Leaving off from the last episode, the party decided that their wounded ranger would be better off getting healed back in town than in pressing on. So they headed back.
Around this time, also, Minston (who had not been seen since he was drugged by Kasarim slavers) awoke from his catatonic state back at the temple of Palaimon. He tried flirting with priestess Chariel, but as usual, she was having none of it.
She reminded him of the mission to map the route to the Spawning Pit. Around this time, most of the group arrived, and they were all reunited. Local rumors of the day included word of an orcish uprising to the west. Norcon encouraged a direct return to the Korrgard caves (probably because he was independently pursuing a mission in that direction). This would leave the orcs for another day.
(The orcs described were indeed Broken Skull tribe orcs that Tili had dealt with before).
So they headed towards the Korrgard caves again, and traced their way through the caves beyond where the troglodytes where.
Tangal had a henchman probe the way south, and uncovered a crude alarm trap based on a tripwire. Norcon quickly disarmed it. They continued on, and heard voices down a side passage.. but they decided that they should avoid battle for now.
They later ran across a sulfur mine cavern and a long cave where there was a pool filled with blind cave fish, and then back north until they reached the far side of the closed porticullis gate they had encountered weeks earlier. Tili-Teshub rejoined the group at this point.
They had come full circle, but so far avoided the center! This kicked off a bit of a debate about getting to lower levels of the dungeon, and a few different ideas were tossed out, and the map discussed. Finally the group backtracked to one of the caves adjoining the large central cavern, and identified the lever that operated one of the porticullises. (But didn't pull it).
They moved forward into the large central cave and identified the frog caves from earlier. Some of them considered collecting one of the poisonous frogs as either an oddity or to seel to the apothecary, but decided they didn't have the right equipment for it.
They backed out again, and headed towards where they heard the voices, and found themselves suddenly facing the hobgoblin garrison (camped at a cave shrine dedicated to Mgalubiyet) on this level!
There was an immediate large pitched battle between the party and a large group of 11 disciplined hobgoblin fighters. The battle went well-- some hirelings were pulled back from the front lines, and Minston at one point was caught between a pair of tough hobgoblin adversaries. He survived (barely), and the hobgoblins were defeated.
The group picked through the Maglubiyet shrine and the bodies of the fallen, and collected a decent haul of copper and electrum coins.
(...to be continued)