S1 E5: The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, part 4

General Summary

• The party plays a few games of Lela, a three stone Mancala variant, along with the Chwingas, and rests up. Regardless of what the party asks of them, the Chwingas are obsessed with the playing of their game, and they lose interest in anything else the party is doing, though their mere presence seems to protect the room from the amber poisonous gas. Eventually the party heads deeper into the Shrine following footprints.
• They pass through a room where glowing beetles roll debris and bits of fresh meat through their nest, also featuring a paralyzed or perhaps petrified Thri Kreen up in one corner. Ris is disturbed by the insects, but they leave before the bugs can decide that these new visitors are also meat. The Thri-kreen is left behind to his or her fate.
• Mounting a set of stairs, they unfortunately set off a trap that propels an 8' wide, 12' high millstone down at them from the top of the stairwell. Nesskan dodges out of the way nimbly, but her companions are unfortunately slightly run over. Milling around at the top of the stairs puts them all at risk of getting run over again on the stone's return up the stairway, so they proceed into the next room, where baboon statues and half-eaten bamboo corpses, rotting and fungus-ridden, litter the floor. What at first looks to be a Beholder turns out to be a Gas Spore, they discover when it explodes on impact.
• Navigating a couple of dead end halls takes them to a longer hallway with a 10' pit in a turn to the north. The cover of the pit contains a challenge to play Bando Ball and from the looks of it, a couple of Goblins who came before them did so, and didn't survive it. The party wisely nopes the game by edging around the pit, continuing to a vast gallery filled with Leopard and Lightning iconography no doubt referring to Olchurai, the Lightning God of tricks and silver whose sacred beast is the leopard. The room features a threadbare looking stuffed leopard missing an ear, as well as an upright statue of a man in tribal garb wearing an elaborate feathered leopard mask, with a big hole in his chest. Ris, deciding he doesn't like the looks of the stuffed tiger, lops off its head, at which point two things happen - a stony heard plops out of the severed head, and the leopard man comes back to life.
• Before he can attack, however, the heart is shoved back into the hole in his chest, and he stands there, stupefied, for a few minutes. At last he comes fully to his senses, realizing he's been this tomb guardian for at least a few hundred years, his last memory of being run through by a massive balllista-spike when the Minonoise colonizers invaded his homeland, a town called Otoh that no one has heard of, and which is probably long gone by now. He struggles to remember his own name, and decides to go by "Leopardman" for now. The mask, incidentally, is no longer a mask, if it ever was; his actual head is that of a Leopard. He suggests they leave this Shrine immediately and wage war on the Minonois, but the colonizers came and later left from this region hundreds of years ago; indeed, the celebration of independence day in Talaganza was how the party came together in the first place (but to the northwest, there IS a colony still controlled by Minon, the city of Kanambou). 
• Ultimately, the party still feels obligated to complete the quest they promised to the Duchess Mwami, to find her son the prince, Eebo Nibbis, whether alive or dead; one set of goblin footprints still can be seen, going into the darkness in a southeastern direction among the toppled lightning iconography. They have some hope that this is, indeed, a trail left by the Prince, only because there would be no reason for a single bodyguard to continue through the shrine if the Prince had perished. Then again, the party finds themselves stuck in the shrine as the way they came in collapsed, and then was blocked by stone bamboo. If they are to get out to help Leopardman, or to continue in the direction of the prince, both ways for now head in the same direction: Forward.

Report Date

30 Mar 2023