Mausoleum

The mausoleum in Thymore functions as a dungeon for Arc 1, where the party searches for Aura, a librarian from Summerview that went missing. It is first introduced in Arc 1, Episode 2.

The description found on this page is a summary of the description given on podcast. Find an extended cut of the dungeon on the Unprepared Casters YouTube (here) and the dungeon as a PDF module to adjust and play yourself on Patreon for 2 dollars and up supporters (here).

## Description

To the people in Thymore the mausoleum is also known as "the laughing mausoleum" or "the living crypt", because every day at the same time, a deep laughing sound rumbling from the mausoleum and echoing across the town can be heard. At the time the Arc 1 party arrives, the people from Thymore are already used to that, and know the timing of the laughter. Rumour around town has it that a dragon lives inside it, but not everyone believes that.

### Outside

**Official Description:** "It’s a white marble building, no real inscriptions on it on the outside, it’s pretty small and has a big heavy door on the front that when you try it, it is unlocked you can just walk right on in."

### Ground Floor

**Official Description:** "You find yourself in a small-ish, white marble room, there is not much happening here but the wall immediately opposite you has twelve names on it, each corresponding to the grave, essentially, that it is attached to. They’re a little bit offset from the walls, they’ve got lids that you could, presumably, get your fingers in if you wanted to be strong about it. That’s what you’re looking at. [...] There are twelve [names] so it’s kind of like a four-by-three. You have three rows, four columns. [...] [The plaques with the names] are smooth, cold, the letters are engraved in so you feel sort of the ridges and textures as you go along."

The names are:

As the party opens up the graves, they find the following things:

* Ithar Rumblebelly - No body, empty
* Winnie Burrows - No body, poison trap: a puff of green-ish grey smoke comes out of the grave as Thavius opens it, and he has to make a Constitution saving throw.
* Alduin Dovahkiin - No body, but three small black scales that might come from a Dragonborn
* Damir Mortyss - No body, there is a hole in the back leading to a slope or tunnel sliding gently downwards and leading into the basement\*\*
* Kolanay Ladouceur - No Body, empty
* Blaise Stoker - No body, but a greatsword. This is the only name that SK-73 recognised while looking at the graves: Blaise Stoker was a warrior from about a century ago, a big and strong man, and there are a few documentations about his exploits before he seems to fall of the map. The greatsword that can be found in his grave is big and fancy looking, a knight's sword. It is also the blade that killed King Lucius Pinn, the king that reigned two kings prior to King Alaric Eirik.
* Meph Okumura - No body, but the grave has a divination aura that can be detected with the *Detect Magic* spell and that comes from two shiny gold coins inside it. These coins are Gamblers Coins and can be used once per short rest instead of a normal roll. Heads equals a Nat 20, tails a Nat 1.
* Scruff - No body, but there is a smaller white marble box built into the grave to make it a smaller space. The box is also empty, although it might have used to contain something.
* Zlata Hooch - No body, an old looking and unlabelled flask that is about half full
* Blessie Bones - The grave has a necromancy aura that can be detected with the *Detect Magic* spell, and the body inside there was reduced to a skeleton that is missing a few vital bones and joints. The skeleton is twitching, but can neither leave the grave nor attack. As Sir Mister Person hits the body with his greatsword, it bursts into flame.
* Fester Bordon - No body, empty
* Ghol Nox - No Body, empty

\*\*note for this hole, it is at least 4 ft in the air because of the other two graves being at least two feet tall. It is as wide as a grave or a coffin would be.

### Basement

It is unsure how far exactly the slide leads downwards, but the basement is very deep underground.

#### Room 1: Bottom of the Slide

At the bottom of the stone slide that started in Damir Mortyss' grave, there is a big stone room that is about 20 by 30 feet. No lights eluminate this room. Across from the slide there is a door made of stone.

The arc 1 party made a lot of noise on the slide, so the stone door scrapes open ominously, and running through the door come two armored skeletons with shortswords that attack them.

After the fight, room 2 can be entered through the stone door. There are no other doors in room 1, and it is very clean, there is no dust lying around in which footsteps or any other clues could be found. Hope does, however, find a bit of mud that could maybe come from a shoe and that also points towards room 2.

#### Room 2: Main Room (Basement)

Room 2 no longer is made of rough stone, but has stone walls that have been smoothed out, made to look polished, and painted white. It is a big and empty room.

About 30 to 40 feet into the room, there are two hallways going off of it, one to the left, one to the right. The hallways are rather short and lead to two doors each.

