C Series Session 5: Cerebro Cerebro Cerebro

Grenthrum and Roddy took Colette, Condition Killer and La Mal back through the portal to the tomb at Hogman's Plain. Colette wanted to wipe out the Gnolls on the first floor and find the bones of her friends for a Holy Mountain burial. The Threshers wanted severed Gnoll heads as proof of work, to advance their position in the Grain Cult. Grenthrum and Roddy wanted money.

The Threshers cleared the portal. The adventurers followed them through.

On exiting the psi-blanked confines of the Fazenda, Grenthrums' talking sword Cherrywine struck up a telepathic conversation with him. Grenthrum, resurrected as an Orc by the power of Leper Heart, had gained a new respect for organized religion. Cherrywine, who hated Clerics, possessed him and made him hit himself. Condition Killer quickly exorcised him and cast the sentient sword away.

 

Roddy's keen ears detected the sound of argument and bone-gnawing in the side passage formerly occupied by the giant ants. He crept closer and detected the unmistakable scent of Ghouls. The beasts were busy fighting over a recent kill and didn't notice him. He summoned the rest of the group and initiated battle with a thrown rock. Condition Killer hit the Ghouls with a Turn Undead, breaking their morale and allowing the rest of the group to hack the cornered monsters to death without fear of retaliation. The Ghouls must have crawled out of a tomb somewhere on the plain, because they were dripping with funeral jewelry.

R. Smirke

The adventurers considered their options for reaching the ground floor of the tomb. The central shaft required them to squeeze through a chokepoint that let the Gnolls ambush them. The garbage chute likewise led down to a single door. The cliff face leading down to Hogman's Plain at least gave them room to maneuver. La Mal hammered a piton into the tunnel and looped a rope through. The gang rappelled down to the plain.

It was hot. Enough to evaporate the spit in their mouths and sear their lungs. There were two tomb entrances, a small one leading to an older crypt and a grand mausoleum entrance. They picked the small tomb. The entrance was trapped with a Gnoll skull holding a scrimshaw bone, which Roddy removed for later inspection - he knew it was magic but couldn't read the scribbling. The back of the tomb led to a fissure in the rock wall. One fork of the fissure led to the bottom of the trash chute, a large circular room denuded of valuables and corpses by scavengers. The other led deeper into the crypt, to a room full of jackals. Roddy lit a torch and let the beasts see him, Grenthrum lured them with food. They decided to set an ambush in the garbage chute, since the tunnel system was too narrow for their whole group to fight together. Grenthrum spilled a bunch of food on the floor and the dogs happily chowed down while the adventurers prepared their defenses.

It wasn't much of an ambush, since the Gnolls just had to follow the footprints and excited dog sounds to find where the adventurers had cornered themselves. Roddy hit the first one through the door with a thrown rock. The Gnolls used their last scrimshaw bone to cast a spell of Torment on La Mal and rushed in to butcher the adventurers. It was a fierce battle and the group was almost overwhelmed. The jackals hesitated, but eventually attacked the adventurers who had fed them. 

 

Roddy saved the day by tossing grenades over the Gnolls' front line, using their tightly packed bodies to protect friendly forces from fragmentation. Grenthrum, La Mal, Condition Killer and Colette hacked away at the survivors and the Gnolls turned to flee. The piled bodies hindered their escape and several more died in the escape attempt. Roddy chased them, hurling insults and rocks with his sling, while the rest of the group recovered. With heaps of Gnoll corpses to eat, the jackals lost interest in fighting.

Once everyone was ready to proceed they followed the fractured rock into the tomb proper. They found a treasure room where the hyena-men heaped loot from their victims. A spitting cobra almost took Grenthrum's eye out, but he decapitated it with a pistol ball before it could line up a second shot. The rest of the tomb yielded another Bloodiron rod, more Gnoll scrimshaw traps, a mysterious Scepter, a strange Scrimshaw device with a socket, and a big pile of bones. Roddy fiddled with the device and discovered the Bloodiron rod fit inside the socket, and the whole assembly fit inside a skull taken from the bone pile. Grenthrum hypothesized that this was a control interface for manipulating the Intellect Devourers once they had been implanted in a host body.

 

Roddy helped Colette search the bone pile for the remains of her friends. It was tough because Half-Orc skeletons weren't as markedly different from mundane humans as full blooded Hogmen. The sun went down outside, lighting the plain brilliant red. Crepuscular creatures emerged from the sand, huge scorpions and lizards and birds. Colette wrapped a big pile of questionable bones in La Mal's poncho and went back upstairs to the portal. The rest of the group followed her up before the plain became too thick with dangerous wild animals to maneuver.

 

With the tomb scoured of monsters, the squad (sans Colette) climbed up to level 3 and went through the mysterious portal they discovered on the last delve. It led to a circular room with a slimy conveyer, which led out through a sticky wall. They skirted around this and went through a membranous door to a room full of pulsing sacs, pumping black liquid and sand. Roddy identified the machines as air exchangers, like the type used to keep a mineshaft breathable. The next chamber had metal jugs of soil and strange rayguns epoxied to the wall with the same resin used by the Migo in the tomb. The door out of the room glowed an ominous green, sparking when Roddy threw objects at it. Grenthrum suggested returning to the tomb for a debrief with Doctor Pleroma, before returning at a later date with the whole gang.