This being a play report of the first session of The Palace of Unquiet Repose played with Hyperborea 3e, which seemed a good easthetic fit.
They joined a caravan funded by Orixerxes to get them across the desert with water-laden camels, vital in the parched desert. With them they brought a local, Old Jaffa - a noted thief and reprobate down on his luck and offering his services as a professional house breaker for a crust of bread and a warm tent alone. On the second night out of Iotha their rest was interrupted however by a great wailing and howling from the deep desert. They feared to venture beyond the light of their campfires and so endured a sleepless night and a gruelling day, hoping they left the hideous shrieking behind them.
It was not to be so. The shrieks and clamour continued, though the keen ear of Skaris noted fewer voices in the darkness. Alas he did not guess the meaning behind this, and when dawn broke one of the caravan's camels was found disemboweled and throat bitten out in the night - and, too, Old Jaffa, a way outside the camp... with the party's runic blades in his pack. They left the fleabitten thief's corpse to feed the vultures, and the next night they girded for battle.
On the fourth night, nothing came - not wailing nor attack. On the fifth night, they - wisely it would transpire - did not take this for a sign they had escaped the turab'shaytan, as the caravaneers had taken to calling their stalker, and continued to post watches throughout the night. It was on first watch when Proculus, strong in thew but never the most observant for his senses were ever clouded by red mist and the clangor of distant battlefields, heard the death-rattle of a caravaneer and investigated to find a hideous aglomeration of bird, beast and emaciated man - the Dust Stalker! Meanwhile, Skaris' - drunk on Freygunnr's mead, was woken by the agony of a second beast's jaws clamping down upon his shoulder, fare tearing the meat loose before his hand gripped his rune-axe and dealt it a blow in kind, the creature recoiling in pain but not before its raking claws left track-marks like an ardent lover down his chest. The commotion woke Freygunnr, who had been sharing the same tent and was a lighter sleeper than Skaris. The two quickly realised that the beast was a match for both of them, and it would be a cruel and bloody fight.
Not so for Proculus, the giant velite took raking cuts and crushing bites but his lorica hamata held firm and with a skilful pirhouette that belied his great size, sidestepped the creature's lunging assault and beheaded it at the same time with one cleanly economical motion. The Dust Stalker facing Freygunnr and Skaris sensed it's mate's death but it only drove it to further fury. Skaris, nearly unmanned, broke a flask of enriched lamp oil over the beast's bony head and quit the field, having judged from its motions that on an open plain he could outrun it. Freygunnr spat at the cowardice of the pict who would leave a woman to face the axe-gang and held her ground, igniting the beast with a kicked over brazier. Even the fire though could not drive off the maddened beast and still it pressed its attack, dealing her many gashes and blows. Proculus, however, was too much for it to endure and when he entered the fray with his spatha still wet with its mate's blood, it made to quit the field with an eye to lick its wounds and return for vengeance. Freygunnr's arrows cut short that game - striking once in the shoulder and then, when it turned to hiss its contempt, spearing it in the eye.
No further devilry haunted the caravan on the sixth and seventh nights, and through uninterrupted rest and judicious application of Freygunnr's enchanted mead, they arrived at the desert basin forseen by Orixerxes relatively hale and whole. It would prove fortunate that they were.
Looming out of the desert sands stood an edifice of ancient craft, a sphinx composed of parts dragon, scorpion, demon and man wrought in black stone. Skaris, eager to make up for his past cowardice, was the first to approach the foreboding structure and with his keen eye honed by the forests of his homeland found a block that had been loosened by subsidence, needing only a little lubrication to clear the grit that held it. His first suggestion of using some of the party's precious water resulted in a cuff from Freygunnr, who took Skaris' wineskin and used the contents instead, much to his dismay. The block revealed a steep shaft leading down into the earth, they fastened a rope by means of an iron hook Skaris kept and judging Proculus to be the most capable of surviving whatever lay at the bottom sent him first. The grade of the shaft quickly grew steeper than was visible from the surface, and unable to control his descent Proculus hit the bottom hard, and there triggered the first of the deathtraps laid to protect the rest of Uyu-Yadmogh. He was buried under a hail of rocks and sand, and only his prodigious strength saved him from being entombed when he dug himself to freedom before his breath ran out.
