Expedition 122: Otiluke's 3: Loot AND Die!

*The following rant was delivered at superhuman volume by Valorie Veyer several leagues out to sea in Yezra Stormfriend’s boat. It is Valorie Veyer’s impression and hope that nobody except her girlfriend, familiar, and steed heard it:*

“When in the course of one’s career, one finds that a plan has failed so catastrophically that it has endangered the very lives of all one’s fellows and entirely failed to account for the problems and risks that mandated the plan’s construction in the first place, it is necessary to step back, take stock, and consider, not just where the plan failed, but whether one’s very method of planning is itself suspect. It is time to assess, seriously, how my approach to planning failed on Otiluke’s 3, causing grave risk to all of the party.”

“And I’ve been THINKING FOR TWO WEEKS ON IT AND I **DO NOT KNOW WHAT THE HECKING HECK I WAS *SUPPOSED* TO BLOODY DO!**

**“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”**

“The preliminary planning for Otilukes 3 took *weeks*. The mission would have three principal objectives: first, to study the Silvervein Ritual room and recover the Silvervein material; second, to retrieve the massive supply of resources in Otiluke’s storeroom; and third, to avoid destroying Otiluke’s defenses and leaving the Time-Knife, an apparently immovable relic of the *contrived MacGuffin* school, available to any would-be Time Despot who walked in. It was a *complicated mission*, particularly because the storeroom chests in Otiluke’s Sanctum had Gylphs of Warding on them that would both cast dangerous spells and activate the golem if tripped. Additionally, we knew Otiluke to be a *paranoid jackass* after interacting with some of his other deathtraps, and we were sure that some number of his storeroom chests contained *bombs* or something even more horrible, so opening them in the sanctum was a terrible idea.”

“In order to solve these problems, Uzmir and I had acquired a cart and a reinforced metal container to hold Otiluke’s Silvervein Material, knocking out problem 1. The plan for problem 2 was to disarm the traps *outside* the chests then cart the entire heap of loot back through the Mageline to Lin’dseys and open everything from a safe distance far away from the Golem. Of course, the real kicker was the storeroom, and two different ideas had been floated to deal with that.”

“My initial idea had been to empower the Compact’s dispellers to systematically cut through the Glyphs of Warding with Dispel Magic. Just throw four casters of the sixth circle at the problem with enhanced focus and tear down every glyph without letting them activate. If no Glyph went off, nothing would set off the Golem, and we could walk out scot-free.”

“Gonerton thought that this plan was incredibly resource-intensive, which it was, and proposed that instead we lure the Golem into an extraplanar space created by Mordenkainen’s Magnificent Mansion, let it mill about, and then soak every trap in the Storeroom by swamping the with Unseen Servants, which were cheap. This plan required that the Golem be stupid, which didn’t seem like a big stretch, and would let us tear up Otiluke’s storeroom without caring as much about making noises and the like.”

“Both Gonerton and I had been pointing out flaws with each others’ approaches at the half-hour Scheming Meetings we run in his tower, and ultimately we agreed that we’d need to gather more information about additional risks on-site before we committed to anything, like good, sane adventurers. So, on the 8th of Bloom, year 367 of the Age of Pain, we set off, Gonerton and I with Uzmir, Ark, and Clarity, to win ourselves glorious loot, the plan still up in the air, but divided between two equally good options.”

“Everything initially went *fine*. We activated Mage Kendon’s door with an evocation ritual, passed through the Mageline without trouble, and even discovered a sunken Plane of Water ship in an underground lake, filled with skeletons. We then entered Otiluke’s Sanctum, exactly as we had left it! No evidence at all that anyone had tampered with anything since we last went through. The Golem was inactive, and the glorified combination lock protecting Otiluke’s front door hadn’t changed its sequence. We spent five peaceful hours in the Silvervein Ritual Room, taking notes and shoving the Silvervein Material into my nice, expensive metal canister.”

“When we were done, we needed to gather information about the wards on the Storeroom. In particular, we wanted to know:

1. Whether there were any traps not on or in Otiluke’s chests, that we didn’t already know about.
2. How many, and which, of the chests were booby-traps.
3. Whether the Golem would just turn on if we walked by it carrying the chests.
4. Whether anything in Otiluke’s Sanctum was a Mimic.

