Due to some violent content, Barental discretion is advised. In the year two
hundred and forty seven, in the Age of Judges, Vartan was summoned home
after the death of his father. Upon his return, Vartan discovered something evil
fastering beneath the city of Eterno. With the help of some very unlikely allies,
Vartan works to uncover the mysteries of his hometown and put an end to
the nightmares that plague his people. Welcome to Ethereal Embrace, I'm Baya.
In last episode, Bastille was speaking rather impolitely to Priest Talmika. You know
who am I to judge on how people communicate with each other. They've spent
a lot of time together. And maybe I was a little too harsh on
Bastille, or maybe Bastille just needs to be slapped. Day one in the
Temple of the Twelve. In the box are two magic items. One is
a lamp and one is an old coin. Oh, this is actually my
grandpa's old call it coin. And she picks it up and flips it in
her hand, and she says, when any of us kids would argue or
fight over something, he would pull this out and say call it dungeon or
dragon. There's a dragon on one side of the coin, and there's a
picture of a dungeon on the other. And if you got it right,
so you call it while it's in the air. If you got it right,
everyone could just tell before they even saw it, because suddenly we could
articulate our point like we'd been studying the subject for decades, or we could
literally juggle the toy we were just fighting over like a professional. But if
you got it wrong, everyone could also tell, because you usually ended up
just falling flat into a gift left by one of the horses. Actually,
once cousin poked his own eye trying to grab a feather from a sister.
He had to wear an eyepad for a week. And this is actually a
coin called just called Grandpa's old call it coin. So twice per long rest,
you can replace a D twenty role with a coin flip if you call
it correctly critical success, if you call it incorrectly critical failure. I'm gonna
I'm gonna pick up this this odd stone lantern like it's it's obviously some kind
of lamp that has a that has a wick and looks like it holds oil
or something, but it's not shaped like a normal lantern that we would have.
I mean, obviously it's like a like a Moroccan oil lamp, or
like a Genie lamp. That's what it looks like. I wonder what this
thing is. I don't think I've seen that. I might have seen something
like this traveling around. It's definitely old. It's not like most lamps that
we have. Now. I wonder why she had it. I wonder what
it does. Buy a produces a small flame and holds it out. Would
you like me to light it? Well, it doesn't look like it has
oil in it right now, that doesn't matter. This is Tholmt's ergy.
Yeah, go ahead and light it. See what it does. Sure,
you light it, and the lamp begins to light up with the runs,
but then they fade away and fizzle out. It appears to need something else
to be able to fully activate m Were you able to get what some of
those rooms are saying? It was too quick? Oh? Sorry, I
was focusing on not burning myself. Yeah, and I appreciate you not burning
me too. I guess we'll I'll hold on to this one and then uh,
maybe we can figure out what it does. Sounds good, I don't.
I don't have any of my stuff on me now to put oil in
it. But I definitely got oil back at the house, so we'll have
to check it out at the house. Okay, Annie, that that's everything
that was in the chest and in the letter. Anything else you guys want
to do with Bastille or tell Mica or anywhere else, or want to go
home and get ready for dinner? Yeah, ready for dinner? All right?
You both go home. The first person to arrive is Emery, and
she gets to cook and right away, and she inquires about Baia helping her
in the kitchen because she heard that you like to cook. Yeah, I'd
love to. We're both we're both wearing aprons that say kiss the chef yes.
And then others start to arrive. Was there anything that you wanted to
do specifically in this dinner scene or just I think that I wanted to give
a space for Graystone to speak with Emery about what can be done about the
cave, give them those ideas on making it look like it's destroyed, and
then also offer tell Mika any help that she may need and a place to
stay if she'd like to stay here and then set up a date for Magno
and vartandus bar and give her the keys. Yeah, so we don't have
to role play through because that would be a lot of me talking. But
to tackle the first one's emery and Graystone chat through a way to cover up
the things. She does have a spell that will allow the trees to grow
over it and create bushes that'll go through that, and she can create or
give it a magic word to make the trees and brush part. Should you
guys want to gain access to the cave, so I will let you come
up with whatever you want that magic word to be, and that will be
the magic word that you can use later to gain access to the cave.
