#temple game

Davari, Elias, Braco, Tybr, Eniac, and Florian join the Grey Hawks and take out their first contract for a blue wyrmling that has been terrorizing a small village up in the Shattered Mountains. They work their way through the caverns searching for the children stolen by kobolds earlier in the week. Eventually they find the innermost chamber, where the children are trapped in a cage. They fight and kill the blue wyrmling and return the children to their parents before going back to Hywell.

 In Hywell, they are paid for fulfilling the contract and are invited to a banquet for the full initiation ceremony. In the meantime, half the party goes into town and meets Thea and arranges to have her identify the sword Eniac found in exchange for their "best secrets". The sword's name is Godsbane and while it is powerful, it has a dark history. The other half of the party meets Giselle, an elf woman who has a house on the outskirts of town, but who only lives there when she has business to conduct on behalf of the Enderon Empire. The party meets three blood hunters who work for the Grey Hawks named Rowan, Kilgrave, and Ayla. They mention that they've taken a contract to go after a beholder and they're going to have to travel far up north to find the entrance to the Underdark where the beholder lives.

 The next day, the party meets the other initiates, including a gnome wizard named Joyce. When the initiation ceremony starts, a cloud of darkness takes over the room, and when it clears, Joyce is gone and the other initiates from her party have been stabbed. Two skeleton minotaurs attack the room, and the party narrowly manages to kill them before the hall burns down. After healing the initiates, the Grey Hawks leader Mora tells them their new contract is to hunt down Joyce and her partner and bring them in.

 The party discovers Joyce and the other gnome found an entrance to a secret temple in a graveyard. After going through the portal found in the temple, they work their way through the different passages of the temple and find Joyce and the other gnome Emmeline in the treasury. When a wraith snake attacks them all, they find the portal out and appear back in the graveyard. The two gnomes try to escape, but the party kills Joyce and captures Emmeline. They bring her back to the main hall to give her to Mora.

 When they arrive, Mora is talking to Giselle, who seems very upset. Mora takes Emmeline to the jail while Giselle confronts the party about what they told Thea and their history with the Boiling Isles and Ergo Tinnitus. They tell her who they are and their relationship to Ergo. She tells them that she is a member of a group that calls themselves Enderon's Guardians, and that in the morning they will be escorted to Caer Leon where the rest of the Guardians meet so they can tell them everything they know about Ergo and any other information they have.

 The next morning, Mora introduces them to Clay, the tiefling ranger who will be escorting them to Caer Leon over the next five days. The first two days pass relatively uneventfully. They spot smoke in the distance and Elias speaks with the trees to ask them for information. The third day they are ambushed by an assassin after they set up camp. The assassin and his dire wolf are kille d, and when Florian speaks with his corpse they discover that Ergo is travelling between the continents and the Black Rose Trading Company is supplying his army with weapons. The next day they reach Shells Port, a small trading post on the coast, that has been nearly razed to the ground. After a young man named Garen directs them to safety, he informs them that Shells Port is currently occupied by a young red dragon that eats anyone trying to travel between the town and Caer Leon. As the party is discussing plans to reach Caer Leon anyway, the dragon lands a few houses away.

 Garen leaves through the back of the house to gather some archers while the rest of the party stay in the house in order to attack the dragon as soon as it gets close. Davari and Braco get in one shot at the dragon before it blasts them with fire and nearly annihilates the party. The fight with the dragon is nearly deadly, with multiple party members falling before being revived. Halfway through the fight, Tybr notices a black and red eye blink open in Godsbane's hilt, before it vanishes and a red haze overtakes Eniac's eyes. Finally, Davari manages to land the killing blow on the dragon before it burns down Shells Port entirely. Clay gathers up the remaining townspeople to lead them back to safety in Hywell and to tell people further up north what is happening along the coast. The rest of the party heads out to Caer Leon. They get a message from Lord Swift that Oceanside is also under siege by black dragons along the way. When they reach the gates of Caer Leon, Braco's familiar flies in as a seagull and discovers that the town is currently occupied by black dragonborn soldiers and guards wearing black and silver with the Rosenmond family crest on their capes. The party devises a plan to fake papers to get into the city as "prisoners", and then split up to go find Davari's father Rutherford and Ogden Fardepth.

 The party manages to bluff their way into the city, after hearing from one of the main guards about some sort of "event" going on at the Rosenmond Estate that night. Their goal in the city is to find Ogden Fardepth and plan to check the Sea Side Chateau, the main watchtower in the center of the city, and the Rosenmond Estate itself. Along the way, they find a family in hiding that explains why the whole city is on lockdown.  The city has been occupied for about a week and a half. A small fleet of dragonborn soliders arrived, and they were going to set up for a siege, before Lord Sidhal called for everyone to stand down, and half of the soldiers/guards essentially just let the advance party inside. They rounded up everyone who they thought might constitute a threat (basically anyone who put up a fight) and no one on the outside knows where they ended up. The party goes to look for Rutherford Rosenmond in the watchtower. They distract the guards by setting a house on fire, but end up having to kill the guards anyway. Rutherford has been kept locked away while Davari's aunt and uncle, Amelia and Reuben, have taken over Caer Leon. Guards have swarmed the tower, and the party manages to escape from the tower.

