024. Strange Doors and Loop-de-loops
General Summary
After the party left the Room of Axes behind them, they went to explore the rest of the dungeon following the left-hand-rule.
In first corridor they hadn't explored yet, they encountered a dried out and mummified figure. It was slumped against the wall and wrapped in chains. After some deliberation, the party determined it to be a chain devil. More importantly, they were now certain it was actually dead, and wouldn't jump on them as they went past.
4 crosbow bolts from the wire trap.
5 bars of steel
5 bars of copper
1 mold for a bracelet
1 mold for a ring
1 mold for a necklace
The Fools Code
Anytool
The Red Dot Door
A side corridor had the red dot sign painted above it, which peaked the party's interests. It ended at a sturdy, door with heavy iron fittings. Footsteps and scuffmarks were visible in the dust and grime on the floor, but they didn't go further than halfway along the corridor before turning around towards the door. Sure that the door was trapped, the party set to find it. After some fruitless observations, Gram Crackers went with prodding the wall with her magic dagger, to see if it was fake at any point. Having no luck with that, she resorted to inspecting the area very carefully, one bit at a time. This led to her discovering a small hole in the wall at the point where the tracks stopped, which she promptly tried to prod into with the dagger's tip. This stirred the almost invisible translucent wire that spanned the width of the corridor, and went through the hole. Seeing the trap, the party scrambled out of the corridor. Lucky for them, this turned out not to be needed, as the bolts that flew out of the wall flew along the length of the wire, where no-one had been standing. Macca Ni inspected the bolts and, after determining they were intact, took them with him. After carefully approaching the door, Macca Ni tried to open it using his lockpicks. He managed to open it, but not before dislodging something inside the old lock, ruining it in the process. With Gram and Macca at the ready to fight, Gimdalf kicked the door open in a dramatic fashion. The room inside had a distinct lack of opponents, living creatures, or other dangerous items. It did have a lot of heavy scratchmarks on the floor and in the dust. The furniture it lacked appeared to have been dragged through the large stone door in the opposite wall. The door was entirely made of stone, and had a ring of wedge-shaped buttons in the middle, each with a dot on them. Engraved on the doorframe were warning symbols of Tal'nadir dying due to various causes.Loop-de-loop
The party decided that they'd better leave this door alone for now, and went to explore the rest of the corridor. When getting close to a three-way intersection, they heared the famliar sizzling of a spatial anomaly, which moved along the perpendicular corridor. Additionally, the wall of the intersection featured engravings that they'd seen earlier in the complex. And on top of that Gimdalf saw that the rooms in the corridor were similar to the three sleeping quarters they'd seen earlier. Suspecting a loop, or other kind of teleportation, Gimdalf went into the middle room to see if this room also had a collapsed secret compartment with money in it. The compartment was there, but someone appeared to have already taken the money. He then left one of his Returning Rocks on the ground, so they'd have a reference if there was indeed some kind of loop going on. Walking around the corner of the hallway heightened the party's suspicions of a loop; a section of the corridor had been spatially shifted sideways, just like they'd encountered earlier. This allowed Gram Crackers to check what triggering the trap in this area did. In the vision they'd been told not to stand on a specific set of tiles in this corridor, so Gram dropped the resizing statue (which she'd been carrying in her hand this whole time) onto the indicated area. Seeing the floortile press down slightly, Gram jumped back. As she did so, large spiked metal poles shot out of the floor and hit the ceiling. The beams struggled to lift the statue, and toppled it onto the spot where Gram Crackers had been standing just a moment before. The poles then retracted, and Gram retrieved the statue. Walking further along the corridors, the party looped back to the corridor with the red dot symbol, and the now-open door. And indeed, Gimdalfs rock was still floating on the ground. The party was now certain that this facility looped in on itself. A muffled boom and shockwave surprised the party. Nothing seemed to have broken, and the shockwave appeared to have come from somewhere in the West, where they knew there wasn't a part of the facility. The party collectively decided that this was most likely something happening on the surface, or at least not their immediate concern.Colors
The party then went to see if they could open the door with the stone dial. Suspecting a trap, due to the engraved warnings, Gimdalf carefully inspected the room. He found several holes in the side walls and next to the door. All had slight scorchmarks around the edges, and were aimed at the area directly in front of the door. He also saw that the buttons on the door each had a colored dot on them. Suspecting a color sequence to be the key for opening the door, the party went back along the trail of red dot symbols they'd found earlier. Now that they had the light from their weapons, they saw that each symbol had a different color. They had only found four symbols, and had seen eight on the dial. Gimdalf surmised that if there were more than four symbols they could easily verify by going further in the direction of the symbols, because they were a regular distance apart. If they didn't see another symbol within a certain distance, the code was to be only four colors long. There were three corridors they hadn't explored yet in the direction of the color trail. The first led to a room full of cold forges, stacks of metal bars, and several disabled Retrievers. No red dot symbol was to be found. Gimdalf did collect several of the metal bars, and a few jewelry molds that had been pinned under a collapsed furnace. The other corridor had a long staircase in it, with also stairs on the celing. Halway through the engravings on the walls went upside down. Some careful navigation revealed that at that point the gravity slowly reversed. The party floated through and found a half-broken door hanging slanted on it's hinges. A dirt floor was visible behind it. Not wanting to go down to a next level of the dungeon, the party turned back. The third corridor they had not tried yet was behind a slanted door in the courtyard, which they didn't open, because it was clear to them that this was actually where the stairs ended up.The workshop
The code of "blue, yellow, purple, red" was carefully entered from a distance by using a pole. It turned out to be correct and the door slit down into the floor. Behind the door was a workshop furnished in furniture made entirely of metal. Despite having several workbenches, there were no in-progress items visible, nor finished products, tools or raw materials. The bed appeared to have been slept in. And a rummage through the bedside dresser revealed a set of large baggy pajamas, and a book. The book caused some confusion by containing only gramatically correct, but nonsensical statements. Macca Ni checked to see if it was a thieves code, and discovered the title and contents changed when you read them again. Gimdalf then used Identify and determined it to be The Fools Code. Some rummaging around the drawers in the workbenches produced a strange tool, which after some fiddling around with it, Macca Ni suspected this to be an Anytool. The most puzzling feature in the room was a set of metal doorframes without doors. They were standing away from the walls, and only the frame-side of the hinges were present. Curved scuffmarks on the floor, and in the dirt, indicated that at some point in the recent past both had contained a door. An Identify by Gimdalf later, the party learned that these doorframes allowed access into a pocket dimension. The pocked dimension could be teleported around to a few set locations from controls on the inside of the door. These locations could then periodically be changed to suit the needs of the user. However, these doorframes appeared to have malfunctioned slightly, and the target locations could no longer be changed at-will. (It is now about 6 in the evening)Items
Report Date
04 Jun 2021
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