This Chult's Got a Death Curse!

The group entered the Maze of Death by pressing an outstretched arm to the door. The group discovered the Black Opal Crown and switched it out for a weighted bag, triggering the doors to close but nothing else. They escaped only because Philomena sacrificed her arm to a sphere of annihilation and held the wound itself out to another door. Pizza found a friendly lizard hanging out in a green devil face carving.

Vogun discovered a secret door with a candle inside. Snuffing it out transported the group to a dark room with no air, but Pizza realized the bones of the dead aarakocra in the wall held small amounts of air, the breathing of which brought the party to a tomb full of clay statues. Jewel tried to use her Mizzium Apparatus to quietly cast Silence with the help of Bart, Philomena, and Pizza protecting her from terrible luck. The room silenced, Vogun opened the sarcophagus and discovered the fourth Skeleton key as well as a mandolin, wound up possessed by Shagambi.

The group teleported out of the tomb to discover the grandfather clock was still tolling away. The group then headed to the main floor only to be attacked by 4 four-armed gargoyles awaiting tribute. Philomena was invincible against them thanks to her blue key gift, and the group defeated them with Jewel’s well-placed Wall of Fire. The group recruited Napaka’s bodyguard Lukanu and took the spiral staircase down to floor 5, long-resting in a secret hallway.

The session opened in another nightmare from Omu’s buried past. In the dream, Gorra at last explained the activation procedure for the Diurna Varun, giving the party another crucial piece of the machine’s purpose and design. The vision did not stop at engineering. The Omuan generals were shown suppressing an uprising of prisoners with brutal force, killing Thiru-Taya, and taking a brilliant hermit’s notebook for themselves, as though every useful secret in Omu had first been bought with blood. When the party awoke from the dream, its cost was immediate and personal: Jewel had aged five and a half years in the night and felt the loss in her body at once, noticeably weaker than before.

Pressing onward through the tomb, the group used Dust of Disappearance to slip down to the fourth level without drawing the full attention of the purple growths and lurking eyes. There they found a secret door and a chamber holding one of the session’s more unsettling discoveries: a scepter hidden in Queen Napaka’s sarcophagus, alongside a cursed necklace of fireballs dangerous enough that merely identifying it made clear how volatile it was. Unsure what exactly to do with the pair of scepters now in their possession, the party continued exploring until Vogun sat in Acererak’s throne and triggered yet another buried defense, summoning a zombie tyrannosaurus from beneath the floor. They fought it down, then forced their way through a locked exit with Knock and kept moving deeper.

Their exploration next brought them into Unkh’s tomb, where the dangers were stranger and more intricate. An invisible key was found in a chest and wrapped so it could be seen again, and from there Philomena entered a maze while Vogun and Jewel guided her through its shifting hazards. At the same time, Bart held off a horde of minotaur skeletons, buying the others the time they needed to finish the puzzle. When Unkh’s sarcophagus finally turned blue, Philomena moved quickly to unlock it, revealing a Robe of Scintillating Colors that Bart claimed while under the influence of Unkh’s spirit. It was another chamber won only by splitting the party’s attention between puzzle logic and immediate survival.

The session ended with the sort of layered menace the tomb had come to favor. The group discovered a loud grandfather clock whose alarm they tried and failed to silence, even after taking measures against it, leaving its relentless tolling to echo through the level. They also contended with the Mirror of Life Trapping, which briefly claimed Vogun before he was released again along with two other long-imprisoned figures: Napaka’s bodyguard Lukanu and the Omuan merchant A’tan. By the end of the session, the party had gained more knowledge of Diurna Varun, suffered another cruel supernatural cost, looted dangerous relics from Omu’s dead royalty, and drawn still more of the tomb’s prisoners and secrets back into the light.

Stole a key from around a clay golem’s neck to open a nearby chest in a pit, acquired 2 more colored crystal eyes inside. The group found a font of green liquid in the Chamber of Opposition, Philomena manipulated her shadow to drink from it and discovered another crystal eye inside. Vogun and Bart entered I’jin’s tomb while Pizza telepathically read the proper symbols to Bart so he could successfully navigate the floor puzzle.