Irish wristwatch, Irish wrist watch. But you gotta say it five times real
fast, right, Yes, Magno is super excited. She brought a lot
of her belongings with her. She left him out in a trunk outside the
door. She does still have her horse in your stable as well, but
she left belongings out in the trunk and she's gonna head over to the house
right after dinner and after you know, having a couple drinks of wine,
and hanging out with you. She's pretty much open too spar at any time.
Obviously, it's gonna be a little bit busy once the Robin and the
doves get here at the end, and she's still gonna help out with Cody.
I can, I can light up the torches in the backyard and we
could spar. Yeah, yeah, yeah, put on a show for everyone
with your fur Bog's Justice warhammer. Yeah, crack open a couple bottles of
wine in the backyard, good old time. And then tell Mika. At
first is hesitant to take up your offer to stay, just because she's been
at the temple for so long, but honestly, she's feeling like a change
of pace is probably good right now, and being in the house with you
would be probably beneficial, so she accepts your offer to take one of the
spare bedrooms upstairs. All right, nice, this has been a most wonderful
dinner. Thank you Emory for cooking, Thank you tell Mika for bringing your
walnut bread. And you know, I just really appreciate each and every one
of you, and thank you for well giving me back so wholeheartedly as you
did. And let's make this a regular weekly thing. Well, said,
says Graystone, and he lifts his glass to cheers your speech. Cheers all
right, so everybody stays. You guys have a great time. You spar
you swap some books with Emery, you get your kitchen loaded up, and
you make a nice little cozy bed for tell Mica who spends the night,
and you call it a night. Our heroes will be right back after these
messages. Hello listeners. If you are enjoying the show and I would like
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So check out our Patreon at Patreon dot com forward slash Creative Typo.
I would also like to give a big shout out to our executive producer from
Patreon, Nick ned. Thank you Meade. We truly appreciate your support.
Now back to the town of Eternal in the middle of the night. You
hear a loud banging at the door. I'm gonna get up and go down
stairs. I'm gonna s I'm probably in bed, and you find brass Kane
there, And he says, Bartan, I, I know you're still recovering,
but would you be willing to come with me? There's something I I
need you to see. Yeah, yeah, let me uh, let me
get bia. I don't want to I don't want to wake up. Tell
Mikah, I'll be down. I'll be right back down in five seconds.
Oh okay, thank you. All right, I'm gonna go knock on biased
or be like, hey made me downstairs. Okay, And she gets stressed
and comes down, and I'm gonna rush back downstairs without being too loud to
wake up. Tell Mika, but yeah, five ten seconds, right back,
right back at brass Kane. All right, you're ready. What's going
on? About two hours ago, it appears the Briars were attacked and they
were murdered. Oh man, yeah, lead the way. Brass Cane leads
you through the city of Eterno to one of the properties that Kyrian had left
to Vartan. It was one of the houses that had people living in it.
Two guards stand outside the front door. Both appear to be disturbed and
sickened, likely from the scene inside the house. Brass Cane pats one of
them on the shoulder as he passes by, then makes his way into the
house. The house is one of the properties that is in the center of
the town, overlooking the market area. He says, it doesn't look like
when the demons were here. This looks like the work of humans. Monstrous,
horrible humans. I don't know anyone in Eternal that is capable of this,
and he leads you through the main living area down into a basement.
Before he opens the door, he pauses for a moment and looks at you
seriously and says, my friend, what you're about to see is a terrible,
horrible scene. I would not blame any person for feeling sick after this.
The brutality and horror beyond this door is inhumane. I wouldn't wish it
on the worst of my enemies, and I'm sorry that I have to show
you. Are you ready yeah? Brass Cane opens the door to a ghastly
scene. The briar couple was slain and their corpses were desecrated and left in
modeled positions. Their face are contorted in a way that exhibits the fear and
terror that they must have been feeling at the time of death. Their blood
was used to draw sigils on the floors, walls, and ceilings of the
basement. The symbols themselves are dark and chaotic and pain a narrative of horrible,
if not demonic things by You can now read these ruins, but go
ahead and make an Arcana check to see if you can identify what they do.
