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| The enemies are unable to get through the force field Entana created |
The lost city of Essilim sat in a valley about two miles wide. At the middle was a large dried-up lake. On both sides of the lake were hundreds of ruined houses, most worn down by the desert winds to their foundations, and all but a few had lost their roofs.
On top of the southern slope of the valley stood the ruined palace. On the northern side a series of terraces led from the lake to a large structure with a domed roof mid-way up the hill. Further up the slope was a giant structure cut into the stone of the hill itself.
Surmising that the building with the domed roof was the source of the sacred spring, our heroes decided to make camp at one of the houses with an intact roof near there.
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Arriving there, they found themselves challenged by several armed men dressed in black. Declaring themselves to be guardians of the royal tombs, they accused the party of being tomb robbers and demanded they depart immediately.
Through Finaz, our heroes explained that their mission was one of mercy, and after some deliberation the men agreed to let them rest in one of the houses while they discussed the matter with their leader.
Soon the leader of the guardians returned. Having heard the heroes' tale, he apologised for the manner of his men - they had just yesterday clashed with some tomb robbers, and two of them had been captured and brought to the ruined palace, where the robbers had made their base.
Once, he explained, the spring of Essilim was renowned for its healing powers, and the Sorcerer-Kings of the city grew in power and glory with each succeeding generation, until Edu-Ellikinu, the last of the line of Sorcerer-Kings, turned from the worship of the old gods to courting demons for more power. A civil war ensued between those who remained faithful to the old gods and Edu-Ellikinu and his supporters. The faithful, or the Medjani as they called themselves, called upon the old gods to curse Edu-Ellikinu, and they caused the spring to dry up. Men began to desert the city, and the priests would not serve Edu-Ellinkinu, and at last he was overthrown by his people, and fled into the royal tombs, where the faithful could not pursue, for the demons have placed monsters there to protect the king. Since then the Medjani had kept watch over the royal tombs, so that no man may enter the tombs and rouse Edu-Ellikinu.
Our heroes assured the Medjani that their goal was solely to restore the spring if they could, and offered to rescue the two captured Medjani in exchange for access to the domed Building, which the Medjani called Eresh, or the Scented House. The Medjani agreed.
Leaving the elder Vernier and Bram at the house, our heroes and Finaz proceeded to the old palace. It was mid-afternoon when they arrived at the opposite shore of the lake and began ascending the hill which the palace was built on.
Near the top, they were once again challenged, this time by men who declared that they had claimed the palace. An attempt to parley was greeted with a shower of arrows. In response the party charged up the hill, but their attackers fled back behind the fallen walls of the palace, and entered it.
Our heroes entered the palace through it broken walls, and found themselves in the foyer. Once more they were assailed by arrows, shot at them by archers on a balcony overlooking the foyer. Once more our heroes charged up the staircase to engage them, and once more they fell back into a room behind and barred the bronze doors behind them.
Gio climbed through the window in an adjacent room and attempted to enter the barred room via a window on the outside, but was discovered and chased off. Percy and Entana then decided to weaken the hinges of the door with the use of magical acid and fire, and once they were weakened Strigoi broke one door off its hinges, and holding it before him like a shield, charged into the room. One of the men were caught in the onslaught and thrown out of the window. The other heroes charged in after Strigoi, and a few more were cut down. The last survivor then charged at Strigoi's door, and together they both fell through the window and landed on the sandy ground below.
While the party busied themselves with recovering Strigoi, Finaz noted that the floor of the room was littered with hundreds of clay tablets, which suggested that this was the palace library or archive. Recovering a few tablets which were still legible, she used the statuette she had brought from the fort to decipher their writings. From these, they learned about a dungeon built below ground, and of dark summoning rites.
Entering an adjacent room, they found it contained two tables with grids upon them; small drawers on the sides of the tables contained playing pieces made of semi-precious stones - this was the king's games room. Ever curious for more knowledge, Percy copied the patterns of grid on the table, hoping to one day learn what games were played on them.
With most of the party injured, our heroes decided to take a rest in the games room. They pocketed the playing pieces, set the tables against the door leading to the room, and Enatana used his Force runebound shard to throw up a domed shelter.
