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Out of the Cultist Sanctums

Last week, the party chased after the two Sages who inadvertently opened a Gate in front of them. Cayosin knocked one of them out with a well-placed bolt, but the other escaped. The party took their captive Sage, bound him, and woke him up to interrogate him for information. He quickly proved helpful, and explained the riddle of the Gates1. He revealed that there were actually six different Sanctums, and each had a different Obelisk that controlled the minds of the involuntary cultists stationed there. The party pressed him for information about how to escape, and he said that the only escape was through the Elder Sanctum, occupied by the Elder Sage. The Elder Sanctum could only be accessed through the Obelisk Room, where the Obelisk of Control is.

Now that the party finally had a path to escape, they prepared to enter the Elder Sanctum. Lester, Ione, and the captive Sage performed a Ritual of Obelisk Warding on everyone in the party, preventing their minds from being controlled by the obelisk associated with the Sanctum they started with. They also rested overnight to ensure that they were ready for whatever the Elder Sage could throw at them.

The next morning, the party activated the Gate to travel to the Obelisk Room. They saw the remains of a broken obelisk, surrounded by murals on the walls2. The murals indicated the proper arrangement of the orbs to reach the Elder Sanctum, which the party navigated easily with the Sage's help. Before passing through the Gate, they stuffed the Sage into their Bag of Holding.

The Elder Sanctum proved to be a large room surrounded by a mass of books. It was populated by a robed figure and two massive, magically caged demons. The robed figure grinned as they entered and introduced himself as the Elder Sage. The party demanded to be freed, and to their surprise, he agreed. He dismissed their actions so far as "irrelevant", and warned them that their souls were all forfeit to Demogorgon because of their activities as cultists, so they would be severely punished in unspecified ways for opposing the will of Demogorgon or revealing the underground Sanctums. With that warning, he opened a Gate3 to the surface. The party looked out through the Gate and saw that it led to somewhere high on a massive mountain. Most of the party stepped through immediately. However, Lester the Jester stealthily cast a spell to break the magical prison holding one of the demons in place. The demon roared and charged the Elder Sage, who sputtered curses as Lester jumped through the portal before it could close. On the mountain, the party gathered their wits and set off quickly down the mountain path, fearing what might follow after them. Before long, they heard a voice from up ahead greeting them in modern Dwarven...

  1. The solution to the first riddle was that the Gate needed four orbs placed in a rectangle around the central pedestal. The center orb indicated the destination, which corresponded to any one of the six different Gates: orb 1 led to Gate 1, and so on. For the outer orbs, each pair of diagonally opposite orbs had to sum to the same value. Optionally, the seventh and eighth orbs could be placed on the top and bottom pedestals. If they were placed there, demons would not be summoned using the Gate, even if the math was incorrect with the other orbs.
    The solution to the second riddle was that the numbers on the orbs needed to form an obelisk: 1 and 2 on the bottom, 3 and 4 in the middle, and 6 or 8 on top. The seventh stone indicated the destination, and belonged in the center.
  2. The murals, in clockwise order, were as follows:
    A bloody sacrificial altar, wilting flowers under a grinning demon face in the sky, boiling oceans, the sun setting on a ruined landscape, an mass of humans fleeing from a demon, cultists performing a ritual around a hoard with an unusual number of amethysts, and grassy fields with an ominous tower in the background.
    This corresponded to the order "red, indigo, blue, orange, yellow, violet, green", with the plain grey eighth stone in the center as the destination.
  3. The manner in which he arranged the orbs to open the Gate was hard to see, but seemed impossible to replicate.

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Cayosin Ione Lester Shanky Craggles Everyone
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