S11E01 - Finding Nemo

The season starts in Ironwound, an iron mining town high up in the mountains.

Lyra, a female elven druid, returns to the inn she’s staying at in time to see his friend Nemo, a male gnome rogue, captured and being taken to prison. She follows the guards but is noticed and forced to stay behind.

Later that day, while she’s wondering how to save him during dinner, she overhears a fully armored man and a talking wooden puppet say they need someone to pick a lock. She joins them, and they end up agreeing to work together: Gray, the armored paladin, and Ike, the sorcerer puppet, will help her free Nemo, and in exchange, they will help them break into the magistrate’s house. Gray has been given the job of stealthily capturing him, and Ike, who was originally an oak, is looking to recover a piece of himself that he’s sensing coming from the magistrate’s house.

The party arrives at the town’s prison. Gray talks to the slightly drunk front guard and tries, unsuccessfully, to persuade him to hand Nemo. Meanwhile, Lyra and Ike enter the building through the front door. Lyra then tries to convince the guard inside that Ike, who is now acting like an actual puppet, should be thrown into their Lost & Found section, but also fails. Gray joins them, tells the guard the same story, but is also reluctant to comply. Eventually, however, they agree to a game where Lyra will stand against a wall, and the guard and Gray will each throw a sharp weapon, and whoever’s blade ends up closer to Lyra’s head wins. If the heroes win, the guard will believe their story that the magistrate ordered Gray to bring Nemo.

The heroes have to convince the guard that they’re not spellcasters after they cast spells to buff themselves up for the contest and, later, to evade the guard’s throw. They arm-wrestle him, and that convinces him that they can’t be spellcasters because they’re too strong. Both guard and Gray hit the wall, not Lyra’s face, and Gray wins. Pissed off but respecting their agreement, the guard, the paladin, and the druid head back to the building.

While all this is going on, Ike oils himself up and then enters the prison through one of the barred windows, thanks to his tiny size. Once inside, he frees the dozen prisoners there, including Nemo, and then escapes with him through the back door. The rest of the prisoners rush out through the front door, knocking one of the guards unconscious. Gray and Lyra kill and burn the body of the other guard, who, sadly, had already sounded the alarm.

The heroes then run to the magister’s mansion while the attention is about to center here.

On their way there, they see a massive warforged pull a dead sheep over the muddy street, crack it open like an egg, and pour its corpse into a city well. They exchange a brief interaction with the slow-speaking and slow-thinking warforged and part ways.

Once they arrive at the city hill where the magistrate lives, they spot his mansion. It’s a large two-floor, beautiful stone building surrounded by farmland and trees. They decide to get Ike inside as part of a larger plan that they leave unfinished, and therefore, Gray grabs the puppet and tosses him over the iron bar fence surrounding the whole perimeter. Ike manages to get hold of some branches of the tree that he’s flying through and avoids falling into the two sleeping, giant goats on the ground. With nothing to do there and unable to clearly see what the party is doing in the dark of the night, he very stealthily climbs down and walks towards the mansion. He feels the vibration of his wood coming off the house.

When he gets to the building, he hears humans screaming and moaning somewhere on the second floor. Without a better entrance, he climbs to the windows and sees a man and a woman moving one against the other in an interesting way, and he takes mental note. The woman seems to be in pain, but she also seems to be driving the whole thing, so he files it as something to research and, very stealthily, climbs into the room. Once inside, he doesn’t feel his wooden part in the room and assumes it must be on the ground floor. However. he considers it all too risky and instead gets out of the steamy room to join the rest of the party.

Meanwhile, Gray, Lyra, and Nemo go around the iron fence and pick the front door’s lock, breaking Nemo’s lockpicking toolset in the process. Once inside, they first inspect the Eastern small shed, which they find full of farming equipment and piles of salted dried meat. Then they look for Ike in the tree where they last saw him, but when they get there, they accidentally awaken the two giant goats who ram them, knocking Gray unconscious. Lyra casts Speak with Animals and persuades them to stop fighting in exchange for twenty kilos of meat because, apparently, these goats have canines. Meanwhile, Nemo applies first aid to Gray and avoids death in the first episode.

When Lyra comes back from the shed, the whole party is back together and they start whispering, trying to decide what to do. In the heat of the discussion, the heroes don’t notice that the sex upstairs is over, and, at some point in the discussion, the man lets them know he’s sounded the alarm. Nemo decides it’s too risky to stay and runs towards the exit with the rest of the party following him. They leave the property in time to avoid getting rammed again.

Having rescued Nemo but unable to go back to town, the group decides to spend the night in the forest.

Nemo left his backpack and other belongings at the inn, so Gray, leaving his armor and helmet behind, walks back to the inn, accidentally causing a sleepy, drunken dwarf to leave his room and fall down the stairs. Gray ends up finding Nemo’s room, grabs his things, and rushes back to the forest, where he joins the rest of the party.