As we mourn losing yet another Gryff, we can only hope to meet his predecessor. While we’re doing that, we also run into a female genie, a talking skull, a hell room, a picture of protruding spikes, and talk of undead prostitutes. So that’s exciting, right? Thank you Eric for writing this up. I’m already curious what next week has in store for us. It’s also Friday the 13th so yay to that. My name is Kent, and I write all of the useless stuff that isn’t the actual blog itself. This week’s videos will go along with the story, I hope. Starting us off, we have some 90’s pop.
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Tomb of Annihilation
Chapter 22 –Gryffs’ Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very-Bad Day
Continuing their jaunt through the Tomb of the Nine Gods, the party eventually came upon a nondescript bottle. After spending half an hour examining and performing various magical tests on the bottle, they determined that someone (or something) was trapped in the bottle. Compassion, now possessed by an evil god who wanted power, strode over and opened the jar.
Upon the jar being opened, a female genie dressed in thousands of gold-pieces’ worth of jewels popped out. Thankful for being freed, the genie offered one boon (but not a wish) that she could provide. Potential boons included casting a spell to get them out of the dungeon. As the party needed to stay in the dungeon to destroy the soul monger, this did not interest the party. After conversing with the genie for a few minutes they soon realized that she was actually of very little use to the party. As such, the party simply demanded that the genie hand over all of her jewelry as a reward.
After a bit more exploring the party found another sarcophagus room. The room was full of sulfur and brimstone and looked like the room was deposited directly here from hell. Around the sarcophagus was a chalk outline of a pentagram/protection circle that had not been completed. As the party did not have any chalk on them to finish the pattern, Compassion simply walked up and opened the sarcophagus. This resulted in a demon-frog-man type thing being summoned into the room. While the demon-frog-man-thing put up a good fight, it was no match for the party in the end.
As the party continued on, they saw many interesting things, including a section of the dungeon that had been flooded with wine, and a gaping skull that disintegrated anything put into its mouth. The party surmised that the mouth was intended as a dungeon waste disposal mechanism. They also found the skeletal remains of a goat-man who possessed a magical staff and spell book. Tempest took the staff while Xilix took the spell book. Further, when the party decided to sit down for lunch, Xilix took the opportunity to summon Gryff VII.
Eventually, the party came to yet another sarcophagus room. While it looked like all the other sarcophagus rooms, the god possessing Xilix noted that it did not appear as if this room had the markings of any of the nine gods. Assuming the sarcophagus was empty, and this was all a big trap set by Azerack, the party peaced out and headed down to the third floor.
Descending down the stairs to the third floor, they heard various factory steam-shop sounds coming from below. Scouting ahead, Gryff VII found a flesh golem hard at work. The melee fighters charged ahead and attacked, while the spell casters stayed behind and took potshots from the stairwell down the hall.
Unfortunately for the casters, they soon heard the sound of another flesh golem coming down the stairs behind them. Compassion retreated to protect the spell casters while Tempest used her monk powers to repeatedly stun the first golem. Once stunned, Padre smited it hardily.
Running up the stairs, Compassion was able to keep the flesh golem from advancing more than half-way down the stairs. This was great while the golem was still alive, however, upon its death the body fell forward, rolling over Compassion, and gaining speed as it tumbled toward Hertz and Xilix. Reacting fast, Hertz and Xilix were able to dodge out of the way before being crushed. Unfortunately, Xilix had completely forgotten about Gryff VII, who was mashed into a red paste against the wall. Not only was the party victorious, but a new Gryff death speed record had been set.
With the flesh golems dead, the party checked out what the first golem had been working on. Attached to the various steam pumps was a wheel that could be turned with some effort. The wheel was set next to a window that looked into a solid wall with devil faces. They soon discovered that turning the wheel would cause the wall behind the window to rotate, showing new images. While most of these were images of devil faces, one was of many protruding spikes. As this image was different than the rest, they left the wall in protruding spike position.
Entering the next room, the party found a golden skull on a pedestal. Not trusting it, the party used Mage Hand to place it in one of their backpacks. However, still possessed by a power-hungry god, Compassion decided to touch the skull to see if it would grant him more power. Upon touching the skull, it sprung to life and began talking in an excitable and extremely annoying way.
