This Chult's Got a Death Curse!

The group approached Firefinger Tower in the dead of night and climbed its outer face. The group utilized a distraction to trick a number of pterafolk into leaving the fight. The group surprised pterafolk at the top of the spire with an assault from the back.

Vogun blasted pterafolk out of the sky before they knew what hit them. Bart utilized his Spirit Guardians to protect the group and prevent pterafolk from flying in and grabbing his allies. Jewel hypnotized many pterafolk, sending them tumbling from the sky to their deaths.

Pizza caused pterafolk to fail their grapple attempts, thwarting their advantage in the sky. Philomena battered numerous pterafolk including the warrior Nrak, who was able to call for aid but to no avail. The group spoke with the aarakocra Nephyr, who suggested they venture to Kir Sabal and speak to their leader Asharra about the Dance of Seven Winds.

The group acquired various items along with a strange tiger mask, returned to Azaka. The group crossed Ataaz Muahahaha without fighting, thanks to Azaka’s knowledge of the mazes carved into the bridge. The group located Needle’s Bones.

While the current party spent two and a half days buried in stolen tomes among the Mezroan crypts, the story slipped backward into one of the campaign’s older shadows and followed the ill-fated legacy company instead: Scix, Harold Pipper, Dr. Phyrne Fisher, Vogon, Leafinwind, and Syndra Silvane. Their path led them to Mbala, that dead hilltop kingdom of skulls and ruin, where danger announced itself before they ever reached its heart. Along the way they saved an almiraj from hungry pteradons and cut down a kamadan stalker before it could spring its ambush, clearing the approach to the plateau and setting the tone for a brutal sweep of the place.

Once atop Mbala, they found the ruins haunted less by ghosts than by predators. The group cleared out the pterafolk nest there, fighting through the full range of the creatures that had infested the plateau, including common raiders, elders, juveniles, and the more dangerous sky tyrants. What had once been a ruined refuge was turned into a battlefield, and by the time the fighting ended the pterafolk hold on Mbala had been broken. In the aftermath they uncovered the tomb of Mbala’s fallen king, from whose mummy they took the Rain Stick of Mbala. Syndra claimed the item, and it would eventually pass forward into the hands of the party in the present timeline.

The deeper truth of Mbala lay with Nanny Pu’pu. The crone they met there was no harmless witch doctor, but a green hag who had once been counted among the Sewn Sisters before being cast out for refusing to help Acererak build the Soulmonger. In Mbala she had remade herself as a false healer, only to devour the people she claimed to protect and lay a curse upon their king. Pu’pu bartered when it suited her, surrendering a rough location for Omu, but her hunger had not left her. She asked the legacy characters for blood and hair samples, pretending at ritual or medicine, but was caught trying to keep those pieces for herself in order to grow clones she could later consume.

That discovery turned the meeting into a fight. Pu’pu brought violence to bear through her magic and her servants, including a flesh golem and the flying monkeys that circled her domain, but the legacy party brought her down before her scheme could mature into something worse. During the battle Syndra managed an oddly gentle victory amid all the horror, taming one of the attacking flying monkeys and naming him Caesar. When Pu’pu fell, Phyrne came away with a Gift of Heroism potion, the Rain Stick was secured, and the path toward Omu became a little clearer. It was a flashback full of dead ends made useful and old evils finally dragged into the light, while the present-day party, still poring over their books, unknowingly benefited from what these doomed predecessors had won.

The group read about Mezroan history in the library within the Mezro crypt. The group recovered the Eye of Zaltek, which may in fact be the stone of another amulet. The group presented Dralma and Rin with a fake Eye, who divulged the location of Oralunga.

The group parted ways with Nerissa, traveling to Orolunga to learn more Chultan history from its guardian naga, Saja N’baza. The group explored the southwest ruins of Mezro and encountered a Red Wizard who called himself Fred, fighting a yuan-ti mageslayer. The group discovered the location of the buried pirate treasure and took its contents which included multiple tomes to improve one’s abilities.

Azaka informed the group Firefinger is nearby, and requested they help her retrieve a family heirloom stolen by the pterafolk who nest at its peak. Vogun proposed a study group to read the tomes before heading to Firefinger, holing up in the haunted Mezroan crypt library safety.

Travel through the jungle brought the campaign into a new phase and a new lineup. Along the way the party met Jewel, a young eladrin sorcerer driven by vengeance against Ras Nsi and by her own stake in ending the death curse. They revised their navigation plans, hired Azaka Stormfang as a guide, and began moving with more confidence through Chult’s wilderness, no longer treating the jungle as an abstract danger but as ground they meant to cross and survive.

The road to Mezro was marked by smaller threats and larger revelations. The group passed through Fort Beluarian to recover their dinosaurs, killed a troop of many-armed monkeys, saw the remains of Port Castigliar, and escorted Nerissa onward to Mezro. Once inside the Mezroan crypt they encountered the restless spirits of the original barae, including Oyai, and worked to put those spirits at ease rather than simply loot the place.

By the end of the session, the party had learned much more about Ras Nsi’s earlier life as a Bara of Mezro, the war with the Eshowe, and the madness that ended in his banishment. It was one of the campaign’s strongest lore sessions, and it reframed Ras Nsi from distant villain into fallen guardian, traitor, and relic of Chult’s broken sacred history.

The session opened in flight and desperation beneath the Temple of Tymora, where the party pushed through an underground passage with rescued townsfolk in tow while zombies pressed after them the whole way. The tunnels offered no real safety, only distance, and every step forward was bought with the knowledge that the dead were close behind. Father O’Flanigan eventually revealed a hidden passage leading back into the city proper, but there was a cruel condition to it: the way could only be sealed from the outside. He prepared to stay behind and die so the others could escape, but Betty refused to let him make that sacrifice. She stepped forward instead, ordered him onward, and held the passage alone while the rest of the group fled with the survivors and listened to her make her final stand against the horde until she was overwhelmed and destroyed.

The survivors moved on through more sewers, battered and carrying the weight of what had just happened. Along the way they fought off giant centipedes and encountered tortles connected to the smugglers’ network, an unexpected thread of the city’s underlife still functioning amid the collapse. Father O’Flanigan survived, and when the undead threatened to overrun what remained of their path, he called on divine power to turn them and even sent a water elemental against the pursuing zombies. Elsewhere in the chaos, not everyone could be saved. Taban had turned, and the party was forced to kill him in front of his son. Obasi, however, survived the night, one of the few small mercies in a session otherwise defined by loss.

When the party finally emerged through a sewer grate, they found themselves outside Fort Nyanzaru and stumbled straight into the next disaster. A yuan-ti prisoner was being taken into custody, and rather than break under capture, the creature mocked them for already being too late. The meaning became clear soon enough: a bomb had been planted inside the great statue of Ubtao in the harbor. The party rushed there and tried to defuse it, but the effort failed. Whether from lack of time, bad fortune, or the accumulated cost of every earlier delay, they could not stop what had been set in motion.

The explosion devastated Port Nyanzaru. Great sections of the harbor and surrounding districts were torn apart, and the dead mounted into mass casualties. Grandfather Zitembe perished in the destruction, along with many of the people the party had come to know across the city, while the merchant princes were largely spared by distance, their villas lying farther from the blast. The ruin cut especially deep because it did not feel inevitable. Had the people of Malar’s Throat not been stripped so badly of coin and means, more of them might have kept their weapons and joined the defense against the zombie invasion, buying the city precious time. Instead, the session ended in catastrophe: Betty dead in the tunnels, the city in flames, and the party left to face the terrible truth that they had not arrived in time.