Tomb of Horrors – Under Construction Board
According to legend, Acererak was a tiefling fathered by a balor named Tarnhem. In his youth, he studied spellcasting under Vecna, and has since become an archmage of surpassing evil. While researching the means to achieve lichdom, Acererak built a number of dungeons and tombs, including his famed Tomb of Horrors. Those dungeons were created partly as a means to draw out and defeat those adventurers driven to seek and destroy him — and partly to claim those adventurers’ souls to feed his phylactery.
Even after Acererak eventually became an archlich whose dark plots would threaten the world, he left behind the Tomb of Horrors as a monument to his greatness. But in its earliest stages, the tomb was a very different sort of place.
By traveling to the Tomb of Horrors in the past, the characters arrive with the place still under construction. The artificer Moghadam serves as the tomb’s chief architect, overseeing its construction in initial areas dug out by enthralled umber hulks and refined by master artisans. As part of the unprecedented levels of magic used to create the deadly traps in the Tomb of Horrors, Moghadam has installed several of the missing components from the Infernal Machine of Lum the Mad at the site. These components are used to draw magical energy from the life force of creatures sacrificed on Acererak’s orders — including the archmage’s own father, the balor Tarnhem.
Over the years of the tomb’s construction, Moghadam and his rival artificer, Thessalar, have competed fiercely against each other’s endeavors. Moghadam takes pleasure in having lured away several sculptors from Thessalar’s temple to help with the tomb’s construction. He has also recently sent a party of thieves and a master gemsmith to his rival’s temple, instructing them to steal the temple’s two most famous gems — set into the eyes of a great statue of Moloch — for use in the creation of Acererak’s jeweled demilich skull. Unfortunately, those thieves have failed to return, and are presumed captured by Thessalar.