Okay, A fifteen does it. So. These ruins are poorly imitated
versions of the ancient Elvin runs from the Cave network. It's not the same
ruin expell that you saw down there, but many of the ruins are similar.
There is one specific rune that is repeated more often than the others.
It is the run for dissolution, ocean, dissipation, cessation, and destruction.
It's all the same run, but it means those four things depending on
context. The ruins are meant to serve as a poison or desecration to magic,
or a structure. The run is a circle surrounding a pointed shape.
The top half of the circle rests a rhombus with the bottom resting near the
center of the circle, and then splitting the rhombus into a line runs from
the center point where the one would be on a clock face down to the
center of the clock. And then finally a line breaks out of the rhombus
like a tail, running from the center of a part of the circle to
where the four would be on the face of a clock. Oh my heavens,
those poor people. They wrote the run that we saw in the case
all over the wall in their blood. Yeah. This is oh man,
Yeah, this is a lot. Why would someone do this? It had
it has to be someone who knows about the ruins in the cave. Yeah,
I means yeah, they m I guess we do need a list of
everybody that's been down there. Can I do a quick investigation check to see
if I see anything else? You absolutely can. You can too, Bartan,
if you'd like get an eleven, I would instead of an investigation for
me, I would like to do a perception because she's investigating the scene with
the run. I want to do a perception for or the entire room and
house kind of kind of deal. See if there's any funny business points of
entry, that kind of stuff. Okay, by it, you can tell
that the Briars were killed using a knife. You agree with brass Cane,
this does not match the demon attacks, but you're not sure as to the
positioning of their body what that would mean, or any more about the weapon
or how many attackers and what did you get Bartan twenty three For perception Vartan,
You've taken the entire scene of the basement, and this strikes you with
a very upsetting level of familiarity around the acts of cultists, the same type
of methods of how they would set up a scene, how they would kill
the people, how the room would look. So you assume it's definitely a
group of people based off your previous history and experiences. Would I recognize I
wouldn't. I wouldn't be able to recognize like any specific cultist group or anything
like that from how they went about it. No, I don't think there
would be enough for that. I would say that there are ties to the
cultist group that you are super familiar with, but not exact replication m but
you can see some familiarity with it. Okay, I'm gonna after looking around,
I'm gonna walk back over the brass Cane and Baia where Bias doing the
her her investigation. I will say this, Uh, this couldn't have been
done by one person. Uh, this was a group and I the signs
point to possible fanatical religious cult, a religious never seen anything like this from
It reminds me of a cult that I interacted with while I was out on
my journey. But uh, it is kind of sloppy too, so I'm
not exactly sure who could have done this, but it definitely was more than
one person. This is just heartbreaking. And the Briars, Why the Briars.
Obviously somebody's wanted to give us a message, I think, but we
hardly spoke to the Briars. Yeah, is far Tan? Is this house
one of the ones with the tunnels connected? Is this one that's got the
tunnels connected? This house is one of the houses that with the tunnels connected
to the basement. Okay, hmm, do we see that opening or anything?
Has it been used? Yeah, with that perception ship that you rolled,
I would I would definitely say yes, you you saw it. No,
it does not appear to have and used though, so you know,
it's kind of hidden the way the other tunnels have been tunnel entrances have been
and it does not appear to have been disturbed. HM. Can we get
out of this basement before I get sick? Thank you for listening to this
episode of Ethereal Embrace, a Creative Typo production. Vartian. The fur Ballfighter
is voiced and played by Adam Culbertson bay A Rustin. The Half Elf Sorcerer
is voiced and played by Tisha Brass. Cane is voice and played by Nick
Mead's Favorite Bourbon and I am Nico your GM. Please remember to drop us
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Remember be safe, we love you all, and stay foolish