Recap: "Do you think this is a load-bearing pile of bodies?"

We took our newly-gained demonic knowledge and moved farther into the Well of Demons, where we next encountered a trio of spirits. They claimed to be adventurers of song and legend, testing us to see if we were worthy to destroy the champion of Baphomet, but they were actually a group of annoying fuckbags, who wanted us to flex a bunch and tell them stories about how we help old ladies cross the street. Alaric gave them the spiritual finger, but not before they told us a bit about the area in exchange for all our posing and rhythmic gymnastics. There were four items we needed to find, one of which we already had, and when all four were simultaneously placed on four runed circles, the champion would appear.

Setting out in search of the items, we discovered a room which ended in a curtain. On the other side of the curtain was a long hallway filled with mirrored pillars that complled people to look at them, as Alaric discovered when he stepped through, looked in a mirror and was teleported to a small room with no exits containing an angry gnoll who wasn't long for this world. He was joined there soon by Brynn, then Bakun, and finally Finjaq. Meanwhile, the party had been doing some experimenting, finding another curtained area around the corner via another teleporting mirror. In this new area was an altar with a palmprint recessed in it, as well as the item we needed. As angry skeletons attacked him, Quij desperately slammed his hand into the palmprint, bringing everyone back to the first curtained area again. In Alaric's haste to save Quij, he teleported to him and stupidly tore down the second curtain, setting off a chain reaction of teleports that just made getting out an enormous pain in the ass. Eventually, though, the party made it out with the item, a mask.

We then tried to rest, which didn't go so well as a Bar-Lgura appeared from space in our camp. We killed it, and our second rest attempt went better. The next room was filled with a lake of blood, and had two enormous statues holding chains on either side of it. We could see the two pieces of the item we needed, a dagger, on the other side, but were pretty sure that the statues would turn into whirling death machines if we just tried to take them, so Alaric knocked the door down to use as a raft and Finjaq jumped over to a statue to disarm it. It was at this point that all hell broke loose, as the statues did what we expected, except they knocked Finjaq into the blood (which turned out to be poisonous), and three carnage demons came out, all gory and gross. We beat the closest statue to rubble so we'd have a place to stand and so it would stop knocking us into the damn blood, then fought the demons, which were a pain in the ass. Finjaq almost died after being dragged underneath the blood, despite two weak attempts by Alaric to pull him up, but Bakun was able to heal him. Finally, we killed the demons, destroyed the other statue from range, boated over to the dagger on the door, used magic to pick them up, and got the fuck out of there.

The worst was yet to come, however. The last room looked fine- just a room with a bunch of pillars made of stacked, writhing, wailing corpses, no biggie- but when we went in, six carnage demons came out of the pillars and a Bar-Lgura appeared. A serious fight was on, with Alaric drawing the attention of nearly all the demons, while everyone just tried to kill them as quick as possible. Meanwhile, the pillars did weird shit to everyone like grab them, spit acid, throw them around, and more. Bakun made a run for the item, a bell, and the Bar-Lgura went after him, sticking its boot up his ass. When he picked the bell up it shot spikes through his hand, nearly killing him, and he ran for his life back to the rest of us, chased by the big demon. It was at this point, as Alaric was surrounded by demons, barely holding on due to his high AC and HP, that Bakun figured he'd ring the bell and, you know, see what happened.

What happened was everyone went berserk, making them much easier to hit and also do more damage, so suddenly every demon could hit Alaric easily and tear him a new asshole. "I'm bloodied... and I'm pissed!" was the paladin's statement as he dropped from near-max health to 15 in one round. Thankfully, attrition also kicked in around then, as demons started to drop, and some desperate healing and last-minute heroics managed to keep everyone alive long enough to see them all dead. Finally, we have all four items, and it's time to kick some Baphomet ass.

MVPC: Alaric, for his mad tanking skillz.