Pieces of a King Ep 1 — DӒMMERUNG

Champions and players	Mudcat as Grimnar Stormclaw; CriticalBard as Nehebka; JustSeum (“Sam”) as Muffy
Result	n/a. The squad destroys a construct patrol, then retreats with the goblins under artillery cover
Arena	not a Deathmatch. Scenes in the Dread Fortress (Grimnar’s office, Nehebka’s chamber, a courtyard, Stolas’s equatorial, the lava plains, the portal relay room), then a planar vein, then a battlefield on Dämmerung, then goblin tunnels and the Rust Blood Alliance encampment
Hosts	KyleCalrissian (narration and all NPCs)
Watch	YouTube

What happens

Opening narration

1. 0:00:44 The camera descends through the dread horizon: blues, purples and pinks shift to reds and oranges, with kaleidoscopic lightning in a heavy cloud layer. It drops to a molten sea and a volcanic landmass marked by a gargantuan orcish skull, the Dread Fortress, “a mighty bastion that has stood for centuries, or, in some circles of study, since the beginning of time itself.” It moves through winding corridors, past lava flows, the breweries, the training pits and the Coliseum, to Grimnar.

Grimnar and his brother

2. 0:01:42 Grimnar Stormclaw stands in a small candlelit office deep in the fortress, towering over a doorway and a table.
   • He is a seven-foot-plus werebear with white, polar-bear-type fur.
   • Burns run across his chest and hands in branching, lightning-through-wood patterns, and the fur around his eyes is singed black.
   • He wears minimal armor.
3. 0:03:03 The brother is furious. He came to the fortress to follow Grimnar, and he now studies under the Arbiter as a scholar and mage. He asks why that is lesser than Grimnar “gallivanting around with your fancy armor and your weapons.”
4. 0:03:32 Grimnar: “taking this shape is not our way. You must accept who you truly are.” The brother refuses to “be a large, bare man… swinging a sword and being some sort of martial paragon.”
5. 0:04:09 Grimnar can’t understand him: “Maybe it is the will of chaos.”
   • The brother admits much of what he has studied here is “pretty whack,” but he scoffs at an “unseen energy.”
   • 0:04:53 Grimnar: “I was touched by chaos. As a child… I hear his voice inside of me.”
   • 0:05:07 The brother: “You are touched by chaos, or you just happen to be a seven foot tall bear man on a flat plane?”
6. 0:05:30 They make up: “you are still my brother… I still care about you.” Grimnar slugs him in the arm with giant-bear-man force. The brother: “I give you the verbal lashing, you give me the physical lashing… that’s the brotherly dynamic.” Grimnar leaves for his duties; the brother asks him to keep safe. “We’ll see.”

Nehebka’s ritual

8. 0:06:36 In a dark private chamber, Nehebka sits cross-legged before a small fire.
   • She has dark skin and greenish-tan eyes that shift, and wears tasteful wrapped linens.
   • Her long headpiece has a dark blood ruby at the center of her forehead with silver pieces splaying out around her head.
   • A mask always covers her face.
9. 0:07:36 She holds a dark bronze scimitar over the flame, heating it. She sprinkles sand onto the blade from an empty left hand and whispers: “The sand provides the sand… I may not be where the sands reside, but the sands are with me, for I am it.” It is a quiet daily blessing, close to meditation.
10. 0:09:19 — Dread Commander Caim. A knock. A crow-like Aarakocra with shimmering plumage enters. He wears puffy vests and pantaloons, a rapier, and a billowing cloak in the teal and violet of the Grandmaster’s personal heraldry.
    • He is Dread Commander Caim (spelled C-A-I-M at the table), one of the knights of the domain of dread and Nehebka’s superior.
    • “Ah, Nehebka, there you are… in this dark, dank place.” He says her capabilities are “growing more impressive day by day.”
    • He orders her to Commander Stolas’s room because of a summons.
11. 0:11:14 While he talks, a snake-like line of sand slithers toward Caim across the floor, “itching to grab onto something,” because he interrupted a sacred moment. When she hears it’s a summons, the sand slumps.
    • “I would be [there] in just a moment.”
    • Caim leaves, his talons clicking on the stone.
    • The table rules that Nehebka cannot see through her sand, “not in this current form.”

