WRITTEN RECAP
Eldoria — Episode 17: The Graven Tomb
Episode Seventeen begins exactly where the Old Dudes left off.
In a fight.
Two grotesquely altered lizardfolk stand between the party and the hidden entrance north of Scaled Lake. They have the swollen musculature, stitched features and black-ichor corruption the group now associates with Graven Sentinels.
Before anyone can solve the mystery, they have to survive the guards.
The table settles back into combat with the usual confidence.
Whizz is immediately accused of eventually getting everyone killed and, more specifically, of searching for treasure while everybody else is still fighting.
This is described as part of his job.
The battle resumes.
Fars peppers one of the sentinels with glowing magic. Zayon Von drives Judgment's Point into the fight, knocks an enemy prone with his shield and uses divine power to turn a miss into a hit.
Zewor tries to bring his bow into play.
For a moment he accidentally targets Garth Maul instead of the lizardfolk.
The table notices.
Fortunately, the targeting problem is corrected before Garth becomes the first casualty of friendly ranger fire.
The Graven Sentinels prove far worse than ordinary lizardfolk.
Their claws drip black ichor.
Their wounds begin knitting themselves back together.
Each round, the creatures regenerate.
And when Wenende finally smites one hard enough to kill it, everyone discovers one more unpleasant feature.
It explodes.
Black corruption bursts outward from the dying body, washing nearby adventurers in necrotic energy.
This leads to the entirely reasonable table discussion that exploding upon death would be a fantastic player-character ability.
Then someone points out that the Old Dudes would probably start killing one another just to watch it happen.
The proposal is quietly abandoned.
The second sentinel takes more punishment.
Garth swings his halberd. Fars keeps up magical pressure. Zewor finally gets arrows into the correct target. Zayon heals Garth while continuing to attack, and Wenende uses the cold power of Frost Veil along with his divine abilities.
Eventually the second creature falls.
It explodes too.
When the fighting ends, the bodies begin to collapse into themselves.
The black ichor appears to be consuming them from within, breaking down flesh and leaving the remains to melt away. Their scales are visibly tougher than those of normal lizardfolk, prompting Zayon to consider whether they could be turned into a shield.
That idea is quickly followed by an even better one.
Should the party drink the black ichor?
After all, the stuff clearly makes creatures stronger.
Perhaps, somebody suggests, they could become incredibly powerful if they did it correctly.
Fars points out that willingly ingesting mysterious corruptive evil is usually the part of the story where everything goes wrong.
The conversation somehow reaches The Lord of the Rings.
Someone admits to never having read it.
No black ichor is consumed.
For now.
With the guards dead, the party examines the hidden entrance.
It is not a doorway.
It is a deep shaft dropping roughly fifty or sixty feet into the earth. A rope has already been tied off at the top, and old stonework can be seen far below.
Clearly, other people have been using it.
There is a lengthy discussion about darkvision, light sources and who should go first.
Eventually the Old Dudes descend.
At the bottom they find themselves in an ancient underground complex.
The place is part tomb, part temple and part ruin. Old stone corridors disappear into darkness. Bones and skulls occupy burial spaces in the walls. Dust lies across stairs that have not seen honest pilgrims in a very long time.
To solve the lighting problem, Zayon casts Light on Garth Maul's halberd.
Garth is now both fighter and portable lamp.
The party moves deeper.
An ornate iron door blocks the way.
Beyond it waits another Graven Sentinel.
Zewor gets the door open, sees the creature and immediately closes it again.
This may be one of the more tactically sound things anyone does all evening.
The Old Dudes arrange themselves around the doorway and prepare attacks for whatever comes through.
When the door opens again, the tomb erupts into violence.
There is more than one corrupted guardian inside.
The narrow corridors make the fight brutal.
The sentinels attack with blackened scimitars and ichor-infused claws. Fars uses Dissonant Whispers to break an enemy's position. Wenende brings Frost Veil and his smites to bear. Zewor fires into the melee whenever he can find a line. Garth commits fully, including an Action Surge and a devastating critical hit.
Zayon absorbs a frightening amount of punishment.
At one point he is hammered down to only a handful of hit points.
Healing magic keeps him standing.
Eventually the sentinels fall.
Again they burst with necrotic corruption.
Again their bodies dissolve.
This time the strange black scimitars remain behind.
Naturally, somebody touches one.
The weapon responds by inflicting necrotic damage.
Trying to handle it through leather does not solve the problem.
The party decides that perhaps the sword constantly leaking evil black ichor should not be casually stuffed into a backpack.
Progress.
The Old Dudes are now deep underground, wounded and depleted, with an unknown amount of tomb still ahead.
They make another sensible decision.
They leave.
Rather than push farther while low on spells and hit points, the party climbs back to the surface and finds a sheltered place among the rocks to rest.
During the break they realize the accumulated experience has pushed everyone to sixth level.
