This summary sounds a bit different than my usual summaries. The intro to last session explains why. I believe only 2 more will be written this way before we get back to my usual writeups. (although the audio is not returning)

The Story

Time elapsed so far in campaign at start of this adventure: 98 days

Summary

Session Recap: The Ashen Claw Heist

Party: Storm, Valerie, and Beatrice (with a scorpion friend along for the ride) — GM’d by Eric

Fresh off hauling a haunted Viking longship back to town, the party barely had time to catch their breath before a new problem came scurrying up to them — literally. A ratatosk named Chitata Sharp-Eyes, all silver fur and urgency, begged for their help and led them a few miles out to a humble seedling of the World Tree. One step through, and the party found themselves standing in the branches of Yggrasil itself.

An Audience at the World Tree

Ushered into a wood-walled office sized for someone considerably smaller than a tiefling or a dragonborn, the party met Tip-Top Silverleaf, commander of the Guardians of the Tree. His news was grim: a rogue ratatosk named Kurech — dubbed “the Hollow Thief” — had stolen a golden acorn capable of corrupting the World Tree itself, and fled with it to the Ashen Claw, the infernal summer palace of a devil lord named Arzenda. If the acorn reached her hands, the consequences would ripple across every world in the labyrinth.

Silverleaf’s plan: disguise the party as tiefling servants, smuggle them into the palace using magical planar wingsuits, and have them infiltrate the vault before Lord Arzenda arrived to claim her prize. In exchange, each of them would earn an uncommon magic item from the Guardians’ treasury. The party, naturally, spent a solid ten minutes interrogating the plan for holes — could they just steal the acorn and bury it? Eat it? (“It’s the size of a melon. You’d break your teeth.”) Eventually, wingsuits were issued, tails were discussed at length (Storm cut an actual hole in his suit rather than risk it not fitting), and the countdown began.

The Drop

The jump off Yggrasil’s branches sent the party rocketing toward the greater hell of Ty Versarach, a nightmare landscape of brimstone forests, lava-choked ravines, and a black palace shaped like an upturned claw. Valerie and Beatrice stuck the landing beautifully, timing their command word perfectly and touching down with style points to spare. Storm was not so lucky — distracted mid-fall, he called out the command word a beat too late and slammed into the ground hard enough to rattle teeth, narrowly avoiding a much worse fate.

Bruised but alive, the party regrouped on the rooftop of the servants’ tower, changed into stolen uniforms, and slipped into the daily grind of palace life — right as a briefing summoned all staff downstairs. There they got their first taste of the household hierarchy: Sir Equator the major domo, and Chef Vencina, a sharp-tongued tiefling running the kitchen like her own personal war room. Assigned menial chores (dusting a trophy room, mopping blood off the recreation chamber floor, and “reminding the vermin” in a guest tower that their room needed cleaning), the party — never ones to follow instructions when wandering aimlessly was on the table — decided to stick together and explore instead.

Palace Intrigue

Sneaking around the Ashen Claw turned up a rogues’ gallery of infernal set dressing: a blood-splattered game room full of mounted monster heads, a grand hall with a banquet table set for a queen who hadn’t arrived yet, and a guard common room where the party got summarily — and rudely — kicked out for asking too many questions about what a “common room” even was.

The real find was the library, where rows of humanoids lay on the floor, minds hollowed out and repurposed as living audiobooks written in Infernal. There they met Sir Equator properly, and he had a grievance to air: he was convinced Chef Vencina was sabotaging him to steal his position as major domo. Storm turned on the charm (a natural six was more than enough against Equator’s low bar) and talked him into helping locate the acorn’s vault — for a price. Equator wanted the chef dead, and handed over a single-charge Wand of Silence to make it happen quietly, demanding proof in the form of her blood.

After some genuine hand-wringing about murdering an NPC in cold blood, the party made their choice. Beatrice landed a clean, silent kill with a 24 to hit, and the group carried the evidence back to Equator. True to his word, he gave up the vault’s location and the escape route through Lord Arzenda’s private chambers — then washed his hands of them entirely.

The Vault

The vault door was no simple lock: a bloodstained handprint set into adamantine, ringed by eight gemstone spheres — opal, citrine, diamond, emerald, mercury, ruby, quartz, and sapphire — and a rotating lens that revealed hidden properties (nothing, fire, or lightning) when aimed at each stone. Valerie paid the blood price to activate the mechanism, and after some trial, error, and a surprisingly solid deduction chain (ruby for fire, diamond for raw force, quartz for lightning, because quartz watches), the party cracked the puzzle without triggering a single trap.

Inside: fifteen diamonds worth 1,500 gold combined, a rope of climbing, a wand of wonder, a mysterious ring of the Flame Keeper — and, finally, the golden acorn itself.

That’s when Lord Arzenda’s voice rang out through the chamber. She’d been tracking the blood used to open the vault the entire time, and now every guard in the palace was being called to seal the doors and hunt the thieves down.

Escape Through the Ashen Claw

With the alarm raised, the party bolted for the guest towers, ziplined across to Lord Arzenda’s actual bedchamber (everyone nailed the acrobatics check), and found themselves face to face with a very ornate statue of a serene, cleric-robed woman. Valerie’s sharp eyes spotted a hidden trapdoor beneath it, and a well-placed press of a jeweled ornament on the statue’s head opened it silently, dropping into a tunnel that spat them out in the infernal woods beyond the palace walls.

They weren’t in the clear yet. Demon horns sounded behind them, and Kurech — the ratatosk thief who’d started this whole mess — ambushed the party from a tree branch, demanding the acorn back “or die.” Turns out he’d been planning to trade it to Lord Arzenda all along.

The fight that followed was chaotic: Storm blasted the area with shatter (twice, the second time carefully spending a sorcery point to spare the scorpion), Beatrice’s axe-scorpion companion darted in for stabs, and Kurech answered with an earsplitting psychic “chitter” attack that rattled Storm and Beatrice for solid chunks of damage. Reinforcements — a pair of devils and an imp — poured out of the tunnel behind them, and for a moment it looked like the getaway might not hold. Valerie took a nasty psychic hit of her own but scraped through on a clutch charisma save, burning luck points to stay standing.

In the end, survival mattered more than vengeance. The party disengaged, sprinted the rest of the way to the extraction point, and activated the signal tile with the acorn still in hand. The portal opened, and Ty Versarach’s demons were left grasping at nothing but brimstone smoke.

Victory

Back at the World Tree, the party delivered the golden acorn safely into the Guardians’ hands. Tip-Top Silverleaf’s promised magic item rewards are still to be sorted out — but for one afternoon in hell, infiltration, blackmail, a gemstone puzzle, and a very sticky landing all paid off.

Running total: one chef down, one acorn recovered, and Storm still owes his tail a formal apology.

GM Notes

My favorite thing this time was the party being disguised as tieflings, but Scarlett was already playing one.

• Tales-of-the-Valiant