This Chult's Got a Death Curse!

The group prepared for battle with Acererak by drinking resistance potions, casting Death Ward, having Pizza deafen himself, and having Philomena consume a potion of cloud giant strength. Upon entering, the group discovered their loved ones had been resurrected as Zombies ready to attack them. Caesar, seeing Syndra’s horrifying zombie image, attacked the Soulmonger and was ripped in half by the tentacles of the feeding atropal.

Bart, Philomena, Vogun, and Jewel focused on destroying the soulmonger, hoping that doing so would not result in their loved one’s souls being devoured. Pizza crowd-controlled the Zombies to keep the rest of the group focused, nearly killing Syndra’s zombie form but deciding at the last second to spare her. Once the soulmonger was destroyed, the souls it contained spread out into the world, except for the 6 souls of Harold, Syndra, Scix, Leafinwind, Phryne, and Vogon, whose broken bodies healed upon being reunited with their souls, and joined in the fight.

The spirits of the nine trickster gods arrived to help, granting 50 temporary hit points. The atropal wailed as its food source was emptied, and Acererak entered from the misty gate to the south to taunt and threaten the group.

The session began in the lair of the Sewn Sisters, where the party found dolls housing children’s souls and handled them with unexpected gentleness. They crafted toys, carried the dolls for whatever blessings might come of it, and then began working through the strange skeleton-key trials embedded throughout the sisters’ domain. One lever sat inside a glass cylinder and came easily; another required a nursery rhyme read backward to reveal it; a third existed only as a ghostly shape until Vogun traced and solidified it enough to pull.

Not everything in the lair was so simple. Philomena sat down to an enticing feast laid out by Mister Threadneedle and gained great skill at the cost of trouble later, while “Nerissa” told the story of the atropal and its connection to Ubtao, Eshowdow, and the Ring of Winter. A cracked mirror hid levers that could only be seen in reflection, and an incorrect sequence summoned wereboars before the party understood how the candles and spoken words fit together.

Once the final keyholes were opened, the deception collapsed. “Nerissa” revealed herself as a night hag as her coven sisters joined the fight in an effort to keep the atropal alive. When the coven was broken, Baggy Nanna bargained for escape and told the party how they might one day leave the tomb: through the Ebon Pool, using a black marble taken from Mister Threadneedle. The session ended with the party having won the lair, but only after learning that their road out would be almost as strange as their road in.

The group fought the Nycaloth in the room of the Armillary Sphere. It teleported out onto the landing in the room with the Mechanus Chain, pulled Jewel out of the crawlway and hurled her into the vortex below. Philomena quickly cast feather fall with line of sight through the crawlway that she had just moved to stand in front of, giving Jewel time to cast Vortex Warp as she fell, instantly teleporting the Nycaloth below her and Fey Stepping back up to the platform as it was vaporized below. The party had Laskilar and Shago stay behind to control the gears while the group headed for the final room on the floor, the Hall of the Golden Mastodon.

After Pizza brought the broken handle from the control room, Philomena activated the Mastodon, releasing the Skeleton Key inside. Bart was trapped outside the room as the Mastodon began rotating, igniting the floor with hellish fire from the story of Ch’gakare’s escape from the Nine Hells on his mastodon Ghom, though he was able to keep the party up using Caesar. Jewel and Pizza took a lot of damage, Jewel bravely used her Amulet to protect Pizza rather than herself while Vogun helped save Philomena from a barrage of bludgeoning attacks with a well-placed rifle blast.

Something else interesting happened. Pizza used the Rod of Security to take everyone to a tropical paradise for a night of much-needed rest, and the group reached Level 10.

The group learned from Laskilar and Shago that zombies started heading south and followed them here. They are gathering outside the Royal Palace. Fenthaza offered to pay them to retrieve the Black Opal Crown from the Tomb. Laskilar warned Pizza that his Cape of the Mountebank seemed to work as a shortcut, but Undril used it to bypass some walls and never came back. The group headed into the center gear room and used ropes on the ceiling to stay off the ground as Pizza rotated the gears. Vogon was cut off until Pizza could move them back, Philomena and Bart made it to another room away from the Shambling Mounds that raised from the dirt when the room connected to the adjacent small gas room, and Jewel held her own until Vogon could return.

The group regrouped in the third gear room and opened a series of wardrobes, pulling in various monsters from around the multiverse which had to be killed to unlock a door, including a construct that Jewel blasted it to bits. The group figured out the Hall of Decay would destroy nonmagical equipment and stored it safely inside a bag of holding, found a staircase leading down. Jewel’s clothes rotted and she could have walked back out invisible but specifically chose not to.

The group found the shaft and chain that seems to power the tomb, avoided certain death at the top and bottom, fought a pentadrone and some quadrones. Philomena sat in a model of Toril, freed a Nycaloth who decapitated Lukanu.

The session began in another terrible nightmare, this one carrying the party into the final collapse of ancient Omu. In the vision, Hargrim was absent, the remaining Omuan generals were thrown into battle against a beholder, and then Acererak himself arrived to finish what Omu had begun to do to itself. He laid waste to the city, broke its last defenders, and cast the generals into the lava pits below, condemning them to die over and over in fire for what felt like eternity. Yet even that was not the end. Ubtao, in a final act of pity, drew them out of that endless suffering and transformed them into the amulet-stones the present-day party had been finding, their rings preserved within brilliant gems. It was less a dream than an origin story told through agony, and when the party woke, the pain of it still clung to them.

The waking world proved no kinder. Vogun rose from the nightmare feeling especially bound to what he had seen, as though some fragment of Omu’s fall had branded itself into him. Worse, Caesar quickly realized that Syndra was not waking at all. He pawed through her belongings in panic and found a folded letter, which he brought to Jewel, confirming that something had gone badly wrong during the night. As the group tried to make sense of that loss, Pizza discovered that Gary’s control gem had been stolen. Moments later the gray slaad turned on them, casting a fireball centered on himself in the hallway and leaving the party with little choice but to kill him. By the time the smoke cleared, Syndra was dead, A’tan was dead, and whatever thin sense of order the group had carried into the night had been shattered.

Forced onward, the party explored the pentagonal rooms of the floor and discovered Laskilar and Shago alive but injured in a slimy chamber. Nearby they found a suspicious room full of iron pipes and a control panel that seemed capable of rotating sections of the tomb itself. Philomena and the others worked to clog the iron ooze conduits, even resorting to stuffing dried fruit into the works to slow whatever foul process the machinery supported. The exploration then led them back toward Napaka’s chamber, where Philomena salvaged the Eye of Zaltec and Pizza used one of the scepters to destroy the rolling construct associated with the dead queen. The tomb was yielding answers, but each answer seemed connected to another layer of buried malice.

The session ended in equal parts ingenuity and absurdity. Vogun became separated on the far side of the stairwell door and had to improvise a way back, catching the same glowing crabs he had just spoken to and feeding them to the hungry door until it allowed him passage. In the process he learned from the crabs about secret routes leading toward the control room. Caesar was sent out to survey the pool beyond, and from his flight the party learned of a waterfall and paths leading out of a third gear room. By the end of the session, they had survived a nightmare of Omu’s destruction, lost Syndra, put down Gary, rescued two battered allies, reclaimed more of the tomb’s secrets, and gathered the first real hints of how to move deeper into the machine-like heart of Acererak’s lair.