WRITTEN RECAP
Eldoria — Episode 6: Whispers In The Ruined Temple
Episode Six begins with the Old Dudes facing the immediate consequence of Episode Five's most important tactical decision: lighting every candle in an ancient summoning chamber.
The being they released, Norak, sits comfortably in the ruined temple and thanks them for freeing him after untold years of imprisonment.
The party is briefly offered the simplest possible solution. Leave.
They consider it.
Then they decide to attack him.
That goes about as well as one might expect when a newly freed supernatural creature has been imprisoned since a forgotten age and the adventurers fighting him have only recently learned that ball bearings are a valid combat strategy.
Norak proves extremely dangerous. One of the front-line characters goes down, the group realizes the fight is turning against them, and survival finally wins the argument.
They retreat.
For once, “run away” is not a punch line. It is the correct tactical decision.
The ruined temple should have been the end of the night's trouble.
It is not.
During the journey away from the ruins, Zayon hears a bell chime where no bell should be ringing. The sound wakes the others and draws the party toward a corridor they might otherwise have ignored.
Inside they encounter intellect devourers, creating the obvious table joke that the creatures do not appear particularly hungry around this group.
After dealing with them, the party finds a strange gate.
And activates it.
Apparently the lesson from the candles did not take.
The gate opens onto somewhere that is very definitely not Eldoria as they know it.
The Old Dudes step into a bizarre planar space filled with alien architecture and creatures they have never seen. Huge beings hold exposed brains. Tentacles move through the area. Other unnatural shapes begin to appear as the party realizes that they have walked into something they do not understand and are badly out of position to fight.
Once again, discretion becomes the better part of valor.
They run.
Whatever this place is, the glimpse is enough to matter. Zayon's divine connection to Varian seems tangled up with what they are seeing, as though this terrible place may not simply be a random portal but part of something yet to come.
Escaping the planar space does not put them safely back on a road.
Instead, the Old Dudes find themselves on a cliff face.
What follows earns everyone experience for reasons that have almost nothing to do with monsters.
The party has rope. The party has people who can climb. The party has time.
This should be easy.
Fars gets down gracefully.
Everybody else turns descending a cliff into one of the most dangerous encounters of the campaign.
Characters slip, catch themselves, argue about anchors, nearly fall, and generally come much closer to dying from basic mountaineering than they did from several enemies with actual teeth.
There are no opponents.
No trap.
No ancient curse.
Just rope.
Later, the session recap will describe it as the heroes “nearly dying in the stupidest way possible,” and nobody at the table has much evidence to dispute that assessment.
Once they are finally down, somebody remembers the mule.
So they go back for it.
Because the expedition apparently needed an encore.
In the tunnels and passages around their escape route, the party also finds a dark purplish crystal shard. Fars picks it up.
That decision will matter.
At first it is simply another strange object to carry home, but it does not behave like normal treasure. Something about it clings to Fars even when he is not trying to form a magical bond with it.
Eventually the battered, muddy group makes it all the way back to Shade Karn.
Fars announces their return with bagpipes.
The reception is mixed.
Some people cheer. Others cover their ears. The party has survived an ancient temple, released Norak, fought intellect devourers, crossed into an alien plane, fled things with tentacles, almost killed themselves with rope and recovered their mule.
Naturally, the bagpipes are what annoy the city guards.
Episode Six ends at the gates of the Ruby City.
The Old Dudes escaped Norak.
They escaped the other plane.
They escaped the cliff.
But Fars is carrying a shard that may be much harder to escape.