Quest The Chamber of Final Repose - Halloween Event Escape Room

[Darkweaver]

OOC INFORMATION:

In this mini-event, you roll a 1d20 to determine the outcome of each stage of the room. The stages are ordered: Investigate, Fight, Avoid, Escape, Traverse. What you roll in one might stack the odds – one way or another – for the next challenge.

It works similarly to skill challenges in DnD 5th edition. The higher you roll, the better the result. The number shown at the end tells you what each roll results in, but you can take artistic liberties in describing and detailing that outcome. You may also add new features to the room, imagining your character’s way out, but to make things interesting, try and stay faithful to whatever you have rolled in a given check. It explains what happens to your character, and if you’re very unlucky, that character might be trapped down here longer than they bargained for . . . and who knows what might happen then?

The design uses advantage and disadvantage from Dungeons & Dragons (2014 rules). Put simply, if you have advantage, you roll two dice and take the best result. If you have disadvantage, you roll two dice and take the worst result. If you have both advantage and disadvantage, they mitigate one another, resulting in a straight roll of one d20 (die 20). You can use the roll function on Discord to make your rolls. Certain character backgrounds and featured player groups have advantage on one particular skill check. Sometimes, you may even subtract 1 or add 1 to your roll if the given effect says as much.

Each character is ALONE in their own version of this chamber, so there will be no interaction with other players. Just the room and your chosen character.

The Chamber

Spoiler: Music OOC

Consciousness coils around you like a creeping cold. Unwanted, undesired, but inevitable – the stone floor yearns for your submission; just as itself has surrendered to damp growth and plant-life, all soft and pliable below your hands. But eventually, you regain your senses, only to find yourself in a confined space.

A single room. Four walls, pressing in around you, strangling sunlight and fresh air. The air is stale here, damp and heavy with verdant life. Elegant and ancient stonework protrude with bursting weeds and plant-life, snaking through the stone like throbbing veins below old skin. One archway leads into a darkened alcove shooting out dire roots, giving a fool’s hope of escape – only to find that behind them, there is yet another wall - as though someone bricked up this ancient doorway, only for ravenous plants to try to tear through it. A single sarcophagus lies proffered in the centre, neatly arranged, just for you, its heavy stone lid closed. For now.

Dim, emerald glows twinkle with bio-luminescence from the strange roots and hairy vines, as if needing no other light but their own eldritch source. It throws a mystic glow over your surroundings and reveals two statues that seem to melt with the plant and hewn stone, standing over you like a proud father and mother clasping their hands, waiting to witness your transformation, though their muted and eyeless features render it difficult to tell what kind of change they might have in store for you.

You do not recall how you ended up here. But wherever you last put your head to sleep or took the wrong turn, somehow, it has brought you to this place.

You must find your way out.

You must investigate.

Jhinn
Kilien Basmarc
Pim
Nuir

 

[Jhinn]

Jhinn opened his eyes and turned his head and everywhere he looked a wash of green drowned his gaze in its high tide. He pressed his palms to the cold stone floor and pushed himself up, rising like an ancient and slumbering creature the world had forgotten but some unseen, eternal warden bid to wake. Swordless was he, but he yet retained his armor.

He glanced about at his present circumstance, the strangeness of the statues, the sarcophagus, the alien plants and the quiet oppression of their glow. His tail he swished in frustration. He muttered under his breath, "I will repay this trickery as is fitting."

But that, perhaps, would wait for another day.

Now he set himself to the task of scouring his odd prison, for knowledge and—if he could discern it—escape. First he went gently, tracing his hands over the watchful carved stone of the mother and father, along the lid and edges of the sarcophagus, here down the vines and there in the alcove and all about the spaces less defined by serpentine light. Then, more roughly, with measured kicks and palm-strikes and rams of his shoulder, he tested various spots in the room.

And he discovered something, mayhap, that was not meant to be discovered—if indeed this room was intended to be a prison for him. The twisting and spiraling vines in their innocence, or perhaps in conspiratorial malice, concealed the one wall less sturdy than its kin.

Jhinn threw his weight against the failing wall. Once. Twice. These each gave encouragement to the third, and yes, the third did see the collapse of his cage, and stones tumbled to ruin. A new path stood revealed.

"He who expects the rough road is either content," and he stepped through, "or delighted."

 

[Pim]

Pim admittedly held some expectations of what her reality would be like upon awakening from her deep slumber; those being very similar to what she had experienced before going to bed. A warm kitchen, a snug bed inside a tidy closet near the pantry...

