Note that the same campaign had been running for a couple years before they started filming; the entire party is around level eight at the start of the series and has just come off a six-month in-universe break.
Episode 1 is the introduction to the whole shebang. Vox Machina, a group of adventurers, have been sent to the dwarven city of Kraghammer by their good friend Allura, in search of her old friend, a paladin of Bahamut named Lady Kima of Vord, who’s gone missing in her pursuit of a dark evil underneath the city. The party manages to make their way to the mithral mines under the city, where they fight off a horrible stitched-together naga creature that surges up from the mines (Scanlan deals his first-ever killing blow and is as startled as anyone).
Episode 2 is the start of the venture into the mines and, eventually, the Underdark. The party gets Nostoc Greyspine, owner of the mine, to agree to let them travel in and deal with the monster problem (and find Kima). They fight their way through a couple of umber hulks and wind up getting ambushed by a series of duergar and an intellect devourer, which renders Grog catatonic by reducing his intelligence to zero.
Episode 3 is where the plot starts to thicken. The party manages to revive Grog, and proceeds into an abandoned goblin city, where they find several goblin corpses with holes bored through their skulls. They also find a long bridge across a chasm, and some of the party sneaks across; an invisible Scanlan investigates what turns out to be a duergar war camp. There, he watches a dwarf get executed by an illithid, a mind-flayer (think of a psychic tentacle-mouthed creature that eats brains). He returns to the rest of the party, and they decide to create some illusory terrain to make it look like the war camp’s side of the cliff extends out further than it really does. Vax and Tiberius bait the war camp into charging, whereupon a lot of their forces charge right over the cliff… but the illithid makes an appearance and stuns Vax just as he’s trying to cross the chasm on the party’s flying carpet. He nearly falls to his death, but Tiberius rescues him. There’s some debate in the party and it’s eventually decided that they won’t bother exploring the lava- and water-filled tunnels down in the cavern, but Vex and Keyleth decide hey, fuck it, and steal the magic carpet to go down and investigate for themselves. There, they find a mindflayer named Clarota, who has apparently been exiled from his home for his arcane ability. Through some careful diplomacy, the party manages to secure him as an ally in return for the promise to help him free his people from something that’s been controlling them.
Episode 4 is another glorious plan going into action. Vex’s bear Trinket is left behind on the other side of the chasm as the party (plus Clarota, whom they immediately dub “Clarence”) stealths to the roof of the war camp’s main barracks, where an invisible Scanlan flings a bucket of goblin feces into the face of the illithid they find there and an invisible Vax manages to kill it before it can attack. A large battle ensues between VM and the duergar, which is interrupted by the arrival of a burrowing bulette. Percy gets his arm bitten by the bulette and responds by firing into its mouth. The party manages to finish the battle, and the duergar general is on his knees before them.
Episode 5 is an escape gone wrong. The party interrogates the general before Clarota kills him by sucking out his brain. The warcamp, however, works out that they’re under attack, and the party starts to flee to the other side of the camp. Keyleth, in the form of a giant eagle carrying the gnomes, is shot down, and after some tricky maneuvering with an overburdened magic carpet, the rest of the party manages to slow their fall to a still-painful crash-landing, barely managing to survive and escape into the tunnels behind the camp. After some fighting within the tunnels, the party follows a tunnel that loops around back to the chasm and manages to retrieve Trinket.
Episode 6 is a successful rescue mission. The party finds their way to the Emberhold, a duergar fortress, and manages to break in and find Lady Kima in a torture chamber beneath it. They get her out of there, and she is immediately wary of and at odds with Clarota. The party, having alerted the fortress to their presence, continues to creep through its corridors toward the throne room.
Episode 7 is an escape gone wrong. The party attacks the throne room at the top of the Emberhold, causing some confusion by having Tiberius pose as a deity atop Keyleth in giant scorpion form (as you do). There, after a hard fight in which Tiberius and Kima are turned to stone and Scanlan manages to kill King Murghol of the duergar, Queen Ulara disintegrates part of the roof and lets magma flow into the throne room, securing her enough time to grab a charmed Grog and escape with him. The party barely manages to get out in time; Vax falls unconscious and his foot is submerged in lava and seriously damaged before the party manages to pull him out.
Episode 8 is the quest to find Grog. Tiberius and Kima are restored post-battle, and Vax is partly healed. The party follows Vex’s Hunter’s Mark on Queen Ulara and finds a field of shattered bone and glass, having to traverse it carefully (anyone standing still gets sucked beneath its surface) while fighting off a horrifically fast-moving monstrosity that seems part-elven, part-tentacle-monster. Trinket is nearly killed, but the monster is eventually defeated, and the party finds Ulara’s camp, where Grog is bolted by iron bands to a cart.
Episode 9 is the discovery of the name of the enemy. After rescuing Grog, the party starts to interrogate Ulara, and discovers that some monstrosity named K'Varn has been uniting the duergar and the illithid to fight for some nefarious and unknown purpose; K'Varn is in a temple in the center of the subterranean illithid city of Yug'voril. At that point, Ulara starts bleeding from her eyes and speaks to them as K'Varn, who delightedly invites them to come visit him; Ulara immediately dies. The party makes their way into a cavern that contains the island where Yug'voril is located, and they manage to scavenge some broken boats and run into some zombies along the way.
Episode 10 is the approach on Yug'voril. The party discovers that K'Varn has acquired an artifact known as the Horn of Orcus, which gives him power from the god of undeath, Orcus, himself. Keyleth attempts a very dangerous scrying spell and discovers that K'Varn is a beholder and is keeping a strangehold on the illithid using some sort of control device on the top of a ziggurat temple in the city. A couple members of the party wind up in a confrontation with a Fomorian giant on the approach to the island.
Episode 11 is the showdown with K'Varn. Keyleth casts Geas on the Fomorian and gets him to agree to help them out, whereupon he’s Polymorphed into a mouse. The party flies over the city on their flying carpet, weakens the support structures holding up the mind-control device, and drops the Fomorian onto it from a great height. A long battle with K'Varn ensues, in which Grog is killed and successfully Revivified by Pike, and Kima is turned to stone again. Vex kills K'Varn, but he revives and continues to attack them in his zombified form. Tiberius finally manages to kill K'Varn again and wrench the Horn of Orcus from his head.
Episode 12 is an interlude in which Matt gives a lecture on how to play D&D and runs an entirely improvised game for guests Ify, Zac, and Dan, who create their characters on the spot with help from the CR cast. The Good, The Bad, and The Nubbly, as they are dubbed, go through an entertaining adventure that involves, in a very roundabout way, saving a town from a corruption on the land.
Episode 13 is the return to the story. The party’s in the immediate aftermath of the battle with K'Varn, and the Elder Brain of the illithid is starting to wake up. A series of mindflayers come into the temple, and Clarota joins them and turns on the party. After Percy kills Clarota, everyone barely manages to escape alive, and flees to a beach where Tiberius draws a teleportation circle and manages to transport everyone back to the Alabaster Lyceum in Emon. After a how-are-we-alive pubcrawl (with Kima still in stone), the party returns to their keep, Greyskull Keep, and debates what to do–several members of the party are suspicious of Kima’s desire to bring the Horn of Orcus back to Emon. They decide to un-stone her and pretend they didn’t manage to retrieve it, just to see how she reacts, and when she expresses disappointment that her Order of Bahamut won’t be able to seal the Horn away safely for eternity, they decide that sounds reasonable and reveal that they have it.
Episode 14 is downtime and planning. The party brings Kima to see Allura, who is overjoyed to see her again, and then everyone meets with the Council of Tal'dorei (VM became members after saving Sovereign Uriel’s family pre-stream, and Allura is also a member) to decide that the best option for the Horn of Orcus is to transport it via airship to the holy city of Vasselheim and seal it away. Sovereign Uriel, in passing, mentions sending a note to Lord and Lady Briarwood, and Percy immediately takes notice: these are the individuals who murdered his family and took over his castle. He very subtly asks to be informed of any information relating to the Briarwoods moving forward. There’s a bit of a wait before transportation to Vasselheim can be arranged, so the party goes on a shopping spree to Gilmore’s Glorious Goods, their favorite shop in Emon. Gilmore spends some time on a long walk, catching up with Vax. Finally, having purchased a bunch of stuff, the party decides who gets what.
Episode 15 is the start of the voyage to Vasselheim. Kima joins the group on their voyage, returning to the Order of Bahamut in Vasselheim. En route, on the airship Deera helmed by Captain Damon, the party is attacked by griffon- and wyvern-riding bandits and manages to fend them off. In the process, Keyleth turns a wyvern into a bunny rabbit and it plummets to its death; Keyleth is also thrown overboard, but Wildshapes into an air elemental and flies back to safety. One of the pirates, a halfling named Teera, is spared by the party and is currently being held in the airship’s prison, with the possibility of her joining the crew if she can prove herself later on.
Episode 16 is the arrival in Vasselheim. The party arrives and, with the help of Scalebearers of the temple of Bahamut, manages to fend off some of the accidentally triggered formidable defenses of the sanctuary, seal the Horn, and just barely manages to escape as the defenses start up again behind them. The party begins to explore Vasselheim, which is a city that has a substantial presence of many of the gods, where they hear of a long-lost temple of Sarenrae that is being raised in the city. Pike reluctantly agrees to stay and help work on the temple, and the party has a tearful goodbye.
Episode 17 is some downtime in Vasselheim. Scanlan… wow, there’s just no easy way to say this. Scanlan takes a shit on the floor of the temple of Sarenrae because he took a potion that means he can scry through his bodily excretions. Dungeons and Dragons. Anyway, they now have a way to look in on Pike and make sure she’s okay. The party heads out into Vasselheim, where Grog gets into a pit fight with Kern the Hammer in the Crucible… and just barely loses, sulking miserably. The party then hears a commotion at the gates of the city and pursues a hydra into the woods. They manage to kill it, but in the process a different adventuring party led by an abrasive man named Aldor charges in and demands to know what they think they’re doing, killing a monster without being contracted to do so. The party is brought before the city’s monster-slaying guild, the Slayer’s Take, who have a monopoly on contracted monster-hunting in the city and its environs. In return for interfering with a contract, Huntmaster Vanessa Cyndrial explains that the party can either face legal repercussions… or join them guild themselves. They opt for the latter option, and are split into two groups, each one traveling with one other hopeful and led by a current guild member, to slay monsters. The twins are furious at being separated, but Grog bodily takes Vax out of the room to prevent things from escalating.
Episode 18 is the start of the Trial of the Take. The first group consists of Grog, Vex, Scanlan, and Percy, and they head over to the guild hall, where they meet their companions for this journey: one fellow hopeful, a charming tiefling warlock named Zahra Hydris, and one current member (by technicality) to lead them, a bookish human wizard named Lyra. Their quarry? An adult white dragon. They manage to use both social and magical means to work out where the dragon is hiding and set out on horseback. As they camp for the night, they’re attacked by a series of orcs and orcish creatures… and completely destroy them. Percy in particular rolls nat-20 after nat-20 while wearing pyjamas with a buttflap. (“The buttflap is down. The buttflap is down.”) The party sets off, with a great deal of help from Vex’s expertise in this terrain, to the mountain where the dragon is located in the midst of a giant blizzard, and Vex is knocked off her horse and badly wounded when a pair of frost giants come stalking out of the woods and start hucking boulders at them.
Episode 19 is the end of the first part of the Trial of the Take. The group manages to whittle down the giants’ health, and finally Zahra is able to use magical means to convince them to fight the dragon (revealed to be named Rimefang) along with them; the dragon has been destroying the frost giants’ civilization for years. Encountering a few traps along the way, the party finally enters Rimefang’s lair, and even with the giants’ help they barely make it out alive; Scanlan and Percy both very nearly die in the battle, and Grog winds up playing medic almost more than he fights. But the party is victorious and returns, shaken and battered, to Vasselheim with the spoils of their mission.
Episode 20 is the start of the second part of the Trial of the Take. The second group consists of Vax, Tiberius, and Keyleth. They spend a bit of time preparing before heading to the guild hall, during which Vax makes a deal with a hag. The group meets the rest of their party: one fellow hopeful, a taciturn and sarcastic human cleric named Kashaw Vesh, and one current member to lead them, an *extremely* taciturn and weirdly unlucky dwarf named Thorbir (Wil Wheaton rolls a mathematically improbable series of natural ones). Their quarry? A rakshasa named Hotis, a shapeshifting demonic entity from the Nine Hells. The party discovers that Hotis has been masquerading as the assistant to the owner of the Velvet Cabaret in town. The party forces him to reveal himself, and follows him as he flees into a long series of trap- and monster-riddled tunnels under the Velvet Cabaret.
