Dungeon Crawl Classics # 45: "Malice of the Medusa" (Part 2)

See here for Part One

Our second session of the module was definitely more entertaining than the first. All five characters from the first session returned, and there was also a new character, a cleric. In order to introduce the new character, I went with the classic "the party stumbles upon a hero being attacked and decides to help him" routine. Because the group was in a snake-filled valley called "The River of Venom", I chose the weakest monster on the random encounter list: a "Tiny Viper" that had only two hit points.

And it was the toughest encounter of the session!

The viper latched on to the cleric and started draining hit points every turn, while the cleric and the other PCs just couldn't hit the damned thing (it had a decently high AC of 17). Between the fangs, poison, and accidental hits from the other characters, the cleric ended up being knocked down to negative one before someone finally hit killed the snake.

A two hit point snake!

Anyway, things went more smoothly after that. The PCs encounterd the first sizable dungeon in the module, an ancient tomb containing the sarcophagus of an ancient ruler named Shishak. To get into the tomb, the PCs used some clever magic to trick a group of evil cultists into thinking bad omens from the tomb had risen up against them. Inside, various undead creatures were soundly returned to their graves. The only problem in the dungeon was something I think is a real flaw in the module. The PCs come to a (fake) sarcophagus that contains a riddle written on it, and only by solving the riddle will a secret door open that leads to the real sarcophagus that contains the magic staff they're looking for. Here's the riddle:

"Here lies Shishak, before whom serpents in the fold quiver. His glory be unto the wise . . . but to the simple goes but everlasting damnation. No sooner spoken than broken."

Think about it for a minute before reading on.

....

....

So the players quickly hit upon the idea of trying to figure out what could be broken once spoken, and came up with an answer of "silence." They tried saying "silence", being silent, and more, but the correct way to solve the riddle according to the module is to cast the spell Silence on the sarcophagus. This would be a pretty damned hard riddle as it is, but it's even worse because none of the characters happened to have the spell Silence. And in Pathfinder (and D&D 3.5), Silence is a second level spell so no first-level characters could have had the spell to begin with, and even higher-level characters might not have the spell on their spell lists.

Fortunately, the PCs made (by taking 20) the absurdly high DC 30 check to notice the secret door and used the brute force method to break it down and find the real sarcophagus.

Anyway, a good time was had by all and hopefully sometime soon we'll manage to get together for Chapter 4: "Scorpion Rock."