Rooster barges into the common room with a priority one mission. Bizzle, Tricksy, and Slick board PTATA One with Rooster. Tatters boards PTATA Two with several obscure R&S employees all wearing red shirts. As the One PTATA, Two PTATA lift off, there is a popping sound and PTATA Two goes down with apparent engine failure.
There is no time to turn back for PTATA Two. A rebellion within the red wizards of Thay grants R&S limited time use of the Bloodgate Nexus, and the Gatehouse beyond, to access the Doomvault. Details will be available directly from the rebel leader at the Gatehouse. The mission is so dangerous that bottom-line-conscious Rooster passes around extra healing potions and salvage bars, along with a release of liability.
PTATA One reaches the drop zone. Rooster returns to base to check on the souls who fortunately perished in a fiery crash rather than survive delivery to the Doomvault.
Slick, Tricksy, and Bizzle find themselves in a shadowy hall lined with teleport pads. Syranna, rebellious red wizard and procurer of R&S’s services, appears and welcomes them. She explains that there is a lich lord by the name of Tarul Vaul inhabiting the phylactery vault beneath the Doomvault. This lich lord is a real problem for civilization and must be terminated. All they have to do is use a dense map to wend their way through rooms upon rooms with names like Temples of Extinction, filled with traps, monsters, and all manner of other terrors, figure out how to get to the phylactery vault, and then destroy it and the lich lord it contains. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.
Syranna hands Tricksy a magic crystal pendant on a bronze chain and ushers them to a randomly selected teleport pad labeled Blood Pens. The adventurers enter the teleporter and find themselves standing on a black gate in the corner of a room with ambling zombies and a couple of wights.
Tricksy sees no obvious staircase down so she begins to cross the room toward a door. Vines emerge from holes around the room and threaten to entangle all un-undead creatures. Tricksy gets grabbed crossing the room. She stabs the offending vine in its base and it falls away. This commotion does not escape the attention of the undead. The zombies waste no time attacking while the wight hissingly requests the passphrase.
Despite Bizzle’s insistence that they are guests expected by Tarul Vaul, the zombies and wights do not yield. Tricksy’s suture fly companion, Knit, zips over the zombie wave and sews a purple zombie’s eye closed. The zombie botches a lunge at Bizzle’s spleen and its arm falls off. Slick snicks off an ear with her greataxe of finesse, and Bizzle’s scimitars finish the job. One down.
Too many undead in such a small room prevent Tricksy from using her preferred shortbow, so she relies on her rapier while Knit diligently closes zombie eyes, fully blinding a few who make easy targets or wander around ineffectively.
Slick maneuvers around the undead mass to keep the doors at her back, just in case she needs to escape to the next room. Her greataxe makes good progress thinning out her assailants, cleaving down a zombie by dividing it neatly in two. Troublesome zombie Chester clubs Slick repeatedly with his own putrid chest.
Bizzle fights his way over to draw pressure off Tricksy who isn’t as stout as her teammates. They combine attacks against the encircling undead who have a nasty tendency to hinge right back up to continue fighting when struck down.
The wights drain Bizzle’s and Tricksy’s lives with lifedrain and longswords. Zombie Arman improvises his own detached arm to club Tricksy. She slays him and quaffs a healing potion.
Knit blinds Chester and he shatters his chest into the wall, sending some rotted teeth flying out. Confused about the source of the teeth, Knit sews Chester’s mouth shut. Slick’s greataxe finishes Chester for just a moment but he stands up again. Slick’s greataxe finishes Chester for just a moment but he stands up again. Slick’s greataxe finishes Chester for just a moment but he stands up again. Slick’s greataxe finishes Chester for just a moment but he stands up again. Knit gets bored and sews Chester’s nose shut killing Chester for good, not because zombies need to breath but because the suture stings a little. Irritated Slick moves to kill the last zombie, but he blindly knocks himself out smacking into the wall just as she winds up a swing of her greataxe.
Tricksy and Bizzle battle with the two wights non-lethally. The first dies accidentally but the second is knocked unconsciously undead. Tricksy binds the wight with razor wire and Bizzle revives it, asking for the passphrase. The wight couldn’t possibly care less about its predicament or whether Bizzle learns the passphrase and it slays itself by thrashing about.
Slick searches the room and the wights where she finds two more Blood Pen glyph keys on bronze chains. Bizzle borrows some chalk from Tricksy and writes numbers on the keys to identify them uniquely. Badly beaten Tricksy eats a salvage bar and she’s good as new, ready to see the next room, or so she thinks.
Bizzle takes the lead opening the doors. A sign suggests this room is The Pale Garden. The sign is not contradicted by the dozen skeletons tending a vast hedge of plants stretching as far as they can see across the enormous room. Great pillars extend to the ceiling. The skeletons seem prepared to ignore Bizzle as he cautiously advances down a clear pathway. Large shambling mounds of vegetation shamble up to him and Bizzle demands to hear the passphrase. A shambling mound slams, grapples, and eats Bizzle whole.
Slick and Tricksy, observing Bizzle’s demise from the doorway, frantically search their knowledge of large shambling mounds. Tricksy is reluctant to put arrows into the Bizzle-stuffed mound, not that she can even see it well enough in all the vegetation. While they panic, Bizzle uses his helm of teleportation to pop back into the room and closes the doors on The Pale Garden. Whatever is behind door number two of the Blood Pens couldn’t be worse than that.
Beyond the other door is a short hallway blocked by a white gate. Tricksy investigates the blockage and reckons it’s potentially dangerous. As she’s pointing out the danger, her gesticulating arm brushes through the white glow and is unharmed. Maybe the glyph key, number 0, around her neck kept her safe. Bizzle tastes the glyph key; it tastes like metamorphic igneous rock. Bizzle, wearing glyph key number 2 around his neck, experimentally extends his pinky finger into the white light. His finger is unharmed and tastes like magic. Bizzle concludes that it is entirely safe for Slick to walk through the white gate as long as she’s wearing glyph key number 1 around her neck. When this surprisingly proves to be true, Tricksy and Bizzle follow her.
The short hallway leads to a room of caged critters. There are definitely some hooked horrors in a cage to the left, but no time is lost making a further zoological assessment. Apparent curator and red wizard Myrja is a bit surprised at the intrusion. Bizzle quickly demands the passphrase from her before she has the opportunity to demand it from him. The tactic gets nothing, but the party leans into the confusion and reveal they are on a mission from red wizard Syranna. That concerns Myrja because Syranna is a filthy rebel. Bizzle, normally less charismatic, implores Myrja to lead them all to the phylactery vault immediately because rebel Syranna has infiltrated there and has tricked them into thinking she works for the lich lord, and obviously everyone here wants to protect the lich lord from harm. Myrja is willing to believe him, but has no access to the phylactery vault. The adventurers excuse themselves to the next room, leaving a puzzled Myrja with her caged horrors behind.
The next room shows signs of once being an art gallery, but now gore covers the floor. There is a black gate in the corner, like the first room, and a glyph on the wall. A deathlock wight and a regular wight oversee a dozen skeletons feeding an otyugh garbage. Bizzle demands the passphrase.