Catacombs of Wrath Undone

Between Yola's polearm and Seoni's ray of frost you slowly manage to destroy all eleven zombies. Afterwards your party sets off to explore the last few chambers of the catacombs.


The passage leading south out of the prisoner pits branches to the east about halfway along its length. This branch leads to a spiral staircase similar to the one you found earlier, except that instead of leading up, it leads deeper into the earth. But just like the other staircase, this one has also collapsed and the way down is impassable.


Farthest south, the passage ends in a strange spherical room. Several objects float in the room, spinning lazily in space - a ragged book, a scroll, a bottle of wine, a dead raven surrounded by a halo of floating and writhing maggots, and a twisted iron wand with a forked tip. Yet perhaps the most unnerving aspect of the room are the walls, for they are plated in sheets of strange red metal that ripple every once in awhile with silent black electricity that seem to coalesce into strange runes or even words far too often for the effect to be chance.


Yola fishes out all the items except the dead raven as they float by (that polearm sure has come in handy), and Seoni casts detect magic on the loot, determining that the scroll and wand are indeed magical. The book is a religious work dedicated to the worship of Lamashtu, detailing many of the worlds most horrible monsters and woodcut illustrations of how they kill. The scroll is written is some ancient language that no one can read, but a casting of Read Magic reveals it to be a scroll of Burning Hands.


Having reached the end of the complex, the party begins to retrace their steps to the surface, stopping along the way to investigate the three doors in the ancient study. To your surprise they lead into what appear to be prison cells. Within each is a single skeleton of a badly deformed humanoid; one has three arms, another has an enormous misshapen skull, and the third has a ribcage that goes all the way to its pelvis - a pelvis with stunted leg bones strewn below its strangely flat girth. On the way out Sasha finds another scroll written in that same archaic script amongst the ruined books and parchments. Another read magic spell reveals it as a scroll of Flaming Sphere.


Eventually you make it back into the Glassworks basement, where you are greeted by three nervous and trigger happy town guards that almost shoot you down in the dark as you approach before you manage to identify yourself. They are very relieved to so your group alive and are full questions. You manage to forestall most of their questions until after you visit Father Zanthus for some healing and then off to the Rusty Dragon to check on Ameiko and get some hot food.


This is a long post that covers several areas. Please feel free to insert dialog and action along the way if there is something that I glossed over that you want your character to respond to in more detail. Otherwise please discuss the party's next course of action. You've got loot to sell and magic swag to divvy up, and your discovery of monster infested catacombs right beneath the town has raised more questions that answers.


Scrolls: A scroll is a single use spell. Once cast, the magic of the scroll is used up forever. The Burning Hands scroll can be cast by Seoni without effort, but the Flaming Sphere scroll is higher level than she can currently cast, so she must succeed at a spellcraft check when she tries. Poot and Sasha both have the Use Magic Device skill, so they can attempt to cast the scrolls using that skill against a difficulty of 20 +spell level ( 21 for Burning Hands, 22 for Flaming Sphere, so about a 30-40% chance of success ).

Wands: A wand has a spell stored in it that can be used as many times as the item has charges. The wand you found is a Wand of Shocking Grasp with 28 charges. So, Seoni can use the wand to cast Shocking Grasp, up to 28 times before the wand is exhausted. Like the scrolls, Poot and Sasha can make a Use Magic Device check ( against DC20) to activate the wand.