In straightforward walking direction, so opposite of the stone door the room was entered through, there is a big and heavy door. It is arched at the top, and over the top there is scribbled nonsense that doesn't look like any language. The door is locked, and instead of one key hole, it has four, one each made of copper, brass, silver and bronze. To find the keys to the door, the players have to go through the four rooms the hallways lead to.

There is no order in which the rooms have to be made, the order here is just the one of the podcast. Rooms 3 and 4 go off from the left hallway, rooms 5 and 6 from the right. Both the wall colours and the colours of the keys are hints towards dragons.

When all four keys have been found, are being put into the locks and turned, the door still doesn't open. Instead, there is a fizzing and popping sound near the top of the door, and the scribbled nonsense, the letters that weren't any language, shift and turn, fade and reappear into a few sentences in common: "The centre of creation, the heart of a home, what keeps you sane in the dark when you're left alone. I do not live, cold and hungry I die. Use me here plainly, what am I?"

The answer to the riddle is "Fire", and to open the door, a torch or something similar has to be held up to the letters. They then catch fire, and as soon as all the letters are burning, the door clicks and opens and reveals room 7.

#### Room 3: Ooze Room

At first glance, this 20 by 20 feet room seems empty. The walls are the same smoothed out and polished stone, but painted green. In the back right corner of the room, there is a brass key hanging on a hook.

Upon further investigation, a clear gelatinous ooze can be seen. It is sitting in the middle 10 by 10 feet of the room and is also 10 feet high. (The monster is a Gelatinous Cube.)

It is possible to walk around the ooze and get to the key, but as soon as someone takes the key, the ooze moves into the corner and tries to digest the person.

#### Room 4: Claustrophobia Room

This room is 25 by 25 feet, and its smoothed out and polished walls are painted red. In its centre is a four feet tall stone table with a surface of about three by three feet. It resembles an altar or pedestal of some sorts, is made out of the same kind of polished stone as the walls, and all along the perimeter of the outside there are little symbols. (Sir Mister Person does not recognise these symbols, but one looks like a picture of fire.)

As soon as a character, or multiple characters, enter/s the room, the door behind them cannot be seen any longer, and a timer starts. For a single player inside the room, Haley set the timer to two minutes. During this timer, the walls are closing in on the character and slowly making their way towards them. The person cannot be heard outside the room.

When the walls close in around the character (or when the character tries to block the walls and passes an investigation check), they realise that the walls were not actually closing around them, but that it was just an illusion. The actual room never changed. The door can be seen again, and on the back wall of the room, there is a copper key hanging off a hook.

#### Room 5: Shadow Room

The polished stone walls are painted black in this room.

As soon as a character, or multiple characters, enter/s this room, they have to roll initiative as they feel a shift and are suddenly facing themselves, in all shades of greys and blacks, wielding the exact same weapon they are wielding. Around the neck of the shadow version of the first person that entered the room is a chain with a silver key.

The shadow versions of the characters entering this room cannot cast any spells.

#### Room 6: Lever room

This room is 20 by 20 feet big and the polished stone walls are painted blue. The left, back, and right wall all have levers on them that are all placed in the upright position. There are 26 levers in total, and nothing else in this room.

The levers represent the letters of the alphabet. When switching the 11th, 5th and 25th lever (spelling "KEY"), a bit of the ceiling moves away, and a little bronze key clatters to the floor.

If the wrong levers are being pulled, nothing happens.

#### Room 7: Hallways with Notes

The hallway is 50 feet long and 20 feet wide. It is lit by too many candles and torches and quite messy, with a lot of stuff scattered around.

At the end of the hallway, there is an open door made of stone, through which the party can see a flameskull hovering about four feet in the air in room 8. It is pretty big, although not too big to be the skull of a humanoid, and reefed in flames. It stares at them though the door, then floats backwards a few feet. The door infront of it slams shut, meaning that it is now closed between the skull and the party, and echoing through this space it shouts "Who dare disturb the rightful ruler of all of Hyranor?".

On either side, spaced along the first 25 feet, are three stone caskets each (so six in total) that have been broken or busted. All the caskets are plain and have no names on them. They are all partially opened, and many have cracked lids, or the sides are chipped. None of the coffins include bodies, but a few of them have broken weapons, and in one of them, there is a key that can open up the closed stone door. They are misused as tables, and are covered in books, papers and diagrams.

