S1 E7: Escape from the Shrine

General Summary

• The party retraces its way from the room with no other exits after a rest to the remaining door, behind the large and obviously trapped pile of gold and human bones in the hallway which thankfully no one is dumb enough to mess with. It leads to a hallway with a bend in it, and at the end of the hall are a door and a mirror. Nyx fights a warrior of the old chiefdom that steps out of the mirror; to the rest of the party, she appears to be paralyzed for a few long seconds. In the battle in her mind, she vanquishes the warrior by breaking the mirror, behind which are some wooden slats with enough of a gap for an amber mist, evidently the same poisonous stuff from the lower levels, to seep into the hall. Nesskan attempts to open the door and finds it opens on a blank stone wall; Alistor breaks through the flimsy slats that back the mirror and emerges into another large chamber.
• The chamber is an odd room with 4 mirrors in the walls - a red mirror in the west wall, a white mirror and a black mirror next to each other in the northern wall, and a blue mirror in the east wall, with the only egress to the room evidently the way they came in, through the broken mirror backing on the southern wall. The Blue Mirror shows a space in which a goblin in expensive armor struggles to swim to stay afloat; the black mirror reflects a puddle of lead coins and smashed glass gems, and faint tendrils of metal rot have uncoiled across the floor and out of the hole they came in from. The red mirror shows a complex series of visions, like a silent movie; and the white mirror is an ochre jelly that falls out of its frame onto Alistor, revealing a doorway beyond it to another dark room.
• An overly complex solution involving a length of rope and a scimitar eventually results in the rescue of the Goblin Prince Eebo Nibbis from the blue mirror, whose mother the Duchess commissioned them to come here to rescue. He mentions that he did something with the black mirror that activated it, turning all his gold to lead and his gems to worthless glass, and the metal rot is spreading. The white jelly is eventually reduced to harmless dessert (tasting like peanut butter and strawberry jam). Nibbis also mentions that they should try to avoid any centaur mummies they run across, as he had warning of this in the red mirror. But the red mirror tells much more than that, as they watch.
• In essence, the first part of the silent movie concerns an ancient goddess of life and death, which Nyx recognizes as Oiye, of the generation of gods before the deities of the Kaalengi represented elsewhere in the shrine, and worshipped in the Caetica still today. How each of these Old Gods came to their eventual end is an entire body of myth that few other than the most dull scholars care about, so this story is not a familiar one to any of them.
• A sorcerer of old is shown stealing souls, gaining worshippers, and threatening - and eventually defeating - Oiye, leaving her with some semblance of life but stripping her of the power over death, and becoming a god himself with this power. Time goes by, Oiye passes out of common memory, and the sorcerer-godling consolidates power, leading many Kaalengi astray. When the colonizers come from the seas to the east and the west, rather than protect his people from the foreign oppressors, this godling delights in their suffering and subjugation, for a time at least.
• Then the scene shifts to a massive throne in a massive pyramid - the one on the walls of the mural room where the pyramid marked the secret door to the rest of that level, a smooth and otherworldly object of geometric precision which Kristre realizes he's seen with his own Dragonborn eyes - though now covered in vines and a thousand years of jungle overgrowth, off the side of a cliff in an otherwise obscure patrol road somewhere to the east of Talaganza. It is said to contain an impossible maze and as if that wasn't enough, to also be the home of a terrible Mummy Lord named Malavir who destroys alll who would disturb his ancient rest. Perhaps Malavir was a king in the days of Oiye's worship, or this death god's first manifestations. On this throne in this pyramid sits a giant staff or wand - the scale is hard to judge in the vision - capped with a large, non-human skull.
• A warlord in relatively recent Kaalengi garb is shown attacking this pyramid with an army of bandits and miscreants, and making off with the staff, thereafter commanding armies of undead creatures and using dark necromantic powers, leading to the thought that it may be the very Wand of Orcus itself, a legendary item of chaos lost to the ages. The vision shows a lovely French-looking city of soft pastry hues and burnished brass roofs ablaze as the army of the warlord tears through the place while he waves around the wand - surely this is Kanambou, the Minonois colonial trade post to the northwest. Then a city of Kaalengi and Pilaani with low, thatched homes and tall nodding palms also burns amid hordes of undead. Lastly, it is the city of Talaganza, their home, ablaze. The end of this grim vision is a slow pan back from an enormous dark cemetery, which Alistor recognizes from his travels as the massive necropolis of Khazigur, the capitol city of the Empire, far to the north of Caetica. The capital isn't shown burning like the other cities, and the relevance of that graveyard to this story is not clear, other than perhaps suggesting that the only happy ending is to run now and die somewhere far away from here, just to be safe.
• Leaving this room with Eebo Nibbis and going through the hole left by the White Jelly, they find themselves in a trophy room of sorts showing the same treasures that Oiye's beautiful gown and robes were decorated with, being ceremonially trampled by none other than a mummified centaur, exactly what Eebo had warned them of. Nesskan does an amazing job of unlocking the complex door without triggering the guardian's awareness, but at the very last moment a pick slips (Nat 1 on a needed success) and the thing comes back to angry life. Nyx douses its fervor with a perfectly placed darkness spell, and the party escapes the room only to run into a solid wall of Jade. Alistor opens the way by accidentally collapsing the wall onto himself, and he's pulled free; the centaur can't cross the barrier to leave the shrine, so they are safe. Gathering themselves together, they carefully head back to Talaganza, anxious to find it intact rather than set ablaze by this mysterious death-god-worshipping Kaalengi warlord they have seen in the mirror's vision.

Rewards Granted

• Glass vial full of plain water (was gold from the pool in the mirror room, but reverted to water at some point thereafter)
• Various sundry worthless lead coins (had been dipped in the gold pool but likewise reverted back at some point thereafter)
• Level 6

Missions/Quests Completed

• The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan
• Eebo Nibbis, rescued
• Visions of Oiye

Character(s) interacted with

• Eebo Nibbis

Report Date

20 Apr 2023

Primary Location

The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan

Secondary Location

The Caetica Region