The skull began flying and then landed on Compassion’s shoulder. It introduced itself as Yaka, prince of Omu. Yaka told Compassion that he would continue to haunt him until Compassion paid 10,000 gp. Compassion responded by punching him in his stupid skull face, but it had no effect. When asked what he needed the 10,000 gp for, Yaka responded, “undead prostitutes are still prostitutes.”
With no readily apparent way to be rid of Yaka, as the party didn’t have a giant pile of gold simply lying around, they continued through a secret door that led to a hallway. While traveling through the halls, Xilix noticed that there was a purple mold growing along the walls. Worried the mold might be harmful, Xilix tried “cleaning” the walls with fire spells. The mold responded by growing eye stalks that shot lasers at the party. After the eyes retreated back into the wall, Xilix decided not to clean the rest of the hallway.
Eventually ,the party came upon a room with multiple hanging tapestries, one in front of the other. The first tapestry showed a very nice dinner with nobles and servants, however, together the tapestries told the story of how the nobles went mad, ate the servants, and then killed each other. Upon pulling down the last tapestry they saw the most terrible thing of all . . . a mounted boar’s head!
At first relieved that the monster at the end of the book was nothing more than a stuffed boar’s head mounted on the wall, that relief soon turned to horror as Compassion got a crazed look in his eye. Compassion walked towards, and then stuck his head in, the boar’s mouth, which immediately shut tight, nearly severing Compassion’s head. The intense agony immediately broke the spell, and Compassion began yelling to the party to get the ham company mascot off his head. Unfortunately, to get the head off they had to hit it with spells and chop at it with swords. By the time Compassion was freed he was bleeding to death and needed divine healing from Padre.
Once Compassion was healed they continued on, eventually finding another sarcophagus room, which appeared to be the room dedicated to the froghemoth god. In the room were four masks, and on the walls were four paintings. The god possessing Xilix explicitly told him that wearing the masks was a bad idea, however, the rest of the party remembered that outside the tomb was a poem that included the verse, “wear the masks or be seen.” Not wanting to take any chances, Hertz, Padre, Compassion, and Tempest each put on one of the four masks.
Investigating the frescos, the party learned that to open the sarcophagus they had to perform a ritual involving money, a lit candle, and a blood sacrifice. The candle and the money were easy, however, no one in the party wanted to be sacrificed. To solve this, Hertz pulled Xilix aside and asked him to summon a new Gryff. Xilix prepared the spell and summoned Gryff VIII. Upon popping into existence, Hertz grabbed Gryff VIII, brought him to the sarcophagus, and then cut his head off.
On the plus side, the party set yet another new Gryff death record. On the minus side, because summoned magical animals don’t have blood, the magical sparkles that rained down as Gryff VIII faded out of existence did nothing to open the sarcophagus.
With no other options available, Tempest hoped that a single drop of blood would do, and she cut her hand with a dagger and dropped a few blood droplets onto the sarcophagus, which immediately opened. . . . and let out four wraiths, which are basically life draining ghosts. Luckily for everyone who wasn’t Xilix, the wraiths couldn’t see the party members wearing the masks. Unfortunately for Xilix, that meant that all of the wraiths focused their attacks on him. By the time the rest of the party had dispatched of the wraiths, Xilix had been drained of nearly all of his vitality, to the point where a papercut could be potentially fatal.
Not wanting to be possessed by an evil power-hungry god any longer, Compassion reached into the sarcophagus once the battle had ended, grabbed what appeared to be a pair of magical bracers, and then allowed himself to be possessed by the froghemoth god.
What will Compassion’s new personality be like? How can Xilix possibly survive three more dungeon levels in his/her dangerously weak state? Find out next time on Xilix’s possible final episode of Tales from the Plunderbund Consortium!
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Let’s focus on the Hell room a bit with these next 2 videos. First, let’s listen to this underrated classic from the 90’s. This is Hell by Squirrel Nut Zippers, and this isn’t the original music video, but this has skeletons so it makes more sense, plus the original video isn’t terribly exciting.
Next up is some video footage from the classic Doom video game.
Finally, because it’s Friday the 13th, check this video out. It’s for a fairly new game that is pretty cheap on Steam. I highly recommend the game if you like puzzle games. It’s very fun.
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