Tomb of Horrors Part 4 ("Are You Living in My Dream or Am I Living in Your Dream?"

Remembering the price of the silver choice, Salt directed her unseen servant to take the golden end of the scepter and touch it to the mithril doors. There was no lightning. The doors opened.

Beyond lay what appeared to be a funerary treasure chamber, bright beneath a silvered ceiling that reflected light much as the stair chamber had done. The walls were ivory inlaid with gold. The floor was polished agate—common stone, but worked to a mirror sheen.

In each corner stood a nine-foot iron statue, black as pitch and radiating both magic and evil. Each bore a different weapon: a saw-toothed greatsword, a spiked mace, a vicious morning star, and a voulge. Their faces were monstrous and deeply unsettling.

They did nothing.

Salt and Bo-Jing soon learned why. The room was lined with lead and suffused with anti-magic. Spells failed. Magic items fell silent. Even the unseen servant winked out of existence.

Bo-Jing, convinced the statues would animate at any moment, tried to wrench weapons from their grasp or deface them. The iron would not yield—though disturbingly, the statues did shift slightly, as if resisting.

Against one wall stood a granite sarcophagus, its lid inlaid with platinum glyphs spelling ACERERAK. The far end had been smashed open long ago. Inside were rotted remains: fragments of bone, torn wrappings, ruined jewelry, dust, and the unmistakable wreckage of a magic staff . When Salt probed further, a cracked skull rolled free.

Whatever had once lain here was gone.

There were also massive iron chests, triple-locked and set directly into the stone. They did not yield.

And then there was the bronze urn—large, ornate, sealed with gold fill, a thin thread of smoke escaping from a tiny vent.

On a whim—perhaps out of frustration, perhaps out of instinct—Bo-Jing opened it.

Fire poured out of the urn and resolved itself into a towering efreeti, a being of living flame and intelligence. It demanded to know who had opened its prison.

When Bo-Jing stepped forward, the efreeti surprised them all.

It owed him three services before returning to the Elemental Plane of Fire.

Chastened by what wishing had already done to Lao Ren, Salt and Bo-Jing deliberated carefully.

Their first request was cautious: a map of the tomb.
The efreeti vanished in a puff of smoke and returned moments later with a singed parchment. Compared against the crude map they had found earlier, this one proved to be essentially perfect.

For the second service, they asked for a list of the twenty things needed to defeat Acererak. This disappointed Bo-Jing: the list was mostly mundane preparations—ten-foot poles, methods to counter gravity, potions of flight. Sensible. Practical. Unheroic. He already had a magic broom. Or at least, he used to.

The third service required the most care.

They wanted their equipment back. Their weapons, armor, clothes. Their companions. Their strength.

Before they could finalize the wording, the efreeti interrupted:

“Are you living in my dream, or am I living in your dream?”

Salt and Bo-Jing admitted they did not know. They acknowledged that whatever freedom they were offering him was likely temporary—illusory, even—contained within a vision.

Then Salt said something different.

“We are coming to destroy Acererak.
We are coming back for real.
And when we return, we will free you for real.”

The efreeti considered this. He could not reshape reality. But he could reshape a dream.

If that was what they wanted.

It was.

In an instant, Salt and Bo-Jing found themselves outside the tomb, reunited with Bangqiu and Lao Ren. They were clothed, healed, armed. Spells returned to memory. Strength returned to limbs.

But the crown, the scepter, the efreeti’s map, and every other artifact taken from within the tomb were gone.

They were in a dream inside a dream—but they remembered some things from the first dream.

For instance: do not take the northwest tunnel where the rocks fall.

This time, rather than digging through the middle entrance with swords, they used passwall, tunneling through the mud and into the now-obscenely familiar mosaic corridor with the green devil mouth at its end. Bangqiu could not remember what had happened to him inside that mouth—but he knew, with absolute certainty, that he did not want to return.

Between the four of them, they had enough magic to move quickly. They evaded the pit traps, ignored the temptations, and at the end of the corridor phase doored through the wall.

They emerged once more into the throne room.

The place where, in another dream, they had found the crown and the scepter. And the glowing gem. Once again, all these deadly tools were waiting.

