Setup

Hurodash awakes on the floor of the Temple of Shagambi. After a short discussion in which he comes to find a dead god co-habitating in the space between his ears, he leaves to find his friends. What is the plan? The voice in his head responds, “To become a God again.”

Meanwhile, the party wakes up and steps out of last night’s Tiny Hut. Thankfully, Norm had not died during the evening.

After a minor misadventure at the Temple of Kubazan that almost resulted in a solo showdown with the Froghemoth, Hurodash reunited with the reset of the party. The party decided to allow Norm to lead them to another temple, and all the while Norm insists on making clear the dangers within.

Bring Out Your Dead

Norm leads the party to the Temple of Papazotl, one of the temples from which the Polonians were unable to extract the soul stone. Upon entering, skeletons immediately streamed from a magic gate in one wall. The party saw a sack of first-sized rubies, a mural on the opposite wall consisting of three figures with empty eyesockets, and quickly deduced the need to put the rubies in the sockets to stop the skeleton.

Skeletons poured out at an alarming rate, some picking up and attaching the parts of skeletons killed by the party. Some climbed the walls and pulled out rubies placed in their sockets by Corliss, Rhagal, Ser Shadow and Nymeria, each of whom had climbed the mural wall. Meanwhile, Hurodash and Yornan concentrated on the skeletons themselves. A “Turn Undead” destroyed a dozen while Hurodash smashed a similar number. The party began letting go of the wall and crashing to the floor, carrying skeletons with them, as one of the prime methods of protecting the seated rubies from the attackers.

As the fight wore on, the pack of skeletons finally wrested Hurodash to the floor and began inflicting significant damage. At the moment though, the wall climbers had filled all the eyes, the gate closed, and the remaining bits formed Voltron-style into one super-sized skeleton behemoth. A well-timed and surprisingly well-maintained casting of Tasha’s Hideous Laughter by Corliss incapacitated the behemoth, allowing the party to kill the remaining skeletons, then the behemoth, and finally to claim the soul stone within the temple.

Wrapup

Soul stone recovered, skeletons dead, the party awaits their next move.