Gonerton and I discussed the options to learn these things, of which there were too many because Gonerton has figured out how to propose solutions but not how to pick between them. Meanwhile everyone else sat back and let us hash it out, because they’re accustomed by now to letting the two of us come up with all the plans and then critiquing them after the fact. Yes, I *know* I’m being unfair, dear!

Eventually, Gonerton and I settled on *consulting extraplanar forces*, and so we assembled the four questions above and tossed in a question of “is Otiluke in a condition to take offense to what we’re doing?” because we knew he was alive in some respect.”

“Well, Gonerton extended his consciousness into the ethereal realm and stumbled around for a source of wisdom and knowledge, and he found ***GILGAMESH***, because apparently only *good* people stay dead in this world and evil gets infinite do-overs. So the wandering god Gilgamesh addressed Gonerton and Gonerton asked his questions. We learned that:

1. Otiluke had traps aside from the Golem not on or in his chests.
2. That some chests were booby-traps.
3. That Otiluke’s Golem would not activate if we walked past with the chests.
4. That Otiluke’s Sanctum had no mimics in it.
5. That Otiluke *was* in a condition to take offense to what we did, because only good people stay dead, and paranoid jackasses get to live forever.

So then there was another massive debate in which Gonerton and I discussed back and forth about whether trapping the Golem or mass dispelling was preferable, while the rest of the grouped hemmed and hawed and complained about being bad at thinking about plans on the spot."

“In the end, because there were some traps we didn’t know about, I thought that setting off the Glyphs of Warding from inside a safe extradimensional space was the best idea, so I advocated for camping out in the Mansion, setting off the Glyphs, and then trapping the Golem. This was the *first* mistake. It turns out, those extra traps not on the chests were:

1. A bell attached to one of the chests that summoned the golem when the chest was moved.
2. A glyph of warding behind a chest to trigger if the chest was moved, with a Cloudkill spell.

We certainly could have beaten those traps if we had checked for them carefully, but Gonerton and I have gotten to dependant on divinations. In my defense, *my first mission* was solved by Marzipan asking the gods for information we could have gotten *no other way* and then ol’ Maera *broke the limitations of Marz’s Divination spell* to give him an answer. *YES I AM STILL BITTER, BAST, AND I DO NOT CARE IF I HAVE BEEN HARPING ON THIS SINCE WE FIRST MET.”*

“*Anyway*, lesson learned, we need to remember that divination is no substitute for honest fact-gathering and we should use investigation and magic in tandem for the best results. What we *should* have done is run carefully over every chest for an hour or so looking for irregularities and seeing if we could detect any magic around them and *then* divined for more clues and *then* moved in. But we didn’t.”

“Instead, we pilled into the Magnificent Mansion, sent out ten Unseen Servants into the storeroom, and closed the door, leaving behind Bast to scout. The servants poked the chests and got disintegrated immediately. The Golem turned on. Nothing else happened. Bast retreated and we all considered how to lure the Golem into the Mansion and trap it there.”

“Then the Golem cast *Dispel Magic* with a locus of the *Seventh Circle* on the Mansion, because apparently *they can do that*, and then we all landed on our behinds in front of it. Because *apparently* the Archmage Otiluke can’t figure out a better way to secure his Sanctum than a nine-key combination lock I could have solved when I was fourteen, but he *can* work out how to give a robot magic powers.”

“At that point we were fighting, but it looked like it was going to be alright. Gonerton had Wall of Force, the Golem couldn’t stop all of us from running or trapping it in Otiluke’s trap-room, so we all grabbed chests and began to haul for the door. Gonerton stuck the Golem in the Wall of Force and we all high-fived.”

“Then the Golem set off an *Anti-Magic Field*.”

“The MAGIC GOLEM set off an ANTI-MAGIC FIELD.”

“THE **MAGIC GOLEM SUMMONED AN ANTI-MAGIC FIELD ON TOP OF ITS OWN BLOODY MAGICAL SELF!**”

“BECAUSE WHY THE HECK NOT!?”

“Well, at that point, we five magicians had *no options*, so we all consulted and concluded that the only viable plan was to run for it. So we did. And lo and behold, with some teleportation cleverness and Clarity’s disintegrating of Otiluke’s front door, we almost made it!”

“Then the Golem **ate** Gonerton.”

“Walked right up to him, opened up like a suit of armor annnd *swallowed him whole*. And then we all heard him getting pummeled inside of the thing as it walked around and took swipes at Clarity and Ark. At which point we couldn’t just *leave*, so instead we sat around and *panicked*.”