Muffy’s mustache portrait

12. 0:13:44 Muffy is a 2’5” fennec fox with light hair and sharp bright-blue eyes.
    • In a sociable courtyard she paints an almost-photoreal portrait of the Grandmaster (“you can see her pores”). Her dedication to the Grandmaster is very strong.
    • 0:14:49 Just as she finishes, she paints a black mustache on the Grandmaster’s face. “I think it looks great.”
13. 0:15:01 The courtyard is full of Knights of the Void and Dread Knights: some read poetry or study arcane texts, some spar with practice swords, some play music or rest.
    • The crowd behind Muffy laughs and groans. One knight: “I don’t know if they’re gonna like that.” He asks if she’ll put it in the gallery. “If she’ll let me.”
    • 0:16:40 The fortress staff, tiny goblins and “occasionally a rogue chinchilla,” chant “hang it, hang it, hang it.”
14. 0:16:59 She rummages half-body-deep in goblin tool crates and finds a hammer and nails (Investigation). With nails in her mouth she bobs the canvas from wall to wall and hangs it. It ends up at two feet high, so only people her size can see it, and they “lovingly admire it.”
15. 0:18:46 — The elvish Dread Knight. A medium-build elf Dread Knight kneels to look: “I’ve always appreciated your artwork… Perhaps a little higher next time.”
    • She relays the summons to Stolas’s equatorial.
    • Muffy tucks her dripping palette under her arm and sheathes her brush.
    • 0:20:02 As Muffy leaves, the knight adds: “Keep that creative spirit of yours alive… I have a feeling that we’re going to need it in the coming months.” Her face drops as she turns away. Muffy notes it and growls a little.

Stolas’s equatorial

16. 0:20:27 The hallways grow brighter and more magical as they enter the domain of dread, home of the fortress’s scholarship: magic, and research into the Void and into chaos. “This would be the Realm of the Arbiter, where he mostly presides along with his own personal retinue of knights and researchers.” Grimnar’s brother would usually be here.
17. 0:21:08 The door is circular and looks like a spinning spiral-arm galaxy. A Muffy-sized orb with a single slit eye says “Address yourself.”
    • “Muffy.”
    • “Do we have to do this every time? It’s Grimnar Stormclaw.”
    • Grimnar to Muffy: “You’re so short.”
    • The eye blinks three times and the door spirals open.
18. 0:21:59 The room is full of brass, silver and gold astronomical instruments and pristine tomes. Celestial bodies hang from the ceiling, which looks directly into the Void itself, constellations and all.
19. 0:22:56 Nehebka (Perception 25) and Muffy see fresh-inked notes everywhere on planar travel, divination by the stars, and divination by manipulating chaos energy: an intense scrying effort.
20. 0:24:09 Nehebka looks for books on traveling to planes that may no longer exist. She finds treatises on inner and outer planar travel, with documented cases, from the Arbiter himself and others, of people entering and leaving the Void.
    • She casts Guidance, with tiny sand motes floating around her, and makes an Arcana check (21).
    • 0:25:52 What she learns: to travel in and out of the Void at that magnitude you need either an entire domain (a court of mages) or artifacts of incredibly potent power, usually condensed chaos energy, “on par with the Arbiter and the Grandmaster.” It isn’t impossible, but she couldn’t do it now without a lot of help.
21. 0:26:48 — Knight Commander Stolas. He is a second, more ruffled raven Aarakocra in heavy robes hung with golden discs of constellations and sigils. He holds a quill plucked from his own feathers and a magnifying glass, and stares at the ceiling: “Oh, that’s not right… Oh, this can’t be good.” He turns: “so good of you all to join me… there’s been a development.”
22. 0:27:56 — Grimnar clocks Nehebka. Grimnar’s Insight (19) catches the sand particles and her eyes on the outer-planar books. He mutters like the kid at the back of class: “I know that you’re anxious to leave, but perhaps it is not the will of chaos just yet.” Her ever-present sand aura goes spiky for a moment. She says nothing, and he folds his arms.
23. 0:30:05 Muffy wanders at desk-eye-level and notices sand specks settling on everything from Nehebka. She also sees that Stolas’s drawings are lovingly hand-stippled; the two of them share a penchant for art. “How long did this one take?… I can still see all of the lines.” Stolas: “I had to request special ink from…” “Well done.” “We’ll talk about painting later.”
24. 0:31:38 — The briefing.
    • “Something is shifting within the Void.” The Void is massive; “we all are but tiny motes of sand” (he gestures to Nehebka). As it spits things out and brings things in, threats change.
    • 0:32:33 “Currently the Grandmaster and the Arbiter have had to depart the Dread Fortress for reasons of their own.” From a meeting that “could have been a missive,” he reads his notes: they must deal with “something big that could kill us all, end quote.” So “we have a separate world ending catastrophe to deal with… These things always come in twos.”
    • 0:33:33 He has scried with bones, tea leaves and cards, and “some sort of apparatus that give you color projections” that made him dizzy. All of it says shadows are growing at the very periphery of the Void: “I fear that this may be an enemy of old.”
25. 0:34:17 “You all are familiar with the Shadow King?” Grimnar: “Of course we are. But he’s dead. The Arbiter killed him.” Stolas: “Scattered across the Void itself. So we believed.” His divinations say the Shadow King’s power is accumulating.
    • “The people that matter” have mobilized the Void Domain, and multiple squads are being sent out.
    • “If the Shadow King is to return, it would be calamitous… if we are able to destroy it while it might be in its infancy, or maybe it’s not even him.”
    • His readings point to Dämmerung (D-A-M-M-E-R-U-N-G), “a rather bleak looking world,” with a growing darkness “very synonymous with the Shadow King’s.”
26. 0:36:21 — Tremorsense lie detection. Nehebka uses tremorsense to feel Stolas’s heartbeat, plus her high Insight. The DM: “That is big brain.” His heart races with genuine concern, not deceit.
    • Stolas is known to be eccentric, all stars and “crazy mutterings,” but he’s usually not wrong.
    • He is giving them everything he knows, “which is to say, not a lot.”
27. 0:38:37 Nehebka steps forward: “Are we walking into a problem bigger than you can imagine?” Stolas straightens to nearly Grimnar’s height.
    • “If I did not trust all of you as my chosen Knights of the Void, I would not ask you to do this.”
    • It could spill out of control, especially with the Grandmaster and Arbiter away (“something about cats being away and rats and mice and worms”).
    • The Knights’ specialty is “to range out, to find threats, to extinguish them, or to contain them.”
28. 0:39:57 Muffy: “I’m ready whenever.” Grimnar: “chaos will guide my steps wherever I go. It is not for me to decide.”
29. 0:40:16 — The relay stone. It is a small rounded stone bearing the Skypiercer emblem, an arrow spiraling upward, with two wings spiraling down the arrow like a caduceus.
    • “Break the stone and we’ll know to bring you home.”
    • Inside is concentrated chaos energy. Breaking it activates the nearest gate on whatever realm you’re in and acts as a lighthouse beacon.
    • It is one use only.
    • Muffy takes it and stores it with her little paint things. Stolas: “Do be careful.” Muffy: “Don’t treat me like a child.” Stolas explains that breaking it alone would abandon the others.
    • Stolas: “the three of you collectively represent some of the most unique skills that I’ve ever seen within these walls.” Nehebka: “Then let us be off.”
30. 0:43:30 — “Look after my brother.” Grimnar takes Stolas aside and tries to whisper.
    • “You will look after my brother while I’m gone… because he is an idiot.”
    • “Chaos will guide him, but it can only do so much.” Stolas promises to put him on the right path.
    • “Don’t let him stay up too late.”
    • “Sometimes he gets a little gassy if you let him have cheese. I don’t recommend it. That’s more for you than for him.”
    • Stolas: “I’ll be sure not to bring him into my equatorial when he’s had lunch.”
    • Nehebka (passive Perception 24) hears all of it. “He’s a large bear. You’re probably screaming it.” Muffy: “He has the voice that you feel before you even hear it.”

