The Dungeon of Deception was the second level of the Tomb of the Nine Gods, the dungeon beneath Omu.12 It held the forge of the Tomb Dwarves, the office of the Tomb’s custodian Withers, and the tombs of the Trickster Gods Nangnang and Papazotl.13 On its balcony of the Grand Staircase Takhesis Calva was taken from the party, and Ersklan Ghostfang, called Fang, joined it.45
Description
The party came down into the level through heat and noise, by rough stairs that ended at a forge.1 While the party rested on the level, Tomb Dwarves moved through it in the dark, resetting its traps.4 The Tomb’s wards against teleportation covered the level: two creatures that tried to leave it by plane shift were sent to the Oubliette, elsewhere in the Tomb.3
Geography
The level lay below the first level, the Rotten Halls, and above the third, the Vault of Reflection.15 Two ways down from the first level are recorded: a path by an underground waterfall, and a “Maintenance Route” of rough stairs near the magnet statue, which the party took.1 The Grand Staircase, a spiral stair, passed the level at a balcony.4 The way on to the third level was the Devil Pit, a drop through darkness that ended in I’jin’s tomb.5
Inhabitants
The Tomb Dwarves worked the forge, reset the level’s traps and fought with iron mancatchers.14 Withers kept an office on the level.1 Tomb Guardians, constructs made as flesh golems, stood at the forge, lay in the fountain of the scrying pool and fought on the Grand Staircase.124 A Gray Slaad was held in a circle of salt in Nangnang’s tomb, a genie was kept in a bottle in a room nearby, and skeletons and an animated hunter’s shield guarded Papazotl’s tomb.3 The level also held the construct that carried its Skeleton Key.5
Notable locations
- The forge, where the stairs from the first level came out.1
- Withers’ office, reached past a sliding wall, where he kept his journals.1
- The scrying pool, a chamber with a fountain of murky water.2
- The Gravity Ring, a curving corridor.2
- The false tomb, a chamber whose exits sealed with stone blocks and whose gargoyle heads poured wine. One of its spout tunnels led into Nangnang’s tomb.2
- Nangnang’s tomb.3
- The room of the bottled genie, near Nangnang’s tomb.3
- Papazotl’s tomb.3
- The balcony of the Grand Staircase, entered through an archway.4
- The Devil Pit, the last room of the level.5
History
Before the party
The Company of the Yellow Banner, an adventuring company, entered the Tomb before the party did. Its wizard, Devlin Bashir, was separated from the others in a curving corridor where, as his journal put it, gravity was a suggestion. His last entry records his legs bending backward and his fingers fusing, and the voice of the Architect, as Acererak was known, in the walls. He died in the Gravity Ring.2
On the morning of the thirteenth of Eleasis, 1492 DR, while the party was on the first level, a Tomb Dwarf stared up at them from a lower balcony of the Grand Staircase and ran. Which level the balcony belonged to is not recorded.6
The descent and the forge
That evening Vogal, Inete, Glade, Vonara, Taenae and Takhesis looked for a way down. They took the stairs near the magnet statue on the first level.1
At the forge they fought the Tomb Dwarves and a Tomb Guardian. Inete opened the fight with a fireball, and the party cleared the room with acid vials and much of its magic. Vogal cut the right kneecap from the destroyed Guardian for his collection.1
In the cleanup Taenae found the Ghost Lantern. The spirit in it, Starfallen, a Wood Elf of the Company of the Yellow Banner, showed herself, declared her allegiance to the company, and spoke of the Eye of Zaltec, a jewel with the power to resurrect the ancient dead.1
Withers’ office
Exploring further, Taenae was cut off from the party behind a sliding wall and found herself alone in Withers’ office. Withers tried to interrogate her and found her answers “insufficiently valuable.” The two fought, Taenae had the better of it, and Withers fled by the teleportation of his amulet.1
The rest of the party broke into the office and found Withers’ journals. These confirmed that Acererak had murdered the Omuans and enslaved their spirits to build the Tomb, and told of the Sewn Sisters, the night hags who guarded the lower levels.1 The party ransacked the office before Withers could return with reinforcements. Glade took a manual of stone golems, and the party took a control stone without identifying its use. It was the control stone of the slaad in Nangnang’s tomb. Taenae, the only one still in the office, then set fire to it and to the documents that were left, so that nothing useful remained for Acererak or his servants.2
The scrying pool and the Gravity Ring
In the chamber of the scrying pool Inete’s magical sight showed her a Tomb Guardian lying in wait under the murky water of the fountain. Forewarned, the party destroyed it quickly.2
In the Gravity Ring the party found the corpse of Devlin Bashir, changed into the shape of a goat-man by the Tomb’s magic, and took his water-stained journal from it. The journal is given in full at Devlin’s Journal. Its last entry reads in part, “Brixton, you fool. You led us into a machine. And it has killed us all.”2
While the party was in the Gravity Ring, Inete looked into the Border Ethereal and saw the three Sewn Sisters hovering nearby and spying on the party. Their attention was fixed on Takhesis. They made no hostile move, did not know that they had been seen, and in time sank away into the depths of the Tomb.2
By then the party had been in the Tomb for about six hours. Taenae and Inete had grown openly suspicious of Takhesis. He was Acererak’s vessel and had known it throughout, and he gave nothing away of what had been done to him or of his link to Acererak. Taenae also quietly warned the others to watch Vonara, likely on account of her Thayan brand and an earlier betrayal.2
The false tomb
The party entered the false tomb and set off its trap. Stone blocks sealed the exits and the gargoyle heads poured wine into the chamber, which rose quickly. Glade blocked one spout with earth magic and Vonara capped another with a wall of force, which slowed the flood. The party pried open one of the blocked spout tunnels and escaped through it into Nangnang’s tomb.2
