OMG! The players in my game utterly trashed the grikkitogs!
Once they realized what the monsters could do, retreating back to the basement once after a brief skirmish, they used their reflection of water resonant reflection to flood the grikkitog's cavern AND outer hallway.
This forced the monsters to either hide in stone (there is no indication they can breath while earthgliding) or come out of their implantation and face the heroes more directly.
In the end one was reduced to 10 hit points and drowned. The other was grappled and held in the water, thrashing wildly until it too drowned.
Did anyone else find the missing aeon orb to be odd? I haven't finished Books 5 or 6 yet, just poked around. Is there any significance to the aeon orb being brought to Absalom? I'm not really understanding why the cult would have taken the orb in the first place if their stated goal was to try and heal the Welt.
It's not explained in this book what they're doing with it in Absalom. The Lost Omens Absalom book briefly mentions where it is, but nothing else really. I honestly don't know what is going on with it. The group still left behind are an offshoot of the main group that took the orb who seemed to disagree with that and are now trying to undo the damage.
And yes, it's very weird. It's a core problem with book 5: the PCs have to trust this group telling them that "our allies moved the orb and created this problem, and we're not going to help you go visit it even though all you need is the resonant reflection. So instead, travel to the Darklands and go get the resonant reflection of a totally unrelated orb (and if you can steal it for us that'd be great)."
There are several problems there:
1. The PCs need to trust NPCs that are blocking the obvious solution and instead take a much more convoluted and far more dangerous one.
2. Aroden never empowered the orb that is still down there: its the one he left behind with the idea that it would manage to sustain the ecology (which it didn't). So it's not clear why that one even has any of his power to impart a resonant reflection or is linked to a network it wasn't linked to in the first place.
3. Fixing the welt itself seems to imply that actually taking the orb is necessary, which is effectively repeating Aroden's crime. GMs that want to avoid this have to go out of their way to state that the reflection itself is enough and that when the network is restored the welt will start healing (which may or may not be true canonically, but you can make it true in your game).
Book 5 itself is good once you get into the vault of the black sands. It's got a lot of interesting things going on and some real neat flavour. My players enjoyed it once they got there, but getting started on it was a real issue because they balked at the whole premise given the far more obvious solution that the NPCs were blocking.
I offered to rewrite the whole book if they wanted to go the other way, but they felt bad about making me do that. The good news is that once they got over that hump, they had a great time in the book itself.
The Empty Stones NPCs are written as telling the group they don’t know where the aeon orb taken by the splinter group is located. I was planning on an alternative side-trek to Absalom if they pushed the issue. However, they took the NPCs at face value and plunged into the Black Desert. Like Tridus’ group, mine enjoyed the change from what has been a very xulgath-focused campaign up until this point.