Preparations

31. 0:45:08 Nehebka’s home realm lies within the Void but outside the fortress; she reaches it by the portal relay. She doesn’t go home. She spends ten minutes on mantras and meditation, and takes only her ever-present scimitar and some pouches.
32. 0:46:32 — Muffy. She puts on a little plated armor (“the strongest armor in every video game”). As her pre-battle ritual she cleans her paintbrush like sharpening a blade, runs a finger down to the bristles and it nicks her: “I forgot how sharp that gets.” She sheathes it.
33. 0:47:43 — Grimnar’s lightning prayer.
    • He climbs out of the fortress and walks through the giant orc skull’s mouth onto the plains of lava.
    • He stares up into the multicolored chaos storms: “please guide my feet and give me the power to accomplish your will.”
    • He raises a hand and a bolt of lightning strikes it. His fingers are already black, singed and blistered from years of doing this, so it doesn’t faze him.
34. 0:49:20 He always listens for a whisper or a crack of lightning to tell him he’s on the right heading.
    • On a Religion check (21), a rumbling gathers from the storm’s edges until it forms right above him. Motes of lightning dance and streak near him without striking: “I wonder if it’s watching, I wonder if it’s paying attention.”
    • Grimnar: “Allow me to be your vessel.”

The portal relay room and Zzhitopp

35. 0:51:29 The relay room is circular and far larger than the equatorial. It has a small round desk and five large round-topped doorways on the back wall. At the desk sits a lanky, green-skinned Githzerai with sharp cheekbones, a pointed chin, auburn hair and coveralls: the portal relay master.
36. 0:52:41 Grimnar: “Good day, portal master. We have a mission.” The relay master ignores him and keeps flipping a booklet.
    • It’s a comic, a loving, cheesy, cartoonish parody of Conan the Barbarian: a horned-helmet barbarian fighting a hydra, with gold piles.
    • He has more comics stacked on the desk, plus models of spelljammers and skycraft.
    • “Who the hell draws this stuff? Awful.”
37. 0:55:08 Muffy, reading over his shoulder, lets out a jolly, deep, warm guffaw right behind him. “Hey, what the hell?” She points his gaze up to Grimnar.
    • “Didn’t see me? I’m huge.” “Look at this guy, he’s also huge… he’s a hero.”
    • 0:56:04 Grimnar: “What makes him a hero? What has he done?” “He swings a sword. He slays monsters.” “You could do that. I could do that. Show him your sword” (to Nehebka).
38. 0:56:25 — Nehebka’s threat. She looks at her sword and then at him: “The sands have guided us here, and the sands tell me to decapitate you if you do not put us through to where we need to go.”
39. 0:57:00 — The goo pit. “I don’t want to get sent back to the goo pit.” He explains resurrections inside the fortress: “you come out of like the tube or the goo and you’re all back together… some people fall in lava… you gotta put them back together.” It’s “very common knowledge” to him, but none of the three has died in the fortress, so the goo pit is news to them. Muffy: “Disgusting.”
40. 0:58:07 “We are going to Dämmerung.”
    • His Void map is an abstract circle of movable beads, because the Void constantly shifts.
    • Dämmerung is in the southeastern region: “that’s like all the way on the edge. That’s gross.”
    • His notes: “Constant Dusk, Overcast.” He asks whether they got “a little planar gem to come back.”
41. 0:59:22 He needs iron and dirt for Dämmerung (“a lot of iron dirt”; Nehebka: “Need dams.” “I need a whole dam.” “I need stone.”) and piles the materials at a gate. He chants the memorized coordinates with a man-sized filigree “swab” (a cocktail-mixer spoon ending in a basket-weave orb).
    • From the Arcana checks (Nehebka succeeds; Muffy rolls 12), Nehebka learns that Void travel needs exact coordinates, “a five digit X… a three digit Y… a four digit Z,” plus descriptors of the realm, “otherwise, you could get lost in the void for who knows how long.”
    • The materials ignite, he stirs them into a red light, jabs the central door, and the portal fans out with a great inhale and exhale of air.
    • “Well, Zzhitopp, you did it again, you bastard. Another beautiful portal.” His name is Zzhitopp.
42. 1:02:37 — Souvenirs. Zzhitopp asks for trinkets and comics from other realms: “The more stuff that we have from a place, the easier it is to go back to it.”
    • Muffy: “I’ll look for great art for you.” Grimnar: “Does dirt work?” Dirt and metal: “we love it.”
    • “Please don’t bring me any sort of fecal matter.” Muffy: “How many times have you gotten it?… Isn’t it [the] goo pit?” Zzhitopp: “Do they put dung in the goo pit? Oh my god.” Grimnar: “Is it the poop pit?” Zzhitopp: “I’ve never called it the poop pit, but it might be.”
    • His answer to how many times: three large barrels sealed with iron lids in the corner. “I got way more than I hoped for.”
    • Nehebka has negative Charisma and doesn’t understand any of it, but she isn’t judging vocally.
43. 1:05:00 — Safety briefing. Muffy’s Insight shows he forgot to explain safety. “How do we not die?”
    • “Keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. No flash photography.”
    • “Stay within the vein. Do not try to touch the exterior of the vein. Do not try to swim on the outside.” Portals are safe, and they can track the relay stone: “if anything goes south, we’ll know exactly where you last went.”
    • Outside the vein is “a totally black pool filled with like all kinds of sharks and evil things.”
44. 1:07:01 — Muffy can’t swim. She rolls for swimming and gets a natural 1. “That’s canon.” She grimaces in fear: “Last time I went swimming, I almost drowned.” She didn’t; she just walked into the four-foot deep end at two feet tall. “The horror.”
45. 1:07:58 An arrivals and departures board shows planar names, and the map beads drift constantly. The beads are records, not people. Realms go out of the Void “all the time”, which is why mapping is hard and why Zzhitopp wants samples. “Remember Dämmerung is overcast and it’s like always dusk there… Have fun, don’t die.” Nehebka walks through first, with Muffy behind her.

