The Temple Showdown

is the eleventh episode of the first season of Critical Role. Between this episode and the next story episode, a special aired on the intermediate Thursday.

Vox Machina finds itself in dire straits, about to take on a giant of some sort that they stumbled upon while scouting. After Vax'ildan is overpowered by its dreadful stench, a fight ensues, in which the giant is revealed to be a fomorian and is quickly subdued. Keyleth places a geas upon their foe, forcing him to fight for them in the battle against K'Varn. Everybody then rests, to prepare for their next big test:  the assault on K'Varn's temple. Who will survive this grueling battle?​

Previously on Critical Role
"The party of adventurers were tasked to locate an individual, a famed folk hero, a paladin of Bahamut named Lady Kima of Vord who, on a vision quest, went to search out and destroy a great evil that was germinating beneath the dwarven city of Kraghammer in the Cliffkeep Mountains. The party, upon delving beneath the city, discovered it breached into the Underdark and, following her trail, fought past duergar, ashy-skinned evil dwarves, past mind flayers, and various other terrifying denizens of the Underdark, eventually saving Lady Kima after weeks of her own torture, and discovering that some great evil named K'Varn had unified these normal enemy races: the duergar and the mind flayers, the illithid. Also finding that apparently this entity called K'Varn, this great and powerful entity which apparently had acquired an artifact known as the Horn of Orcus that adorns its head, that gives it some sort of power imbued by the dark god of undeath, Orcus himself.

''"The party then managed to find its way into a cavern where the illithid city, Yug'Voril, exists, and after a scry spell via Keyleth last episode, unveiled this entity K'Varn to be a dastardly beholder, an extremely dangerous aberration that currently holds the top of the temple in the city, a stranglehold on the mind flayer civilization. The party slowly encroaching the edge of the island, as the party was making their way up the shore, they found bits of the ruins that coat the entirety of the subterranean city. They found what looked like some sort of a large, stone, partially crumbled fighting pit, and as Vex, Vax and Scanlan were stealthing over, Scanlan himself invisible, had stealthed over to scout ahead, managed to find what looked like an encampment of some kind, a series of rags and furs, a very large living space for some sort of creature. Scanlan, failing his stealth roll, seemed to draw the attention of whatever entity lived there, which was an extremely tall, large, giant-like creature—malformed, kind of pale purplish-gray skin, one squinting eye and one bulging yellowish one—that was dragging something fleshy and bloody behind it. It turned towards the rest of the party, going to inspect what seemingly created this sound near its homestead."''