Into The Odd: The Unquiet Tomb

 

The Brilg and Spowegg expedition to Hogman's Plain was going great. The desert was lethally hot by day and infested with undead by night, but the gunboat cared not for either as it motored up the River Hog. When three of the crew disappeared in the night, the Captain of the Rent Seeker wasn't fazed. He sent three of his top explorers ashore to follow the mysterious tracks into the cliffs above the river: The Janitor, the Pistoleer and the Grenadier.

 

The footprints led to an opening in the rock, tall enough for a man to enter at a crouch. A heap of scorched human and humanoid bones lay outside the entrance. The space inside was dimly lit by a red glow from the passages beyond. The shore party entered the tomb. 

 

The entry hall was a domed chamber with paintings of animal headed people summoning demons. In the center was a huge quartz boulder with a lens cut into one side facing the entrance. The halls beyond were lit by red bulbs dangling from the ceiling. The shore party stood on each others' shoulders to retrieve them and they still shined when detached. The Pistoleer picked up the boulder and carried it down the hall with the others to explore the door to the west. The smooth bronze portcullis had a handle at the bottom. After some initial resistance it slid up on a hydraulic mechanism. He placed the boulder to stop the door from shutting and the Grenadier went into the room. It was a little garden with a water feature and plants. He tried to get the coins out of the water feature and a giant cobra flared its hood and hissed at him. The shore party laid into it with pistols and clubs but it spat venom into the Pistoleer's eyes, blinding him. They dragged him away and rolled the boulder out of the door before the serpent could follow. 

 

 

The sun went down as the group recovered. The boulder lit up, shining a bright light out of the faceted side against the closed bronze door. A horde of undead shuffled toward the tomb entrance. Thinking quickly, the Janitor and Pistoleer rolled the boulder back to its spot in the entry hall with the beam facing out the entrance. The zombies and skeletons and wraiths and ghouls were burned to a crisp before they could get into the tomb.

The Pistoleer's vision was still blurry but the explorers were concerned about being caught by the denizens of the tomb. The snake was clearly kept as a pet in a room that couldn't escape, implying the site was inhabited. They followed sidewinding tracks along the ground to a forked tunnel where one of the doors made a sound like a heartbeat. They noted an opening at floor level that led into a cramped burial chamber, but decided against crawling around in there just yet. They opened the metal door.

A serpent man stood over the vivisected body of Martim the missing adventurer, surrounded by lab equipment and notes written on thin sheets of gold. Martim was still alive, organs and body parts connected by tubes. The Grenadier must have made a good first impression on the serpent, because it clasped a pulsing book from one of the worktables and spoke to him telepathically. It asked if he was bringing more offerings. It wanted sacrifices with the strongest possible life glow. The Grenadier explained the situation to his allies. The Pistoleer offered a bottle of poison he brought with him. The snake tasted it and eagerly gulped it down to no ill effect. Thinking quickly the Janitor offered the serpent a bottle of glue. He tasted it and got it stuck to his face. The shore party pounced and hacked away at the serpent, who fled into the adjacent hall.

The adventurers looted gold tablets, potions and a wand from the chamber and promised the disassembled Martim they'd be back for him. They rushed after the fleeing serpent and found it in an adjacent garage with a second snake and a chariot full of glittering circuitry. The Grenadier threw a grenade, the Pistoleer and Janitor piled on with their hand weapons and slew the serpent people before they could react. The grenade wrecked the chariot but the serpent halberds and their magic book were still functional. The ceiling groaned and the shore party vacated the chamber ahead of a potential collapse.

Working together, the three adventurers were able to reassemble the still-living Martim's body. He was naked and divested of his equipment but they gave him one of their disused cudgels. Coxinha and Coquito were somewhere else in the dungeon, they'd been hypnotized by the snakes and led away. The marines used the serpent translation book to read the gold plates. They chronicled the serpents' experiments sacrificing beings of larger and larger "life glow" to manifests constructs from the other side. Rats produced disappointing manifestations and they hoped the adventurers would do better. By this point the sound of horns or bellowing were audible from deeper in the temple complex.

 

The next room had a rack of weapons, but no snake tracks on the floor. The Grenadier went to take the weapons and the rack lurched forward like the jaws of a viper, striking him with the protruding polearm. He survived the onslaught and Martim grabbed one of the glaives. It got stuck to his hand. The weapons were all cursed except a rainbow sword that shined with magical light, which they pocketed. The room after that was an ablution chamber with flowing water and shining chains in a sunken pool. The marines swept past the massage bed and scented oils and stacked the door where the metallic bellowing came from. They tried to convince Martim to go first but he wouldn't do it, so the Grenadier stepped forward into the temple.

