We watch Amkaro grow steadily into a man before our eyes.
Energy ripples around the chamber and my hair is blown about my face.
I cannot look away.
And the man that Amkaro the supposed ‘usurper’ becomes, the man that the boy grows into, is one we all recognise.
…He is Rocko.
The two are one, and the same.
A tear falls from Rocko’s eye and slips down his cheek as the man he was, Amkaro, stands alone in a chamber of colossal size. A dark object lies above him on the steps. The surrounding pillars leak sand and dust as the intricate network of carved lines and drawn shapes in the stone shimmer and ripple as one. Cracks and crystals form in the wall as the veins bulge across Amkaro’s arms and neck. He roars with bitter determination, eyes aglow, shaking with adrenaline as he raises his hands…. And the object on the steps begins to twitch. It rises too.
The mummified body of his brother, Omisares.
Energy flows from the patterns in the wall, through Amkaro, and into the corpse of Omisares... the boy’s binding tearing and cracking, his embalmment failing, and the moisture is drawn from the surrounding air to reanimate his body. Colour returns to the boy’s skin, but it is disjointed and incomplete. Amkaro does not seem to notice this falling, however, and laughs with mad, fevered delight. The sound is soulful, a heart-breakingly pre-emptive expression of success…
“Omisares!” Amkaro cries out with delight, dropping his arms and relaxing his body, stumbling and running over to embrace his brother at once.
…But Omisares only screams.
The energy in the enormous chamber did not dissipate as Amkaro dropped his arms. It instead hangs dangerously in the air, and as Amkaro squeezes his, supposedly, reanimated brother tight to his chest, the mysterious forces seem to change their allegiance.
Omisares screams
We descend the stone stairs, single-file. The Professor at the head, her torch casting a beam of light down into the dusty gloom. The second she drops below the layer of gold, the gentle waves of Heka that roll across her palm disappear. She stops for a moment and examines her hand, clenching and unclenching her fingers. She mutters something to herself, then looks over to us, raises her eyebrows, and carries on along her way.
Sethos goes down after her. As the first turned to stone, his top half, and the contents of his backpack, are still mostly dry, including, it would seem, his digital camera, as a flash illuminates the walls of the narrow little corridor. The rest of us aren’t so lucky. Everything in my own backpack has been soaked through along with my clothes, and I shiver despite the returning warmth that emanates from the walls. My torch has stopped working too, and I’m amazed that the Professor’s is still able to produce light. I go down third, and as a team we follow the remaining, wandering beams.
The golden door above shuts fast behind us.
The steps go around and around, down into the deep, and we walk in silence, processing the things we’ve seen, our experiences in the tomb; shooting the occasional glance up at the intricately carved eyes that watch suspiciously from amongst the rows of symbols and glyphs across the wall.
The stairs come to an end at an archway, one that leads into the third layer. A wide and open space, shrouded in darkness. A small pot of oil sits at the base of each of the archway’s pillars, and the Professor reaches up for the wooden torch attached to the wall, unfastening it from its perch and dipping its head lightly into the mixture. She draws her lighter from her pocket, and curses when she realises it is ruined.
“Sethos”, she says, “Don’t suppose you’ve got a lighter in that bag?”
“No, Professor”, he replies, grunting as he pulls his backpack around and drops it onto the floor, opening it up. “But I have these. Here”. He passes her a box of matches and she thanks him, striking successfully on the first attempt and bringing fire to the oiled torch. She does the same with the torch on the opposite side of the arch, and the bright, ensuing yellow-gold glow allows us a greater view of our surround
... keep reading on reddit ➡
Hi, I've been recently interested in buying Sekiro since I loved Dark Souls 3, and I saw some bosses on youtube and the combat looks absolutely amazing. I would buy Sekiro now, but the problem is the price on pc is really high, it's 60$ and it hasn't been on any sale recently, but the summer sale starts in about a month. There is my question, should I buy the game now or should I buy Hunt Showdown or Shadow of The Tomb Raider in the meantime to have something to play? Is Hunt Showdown enjoyable solo or should I just go with Shadow of The Tomb Raider.
https://www.netflix.com/title/70307661?s=i&trkid=13747225
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt2870612/
Amazing movie, feels similar to the Blair Witch Project in the way it was filmed, but definitely not a copy. Recommend to anyone looking for a nice, moderately scary flick.
