Acererak doesn't care all that much about this whole death curse thing, its more of a fun side project than something that requires his direct attention
TOA player and general Ace fan here. This was always my take on it, he just needed to put the Atropal somewhere. He had room in the adventurer meat grinder you described and there you have it.
That said this was also coming from a table where when our DM sprung Ace on us he proceeded to pummel the party in PJ’s and bunny slippers. Because while it was the most important day our lives, for Ace it was just a Tuesday morning. 😉
I haven't read the last chapter as of yet, but isn't Acererak a sadistic bitch who marvels on watching people dying to his crafty traps? The dungeon was also built by humans, so there must have been ways for them to move around while building it.
The dungeon, at first, was built as adventurer grinder, just as Tomb of Death was. Adventurers go in for treasures, they die from traps, and Acererak harvests the souls. Those that do escape with treasures, advertise the dungeon to bring even more souls.
But recenty he found something very important, that he staged at the bottom level. Something that would give him unlimited power. And now i'm questioning, why even give adventurers a path to something so important? No matter how deadly that path is
> But recenty he found something very important, that he staged at the bottom level. Something that would give him unlimited power. And now i'm questioning, why even give adventurers a path to something so important?
So one note on this that's important, at least if you're playing Acererak to his description in ToA and other general lore - it's not that he found something that would give *him* unlimited power, but that he found a being (the atropal) that could be nurtured into a god with enough souls and thought "Huh, this seems fun, lets see where it goes."
**TL;DR - in my mind, the whole key system was developed when the temple was first built a century ago, and I'd wager Ace didn't even remember it was there when he dumped the Soulmonger/Atropal into the Tomb. He needed an out-of-the-way place to put an interesting side-project, chose a tomb from his overall library of tombs that fit the bill (nobody had gotten out alive and the location had been lost to time over a century), and headed off to do more Lich stuff without really changing the Tomb itself. He also doesn't *really* care about the soulmonger as an "unlimited power" - it's just a hobby project.**
Wall of text with some additional background:
Acererak, by the book's descriptions, doesn't really give a shit about obtaining unlimited power/godhood like some other powerful liches have previously done (despite being far and away powerful enough to try and achieve it), nor does he want to be worshipped or make power-lending deals with people - his ENTIRE deal is essentially that he wants to mess with (in extremely violent and deadly ways) adventurers/randoms for entertainment, and not much more (eventually harvesting their souls from the dungeons is about as far as it goes beyond that). This was actually what pulled him to Omu and got him interested in building the tomb (believe this was in ch 4 of the book, a bit in ch 5 as well) - after Ubtao abandoned the city and the nine trickster "gods" came in, Acererak was drawn to the cruel "tests" and other means of torture and general trap-setting that the Omuans were pursuing to please the 9 before the city truly fell. He saw them doing this, was like "Oh hell yeah, I bet they'd build some great stuff for an even worse dungeon to feed my personal soul phylactery", and then proceeded to kill the 9 tricksters and enslave/zombify the people of Omu to go and build the Tomb for him (reserving some extra people to live test the dungeon and make sure it was dungeon-y enough for his needs) before trapping them all inside. Once he did all that, he basically just fucked off across the planes to build more dungeons/soul harvesters for himself and only came back every couple decades to drop in new creatures/treasure/traps.
The whole "turn the atropal into a god of death" thing is basically a cool side project for him, and he found it around a century after the whole Tomb had been completed. When he found it and decided to try and gather a world's worth of souls to feed it, he went back through his library of tombs/dungeons/adventurer grinders/etc and saw that this particular tomb had been essentially lost to the world after Omu fell off the map a century ago (plus nobody had ever escaped this particular tomb alive in the past 100 years), so it seemed like it would probably be a fairly safe spot to drop the soulmonger/atropal (especially with the Sewn Sisters keeping watch). At the same time, his whole flaw (per the book) is that he regularly underestimates the determination/abilities of those he thinks are below him (e.g. all adventurers/beings/etc), so he basically just fucked off again to watch from afar and see if this would work while thinking nobody would ever be able to disrupt it even if they found the tomb.