However, before the party could take a breather, more men arrived and started to attempt to break into the room. Leaving the shelter, Gio took a peek through the door and saw six more armed men, along with a warrior dressed in fine clothing. The men soon broke through the door, but could not break through the magical dome. The party attacked the intruders with spells, and they too fell back in disarray.
For a while the party could hear the men speaking behind the door, arguing on what to do next. Then Entana exited the dome, opened the door, and threw a fireball into their midst. Cries were heard, and then footsteps running away. Our heroes gave chase, and soon caught up with the survivors and cut them down. Searching their bodies, they found that the warrior held a golden statuette of a winged demon in one hand, which Strigoi claimed.
The party then searched the rest of the floor, but found no more enemies. It seemed that these men had taken up quarters in the rooms of the former palace dwellers. In one room they found clothing that matched those worn by the warrior. Then in the largest room, which must have been the king's own bedchamber, they found clothing belonging to a taller man, a chest of coins, as well as manuscripts with ancient cuneiform writings as well as Al-Kalim script on them, and an annotated sketch map of a compound. Once more Finaz translated the writings - it seemed that the writer was planning to enter the royal tombs after all! Annotations on the map mentioned the use of two keys, and had a cryptic reference to bull's horns... what did that mean?
Returning to the ground floor of the building, our heroes found that the men had used the level for stabling their camels and storing their food and water, but there was no sign of the captured Medjani.
Then they spotted a flight of stairs leading underground... could this be the dungeon spoken of in the cuneiform tablets?
Prepping and Running the Game
This session is based on the module The Book and the Spring by Christopher Letzelter. It is a big module in the vein of the early days of D&D, and contains three major multi-level "dungeons", several smaller ones, all populated by various monsters and several factions with different goals.
What makes this module special, and what led me to finding it, was the fact that while the background to the story is about an ancient city in the desert, the author had chosen to base the fluff on Mesopotamian mythology instead of the more commonly used Egyptian one. The way this is presented is not just in the names used, but also in the unique monsters, and the many pages of art used.
The module comes in two parts, one with the "plot" and location information, and one with the maps and art. They are sold separately, but you need both to play the module.
There are almost 90 pages of material, and it would take several sessions for a party to play through all the locations. As I bought the pdf version of the module, and as the location descriptions and the maps were on different pdfs, and a few of the maps spanned two pages, it was a little difficult to read through the whole module to get a sense of what the whole story was about. Ample description and read-aloud texts are provided, which unfortunately made picking out the important details like where a special key had to be found less easy. It would have been easier if the author had provided an overview of the whole module and what players are expected to achieve at each location, but the author had intended the module to function a bit like a sandbox. To me this was an error, as there is a definite quest in this module: to reactivate the spring (so that a cursed item could be destroyed). And how this was to be achieved was also rather fixed, although the order at which the players visited each location was less fixed.
As usual I decided to reduce the number of encounters, but I expect it will take another two sessions for my players to complete the module.
The actual game was rather brutal, with Strigoi taking a lot of damage from arrows due to looking most threatening among the party members. I decided that the enemy fighters were trained and had planned their defences, so I had them fall back to a different position each time they were losing. By the time they had defeated the first group of enemies, the PCs were in pretty bad shape.
They made a good decision to cast Leomund's Tiny Hut and try to rest, but given the noise the first fight would have generated there was no way the other enemies did not hear them. The second group that came actually had a leader NPC character who had the Leadership trait, which would have made the encounter even deadlier, and I gave him a magical artifact which gave him Advantage on saving throws against magic. Unfortunately for the bad guys, my players were smarter at using the Tiny Hut as a base of attack than I was at defending against it, and I was surprised by the fireball, and the leader failed his saving throw (with Advantage!) and they were quickly defeated. This was the first session we played since most of the PCs had reached level 5, and I guess I wasn't prepared for how much damage they could put out now that Entana can cast Fireball and Strigoi had two attacks per turn. I will have to recycle this encounter for another day.
This part of the module could have just been a series of fights, but the author had made things interesting for the players by planting clues and description of what each room was used for, all of which helped pace the adventure and give the players a sense of the size and scope of the palace compound. The clues foreshadow encounters that they will have later on in the adventure, and make them suitably paranoid.
We actually played through to the dungeon level of the palace, but I will write about that in a separate post so this one will not run too long.
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