Terrinoth #27 - Curse of the Sand Lord

In the tomb of the Sand Lord

Campaign Diary

Sensing that the dust devils were approaching them with sinister intent, Strigoi, Percy, and Gio charged towards one, while the other one went for Entana.

(Click here for PC profiles)

The whirlwinds fought as though they were living beasts, abrading the skin of our heroes with whirling sand, but were soon destroyed.

While they took stock of the situation, our heroes noticed the skeletons of the dead rising from the ground, and then slowly stumbling towards the north. Unwilling to suffer the undead to... live, Percy began calling on the flames of Kellos to destroy them, but were eventually persuaded to allow one to survive, that the party may follow it to whomever had created and were probably summoning them now.

After an hour, they arrived at a large stone structure in the middle of the desert, resembling a stone house built atop a ziggurat. The skeleton climbed the tall steps of the ziggurat, and disappeared into the doorway of the building.

By now the sun was close to setting. The party hobbled their camels, Percy took her bearings once again, and they then followed the skeleton into the doorway.

When they have ascended the steps of the ziggurat, they realised that the strong stone doors of the doorway had been broken as if by a great force, and that a gentle wind blew out from the doorway, and trailing on the ground was a thin stream of sand that flowed out within the doorway, like a layer of water.

From the doorway stairs descended to the darkness below. At the bottom of the stairs some 60 feet below the party found themselves at the start of a long gallery. On both walls of the gallery were bas relief with the figures of men and inscription of an unfamiliar language.

The first six reliefs depicted what appeared to be the coronation of a king, his battles against his enemies, and finally their subjugation. In between the panels they saw depiction of a lion-headed eagle battling and triumphing over a bull with the face of a man. The final two panels, however, were unfinished. Percy took tracings of the relief and script, hoping to study them later. As she did so, she noticed that fine lines were scoured across the surface of the relief - could the sand once have covered much of the walls?

The gallery led to an archway, the lintel upon which once more showed the lion-headed eagle clutching two bulls in its talons. The archway led into a large hall. The floor of the hall appeared to be covered with sand which streamed slowly outwards. On both sides of the hall, standing against the walls, stood dozens of skeletons, silent and motionless.

Strigoi stepped into the hall, only to sink into the soft sand, and was promptly pulled free by the others. Probing with the shaft of Strigoi's axe, they soon determined that the hall resembled a pool that had been filled with sand, but there was a ledge on the sides, which the skeletons stood on. The party gained the ledge on one side with the aid of rope and pitons, and as the proceeded along it they burned the skeletons, which did not put up a fight.

At the far end of the hall a corridor continued. The party investigated a door on the left of the corridor, which was a large room with shelves carved into the stone walls, but it was otherwise empty.

Moving to the far end of the corridor, they entered yet another hall. At the end of this hall was a raised platform, upon which was a plinth. Standing before the plinth was a figure they recognised: it was the king from the bas relief!

The king spoke to them in an unknown tongue, and when he did not receive a reply, repeated himself twice more. Our heroes tried to appease the ancient king by their gestures, but he raised his hands, and in an instant two sand devils formed, and he himself took the form of a whirlwind, descended the platform, and then took human form again as he moved to attack them. Up close, our heroes now realised that his body was made up of a shifting mass of sand.

The ancient king was a formidable foe, as many time just as their weapons looked sure to strike him, the sand that made up his form parted, causing the weapon to cut through only air, or he would turn into a whirlwind and passed between them when he pleased; yet when he struck our heroes, it felt like they were hit by a bag of sand. Entana tried to cause his form to disperse with a spell of wind, but found to his frustration that he could not do so.

In the chaos of the battle Percy noticed that the brooch upon the king's headdress did not appear to be formed of sand as the rest of his form, and called out to the others. Now they focused their blows upon the brooch, until at last Gio struck it with his sword, causing it to fly into the air - the form of the king and the two dust devils collapsed in an instance.

As the party tended to their wounds and recovered the brooch, they noticed that sand was beginning to seep through the cracks in the ceiling. The raced through the gallery and hall which they came through, and when they ascended the stairs and passed through the doorway it was already dark. The camels bellowed as the ground trembled, and the stone house which the party had just exited began to collapse, sending a cloud of dust into the cool night air. At the same time the sand around the ziggurat sank, as if it were filling the space beneath it.

Exhausted and disorientated, it took the party several hours before the managed to find the camp. Their fellow caravaneers were curious about their wounds, but our heroes remained tight-lipped.

Two days later the caravan arrived at White Dune Pass, which led to the Blessed Valley. Passing through the customs, they noticed a white stone fort in the cliff above the pass.

The land beyond the pass was like a different world from the desert they had just left: here the land was green and lush, and filled with the sound of birds. Picking up their pace, the caravan arrived at Al-Madena by the next day.

Much of the city of Al-Madena sat at the valley floor, but carved into the cliff on the west side of the valley were the homes of the nobles and the wealthy, while at the top of the cliff, next to a waterfall that plunged for hundreds of feet to the valley below, was the palace of the Caliph, the building to meet the rising sun each morning, as befitting the residence of the son of A'tar.