Legends tell of the vast treasures entombed with the body of Aun Mun Itzpa, the greatest emperor Andeana has ever known. To this day, no living soul has set eyes on the foretold riches that lie beneath the mountains. At least, none have done so and returned to tell the tale. Arriving at the shores of the Andean capital, Cuzcala, a hearty group of adventurers hope to break this pattern. Seasoned explorers, the trials of the ancient emperor should be no match for their skills. That is, if no one else gets to the tomb first...
This is a one-shot adventure that should take about 3-5 hours. I originally ran this with four level 10 players, but there should be some flexibility. Let me know what you think! If anyone wants advice on how to adjust the adventure for different levels, feel free to ask.
I recently finished God of War and I found it to be quite relaxing in easy mode. I also recently finished Rise of the Tomb Raider in easy mode but I found the whole ordeal to be quite stressful. Where does The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (I've never played a Witcher game before) lie between those two games in easy mode? If a game is not a certain level of easy (like God of War), it ruins the experience for me regardless of the story/graphics. Thanks in advance!
The second that we arrive at the base of the stairs, Aziza is violently sick. The sound of the bile splattering against the dusty stone tiles is enough to make me gag myself, and I turn away, my stomach contracting painfully as I do so.
“We did nothing…” whispers Aziza, spitting and wiping her mouth as the Professor lights the wall torch. I catch a glimpse of Dave, grim-faced, headphones in. Our eyes meet, and he looks away.
She says it again, louder: “WE DID NOTHING! We just sat there and ignored him! Sethos is… He’s dead! He’s DEAD!”
“If you’d gotten up to help you would have been taken in turn”, the Professor replies.
Aziza is shaking her head, angrily. “You don’t know that, Professor. There were still burning torches, maybe we could have-”
“If you’d gotten up to HELP”, the Professor says again, her voice rising, “you would have been TAKEN”.
There is a tense pause. The walls down here shimmer and shift in a manner like they did on the second layer, rippling slowly like water, despite being hard and solid as rock to the touch. That same mysterious rumble from beyond growls steadily at the edge of our hearing.
The Professor sighs and rubs a hand over her forehead. “I’m sorry Aziza. I’m sorry there wasn’t more we could do. But Sethos is gone”. And without another word she lifts her head and strides off, deep into the hall, with its high ceiling and multitude of yellow-grey pillars, stretching off into the gloom.
Dave follows.
Ronnie comes by and squeezes Aziza on the shoulder before doing likewise. I walk together with the girl at the back of the procession.
“It was my fault, Leila”, she whispers to me, struggling to hold back sobs. “I’m the one who made the first noise. I drew the monster over. It’s not fair… I survived, and he didn’t…? Why? How is that right?”
I don’t have an answer. I don’t know what to say. So I just squeeze her close to me as we pass through the pillars, our footsteps echoing through the ancient darkness.
We continue on, in more or less a straight line, for maybe around twenty minutes more in pensive silence. We pass through broken and fallen sections of wall. Collapsed little arches and long-forg
... keep reading on reddit ➡“Rocko!” the Professor exclaims, darting round the massive outcrop of crystal, placing her hand against it and staring through the shimmering surface, into the face of Rocko Khayin. He neither moves nor responds. I’m not sure if he even can. Smaller, lighter little crystals cascade from her fingers and fall from her elbows as she examines the bizarre structure, tapping it thoughtfully as the gears turn in her brain.
“He’s here… he’s actually here… I knew it, I knew it…” her face has completely alighted. She shakes her head and brushes her hair from her eyes.
“Rocko…” she whispers.