 As they are running, Eniac trips and stays behind as a distraction as the rest of the party hides in an alley. The guards overwhelm him, and he is taken away in chains to the east. The party (minus Eniac) sneak the long way around to the Rosenmond Estate, which is heavily guarded and has a steady stream of armed people making their way inside. Braco scouts out the area with his seagull familiar Luther, and discovers an attic full of medical supplies, books, and cages of small animals. Davari and Braco bluff their way into the house by pretending Braco is Davari's brother, and then Elias causes a distraction by Calling Lightning repeatedly on the other side of the house. While everyone rushes to see what's going on, Elias takes out the guards in the front of the house and the rest of the party makes it in. The guards have moved downstairs. The party goes down into the basement, and find themselves in a large arena with a sand pit and a large shadowy area in the back. Amelia and Reuben sit in the front. Various gladiators are brought in, all with completely blank expressions, except for one fire genasi sorcerer named Spark who seems to be a crowd favorite. Finally, a trap door opens in the shadowy area in the back, revealing a manticore and a blank-faced Eniac, who works with two other gladiators to bring it down. At the end of the event, the party hangs back to confront Amelia and Reuben. When Amelia sees that Davari (who she tried to have killed years ago) is approaching, she casts circle of death on the party. Everyone goes down, except Florian, who just manages to hear the two of them laugh before Reuben knocks him out.

 The party wakes up chained together in a dungeon cell underneath the fighting pits. Amelia walks up from a staircase that seems to descend even further beneath them and questions them about what they know regarding the Rosenmonds and the dragonborn invasion. When they don't answer, Amelia reveals that Eniac has already told her a lot, and lifts her enchantment on him. The party is led off to the fighting pits as that night's entertainment. They manage to defeat an undead Chimera, and when they are led back to their cell, they recognize the person in the cell next to them as Ogden Fardepth. He is pretending to be unconscious while the guards are watching them. While they wait for the guards to leave, they get acquainted with the people in the cell across from them: Spark the fire genasi sorcerer and a human monk named Kier. Spark and Kier tell them that Amelia is working on some sort of project in the lower levels, where they can hear machinery grinding. Ogden wakes up and they tell him that Giselle sent them to find him. Ogden explains that he doesn’t know where the rest of the Counsel is, but that if the party can make it out of the dungeon and get to the Boiling Isles, then they'll have an opportunity to take out Ergo Tinnitus while his army is spread out across the main continent. Ogden will coordinate retaking the city while they take care of Ergo at the source. First, they have to take care of whatever Amelia has been building in the basement, because her secret weapon could seriously change the course of the war. The party also decide to call themselves the Degenerates.

 The next night, the party manages to escape from their cells by charming the guards, and head deeper below the Rosenmond Estate to deal with Amelia's secret project. In the basement, they find a laboratory and a gnome named Noro working on something. The temperature has dropped significantly, and when they question Noro about what he is doing under the pretense of coming to check on his progress on Amelia's behalf, they discover that she has been building an enormous brass titan powered by an arcane core. The titan is almost finished, and with a few final touches it will be ready to release on the continent. The party breaks into the cold holding chamber, where the titan is stored to prevent it from overheating. Before Noro can stop them, they attack the sixty foot titan, and are nearly wiped out but just manage to destroy the arcane core and completely disable it.

 Noro finally figures out that they do not work for the Rosenmonds, and panics over what Amelia will do to him once she realizes he let them in to destroy her project. The party convinces him that he is better off travelling with them to the Boiling Isles instead of waiting to see what Amelia will do. To escape from the underground chamber, they pull off a dangerous rope climb up a rock vent leading to the ground, using Elias in his elk form as a weight at the top. Unfortunately, Noro slips and plummets to his death several hundred feet below. The party makes it to the docks and onto a ship before the guards they had evaded earlier reach them. As the boat sails away, a series of Call Lightning spells absolutely annihilates the docks behind them, leaving Amelia's fleet in ruin. The passage to the Boiling Isles proceeds relatively smoothly, until they realize that the water has turned to acid and their boat is being dissolved a few miles from the main island of Thazardune. After casting water walking, the party manages to escape the ship before taking any acid damage themselves and run the rest of the way to the island.

 Their approach to the island catches the attention of a patrolling group of red dragonborn guards, who ambush them from the cliffs above. Battling from below, the party manages to take them out and make their way up the cliffs at the same time. On solid ground, they kill the guards, except for one, who informs them that Ergo Tinnitus, the Scorched Lord, is in his palace waiting to attack the mainland with the last fleet to leave Thazardune. His palace turns out to be built into the side of a massive volcano known as the Crimson Summit. The party decides to try crossing the wasteland to reach the volcano instead of trying their luck in the city. As they walk through the twisted obsidian landscape, they realize that they can hear no sounds of life coming from anywhere. That night, they notice that the wind has stopped, the smoke clouds are still above them, and there is no motion or sound anywhere. As soon as they step outside of their alcove, they feel a strong psychic presence bearing down on them. Tybr and Florian instantly begin hallucinating some of the worst moments of their life, and run towards the blinking purple light they see in the distance. The rest of the party chases after them, but are ambushed by construct assassins that keep reanimating until their amethyst power sources are destroyed. The party follows Florian and Tybr's tracks until they find the purple light they vanished into. The party steps into the light.