S10E04 - Drug Overdose and Shagambi's Shrine

The session starts inside Moa’s shrine, where Krariak is inspecting a room with its walls full of statues of Omuan archers overlooking a pedestal in the center of the room with a cube on top. The barbarian is tempted to take the cube but an unfamiliar voice tells him it may be dangerous, and he decides to leave the shrine and share his findings with the group.

Sophi thinks that replacing the cube with something of similar weight might do the trick, so she grabs a stone and casts Mage Hand to replace the cube from a distance. With Avilos’s help, she manages to do so, but the cube disappears as soon as the Mage Hand brings it out of the shrine.

Next, Silas misty steps into the room, gets riddled with magical arrows, and hides inside his safe rope trick room space. Trying to help Silas, Ellie conjures spiritual animals into the room which fool the statues long enough for Silas to get out of his rope trick interdimensional hideout and out of the shrine.

After this failed second attempt, the heroes pay attention to the arrow slits on the corridor and see two rooms on both sides, each with a snake statue taller than a man. In one room, the snake’s head has fallen onto the floor, and there is a puzzle cube lying there too, whereas on the other, the snake’s head is intact and its jaws are holding the cube. Doubting which one is the real one, Avilos and Sophi cast Mage Hand again and pick up both cubes at the same time, and take them out of the shrine. One of them disappears, but not the other.

After getting the cube, the elves in the party who only need four hours of “trance” sleep, take a long rest to recover, while the rest wait for them. After this freshing up and still worrying about Chos’s limited time alive left, they head to Unkh’s shrine.

When they arrive, Krariak and Avilos open the heavy front door and see a room with a large snail statue, six alcoves with oversized keys on the walls, and an empty pedestal with a lock on it at the back of the room. Krariak, who was inspecting a nearby ruined workshop building, takes all the keys he can fit into his arms into the shrine. As everybody enters the main shrine’s room, three ghasts come out of hiding behind the huge statue and attack them. The heroes, however, kill them with little effort.

After the fight, Chos and Ellie start inspecting the alcove keys, but before they can find out anything, Krariak takes one of the keys from the floor and tries to open the pedestal’s lock. A searing-white radiant ball of energy ejects from the statue, swiping the whole room and seriously injuring everyone. Still in shock from the attack, the party is trying to realize what happened when Avilos feels the urge to lick the lock’s keyhole. Another radiant ball of radiant energy swipes the room and nearly insta-kills Avilos and Sophi.

The near-death experience makes everybody leave the shrine instantly. After some thinking, Chos and Ellie bring the remaining keys that were lying outside into the room, they grab the oversized keys hanging in the alcoves, put them together into a single large key, and use Chos’s Locate Object to find a matching key among the pile of keys brought from outside. They find the matching key and, after leaving Ellie alone inside the shrine to minimize further team resources, the druid inserts the key into the lock and successfully opens it. Fionghan, who unbeknownst to everybody else had entered the room, approaches the compartment that Ellie had just caused to appear, takes the cube inside of it, and walks out of the shrine.

After so much progress, the heroes decide to get back to their camp to rest.

As they’re crossing a flooded part of the city, they meet a batiri goblin running away from something. The goblin climbs Krariak’s back and tries to stay very still. The barbarian, surprised but ok with this, runs to dry land just in case. Silas, Sophi, and Avilos drop to their feet and hide in the water while Chos and Ellie stand there trying to simultaneously look prepared and non-menacing.

A moment later, a group of vegepygmies with bandoliers and gang tattoos shows up and starts talking in a very strange language of whirrs and woody sounds. The heroes try all their different tongues with them, but unable to find a common one, they try to calm the plant-people and, after a few tense minutes, make the plant people bored and frustrated enough to make them leave.

Chos and Ellie then walk to dry land. Before Silas, Sophi, and Avilos can follow them, still prone and underwater, they get attacked by something lying a few meters away. Sophi receives the brunt of a massive psychic whipping and falls unconscious, but Avilos and Silas use solid tactics to get themselves and Sophi out of the water safely.

Back at their camp, the self-rescued goblin, called Zork, thanks the party for their help. He’s high, mentally unstable, and carries a lot of drugs, which the rest of the party is eager to try before they all go to sleep. Once the unstable goblin falls asleep, the heroes, still away and a bit weary of him, tie him up and then go to sleep. During the second watch, the goblin starts screaming, waking everyone up and complaining about being tied. The heroes give him some of his drugs, calming him enough to gag him without resistance, and then they all go back tro sleep. A couple of hours later, Zork wakes up again and starts complaining, still gagged. Sophi repeats the process by giving him more of his drugs, and the goblin rapidly calms down and closes his eyes.

That night, Sophi has the same vision of the past few nights with the skeletal figure theatrically approaching him and ending a few steps closer every night.

The next morning, the heroes wake up and find Zork dead. They question Sophi, who claims ignorance of what happened, and, silently, files a note to be more careful in dosing drugs to neutral or friendly people, especially when you don’t know what drug you’re handling.

With a mission to accomplish and nothing else to do about Zork, the heroes dispose of his body outside the building and head to Shagambi’s shrine, the kamadan trickster god.

When they arrive, Krariak and Avilos push open the doors. Inside, they find four statues of old Omuan warriors missing spears, an empty pedestal, and beneath a grate, a fighting pit. Krariak, who felt called by the pit, climbs down the grate and into the pit and hears a “click” sound as soon as he touches the floor. Soon, he’s surrounded by four clay gladiators who start hitting him with their spears and fists. The rest of the party jumps into the pit, but by the end of the first round, Krariak is almost out of hit points while the clay fighters have barely been hit.

Fionghan’s joke of the day

“What do you call a knight who’s afraid to fight? Sir Rendered!”