Nangnang’s tomb and the genie
In Nangnang’s tomb Inete’s sight showed her at once an invisible Gray Slaad pacing angrily inside a circle of salt on the floor. Taenae added salt to the circle. Vonara then flew over it on her broom, and the binding broke. The slaad attacked Glade, who was nearest, and wounded him badly, and the party overwhelmed it. It tried to leave the Tomb by plane shift. The Tomb’s wards intercepted the spell and sent the slaad to the Oubliette.3
The party took Nangnang’s Grung egg from the tomb with tools and bags, so that no one touched it with bare skin, and no one was possessed.3 The egg stayed in its bag until the night of the fifteenth of Eleasis, when Taenae took it out.7
In a room nearby a genie trapped in a bottle promised the party great riches for its freedom, and the party agreed. The genie paid in jewelry, which it gave to Inete: two sapphire cords, two platinum armbands engraved with dueling dragons, and a topaz made to be worn in the navel. It then tried to plane shift out of the Tomb and was drawn down into the Oubliette as the slaad had been.3
Papazotl’s tomb
Skeletons and an animated hunter’s shield guarded Papazotl’s tomb. Vonara held the skeletons in check with Yolande’s regal presence, Taenae pinned the flying shield to the ground, and the fight was short. When the party opened the sarcophagus, shadows on the walls formed the outline of a long-legged bird, and a voice said in Taenae’s mind, “You will do as I command!” Papazotl, the eblis, had possessed her.3
The rest
After six hours of delving the party was spent, and made its first long rest in the Tomb on this level, under a magical dome.34 Where on the level the camp stood is not recorded. Inete kept the first watch, of four hours, and heard Tomb Dwarves resetting traps in the dark. None came near the dome.4
Takhesis kept the next watch standing, with his bare hands pressed to the freezing stone of the Tomb. Glade woke and tried to reach him. Takhesis spoke of the perfect design of the dungeon, of the fragility of mortality and of emotion as a weakness, and called the Tomb a “crucible” meant to separate the worthy from the weak. His last words to Glade that night were, “The dungeon is perfect in its design.”4
The party woke rested on the morning of the fourteenth. Taenae, under Papazotl’s influence, was imperious, and threw gold coins at her companions to make them do her bidding.4
The Grand Staircase
That morning, the eighty-second day of the expedition, the party left the tombs of the Trickster Gods and stepped onto the balcony of the Grand Staircase. The hum of the Tomb stopped. Frost spread across the stone, and a wave of magical pressure rose from the dark below and drove everyone but Takhesis to their knees, paralyzed.4
Takhesis rose an inch off the stone. His armor turned translucent, a violet light lit in his eyes, and a tether from the dark below fastened on his chest and drew him out of phase with the world. He told his companions that the Master called. The tether pulled him into the Ethereal Plane and down the shaft. Inete, with her ethereal sight, watched him sink into the gray and saw the three Sewn Sisters waiting for him. They cradled his face and whispered, “Welcome home, our perfect child… the cradle is waiting.” They wrapped their cloaks around him, and all four sank out of sight. Takhesis had accepted Acererak’s call.4
The mist still hung in the air when a haggard, bleeding man, glittering with crushed silver glass, was thrown backward through the archway onto the frosted steps. A Tomb Guardian blocked the archway behind him. The voice of Withers came out of the masonry, addressed to Taenae: “You dare burn my sanctuary, druid? Let us see how your pack survives the dark.” Tomb Dwarves came out of the ceiling and down the spiral stairs and boxed the party in. They passed Vogal by and dropped among the spellcasters with iron mancatchers. The bleeding man shouted, “Don’t let them collar you! They drag you away, you don’t come back!”4
The dwarves hooked members of the party with the barbed mancatchers and dragged them around the stairwell to separate them. The party was badly hurt, but destroyed the Guardian and the dwarves, and no one was dragged away.5 On this level the party also met and destroyed the construct that carried the level’s Skeleton Key, and took from it the square key, the second of the Skeleton Keys after the triangle of the first level. Where on the level this happened is not recorded.5
The stranger introduced himself as Fang, a Human rogue, and thanked the party. He had come up from the lower levels, where he had just broken out of the Mirror of Life Trapping, and he meant to go back down for a companion whom he called only the Paladin. She was Savriel Tirinath. Fang traveled with the party from then on.5
After the fight Chakuna, Taenae’s patron, gave Taenae a vision of what waited at the bottom of the Tomb, a mind of cold iron and dead angles, and told her, “You have to become my priestess. Not to bow. Not to pray. But to eat.” Taenae accepted and became a cleric of Chakuna.5
The Devil Pit
The party then went to the Devil Pit. Finding no other way on, they jumped, and landed safely in I’jin’s tomb on the third level. They had been in the Tomb for fourteen hours.5
Afterward
No return to the level is recorded. In the early morning of the fifteenth of Eleasis Withers came to the party on a lower level and listed the burning of his office and the butchering of his dwarves among its offenses, before offering a bargain.8 His letter to Taenae, delivered in the Cradle on the sixteenth, spoke of the office fire.9
The level was destroyed with the rest of the Tomb in the night that followed, when Omu sank into a caldera.10 On the morning of the seventeenth a bowl of red earth two miles wide lay where Omu and the Tomb had been.11
Appendix
Appearances
Mentioned in Session 64, Session 77, Session 82 and Session 89.