nobody knows much, but the statue merchants staying there would buy them if they were in good condition. Wooshhh performs for the small crowd as Uffda serves as an effective hype man.