The planar vein

46. 1:10:01 The portal feels like a two-way mirror. Resistance builds on the face, then the chest, like walking through a heavy wall; then they are sucked in from the front and pulled from behind. For three seconds each of them fears being ripped in half, then they stabilize as they are catapulted across the Void.
47. 1:11:37 — What Grimnar and Muffy see.
    • They ride a glass-like tube of shimmering force with crystalline rainbow light.
    • Beyond it lies the inky Void: red and blue planets, floating continents, destroyed moons, galaxies, nebulas.
    • Gargantuan life forms drift alongside them:
      • a cross between a turtle and a dolphin, impossibly smooth, feathering out into rotating tentacles that propel it;
      • an “ossuary whale” of porous bone.
48. 1:13:04 — What Nehebka sees. The vein rotates and she sees a stunning black hole above them, with countless blips rotating in and out. “You feel an undeniable presence gazing at you from this black hole.” It is neutral: “no care in it… no hatred… just something regarding you as you regarded it.”
49. 1:14:48 It’s like a full-speed people mover; Muffy: “Whee!” Nehebka asks whether this is their first mission together. Muffy has never worked with them before. Nehebka: “So what can you do with your artistic talent?” It isn’t condescending, and Muffy doesn’t take it that way.
50. 1:15:48 — The brush. Muffy has Nehebka hold up cloth-like painting paper.
    • Her brush looks ordinary: a brown wooden handle and a muddled, once-white tip. It’s pristine and never frays, however much she paints with it.
    • The bristles barely touch the paper and slice it cleanly in two. “Ta-da!” Then she runs her hand through them and they’re soft.
    • Nehebka: “There is a warrior within you.” “Yes, there is.”
51. 1:17:31 — The sand heart-cage. “Then perhaps said warrior should be protected.” Sand circles Nehebka’s hand: “Are you a fan of consumption or would you like it to just take hold?” Muffy says she consumes a lot of food and water, and the sand flies into her mouth while she isn’t paying attention (“crunchy peanut butter, but not”).
    • It settles as a cage of sand around Muffy’s heart: Death Ward.
    • Muffy hunts for a waterskin.
    • (The Foundry automation error is waved away: “The void here decrees. Chaos decrees. Ignored.”)
52. 1:19:32 — Landing. They rupture out of the vein’s bright end wall. “The sky cracks open with a thunderous proclamation, and three stars plummet to the plane of Dämmerung below.”
    • Crystalline shards shed from the tube as they descend, and they land unharmed.
    • A sigil of the Grandmaster burns into the earth beneath them, then fades.
    • They hear shouted orders, metal on metal, a whip crack of lightning and explosions all around: “retreat, pull back, pull back, get everybody out of here.” Someone screams for help, and a life fades out.
    • (Ad break at 1:20:43, cut from the mp3.)

The battlefield on Dämmerung

53. 1:21:21 They are in the middle of a battlefield: black smoke, fire on the horizon, and corpses of both the living and metallic humanoids, some multi-armed or bulbous-headed. There are also dead drow, duergar and goblinoids.
    • Ahead: metallic banners bearing one complete gear with a half gear in the center, circuitry running through both, brutalist structures, and more constructs advancing.
    • Behind: colorful banners (lavender and silver, carmine and orange) and living drow, duergar, goblinoids and kobolds pulling back or rescuing pinned comrades.
54. 1:26:18 Gates should connect gate to gate, so landing in the middle of a battlefield tells them at once that something has gone wrong.
55. 1:23:24 — Muffy’s double nat 20. Most of the party fails the Dexterity save, but Muffy rolls two natural 20s. Instead of being trampled by retreating troops and waking up face-to-face with “a Terminator,” Muffy coordinates Grimnar and Nehebka through the stampede, ducking between legs and jumping over shoulders, and keeps the whole squad on their feet.
    • Sixty feet away, six constructs advance. One shouts: “Surrender to the will of the Warmind.”
    • The squad gets a surprise round.
56. 1:28:35 — The constructs.
    • They have glowing magenta eyes: one, two or more.
    • They are hodgepodge simulacra built from the bodies on the field: “a dwarven duergar torso attached to elven legs with multiple human arms,” all in metal, in small, medium and large sizes.
    • No blood when broken, at most a hint of oil.
    • The squad’s leader is more upright and better designed: fully humanoid, lithe, with a cloak.

