Session 37: It Reaches Out

General Summary

The party interrogates Lissy as she seems to have a slight bit more memory and context than the rest of the Lost Adventurers and continues to talk about a map and instructions they were hired to carry out.

As Kayl and Odila sneak forward to push ahead in the mines, the rest trail behind with the adventurers and try and piece together more of the story. When Kayl and Odila find an open portal to the Shadowfell (like a twisted and dark version of the portal that Squelaiche used to cary them to and from the Feywild,) they use their thumblinks to call back, which prompts Bengt to rush forward to join them. As they find the "map" and realize it's an arcane ritual, Frederick suggests that Soma-Rai probe the adventurers's minds to see if she can hear anything while he asks questions. She is rebuffed, violently, and all five of them melt and turn into Chosen—eldritch abberations from between the planes—and attack him!

After a hard-won fight, in which some of the party is forced to face their deepest darkest fears, they return to the portal only to realize that while they dallied with the Chosen, the portal had begun opening fully and was pushing hordes of tentacles through into the material plane! Frederick rushes forward, confident that if he can get his hands on the ritual paper he can find a way to stop it, and is side-siped by a tentacle as he sees two large hands ending in claws reach out of the portal and begin to pull something through!

Odila nimbly dodges through the tentacles, under the gun of the horrific gaze of the Woe Strider emerging from the portal as Kayl and Bengt lay into the fel tentacles closest to them. she gets the spell to Frederick and he, begrudgingly, incinerates it in the radiant fires of Kayl's Sunbeam, reversing the portal and shutting it as Kayl surges forward and blasts the creature of the Shadowfell back to whence it came.

They search through the Lost Adventurers's belongings and find Derg's journal, which reveals that the party was hired by a mysterious benefactor to investigate a secret entrance into Forgehammer and that they were to cast a ritual for him so he could lay claim to valuable ores under the mountain—the ritual that instead sacrificed their minds to the horrors of the Shadowfell and was intended to summon an eldritch power to the material plane.

Derg
Jenna
Hector
Johan
Lissy