Episode 21 is the end of the Trial of the Take. The party, still in pursuit of Hotis through the series of underground traps and enemies (Keyleth nearly dies in one of the battles), comes across a pit of acid and attempts to traverse it on the flying carpet. Unfortunately, the carpet passes a magical rune that activates and dispels the enchantment on the carpet, which promptly plunges into acid. The group manages to retrieve and mend the carpet… but it is now just a mundane carpet. When they finally catch up with Hotis, Tiberius prevents him from making another escape, and Hotis looks at each of them and threatens their families and loved ones very specifically. Vax slits Hotis’s throat (“Talk about my sister again…”) and the group brings back their trophies to the guild hall to fulfill the contract. Kashaw abruptly kisses Keyleth right before the group splits up.
Episode 22 is an interlude for Keyleth’s backstory. The party reunites (including an emotional hug between the twins) and go over the events of the past few days. Vex is furious at the loss of the carpet, but for the most part everyone’s just relieved that they all survived. Vanessa brings them down to meet Osysa, the gynosphinx who is responsible for the guild, and Osysa brands them all with the mark of the Slayer’s Take on their shoulders. Pike, meanwhile, discovers that there was a curse that needed cleansing in the temple to Sarenrae (the magical equivalent of a fumigation), so she rejoins the party just as Scanlan heads off on his own into the city. The party (plus Pike, minus Scanlan) decides to head out to visit Keyleth’s sister tribe in the city of Pyrah to the southwest of Vasselheim; part of her Aramente, her journey to become the leader of the people, involves passing trials set by each of the four tribes. They get to Pyrah and go through a trial in the elemental plane of fire that involves fighting Pyrah tribe members in fire elemental form. While trying to escape the elemental plane of fire, they have a near-miss with an impossibly huge red dragon that flew overhead, but they manage to remain stealthed and it flies by. Keyleth receives the blessing of the Pyrah for the Aramente and receives a sparkstone that allows her to light her hands on fire at will. On returning to Vasselheim, Pike says her goodbyes and goes back to her temple.
Episode 23 is the return to Emon. Before leaving Vasselheim, Grog has a rematch with Kern the Hammer, and this time prevails! An enigmatic individual involved with the temple of Kord (god of strength) known as Earthbreaker Groon witnesses the match and seems to give Grog his approval. The party finally returns back to Emon, where they find a fanboy has been camping outside of Greyskull Keep for two weeks, waiting for them to return. Vax knocks him out, then brings him around and explains to him that their life is dangerous and shouldn’t be taken lightly. The young man, Kynan Leore, tearfully heads off to train harder. Once the party’s returned to the Keep, the spymaster of the Council of Tal'Dorei, Seeker Asum Emring, comes to them and tells them that Lord and Lady Briarwood are expected to arrive in Emon in a week’s time for a feast to discuss the building of a bridge and some new political ties in Emon. Asum knows that Percy requested information about the Briarwoods, so he ensured that the party would be invited to the feast. They now have a week to prepare.
Episode 24 is the feast itself. Percy reveals his backstory to the others, explaining that the Briarwoods killed his family, and showing them that his Pepperbox has names along five of the six barrels: the Briarwoods and three of their cronies (Kerrion Stonefell, Anna Ripley, and Professor Anders). After a couple years of fleeing, Percy managed to track down Dr. Anna Ripley, who tortured him in the immediate aftermath of the Briarwoods’ coup on Whitestone, but didn’t manage to get close to her before her guards threw him in jail (which is where the rest of Vox Machina found him). The party promises a tearful Percy that they’ll help him through this. In the lead-up, the party manages to get their long-delayed payment from Kraghammer for the work they did clearing out the mithral mines, Vax and Keyleth cover Trinket in braids and ribbons while Vex is away, and Vax escalates his prank war with Grog by shaving half of Grog’s prized beard (which he has been growing painstakingly via an enchanted belt for weeks now). When the feast finally arrives, the plan is to pretend that Percy is ill and have him enter the feast under disguise as Vax, with the real Vax stealthing at the periphery to try and get some information about the Briarwoods. Asum sees through their disguise at the door and confides in them his own suspicions about the Briarwoods. He asks Vax to meet him in the foyer during the feast. The party meets Sylas and Delilah Briarwood, who are very charming but also a little unsettling. Vax, unfortunately, completely forgets to go visit Asum, but winds up following the Briarwoods to their chambers, using his serpent belt as a distraction for the guards… and accidentally walks into the Briarwoods’ bedroom (he was expecting another corridor) to find them staring right at them. After a failed attempt at fast-talking, Delilah casts Hold Person on Vax and Sylas pulls him inside, closing the door behind him, assuring him that he has nothing to worry about, he looks delicious.
Episode 25 is the confrontation with the Briarwoods. After some more failed attempts at talking his way out, the Briarwoods start to attack Vax, and Sylas reveals himself to be a vampire, biting Vax on the neck. Vax manages to tear himself free and flings himself through the second-story window to the courtyard below, yelling the emergency go-word through his Earring of Whisper to the party: “Jenga!” As the rest of the group scrambles to find him, Delilah manages to hold Vax in place again and casts a Blight spell that nearly kills him. Alone with the Briarwoods, Vax only has time to think of his sister and of Keyleth before he passes out. Seeker Asum bursts out of a bookcase in the Briarwoods’ room, but is put under a charm spell by Sylas and steps out of the confrontation. A servant reveals herself to be a tiefling named Lilith Daturai and jumps into the fray as well. Vex rounds the corner to see her brother unconscious, and rolls natural 20s on both of her attacks against Delilah… who then retaliates with a Finger of Death spell that almost perma-kills Vex in one shot; she also Feebleminds Tiberius, robbing him of his spellcasting ability. Scanlan just barely manages to heal Vax from a distance. As Percy rounds the corner, yelling Sylas’s name in fury, the Briarwoods sense the tide of battle turning, tell Percy that he really should visit home again because his family misses him, and Dimension Door to their carriage, attempting an escape. Percy manages to shoot out one of the wheels of the carriage, but when they get to it, they only find the driver, Desmond, with no sign of the Briarwoods. Percy interrogates the driver, who claims that life in Whitestone has become so difficult that most people have no choice but to serve the Briarwoods. Percy shoots off his hand and has him brought to the prison under Greyskull Keep. Sovereign Uriel storms out, and amid the commotion it becomes clear that he thinks VM has just attacked valued guests of the city for no apparent reason, and he demands they return the next day for a discussion. Meanwhile, the party (plus Lilith) goes to a temple of Sarenrae, where Tiberius is restored and everyone is reassured that Vax isn’t about to go vampire on them. On their way back, Lilith explains that she’s being hunted by her sisters, and that revealing her presence to jump in on the fight means that they now know how to find her. A series of bounty hunters hired by Lilith’s sisters jumps into action, and the party easily defeats them–at one point, Percy screams “Your soul is forfeit!” and blasts a hole through the chest of one. Tiberius shreds another one of the them, an old woman, as she’s mid-retreat. Exhausted and unsettled, the party returns to their Keep.
Episode 26 is… well, there are cows. Lilith leaves the party the next morning, and they head out (minus Percy, who’s determinedly tinkering in his workshop) to meet with the Council of Tal'Dorei, where they come up against a frustrating conversation with Sovereign Uriel, who’s heard of their recent brutal acts and, considering those acts together with their apparently unprovoked attack on the Briarwoods, revokes their membership from the Council. Keyleth manages to cast a restoration on Asum, who seems to finally shake his charm effect from Lord Briarwood, but he signals to the party to keep playing along. When they get back to the Keep, the party finds a couple of farmers requesting their aid: apparently some sort of giant bird has been stealing their cows. Determined to help salvage their image, the party (again minus Percy) charges out to solve this mystery. The plan? They’re all cows. They use Seeming to look like cows, attempt to interrogate some cows, and finally cow-Keyleth gets carried off by the giant bird, a roc. Tiberius casts Fly on the rest of the party and they give chase, a squadron of unusually shaped cows against the moonlight. Finally they manage to turn the roc into a cow to get it to crash-land, and chase it up to its perch in the mountains to the northwest in Emon, where they discover that it’s being kept by a gnome druid. The party manages to convince the druid that the woods around Vasselheim might be a better environment for such a creature.
Episode 27 is the final preparations before heading to Whitestone. Percy awakens from nightmares alone at the Keep in time to find a couple of ghostly assassins trying to kill Desmond, the Briarwoods’ driver being kept in the Keep’s prison. With the help of Trinket and Jarett, the captain of the Keep’s guard, Percy manages to keep the assassins away from Desmond long enough for the rest of the party to catch up and defeat them. The party does some last-minute preparation before leaving Emon and beginning to trek towards Whitestone, where they come across a massive monstrosity in a valley in the wilderness.
Episode 28 is the arrival in Whitestone. After battling a monster on the outskirts of Whitestone, Tiberius decides the party isn’t prepared enough and teleports back to Emon. Unsure what to do other than keep moving forward, Keyleth and Scanlan sneak into the city (in bird form and invisible, respectively), where they find zombie giants patrolling the city’s frightened and exhausted populace. At the center of the city, the Sun Tree, a holy relic of Pelor, has been defiled with eight bodies hanging from its boughs. The party disguises themselves as villagers and steps into the city… and discovers as they get closer that the eight corpses hanging from the tree are villagers made up to look like Vox Machina, apparently as a welcome from the Briarwoods. The party sets up camp under an abandoned tavern and decides that the way to go forward is to try to let Keyleth commune with the Sun Tree and then see about raising some sort of rebellion among the people of Whitestone. Unfortunately, Keyleth discovers that the Sun Tree is dead.
Episode 29 is when things start to get really dark. While Keyleth tries to revive the Sun Tree through an extremely complicated and involved spell, Vex and Grog stay behind to guard her, while Vax, Scanlan, and Percy head off to investigate the Lady’s Chamber, the temple to Erathis within the city. There, after spending three spells and taking some damage trying to open an unlocked door (amazing!), they battle off terrifying spirits, discover that the priest of Erathis that Percy knew has been killed, and finally decide to leave the symbol of the de Rolo’s family crest to start planting the seeds of the rebellion. Unfortunately, Keyleth’s spell fails, and the Sun Tree remains dead. The party discovers that there are four houses in Whitestone being occupied by the “new nobles”, and they decide to try and sneak in to take out Sir Kerrion Stonefell, one of the names on Percy’s “list”, the barrels on his gun. They manage to sneak in, and Percy gets the killing blow on Stonefell, black smoke rising from him in the process. The party takes Stonefell’s right-hand man, Vouk, Grog tears out his tongue, and Percy burns the de Rolo family crest into his forehead before throwing him out the window to spread the word. The half-elves in particular are taken aback by this violence, but Keyleth lights the house on fire before they all flee back to the tavern.
Episode 30 is set-up for more attacks against the new nobles of Whitestone. The party manages to meet up with Archibald Desnay, the former chancellor to Percy’s father, and gets him to help spread the word that a rebellion will be happening. They also get in touch with Keeper Yennen, a priest in the city that Percy suspects will be trustworthy. Yennen is delighted to discover that Percy’s still alive, and tells him that this means there are two de Rolos in Whitestone: Percy’s youngest sister Cassandra, who was felled by arrows helping him escape, is apparently still alive! She’s being kept under lock and key by the Briarwoods in the castle, but has been secretly helping with previous attempts at fomenting rebellion among the people of Whitestone. The party decides to set up a two-pronged attack against two of the remaining new nobles in town: Scanlan will go alone to Duke Vedmeyer’s estate to set it ablaze as a distraction, and the rest of the party will take out Count Tylieri’s estate. Scanlan gets up close to Vedmeyer’s estate by Polymorphing into a fly, then Polymorphs himself into a triceratops and smashes through the door. Meanwhile, the rest of the group accidentally gives the go-ahead to Grog, who charges the front door of Tylieri’s estate.