Surprise round

57. 1:29:33 — Muffy’s paint. This is JustSeum’s first time playing a barbarian (a Zealot). Muffy rages.
    • She pulls her palette off her back plate. Empty at first, it fills with rainbow paint pots once it’s in her hand; it serves as her shield.
    • She mixes magenta and flings it with the brush, an extension of her reach.
    • The paint seeps into the loose plates and mismatched joints, bubbles, and corrodes the metal (necrotic, through Divine Fury).
    • 1:36:02 With two hits, the front construct staggers back with a loud crunch. Its limbs melt into a “goopy” ruin and it is barely standing. Its eye: “Surrender to the will of the war[mind].” Muffy: “Oh, you don’t look very good!”
58. 1:37:46 — Grimnar’s storm. He stretches his hands to the raging sky and lightning strikes his hands and chest; his eyes go completely black to match the singed fur.
    • “Maybe it is you who should submit to the will of chaos”. He casts Storm Sphere behind the constructs, out of Muffy’s way, redirecting the sky’s lightning through his heart and pointing it at them.
    • Most fail the save. One grunt rolls a nat 20, and the leader also isn’t affected.
    • Wind and hail batter them, and his surprise-attack feat adds damage to all of them.
    • 1:43:28 A bolt of lightning leaps from the sphere and wraps around a construct’s arms and legs, shoots up under a slit in its neck, bursts its eyes out, and melts it into a pile of heated slag.
    • 1:44:21 The wind picks up the construct Muffy’s paint had already loosened and scatters it across the battlefield.
    • “Just like a demon with black eyes” holding the storm overhead. Muffy: “Bring this goo back to the goo pit.” DM: “Hey [Zzhitopp], we brought you some slag.”
59. 1:46:38 — Nehebka’s sand. She raises both hands with the scimitar, muttering, and tendrils of sand flow from her pockets, her pores, everything around.
    • Sand form (Wild Shape): from just below her chest down she becomes a tornado of sand and floats toward the enemy.
    • Erupting Earth: a deluge of sand flows off her scimitar and slams into the ground, which erupts into shrapnel. The scout fails its save with a 1.
    • 1:50:38 One construct is shredded into scraps, and the sand compacts it into a literal coffin.
    • 1:51:41 Another is sandblasted into small particles and beaten into the earth in a serpentine fashion.
    • 1:52:34 A third is dragged into the earth, its rising hands shaved down to mere digits before it is buried.
    • The leader survives. With most of his squadron gone, he surveys the damage, and they can tell he feels fear.
    • The DM: “I was not expecting y’all to just absolutely demolish everything in front of y’all… Surprise round.” Players: “We’re not even in combat yet.” Muffy: “We were in art class.”

Combat

60. 1:54:20 Muffy’s Perception (19) picks up a faint rumbling and a large mechanical creaking, something lumbering and approaching from a crevice ahead and to the right. She can’t see it through the smoke.
    • She points at the ground and tells Nehebka (who has tremorsense and is technically on the ground): “Pay attention to the ground.”
    • Initiative: Muffy, Grimnar, the Blade Scout, the Warforged Soldier (the DM: “We’ll settle on the name eventually”), then Nehebka.
61. 1:58:39 — Muffy. With purple paint (blue and red mixed) she hits the Warforged Soldier: “Be free, my paint, be free!” It melts T-1000-style into a slump of purple and silver goo and dies.
    • (The DM sees her as Delia Deetz screaming “my art is dangerous!”)
    • She then hits the Blade Scout. It corrodes but stands. It has a heavy bladed arm and a heavy-crossbow arm that fires javelins.
    • Muffy bounces on her feet like a fencer, palette over her head: “It’s your turn.”
62. 2:02:41 — Grimnar. A sphere bolt hits the scout (“30 to hit”). The DM: “he’s at an all-you-can-eat buffet of suffering… like one of those inflatable noodle men… getting slapped around.”
    • Chaos Bolt at 3rd level: multicolored lightning licks out like tongues. He chooses psychic, and a purple tongue of lightning strikes through the paint and picks up its purple hue, coalescing into a psychic blast.
    • The scout’s head jitters, but it’s still standing, heavily injured.
63. 2:08:27 — The Blade Scout’s signal.
    • It raises its launcher and fires a red-tipped javelin that ignites into a phosphorescent red signal flare in the sky. War horns answer in the distance: one, two, three.
