The team, reinvigorated by some downtime and two new members, defeated the four-armed mutant gargoyle this time, enabling them to move deeper into the tomb. Finding two apparent routes forward, they explored one – a 10×10 room – and found that it was trapped by a magic missile, which fired every few seconds if anyone was in the room. Nothing seemed up to the task of diffusing the trap, and so the team turned to the second route, which consisted of four 10×10 rooms connected by normal, unlocked doors, going roughly in a circle, and dead-ending in a heavy, locked door behind which there was only a solid wall. After searching long and in vain for any secret doors, they found none and accepted that getting blasted repeatedly might be their only way forward.

And so they sent Calathors in, again, albeit with the other rogue and a monster-summoned dire rat to act as a meat shield. The trap seemed to only be able to fire off one missile, and so the more targets that were in the room, the less chance of any one taking damage. Corellia summoned more ROUS’s and they forged ahead together, searching for and finding a secret door that led to another room with the same trap, and then another, and another, and another…for a total of 7 separate rooms, each with a secret door that opened differently from the others, and each with a magic missile trap in the ceiling. Everyone came out slightly singed and smelling like Uncle Lyle’s backyard grill, and yet finally they made their way into another large, long corridor, almost identical in size and construction as the first, although with different tacky art on the walls.

This corridor was painted with humanoid and monstrous figures doing calisthenics or pilates or something with colored spheres. After hours of study, and sleep by some of the party, who suddenly for no reason at all felt safe within the vaunted Tomb of Horrors, it was discovered that some of the spheres were just paint and others were illusory, concealing tunnels out of the grand hall. After a few dead-end explorations of some of these tunnels, one long crawlspace was found that led into a temple of some sort. The walls were painted with pleasant scenes of undead humanoids tending to farms and other mundane tasks, while likenesses of various good deities stood around dumbly. The only immediately obvious items in the room were eight pews, a large glowing altar separated from the rest of the room by a low wooden fence, and some urns and lit candleabras.

Three of the four pairs of pews were full of silver – well over 10,000 pieces they estimated – and the final pair triggered a nasty gas trap. A skeleton was found, which the team interrogated using arcane means, discovering basically nothing of value. Another misty doorway was found and avoided. And it was discovered that the altar, glowing a faint aqua color, was trapped with both a lightning bolt and then exploded when touched a second time. The whole team was really thankful to Corellia for deciding, against the good advice of the dwarf, to touch the thing not only once, but twice. Good going, mage!

Finally, the team sacrificed a magic ring in order to open a passageway into a secret tunnel that led…down, of course…and through a series of poorly-obstructed doors, each followed by a pit trap, and then into a long hall, which ended in a single door, which led into a hall that tilted when entered, almost spilling the team into a Burning Ring of Fire or something like that. Without too much trouble the team was able to escape, and was left standing in the long hall, outside the door into the tilting hall, wondering what to do next in what was quickly becoming a tedious succession of moderately lame traps.

Schlag Deingesicht was growing impatient and frustrated with the glaring lack of enemies to slice & dice, and was muttering only somewhat under his breath about what a load of crap this bug hunt was becoming. “No fightin’, no killin’, and no treasure worth havin’. Where’s the exit, dammit?”