Setup
The party is progressing away-from-sunward through the Feywild and has entered a deep and tangled forest. The sun has barely moved in the sky despite the hours that they have been trekking through the land.
Tell Me a Secret
The party finds themselves trapped in a hedge maze and eventually comes to an opening containing the Lady Suvall, a sprite with some unsettling features such as abnormally large incisors. In order to progress, she demands that they each tell her a secret. Each party tells her one with Rhagal confessing vanity, Corliss shame, Ser Shadow wrath, Yornan sloth and Hurodash lust.
Lady Suvall is satisfied and lets them progress to a game that she has created. She gives them sixty seconds to move each of three glowing orbs to stands at the far end of the course.
Corliss evades and defenestrates some sprite-driven wicker artillery, Ser Shadow slips through some creepy plants and statue amputees, and Yornan raises a bridge to cross a chasm. They solve a puzzle (cyphers!) and Hurodash fights a mirror image of himself before Rhagal uses Mage Hand to set the orbs on each of the stands to complete the contest.
Setup
The party has returned to Highbridge after delivering Alluria’s body to her mausoleum in her Vale. They step into the middle of a raucous evening at the Rusty Spigot in Overtown where they are hailed as heroes and given the best table in the center of the bar.
An Evening at the Rusty Spigot
The musical nemesis of Corliss, the bard extraordinaire Cappen Varra, informs the party that he has a message for them, but refuses to give it unless Corliss agrees to an onstage Battle of the Bards. Corliss agrees, and the crowd eventually chooses his knee-slapping, sing-along, hold-your-lighter-aloft version of Shitty Shitty Poop Stick as the victor over a morose, dissonant, but virtuoso performance by Cappen. Slightly perturbed, Cappen relays the message to the party: “Yancey has been looking for them and has some information.”
The party spends the next hour drinking and making off-color jokes, interrupted only by an interlude where they humiliate and then beat up a burly fellow named Sess that had given their landlord Batilda a black eye while arguing with her about rent.
Meeting with Mistress Valenna
Yancey, previously known to be part of a secret society that controls The Resistance, has passed on information about the spellbook (Spellbook of the Celestial Spheres) to his superiors and they want to meet. After agreeing, the powerful Mistress Valenna teleports to party to the Lyceum Arcanium tower in Greenmouth and tells them about the mission of their organization.
She says gives some backstory:
The seventh age is ending and a Convergence is coming.
There is some sort of ceremony that will occur that will dictate which elemental power is ascendant during the eighth age.
The Polonians (water) and the Orcs and their allies (fire) have all sorts of knowledge about the what the Convergence is and what it entails. The Lyceum Arcanium has none.
The Polonian invasion of The Riding and the Orcish incursions westward are all associated with the coming Convergence, but what they are seeking is unknown. Only that The Riding is important is apparent.
The Elves should be supporting the elemental power of earth, but they are missing, and the duty of supporting the currently ascendant earth falls to the Lyceum. And perhaps the party if they will join forces.
Their plan:
Having run out of places to look for information in The Riding, the Lyceum Arcanium has identified the Fey Library in the Feywild as a potential source of information.
However, every party they have sent through their magic mirror to the Feywild over the last decade has not returned.
There is one exception: a member of a past expedition named Loomis Erstand returned only days after passing over but thought that he had been gone for years. He claimed to have traded his two amputated fingers and the color blue for a key piece of information that he would not divulge.
Loomis has fled east into Orcish territories.
Given the option to search for Loomis and gain clues about what he learned and how he succeeded in escaping back through the mirror, the party chooses instead to dive through the mirror and into the Feywild.
In the Feywild
The party meets an adventurer named Sei that may have been part of a previous expedition. He has spent an unknown amount of time attempting to map the Feywild, but his map makes no sense. He follows the party.
Next, the party meets a Cambion under the influence of three Dryads that force him to play hide-and-seek with them. The party uses its wits - and Rhagal’s potion of flying - to track the three dryads down. The Cambion, in gratitude, offers information about the location of the library. The info: “Walk away from the sun until it is almost dark, then turn right and walk until you reach a lake. The library is on the shore of the lake.”
Finally, the party does battle with a pod of snakes that were living in the remnants of a dead body hanging from a tree. The snakes repeatedly hoist Hurodash into the air and attempt to strangle him, but the party comes to his defense and kills them.