With the bottom of the shaft now fully filled with sand and rubble, the three were forced to dig a narrow crawl-shaft through into the horizontal channel, using up a full torch-flame's time in the effort but at last they were into the structure proper. Behind a sliding panel of tarnished bronze lay a circular chamber containing a charnel pit filled with blackened bones, ringed about with murals of lurid aspect, depicting the rise and ultimate fall of Uyu-Yadmogh, and the ultimate fate of Tzyan driven before the Solar and Lunar Hosts of heaven. On an altar Skaris found a dagger of black steel stamped with flesh-crawling runes. Freygunnar recalled a time when the old vikti who taught her recounted tales of weapons from ancient times, made from a black alloy that could only be forged in purest darkness, which allowed their bearers to speak to unearthly evils through some foul rite. They took the southwest passage out of the charnel room and at its terminus found a hallway lined with statues of Uyu-Yadmogh in tricephalic aspect, bearing aloft mauls and hammers as symbols of his power. Skaris wisely tested the floor panel between the first set of statues with a pole, only to find that it had been reduced from 10' to 8' by a scything blade that whipped killing-fast from the statues at knee-height.
As they pondered how to proceed, a tingling and burning sensation along their skin alerted them to another threat posed by this hall, and once their armour began to tarnish and discolour from an acrid mist that had begun to fill it, they swiftly hauled the door panel shut and resolved to try another path.
Testing the southwestern path they came to another circular chamber, domed and with its walls covered in stone masks of wailing faces with cavernous gullets. At its end a heavy bronze basin filled to the brim with glittering gold coins. At this point they were wary for the wiles of wizards and opted to not even set foot in the chamber, but instead to use Skaris' skill with a lasso to pull the basin of gold off the plinth toward them, caring not if some of the coins spilled in the process. And so they did, almost half the coins spilled from the basin as soon as it hit the ground - but more to the point, their scepticism was validated as the stone mouths began to gush forth sand like waterfall cataracts! They wasted no time in reeling in the basin before the chamber was fully flooded and rejoiced in their canniness - until they realised that the golden coins were naught but painted clay! Cursing the treachery of sorcerers they trudged back, dejected. Only Freygunnr seemed undismayed, for she knew a rune that could make the obvious fakes pass for real coin to the unwary - at least for a while.
The encounter, however financially disappointing, did give Skaris an idea - to use the heavy bronze basin as a weight to trigger the traps in the Hall of Judgement, and so pass to its end. The others watched in mingled trepidation and amusement as he hopped from space to space, tossing the basin like a child playing hopscotch, even as the acidic vapours tore at his flesh! Through persistence and barbaric obstinance did he finally make it to the end, though by then his skin was so scarred by the vapours that his moniker was starting to sound like a presentiment or gaesa. With the traps revealed, Proculus and Freygunnr were able to make it through the hall faster, and with less exposure to the caustic mist that spilled from the mouths of Uyu-Yadmogh's idols.
At the hall's terminus, there scribed upon a panel of bronze in sigils that could be read even though it was a script none of them had ever been taught, as though written in the secret language of the soul was an simple warning;
ANCIENT TRAPS ARE BUT THE FIRST,
THE MOST LENIENT, OF MY GUARDIANS.
Uncowed by such necromancer's tricks, they slid the panel aside, to reveal a dark miracle; a coastline of black sand and petrified trees upon a sea of shimmering quicksilver, each pebble of beachstone the artifice of a master crafter, testament to the monumental power and hubris of its commisioner. And there, at it's centre, an artificial island upon which lay a necropolis of black stone and looming out of the silver sea another ghastly tricephalic idol of the Eater of Children, cast in onyx some thirty cubits in height. And there they stood for a moment in stunned awe, and wondered what manner of mind, what force of hand and skill, could make such a thing manifest?
Time alone would tell if they would live to know.
