Mummy's Mask - Shifting Sands [IC]

[Gwynfrid]

After moments of hesitation and looking for solutions to the tricky layout of the Spiral Archive, Vershab carefully steps on the bridges to venture the treacherous heights. This consumes a good deal of time on his research, but it is a lot safer. At times when his search leads him to the highest parts of the shaft, the dizzying sight of the floor some 150 feet below makes him extremely uneasy, but he steels himself to carry on.

Looking for the lineage of Hakotep yields only frustration, but he soon finds another way, via indirect religious references. Here, his prodigious memory and many hours of study serve him right: At long last, he lays his eyes on an index that catalogs all of the scrolls copied from Hakotep's library. However, the scrolls are not where the index says they should be! They have clearly been moved or hidden at some point.

Spoiler

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I was so focused on the description of the bridges I only now looked into the stats for this particular library. It turns out like this:
- You can use Knowledge on either History, Nobility or Religion
- The library itself provides a bonus of +3 to Knowledge
- Complexity is 20, that's the DC of the roll.
So, if we account for -2 for the time lost on the bridges, Vershab's Religion bonus totals 18+3-2 = 19... which means he succeeds on his rool of natural 1. Congratulations for your choice of Skill Focus(Knowledge(Religion)), this is a RP decision that pays off in the end. Your roll of 2 yields 7 points of knowledge "damage" (it's 1d8+Int).

Now, we have Calathon contributing a +14 In Knowledge(History). He could risk the Acrobatics check, but failure, while unlikely, could be really bad, so let's say he doesn't. 14+3-2=15, (1d20+15)[33], if successful he scores (1d8+4)[7] knowledge points off the library.

By the way, looking at these rules a second time I found that a character cannot take 10 or take 20 on a Research check, but Research checks can be made untrained due to the Great Library’s extensive collections. So, everybody can play.

Working from Vershab's clue, but focusing on the history of the pharaohs' successive reigns, Calathon makes another breakthrough: The missing scrolls from Hakotep's library, a huge pile containing several references to the Sky Pharaoh and his participation in some ancient war... The two scholars excitedly spend the rest of the day going through this treasure trove of information.

The Sky Pharaoh is represented by a very distinct hieroglyph of a winged pyramid. According to the scrolls, the Sky Pharaoh was convinced that an attack was coming from enemies who lived in cities in the clouds, and that he was frantically searching for a weapon to defeat them. Apparently, the pharaoh eventually succeeded in finding it, but all that remains of the scrolls that detail this weapon are a handful of ragged papyrus scraps depicting confusing geometrical patterns - these scrolls should be here, but have clearly been removed. It appears whoever wanted this knowledge hidden went to great lengths to make it vanish from the records.