Episode 31 is sheer bardic magic. Scanlan smashes through the front door of Vedmeyer’s estate as a triceratops… and discovers that Vedmeyer (revealed to be a goliath) is apparently expecting company, as he has almost a dozen guards waiting with crossbows at the ready. A series of amazing moments ensue in which Scanlan single-handedly keeps the guards from killing him and damages them heavily, Dimension Doors to the roof, uses a Potion of Fire Breathing to light the house ablaze, has a confrontation with Vedmeyer on the roof of the house that ends in Vedmeyer getting shoved off the roof, and finally manages to escape, watching as a group of villagers begin to take down one of the zombie giants patrolling the city. The rest of the group bursts into Count Tylieri’s home (revealing him to be another vampire) and Trinket manages to get the killing blow on him. As the rebellion begins to spread throughout the city, the party rushes in towards the town square to check on the Sun Tree, where they find a large horde of skeletal undead clattering towards them.
Episode 32 is a series of reveals. Pike appears, in spectral form, and helps the party keep the undead at bay. The party manages to escape and begin making their way toward the castle itself. They travel in through a partially collapsed secret passage that leads to the dungeons under the castle, where they find an old woman who claims to have been locked up by the Briarwoods and pleads with the party to release her. The party doesn’t especially trust her, but Vex pretends to make an effort at picking the lock… at which point she realizes that even though the woman is touching her with both hands, she can only feel one.
Episode 33 is a series of reunions. Vex tells the rest of the party about the strange one-hand feeling with the old woman, and they realize that she must be Dr. Ripley in disguise under an illusion spell, knowing that Ripley, having attempted to reproduce Percy’s firearms-related experiments, managed to blast off one hand at some point in the past. The party dispels the illusion–Ripley is startled and delighted to see Percy in front of her–and takes Ripley prisoner, forcing her to march along with them up into the castle. Ripley assures them that she has no love for the Briarwoods either after they locked her up. While Ripley retrieves some of her equipment (the party confiscates most of it), Vax scouts ahead and finds Professor Anders in the study with a knife to Cassandra’s throat. He bursts in (“Jenga!” round two), but Anders has time to slit Cassandra’s throat before the rest of the group arrives; when they do arrive, they cast healing magic on Cassandra, and the blood and the wound vanish immediately. Anders is a bard, and the battle is made more difficult when he manages to cast Dominate Person on Grog, who nearly kills Vax, and then a couple of guards almost finish the job while he’s unconscious on the ground. Keyleth and Vex manage to bring Vax back from the brink, and Percy kills Anders, the next name on his list, again being engulfed in billowing smoke when he pulls the trigger. Unfortunately, in the chaos of the fight, Ripley manages to get away and disappears. A still-woozy Vax confesses his love to Keyleth and kisses her, and she, flustered, casts a high-level healing spell on him in return. Percy then swats Vax with a makeshift switch and yells at him to stop running off on his own… and then thanks him for what he did and turns to talk to his sister for the first time in years. Despite Percy’s misgivings, Cassandra is determined to join them in the final press against the Briarwoods, and runs off to get her mother’s old armor. In Professor Anders’ study, the party finds some information that will help them clear their name back in Emon. Finally, the group (plus Cassandra) makes their way into the Undercroft of the city and through a mausoleum where they have to fight ghosts and, eventually, their own possessed party members. Despite some close calls, everyone pulls through, and the party starts moving through a tunnel the Briarwoods have apparently had constructed underneath the city of Whitestone, towards whatever this Ziggurat project is that they’ve been working on.
Episode 34 is the final confrontation with the Briarwoods. The party steps into a trap, walled in by glass, and finds themselves confronting the Briarwoods, with Cassandra on the other side of the glass. Cassandra tells them that the part of her that was a de Rolo ceased to be when Percy left her to die in the snow, and that her real family is with the Briarwoods. In desperation, Vax uses his cloak to Dimension Door to the other side of the glass, where he hits a button he assumes will open the glass. Instead, it starts a stream of acid pouring into the room, and Sylas casts a charm spell on him. The Briarwoods and Cassandra leave VM to their fate, a charmed Vax meekly following behind them, and the party has to work quickly to use the acid to melt part of the stone ceiling so they can escape. Percy discovers that there is now a name on the sixth barrel of his gun: Cassandra de Rolo. The party manages to sneak forward and finds some sort of ritual underway featuring entreaties to some entity the Briarwoods only refer to as the Whispered One. The party manages to ambush the Briarwoods, Cassandra, and Vax on the steps of the Ziggurat, before they can enter the ritual chamber. After a bloody battle, Keyleth and Pike work together to destroy Sylas with a Sunbeam spell. A distraught Delilah Dimension Doors into the ritual room, and the party follows her into a room filled with writhing bodies on the walls and the shape of a massive handprint in the floor. Using her own blood, Delilah seems to finish her incantation, an attempt to raise Vecna, a powerful lich who attempted to ascend to godhood… and apparently things don’t quite go as planned. Delilah whispers something about the ritual happening too soon, and Vex, using a Potion of Flying, moves forward to attempt to stop things from going wrong any faster than they already have. Delilah casts another Finger of Death at her that does a truly obscene amount of damage and nearly permakills Vex, bringing her down to one hit point. As the ritual produces a tiny spinning black sphere, locked in place, the writhing of the bodies on the walls stops instantly, and Vex’s flying spell stops with it. She hits the ground and is unconscious and bleeding out. As Vax rushes to his sister with a potion, Percy takes a shot that blasts off Delilah’s right arm but doesn’t kill her. Vax gives his sister the potion… and it has no effect. No magic seems to be working in the chamber, including healing magic. In a panic, the party drags Vex (and, as an afterthought, Delilah) out of the Ziggurat–at which point Vex rolls enough successful death saving throws to be stabilized.
Episode 35 is the end of the arc. With Vex healed up, the party attempts to interrogate Delilah, and in the process the dark presence made of smoke that’s been egging Percy on through this whole endeavor flares up and encourages him to finish the job. This creature, a smoke demon, found Percy years ago and gave him the inspiration to build the gun in the first place, and through the pact Percy made (which he convinced himself was just a dream) is now determined to reap the remaining souls on Percy’s List. Percy manages to fight it off to the point where it manifests in physical form, and the rest of the party manages to defeat it; despite the destruction of the shadow demon, an entity known as Orthax, there is still a nugget of cold somewhere in Percy’s chest. In the confusion, Delilah nearly escapes, but Vax manages to stop her and Cassandra is the one who deals the killing blow. The party leaves her body in one of the acid pits beneath the city, and Scanlan, in a moment of insight, casts a spell on Percy and encourages him to give up his Pepperbox. Scanlan then throws it into the acid, and as it dissolves… the final nugget of cold that was tying Percy to the remnants of Orthax disappears entirely. Everyone is delighted to have Percy back, but Percy is mostly distraught at the loss of such an expensive weapon. Keeper Yennen, who’s been running the rebellion outside the castle, informs the party that the remaining nobles have been rounded up, and requests that the party stay to help prepare for the upcoming Winter’s Crest festival. Keyleth clears the skies so the people of Whitestone can see the sun, and the Sun Tree appears to be living once again.
Episode 36 is a whole lot of decompression. First, the party divvies up some of the spoils of the battle with the Briarwoods; Percy picks up Sylas’s sword, which calls itself Craven Edge and speaks to him, asking if he’s to be its new champion. Percy decides he’s had enough of haunted weapons and gives the sword to Grog, whose good-natured confusion manages to offset the sword’s apparently evil aspect. A council is established in Whitestone, with Cassandra stepping up to rule in the de Rolos’ name despite her own misgivings. The party celebrates Winter’s Crest in Whitestone, an endeavor that involves all sorts of very creative applications of the D&D ruleset. Keyleth gets a little suspicious and terrified of a street magician, there is an arm-wrestling competition (Grog comes in second place to a Whitestone guard named Trisha, who is immediately nicknamed “Trish the Dish” and becomes everybody’s favorite), and a Polymorphed-into-a-human Trinket ties for first in a pie-eating contest. Vex gives Vax a gift: she’s managed to retrieve the serpent belt (named Simon) that he lost during the attack on the Briarwoods in Emon. Keyleth gives Percy a gift: a bird’s skull to remind him of what he could’ve become. Everyone decides to return back to Emon, having sent word for several of their allies (like Allura) to travel to Whitestone to figure out what the heck’s going on with the little Orb under the city.
Episode 37 is a bit of backstory for Scanlan. As the party arrives at their Keep, they find Tiberius in the middle of packing his things; apparently he’s going to try to return to Draconia to do some good there. After a tearful goodbye with him, the party meets with the Council, and Uriel has a bit of a breakdown over what his leadership has wrought for the city (this isn’t the first time he’s been influenced by supernatural forces into making bad decisions). Poring through the notes they’d found in Anders’ study, the party discovers that Uriel’s defenses weren’t up because there was a traitor on the Council who’d been working for the Briarwoods and who was secretly a follower of Vecna, Riskel Daxio. Daxio fled and is currently being pursued by the city guard, but the party decides to try and find him themselves. They discover that he’s currently being sheltered by the Clasp, a thieves’ guild with which Vax in particular has had several run-ins. On their way to one of the entrances to the Clasp’s hideout, they stumble across a band of traveling musicians, Dr. Dranzel’s troupe, with whom Scanlan used to perform. As a distraction for the rest of the party, Scanlan gets into a flute duel with a new member of Dranzel’s troupe, Kaylie, a young gnome with whom he starts flirting. He throws the duel, and then, being a man of his word, gives all his gold to the young woman. The party manages to sneak through the kitchen through a secret hatch and has a tense discussion with the Clasp, who agree to look the other way while the party confronts Daxio. The party manages to knock him unconscious and drags him back to the Cloudtop District of Emon to turn him in to the Council.
Episode 38 is a lot of past transgressions coming home to roost. VM brings Daxio to Sovereign Uriel, and Grog beheads him as part of his punishment (Daxio just smiles, stating that he’ll be closer to Vecna soon). The party goes out for a pubcrawl and runs into Gilmore, who makes a Heroes’ Feast for the party. Vax takes him aside and they talk about their relationship; Vax explains that he’s in love with somebody else, but that he doesn’t want Gilmore to think he was just playing around. They share a kiss, and everyone goes their separate ways for the night. Back at the Keep, Dr. Dranzel and his troupe are waiting around for them to return, and Dranzel explains that they have a caper in mind that could net the party a bunch of money, but that they’ll discuss it in the morning. Scanlan takes Kaylie, the gnome flautist, to his bedroom… and she pulls a blade on him, telling him that she’s his daughter and that he’s a scoundrel who abandoned her mother when she needed him most. She’s spent her life honing her skills as a bard with the intent of finding and disgracing him. After an emotional conversation in which Scanlan expresses how sorry he is he never knew about her, Scanlan bares his chest and tells her to go ahead and attack him… and she does, but she rolls a natural one and leaves the room instead, frustrated and confused. The next morning, Dranzel reveals that apparently there’s an old, abandoned house with an embarrassment of riches inside; the party knows the house because they explored it long ago, back before the stream started, when it was the home of General Krieg, who turned out to be a blue dragon named Brimscythe who had infiltrated the Council. A little unclear on the morality of robbing this place, but operating under the pretext of making sure it’s safe in case anybody stumbles across it, VM breaks into the house for the first time in a year and steps through the secret passage that leads to the cavern that once housed Brimscythe and his horde. They find claw marks in the cavern that Vex identifies as belonging to another dragon, which apparently rummaged through and found Brimscythe’s corpse. Just as they’re starting to dig through the gold that remains, a giant worm burrows up from the ground and attacks.