The party made their way to the Terrinoth traders' compound, where they were led by a worried servant to the Veniers' quarters. They were greeted at the door by Bram, the elder Venier's bodyguard, and led to his room. The merchant lay in his bed, pale and gaunt. He explained that he had sent for Entana several months ago when he had obtained a map to a lost tomb, hoping that father and son could explore it together. When the weeks passed without sign of his son, he decided to go with Bram and a small party to find the tomb himself, before the weather turned hot. They managed to locate and enter the tomb, but the only grave good he found that appeared to be of value was an obsidian tablet, engraved on one side with the figure of a beast-headed man and animals, and on the other an unfamiliar script.

Returning to Al-Madena, the elder Venier soon became ill and his sleep became haunted by nightmares monsters and fire. When neither Terrinoth nor local physicians were able to make a diagnosis or find a cure, Bram decided that the tablet must have been cursed, and attempted to destroy it; however the tablet seemed indestructible. When he attempted to discard it by throwing it into a river, it mysteriously appeared back in the quarters again.

Examining the tablet, our heroes found the script to be similar to those which they have found in the tomb which they have recently explored themselves, but were unable to decipher them. Entana had the suspicion that the inscription on the tablets held a clue to how the curse may be broken, and upon his suggestion the elder Venier sent for Iwan, an Al-Kalim man who was his local 'fixer', and whom Gio recognised to be someone familiar with the workings of the criminal world as he himself.

Having heard their tales, Iwan ventured his opinion: the script was familiar to him and his... associates, who had knowledge of ancient tombs (the exploration of which, it may be worth noting, was forbidden by the court for fear of releasing hidden djinni) for... various reasons. In the course of their work, he had surmised that the ages of the tombs spanned many centuries, and the dress of the figures depicted in reliefs found therein, the form of the grave goods, and indeed the variations in the scripts found within each of them indicated one thing: that despite the official account of the court that the people of Al-Kalim were all one people, in the days before the djinni they must have comprised of different cultures and nations. When he shared his insight with his associates, he learned that there were stories of magical artifacts created in the days of the djinni, which would allow those who wielded them to understand the language of any nation - why would such artifacts be needed if all the people of Al-Kalim spoke the same language, as they do now, he mused?

Since they needed to know what was written on the tablet, and since they could not just go to the nearest arcane college and reveal that they possessed grave goods, perhaps such an artifact was what they needed, Iwan ventured.

Fortunately for them, he then revealed, it was rumoured that one such artifact was kept at the fort at White Dune pass, not two days from Al-Madena...

Prepping and Running the Game

The first part of this session was based on the Hellfrost Land of Fire module The Curse of the Sand Lord.

While looking for modules for a Arabic setting, I decided to look at the Hellfrost Land of Fire modules (I had previously looked at some of the Hellfrost modules and found them interesting), and found that they actually had a lot more fluff than Realms of Terrinoth had on Al-Kalim. Interestingly, they also seem to have had a period in history when djinni ruled over mankind.

I took the background story from the module plus a couple of the more interesting encounters as the basis of this session's plot. The dust devils were just reskinned Dust Mephits from the Monster Manual, and the Sand Lord was a fusion of the Mummy Lord and the titular Sand Lord from the module.

I had decided against basing the tomb on an Egyptian one, and went the Mesopotamian way instead. The Mesopotamian mythology is less familiar to most people but certainly no less interesting, and to me their demons have always had a more bestial, atavistic horror to them.

Of course the Mesopotamian cultures are not known for the scale of their tombs compared to their Egyptian neighbours - the overground structure I described in the game was based on the Persian model. The players gathered from the description of the tomb that it was incomplete, and that it once may have been completely filled with sand. They were correct, of course: the background here was that the tyrannical king who worshiped the Lion-headed Eagle demon - a wind demon - was overthrown by his own people and buried alive in sand in his tomb. In his dying moments he called upon the power of his patron, and was turned into an undead whose form was composed of sand. Over the centuries his power had slowly grown, and with the power of the wind he had slowly emptied his tomb of sand, and only recently he had sent out dust devils to gather skeletons for him, with which he planned to create an undead army out of. Typical mummy stuff, you understand. The players may never learn of the whole story, but I supposed this was realistic as the PCs may never find out either.

I was not too happy with the way I ran the dungeon-crawl. I had made the wrong decision of having a large number of relatively weak opponents in the form of the unarmed skeletons. I had initially counted on the players leaving them alone, since I decided that they would not actively attack the PCs, but I had forgotten that Percy hates undead and would destroy any that she came across. This left me with the choice of either playing through a massive combat against forty or so skeletons, which would drag, or having the situation of them being able to destroy the skeletons at their leisure, without the skeletons or the Sand Lord retaliating - a situation which would almost certainly cause a total party kill. Lesson learned, I guess: do not place opponents within reach of the PCs which you don't want them to fight.

The second part of the session set the scene for next week's module, which I will discuss in the next report. Here too I am not too satisfied with what I have done: essentially a hackneyed "mummy's curse" plot with an obvious and too convenient solution, leading to a heist game. The players seem to have taken it in good humour though, so hopefully next week's game will make up for this deficiency on my part.

Despite all that, I learned a lot prepping for the session.

As with the other regions the party travels to, I tried to find its real world geographic counterpart so I could have an idea of the climate, daily temperatures, and sunrise and sunset time. Other things I learned prepping for this game were Mesopotamian history, mythology, and languages, how oases are formed, and we all learned at the table how to hobble camels.

In the sessions after the next one we may be seeing more elements of Mesopotamian mythology incorporated into the game, so do stay tuned if they are your cup of tea.