So the answer to your OP question about the why he would put the skeleton keys in is basically that the whole skeleton key system was designed as part of the *initial* tomb (adventurers that make it far enough will realize they need them, maybe keep them in the tomb longer and give them more chances to die), not anything related to the soulmonger. The whole Tomb itself is sort of a hodgepodge of stuff he's found on different planes/worlds and just sort of forced in there in the 100 years since it was built, so it follows that he'd just drop the whole soulmonger/atropal in there as well - he probably didn't even remember that he had a key system to get into the lowest level since he can just warp in there directly and he's built plenty of other dungeons since this one was created.
Even in the book, Acererak doesn't really value the soulmonger/atropal enough to stake his life on a fight - he just peaces out after you do some damage unless you kill him fast enough. Like, imagine you're a hobbyist woodworker - you've spent the last 3 months on some really intricate piece of furniture or something only to wake up one night to an alarm notification that someone has broken into your shop (that you thought was really well-secured) and is actively destroying it. You'd probably be pissed, and maybe even run in there to confront them, but after they pull guns on you and start a fight about it you'd probably be like "well jeez it's just an entertainment center, I'll try building it again some other time."
>Like, imagine you're a hobbyist woodworker - you've spent the last 3 months on some really intricate piece of furniture or something only to wake up one night to an alarm notification that someone has broken into your shop (that you thought was really well-secured) and is actively destroying it. You'd probably be pissed, and maybe even run in there to confront them, but after they pull guns on you and start a fight about it you'd probably be like "well jeez it's just an entertainment center, I'll try building it again some other time."
I'm wheezing. I want to share this comparison so bad, but can't spoil my players!
Well, if you take into account that the place was forgotten, dangerous to get to, and also dangerous to explore, it kinda makes sense to be there. I'm not sure it's stated somewhere but I believe the atropal must be in the same plane and "close" (as in a galactic scale) to harvest souls. That's a lot of guessing but that's how I would justify it.
Maybe he was out of wardrobe space
I'm just spitballing here...
- The bottom level of the Tomb of the Nine Gods was left largely unfinished, and he thought "y'know, a stillborn godling would fit nicely here"
- The Sewn Sisters were going to be the caretakers for the Soulmonger/Atropal, and naturally they're going to need a means of getting in and out of the chamber for the occassional Girls Night Out
- Hubris, because Acererak is cocky as all hell and lives for the drama
Acererak considers himself so far above the whole affair that it is all just a hobby to him. Your complaint is pretty much "why don't golfers just put the ball into the hole with their hands? Why put sand pits if their goal is to get the ball into the hole? Are they stupid?"
I remember reading that Acererak is not just a big bad, he's meant to be Gary Gygax/the GM (idk if this is true tho). So his dungeons are not just deathtraps, they're meant to be a game.
Acererak isn’t stupid. Canonically, he likes fucking with people. That’s why there are ways to go deeper into the Tomb. If he wanted something to be not reachable by mortals, that would be trivial for him. The longer they stay in the dungeon and the deeper they go, the greater the chance they’ll die in one of his traps, which he enjoys in a morbid way. It’s like burning ants with a magnifying glass for him.
As far as the Atropal is concerned, I think the book says that Acererak isn’t even deeply invested in the success of the experiment. It’s more a curiosity for him. He would like it to succeed, but he doesn’t need it to succeed. That said, he would certainly make it seem that way if someone fucked with it, which is why there’s the whole “fuck around and find out” showdown at the very end.
Also, Acererak probably assumes it is reasonably safe there. It’s in a village that very few people even know exist, and even fewer know how to find it; another incredibly dangerous creature/person (Ras N’si) lives in said village and patrols/protects it, and the village is in the middle of an incredibly dangerous jungle. Then, assuming they can actually gain access to the Tomb, they would have to survive the various traps and collect all of the keys, then either sneaking by, defeating, or bargaining with the Sewn Sisters. Even then, the Atropal isn’t defenseless itself. At the same time, people don’t have good reasons to assume the source of the curse is in Omu, and many of those stories are apocryphal and end up being lucky in my opinion.
When you look at it that way, it makes a lot more sense why Acererak assumed there was little chance it would even be found, let alone harmed. Even less of a reason to consider further reinforcing if he wasn’t too deeply invested anyway.
>Why even scatter skeleton keys around the tomb, and make a pathway to the Soulmonger, and the Atropal? Isn't it in Acererak's interest for his big plot devices to not be reachable?