Episode 39 is when everything changes. The party battles off a purple worm and a frost worm, and much of their usual teamwork is missing; Keyleth casts a new spell that accidentally puts most of the party out of commission for half the battle, and Grog almost kills Vax while trying to cut him out from the innards of the purple worm. The party realizes the worms are only adolescents and manage to escape before the mother shows up. Grog picks up a skull with a crystal gem in one eye, and immediately bolts from the house, yelling at everyone to leave; apparently there’s something inside the skull that spoke to him. In the confusion that follows, everyone’s still raw after the fight, and many members of the party are still at odds over robbing the house in the first place; Vax demands to know what the party’s even doing anymore and storms off alone into the city. The rest of the party heads back to Greyskull, where they find out that Kaylie has been imprisoned after getting into a bar brawl. Percy and Scanlan manage to bust her out, and when the party returns to their Keep (Vex finding a still-frustrated Vax waiting for her in her room; he asks if maybe they weren’t better off on their own), they find out that their presence is requested in the Cloudtop District downtown, and that Sovereign Uriel is about to make an important announcement. Meeting up with Gilmore along the way, the party makes their way to Uriel’s speech, where he informs everyone that he will be stepping down as the ruler of Tal'Dorei, no longer feeling competent to lead. In the aftermath of this bombshell, Vex notices out of the corner of her eye two streaks of color in the sky, red and black. Before she can react, a massive, ancient white dragon slams into the side of Allura’s tower and destroys it, and a massive, ancient green dragon, calling herself Raishan, perches at the edge of the town square and starts belching bile over the assembled crowd. The party very, very briefly tries to fight, but realizes how badly they’re outmatched by just one of these creatures; there is a massive red dragon (and the party recalls, way back during Keyleth’s Aramente, spotting a big red dragon in the fire plane…), as well as ancient green, black, and white dragons. The red slams into the center of Emon and claims it as his own domain, and the party just barely manages to escape (looking in vain for Gilmore among the bodies along the way) using Keyleth’s Transport Via Plants spell back to their Keep.
Episode 40 is the party falling apart under pressure. As soon as they return to the Keep, they start trying to let a series of refugees from the city of Emon into their gates, before the white dragon, Vorugal, charges in and attacks. The party barely survives the attack only by virtue of the red dragon, Thordak, flying in to knock Vorugal out of the sky and demand that he move on to continue with their plan. The party, badly shaken, splits up to try and be useful in the aftermath of the attack; Vex and Vax have a tearful and frightened moment as they help bandage the injured, and Vex is forcibly reminded of how the two of them, as teenagers, found their mother’s home burned to the ground by a dragon (“Do you think this is what mother saw before she died?”). Meanwhile, Grog pulls Percy down to his workshop and locks the door behind him, stating that this skull artifact he picked up (which Percy is now keeping safe in his workshop) offered him a deal. Whatever entity is inside the skull claims to be able to offer a use of the Wish spell if someone touched by darkness smashes it. It wanted Percy, apparently, but Grog isn’t about to let that happen. Percy advises caution and suggests that Grog bring down Vax as someone trustworthy to witness this exchange. Grog concedes and goes to fetch Vax, and as soon as he’s gone, Percy pulls the skull out of hiding and starts talking to it. As Grog pulls Vax away from his sister, Vax tells her to come down and get him if he’s not back in a few minutes. When they arrive, Percy is even more determined that they shouldn’t use the skull, but Grog is adamant that they have a responsibility to use that Wish spell if there’s any hope at all of undoing this attack by the dragons. A tense confrontation follows, Vex comes downstairs and is handed the skull, and Grog bum-rushes her to try to grab it back. Percy lunges in first and pulls Vex away from Grog, and Grog shoves Percy back and stands between him and Vex in a protective stance as Percy grabs a fireplace poker and starts to square off. Grog tries to spike the skull on the ground to shatter it… and rolls a natural one. Just at this tense moment, Allura, along with her friend Drake Thunderbrand, teleports back from Whitestone, come to check in on why her connection to the teleportation circles in Emon have been severed. Vex secretly slips Allura the skull during the conversation that follows. The party has to tell Allura what’s transpired, and when they describe Thordak, she goes pale. Apparently, fifteen years ago, Allura’s adventuring party battled Thordak and just barely managed to seal him in the elemental plane of fire (of the party, only Allura, Drake, and Kima survived the battle). In her description of the destruction Thordak wrought, Allura mentions that he destroyed Byroden, the twins’ home, in the attack that killed their mother. Allura’s connection to the Westruun sigil (in the city where Pike and Grog grew up) has also been severed, and she and Keyleth scry on the fire ashari at Pyrah, who guard the entrance to the elemental plane of fire. They see devastation; apparently most of the ashari people at Pyrah have been killed during Thordak’s escape. Thordak has dubbed himself the Cinderking and put together this collection of ancient chromatic dragons called the Chroma Conclave to attack and conquer the cities of Tal'Dorei and beyond for some unknown reason.
Episode 41 is the party starting to take in the scope of the aftermath. They decide to head into Emon to see if they can find any allies. There, they run into and befriend a member of the Clasp named Garthok, a half-orc rogue who shows them a secret entrance to the Clasp, where they might be able to find some additional information. Along the way, they stop in at what remains of Gilmore’s shop, which has been utterly destroyed and is being picked over by looters. The party demand that the looters leave, and things escalate into a battle that is easily won by the party. They dig through the rubble and find a secret compartment under the shop where Gilmore keeps a teleportation circle. There, they find Uriel’s wife Salda and his three children, Gilmore’s assistant Sherri, and Gilmore himself, unconscious and barely alive. Pike manages to heal Gilmore, and a tearful Vax holds him while he explains what happened; he found Uriel and Brom Goldhand (another member of the Council) dead, but knows that Asum and Tofor Brotorus (another member of the Council), have survived and are out looking for more survivors. After evacuating Salda and the children, Gilmore returned to look for Vox Machina and wound up dueling Thordak himself, nearly dying in the process. The party splits off from Garthok to get Salda, Sherri, the children, and a horribly weakened Gilmore back to Greyskull Keep.
Episode 42 is the party starting to make strides toward figuring out how to take the city back. First, the party uses Keyleth’s Transport Via Plants spell to evacuate most of the refugees at Greyskull Keep out to Whitestone. The party then has a tense meeting with Spireling Shenn, the leader of the Clasp, in which they briefly entertain the idea of awarding the Clasp unprecedented power within the city in exchange for their help, and finally decide against it, fearing the long-term consequences. Shenn grabs Vax, who has the mark on the Clasp between his shoulderblades, but Vax slips free and the party manages to escape without further bloodshed, marked for death on sight by the Clasp should they ever return. Vax has Keyleth burn the mark off his back with her handprint, and goes to her room that night; she invites him in. The party then (leaving Pike to help the refugees in Whitestone) travels to Vasselheim, apparently untouched in this attack, to seek allies among the Slayer’s Take.
Episode 43 is a bit of much-needed levity. VM runs into some old friends at the Slayer’s Take guild hall, including Huntmaster Vanessa Cyndrial, Zahra Hydris, and Kashaw Vesh. They let them know what’s been happening, but the Take’s mercenary attitude, combined with Vasselheim’s very looking-out-for-itself history, means that nobody seems too inclined to jump in on this fight unless Vasselheim is directly threatened. The party (Zahra manages to talk Kashaw into staying with the party) has an audience with Osysa the gynosphinx to see if she can point them to some further assistance. Osysa tells them about the Vestiges of the Divergence, ancient weapons of great power that were used in the old wars against the gods; if they can find these weapons, they might stand a chance against the Conclave. She doesn’t know where any are, but her mate, an androsphinx who resides south of the Frostweald, might have that knowledge. Osysa manages to extend her vision and finds the dragons moving onward beyond Westruun… and sees the floating islands of Draconia falling. The party leaves, discomfited and alarmed, and starts doing some preparation around town, including a visit by Percy to Victor, the eccentric blackpowder merchant, who reveals that a woman matching Ripley’s description has been purchasing blackpowder. The party finds themselves day-drinking at a tavern, where Grog runs into Kern the Hammer, and the two of them proceed to have a very awkward conversation (it’s very post-one-night-stand); Grog is reminded that Earthbreaker Groon is at the temple of Kord. The party stops in to pick up Kima, who is horrified at the news that Thordak has returned (she very nearly has a panic attack and the party has to stop her from immediately running to find Allura, who along with Drake is sneaking into Westruun to find what information she can there). The party trails Grog to the Trial Forge, where Grog has to prove his worth to Groon. Groon demands to know where he finds his strength, and Grog tells him he finds strength in his rage. A knock-down drag-out battle ensues in which Grog can call two allies to his aid, and after calling for Pike (who isn’t there, unfortunately), brings Vax and Scanlan in to fight alongside him. Groon knocks them all around, even going easy on them, and comments on Grog’s dark weapon (Craven Edge, Sylas’s former sword). Grog tries to switch out the sword for his old weapon and finds it won’t let him. Finally, when Groon demands to know again where he gets his strength, Grog tells him he gets his strength from his friends. Groon decides this proves Grog’s mettle, and stops the fight, giving the party the location of two Vestiges as a reward. The first are the Titanstone Gauntlets, currently held by Grog’s terrible uncle Kevdak, who beat him and left him for dead years ago. The second is the Deathwalker’s Ward, a set of leather armor that once belonged to a champion of the Raven Queen and now lies in the champion’s tomb that has sunken beneath the Marrowglade Loch.
Episode 44 is things going very wrong very quickly. The party, along with Kashaw, Zahra, and Kima, travel to the sunken tomb–when they stop for the night, they see off in the distance the giant roc they’d encountered back in Emon. The party eventually manage to fight their way in through a series of fish creatures called Kuo-Toa… who turn out to be serving another denizen of the temple, a beholder. The group fights off the beholder with a couple of very close calls–Kima is knocked into a massive fall and nearly killed outright–and Zahra deals the killing blow. As Vax climbs down to help her out, Percy and Vex get closer to the Deathwalker’s Ward, laid out on the tomb. Before Vex can look for traps, Percy touches the armor, and dodges back just in time as a wave of death energy explodes outward. Unfortunately, Vex doesn’t move back in time, and is killed instantly by the trap. A horrified Vax clambers out of the chasm to find his sister dead and the rest of the party staring on in shock. Kashaw, a cleric, can potentially revive her, but tapping into life-and-death magic brings him closer than he’d like to his horrific patron deity, Vesh. Still, he decides to cast the spell, and three members of the party (Percy, Zahra, and Vax) make offerings to help with the ritual. As the ritual progresses, a dark figure appears at the periphery of their vision; Kashaw worries that it’s Vesh, but it turns out to be the Raven Queen herself. Vax demands that she take his life in place of his sister’s. She nods to him, and Vex starts breathing again, baffled at everyone’s concern. Vax finds himself still alive and isn’t sure why. The party returns with their new allies to Whitestone and goes their separate ways; Kashaw apologizes to Keyleth for stealing the kiss back in the day, they find a somewhat awkward rapport. Zahra gives Vex a special dragon-slaying arrow she’s crafted.
Episode 45 is the aftermath. Vax discovers that Percy was responsible for setting off the trap that killed Vex, and after a tense conversation in which Percy, guilt-ridden, can’t bring himself to say what he almost did, Vax punches him out of frustration. Vex and Vax have a tearful conversation that ends with Vex handing over the leathers to Vax. and telling him he should wear them. The leathers also came with a necklace, Raven’s Slumber, that can store any willing creature (or unwilling creature that fails a saving throw) within it; Vex realizes it’s basically a Pokeball and she can use it to store Trinket. The party makes their way up the mountain to Pyrah and finds remnants of the tribe still alive. Some members of the air ashari have also made their way to Pyrah, including Keyleth’s father, Korren. They reveal that the green dragon, Raishan, came to the ashari people under the guise of a young woman, and was taken in by the Pyrah tribe. Raishan was the one who opened the portal to the fire elemental plane, freeing Thordak and letting him destroy so much of their civilization. The group moves through the remnants of the Cindergrove along with the ashari, hoping to close the tear in the elemental plane once and for all.
Episode 46 is a battle in Pyrah. On their way to close the tear in the portal to the elemental plane of fire, the party comes across a very strange dragonborn necromancer/candlemaker named Gern Blanston, who accompanies them on their journey. After several battles with fire elementals and ifrit, Vex winds up stealing a magical flying broom from Blanston; ever since her distastrous experience with flight at the Ziggurat, Vex has been desperately chasing after ways to fly. Gern goes his own way, and the party breaks off to start heading toward Westruun.