She did not think these expectations were particularly too much to ask of space-time as a whole, but as she awoke to find herself in unfamiliar -- and rather unpleasant -- surroundings, she considered that maybe the unseen entities that wove the strands of fate might have made an error in their calculations.

"Hello?" her voice echoed uncertainly in the dimly-lit chamber before dissipating into the cold stone. She shot up, suddenly in a panic when she realized that her faithful companion Smokey was nowhere to be seen.

She called out to him several times, receiving only silence in response. Had he been left behind? Or worse, had he been taken prisoner by rogue fate-weavers?

Pim took a deep breath and sat on the sarcophagus to think. Now was not the time to be rash. Now was the time to be methodical. This was simply a puzzle. She liked puzzles...usually.

The halfling poked around at the plants and stonework, taking mental note of everything. She picked some of the glowing plants and wrapped them around her wrists to light her way as she moved around.

Where there were plants, there was water. Where there was water, there was erosion.

She prodded at some of the old stonework the roots had nibbled their way through, and found that some of them were not as strong as they outwardly looked. A way out, perhaps.

 

[Kilien Basmarc]

For whatever reason that Kilien could not presently fathom, the looming darkness encased by stone felt strangely familiar. Not quite like home, but near enough. The sensation of claustrophobia had long since run dull in his bones and after years of waking within a chamber of stone with no light and nary a visible door, it had instead become a source of comfort.

Safety.

Behind this closed door, his mind told him in the eddies of his subconscious, they can't touch you here.

Except here wasn't quite there, was it?

In the dark his eyes flashed a pale, moony gold. The shivers of change's onset were gone... which meant he'd woken up not just in an unknown place but on the other side of the full moon. His hands lifted to press the tangle of brown from his face, smoothing down and plying over his beard as his feet moved, not as steady as he'd prefer, across the short distance of the first chamber. He reached the wall and the open doorway and there he paused before the brink to lean and think.

Memories of the immediate past escaped him, but he could recall his arrival to Elbion clearly. Could see Vittoria leant against the ferry's rail as the grand walled city sat before them across the glittering waters of the Cairou.

Something about shopping.

The pads of his fingers closed around the greenery that clung to the walls. Not his walls, they'd never played host to plants before.

As if he knew what that meant.

He pressed through to the next chamber, greeted by a silent sepulcher. Kilien met the quiet with a sigh, fingers lifting to drum along the stone top.

"Don't suppose you know a way outta here?" he asked the unknown tomb's occupant. Schrodinger's corpse, perhaps.

 

[The Spear Thistle Fairy]

One moment Spear Thistle was scheming about all the ways she could magically mess with the Allirian city guard, and the next she was in a musty tomb that stunk of mildew and forgotten undergrowth.

“Yuck! Yuck! Yuck! Where is this, who put me here?!”

The purple haired pixie frantically fluttered around trying to find an obvious exit but couldn’t spot any.

“Ugh this place is so gross and icky and junk, does an unseelie live here or something? Probably not since nothings complaining about how sad life is yet.”

Spear thistle flicked her wrist and turned the lighting of the room from a sickly green into a warm and inviting red.

“There, that’s like marginally better I guess, still smells like goblin pits though.”

With another flick, the room began to smell faintly of flowers and freshly cut grass. Spear Thistle breathed deeply of the descended air

“Ahh”

“Well, now with the essentials out of the way how the heck am I getting out of here?”

 

[Nuir]

The pale elf sat up like a lever being switched on. In this situation that should have inspired a dread seeping into his bones he felt a sort of nostalgia. For a moment he half expected to find that one of his sisters had played a prank on him again.
The dull glow of the vines against the damp stone was quite comforting in a way. The smell could be better.
He inspected the vines more closely. Nuir wasn't sure he had seen this particular kind before so they collected a bit into a vial.

Nuir surveyed the room like he would a patient. Measured and orderly in his assessment. The wall crawling with the most vines seemed to promise a way out beyond the walled exit. Perhaps he could even squeeze out if he pushed the vines aside just right, though to where he wasn’t as certain. Most of all he noticed the statues, they gave an eerie impression down here. Was this the grave of some noble? Something about it struck him as odd to be just a bit of a memorial. Or perhaps it was a site for something else. Nuir shrugged a little. The contents of the stone sarcophagus likely would have revealed a hint.
He hummed absentmindedly.

Nuir quietly considered if it was worth the effort of heaving stone around or if he should instead squeeze out and be on his way. Curiosity his true weakness, causing him to linger.