Session 24: Webs of Danger!
General Summary
As the Thieves draw closer to their goal -- the keel of Little Sister's great, planes-sailing hammership -- the goddess herself seems to grow almost impatient, sensing the keel deep in the stone beneath the desert of this desolate stretch of the Ten Thousand Trackless Sands. Splitting up to try and locate the elusive entrance to the chambers holding the keel, Percy leaps down onto the rotted barrels and crates littering the hold, while Kelpip tries for a more cautious route down to the lowest level of the sand-locked shipwreck they are exploring, vis a vis, the stairs.
While Percy is busy disentangling herself from the rubble she created in her exuberance, Kelpip descends the aft stairs into a secondary hold. But the noise of Percy's destruction (and continued crashing about as she wades through piles of ancient cargo), has alerted something else here in the ship. Something ... large ... slams against a door leading into an even more aft-ward storage area. Even as Kelpip makes for a hasty retreat, the door bursts open and a spider the size of Dolan's metal horse, Thunderwind, scuttles into the room with the diminutive spell caster. Barely a step or three up the stairs, Kelpip yowls out his people's ancient battlecry ("Eeeeep!") and hastily fires off a handful of spells.
Hearing Kelpip's distress, the other adventurers hurriedly make their way to the top of the stairs, where the bottleneck makes it difficult for them to do much, though Fenris leaps through the hatch, over Kelpip's head, only to slide off of the one-eyed spider's chitinous back. Percy, still swimming in rubble, fights her way to a doorway so that she can aid her friend.
Dolan and Ruhst fire off arrows as Trajinous launches spells. However, the spider proves particularly resilient and gets in a few good swipes at Kelpip.
Still, soon enough, the guardian of the ship's shadows is brought low, its legs curling up as the body seems almost to shrivel in on itself. The team searches the area it came from and find a trap door -- carved into the hull of the ship itself -- open from when the spider pushed through to investigate the intruders. Incidentally, a number of dust goblin bones also litter this aft-ward storage room, long ago picked clean of meat.
Descending into the darkness, the Thieves slide down an almost gentle slope and into a series of caverns cut into the sandstone over the course of centuries, perhaps. These caverns and tunnels were used, it appears, as catacombs, for stone sarcophagi adorn every chamber and even some of the hallways. Little Sister becomes even more animated as she feels the power of her ship's missing keel radiate through this underground labyrinth. "Ware," she says, "I do not know what effect such long exposure to the magic and planar radiation might have had here."
This is borne out shortly as, exploring ahead, Ruhst comes across a sarcophagus whose occupant isn't as quiet as the rest. There is a grating and then a crash as the stone lid slides off and lands on the floor, the cacophony reverberating throughout the catacombs. From within the webbed darkness rises a form shrouded in ancient mummification linens, its eyes glowing an unholy, liquid green!
At the same time, a mass of iridescent scarabs crawl and fly forth from the sarcophagus in a river. Pressed back by this assault, Ruhst knocks into another coffin, and the lid of this one, too, begins to slide aside! But by now the others are on the scene. Dolan, Percy, and Trajinous (along with Little Sister and Fenris) try to come in behind the mummy from a narrow cleft in one of the sarcophagi chambers, while Kelpip swings around via the 'low' road to fire off bolts of fire at the flammable ancients.
The scarabs swarm Percy, apparently going for her vorpal sword, but she holds it high and slaps, brushes, and kicks at the scarabs until she can get free of the swarm. Dolan tosses a flame grenade into the corridor, and this seems to dismay the swarm, but things aren't looking good as they turn their attention to Trajinous, who discovers (as did Kelpip moments before) that spells seem to have no effect on the scarabs. In fact, they seem to almost feed on the mystical energies of spell casters.
Worse, the noise has drawn the attention of yet another mummy, who joins the battle from deeper in the catacombs.
Burdened with a lack of area effect spells, the Thieves are hard pressed by the scarabs, but though the mummies pack a wallop, as Ruhst learns to his detriment, they are also very flammable. Kelpip, darting back and forth between angles of attack, keeps up a steady support of fire-based conjurations, while Ruhst and Dolan decide to get up close and personal with the undead, slicing and hacking as severely as they can.
Eventually, with three mummies left as charred bones on the floor and the scarab swarm reduced to a fraction of its original mass and forced to flee back into the cool protection of a sarcophagus, the Thieves declare themselves victorious.
Not wishing to retreat back up into the hold of the wrecked ship above, and not willing to rest for long in the sandstone tunnels that now smell of mold and burned flesh, the adventurers press onward until they find a broad set of carven steps leading down.
Dolan scouts ahead with Fenris, but the others don't linger and follow close behind. The stairs open into a huge, cavernous chamber. Dolan's dwarven dark vision can see only so far, but then mystical torches flare into brightness around the room, revealing a huge space whose ceiling is held up by four massive pillars of piled and mortared stone. An ancient, frayed carpet leads from the bottom of the stairs to a giant's throne at the far end of the hall. And upon the throne is a skeleton large enough to suit it. One of the skeleton's hands rests on the hilt of a massive sword, while the other holds an equally impressive cup. But it isn't these things that draw the eyes of the Thieves. No, it's the fact that the skeleton's spine is strangely curved and strangely solid. A single, curving scimitar of bone that almost seems to hum with mystical energies. The keel.
And with that revelation, the room shudders, and one of the skeleton's feet moves ever so slightly.
Rewards Granted
Treasure in the form of ancient coins and sealed amphora of oils and spices
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