Episode 47 is a bit of downtime and a new mission. The party discovers Scanlan now has the ability to cast a spell once a day that produces an amazing mansion for all of them to stay in. Vex tries to get her stolen broom to work; with Scanlan’s help, she figures out the code-word (the Draconic word for “candle”). In exchange for his help, and to atone for stealing the broom, she agrees to do a favor that he suggests down the road. That night, Grog uncharacteristically has a nightmare in which Craven Edge forces him to murder many, many innocent people, including Pike. Vax also has a vivid dream in which the Raven Queen herself shows him a gleaming thread of light, his life, and calls him Fate-Touched and her champion. The party moves uneasily into the outskirts of Westruun, where they kill a goliath guard and meet a farmer named Reginald, who tells them his daughter is still inside the city, and explains that the city, in the wake of the dragon Umbrasyl’s attack, has been taken over by the wandering Herd that used to be Grog’s family (before they left him for dead); the dragon, living in a lair up on the mountain Gatshadow, has agreed to let the Herd take over the city as long as they keep giving him tribute. Grog decides that he doesn’t want to move forward and face Kevdak without Pike at his side, and the party detours toward the mountains where Osysa’s mate resides.
Episode 48 is the journey to the androsphinx. The party reunites with Pike, then stumbles across and defeats a hive of basilisks, where they find an obelisk of Ioun, which gives them a hint to where this androsphinx will be found. The party also comes across Tyriok Gadsworth, a mild-mannered cartographer they met back in Vasselheim, who has had one arm chopped off in battle and has been turned to stone. The party revives him, sans arm, and he helps show them the way to where some survivors of Westruun’s destruction have been camping (including Simon, the little boy that Vax named his serpent belt after during some pre-stream adventure), and beyond that, to where some of the survivors were captured by a camp of roving orcs. (There is also a great interlude in which the party is in the mansion and Vex attempts target practice on her broom… and accidentally shoots Scanlan in the neck.)
Episode 49 is an orc battle and a puzzle you really gotta sphinx about. The party successfully rescues the survivors of Westruun through a battle that includes such highlights as Keyleth accidentally summoning two dryads directly into a pit trap and Scanlan rolling into camp in a hamster ball (Otiluke’s Resilient Sphere). They then find their way through a series of puzzles and traps into the androsphinx’s lair, and find themselves having to press briefly into each of the elemental planes to find portions of his name while he attacks them. During the battle, Grog absorbs enough strength using Craven Edge that the weapon extends into an even larger and more dangerous form. Toward the end of the fight, Grog jumps into the elemental plane of air and is set adrift; he attaches his Chain of Returning to Craven Edge and throws it through the portal… where it impales Pike on the other side, and she manages to hold it in place long enough for Grog to pull himself through. Distraught at what he’s done, Grog spends a full round of combat in shock while everyone else demands to know what letters he saw. Finally, the party manages to piece together Kamaljiori’s name, thus proving themselves worthy. Kamaljiori describes many more Vestiges and their locations throughout the world, awards Scanlan with his own Vestige, a sword known as Mythcarver, and sets them back on their way outside the temple.
Episode 50 is the beginning of the push to free Westruun. The party returns starts moving toward Westruun, but along the way, Grog drops Craven Edge in the snow and starts trudging toward the forest, before falling face-down into the snow, dead. In horror, the party manages to bring him back through a combination of Pike’s Revivify spell and Percy’s confrontation with Craven Edge. Everyone manages to get Grog to agree to let Keyleth Banish the weapon to the plane of the Dread Emperor (pre-stream stuff), and as soon as it’s gone, Grog abruptly has the conscious realization that the sword just tried to eat his soul. Shaken by the encounter, the party starts moving back towards Westruun… and finds a scarecrow in the farmlands, which turns out to be the body of the famer Reginald, killed and strung up, having apparently been accused of killing the guard that VM dispatched. Keyleth digs a pit trap underneath the front of one of the main gates of the city, and Scanlan stealths into town, invisible, to try and cause a distraction to draw out some of the goliaths from the middle of the city. Unfortunately, he forgets that casting a spell breaks concentration on his Invisibility, and finds himself perfectly visible, alone, and surrounded by enemies. He manages to Dimension Door twice into a partially ruined temple of Erathis, where he finds a bunch of terrified, hiding Westruun villagers… along with Kaylie and Dr. Dranzel.
Episode 51 is the continuation of the push into Westruun. The party manages to take out many of the goliaths at the front gates of the city, but Scanlan is mostly out of commission for that part of the battle, having to bluff everyone’s way out (with Kaylie’s help) from the temple to rejoin the others. Finally, Grog demands a confrontation with Kevdak in the middle of town, single combat for supremacy of the Herd, and after some good intimidation checks, it is agreed. The rest of VM trails him from a distance. Kevdak starts fighting Grog in a pit of spikes, surrounded by much of the clan watching on. Very quickly, Grog realizes this is not a fight he can win, and calls on Vox Machina to jump in and “fuck shit up!”
Episode 52 is one heckuva pit fight. The party uses some very clever strategy and still barely survives the fight, which is particularly dangerous in that a downed party member will likely be hacked to pieces immediately by the large number of Herd members in the fray. As most of the party is seriously injured and surrounded, Vex takes five attacks of opportunity to fly in on her broom and medevac Grog via Raven’s Slumber, and then drops him from a great height onto Kevdak, where he rolls a natural 20 and manages to split him in two. Vex demands that the Herd bend a knee to the new leader, and rolls a natural 20 on her intimidation check; a wary ceasefire is called. Grog demands to see his cousin Zanror, who was kept in chains by Kevdak for defying his more brutal way of leading. Kevdak’s right-hand man, Greenbeard, immediately tries to ingratiate himself with Grog. Grog cuts off his head (rolling another natural 20) and releases Zanror from his shackles. Zanror decides that the Herd and Vox Machina will take on the black dragon Umbrasyl together in battle.
Episode 53 is, well, some planning. Still undecided as to whether or not to face Umbrasyl right away, the party starts making preparations; they check in on Pike’s great-grandfather Wilhand and find him nervous and hiding but alive and well. Scanlan asks Wilhand for Pike’s hand in marriage, and then backs off when Pike says she’s not ready to answer that. Pike retrieves a necklace from under her bed and gives it to Percy, telling him it’ll keep him safe. Percy starts work on a trap so that when Umbrasyl lands to retrieve his treasure, he’ll hopefully be caught on the ground long enough for members of the Herd to throw chains over his body and prevent him from flying away. Half of the Herd, mostly part of other tribes incorporated into the Herd of Storms over the years, wind up leaving, deciding against following Zanror into this battle. The remainder of the group prepares to do battle with an ancient black dragon.
Episode 54 is the fight with Umbrasyl. Umbrasyl does indeed trigger Percy’s trap and the party manages to deal a lot of damage to him while he’s on the ground before he begins to break free and starts dissolving most of the Herd. In a last-ditch attempt to keep him on the ground, Scanlan and Vax Dimension Door to the inside of the dragon–unfortunately getting separated, squashed, and suffocated in the process–and click on the Immovable Rod, which the dragon has to tear through his body in order to escape. Umbrasyl starts to fly away, but Grog throws his blood-axe, attached by the Chain of Returning, into Umbrasyl’s back as he goes, and is now dangling behind Umbrasyl as he flies off, Vax and Scanlan still inside him.
Episode 55 is the end of the fight with Umbrasyl. With the rest of the party left too far behind to help, Scanlan manages to find his way out of the dragon and uses Bigby’s hand to break his fall. Vax also cuts his way free, Grog is bucked loose, and both are in free-fall; as he falls, Vax swears to embrace the blessing of the Raven Queen and pursue his responsibilities as her champion and paladin, and black feathers start to stream in an arc from underneath his cloak as he falls. Scanlan flies down to catch Grog with Bigby’s hand, then Polymorphs him into a giant eagle, clings to his back, and has him dive for Vax. As Vax is falling, he hears the word “left” whispered into his mind, reaches out blindly in that direction, and finds himself safely on Grog’s back. The party reconvenes as Umbrasyl escapes back to Gatshadow, and meets up with an elderly goliath named Shale, who’s the only survivor of a scouting party sent by the Herd to investigate the dragon’s lair. She helps them up the mountain and even joins them in battle, mostly yelling at the dragon and bopping it with a staff. Grog finally deals the deathblow on Umbrasyl, and Shale shambles off to meet up with Zanror and the rest of the Herd.
Episode 56 is the aftermath. VM sorts through the spoils of their battle with Umbrasyl and works out how to return most of the riches to the people of Westruun. They also have a cannonball contest in the spa located inside Scanlan’s mansion to unwind. Upon returning to Westruun, they meet a blacksmith named Kerrek who winds up giving some very sage advice to and bonding with Keyleth. Scanlan, along with a couple of friends, makes his way out to Kymal and meets up with Kaylie there. The party lays the groundwork for a subterranean portion of Westruun to protect the denizens of the city from future dragon attack. Exhausted, the party decides to return to Vasselheim; Vax needs to visit the Raven Queen’s temple to see what duties she has for him.
Episode 57 is the unexpected return of an old enemy. Vax travels to the Raven Queen’s temple, where he is made to drown himself by stepping into a pool of blood, and finds himself speaking directly with her. She explains to him that she has dominion over the moment of death, and that her duty (and his, by extension) is to prevent people from artificially lengthening their lifetime after their destiny is up (being resurrected after being cut down too early is a different matter). Stunned, shell-shocked, and a little giddy at the relief of tension, Vax stumbles out of the encounter and rejoins the others. In the meantime, Scanlan and Grog do a little hat shopping, and Scanlan finally reveals the favor he’s been holding over Vex: every time she flies on her broom, she has to wear a witch’s hat. That night, Percy steps into the Raven Queen’s temple and has a considerably more traumatic conversation with the Raven Queen, who warns him that if he’s not careful he could find himself in opposition to her and her works, but she does explain to him that mortals can achieve great things (“After all, I did.”). Disconcerted, Percy cleans himself off as best he can and returns to the rest of the group… but Vex spots a bit of blood behind his ear and realizes where he’s been. The party heads to Whitestone, where they run into many old friends, like Allura, Kima, and Gilmore, and start talking about how to move forward. That evening, there’s a knock at Vax’s door in his room in the castle, and he answers it to see Gilmore. Gilmore offers him a fine robe, which Vax dons, and asks to walk with him a while, which Vax agrees to. The two of them walk to the top of one of the castle’s towers, at which point Gilmore’s attitude shifts dramatically, and he stabs Vax in the gut with a poisoned dagger. As he does, his form flickers, and Vax recognizes Hotis, the rakshasa he’d killed back at the Slayer’s Take. Rakshasas, by the way, don’t die permanently unless you kill them in the Nine Hells; otherwise, they just spend several months in agonizing pain plotting their elaborate revenge once they get back to the Prime Material Plane.
Episode 58 is the fight with Hotis. Vax, badly injured, alone, and unarmed, calls “Jenga!” once more. Several of the others, upon awakening, find that they’re not alone in their rooms and have to fend off attacks by assassins. Scanlan manages to Dimension Door to the tower where Vax is facing off with the rakshasa, just in time to see Vax grab the rakshasa and drag him along with him off the edge of the tower, falling seventy feet onto solid stone. Before Vax can get up, Hotis stabs him twice, and just as he’s about to finish off the now-unconscious Vax, Scanlan jumps off the tower and plunges Mythcarver into Hotis’s shoulder. The rest of the party finally charges in to the rescue, with Pike dealing the killing blow on Hotis this time around. Vax tries to remove the robe that “Gilmore” gave him, only to find that the attempt makes it start flaying his skin off. Percy and Vex rush Vax down to the vicinity of the magic-eating Orb beneath Whitestone, where he manages to remove the robe safely. Meanwhile, Keyleth rushes out to find Gilmore facing his own assassin… and essentially pulping him into mush. Everyone reconvenes (Kima also took out an assassin who came after her and Allura in their house), and the next morning the party manages to remove Hotis’s last lingering curse on Vax, which was preventing him from having a restful or healing sleep. The party decides that their next order of business is to pursue another Vestige, a bow called Fenthras that forms the heart of a cancerous tree in the Feywild. Keyleth Plane Shifts them to the Feywild, which is also where the elven city of Syngorn has shifted in order to escape the dragon attacks.