The books and pages include:

* Three or four books about dragons, the history of how dragons have moved around the continent, and every time the kingdom has interacted with dragons
* A journal with magic looking runes inside it that turns out to be a book almost exclusively about necromancy spells. After Arc 1, Episode 6, this book is kept in the library of Summerview.
	+ Inside it, there were a few loose diary pages that fell out. They were from the diary of Damir Mortyss, a necromancer, and written after his death. The handwriting gets messier as the pages go on, and the text makes less and less sense, except for the very last page, where the handwriting is better than on the first page, and that reads "The dragon will carry me back -Mortyss".
* A nicely bound leather journal with the royal crest on it, that includes identical versions of the royal family tree including the king, the queen, and their four children written up over multiple pages. On every page, someone from the royal family is circled, and there is a weirdly detailed assassination plan. While there are about twenty different plans to kill the king, increasingly wild and unlikely, the youngest son, Prince Laurent (who is three years old during Arc 1), is only circled on one page, and every attempt for a plan seems to have been rejected.
* Scattered pages with half-completed nonsense and sketches on them. One looks a bit like a saddle, but doesn't have the right form to fit a horse.

Going into the hallway, there are two traps: after 30 feet, there is a caltrop trap that has to be avoided with a Dexterity saving throw, and 40 feet into it there is a wire trap. If the wire trap is not avoided (which does not require a check once the wire is seen), a little panel on the wall opens up and an arrow shoots out.

After Arc 1 Episode 5, the stone door is now partially broken. It has some big cracks going across it, and a small hole, because Sir Mister Person and Thavius tried to break through it before Deb found the key.

#### Room 8: Flameskull Fight Room

The room is a square with a length of about 40 feet on all sides. It has a very high ceiling, and about 30 feet going into it, there is a kind of stone altar that is about 20 feet tall and rectangular. It has the shape of a coffin, except for its size. In addition to the door the party enters through, there is a door on the left wall (room 9), a door on the right wall (room 10), and a door on the back door (room 11) that is hidden right behind the altar.

Right next to the door the party enters through, and then both at the left and the right hand walls, is one coffin each, so three coffins in total. As the party enters, they see a shimmery green outline of a hand pushing open the coffin right next to the door and then zooming back to the altar.

There, they can first see orange and green flames rise from behind the altar, and then the whole flameskull, as its mage hand comes back to it. It looks at them and begins to cackle: "Nya-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, you will all bow down to your one true king!", after which initiative is being rolled.

Atop the stone altar is a corpse. It can be seen from the moment the party enters the room, but cannot be identified further than "corpse of a humanoid". On a closer look, it is the not-fresh body of a probably male person without armor. Carved in different places of the body are runes from the necromancy spellbook found in room 7: some sort of ritual turned this man into the flameskull.

#### Room 9: Workshop

The door on the left wall of room 8 leads to a 20 feet long hallway, that again leads to a small room that looks like an artisan's workshop. It is a bit messy in there, and there is the halfway completed saddle from the diagram that can be found on one of the papers from room 7.

#### Room 10: The dragon

The door on the right wall of room 8, too, leads to a 20 feet long hallway that leads to a room. There is a flickering light coming out from this room, and entering it, the Arc 1 party finds the room being almost entirely on fire. There is scattered wood, kindling, and logs inside the room, and in the back corner, curled into nearly a ball, but watching the party enter, is a large golden dragon.

The dragon at first shows suspicion and fear in its position, but as soon as SK-73 enters, it relaxes and shifts into Aura, the missing librarian, who was secretly a dragon. Holding in her hands she has a big golden dragon egg that is nearly the size of her head. She heard rumours about an egg in the mausoleum and came there to find it and adopt the baby dragon. On her way in, she managed to defeat the flameskull, but it came back to life about an hour later, and she feared it could hurt the egg if she tried going past it again, so she didn't dare leaving the room.

#### Room 11: Way out

The back door of room 8 leads to another 20 feet long hallway leading to a small stone room. Scattered in there are 10 to 15 gold coins. There is a rope hanging down into the room from some point, and a light coming from far above. Climbing up the rope, the party can leave the dungeon and finds themselves climbing out of the wishing well in the middle of Thymore.

## Notable Inhabitants

* **Damir Mortyss** - the necromancer-turned-flameskull that is also the endboss of the dungeon
* **Aura (temporarily)** - the missing librarian that is stuck in the mausoleum

## Trivia

* The colours of rooms 2-6 as well as the metals of the keys are hints towards a dragon being inside the mausoleum.