The group found no skeleton key and left an almiraj horn but acquired 2 more eyes. The group placed the 10 collected eyes around the mirror on the wall in the southwest, opening the door to the Vault of the Beholder with a magically magnetic ball and an invisible beholder named Belchorz. The group found a skeleton key and took it, angering Belchorz who chased the party away, following the party via purple moldy growth throughout the floor that he could operate eye rays of, which Jewel burnt down.

The group crossed the Winds of Pandemonium on floating platforms while being attacked by eye rays. Withers telekinetically flipped the lever on the west wall to activate the wind, blowing people off their platforms to the pit below. In the chaos, Syndra was petrified. Once the group arrived safely in the Chamber of Respite, Bart restored her and the group settled in for a rest.

Everyone climbed into Philomena’s portable hole as she attempted to swim against the current of the wine, eventually making it to the Tomb of Nangnang. Inside a salt pentagram was an invisible gray slaad, which Pizza took control of and named Gary using the control gem from Withers’s office. Vogun grabbed an egg from the sarcophagus and was possessed by the spirit of Nangnang.

The party went down the spiral staircase outside of Withers’s office and found a Tomb Guardian manning a peculiar trap. It was killed and the trap jammed by Philomena, guarded by Pizza’s alarm. In Kubuzan’s Tomb, the party performed a ritual to open the sarcophagus by wearing frog masks and performing actions depicted on the walls. Philomena grabbed Kubuzan’s bracers and was possessed by his spirit.

A room with puddles of water was discovered as well as a few crawlways leading to undisturbed areas and a rotating crawlway trap. Hidden in alcoves were two small crystal eyes. The party found a room with floating platforms and gusting wind hazards which hid two more crystal eyes. The group discovered another room full of statues just as Pizza’s alarm was triggered.

The session began in another vivid nightmare, this time from the perspective of Omu’s ancient generals as they pushed their will into Hrakhamar. In that dream-memory, Hargrim, Jalithra, and the others seized the mine in brutal fashion, slaughtering the albino dwarves and firenewts who still held it and pressing deeper into its volcanic heart. They fought through the red dragon’s domain and nearly lost one of their own to the lava before Jalithra struck down the Eye of Flame with lightning. As the generals advanced, more of the old magical rings were claimed, including one seized the moment it was found and another taken deeper in the mine, while the cost of the place made itself known in exhaustion and ruin.

The nightmare grew darker still when the generals uncovered what the dwarves had hidden away in their treasury: some monstrous infant thing whose cry itself brought exhaustion to those who heard it. Before the mystery could be fully unraveled, three night hags appeared and took the creature for themselves, tying this ancient memory back into the larger horrors that had been haunting the campaign all along. By the end of the vision, the party had seen not just another fragment of Omu’s violent past, but one more piece of the chain connecting the city’s fall, the hags, and the unnatural evils now festering beneath Chult.

When they woke, they were back in the tomb and in immediate danger. Withers was waiting outside his office with four Tomb Guardians and wasted no time in acting, dispelling the group’s Tiny Hut before retreating and leaving his creations to finish the work. The fight that followed taught the party something important about the tomb’s defenses: lightning strengthened the guardians, while fire badly disrupted them. Armed with that knowledge, they adapted quickly, destroyed the constructs, and forced their way onward after Withers slipped back into the depths.

With the guardians dispatched, the group pushed farther into the third floor of the tomb and uncovered more of its grotesque design. Purple growths spread across the floor, from which eyes and spores emerged in unsettling pulses, and the party found additional passages branching through the level. They also encountered another of Acererak’s warnings, a pair of guardians bound together by a chain, and a route leading back toward the previously discovered tomb of I’jin. It was a session split cleanly between nightmare and dungeon, ancient atrocity and present danger, with both halves driving the party deeper into the truth of what the tomb had become.