This should be exciting.
Instead, it becomes a prolonged battle against character sheets and Foundry's level-up interface.
New abilities appear. Numbers change. Buttons move. Several grown men become increasingly annoyed at software.
Eventually the characters reach level six.
The players mostly survive the process as well.
The following morning brings drizzle and another descent into the Graven Tomb.
The residue from the previous day's sentinels is still there. So are the dangerous scimitars.
The party leaves them alone and continues exploring.
The tomb opens into older burial passages covered in dust and crossed by many footprints. Whatever Silvara's people are doing here, they have been moving through these halls regularly.
Then the Old Dudes find a sarcophagus.
Zayon, being a cleric standing in an ancient burial place, makes his position clear.
Do not desecrate the dead.
Some of his companions hear this and apparently interpret it as a suggestion.
Garth and the others begin pushing the lid aside because there might be treasure inside.
Zayon is required to make a Wisdom save to determine his reaction.
He fails.
He announces that he is disappointed in his friends' choices.
The lid comes off.
Inside is the dust of someone who has been dead for a very, very long time.
No magic sword.
No jewels.
No necklace.
No treasure at all.
The disappointment now belongs to everyone.
The group puts the lid back and proudly declares the sarcophagus undesecrated.
Farther inside, they find a stone inscription and a strange arrangement of statues.
The message describes the weak speaking, the fearful watching, and the faithful doing neither. It says that when flesh becomes stone, stone becomes a witness, and when that witness is silenced, the path will open.
The surrounding stone figures look disturbingly familiar.
They are massive, muscular humanoids with mouths carved or bound shut in the same visual language as the Graven Sentinels.
The Old Dudes begin experimenting.
Water is discussed.
Basins are inspected.
Reflections are considered.
There is an attempt to work out whether something needs to be smashed.
At one point the solution threatens to involve bedding.
Eventually the party focuses on the important word.
Witness.
The statues are the witnesses.
To silence them, the Old Dudes cover their mouths.
A mechanism clicks.
The sealed path opens.
Jay later points out that this particular solution also allowed them to avoid a trap.
The table congratulates itself on being extremely intelligent, possibly through cheating.
Beyond the opened passage, the tomb becomes something else.
A heavy door leads into a chamber that is no burial place.
Four deep pits or vats hold swirling black ichor.
Stone devices and glowing cubes appear to feed power into the process. Arcane markings cover the floor.
The party recognizes the rune work.
It matches the same strange sigil they saw on the banner in Varic's cave.
And standing among the equipment are more Graven Sentinels.
One is a female humanoid transformed by the process. Another altered guardian stands nearby.
This is not merely where Silvara once experimented.
The operation is active.
The fight begins immediately.
Garth charges into the room and lands a crushing blow.
Fars blinds one of the sentinels, making it easier for the front line to close.
The enemies answer with the same brutal combination of scimitars, claws and unnatural power the party has already encountered.
One of the creatures uses magic to lock Garth in place.
Wenende keeps bringing divine force into the fight.
Zayon alternates between attacking and keeping people alive.
The chamber fills with weapon strikes, spells and the increasingly familiar problem of enemies that refuse to stay damaged.
Eventually the sentinels go down.
The Old Dudes turn their attention to the room itself.
The black ichor continues churning in the vats.
The glowing runes and powered devices appear to be part of whatever process is being used here.
Rather than investigate by drinking anything, the party tries a different form of science.
They damage the symbols.
Scratching and breaking the rune work disrupts the magical circuit.
The glow in the cubes fades.
The machinery quiets.
The ichor remains, but the process feeding it has been interrupted.
Then they find the research area.
Tables hold alchemical tools, papers and equipment. More runic markings connect the room to the same system. The Old Dudes disable those as well.
Most importantly, they find records.
A leather-bound book.
A smaller black ledger.
Documents associated with the experiments.
Instead of standing in the laboratory and reading everything while unknown monsters wander the halls, the party takes the material with them.
For the first time, they may have more than testimony and samples.
They may have written evidence of whoever is creating the Graven Sentinels.
The tomb is not finished with them.
They continue through additional burial chambers and old passages, discovering that the underground complex extends much farther than the first laboratory.
Near the end of the session they open the way into another section.
There are more coffins.
Another ornate sarcophagus.
And movement in the darkness.
Two familiar hostile shapes are waiting ahead.
Jay looks at the clock.
The Old Dudes look at the creatures.
Nobody particularly wants to begin another full combat with the session nearly over.
So Episode Seventeen ends exactly where an episode called The Graven Tomb should end.
Deep underground.
Surrounded by the dead.
Carrying evidence of forbidden experiments.
And staring at two more things that would very much like to kill them.
The Old Dudes have found Silvara's operation.
They have damaged part of it.
They have stolen its records.
And they are nowhere near done with the tomb.