“Uzmir started thinking of ancient poetry Otiluke might have used as a key to the Golem. Ark, using their Moonblade, summoned a Shadow and had it try to drain the Golem’s strength, and for *some incomprehensible reason* the Shadow didn’t disappear into smoke inside the anti-magic field. Clarity attempted to *threaten* the Golem, which *worked* by some ungodly logic, and drew its fire. Gonerton slathered himself with healing potions. And I tried to *talk* to the Golem—it was rambling in halfling—and that didn’t work because it was a pre-recorded message, so then I tried to send my *own* summon at it, and that didn’t work because *apparently it didn’t*, and then I just sort of *was present*!”

“AND THEN WE WON.”

“NOT BECAUSE WE WERE SMART. BUT BECAUSE ARK’S FRIGGING MAGIC SHADOW SWORD **KEPT WORKING** AND CLARITY **KEPT BEING THREATENING** AND GONERTON **KEPT ON HEALING HIMSELF** **WITH POTIONS**. AND UZMIR MANAGED TO FIGURE OUT WHAT OTILUKE’S PASSCODE WAS, AND SHUT THE GOLEM DOWN AFTER GONERTON FORCED HIS WAY OUT OF ITS WEAK, DRAINED FRAME. THEN WE BEAT IT TO **DEATH**. HUZZAH.”

“Apparently Otiluke had prepared for every possible eventuality, except for low-order undead.”

“And that was that! We pulled out all of the chests, I had summoned an angel during the fight that ate the Cloudkill to the face and died, and then we left! Well, actually, we first debated how to resolve the problem of the Time Knife being out in the open, but Gonerton and Clarity looked it over and figured out that they could probably teleport it, so they did that! And now it’s hanging ominously over Clarity’s table in her tower. Every objective was resolved satisfactorily, *except that we all nearly died and got out of it by pure luck!*”

“HOW IN THE HECK WERE WE SUPPOSED TO GUESS THE GOLEM HAD AN **ANTI-MAGIC FIELD!?** I didn’t think those were things golems could even have! Heck, it wasn't even a real golem! Once we pulled its *remains* out of the base, it turned into Colbarious Dust! It was an illusion! I don’t even know what I’m supposed to learn from this!”

“And the worst part is, despite the plan *imploding*, this was the most lucrative mission of all time! Half of the chests were deathtraps, and what was left was still such a comical amount of money it even made up for all the blasted healing potions Gonerton burned through!”

“I don’t know. Apparently Otiluke was *vastly* more powerful than we’ve been giving him credit for. So much so that we completely misjudged how much of a threat his works were. And he’s still in a state to take offense to what we did. Brilliant. We’ll probably be regretting this whole operation, one day. Blasted wizards."

**Expedition Result: Expedition is considered a Success**

**Expedition Level:** 15 or Something

**Expedition Loot:** Extensive. Two units of Colbarious Dust from the remains of the Golem. The Silvervein Material, an alloy containing three units of Mercurial Steel, 3 units of Mythril, 3 units of Dragonsblood, and 3 units of Everglow. The Time Knife, in Clarity’s Tower. And twelve lead chests which contained:

1. Metals, taken previously.
2. The Book of Primal Metamorphosis and Moolcaz, Ax of Endings
3. 25 Silver, 7 gold, and 3 platinum coins.
4. Contained a one-way portal to a demiplane intended as a trap. Inside the demiplane, there was a Plate of Familiar Snaring and a ruby-encrusted gauntlet of unknown but surely dire power.
5. A Glamorweave Tunic and two Bands of Ogre’s Resiliency.
6. The Mask of Murderous Greed, intended as a trap.
7. A false bottomed chest containing the Eastern Blastrod and the Khanate Torch Repeater.
8. A small stand with a glass case, inside of which is a mundane stone hand gripping the Rod of Molten Mystic with the Corpsemonger’s Friend on one finger and the Symbol of Unshattered Spirit hanging from it.
9. Vast amounts of the Empire of Stone’s paper money.
10. 4200 gp in assorted gems and gem dust, including one each of an emerald, ruby, sapphire, topaz, and diamond worth 100, 200, and 500gp.
11. A Tome of All Conjuration, Tome of All Transmutation, and a Tome of Precise Thought (+2 Wis)
12. A system that repeatedly cast Freezing Sphere and Magic Missile over and over again, intended as a trap.