“Maybe we’ll finally get some answers to all this bullshit”, Dave grunts as we lower Ronnie to the ground. “If he’s even alive in there…”
“So how are we going to get him out?” asks Aziza. “There were no crystals on the layer above… Maybe we should try and take him back up there?”
“What, back to Ammit?” Dave says, “and besides, we can barely carry Ronnie, how the hell are we going to carry him AND a massive, heavy bit of crystal like this? Could we even carry the whole thing between us?”
“What if we don’t have to take him all the way back?” I suggest, gesturing to the dark passageway, and the stone steps that descend down to the final layer. “What if we just need to get him through there and down to the layer below?”
“DOWN? Why would we go down?” Aziza asks. “This is Rocko! We’ve found him! Mission accomplished, I think we’ve all seen enough, right? Let’s go home!”
“But we can’t go home without Rocko”, I reply. “And we can’t carry him, not like this… What if we just take him down to the next layer, let this crystal crumble away and then hightail it back through as a team?”
“Hightail? And how are we going to do that with Ronnie, here?” Dave asks.
“Well… Maybe the Professor and Rocko could run on ahead, and we could carry Ronnie behind…”
The Professor puts out her hands. “A lot of assumptions are being made here. The entrance
... keep reading on reddit ➡The sandstorm rages across the desert. The sun hangs low in the sky and the world is a swirling, shadowy blur of orange and gold. The sand stings like little shards of glass where it strikes my skin; the thin cloth of my trousers and Egyptian-style galabeya billowing out and doing little to protect me from the fevered assault over the dunes.
The leader of our expedition, Professor Deborah Winterfield, stands before us; arms crossed, back straight. I can just about see her through the slits in my fingers, eyes squinted. Beyond her and just visible through the storm is our bus, a battered old vehicle now slowly disappearing beyond sight beneath layers of yellow dust.
The driver is stood to my right. A local named Sethos, the man who was able to guide the way. He looks at me through his goggles and asks, in English, if I am alright. I lie and reply that I am.
The man had only four spare pairs of goggles in the bus. The Professor had the foresight to bring her own. There are six of us in total, so I volunteered to go without.
...I’m regretting that decision now, a little.
The other three members of the team stand to my left. An Irishman in his late twenties named Ronnie, an Egyptian-American grad student by the name of Aziza, and a middle-aged, sturdily-built guy called Dave, from Oxford, like the professor and myself. I’m a supposed ‘mature’ student, but I think that Dave and the Professor are friends. He’s certainly not a teacher. He’s a miserable git, to be honest. He’s been nothing but rude and cold since I met him at Cairo airport the other day. I have no idea what his problem is.
“One year ago”, the Professor’s voice suddenly blares, strong and fierce above the gale, “One year ago my friend and colleague Rocko Khayin, as you know, abruptly vanished off the face of the planet. Over the course of these last twelve months I have come to the understanding that Rocko, at some point, discovered the entrance to a particular tomb. The tomb of the object of his life’s work: the forgotten Pharaoh, Omisares. And not only this, but more importantly: a way inside.
“Why Rocko chose not to share with me his discovery… why he would disappear without a trace… I do not know. But disappear he did, and he never returned. I have spent the last year of my life following the paper trail Rocko left behind, and I now believe that we stand at the entrance to Omisares’ tomb”.
The party glances over to our right. There is no gate, nor hole in the ground, nor visible
... keep reading on reddit ➡We reach the bottom of the steps and arrive in the fifth layer. As with the others, shimmering walls and cracked stone pillars lead away into the shadows. There are wall torches and pots of oil available, but the Professor does not move to light one.
She seems… dazed, and we rely instead on the light of the remaining electric flashlights. Despite the similarities with the previous layers, this level of the tomb is different in the sense that bizarre, translucent clusters of whitish-pink crystal are clumped together over cracks in the wall and against the bases of the pillars.
Some are no larger than a handful’s worth, other such groups are as big as barrels and glitter spectacularly in the light of our electric torches. But I struggle to appreciate their beauty now. I can focus on nothing but the loss of Ronnie.
