The next couple days are wet and uncomfortable, between the need to calm the animals down frequently, and the lack of a reliable fire, but you get through them, and wake up one morning to find that the sun has once more come out and promises to make up for it's absence by making a nice hot day. After giving your gear an hour or two to dry before packing it up, you are moving once more by late morning. The terrain is mostly flat, but has a surprising number of small hidden ravines and streams that require you to be a bit careful as you travel. Eventually, evening starts to fall, and you need to find a place to camp, as you are still at least half a day's travel away from the door.
Survival
Survival
Survival
The distance you manage to cover during the day is shortened as the party struggles to maintain landmarks and avoid the many natural and plant life hazards to the animals' health, but the party is able able to avoid the tall dirt columns and find a decent campsite before the moonless night descends on the vast plain.
The night passes uneventfully, though several times, the animals seem to be get a bit jittery as if something was close by they didn't like. Morning comes, and you set out once again, hoping to make better time today.
Survival
Once Atokos proves that he is not the go to person for tracking or finding anything out here, you are once more able to avoid any serious trouble, and find a good campsite close to where you think ravine with it's pillars should be, but it's getting dark, and clouds block the moon and stars tonight. You have another uneventful night, and are able to find the ravine in question without too much trouble, although you see very quickly why the door is undisturbed, since you would not have found it without looking out for it. It's actually a pretty impressive sight given it's surroundings. Built into the side of a moderately deep ravine, the simply decorated slab of stone celebrates the life of a minor giant noble. There is no immediately obvious way to open it.
Well, that's a helluva door, eh?
"We could try pushing on it." Evrail says after hearing Garret speak.
"In hindsight, that would have been an excellent idea," he says, pushing on the door.
Handle Animal
It takes a while to figure out, but you are eventually able to find the mechanism to open the door. You don't think it was screamingly obvious to begin with, and being exposed to the weather made it even hard to detect, but there is a small latch integrated into the design on the door.
The wide stair case that is revealed is clearly built for giants, but there is a small section on one of the sides designed for their servants that you can traverse comfortably. It seems to go down for about 30 to 40 feet before it hits a landing and turns a corner.
Einar will follow behind the other to protect the back of the group as we advance behind Garret.
Follows behind Garrett.
Atokos indeed follows behind, whip in hand just in case.
Going down, you find that the hallway leads to a large square room. In the center of the room is a large sarcophogus very fancily decorated. There are also four big chests in the room, one on each wall. The walls of this room are also richly decorated, with a couple of the walls appearing to be large maps, and the others with various murals and such. There is a hallway that wraps around the room, with several entry points filled with niches with urns in them. Many of the urns seem to be labeled.
Looks around the room "They seemed to honor the dead well."
There is some writing on both the urns and the maps. Is anyone going to investigate anything in particular in the room?
I will investigate the contents of the urns and continue on to a room.
"Very well off." Evrail says as he looks around the room.
Atokos nods. "Well off indeed." He looks around the room, but doesn't touch anything.
You go up to the closest labeled urn, and the point that these were giants is driven home; some of the urns are almost as tall as you are. About 2/3 of the urns appear to have writing, and even though you can't read it, you can guess it's probably a family crypt from the repeated words. You can open an urn barely, if you really try, but it takes a while, and all you find is ash. None of the chests appear to be trapped, though they are locked. The maps seem to be mildly interesting, showing the growth and decline of both the empire as a whole and this family's land holdings over a period of time, though you are not familiar with the calendar, so you don't know the extent of the time covered. The murals seem to be related to the process the soul goes through after death, though again you can't really make out details. Oddly enough with the ornateness of the maps, walls, and urns, the sarcophagus seems out of place, especially if they cremated their dead. It's a plain stone box built into the floor, and the plain lid seems to be hinged, though again the fact that everything is giant sized suggests that it would take a bit of effort to open the lid.
"This is quite tiresome" as Einar catches some breath after opening the urns putting his back into it. "Let's just check everything for traps and such and just let the dwarves open this while we watch or something"
"That works for me if we could get the chests open." Evrail says.
The chests are giant size. While you could drag/lift one, maybe two, of them out between the four of you and get it on your cart, that would be it, and the cart would definitely feel the weight of more than one.
On the fourth try, you finally break one of them open. You find 640 ancient gold coins, a large sized +1 longbow, and an efficient quiver made for a giant. If you reach out to pick up the weapon and the quiver, they shrink down to medium.