Beast
Feast

The party meets in Elmore and receives their mission from Carot: descend into the Plover Caves and return with ghost scorpion venom. They ride the ramshackle elevator operated by Vinnie the Winch down into the Giantcap Grotto and immediately encounter three beetle creatures with rending claws and silk-fishing tactics. Juniper vaults the cavern walls with her boat hook; Mul fills the chamber with fiery tornados. The party harvests their first ingredients and pays Vinnie his toll in beetle leg.

The party explores Giantcap Grotto — a bioluminescent underground settlement run by a fungrile mayor named Malk — and picks up their first official job from Feldspar, a deep gnome grain processor whose root warden facility has a rat problem. The cranial rats are dog-sized, expose their glowing brains to the open air, and hit psychically. After defeating five of them (including the alpha), the party learns the settlement's runic wards are failing, monsters are escaping, and an ancient organization called The Riven is the only thing standing between the grotto and collapse. Feldspar offers them a feast.

The party is officially chartered by Mayor Malk as "Can I Eat a Fishman?" at Malk Manor. They spend the day gathering intel: Iron Tooth Marga sells them a Jasmine Reaches map for two handfuls of gold; Silviana Starweaver explains ghost scorpion anatomy and the need for phase lynx essence; Sarsaparilla Amarilla explains exactly how to process that essence. Then they cook. The Brain Dumpling Feast — rat brains, beetle egg, silk strands — produces a 44-point heal on double natural 20s. Full party recovery. Maximum hope. An absolute triumph.

The party travels north into the Ethereal Hunting Grounds, a region where reality thins and the phase lynx hunt across the boundary of worlds. They fight a female lynx first, then track the male back to its lair. The lair yields more than just essence: an ornate golden bracer and a mysterious leather-bound field journal bearing a watermark the party won't fully understand until Session 11. The phase flanks shimmer between solid and translucent on the cook-fire — a genuinely strange meal.

Returning from the Ethereal Hunting Grounds, Norin walks through a temporal anomaly and spends the next several minutes trapped in a six-second repeating loop — no memory of it afterward. Back in Giantcap Grotto, Sarsaparilla Amarilla vibrates with caffeinated enthusiasm as she guides the party through a four-phase alchemical process: Extraction → Stabilization → Refinement → Binding. Six doses of ghost touch elixir. In a brief encounter, the party glimpses Ward — a nine-foot Riven with obsidian talons inscribed with golden script — who has almost nothing to say but gifts Juniper a soccer-ball-sized stone spider familiar with a pulsing blue rune.

A gear-up session at Cortland's Trading Post, where the dwarf proprietor cheerfully admits he has no idea where anything is (his assistant Marble handles that at terrifying speed). Tortoise Fletcher, an ancient tortoise who crafts fungus-wood recurve bows strung with cave fisher filament, is available for custom orders. The party receives a warning about bandits in the Jasmine Reaches — Pesci the Cat and Stern Daniel the Infernus, leaving a trail of charred caravans. Ward's stone spider familiar, now warmly settled with Juniper, is ready for the road.

The party departs Giantcap Grotto and enters the Jasmine Reaches for the first time. The smell hits before the cavern opens up — jasmine, warm and disorienting, rising from fields of cave flowers. Ghost scorpions are active here, phasing in and out of visibility. The ghost touch elixir works. The hunt tracker begins to climb as the party scouts territory, identifies patrol routes, and learns the rhythms of the ghost scorpion population. Their reputation from Giantcap Grotto follows them — they know what they're doing now.

The party pushes further into the cave system, clearing scorpion territory and gathering intel on the alpha's range. The hunt is methodical now — each encounter deliberately chosen, each harvest carefully managed. They begin to notice the territorial markers left by the alpha: pheromone traces and environmental damage that doesn't match what Silviana Starweaver described. Something in these caves operates on a different scale.

The party descends into a cracked caldera with unstable ground, salty reddish pools, and the unmistakable smell of a brood nursery. Three ghost scorpion broodmothers wait inside, physically heavier than the smaller scorpions and harder to force into material form. When they die, hatchling swarms erupt from the fissures. Juniper fights in scorpion form, Kai tanks the swarms with Unstoppable, Norin pins enemies with sticky arrows. Juniper is driven to zero hit points and chooses unconsciousness over a scar — carried to safety and recovered at Brynna Stonefallow's Rocking Ranch, where the proprietor's gnomish prosthetic arm and no-nonsense demeanor are a welcome sight. Hunt tracker: 7 of 12.

The hunt continues. The party tracks the alpha across its patrol range — through the Echoing Ribcage, along the Plateau of Thin Veils' lower approaches. The hunt tracker continues to climb. Each encounter adds data: how the alpha phases, how long it remains material, where it returns. The Severance Institute journal from Session 4 starts to make more sense in retrospect, though none of them can read its technical notation yet. They are getting close.

The party finds it: Observation Post Delta, an abandoned research station bearing a compass rose with a doubled ouroboros as northern needle — the Severance Institute mark that matches the journal from Session 4. Inside, past brass scanning cylinders and a copper-tasting corridor, they find bunk rooms, a main lab, a vivisection room containing a standard ghost scorpion specimen. In the records alcove: a photograph of three researchers — Professor Marcus Kellan, Dr. Elena Voss, Researcher Finn Bridgewater. Kellan himself stands in the lab, mid-scream, frozen in a temporal loop he cannot escape. Mul's Mending Touch repairs the crystal relay array; the Bridgewater Field Log and Kellan's tablet fall out of the data. The alpha is P-7, Sigma-class. 400–600 kilograms. Full phase events lasting 2.3 seconds. And on the vivisection room wall, in someone's handwriting: "It doesn't eat flesh. It eats the time we have left." Hunt tracker: 13 of 12.

The Plateau of Thin Veils: a blasted mesa of branching lightning, afterimages, and floating globules of unreality where the alpha waits. The party springs their ambush — ghost touch oil on weapons, high ground, the full benefit of four sessions of preparation — and four brutal phases follow: initial ambush, phasing combat as the alpha vanishes and attacks echoes, shell break as Juniper's hyena-form teeth shatter its phase carapace, and second form as a living siege engine fully material and furious. Juniper is driven to the edge of death. Kai refuses to let it end there. Mul ruptures the damaged tail with a final spell as the plateau itself begins to fold into a rift. They run. Kai carries Juniper. Mul grabs the tail. All four make it out as reality collapses behind them. They walk the long road back through Giantcap Grotto — where familiar faces stare at the enormous severed tail — and emerge into Elmore's daylight after a week underground. Carot processes the alpha venom into a protective perimeter. During two weeks of downtime, Deputy Debbie Duggles arrives with a flyer for something called Aldous Morvain's Traveling Menagerie of Marvels. Juniper goes very still.