The Flooded Tomb of the Aurochs Vikramarka - Play Report 2
This is the continuation of our last adventure. It was remarkably shorter for reasons which will become apparent.
We backtracked from the room with a turtle in it to the false back of the tomb of the bull-helmeted man, which off-game I now know to be named Vikramarka.
Going down the stairs we found a landing that went to the left and right.
A large mural stood there depicting Vikramarka dying, going to the river, then emerging and breathing life into his child. We quickly assumed this had to do with reincarnation due to the imagery, and later it was confirmed to be correct.
As we admired it, we heard something trudging in the corridors.
Wanting to see the rest of the murals, still unsure if they would be telling the story of the reincarnated Vikramarka or not (though conjecturing not), we went down south, where we knew the trudging thing in the water wouldn't be. The water here was chest high for my character, who was the tallest, and about neck height for our smallest character.
In the southern corridor we found another mural, depicting battle and the life of Vikramarka, along with some pillars in the shape of aurochs, depicting how he obtained his obsidian-tipped spear.
The trudging was getting closer so we scurried down to the hallway. There was another mural here to the right of this one, but we couldn't afford to spend the time inspecting it.
At the end, a passage to the north opened up in a corridor flanked by many decorative aurochs statues, drawing the eye to a tomb at the end of it.
As we explored we noticed little canals going with the statues, and we got an inkling that the big rectangle behind us was likely a room, but we went ahead forwards anyway and explored this tomb.
There was a sarcophagus here in a platform above the water, along with two pillars depicting prosaic life.
We knew there was something coming but we explored the room nayway in search of anything that might help us, but it eventually became clear that we were going to have to face down the thing whether we liked it or not.
We hatched a plan and waited. From the edges of our lamplight, trudging in the water, there appeared a massive bull statue moving on its own, clutching a wholly bronze spear, its skin painted a masculine black and its face contorted in a scream. It stopped and stared at us, and so we bowed and hailed it as king.
Next round, it approached but seemed to lose control of itself, threw its spear away and came running to clutch at us. The thing has 3 attacks and so it rips Malachi apart, leaving Man-Killer Adva and the Heretic Puabi to think on what to do.
Puabi jumped in the water and decided to swim out stealthily. Adva (my character) decided to crack open the sarcophagus in hopes of there being something helpful in there, not finding anything besides a skeleton with osme treasure, and then jumped on top of the monster.
Next round we got initiative, Puabi swam away some more and Adva put his feet to the back of the monster and pushed himself outwards, to get more speed and start swimming out. This didn't work, in his round the monster came after him and killed him too.
The remaining Puabi tried to stealth their way out by taking distance, but a series of failed Saves meant Puabi made too much noise and was found by the monster, and that's how we ended the session.
Further thoughts
This time around I don't really have many further thoughts. It was a fitting conclusion for what we had begun the previous session.
The thing we did discuss after the session was that this dungeon would likely be best suited for a hexcrawl rather than a one-shot. You can read it here, but the conclusion we reached was that "solving" the dungeon was pretty much out of our reach without some serious cultural context or lateral thinking. The tomb we died in was the second false tomb, the true tomb was to our backs, in that empty rectangle, which we did notice. However, even if we had found it, it wouldn't really have done us much good. Maybe we could have killed the wraith which plagued us, but with a minotaur on our ass, it's more likely that we would have simply been tag-teamed by the both of them and put on the ground a little later than sooner.
Still, this didn't sour my experience or change my thoughts from last time. Ultimately, the framing of why you're going inside the dungeon is what changes it for me. Money and power are interesting, but I felt like this dungeon demonstrated to me that going inside a dungeon and not grabbing those can be just as rewarding... so long as there actually is a way for the problem to be solved. In a campaign we would have certainly found a way, though.
RPGs forever!
