S10E03 - Charred Frogs and Petrified Scribes

The episode starts with the heroes going to sleep in a building near Kubazan’s Shrine. Silas is the first on watch, and after an hour or so, he starts hearing wet, crunchy sounds and a heavy weight being dragged across the floor in the next room. He considers going to take a look, but he’s quickly gotten comfortable with the safety of Avilos’s Tiny Hut of Leomund and stays put.

Later in the night, while Sophi is trancing, she has again a vision of the skeletal creature approaching her through the ruins of Omu. Not an easily scared person, she will later come out of the trance cheerfully.

In the morning, Krariak and Orvex inspect the nearby room where Silas heard the sounds, and they see blood stains on the floor, a heavily damaged window frame, and spider cobweb debris.

After breakfast, the heroes first discuss what they know about Acererak, liches, and their philacteries. However, after searching their memories for a while, they hit several dead ends and decide to get going gathering the cubes. Their next stop, Nagnang’s shrine.

When they arrive, Krariak quickly moves in towards the door, making seven rooftop grungs and four ground grungs come out of hiding and shoot at him.

Silas casts Entangle to pin the rooftop grungs so that Avilos, who then casts Fireball, can cleanly annihilate in one round the territorial but otherwise not-at-all-at-fault party in this fight. Krariak then successfully intimidates two of the ground grungs who croak aggressively at him and then flee.

With the defenders gone, the heroes open the shrine’s front doors and find a maze of corridors filled with treasure. Krariak, Sophi, and Orvex fill their pockets. After the party explores the shrine a bit more and decrypts some old Omuan messages, Krariak and Sophi change their minds and drop all the recently acquired treasure in front of locked doors. However, Orvex keeps his treasure, and that seems to trigger a locked door that was further into the shrine. Orvex sees a cube in the room behind the door, picks it up, and, after a heated discussion with the rest of the group, which included events such as Falkor grabbing a fleeing Orvex by his underpants, the recent hire is allowed to carry the cube. Unluckily for him, all the treasure he was still carrying turns to metal scraps and clay after they leave the shrine.

The heroes then go to Obo’laka’s shrine, across the palace district. Again, Krariak doesn’t let a good, careful plan get in the way of quick results and approaches the front door. Four curious and non-threatening zorbos approach him and, after a brief interaction with the goliath barbarian, leave with their mouths full of dried meat.

After that, the barbarian opens the heavy and shrieking shrine’s front doors and explores the dark entrance corridor, which is full of empty torch brackets. The rest of the group follows him, and they then open the door at the end of the first corridor. Behind it, they find a square room with a small pond and a very reflective surface. Above it, a sun is carved on the ceiling. Sophi throws a coin into the pond, which immediately disappears. While the party is discussing what to do, Orvex, sneakily, throws his cube into the pond and disappears. The rest of the party notices it, and he gets bullied into a corner. Ellie then transforms into a giant octopus and, with difficulty, enters the pond and finds herself in another room, nearly identical to the one they’re in.

The new room has walls covered with carvings depicting Obo’laka in ancient times. The room also has a door. Ellie, though, leaves the door for later and returns through the pond and, still in octopus form, to the first room and makes the party follow her back where, together, they open the door. Orvex, eager to raise his status with the party and pissed off at Krariak from recent commetns, rushes inside.

When the rest of the party follows, they find a room brightly lit by eight torches. A petrified Orvex and a petrified stranger stand in the middle of the room, both touching a cube that sits on top of an altar. The heroes also find a secret door that reveals a corridor back to the shrine’s entrance.

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After exploring the whole shrine a few times, unsuccessfully trying to pick up the cube with Magic Hand, and various other experiments, Sophi figures out the clue. She instructs octopus Ellie to carry the seven torches from the last room and insert them into the empty torch brackets from the entrance corridor. One of the torches, which the party had carried through the pond and extinguished, is lit back by Silas who brings it to the central room.

After the last torch is inserted into the torch brackets, the heroes notice something shift. Sophi tries to grab the cube again with her Magic Hand and, this time, is able to do so.

Krariak tries to knock Orvex’s petrified state out of him with a stone, but that opens a front-to-back hole in Orvex’s chest. Sophi then fills the whole with korbo poop, just in case it helps once they find a way to unpetrify him. They then put Orvex and the other petrified stranger statue in two alcoves inside the shrine and leave.

Worried about Chos’s worsening condition, the party then immediately heads to Moa’s shrine, which stands on an island in the middle of the lava chasm.

The party finds masts dug into the ground and organic food scraps, but nothing of use. They then orchestrate a risky plan: Sophi casts Misty Step on Silas, teleporting him halfway to the shrine but leaving him floating in the air. The ranger then immediately casts Misty Step on himself to cover the remaining empty space between him and the shrine. Next, the heroes tie two ropes together and get one end safely to Silas, who secures it on his end. Sophi then crosses the chasm by walking over the rope like a boss. The rest of the party, excepts Ellie also crosses safely to the other side in a less flamboyant way, but Ellie loses grip of the rope and nearly falls into the chasm if not for Silas who Misty Stepped in-between Ellie and the rope, grabbing her before it’s too late and bringing both of them to safety.

After they catch their breath, Krariak again takes the initiative and rushes into the shrine’s entrance corridor.

He first triggers a pressure-plate activated pit trap, but avoids falling into the pit by holding onto the fingernail-wide edges next to the walls. From there, he flips over forward into the corridor, but triggers a second pit trap. This time, he falls into it and finds himself inside a semi-translucent acidic green slime. Thanks to his bulging muscles, he grapples himself out of the slime and climbs out of the trap and further into the corridor, feet on one wall and hands on the opposing wall.

The episode ends as Krariak enters the room at the end of the corridor and finds an empty pedestal and a wall covered with archer statues looking over the pedestal.

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Fionghan’s joke of the day

“What did the peasant say when he lost his wooden cart? ‘Wheel-y unfortunate!’”

More Fionghan humor

— “I already have two cubes.” — “Why didn’t you say that before? Show us!” — “I thought Seorse told you,” and the druid instantly lowers his pants.