Dungeons & Delvers: Age of Worms, Episode 711

Cast

• Humal (level 12 wrathful cambion wizard)
• Corzale (level 12 dwarf war cleric/druid)
• Sumia (level 12 elf rogue/ranger/wizard)

Session Highlights

After much debate, the party eventually opts to open the sarcophagus (against Corzale's protests). Inside is an angel who seems to be on the verge of succumbing to the sin of pride, but he's all for finding and killing Kyuss so they bring him along, anyway.

There's only one door left. Inside is a kind of mummy secretary named Ahatsunu. To their surprise she doesn't attack them immediately, instead mistaking Humal for Kyuss and assuming that everyone else is some new minion he obviously picked up on his journey back from wherever an undead dragon carried the obelisk he had vanished into prior to his apotheosis.

This raises more than a few questions, but she is very, very friendly towards Humal, so he plays the part, feigning memory loss in order to get her to explain for starters everything in the room: there's a bunch of books on a bunch of shelves, and a dozen jars filled with worms that will, assuming whoever ingests them can avoid dying from having their brain eaten, impart knowledge.

Humal-Kyuss asks her to draw a map of the subterranean level, while he and Doppel-Filge dump all of the books and the worm-jars into his bag of holding, explaining that he's found a new base of operations and so they'll need to move everything (he also states that the binding ring is still intact, but he'll come back for her later once he's figured out how to remove it).

Once they've learned-and-looted everything they can, Humal reveals that he is in fact not Kyuss...until the rest of the party points out that having a highly-knowledgeable mummy assistant mistaking one of them for her boss can only be a good thing: so Humal backpedals, saying that he was really only testing her, and then charms her anyway for good measure.

This just leaves the pit, which according to Ahatsunu has several worm-flooded chambers due to worm generator malfunctions. There's no obviously safe way down, which isn't that much of a problem since the main party can fly: for the rest, Humal uses his illusion magic to make a floating, solid platform to slowly lower them down.

The shaft is riddled with tunnels, and it doesn't take them long to discover what probably made them: human-sized Kyuss worms that not only don't quickly die and decompose outside of a corpse, but can also fly and cast spells.

Designer Notes

As mentioned in a previous post, I think, I've removed a bunch of what I consider to be pointless filler fights. Also all the random nonsense visual-time-echo info-dumps. I prefer the party to figure out information on their own: they'd have been able to learn a bunch of backstory by reading the books in the Chamber of Enlightenment (ie, library that also has worm jars), or trying their luck with the knowledge worms.

In this case they surprised me, as they are wont to do, by going along with the Kyuss ruse and even succeeding in charming the mummy.

Actually, on the topic of mummies, they were surprised to learn that Ahatsunu was "only" a level 2 undead. I know in Dungeons & Dragons mummies are pretty badass, but honestly it makes sense to have default mummies just operate like normal zombies. I got no problem with super powerful curse mummies, but those should be more of an exception than the rule.

Announcements

You can now get a physical copy of Dungeons & Delvers: Black Book in whatever format you want! We've also released the first big supplement for it, Appendix D, so pick that up if you want more of everything.

After months of doing other things, we turned our attention to and released The Warden. It's based on the 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons class of the same name, but judging by the responses we did an excellent job converting it over.

Dwarven Vault is our sixth 10+ Treasures volume. If you're interested in thirty dwarven magic items (including an eye that lets you shoot lasers) and nearly a dozen new bits of dungeon gear, check it out!

Just released our second adventure for A Sundered World, The Golden Spiral. If a snail-themed dungeon crawl is your oddly-specific thing, check it out!

By fan demand, we've mashed all of our 10+ Treasure volumes into one big magic item book, making it cheaper and more convenient to buy in print (which you can now do).