This Chult's Got a Death Curse!

Realized a bunch of the party’s scrolls were fakes and sorted them out. The group talked to Ras Nsi about not taking the princess, asked about the hermit’s journal, he refused to appear to his yuan-ti to abandon their ritual. The group teleported to the prisoner room but found only Dragonbait still in the room. Jewel disguised herself as Ras Nsi and waltzed into the sacrificial chamber, demanding everyone leave at once. Freed Cassandra and Azaka, then went to the underground river from the throne room.

The group fought a hydra and discovered a cave of fungi, took some samples and a key to the venom distillery. The group killed the guards outside the distillery and demanded more antidote doses. The group unleashed a fog cloud using a concoction made by Philomena, freed the remaining panicking prisoners and escaped.

Azaka revealed the Sewn Sisters had taken Artus, then she was sent to Nyanzaru with Cassandra, Fenris, and Valza. Dew on the Grass left to search for his uncles while Dragonbait went in search of a way to rescue his friend. The group returned to the waterfall cave, decided to hide the Princess and cubes inside a portable hole hidden in Omu with 15 days of food. The group headed to the Diurna Varun mine to get a decent rest, but were once again plagued with horrific nightmares.

In the throne room of the palace, Vogun attempted a surprise shot on Ras Nsi but struggled to aim from upside down on the ceiling. With everyone’s help, he landed one shot, drawing Ras Nsi to Power Word Kill him, which he absorbed. The group fought Ras Nsi, his broodguards, his bodyguard Sekelok, and 2 Malisons. The party slowly began to realize that Ras Nsi was never bleeding, and must in fact be a simulacrum wearing a forgery of the Ring of Death. Vogun dumped the fake puzzle cubes out but did not attract the attention of Nsi, who seemed to have something different in mind than taking them.

Ras Nsi landed a few Steel Wind Strikes and then teleported right into the thick of the group, then attempted a devastating Chain Lightning which was prevented by Pizza’s Counterspell. Jewel blasted Ras Nsi’s simulacrum with a fire bolt, shocking Sekelok who did not seem to realize he was protecting a construct. Sekelok ran for the teleportion disk to alert the rest of the Fane of what was happening, but Vogun used his Rod of Absorption to cast Spike Growth, slowing Sekelok down and forcing him to run through sharp spikes to escape.

Pizza Mind Whipped Sekelok and Jewel telekinetically shoved him back, causing more spike growth damage that he succumbed to. The group found a secret door leading to a hidden lair. The real Ras Nsi was there, weakened by the death curse. He offered the location of Acererak’s phylactery in exchange for his life, and promised the cube and the party’s predecessors things if the party destroyed it. Vogun, skeptical and mistrusting of Ras Nsi, turned to the adventurers he had grown to respect as equals over the last 59 days and said “I don’t believe him, I think we should kill him, what do the others think?”.

The group left Mwaxanare and Orvex with 7 days of supplies, hid the cubes in a bag among the stalactites. The group traveled to the Royal Palace but encountered a young Elf woman named Xandala being chased by the King of Feathers, a teleporting dinosaur. The group defeated the King, took some of his feathers, and talked to two other Tabaxi hunters who wanted to kill it, a brother and sister of Bag of Nails.

Xandala claimed she was Artus Cimber’s daughter, but Pizza saw through this lie and the party sent her to the Heart of Ubtao, telling her Valindra has the Ring of the Dead, similar to Artus’s Ring of Winter. The group distracted zombies at the secret entrance to the royal palace and entered through the underground caverns. Jewel disguised herself as a high-ranking yuan-ti Malison, Bart as a prisoner, and Philomena as Princess Mwaxanare while Pizza became invisible and Vogun stuck to the shadows.

The party bluffed their way through many dangerous rooms full of yuan-ti, explored the area without being caught, and discovered an in-progress ritual converting prisoners into yuan-ti slaves. Silently killed Ras Nsi’s throne room guard and prepared to assault Ras Nsi from the ceiling, sent Caesar through the stone teleporter circle.

The session began with preparation rather than battle. Philomena set to work constructing forged replicas of the puzzle cubes the party had acquired so far, carefully shaping them to look and weigh close enough to the originals to survive close inspection. Dirt was rubbed into them to sell the deception, the real cubes were hidden away in the Box of Colding beneath their supplies, and the counterfeits were placed in the bag of holding for quick use. It was a small act of craft that would shape everything that followed, because by then the party understood the cubes were the keys that would ultimately open the tomb.