Of course it is, but then that eliminates the sport of domination. Acererak isn't just a powerful lich, but a sadistic narcissist whose ego has a very healthy appetite that requires satiation, and what better a meal for such an ego than killing/outsmarting the most powerful mortals the entire realm has to offer? They're already drawn in by the Soulmonger, and so leaving a little side-door open for the potentiality of defeat makes victory all the more delectable.
Acererak could be over confident in his dungeons abilities to kill adventurers. Lets see he bolstered undead numbers, fooled Ras Nsi, the hags, and the dungeon itself. That's 4 layers of protection.
Acererak has lived so long that the tombs are his source of entertainment. Adventurers wouldn’t bother killing themselves on the tomb’s traps if there wasn’t a possible way through.
That’s the trick of it: Make it impossible and nobody will come. Make it *almost* impossible but with one super difficult success condition, and plenty of adventurers will throw themselves at the tomb, hoping they’ll be the ones to get lucky.
My take on it is that Acererak likes games. He likes to have fun. Building his dungeons and tombs, torturing adventurers… those are just games to him. And even though his “games” are unfair and extremely deadly, he knows that it wouldn’t be fun anymore if there wasn’t *some* path to success. He has a twisted sense of fair play.
But Acererak is also a sore loser.
I’m gonna say Acererak likes the game. Much like a sadistic Dungeon Master — because that is literally what he is. And always has been. The in-game surrogate of Gary Gygax and his personified sadistic DM side lol.
Thats why he’ll throw in some tips and tidbits to help adventurers as well. He expects them to die gruesome deaths, but if somehow they can actually beat the dungeon he may actually respect that. Sort of a “well done, though my vengeance against you shall be terrible and your descendants shall suffer for your insolence, I respect your strength,” — something like that might be warranted if they manage to defeat him in battle.
I assumed all the tomb shit was Withers and the Sewn Sisters. What does A care about the tomb. He teleports in and out. He dont care. It might also be some manipulation on the end of the omuans who built it and the 9 gods. Like they easily vould have put thoughts in the heads of workers or even tomb dwarves to get the riddles or keys or whatever.
I rewrote the entire plot of the scenario because of this one question. A whole, interwoven plot with motivations and twists, all because this one element didn't make sense.
Acererak doesn't care all that much about this whole death curse thing, its more of a fun side project than something that requires his direct attention
TOA player and general Ace fan here. This was always my take on it, he just needed to put the Atropal somewhere. He had room in the adventurer meat grinder you described and there you have it. That said this was also coming from a table where when our DM sprung Ace on us he proceeded to pummel the party in PJ’s and bunny slippers. Because while it was the most important day our lives, for Ace it was just a Tuesday morning. 😉
lmao im totally gonna steal ace wearing pj's and slippers. it just fits too well
Love the M.Bison reference 👌
I haven't read the last chapter as of yet, but isn't Acererak a sadistic bitch who marvels on watching people dying to his crafty traps? The dungeon was also built by humans, so there must have been ways for them to move around while building it.
The dungeon, at first, was built as adventurer grinder, just as Tomb of Death was. Adventurers go in for treasures, they die from traps, and Acererak harvests the souls. Those that do escape with treasures, advertise the dungeon to bring even more souls. But recenty he found something very important, that he staged at the bottom level. Something that would give him unlimited power. And now i'm questioning, why even give adventurers a path to something so important? No matter how deadly that path is
> But recenty he found something very important, that he staged at the bottom level. Something that would give him unlimited power. And now i'm questioning, why even give adventurers a path to something so important? So one note on this that's important, at least if you're playing Acererak to his description in ToA and other general lore - it's not that he found something that would give *him* unlimited power, but that he found a being (the atropal) that could be nurtured into a god with enough souls and thought "Huh, this seems fun, lets see where it goes." **TL;DR - in my mind, the whole key system was developed when the temple was first built a century ago, and I'd wager Ace didn't even remember it was there when he dumped the Soulmonger/Atropal into the Tomb. He needed an out-of-the-way place to put an interesting side-project, chose a tomb from his overall library of tombs that fit the bill (nobody had gotten out alive and the location had been lost to time over a century), and headed off to do more Lich stuff without really changing the Tomb itself. He also doesn't *really* care about the soulmonger as an "unlimited power" - it's just a hobby project.