Episode 59 is the start of the Feywild arc. The party has a brief discussion with an old friend, a nymph named Nala that Grog got to know back in the pre-stream days, and starts moving northward toward the direction of the Vestige. Along the way, Vex realizes somebody’s following them and manages to sneak up on him, grab him, and bring him up to the rest of the party. The satyr, named Garmelie, has been following the party while sketching some very unflattering caricatures of them. The party decides to drag him with them into Scanlan’s mansion for the night, where he manages to Charm Percy into agreeing to a deal with him: in return for stealing a couple of items from the elven city of Syngorn (the hat of Watcher Iova, the leader of the guard in the city, and a piece of a threshold crest, part of the stones that allow the city to transport from plane to plane), Garmelie will get them right up to where they need to go in order to find Fenthras. Garmelie also gives them some warnings: avoid a particularly happy-looking campsite, avoid the hut of Wodenna, and avoid the theatre. Percy realizes as he’s going to sleep that the charm spell has just worn off, and chats briefly with Scanlan before coming across an uncharacteristically nervous and tearful Vex, still awake in her room. Vex reveals that she and Vax were judged horribly when they lived in Syngorn, and asks Percy whether she looks like she comes from money. Percy reassures her that a lot of wealth involves some very deep bullshitting, and offers to help her if need be. And if all else fails, he assures her that they can always steal the elves’s stuff, so they won’t have cause to be smug anymore. The party (trailed by an invisible Garmelie) arrives in Syngorn, is greeted by Watcher Iova, the leader of the guard, and is led to the house of Syldor, Vex and Vax’s dad.
Episode 60 is some awkward family reunions. The twins haven’t talked to their father since the pre-stream days, where they discovered for the first time that he’d gotten married and now had a young daughter. Their relationship with their stepmother is awkwardly cordial, but their relationship with their little half-sister Velora is extremely sweet and warm. Syldor and the twins (especially Vex) have a tense and fraught conversation, at which point Percy casually reveals that Syldor should watch the way he talks to her, as she is now Lady Vex'ahlia, Baroness of the Third House of Whitestone and Grand Mistress of the Grey Hunt. Vex is stunned at the revelation, and thanks Percy afterwards; it’s a real title that was his to give (the party kinda killed the last person to hold that title and burned down their mansion, so hey). The party, still trailed by a couple of longsuffering guards who, through a series of very bizarre persuasion/deception checks, are laboring under the impression that VM is one big kinky polyamorous bunch, meets up with Watcher Iova, where they talk about Syngorn’s plans to attack and manage to get a loose agreement to join the final push against Thordak. They also manage to gain access to her hat room. When Vex causes a distraction, Vax swipes the hat, which Garmelie wears proudly once they return to their room. Keyleth and Percy then reveal their plan for the second half of the heist (a piece of a threshold crest): they create a stone crest out of the threshold of the door to their room, break it, and hand Garmelie a piece. Since this is exactly the kind of trickery that exemplifies contracts in the Feywild, Garmelie begrudgingly has to agree that they’ve done their part. He leads them toward the Gilded Run, a series of rivers that wrap around their final destination, the Shademurk Bog, within which lies Fenthras.
Episode 61 is some awkward Feywild diplomacy. The party, after narrowly escaping the last campsite of Sorudin the Happy, winds up facing a choice of allying either with a group of pixies or with the group of lycanthropes they’ve been terrorizing; the party winds up choosing the lycanthropes and have a difficult battle with the pixies, during which Grog is turned to stone (and Travis holds a thumbs-up position for over eight minutes in real-time). The leader of the lycanthropes, a massive werewolf named Ukurat, pledges his aid to VM as they move forward toward the Gilded Run.
Episode 62 is a whole lot of river-hopping. The party manages to make their way across the Gilded Run, with some difficulty compounded by the fact that the river is enchanted to make anyone flying over it want to dive straight in. Eventually the party manages to cross by tying themselves together, which starts to go poorly when a strange crocodilian plant-monster attacks them and swallows Grog, at the front of the line. The monster is eventually destroyed, Garmelie heads off, his work done, and the party starts moving forward, stumbling across a hovel built out of a tree trunk. Pike and Scanlan ride Vex’s broom up to get a closer look… and the broom is temporarily robbed of its magical enchantment.
Episode 63 is the confrontation with Saundor. Deciding to heed Garmelie’s warning and avoid the Hut of Wodenna, the party reconvenes and heads deeper into the Shademirk Bog, eventually finding the tree that Fenthras lies at the heart of. Along the way, Keyleth communes with the plant life in the area and discovers that the cause of the infection in the area is an entity named Saundor, who turns out to be a heartbroken, vengeance-obsessed archfey. In a horribly tense, intimate, and twisted conversation, Saundor immediately confronts Vex, telling her that he understands her, callous and cruel and willing to do terrible things to protect her friends and get back at those who wronged her. He tells her that inside she’s still the young girl, bloodied dagger in hand (which refers to a backstory piece Laura Bailey wrote about how Vex came to rescue Trinket, the first time she ever killed anyone). He asks her if she would give up her heart to him in exchange for great power. She tells him that her heart belongs to someone else and releases an arrow at him. In the battle that follows, Saundor focuses his attacks on Vex, but stops short of shooting her after she’s unconscious on the ground. After a little help from Ukurat, Grog unexpectedly lands the killing blow. Keyleth and Percy take some time to reassure a badly shaken Vex that she made the right decision. As they leave the tree, Fenthras in hand, they are greeted by a strange, lithe figure, who reveals himself to be the archfey Artagan, and had disguised himself in the form of Garmelie to follow along with them and amuse himself. (Keyleth: “For someone who hates the theatre, you’ve made quite a show of all this.”) The party returns to Whitestone via Keyleth’s Plane Shift spell.
Episode 64 is a close call and a terrible discovery. Upon returning back to Whitestone, the party discovers that, thanks primarily to Allura and Gilmore’s arcane efforts, there is a barrier being held over the entire city to prevent anyone from recognizing it from the air. The barrier is put to the test as Vorugal, the white dragon, buzzes the city, passing so close overhead that everyone is nearly ready to pull the trigger on attacking him. After that particular close call, the party realizes that if Vorugal’s out looking for them here, that means his roost over the ruins of the city of Draconia must be vacant, so they all decide to seize the opportunity and travel to Draconia. They meet up with a long-enslaved offshoot species of dragonborn, tailless and surviving in the wake of the attack of Vorugal that took down most of the ruling class. Most of the royal elite of Draconia were slaughtered by Vorugal to prove his dominance and to ensure that the Ravinites would continue to bring him tribute. The party makes a deal with Tooma, the leader of the Ravenites, to help destroy Vorugal within the next two weeks. Tooma overheard the party talking and knows that the resistance is building in Whitestone; if the party doesn’t keep up their end of the bargain, she’ll let Vorugal know where they’re all hiding. Unable to take the risk, Scanlan uses a Modify Memory spell to make Tooma think she’d heard Emon rather than Whitestone, but the party is still determined to keep their end of the bargain. On their way out of the city, they find many dragonborn corpses on spikes; Percy asks that one be cut down and whispers to the rest of the party not to react. The party realizes that they’ve just found the corpse of their longtime friend, Tiberius Stormwind, and they have a tearful goodbye once out of eyeshot of the Ravenites, setting him to rest in the ruins of a nearby library. The party makes their way back to Whitestone.
Episode 65 is the journey to Ank'harel. The next Vestige, Cabal’s Ruin, is a cloak apparently worn by a merchant warrior in Ank'harel. The party talks to Jarett, the captain of their Keep’s guard, about Ank'harel, his old home, and he tells them that he committed a crime in the city that means he can’t return. They ask if he wants anything from home while they’re there, and he tells them that if they could bring him some fusaka, a spice from Ank'harel, he would be very grateful. Everyone immediately starts wondering whether spice might be slang for drugs, but they all love Jarett and decide to maybe go along with it even if that’s the case. They then talk to Gilmore, who grew up in a smaller town near Ank'harel and find that he has access to a teleportation circle within Ank'harel; he lets them use it and gives them a small locket to give to the people they meet there, who turn out to be his parents, who are lovely people and very glad to hear that Gilmore is doing so well for himself. The party mist-walks (after a quick discussion re: whether they might evaporate in the desert environment, thus making for the saddest TPK ever) to Ank'harel, where they wander the streets a bit aimlessly. Scanlan, with his extremely subtle “do you spice?” inquiries, makes a deal with a shady figure to obtain some fusaka. Keyleth and Percy get extremely wasted on a sandkeg-based liquor, Vax fails completely to play it cool at a hookah bar, and the party eventually meanders their way to the Cerulean Palace at the center of the city. The Grand Maven there overrides the Hand of Ord who blocks their passage and gives them entry to the Cerulean Palace, where they meet the longtime ruler of the city, J'Mon Sa Ord.
Episode 66 is the search for Cabal’s Ruin. The party proves themselves to J'Mon Sa Ord in combat as worthy allies, and they agree to bestow upon the party their favor, in the form of their seal on a chain. J'Mon also reveals themself to be an ancient brass dragon named Devo'ssa, and awards the party a brass flute they can use to call upon them in case of emergency. Scanlan learns that fusaka is, in fact, just a spice, and that he got swindled out of a lot of money. The party then tries to get in touch with Mistress Asharu, the merchant warrior who apparently has the cloak, Cabal’s Ruin, but don’t hear anything from her and eventually decide to break into her house, where they find her body… riddled with bullet holes. Ripley, it appears, has returned.
Episode 67 is the search for Ripley. Keyleth takes a close look at Percy’s gun, confiscated from Ripley back in Whitestone, and realizes that there’s some sort of enchantment on it that’s allowed Ripley to listen in on everything the party has done to date. The party hastens back to let the folks who work with Asharu know what’s happened; they agree to let the party go as long as they return with Ripley’s hand as proof of having killed her. A scrying spell reveals that Ripley is somewhere out at sea, has Cabal’s Ruin, and is apparently, along with her new traveling party, in search of the next Vestige, Whisper, a dagger deep at the bottom of the Ozmit Sea near an island of glass known as Glintshore. The party, leveraging their newfound influence with J'Mon Sa Ord, manage to charter a skyship that turns out to be the very same skyship (the Deera) and the very same captain (Damon) who flew them to Vasselheim many, many episodes ago. The tiefling pirate they spared, Teera, is now a trusted member of the crew. Keyleth splits a massive storm, allowing the ship to travel more rapidly, and they manage to catch up to Ripley faster than expected. The party easily tears apart Ripley’s ship, waiting off-shore at the bay outside of Glintshore, and reconvenes on the beach.
Episode 68 is where things go very wrong. The party makes their way into the jungle in an attempt to ambush Ripley, but they walk into a trap, and a terrible explosion badly injures most of them, leaving them exposed to the snipers Ripley has positioned around the clearing. She also has a familiar face working with her: Kynan Leore, the Vox Machina fanboy, who is apparently disillusioned with his heroes. Vax spends most of the battle desperately trying to get through to Kynan, but Kynan uses Whisper to stab Keyleth, nearly killing her, before he finally steps away, hands raised. Ripley, meanwhile, has now bound herself to Orthax, and the fight continues to take a turn for the worse. Ripley and her fighters focus down on Percy, who is killed but instantly revived by the necklace Pike gave him, which shatters after its single use. The fight takes on a nightmarish quality, with the healers of the party desperately trying to keep each other alive under the onslaught, and Ripley succeeds again at killing Percy, this time for good. Grief-stricken, the party rounds on her after Scanlan manages to keep her from Blinking into the ethereal plane… and tears her to shreds.
Episode 69 is where the ball starts rolling for the endgame of this arc. The party returns to Whitestone, and with Pike’s help they manage to rescue Percy’s soul from where it’s being consumed by Orthax. A Resurrection ritual succeeds (in which Vex rolls a natural 20 and confesses that her heart’s always belonged to him). Later that day, Keyleth receives a lovely and encouraging letter from her friend Kerrek, along with a handmade ring that reads “I have passed through fire.” Scanlan delivers the fusaka to Jarett, who is grateful but a little baffled at his clandestine demeanor. After an evening’s rest, they’re approached by Seeker Asum, who asks them to meet him upstairs in the war room for an important meeting. Once the party gathers around him, Asum reveals himself to be the green dragon, Raishan, calmly informs them that they have to plan and no hope to defeat her like this, and explains that she too intends to kill Thordak and has come to strike an alliance.