 

A serpent priest lay prostrate before a huge horned snake statue of bronze, which emitted a shrieking sound from its open mouth. A fire blazed beneath the bronze, heating it up. A second snake glared at the Grenadier and hypnotized him, drawing him into the room. The shore party realized something was wrong and rushed into the room. Battle was joined. The serpent priestess lifted a braceleted hand and summoned a cloud of freezing fog that almost paralyzed the entire shore party. The survivors shot and stabbed and chopped her to bits, just in time for a horde of ratment to rush them from behind through a hidden door. The rats brandished their cutlery, incensed that the marines were messing with their meal ticket. The Grenadier spent a precious grenade to stop the rodents' charge, only a single rat survived as the Pistoleer waded in to finish off the wounded.

 

The Janitor used her heavy tongs to open the bronze statue's hatch. Coquito the adventure came tumbling out, burned and barely alive. They looted the room while he caught his breath, grabbing the ice bracelet from the dead priestess, assorted treasure from closets adjacent to the room, and diamonds from the statue's eyes (at the cost of a scalding steam bath). The snake priestess was still alive, critically injured she would die without care. The party shoveled her into the bronze statue and rekindled the flame, interested to see what would happen. The smoke issuing from the statue darkened as her body cremated. The bronze doors opposite the statue opened and a brazen bull came out, prancing and blowing steam out of its nostrils.

 

 

Martim was the strongest willed of the shore party. He stepped forward and tried to command the monster. It gored him mid-sentence. 

 

The party's weapons proved ineffective against the bull's metal hide. Its billowing steam breath killed Martim and Coquito and forced the others back. The Grenadier summoned a cloud of ice using the priestess' magic bracelet and wounded the beast. More ice and focused fire stopped it in its tracks and broke it apart Demolition Man style, superheated innards shattering the frozen exterior plates so the whole thing fell apart.

 

With magic ice clouds at their command and no more motile monsters to menace them, the surviving shore party made quick work of the rest of the tomb. The sacrificial room connected to the small crypt they found earlier, and when a horde of skeletons tried to crawl out they just parked the freezing cloud over the entrance. A supply closet branching from the temple was full of weapons and items taken from the captured crewmembers. Loaded down with more weapons and armor, the adventurers found a secret door the snakes had missed, probably left by another culture that inhabited the site. 

 

 

On the other side of the secret door, they found

• A room filled with cloth, wax and other junk. 
• The final explorer Coxinha, stuck in a pillory after she escaped the Snakes' prison. She was upset that the others died but she showed the shore party how to use her arcane gavel to seal and unseal doors.
• A basking chamber full of coins and a room full of stone stasis eggs where the serpents had hibernated. 
• A magically sealed garbage room full of lemures which regenerated through all the damage the marines stacked, prompting them to seal the chamber with the gavel.
• The other entrance to the cobra's room, who they promptly froze and hacked to death so they could loot the coins in his little fountain.

The only thing left was to confront the surviving rats. The secret door led into a rat nursery where the panicked mother tried to gather her rodents and escape. The little rats had never encountered anything dangerous before, only people who wanted to feed and play with them. They rushed toward the adventurers, who declined to slaughter them and let mom flee with the babies. The one surviving rat from the earlier battle got into a screaming Curb Your Enthusiasm style argument with the marines, mostly trying to buy time so his mother could escape. The party learned that the rat people worked with the serpents for food, they had given up a couple ratlings as sacrificial offerings but the results had been worthless, so they served as scouts and sentries instead. When it became clear they really weren't interested in killing him, he threw a fistful of accumulated junk to satisfy their lust for treasure and scampered away in disgust. The Janitor donned a strange ring from the pile of rat junk and broke out in a thick blue sweat, rendering her resistant to fire in disgusting fashion. 

 

The shore party had to wait until dawn to return to the ship, when all the undead went back underground or died trying. Captain Yarrow was thrilled that they returned laden with treasure and magic items, and even managed to rescue one of the missing explorers. He nodded distractedly when they asked to blow up the tomb and told them to draw explosives from the quartermaster. The sailors loaded the mysterious searchlight-boulder onto the ship using the crane.