With the forgeries prepared, the group moved through Omu shrine by shrine. At I’jin’s shrine, Vogon used spider climb to ignore the floor puzzle entirely, walking across the danger, lifting the cube from its pedestal, and slipping back out with insulting ease. At Shagambi’s shrine the tone shifted sharply when Jewel was ambushed by mated kamadans and mauled badly enough that Bart had to pull her back from the brink. Once recovered, the party faced the shrine’s guardians honorably, defeating the clay golems in the manner required and earning Shagambi’s cube. At Kubazan’s shrine they met a far uglier challenge in the form of a froghemoth, but Pizza’s psychic assault left the creature reeling at exactly the right moment, sparing Philomena from a devastating attack. With the beast checked, the party took the key from its mouth, and Vogon bounded across the retracting planks to swap the real cube for one of Philomena’s fakes, neatly avoiding the deadly trap built to punish greed or clumsiness.

Their path then carried them across the river by way of a great fallen tree and into an encounter with Bag of Nails. The tabaxi hunter welcomed them with apparent civility, invited them to share stew, and spoke of searching for his son, Dew on the Grass, but the invitation quickly soured when the party realized the meal had been poisoned. They narrowly stopped Princess Mwaxanaré from eating it and, recognizing at last that Bag of Nails meant to kill them, turned on him and put him down. The group then took shelter in his basement for the night. Even that rest came at a cost, with only some of the party emerging fully restored by morning.

From there they went on to Koa’s shrine only to discover they had been beaten to it, the cube already taken by the yuan-ti. That loss made the next move unavoidable. The party hid Mwaxanaré and Orvex in the cave behind the waterfall, gave each of them a sending stone so they could be reached if disaster struck, and then turned their attention toward the royal palace itself. By the end of the session they had gained more cubes, lost one to their enemies, sharpened their plan through deception and theft, and reached level 8 as they prepared to strike directly at the serpent-held heart of Omu.

The session opened with the party ambushed by yuan-ti agents who were trying to use enchantment rather than brute force, hoping to compel Princess Mwaxanaré to go willingly to the royal palace. The attempt nearly succeeded in turning the confrontation into an abduction dressed up as consent, but the party disrupted it before the princess could be taken. The fighting was ugly and close. Vogon, still shaken from his earlier brush with the giant crocodile, struggled badly with his aim and could not bring his usual precision to bear, leaving the others to carry much of the battle. Jewel was incapacitated during the clash, yet the yuan-ti templar failed to break free of Pizza’s restraint, and that single failure gave the group the opening it needed to bring down the malisons and survive the ambush.

With the immediate danger ended, the party made full use of the prisoners they had taken. They interrogated two yuan-ti and came away with crucial intelligence about the serpent cult’s movements in Omu, including the existence of a secret entrance south of the palace and a description of the door leading into Ras Nsi’s throne room. More disturbing still was what they learned of Ras Nsi’s intentions toward the princess. He meant to transform Mwaxanaré into a yuan-ti and wed her, using her bloodline to legitimize himself as Omu’s first king. The princess, for her part, found the idea contemptible and grotesque, which only sharpened the sense that the party was no longer dealing with a mere territorial enemy, but with a ruler in waiting who meant to claim both throne and dynasty through violation and force.

They withdrew afterward to the kobold lair to rest, but whatever shelter it offered in stone and darkness did not protect their sleep. That night the party was drawn into a horrific dream-vision of Omu’s past, watching five generals appointed beneath Queen Nepaka as a new Omuan army rose in grim ceremony. The vision quickly turned from pageantry to atrocity. Guards in Mbala were butchered, a tyrannosaurus devoured villagers, a demon was summoned, people were disintegrated by the power of Ubtao, and a gnome artificer murdered the royal family. The dream felt less like history than accusation, as though the city itself were forcing them to witness the chain of violence that had brought Omu to ruin.

Morning brought only partial relief. Bart and Philomena were the only ones who had truly slept well enough to claim the benefit of a long rest, while Pizza, Jewel, and Vogon rose still frayed by nightmare and exhaustion. Yet the dream left something behind besides weakness. As Philomena rebuilt Phlappy, she felt a strange empowerment lingering from the night’s vision, as though some fragment of Omu’s lost force had passed through the horror and into her hands. By the end of the session, the party had survived a yuan-ti ambush, gained a path toward Ras Nsi, learned the depth of his ambitions for the princess, and been shown a nightmare glimpse of the ancient crimes buried beneath the city they were only beginning to understand.