Episode 70 is negotiating terms. After a fraught discussion in which Raishan reveals that she believes that Thordak’s corpse will give her ability to overcome an illness brought on by a curse carried out by a worshipper of Melora, Keyleth has a hard time restraining herself when coming face-to-face with the dragon who betrayed the Pyrah’s trust and wound up destroying them. Eventually the party gets Raishan to agree that, in a show of good faith, she will help them kill Vorugal before they decide how to proceed with their alliance moving forward. VM puts their plan into play and opts to lay a trap for Vorugal; Scanlan will use a Gate spell scroll that the party recovered on Glintshore in order to summon the holder of another Vestige, a goristro named Yenk, who has apparently swallowed the Spire of Conflux (and its previous wielder along with it). Two birds with one stone. Kima comes with, and the party sort of half-accidentally reveals Raishan’s deal to her. Scanlan tries to modify her memory, but it doesn’t work, and Kima slugs him for it.
Episode 71 is the fight with Vorugal. Sticking to the plan as much as possible, Raishan tags along in disguise as a dwarf named Larkin (resulting in the start of the “where’s Larkin?” in-joke when Liam doesn’t realize Larkin is in fact Raishan). Scanlan just barely rolls well enough to summon Yenk, who grapples with Vorugal for a while until the rest of the party jumps in. Vax and Pike are both nearly killed in the fight, Raishan flies in and helps out, and Vex gets the killing blow. The Spire of Conflux is retrieved from Yenk’s corpse.
Episode 72 is a lot of decompression after that particularly intense fight. The party gets super rich (like 150,000 gold rich) based on the spoils of that battle. Keyleth turns into an elephant to mess with Grog and things escalate, hilariously. Percy and Vex have a talk about forgiveness and share a kiss in the woods.
Episode 73 is the Halloween episode and everybody dresses up as NPCs, which is amazing, but I guess some other things happened too. The war council in Whitestone is now aware of Raishan’s alliance (Percy tried to stab her in her Asum disguise in front of everyone) and everything’s sort of in a nervous balance. Scanlan quietly seeks out Jarret and requests that he find him some real drugs, and a flustered Jarret agrees to find him some suude. The general plan seems to be to try and get Thordak to come to Fort Daxio (north of Emon) and hold out there.
Episode 74 is the party getting preliminary stuff ready at Daxio before deciding at the last possible moment to travel to the elemental plane of fire to get the final Vestige, the Plate of the Dawn Martyr. They have a bit of a rough time in the City of Brass, and narrowly avert a scuffle with the help of a pair of jewelers, a tiefling named Uten and a very unsettling fire genasii named Senokir. Senokir convinces the party to shackle themselves to him in order to pass as slaves, offering to help them find out where the Vestige is in return for a favor.
Episode 75 is things escalating quickly in the City of Brass. Scanlan gets into a card game with a fire giant to try and win the Plate of the Dawn Martyr, but loses. The party has the option of doing a favor for this giant or submitting to slavery. The favor? Kill a pit fiend named Ghurrix. The party concocts a very typically complicated and very typically nonsensical plan involving identical septuplets. Things very typically go poorly. (Along the way, Vex insists on rescuing a couple of aasimar teenagers, Hunin and Kyor, who wind up catching Ghurrix’s eye.) Ghurrix, realizing he’s walking into a very strange ambush, summons an erinyes to his side to help him in battle.
Episode 76 is fighting a pit fiend! It’s an extremely rough battle, and the party’s just on the verge of retreating into the mansion when Scanlan unexpectedly manages to deal the killing blow. The party gets Pike’s new Vestige, Senokir reveals that his only condition for helping them was that the party bury his wife’s ashes in Vasselheim, and the party Plane Shifts back to Fort Daxio… in time to see it under attack and in flame.
Episode 77 is turning the tide at Daxio. The party discovers that Allura has been Feebleminded by Xanthas, who has thrown in his lot with Thordak. (Who’s Xanthas, you ask? Grumpy dude who worked at the Alabaster Lyceum who last appeared like fifty or sixty episodes ago? Yeah.) After Allura is restored, Kima runs up and kisses her. Everyone converges on Whitestone (including the aasimar boys) and decides what needs to be done for the final fight that will be taken to Thordak.
Episode 78 is the lead-up to Thordak. The party gathers their allies: an army composed of fighters from Fort Daxio and Syngorn (Syldor, as a diplomat, stayed behind), as well as the ashari (including Korren). A smaller group composed of the party, Zahra, Kashaw, Jarret, Gilmore, and Kima moves forward, makes a brief alliance with the Clasp to move underneath the city, and pops up right near Thordak’s new lair. Zahra and Kashaw stay behind to fight a pair of fire giant guards, buying time for the rest of the group to move in on Thordak, who is apparently awaiting their arrival.
Episode 79 is the fight with Thordak. In a knock-down drag-out battle in which Gilmore and Jarret nearly die, Vex manages to take out the soul anchor (the big stone in his chest), and Thordak shrinks down to a more normal size and starts to flee down a tunnel to his lair. Vax follows, and manages to deal a very emotional killing blow alone in the dark (“I hear the voice of my mother in the morning. Fuck you.”). After Thordak falls, Vex and Raishan catch up with Vax, and when Raishan starts reading a scroll over Thordak’s corpse, Vax pulls the trigger on attacking her, since they’d agreed not to let her carry out her plan. Raishan baits them into Thordak’s lair and casts a friggin’ level nine Meteor Swarm on them.
Episode 80 is the inevitable confrontation with Raishan. The battle is brutal and vicious (Vax nearly gets perma-deathed by falling unconscious mid-flight and nearly landing in lava; with most of the party unconscious, Keyleth tries to jump in and help, but rolls a one and faceplants into lava, barely surviving; Vex and Scanlan both die but are resurrected by Pike with Revivify), but the tide turns when Scanlan summons J’Mon Sa Ord, who immediately appears to help. Unsettled by their appearance and power, Raishan switches into flight rather than fight mode and successfully makes a break for it along with a couple weird eggs that apparently Thordak has been keeping in his lair. The party is left exhausted but alive in the wake of the one-two punch of battles.
Episode 81 is the aftermath. The party finds that Zahra and Kashaw survived, and that Kerrek was part of the group fighting in Emon; he joins the group for a while as they travel back to Whitestone to figure out where Raishan could have gone. Through some scrying, they manage to determine that Raishan is on an island called Viscan in the Lucidian Ocean, which was Thordak’s lair before he was sealed in the fire plane, and before that belonged to a necromancer named Opash. After debating whether to pursue immediately or rest up and go in the morning, the party opts for the latter.
Episode 82 is the trek through Opash’s lair. The party, along with Kerrek, Allura, and Kima, travel through what amounts to a dungeon crawl littered with extremely unsettling traps (including a bridge over a pit that features reverse gravity and a whole lot of undead corpses, from which Vex makes a narrow escape on her broom). The party finally comes to a room containing the two eggs from Thordak’s lair… and Raishan, in human form, apparently unconcerned at their arrival.
Episode 83 is the final battle with Raishan. This battle is similarly brutal, although Keyleth has a spectacular moment where she successfully casts Feeblemind on Raishan, robbing her of her intellect and spellcasting ability. Still a dangerous foe, Raishan literally guts Percy and kills Scanlan as well, before Kerrek unexpectedly deals the final blow. Percy is revived with Revivify, but Scanlan is not, and the party starts to make their way home to try and bring him back. Unfortunately, Opash’s sanctum was also built with a lot of anti-transportation magic measures, and Allura steps through a strange, glitchy teleportation circle (Kima immediately follows her). The two of them wind up lost out at sea, and only a fluke nat-20 perception check by Keyleth allows the party to spot them and rescue them. Everyone eventually manages to escape to Whitestone via Keyleth. Vex enlists the help of Eskil Ryndarien to travel to Kymal to bring Kaylie back.
Episode 84 is the aftermath. Scanlan is successfully revived (with an especially heart-wrenching contribution from Grog) but remains unconscious and recovering for the rest of the episode. The party goes to Vasselheim to bury Senokir’s wife’s ashes, resulting in a very long sequence of convincing themselves that this is just a good deed and not something secretly nefarious. Everyone makes their way to the Trial Forge next, where Earthbreaker Groon has apparently been awaiting his rematch with Grog.
Episode 85 is one hell of a mood-swing. The first half is a very entertaining and uplifting battle between Grog and Groon; after defeating Groon, Grog’s Titanstone Knuckles are exalted. The second half is Scanlan waking up after his resurrection and having an extremely emotional and occasionally vicious confrontation with the party, accusing them of using him and not really caring about him, lashing out with personal attacks in retribution for the party bringing Kaylie to see him in this moment of weakness, and just generally coming to the conclusion that he needs some time away from the party. Scanlan and Kaylie leave the tearful, furious, and bewildered party. Everyone spends the night in varying states of drunken disbelief and then goes back to Marquet to run a few errands. There, they meet an adventurer in gleaming armor, trailed by a robotic companion… and Sam opens his mouth to speak in character. Taryon Darrington (along with his mechanical construct and archivist Doty) is a wannabe adventurer who’s prepared to hire the party for a great deal of money to take him with them on adventures. Put off by his bluster, the party reluctantly agrees.
Episode 86 is Tary’s trial by fire. He gets pretty impatient with the party when their idea of taking him on an adventure involves returning Ripley’s hand and checking in at the Cerulean palace, but is mollified when the group teleports back to Whitestone (he has a list of Adventuring Things, and teleportation is on it). There, most of the party (minus Vex) attacks him to see how he’ll fare, whereupon they discover that he’s an Artificer who has gemstones in his helmet that can be converted into spells. During the brief fight (which Vex flies in to break up), he actually manages to stay on his feet… and promptly bursts into tears. Through a lot of ugly-crying the party discovers that Tary’s bluster is all talk and he’s only out on his own because his very rich father decided to leave everything to Tary’s sister, so Tary wants to prove himself to his father as an adventurer. The party instantly flips from hating his guts to wanting to protect him, because hey, a lot of them hate their respective fathers, it’s a good bonding moment. Everyone decides to hold off on going after Hotis in the Nine Hells for a bit in favor of visiting the water ashari, and they manage to book a ship in Emon to travel there (unfortunately, Pike has to stay behind).
Episode 87 is the trip to Vesrah–during a mostly uneventful several days at sea, the ship is attacked by a band of pirates but manages to fend them off (Tary gets the final kill on the big bad but knocks himself off the ship in the process). When the party reaches Vesrah, the leader of the water ashari reveals that Keyleth’s mother made it to Vesrah but did not survive this part of the Aramente (they only recovered a leg). Keyleth remains hopeful. This part of the Aramente, by the way, involves going into the elemental plane of water and retrieving lodestones that are important to the survival of Vesrah… and the lodestones, by the way, are produced by an honest-to-goodness kraken. The party must retrieve three lodstones without killing the kraken.
Episode 88 is the kraken fight, and also the longest episode to date. The battle is intense and things start to go poorly very early–since the party is focused on retrieving lodestones and trying not to kill the kraken, they are easy prey for being restrained by its many tentacles… and swallowed. After they manage to get the lodestones but are struggling to escape, Vax is knocked unconscious when he’s swallowed by the kraken, and when he finally fails his last death saving throw, fortunately Grog is swallowed as well and manages to do enough damage to make the kraken spit them up. Keyleth grabs both Vex and Vax’s body and manages to Plane Shift them out. Percy escapes and is waiting at the portal, but Tary is knocked unconscious… and Grog decides to leave him behind in favor of escaping. Percy casts Friends on Grog to convince him to grab Tary (who also happens to be holding the last lodestone), and Grog just barely survives going back after him.
Episode 89 is the aftermath. The party reconvenes and manages to bring Pike in her spectral form to cast the Resurrection ritual for Vax. A furious and tearful Vex calls on the Raven Queen directly and promises to straight-up kill the god of undeath, Orcus, in exchange for her brother’s life back. After emotional entreaties by Keyleth and (well, emotional for him) Grog, Vax is restored, but the Raven Queen lingers in his vision. The dazed party sits on a beach, Percy makes everyone shell jewelry, and Keyleth reveals a gift she had Gilmore make for everyone for this occasion: a series of necklaces that vibrate when one of the people wearing them goes unconscious. After some deliberation, she decides to give the one intended for Scanlan to Tary instead, who is touched by the gesture. Finally a celebration starts up for Keyleth’s successful Aramente. There, she receives a reward (coinciding with her bump to level 17): she can Shapechange into any creature for an hour at a time. She turns into a dragon and gives the whole village dragon-back rides. Pike discovers that Tary hasn’t bothered learning the party’s names (except for Percy’s, because they’re science bros) and asks Doty to draw pictures of everyone as flashcards. Unfortunately, Doty takes the command very literally and sketches pictures of everyone in bed. It’s very, very funny. The party makes their way back to Emon.