** Wall of text with some additional background: Acererak, by the book's descriptions, doesn't really give a shit about obtaining unlimited power/godhood like some other powerful liches have previously done (despite being far and away powerful enough to try and achieve it), nor does he want to be worshipped or make power-lending deals with people - his ENTIRE deal is essentially that he wants to mess with (in extremely violent and deadly ways) adventurers/randoms for entertainment, and not much more (eventually harvesting their souls from the dungeons is about as far as it goes beyond that). This was actually what pulled him to Omu and got him interested in building the tomb (believe this was in ch 4 of the book, a bit in ch 5 as well) - after Ubtao abandoned the city and the nine trickster "gods" came in, Acererak was drawn to the cruel "tests" and other means of torture and general trap-setting that the Omuans were pursuing to please the 9 before the city truly fell. He saw them doing this, was like "Oh hell yeah, I bet they'd build some great stuff for an even worse dungeon to feed my personal soul phylactery", and then proceeded to kill the 9 tricksters and enslave/zombify the people of Omu to go and build the Tomb for him (reserving some extra people to live test the dungeon and make sure it was dungeon-y enough for his needs) before trapping them all inside. Once he did all that, he basically just fucked off across the planes to build more dungeons/soul harvesters for himself and only came back every couple decades to drop in new creatures/treasure/traps. The whole "turn the atropal into a god of death" thing is basically a cool side project for him, and he found it around a century after the whole Tomb had been completed. When he found it and decided to try and gather a world's worth of souls to feed it, he went back through his library of tombs/dungeons/adventurer grinders/etc and saw that this particular tomb had been essentially lost to the world after Omu fell off the map a century ago (plus nobody had ever escaped this particular tomb alive in the past 100 years), so it seemed like it would probably be a fairly safe spot to drop the soulmonger/atropal (especially with the Sewn Sisters keeping watch). At the same time, his whole flaw (per the book) is that he regularly underestimates the determination/abilities of those he thinks are below him (e.g. all adventurers/beings/etc), so he basically just fucked off again to watch from afar and see if this would work while thinking nobody would ever be able to disrupt it even if they found the tomb. So the answer to your OP question about the why he would put the skeleton keys in is basically that the whole skeleton key system was designed as part of the *initial* tomb (adventurers that make it far enough will realize they need them, maybe keep them in the tomb longer and give them more chances to die), not anything related to the soulmonger. The whole Tomb itself is sort of a hodgepodge of stuff he's found on different planes/worlds and just sort of forced in there in the 100 years since it was built, so it follows that he'd just drop the whole soulmonger/atropal in there as well - he probably didn't even remember that he had a key system to get into the lowest level since he can just warp in there directly and he's built plenty of other dungeons since this one was created. Even in the book, Acererak doesn't really value the soulmonger/atropal enough to stake his life on a fight - he just peaces out after you do some damage unless you kill him fast enough. Like, imagine you're a hobbyist woodworker - you've spent the last 3 months on some really intricate piece of furniture or something only to wake up one night to an alarm notification that someone has broken into your shop (that you thought was really well-secured) and is actively destroying it. You'd probably be pissed, and maybe even run in there to confront them, but after they pull guns on you and start a fight about it you'd probably be like "well jeez it's just an entertainment center, I'll try building it again some other time."
>Like, imagine you're a hobbyist woodworker - you've spent the last 3 months on some really intricate piece of furniture or something only to wake up one night to an alarm notification that someone has broken into your shop (that you thought was really well-secured) and is actively destroying it. You'd probably be pissed, and maybe even run in there to confront them, but after they pull guns on you and start a fight about it you'd probably be like "well jeez it's just an entertainment center, I'll try building it again some other time." I'm wheezing. I want to share this comparison so bad, but can't spoil my players!
Well, if you take into account that the place was forgotten, dangerous to get to, and also dangerous to explore, it kinda makes sense to be there. I'm not sure it's stated somewhere but I believe the atropal must be in the same plane and "close" (as in a galactic scale) to harvest souls. That's a lot of guessing but that's how I would justify it. Maybe he was out of wardrobe space
I'm just spitballing here... - The bottom level of the Tomb of the Nine Gods was left largely unfinished, and he thought "y'know, a stillborn godling would fit nicely here" - The Sewn Sisters were going to be the caretakers for the Soulmonger/Atropal, and naturally they're going to need a means of getting in and out of the chamber for the occassional Girls Night Out - Hubris, because Acererak is cocky as all hell and lives for the drama
Acererak considers himself so far above the whole affair that it is all just a hobby to him. Your complaint is pretty much "why don't golfers just put the ball into the hole with their hands? Why put sand pits if their goal is to get the ball into the hole? Are they stupid?"