Tomb of Horrors Part 2 (Green Devil Mouth)

 

DM note: The PCs are 10th level, and they are assisted by a 14th level NPC Magic-User, the sage Lao-Ren. Clearly, there are hazards in including high-powered "DMPCs" in an adventure, with great potential for them to overshadow the party. I think it works for this adventure because Lao-Ren is very clear about why he needs the PCs. For decades, even centuries, he has been seeking "the clever ones," which he has come to understand will distinguish themselves not by their raw power, but by how they use it, their uncanny access to insight greater than their own-- i.e. that of the players. So Lao-Ren can cast 7th level spells and he can explain what it means to be ethereal, something that the players and I are still trying to make sense of. But all the clever ideas have to come from the PCs.

I included some use of etherealness in earlier adventures, partly in anticipation of running TOH. Along with Bryce Lynch and others, I oppose disallowing certain high-level spells simply because they "break the adventure." That's what clever PCs are supposed to do. I think the TOH solution is a good one-- being ethereal within the Tomb attracts demons. One demon is easy for a high-level party to deal with, but it drains resources, which is frightening for a party that wants to save its high-level offensive spells for Acererak.  
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Still within Lao Ren’s ritual of vision, the party found themselves in a long, wide corridor of dazzling color. Faint daylight that passed through the clog of mud and silt at the entrance revealed that the passage was unlike anything they had seen before: walls, ceiling, and floor were coated in smooth plaster and painted with vivid scenes untouched by time. Fields of grazing cattle, wolves lurking at the edge of forests, slaves of many races and strange hybrids going about their work. Some frescoes depicted interior chambers—a library heavy with books and scrolls, a torture room, a wizard’s workshop. Birds, bats, spiders, doors, chests—an entire world painted flat and watching.

The floor was a mosaic of brilliant stone, and running through it was a narrow, winding path of red tiles. Bangqiu studied the symbols worked into those red stones and realized they formed a kind of riddle or poem—guidance for navigating the tomb safely. But the guidance was incomplete.

Hidden pit traps lined the corridor. Being ethereal, the party could drift safely above them—but that same ethereal state left them exposed to infernal creatures likewise confined to that plane. Without weapons or armor, they were forced to rely entirely on magic. Bo-Jing, unable to bring his strength or sword to bear, found himself uncomfortably sidelined.

 

At the far end of the corridor loomed a green devil face, its mouth gaping open. Nearby stood a misty archway that likely promised teleportation—and danger. Having learned from bitter experience, the party avoided both.

 

Instead, they carefully retraced their steps, studying the mosaics near the entrance while fending off infernal attackers drawn to their presence.

After the party destroyed a vulture-like creature, a more cautious demon emerged from the mist: a horned, dog-faced creature that called for parlay.

 

“You want Acererak,” it said. “I will call him.”

Moments later, a skeletal figure appeared at the far end of the hall, beyond the reach of Salt’s steam breath. Taking a desperate gamble, Bangqiu cast polymorph, declaring that the figure should become “a panda. Without legs.”

The skeletal form collapsed. The spell appeared to work.

But when Bangqiu approached, he found himself staring not at a helpless animal, but at a panda with Salt’s face. In that instant of confusion, the demon struck him from behind with a blast of force, hurling Bangqiu bodily into the green devil’s mouth.

Bo-Jing, with nothing else to do, struck the demon with his bare hands. It was like punching solid marble. The horrific Salt-Panda hybrid on the floor proved to be an illusion and disappeared.

Salt and Lao Ren destroyed the demon with magic. There was no discussion of following Bangqiu into the devil face, nor of testing the misty archway. Instead, the remaining three stepped into the stone wall itself, drifting blindly through dense ether until the world reshaped around them.

They emerged in a vast throne room.

Scores of massive columns filled the chamber

Near one devil face lay a ring of charred remains—ashes, bones, and ruined gear—surrounding a glowing orange gem that pulsed with dreadful power.

At the heart of the room stood a black ebony dais bearing a silver-inlaid obsidian throne. Resting upon it were a crown and a scepter, both heavy with magic.

Salt called on one of her most rudimentary spells, normally used for sweeping floors or carrying water, an unseen servant to retrieve the crown, the scepter, and the glowing gem.

While they explored, another vulture-like demon attacked, which Lao Ren trapped inside a sphere of force.

Testing the crown, Lao Ren found that it granted him perfect sight in the throne room—but once they stepped through the ether into another chamber, a triangular-shaped room dominated by a multi-colored flight of steps, he was left blind.

Recalling the riddles inscribed along the red path, Lao Ren asked Salt to remove the crown with the scepter.

Gold end or silver?

Trusting the poem—or luck—they chose gold.

The crown came free.