Session 3: Tomb of the Iron God, Part 3

The party begin the session by completing their interrogation of the goblins. The shaman is the only goblin that speaks Common, so he ends up answering most of their questions. Overall, they discover several interesting pieces of information:

• The goblins arrived at the monastary about a week ago. Previously, they had been living in the jungles around the area.
• This group of goblins know about the other group of goblins to the east, but they are not on good terms with them.
• The talking head at the entrance to the cellars was actually placed by the shaman, in order to scare off intruders. It has nothing to do with the Iron God.
• The goblins attempted to explore the catacombs, but everyone they sent started to experience strange visions and hallucinations.
• Similarly, they tried to steal the silver from the bowl to the north, but as they took it away, it somehow became progressively heavier.

The party decide to be friendly to the goblins, after Iriellis deflects their suspicion about the party sending the iron statue at them. Iriellis spends the last of her healing magic helping some of the wounded goblins, and Zedlyn proposes an offer: the party will allow them to live, if they leave the monastary. The goblins accept this offer, and the party escorts them out, although not before they search through the goblins' pile of spoils, finding 100 gold pieces and several gems and trinkets that seem valuable.

At the front entrance, they rejoin with Sharla to plan their next move. Everyone is in favour of resting, since several party members are quite injured; Sulif points out that Asuna is only an hour away, so they could easily rest the night there. Everyone agrees, so they head back to the town, paying close attention to the route so that they will be able to return without Sulif's guidance.

Back at Asuna, Sulif departs - with his broken arm, he won't be much use adventuring, although fortunately his share of the loot from the goblins should be enough to tide him over until it heals. The party check in with Arik, who is feeling a bit better, although unsure if he'll be able to join them tomorrow. He reminds them that they only have two more days before the caravan departs. Zedlyn, Adokas, and Iriellis check in at the local healer's home, and everyone rests for the night.

The next morning, Adokas picks up some dungeoneering supplies from the village's store, including torches, a lantern, and a prybar. Arik is still too exhausted to join them and decides to spend another day resting. The party head out, with Iriellis retracing Sulif's footsteps back to the monastary.

Their first stop after they arrive is the storeroom where they found the embalming fluid, and where they hope to find more. There are nine more crates in the room, which open much more easily with their newly-acquired prybar. Most of the crates contain various mundane supplies - ceremonial garments, scrap iron, tanned hides, and dried food. In addition, they find a crate full of various primitive idols, which Iriellis recognizes as representations of orc and goblin deities. There is also a crate containing hundreds of wooden sticks, about the size of wands; Lorcan uses a spell to detect magic but they do not appear to be enchanted. Another crate contains what they were looking for: three vials of embalming fluid, along with ten flasks of (holy?) water, a flask of what appears to be honey, and two unidentified green flasks. They take them all. Finally, at the bottom of the crate that contained ceremonial garments, they find a strange book. Sharla quickly flips through it, and finds that it concerns necromancy. The first half of the book concerns the creation of skeletons and zombies, the second half, ghouls. Oddly, there do not appear to be any references to the Iron God in its pages, only Mung, the God of Death. Sharla takes the book for more in-depth study later.

Continuing on, the party head to the east from the four-way intersection, but are stopped when they notice a large pressure plate stretching across the passage. Adokas and Lorcan investigate, but are unable to find any linked mechanisms, so the plate is either a pit trap that opens up, or it's a pressure plate that controls something deeper into the cellars. The party decide to avoid it for now.

Taking a nearby door, they enter a mostly-empty room filled with animal droppings. As this is near where they previously heard the sound of giant rats, they decide to leave the room alone, reasoning that rats are unlikely to have treasure or anything else of value.

At this point, the group decide to return to the front chamber to investigate the statue of the Iron God holding an urn. From this room, they can see the barricade they put up to block off the goblins they heard earlier; it appears to be undisturbed. Lorcan is the only party member tall enough to see into the urn, so he takes a torch and peers inside. The urn actually opens into a chute, which goes for about ten feet and opens into a room, although all Lorcan can see of it is the floor. He throws the body of a goblin down the chute to see if it has any effect; the goblin tumbles down into the other room, but nothing unusual or unexpected happens.

Their options being limited to the goblins past the barricade, the passageway through the urn, the passage beyond the pressure plate, the room with the rats, and a single unexplored door near the rat noises, the party opt for the door. Beyond, they find a ransacked storeroom, followed by an intact storeroom containing five barrels, two boxes, and a large spool of thread, as well as doors to the north and south. Continuing to the south past the barrels and boxes, they enter the room at the other end of the urn's chute, where the goblin's corpse lies. Inside are a large stone slab, shelves lining the west and east walls, several large iron vats, and a pile of curiously large wicker baskets. The party surmise that this must be the embalming room, and follow a passage out to the north.

The north passage opens into a small room containing a stairway down, mounted by an iron plaque similar to the one above the catacombs entrance. Zedlyn steps forward to read the plaque, at which point he triggers a pit trap that none of the party had noticed. Luckily, quick reflexes save him from falling in, but the open pit now prevents easy passage, so the party decide to return to the storeroom from before.

Inside the storeroom, two of the barrels contain nothing but stagnant water, while the other three are full of embalming fluid. One of the boxes is full of alum powder, used in dehydrating bodies to be preserved, and the other contains various surgical instruments. This is clearly where the priests kept their embalming supplies. The party proceed through the northern door.

This door leads to a passage which swings to the east, then opens into a room that appears to be a library or archive, full of shelves of books. Strangely, the books appear to all be made of solid iron, fused shut. The only books that can be read are four that are open on a sturdy reading table, and even then, only the currently opened pages can be read. One book is open to a description of a spell that creates illusionary duplicates of the caster. The second contains a description of how to prepare the dead for re-animation (broadly consistent with the surgical tools from the storeroom before). The third seems to be a record of valuable items. The fourth and final book is open to part of a story or parable, describing how the Iron God defeats something called the "Eater of the Dead" by imprisoning it in store.

The books are solid iron and thus extremely heavy, so Sharla gets to work copying down the spell while the rest of the party check out the other books on the shelves. None of them can be opened, so they can only judge by the titles, but most of the books seem to be either religious texts or archival records, mixed in with a smattering of tomes regarding necromancy, as well as a few books covering sagely topics such as history and magical theory. Unfortunately, none of them can be opened and read.