After our brush with skeletons and weird crawly creatures we followed the narrow path south again, back to the area where we had fought the first skeletons a week ago. Again it came to pass that Merrick had to take point with his lantern, while Farin whispered suggestions what to do next. Especially, Farin wanted to continue past that door and go down to a lower level.

Merrick had other ideas: we had seen two doors where we had fought the skeletons, so it would be good to check on them. He found the door closed, but it was easy enough to open. And so we stayed on level 1. Inside everything was as it had been: scatterd bones, our two iron spikes keeping the wooden door shut, and a metal door.

Merrick tried to listen on the northern, wooden door, but Willem went ahead and tried to twist open the metal door with some measure of brute force. On his second attempt, he managed just that, and opened the way into another narrow tunnel, one with a very low ceiling and copious amounts of sand on the floor. Sand that revealed a couple of footsteps.

tunnel network

Merrick took point and followed them. And thus we discovered a rather complex web of odd little tunnels which reminded Merrick of catacombs, but without the grave sites: the walls were oddly solid and unbroken, which raised questions on the why of the design, but delivered no answers.

So many twists and turns and dead ends… but also a subtle light source north from that central crossing. Merrick let the others catch up while he studied the tracks in the sand. They did not go everywhere, he noticed. Just north of here, west, and south, but not into the side passages. It was also one set, or two at most. Old too. So these tunnels were not well-travelled at all.

Family crypt

When the others were behind him again, Merrick moved up to take a peek. The light came from a holy symbol of Tah worn around the neck of a bronze statue of a bearded man. Merrick studied it carefully and found an inscription: “Kenley, protector of our family”. This statue had to be here since long ago, even before the rise of the demons.

Respecting the symbol of Tah, the cleric left the statue untouched and simply used the moment for prayer, then went farther north, to a metal door that must, by the laws of physics, go to the room with the dead person in front of the chest. Locked.

Another path went west and turned south from there, but with no footprints. Merrick turned to the others and asked them for the 10-foot-pole, because that seemed fishy. When he had it, he went through that corridor slowly and deliberately: he suspected a pit trap somewhere in here and was curious how deep it would be and what the walls would be made of. But he was wrong: It was not a pit trap, it was a different sort of mechanics; one that did not give him the information he wanted. But at least nobody had run into it, that was a good win.

Merrick asked the group behind him to turn around and backtrack to the central crossing. There they waited to let him take point again. He went west and discovered that the northern branch here ended in another dead end — but that there was a slight elevation in the undisturbed sand. Something was buried here, he figured, so went down in a crouch and poked it with the 10-foot-pole, while Farin stood behind him to back him up. The others gave them a bit of breathing room.

Boom: A skeleton swiftly rushed up out of the sand and went in to attack!
Merrick had expected all sorts of things under this elevation of sand, but not a full skeleton! Farin failed to turn it, Willem came after us but could not get to it, and so Merrick got attacked, and hit, and wounded me for 4 damage: maximum roll with its unarmed bone-fists!

I moved back out of the way in a fighting retreat and also tried to turn it, but also failed. Both Farin and I will really have to practice that, we don’t have a great track record so far.

Luckily Willem was there to step in and smash the undead with the mace he had won.

Hourglass

Nothing else was here. Wounded, I now requested to step farther back and not always take point, given that I am only very lightly armored too. So Farin took point and went south, where he discovered a massive hourglass, with all the sand run down. The footsteps gave us an important hint, as they ran right into a solid wall. We played around and discovered a very strange secret room, protected by an oppressive magical atmosphere that doused sounds and prevented speech. In it, we found another holy symbol of Tah and two coffins: one of them hale, one broken (and empty). One set of footsteps came in, two left. So at some point a few decades ago someone had gone in here and raised one of the dead, but left the other to rot.

Sounds like some marriage/adultery thing to Merrick’s mind; the husband sleeps on in eternity, while the faithless wife’s corpse cavorts around with a dark sorcerer… pure conjection of course, we have no clues and it can be a completely different story. Just, sin is everywhere! Even after death. And that is doubly disappointing in a crypt lying so thoroughly under the blessing of Tah.

I did my best to re-consecrate the grave chamber, as I had to count that raising of a dead person, lover or not, as desecration. No result could be sensed, I simply have to trust in Tah that my prayers took hold. Obviously, we left this symbol of Tah where it was too.

mundane loot

On the way out I stopped at one dead end with a bit of rubble and asked Farin to sift through that, carefully of course. He did, and found 2 scrolls; one a “treasure map”, the other a class-agnostic spell, “protection from the undead”. This would be a VERY useful spell to learn rather than to read off the scroll and lose, but how does one learn a class-agnostic spell? Especially as a cleric, where I generally do not learn my spells but request the power from Tah directly. Food for thought!

Furthermore, the rubble contained a book, the so called “book of blood”, which we clerics scanned to see if it was evil. It was not: rather, it was a treatise of medicine clustering the blood of living humans into “blood types” and describing various blood diseases. Useful for healers! It went into Farin’s pack; together with 10 normal wax candles that also lay here.

Now, here we are: Willem and I have been wounded, so we need to decide our next steps.
Farin argues strongly in favour of going downstairs to level 2.
I wonder what lies behind that wooden door. But wounded it is not the best moment to sate this curiosity. The general consensus goes Farin’s way: We shall walk down next time.

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