    • It swings three times at Muffy and misses every time. She deliberately paints its blade a little with each miss.
    • Its wrist slides open and a launcher fires a small ball into the earth at Muffy’s feet: a snare trap.
    • With cold malice from its single cyclopean eye, crumbling: “surrender to the will of the war mind.”
64. 2:12:12 — Nehebka. She notes that the little fox is “something more than we are currently able to see,” and she’s intrigued.
    • “The only one that I serve is the Lord, and you are not him.”
    • She slashes the air, and a cannonball of compressed sand (Abrasive Blast) misses. “It permeates all. Do not fight it.”
    • She lifts her scimitar, and the residual sand from Erupting Earth rises and constricts the scout, glowing red-hot: Heat Metal. The DM rules that it can’t let go of its own body, so it auto-fails: “One of my favorite interactions.”
    • 2:17:46 It begins to liquefy. Its arm practically falls off and it sinks to one knee.
    • Nehebka watches it suffer, chin up, with a hint of a smile.
65. 2:19:15 — Glass cheek. She took storm damage by ending her turn in Grimnar’s sphere, and she isn’t perturbed; she’s used to destructive forces, “as she is one herself.” The sandstorm is like ones she has lived through, “or has become.”
    • The lightning hits the sand around her and makes little pieces of glass.
    • One strikes her cheek, and for a moment her cheek is glass. Muffy sees it, gapes, and gets choked by sand. Then more sand covers it and her skin comes back. CriticalBard: “We’re dropping the lore already.”
66. 2:21:30 — The walkers. Muffy’s eyes are full of sand (“it’s in your socks… why is there sand everywhere?” “Of course, it gets everywhere.”).
    • Nehebka sees what’s coming. The largest thing she’s ever seen would be a sandworm, “no way in heck sandworms aren’t a thing where they are from.” These are smaller than that.
    • A large metallic walker comes on slow and ponderous, its limbs creaking and its treaded feet leaving deep prints. A second emerges from the smoke. Both blare war horns, and each is escorted by more constructs.
    • Muffy pictures a grandma’s walker: “Get off of my lawn!” (DM: “This is my battlefield… You’re scaring the neighbors.”)
67. 2:24:09 — Grym the goblin. Grimnar, who has passive Perception 9 (“I don’t see shit”), feels a slap on his thigh.
    • It’s a goblin in a leather coat with a gas mask around his neck and multiple weapons, with two more behind him: “Friend or foe?”
    • Grimnar: “Are you with him?… I guess I have no quarrel with you.” “Friend? Good enough for me.”
    • “How long do we have before the artillery hits?” “30 seconds, chief.”
    • “Those things are coming in fast… You want to live? Get your friends.”
    • 2:25:51 Grimnar kneels: “You are an emissary of chaos. Sent here to deliver us. I thank you.” Goblin: “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about… What’s wrong with you?” Grimnar shouts: “We have new friends. Come this way.”
68. 2:26:46 — The mustache kill. Muffy wipes a coagulated blob of sand off her paint, dips fresh, hops up and paints a mustache that sticks onto the Blade Scout’s face as it falls. “Magnifique.” She hightails toward the colorful banners.
69. 2:29:02 — Retreat.
    • Grimnar scoops up the lead goblin: “Come with me if you want to live.” (DM: “Reverse Terminator.”)
    • There are six spry goblins who know this terrain. The lead one’s boots have spikes for grip on the inside, so “the pain makes him move faster” (the DM’s gag).
    • Grimnar dashes clear.
    • 2:31:42 Nehebka rises; the sand overtakes her completely. She lays a hand down and drops a large sand tornado (Sand Dervish) in front of the enemy to slow them. Then she becomes a giant whirlwind, “the soft indentation of a face never moving from one spot” (the table: like Imhotep in The Mummy). She scoops Muffy up into the whirlwind, and Muffy screams the entire time, reaching for her paintbrush: “No!”
70. 2:33:53 — The barrage. A whistle overhead, a flash right behind Muffy, concussive heat, then sound. Red spheres of mana-infused artillery shells tear up the whole area where they fought, pummeling the giant constructs and everything behind them.
    • The goblins throw vials of opaque milky liquid that burst into obscuring fog, three each, fifteen in all, covering the escape.
    • The goblin in Grimnar’s arms snickers: “Music to my ears.”
    • DM: “You all have solved my combat puzzle.” Muffy: “Nothing an artist can’t do.”

