A DnD Tale: The Catacombs of Fallcrest

Every catacomb gotta have skeletons

The caravan continues to Harken, but due to losing time just unpack and pack on and travels back. Just before leaving an old lady notices Kiera and ask if she has seen her husband, Dauvren Staul. He went on the caravan the last time to Winterhaven and haven't sent word since then. She ask if she can look for him since he can be so engrossed in his work as an archeologist (I also hints that the onyx pyramid was one of his finds he gave to the Duke that then gave it to Kiera). She agree and the caravan is back in Fallcrest. The importer shop has to find more guards since most were scared of by the goblin attack or hurt so they have a day of. Leaving the import shop one of Despair's kids runs up to them and tell them that Marcie has been lost in the catacombs. They all agree to enter. They enter the dark mausoleum of the old lords of Fallcrest. Skeletons litter the place from 100 years ago when the Bloodspear war raged. Orcs, humans, ogres, dwarves, goblins and elves. Piled all around. The sarcophaguses are mostly smashed and anything of value have been taken long ago. The central corridor ends at a dirt wall and on each side through the corridor is five rooms containing the dead lords. They realise that Marcie must be behind the dirt wall since it appear to have had a hole that have been covered up. As usually Sarion is rather ineffective with his magic spells so Sphinx charges the wall, but get his head stuck. He is able to see the other side and he sees light from the walls, created by fluorescent colours painted on the wall. The others pull him out and he tries again. He stumbles on his feet, goes right through the wall and falls down the stairs in the hidden room. After the others stopped hearing him, they continue down. 

They enter pretty much a similar corridor, but much brighter and colourful. They start by looking into every room and then they start from the top. The first room on the left is a pool of water with a statue of a mermaid in the middle on a pedestal. The mermaid is Pisces Matsya, a holy saint for those traveling on water, she is the one that banished the ocean from this valley so that people could settle. The rouge notices some gold and pearls at the foot of the statue, but she obviously smells a trap and ignores is (sad, since I placed two lesser water spirits in the pool that would have attacked her, missed encounter and the idea is so neat I have to figure out a way to use it). The room on the other side is a library with a statue of a turtle, Cehlone Kurma, the guardian of wisdom and knowledge and the saint of magic users. Here Sarion fails to notice the arcane powers, except a black book on a pedestal in the back of the room. He recognises it as Kurma's Black boook. A book that contains the spirits of demons that Kurma captured and bend toward his will. Sadly they didn't take it, every adventurer know that you take anything that isn't nailed down, no matter the dangerous artefacts. If nothing else you can always sell them. 

They go south to the next room, a room divided in gold and silver, night and day with a lion-man statue in the middle and a towering statue of a rhakshasa in the back of the room. The lion-man was Leo Narashima who defeated a rhaksasa demon lord by striking in the twilight since the demon was invulnerable during the night or day. They leave the room and enters the one across. Mostly an empty room besides a statue of a boar-man. Sarion is able to locate a magical dagger in a crevice under the statue. The dagger has a shaft in the shape of a snake and is identified as a assassins dagger +2, and are finally given to Despair. Now what they don't yet know is that when she gets a critical and deals that damage she will start to fall under the spell of the dagger that is a Fang of Zehir, the snake god. This is because she is a worshipper of Zehir from the beginning so I will give her nightmares and in the process influence her to either because more snakelike or throw away her evil god. So nobody tell her alright? The boar-man is Erymanthius Varaha that battled the Yuan-ti and drove the reptilians from the valley. They went south to the next room and inside they find statues of warrior of metal with weapons in hand, 44 total and in the middle a statue of a dwarf. The dwarf is Bes Vamana, a dwarf that grew to the size of a giant and is the saint of metalworkers and miners. As they investigate the statue they trigger a hidden trap and a door closes down behind them and three of the statues awakens, talking about protecting the creator. As they slay the Warfoged captain his eyes turns red and he begins to talk about self-destruction. He explodes and covers the Dragonborn and Tiefling in oil while the others destroys the two warforged warriors remaining. They look around for something to open the door and finds the mechanism at the dwarven statues arm and they pull it up. And so does the door.

Here ends the second session. There is one more next week and after that we return to video game weekly.