Session #32: The Big Bad

No Sterling for this session, so Andrew played Seamus. Sal was an hour late. On to the recap.

A large part of tonight's session was taken up by a puzzle involving the two doors leaving the room the party found themselves in at the end of last session. They found 4 inscriptions in this room - 1 each in front of the gray & yellow stone doors leading out of the room, and 2 on the back of the largest throne in the room. They were as follows:

• In front of the gray stone door, there was a cross inscribed, followed by a dash, and then an X, like so: "+ - X"
• In front of the yellow stone door, there was a dash and a cross, like so: "- +"
• On the back of the throne were two inscriptions. The first showed a semicircle with lines coming out from it laid on a horizontal plane, with a "_" next to it, indicating a blank space meant to be filled in, followed by a circle with lines coming out from it with another "_" next to that, then a crescent with yet another "_" next to it, and finished off with a stick figure-like pictograph of a person. 
• The other inscription showed a pictograph of a spider, then a pictograph of a horse.

The party spent quite a while trying to figure this out. They eventually managed to figure out that the symbols on the ground represented mathematical operations to perform using numbers derived from the inscriptions on the back of the throne. The first was easy: the numbers were represented by the numbers of legs each creature had: so 8 - 4 = 4, the number of coins to open the first yellow door; and 8 + 4 = 12, the number of coins to open the second. This turned out to be a trap, however, and the party had to fight a group of rust monsters. These beasts ate Seamus' +1 magic battleaxe, but were fairly easy to deal with otherwise.

After dealing with the rust monsters, the party set about solving the other puzzle. Eventually (with a lot of hint-dropping from me), they worked out that the first inscription referenced the famous Riddle of the Sphinx: the person represented the riddle's answer. The riddle itself was, of course, "What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs at night?" This led them to be able to figure out that the numbers they needed to work with were 4, 2, and 3. From here they performed the necessary operations: 4 + 2 + 3 = 9 coins for the first door. The second door had a dash with a slash through it, meant to indicate that they should remove the negative symbol from the result they would get from 4 - 2 - 3, which would be -1; however they figured this out by dropping the 2 out of the equation, a conclusion which I'm not sure how Traver reached, but he did reach it. The final door was 4 x 2 x 3 = 24, which they figured out rather easily (despite some silliness about not using "x" for multiplication - fuck algebra, honestly.)

Within the vault they found a great wealth of treasure - along with a very large troglodyte. This was the boss encounter, and it proved to be a difficult one - Seamus was brought into dying, and the party's dailies were depleted by this encounter. However, the party triumphed in the end, and the massive troglodyte was felled. They gathered all the loot they could carry (about 2500 gold pieces in valuables, the Silver Mask of Kas they'd been sent for, an Amulet of Vigor +2, a set of Magic Chainmail +3, and a rare item, the Helm of Seven Deaths) and left the vault - where they were immediately stopped by a smug Gregor Amberforge and his large force of guards, including a young white dragon, "requesting" the return of his family's treasure from the vault they'd just cleared for him.

With this cliffhanger in place, we should be set up for a good session next week. Hope to see everyone there!