The Temple of the Niffugcam

Question

An entry in Fortnightly Topic Challenge #39: Deep Down in the Dungeon 1

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The party has entered the legendary Temple of the Niffugcam to recover the legendary artifact, also named Niffugcam. After a few battles, the party reaches the very top of the temple, into a chamber with nine glowing pedestals in a straight line from left to right, numbered 1 to 9.

The party rolls fairly well on their Perception checks, and finds around the room eight objects. The eight objects are (in no particular order)

• Bow
• Leather Armor
• Fishing rod
• Trident
• Ice (2-foot cube, doesn't seem to melt)
• Rapier
• Orc tooth
• Eyepatch

After gathering these... odd objects, the party's rogue finds a small piece of parchment, which gives the riddle:

To claim the reason why you're here;

You are coming very near;

Just solve the riddle, place the eight;

Upon the pedestals 'fore it's too late.

The objects doing with the sea;

are each away, one four, one three;

the weapons that are in front of you;

one pause of three, one pause of two;

the places where these overlap;

come at the end for no mishap;

the ones whose letters total eight;

have one apart, that's shooting slate;

the one replacing pirate's sight;

spots the first letters of fight;

the part of the race not very nice;

comes to the right four after ice;

The first platform is what comes last;

the rest tell you which spell to cast.

How can the party put the eight objects on the nine pedestals and find the Niffugcam?

Answer 1

The spell to cast is probably

Firebolt, as an anagram of the initial letters

The order of things could be:

Empty, fishing rod, ice, rapier, eyepatch, bow, orc tooth, leather armor, trident.

My reasoning: Items to do with the sea:

Fishing rod, eyepatch, trident, spaced three and four apart

Weapons:

Trident, bow, rapier, spaced two and three apart. To the overlap is Trident, which comes at the end.

Combining so far, one possible order is:

sea item, space, weapon, sea item, weapon, space, space, trident

Considering four to the right of ice is part of race not nice:

Ice, 3 spaces, orc tooth

And eight letter words have a gap of one:

eyepatch, space, orc tooth or same reversed

Overlapping all of this information gives:

Sea item, ICE, weapon, EYEPATCH, weapon, ORC TOOTH, space, TRIDENT

first in this list is:

FISHING ROD, the only sea item left to place. The weapon between eyepatch and orc tooth could be BOW, based on the "shooting slate" (straight?) comment, putting RAPIER in the third spot. So far, we have F, I, R, E, B, O, ?, T

At this point:

First comes the last thing, and the rest tell you what to cast ... Cast FIREBOLT and the last thing is the empty column, so it's empty, F,I,R,E,B,O,L,T

Also, bonus points for the reversal of

Macguffin