My thoughts are interrupted by a muttering from Dave, to my left. “Running out like that into the hall; what were you thinking? You could have gotten yourself killed!”
“Unless you’d FAILED to notice”, I reply through gritted teeth, glaring at the abhorrent man, “I was TRYING to save our TEAMMATE”. I look around the faces of the group. Aziza at least has the good grace to look ashamed. “I can’t help but notice that none of you came up with any kind of plan AT ALL”, I mutter angrily, still shaking.
Guilt finally becomes visible in the Professor. She sighs. It’s deep, and sad, and her voice shudders as she pushes the loose strands of white hair away from her forehead. “I had no plan”. The Professor admits, whispering through the dark. “I was faced with a challenge and I couldn’t come up with a plan. In the moment, I had nothing… I let him down. Ronnie. I let him down. And Sethos too. And I’m sorry”.
Dave shifts where he stands. “It’s no one’s fault, Leila. It was an accident”.
An accident…
I try to play through the events of the previous layer in my mind, but it all happened so fast… We were running, and then- then Ronnie stumbled, he fell, he crashed into the vase…
…Or was he tripped?
I think about
... keep reading on reddit ➡The tunnel is like nothing I’ve experienced. It’s so painfully tight; I grunt with effort, sweat budding on my forehead as I twist and turn, lowering myself by mere inches at a time, torturously, reluctantly down through the darkness.
My arm, caught by my side, becomes bent at an unnatural angle, and the rush of pins and needles floods relentlessly through my joints. Normally I would just wince and stretch the discomfort away… but in here… trapped in the hole… I cannot move it. It is stuck, and so the discomfort only grows into outright pain.
“FUCK!” I cry out, struggling to shift myself, to get myself free. I drop down successfully another few inches, but my arm remains fixed in place. Pitiful sobs escape my lungs, and the rock of the tunnel is so close to my face that I can feel the heat from my breath wash right back over me.
Don’t think, just keep moving.
That’s what I keep telling myself.
If I allow myself to think, I will panic. Panic will be the end of me.
Keep moving.
Don’t get stuck. Don’t get stuck.
The sweat across my forehead buds in thicker beads. It begins to trickle down into my eyes, and of course, I cannot wipe it away. It stings.
I blink rapidly instead, though unfortunately, it barely helps. It does give me an idea though.
I start to deliberately exert myself. I shift and shake as best as I can, using energy, and I feel the sweat forming on my exposed legs, my bare arms… It acts as a lubricant, for want of a better word, and I find I am able to shuffle down through the tunnel with slightly greater ease, my feet connecting occasionally with rock, then with nothing. Then again, with rock, and then, with nothing. Down I go.
Down, down, down.
Shifting, squirming, breathing.
Inch by agonising inch.
Occasionally I become lodged in place, the control I have over my disposition wavers, the fear flares up, and it takes everything I have to push it back down and continue my descent.
After what feels like hours, but surely could have been no longer than fifteen minutes, my heart leaps with relief. My lower legs have some space beneath the knees; I find that I can wave them about freely. I can kick them forwards and backwards and they connect with nothing: no rock, just open, welcome air.
I’m nearly there. I’m nearly there!
I shake my shoulders from left to right and I drop with boosted speed until I am f
... keep reading on reddit ➡Legends tell of the vast treasures entombed with the body of Aun Mun Itzpa, the greatest emperor Andeana has ever known. To this day, no living soul has set eyes on the foretold riches that lie beneath the mountains. At least, none have done so and returned to tell the tale. Arriving at the shores of the Andean capital, Cuzcala, a hearty group of adventurers hope to break this pattern. Seasoned explorers, the trials of the ancient emperor should be no match for their skills. That is, if no one else gets to the tomb first...
This is a one-shot adventure that should take about 3-5 hours. I originally ran this with four level 10 players, but there should be some flexibility. Let me know what you think! If anyone wants advice on how to adjust the adventure for different levels, feel free to ask.
