by Count Mohawk » November 24th, 2019, 1:40 am
It's not too difficult to construct a narrative line that makes the chain of events in Quests 5 and 6 make sense:
The Heroes get to the gate of Bellthor at the end of Quest 5 and are summarily unprepared for the Gargoyle's poison-gas explosion trap, so they get knocked out.
The Witch Lord finds them a little while later and has his minions lock up the Heroes in the jail cells of his coliseum. To his dismay (but probably not his surprise), the Spirit Blade is among their weapons. Bummer! Welp, better make a note to hide that thing away again at some point in the near future. Anyway, the Heroes need to be killed off first before he can leave his lair; it's generally a bad idea to let your enemies capture your base of operations while you're out taking care of other things.
So the Barbarian and the Elf get dragged out to be fed to the Witch Lord's coliseum lions, or whatever horrible monsters he has on the box art for the Quest Pack. Unfortunately for him, Mentor intervenes at that moment, freeing the other two prisoners and letting them get the jump on some of his guards. At this point, the Witch Lord has two options: stay and fight, or run away to his Court. The problem with staying and fighting is that the Spirit Blade is either in the Dwarf's hands or in the chest containing all of the Barbarian and Elf's weapons, so if he stays he's likely to be cut down, particularly since all he has for minions at that point is a dozen skeletons and two Doomguards. So running it is.