The tunnels and the Rust Blood Alliance

71. 2:36:28 The retreat passes in a quiet blur. Grimnar keeps running ahead and slowing down. Goblin: “We’re going into this tunnel. Come down here, you giant thing.”
    • Grimnar: “I have a great sense of direction. Don’t tell me where to go. The will of chaos is guiding me.”
    • “Can you wheel chaos to get in the tunnel, please?” He goes the way the goblin says.
72. 2:37:11 They spend an hour in dark tunnel networks, passing caches of weapons and equipment and dug-out holes with tables of parchment rolls and rations. They reach a ladder to an above-ground doorway. Goblin: “that could have been real bad… Anybody missing any limbs?”
    • Nehebka’s sand coalesces back into her feminine form.
    • Muffy, dry-heaving like a dog from all the sand, chugs a goblin’s entire flask, water dribbling into her fur, and hands it back empty. “All right, I guess I’ll drink later.”
73. 2:38:50 “We saw you all come out of the sky… You guys got caught in a full blown retreat. They just hit us way too hard.” “Who are y’all?”
    • Grimnar: “We are emissaries of the Dread Fortress… we were not told of this conflict.”
    • Goblin: “If it’s made of metal… it’s gonna try to kill you. If it’s not made of metal, well, take all the help we can get.” Muffy: “So fleshy good?” “Flesh, great. Flesh, we love flesh.” “If it bleeds, we like it. We don’t kill it. If it’s metal… break it. Hit it with a hammer. Blow it up.”
    • Nehebka: “Not all things that bleed are good.” Goblin: “I agree with that. 100%.” The constructs would have ripped them apart “or worse, would have carried you away to God knows where.”
74. 2:41:18 The goblins hang back with crossbows and primed vials, watching for anything following them. Nehebka and Grimnar share a look: they should never have landed hot in a battle, so something more is going on than “the metal men.” Grimnar nods knowingly.
75. 2:42:00 — The encampment. Stone buildings and tents hold groups of kobolds, duergar and drow, “members of the Underdark, or at least whatever iteration of it would exist here in the Void.” They all eye the newcomers with suspicion. The lead goblin slaps Grimnar’s calf: “Name’s Grym, by the way. You’re welcome for the save. Oh, and welcome to the Rust Blood Alliance.”