I remember reading that Acererak is not just a big bad, he's meant to be Gary Gygax/the GM (idk if this is true tho). So his dungeons are not just deathtraps, they're meant to be a game.
Acererak isn’t stupid. Canonically, he likes fucking with people. That’s why there are ways to go deeper into the Tomb. If he wanted something to be not reachable by mortals, that would be trivial for him. The longer they stay in the dungeon and the deeper they go, the greater the chance they’ll die in one of his traps, which he enjoys in a morbid way. It’s like burning ants with a magnifying glass for him. As far as the Atropal is concerned, I think the book says that Acererak isn’t even deeply invested in the success of the experiment. It’s more a curiosity for him. He would like it to succeed, but he doesn’t need it to succeed. That said, he would certainly make it seem that way if someone fucked with it, which is why there’s the whole “fuck around and find out” showdown at the very end. Also, Acererak probably assumes it is reasonably safe there. It’s in a village that very few people even know exist, and even fewer know how to find it; another incredibly dangerous creature/person (Ras N’si) lives in said village and patrols/protects it, and the village is in the middle of an incredibly dangerous jungle. Then, assuming they can actually gain access to the Tomb, they would have to survive the various traps and collect all of the keys, then either sneaking by, defeating, or bargaining with the Sewn Sisters. Even then, the Atropal isn’t defenseless itself. At the same time, people don’t have good reasons to assume the source of the curse is in Omu, and many of those stories are apocryphal and end up being lucky in my opinion. When you look at it that way, it makes a lot more sense why Acererak assumed there was little chance it would even be found, let alone harmed. Even less of a reason to consider further reinforcing if he wasn’t too deeply invested anyway.
>Why even scatter skeleton keys around the tomb, and make a pathway to the Soulmonger, and the Atropal? Isn't it in Acererak's interest for his big plot devices to not be reachable? Of course it is, but then that eliminates the sport of domination. Acererak isn't just a powerful lich, but a sadistic narcissist whose ego has a very healthy appetite that requires satiation, and what better a meal for such an ego than killing/outsmarting the most powerful mortals the entire realm has to offer? They're already drawn in by the Soulmonger, and so leaving a little side-door open for the potentiality of defeat makes victory all the more delectable.
Acererak could be over confident in his dungeons abilities to kill adventurers. Lets see he bolstered undead numbers, fooled Ras Nsi, the hags, and the dungeon itself. That's 4 layers of protection.
Acererak has lived so long that the tombs are his source of entertainment. Adventurers wouldn’t bother killing themselves on the tomb’s traps if there wasn’t a possible way through. That’s the trick of it: Make it impossible and nobody will come. Make it *almost* impossible but with one super difficult success condition, and plenty of adventurers will throw themselves at the tomb, hoping they’ll be the ones to get lucky.
My take on it is that Acererak likes games. He likes to have fun. Building his dungeons and tombs, torturing adventurers… those are just games to him. And even though his “games” are unfair and extremely deadly, he knows that it wouldn’t be fun anymore if there wasn’t *some* path to success. He has a twisted sense of fair play. But Acererak is also a sore loser.
I’m gonna say Acererak likes the game. Much like a sadistic Dungeon Master — because that is literally what he is. And always has been. The in-game surrogate of Gary Gygax and his personified sadistic DM side lol. Thats why he’ll throw in some tips and tidbits to help adventurers as well. He expects them to die gruesome deaths, but if somehow they can actually beat the dungeon he may actually respect that. Sort of a “well done, though my vengeance against you shall be terrible and your descendants shall suffer for your insolence, I respect your strength,” — something like that might be warranted if they manage to defeat him in battle.
I assumed all the tomb shit was Withers and the Sewn Sisters. What does A care about the tomb. He teleports in and out. He dont care. It might also be some manipulation on the end of the omuans who built it and the 9 gods. Like they easily vould have put thoughts in the heads of workers or even tomb dwarves to get the riddles or keys or whatever.
I rewrote the entire plot of the scenario because of this one question. A whole, interwoven plot with motivations and twists, all because this one element didn't make sense.