The group is still progressing and getting gear from those 9 trickster gods. I think we finally go a week without a Gryff death, so there’s that! Hertz goes chasing Waterfalls. We deal with some glass eyes, not Left Eye. Somewhere in there I believe that Padre saw a Red Light Special, saw a girl that declared that she didn’t want No Scrubs, and told him to Creep on outta there. Yeah, my name is Kent and I just did a lot of TLC references, deal with it. I am your host, Eric is our esteemed writer of this content. Together, we kinda work together. I like to provide YouTube videos. You can guess what this week’s theme will be, so don’t be to proud to beg, and just enjoy the tunes.
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Tomb of Annihilation
Chapter 23 – Penultimate
Having exhausted most of their spells and abilities for the day, the party settled down to camp for the night and to play with their new magic items that they had found in the various god-coffins. While the night was mostly uneventful, as Xilix was standing last watch he heard the distinctive sounds of yet another armored flesh golem trudging in their direction. As the golem was slow and loud, Xilix (still Xilix-ina at this point) was able to rouse the party.
After playing with her new quarterstaff prior to bedtime, Tempest learned that she was now in the possession of a Staff of Striking, a magical staff with the power to hit things really, really hard. Wanting to try it out, Tempest asked the party to stay back while she took the first shot at the golem. Tempest deftly maneuvered around the golem, wound up the staff for a hit, and proceeded to knock the golem’s head clean off. Tempest gave her new magical weapon an approving glance and said, “this’ll do.”
Continuing to explore the third floor, the party walked down a hallway and came upon what appeared to be two small statues across from one another. The statues appeared to be mini (aka chibi) versions of the flesh golems. The party noticed too late that the “statues” were holding a giant chain between them. The mini-flesh golems jumped off their pedestals and ran down the hallway, tripping everyone in the party. Once all the party members hit the ground, they proceeded to jump upon Tempest and Compassion and began punching them with spiked metal gauntlets. By the time the rest of the party got to their feet, Tempest and Compassion were looking like tenderized meat.
While the mini-flesh golems were harder to hit due to their small size, overall they were much weaker than the regular golems and the party was easily able to defeat them and rescue Tempest and Compassion. While Hertz and Padre were able to heal Tempest and Compassion’s wounds, their bodies maintained a reddish hue for most of the day.
Having disposed of the minis, the party ventured forth, eventually happening upon a room with a waterfall flowing down and cutting off their progress. Having found clues earlier in the dungeon, they knew that the waterfall was a magical trap. Hertz stood in front of the waterfall as the rest of the party spent the next 20 minutes trying to figure out the puzzle. The puzzle seemed to be very complicated, involving the pulling of multiple switches, disarming statues, and crawling through various crawlspaces and the legs of multiple statues.
Once the rest of the party was sufficiently frustrated with the puzzle, Hertz decided it was time to make his move. As Hertz stood in front of the waterfall, he performed various stretches, cracked his knuckles, said, “screw waterfall traps,” and then proceeded to cast Control Water. With the help of Talos, Hertz was able to redirect the water from the waterfall to flow along the ceiling rather than directly down to the floor. With the magical death waterfall neutralized, the party flipped off the statutes and continued on.
As the party journeyed through the next few rooms they found a number of glass eyes of varying colors. Thinking they may be important, they stowed the eyes away for safekeeping.
Continuing on, the party found another crawl space that appeared to lead to a dead end. After trying a few things, they found that it was a trick rotating wall that required two people to operate. Compassion and Tempest went ahead to investigate.
The crawlspace eventually led to a golden sarcophagus room adorned with many picture tiles on the floor. As Tempest entered the room she saw a skeleton on the floor and then had a vision. In the vision, a dwarf walked into the room, stepped on the wrong tile, and then was eaten alive by locusts that poured into the room.
Not wanting to suffer the same fate as the dwarf, Tempest carefully surveyed the room. Hanging on a nearby wall was a skull with a pentagon marked upon it. As the party had been collecting geometric skulls up to this point, Tempest climbed up the wall all monk-like and pulled the skull from the wall. Upon doing this she found it was attached to a turnable knob. Upon turning the knob, she discovered that it showed pictures matching the tiles on the ground. Tempest and Compassion figured out that the knob was informing of the correct tile order to safely reach the sarcophagus.
Following Tempest’s directions, Compassion was able to reach the sarcophagus without being eaten alive by locusts. Opening the sarcophagus, Compassion was able to resist possession by the god within, Unkh, and he claimed the magical horn found next to the dead god’s body.
Feeling like they had accomplished all they needed to on the third floor, the party descended to floor four. Upon reaching the bottom of the stairwell, the party came upon another skeleton, this one having a hexagon imprinted on its skull. As they already had geometric skulls from the previous three floors, they blew up the skeleton and put its skull in their skull pack.
Continuing on, the party came to the sarcophagus room of Shagambi. On the walls of this room appeared to be an intricately designed maze puzzle. As Tempest and Compassion went to inspect the walls, they suddenly disappeared and were transported into an extradimensional maze. Meanwhile, in the real world, the rest of the party saw little player icons for Tempest and Compassion appear on the walls.
In order to solve the puzzle, Hertz, Xilix, and Padre searched the room for clues. Xilix found a mechanism that, when used, allowed the user to manipulate the maze. Hertz and Padre found a grandfather clock that, when advanced in time, rang in both their world and the maze world. Working together, Hertz and Padre constantly rang the clock to direct Tempest and Compassion, while Xilix manipulated the maze to allow them to get to the escape point. Upon reaching escape point, Tempest and Compassion found a key and were teleported out of the maze.
Unfortunately for the Padre and Hertz, the grandfather clock had magic on it that aged anyone in the nearby vicinity whenever it gonged. When all was said and done, Hertz had aged to his mid-30s, and Padre had reached the age of 102. Meanwhile, Compassion used the maze key to open the sarcophagus, resisted the pull of the god within, and he looted all the treasure.
Moving ahead, the party eventually came to a room with an evil looking demon statue guarding a pit. From within the pit came the sound of horrible wailing. Upon inspecting the statute, the party found that it had donation slots where monetary coins could be inserted. Not wanting to insult the demon-god, the party gave it about 1,000 gold pieces in money before jumping down to the next level.
What will the party discover on level 5? Where is the soulmonger? Is the party going to die horribly? Find out next time on the season finale of Tales from the Plunderbund Consortium!
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Here are more TLC videos.
I also came across a video about song that “get white people turnt”. See, this is the fucking problem with allowing people to make up words.
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