Episode 90 is the end of Keyleth’s Aramente. Vax has been having nightmares and reveals to his sister a strange bruise-like pattern on his chest that coincides with the thread of light that he’d been suspended by during the Resurrection ritual. The party goes off to run some errands, and Grog and Tary wind up paired up together and very nearly killing two Vasselheim guards mostly by accident (right in front of the shop where that longsuffering cart guy who haggled with Grog works). The party finally returns with Keyleth to her home, where a beautiful ceremony takes place and she receives her mantle as Voice of the Tempest (including the Inspiring Leader feat!).
Episode 91 is the party, well, going to hell. Since Hotis is the last thing on their list, they decide to head off to the Nine Hells, and make a perfunctory attempt at doing some preparation, which mainly involves trying to learn some Infernal from an ashari tiefling named Whitney. Poor Matt has to actually come up with words on the fly, and when the group gets to “goodbye” and Liam mutters “ermagerd”, Matt decides that’s now the canonical Infernal term for goodbye. The party (sans Pike, unfortunately) Plane Shifts to the Iron City of Dis, the main feature of which is a massive iron tower that is always in your line of sight no matter which direction you look. Mostly disguised as tieflings, they travel around a bit, and eventually manage to find a tavern, where Keyleth accidentally eats a soul shard, Tary eats one as well without realizing what it is, and Percy eats one as well. Because hey, when in hell…? Everyone decides to avoid using real names, resulting in a great scene in which Percy and Grog introduce themselves very seriously as Freddie and Greg. The party learns of a prison beneath the city that likely houses Hotis, and is offered a deal by Ipkesh, the cambion who runs the tavern… if they kill his employer, he’ll get them into the prison, with their weapons, unharmed. The party decides to see if there are other options available, and Keyleth sets out alone to do some quick scouting… and immediately winds up cornered in an alley by a couple of individuals who apparently have an interest in Vax (who took on an albino tiefling disguise much like Lilith’s appearance).
Episode 92 is the continuation of VM’s adventures in hell. Keyleth transforms into an erinyes and, wonder of wonders, manages to intimidate her way out of the situation and retreat to the tavern. The group does a little shopping in town and finally decides to take the deal Ipkesh offers, which involves signing a contract. The first pact of the contract: in exchange for killing Ipkesh’s employer, Utugash, a pit fiend, the party will be transported unharmed to the Mentiri prison and be given their weapons. There are two other optional pacts that can be invoked at any time. The second pact: in exchange for a cadre of devils under their command for a month, the party must install two chosen of Dispater (the ruler of the city of Dis) in a holy place and not interfere with their activities. The third pact: in exchange for the signatory’s soul for all eternity, the signatory receives extremely strong powers. Percy signs the contract, pointing out that he’s got a pretty vested interest in never calling on those last two pacts. The party starts their break-in to kill this pit fiend, where they discover a prisoner of his, a werebear named Tova who is eager to join them in killing Utugash. After some fumbling through Utugash’s home base, the party finds him.
Episode 93 is the fight with Utugash. After a rough battle that involves Utugash surrounding himself with a wall of flame, Tova gets the final blow, but Doty is destroyed, and is left behind as the party (plus Tova) is dragged away to prison. There, an ally of Ipkesh’s gives the party their weapons back, and they manage to escape into the prison itself, where they have to wind their way through a variety of caverns and traps and stay one step ahead of the prison guard, right on their tail. Keyleth comes within one dice roll of dying, and Matt points out that if she’d died, the party would have lost Plane Shift and would’ve been trapped in the prison with the guards juuuust about to arrive. Everyone realizes after the fact that it probably would’ve ended in a TPK if she hadn’t rolled high enough on her death save. Regardless, Vex manages to heal Keyleth, and the party makes it to the prison itself, where Grog smashes the still-forming Hotis and ends the curse once and for all. Tova remains behind to look for her friends in the prison (Vax leaves her his Ring of Invisibility), and the party links hands and Plane Shifts back to Whitestone just in the nick of time.
Episode 94 is a moment of rest. Everyone meets up with Pike again (where they find Salda and her children, along with the aasimar boys, on their way back to Emon) and they all go get drunk in a tavern and decide to try and get Tary laid. Tary reveals that his only romantic experience was in his early twenties, with a tutor named Lawrence that his father hired; when his father found out, Lawrence was banished, and Tary’s worried that he might have been killed. Tary’s eventually set up with Trisha (Trish the Dish from the Winter’s Crest festival), and as he goes off with her, Percy borrows Keyleth’s Scrying Eye and decides to make sure everything’s okay. Only he doesn’t scry on Tary… he scries on Scanlan. Matt makes the entire cast (except for Taliesin and Sam) leave the room, and reveals that Percy sees Scanlan and Kaylie out somewhere in the world, doing well and entertaining a group of people. Percy keeps up the illusion and pretends to have looked in on Tary, then admits the truth to Vex, mentioning how angry he still is with Scanlan, and how he’d like to get some of his property back from him. Vex tries to remind him of the lessons they’d learned about forgiveness, and Percy agrees to practice restraint for now. Pike and Grog remain at the tavern waiting for Tary all night, and Pike reveals that when she’s alone, sometimes she talks to Scanlan through the earring even though she knows he can’t hear her. Tary returns the next morning and decides that his night with Trish has cemented one thing: he’s definitely not into women. Vex learns more about the Grey Hunt: it involves getting a vision from Pelor and going into the forest and defeating a quarry. After several false starts and many hours alone with Trinket under the Sun Tree, she manages to get a vision, and tears off into battle with a grey render, which nearly kills her in the process (it throws a tree at her!). She tries to spare its life, but when it tries to escape, she’s forced to kill it. Bloodied and exhausted, she returns to Whitestone with the creature’s massive hand in tow, Vax puts her to bed, and they talk briefly about the lingering promise she made to the Raven Queen. Matt reveals that the next episode will pick up one year later.
Episode 95 is back to the main story. During the year off, some highlights: Grog hands a card from the Deck of Many Things to a random guy outside a tavern, and the guy gets two Wishes and promptly makes himself a noble of the Quadroads. Pike sends a bit of her money to some distant relatives, and then rises through the ranks to become the second at the Crucible, and she and Grog agree that they don’t need to fight to see who’s better, they’ll just be champions of the Crucible together. Vex tries unsuccessfully to make peace with the offspring of the grey render she killed, and also builds up her house in Whitestone (she also begins acting as an ambassador to Syngorn), and Tary, who has nowhere else to go, moves in with her. He spends months crafting armor for her out of Vorugal’s hide, and she spends that time chatting with him; they become besties over that year. Tary also crafts a new Doty, who can speak… but can only say Tary’s name. Percy takes on new responsibilities at Whitestone and is the only one who doesn’t really get as much of a holiday out of the deal. Vax and Keyleth return to Zephra, where Keyleth starts taking on a more diplomatic role. Almost everyone tries to find Scanlan; everybody fails. But the entire party spends a lot of time together: Keyleth, Pike, Vex, and Tary open a bakery in Whitestone together called the Slayer’s Cake, and Vax leads an expedition to the theatre in the Feywild. We also get a little glimpse into that year, as the party travels together to the Bay of Gifts for a very tropical Winter’s Crest. A prank war initiated by Vax escalates dramatically when Tary gets involved, but overall the party gets a great break after the weight of the world’s been on them for so long. Finally, after the time-skip, some visitors arrive in Whitestone claiming to know Pike: Ogden, Johann, Astra, and JB Trickfoot, her relatives (she and JB grew up together before Wilhand took Pike away). Despite the party’s wariness, the Trickfoots seem more strange than dangerous, and Grog and Percy offer to give them a tour of Whitestone in the morning. Pike’s uncle Ogden, an elderly and frail gnome, mentions to her that he’s been having visions about her being in terrible danger due to a curse on the family.
Episode 96 is the denouement of Pike’s family reunion. There’s a great tour led by Grog (he gets a very fancy hat that Percy and Vex put together for him), including an introduction to the riflemen of Whitestone (Percy wants to call them musketeers, but Cassandra forbids it)–Kynan Leore is now the captain. The party travels briefly to Westruun to check in on Wilhand, who doesn’t know much about this specific family curse but is generally untrusting of the Trickfoots; he got Pike out because he saw more potential in her. The party returns to Whitestone, and Ogden explains that they’ll have to travel up to a mountain and do a sort of exorcism ritual to cleanse Pike of her curse. The party contributes an expensive diamond to the ritual, and Ogden begins chanting (Tary tries to read his mind, but nobody can understand the language being spoken). A horrible monstrous creature emerges from Pike, and the entire party jumps into a very confusing battle: they can only seem to deal damage to the monster sometimes, and it can’t seem to hit them at all. Finally, Vex realizes that the monster is an illusion, and the party rounds on and prevents Ogden and the other Trickfoots from fleeing, the scam revealed (they were only “dealing damage” on the monster when Ogden could see them attacking and make it react realistically). Ogden immediately shifts out of his very frail and befuddled persona, and Pike confronts him; he explains that they received the money from Pike and were disgusted at how little she sent them, considering that she could easily have sent enough to completely change their lives, so they decided to try and scam her out of some more money. A tearful JB reveals she only went along with it because she wanted to spend time with Pike, her childhood friend, again. Tary’s attempts to intimidate Ogden by holding him over a thousand-foot-deep chasm get a little extreme when the minute-long spell ends, and Vax manages to swoop to the rescue, but Ogden drops the diamond in the process. Pike, disgusted and betrayed, gives the Trickfoots all the money she has left on the condition they never return, and decides to keep JB by her side.
Episode 97 is a whole lot of stuff going on. Vex flies down to retrieve the diamond, and Keyleth jumps down to join her… and through a series of bad rolls manages to swan-dive right into the jagged rocks at the bottom of a 1000-foot cliff. She dies instantly, in what is possibly the weirdest and yet most characteristic character death in the series. Fortunately, Tary had enchanted a coin with a Revivify spell and given it to Vex at the start of the fight with the monster “possessing” Pike, and she successfully brings Keyleth back. The party returns to Whitestone, where JB happily helps with research into the Orb under Whitestone. The party realizes that they should probably hire somebody to run the Slayer’s Cake while they’re away, and coincidentally an old woman named Hilda is waiting outside the Slayer’s Cake, introduces herself, and offers to help out. The party, ever suspicious, follows her home and doesn’t see anything especially out of the ordinary. Meanwhile, Percy and Vex contemplate the Orb under Whitestone, and Vex has a moment of inspiration: she could use an Oracle Arrow from Fenthras to look through the Orb. It’s a tricky shot: she fires from outside of the magic-dampening zone. But even with disadvantage, she rolls a 30 and manages to get the Oracle Arrow through the Orb, where it reactivates once passing through… and reveals a glimpse into the Shadowfell, the dark mirror to the Feywild. The party calls on Allura to give her this update (at which point they notice that she’s wearing a wedding band, and she shyly reveals that she and Kima got married), and she sets to work finding out more about it. The next morning, everyone gathers for breakfast and chats about what to do next… only Tary’s still in his room. Everyone heads upstairs to find Doty temporarily deactivated and Tary missing. Some scrying reveals that he’s been kidnapped (Hilda was actually a drow bounty hunter named K’ryyn in disguise) and is heading back to his hometown in Wildmount. The party dashes into pursuit and manages to intercept Tary and K’ryyn, and stops them in their tracks. K’ryyn explains that she was hired by Tary’s father to return him, unharmed, and Tary decides to go back home under his own terms to confront his father once and for all. The party convinces Tary to let K’ryyn get her bounty, if only to force his father to pay for the job, and in return for her life, K’ryyn agrees to do work for them. The party arrives at Tary’s father (Howard)’s compound and confront him, whereupon Howard reveals that the family is destitute and indebted to the Many, which apparently the party had run-ins with back in their very early home games (pre-Percy, even!). Howard has set up a marriage of convenience between Tary and a woman in a nearby rich family, and tearfully asks that Tary consider it to save the family. Once alone, the party is horrified at this prospect, but Tary is taken aback at seeing his father this way. The party decides to check in with Tary’s sister and figure out what should be done.
And… now you’re caught up! Whew.