Who and what appears

Characters

Grimnar Stormclaw (Drew, a player character)

• A 7’+ white polar-bear werebear with lightning-pattern burns on his chest and arms, eyes singed black, and minimal armor.
• Touched by chaos as a child; “I hear his voice inside of me.” He lives by the will of chaos (“It is not for me to decide”).
• His ritual: he walks out the orc skull’s mouth onto the lava plains and lets the chaos storm’s lightning strike his hand (he has years of scars from it). He offers himself as chaos’s vessel, and the storm answered with gathering lightning.
• He insists his brother return home to their traditions and keep their (bear) shape. He asked Stolas to look after the brother.
• In combat he channels storm lightning and his eyes go fully black. He used Storm Sphere and Chaos Bolt (psychic).
• He believes “the Arbiter killed” the Shadow King, and hailed Grym as “an emissary of chaos.”

Grimnar’s brother (DM; name heard “Namot”)

• A scholar and mage studying under the Arbiter in the domain of dread.
• He refuses the traditional bear shape and martial way. He came to the fortress to follow Grimnar.
• He is skeptical of “the will of chaos.” Gassy with cheese (per Grimnar).

Nehebka (CriticalBard)

• She has dark skin, shifting green-tan eyes, linens, a blood-ruby headpiece with silver, a mask that always covers her face, and a bronze scimitar she blesses with sand daily.
• A constant sand aura that reacts to her mood (it slithers when she’s annoyed, goes spiky when Grimnar calls her out).
• She can become sand (sand form or whirlwind). Her cheek briefly turned to glass when lightning hit her sand.
• Mantras: “the sand provides”; “for I am it”; “It permeates all.” “The only one that I serve is the Lord.”
• She has tremorsense and used it to read Stolas’s heartbeat. Her home realm is within the Void, outside the fortress.
• Interested in planar travel, including to planes that may no longer exist; Grimnar thinks she is anxious to leave.
• She saw a neutral presence watching her from a black hole in the Void. She is from a land where sandworms are surely a thing.
• Spells and abilities: Guidance, Death Ward (a sand cage around Muffy’s heart), Erupting Earth, Abrasive Blast, Heat Metal, Sand Dervish. She has negative Charisma.

Muffy (JustSeum)

• A 2’5” light-haired fennec fox with bright-blue eyes and a jolly, deep, warm laugh. A photoreal painter devoted to the Grandmaster, and a Zealot barbarian.
• Gear:
  • Her paintbrush is her weapon: always pristine, it cuts like a blade or is soft at her will, and she keeps it sheathed.
  • Her palette (it fills with paint when held) is her shield.
  • Her paint corrodes metal.
• Painted the mustached Grandmaster portrait, now hung at two feet in a courtyard. Her signature finisher is painting mustaches.
• Can’t swim; she thinks she nearly drowned (canon from a nat 1).
• She carries the relay stone. Her double nat 20 saved the squad from the stampede. This is her first mission with Grimnar and Nehebka.

Dread Commander Caim (DM). A crow Aarakocra in musketeer-ish puffy vests and pantaloons, with a rapier and a cloak in the Grandmaster’s teal and violet. A knight of the domain of dread who outranks Nehebka. He would normally test her with a duel (“have at thee”).

The elvish Dread Knight (DM, unnamed). She admires Muffy’s art and foreshadows: “we’re going to need it in the coming months.”

Knight Commander / Dreadknight Stolas (DM)

• A ruffled raven Aarakocra in constellation-disc robes, with a quill from his own feathers. Almost Grimnar’s height when he straightens up.
• An eccentric diviner (stars, bones, tea leaves, cards), usually right, and a stippling artist.
• The squad’s commander. He sensed the Shadow King’s power growing at the Void’s edge, pointing to Dämmerung.

Zzhitopp (DM)

• A lanky Githzerai relay master in coveralls who reads comics and builds spelljammer models.
• He opens portals with materials, memorized coordinates and a filigree swab.
• He wants souvenirs (no feces; three barrels so far). He mentions the goo pit.

Grym (DM). The goblin chief of a six-goblin squad of the Rust Blood Alliance. He wears a leather coat, a gas mask and spiked boots, and uses smoke vials. “Music to my ears.”

The constructs (“metal men”)

• Hodgepodge metal simulacra of the dead with magenta eyes and no blood, serving “the Warmind” (“Surrender to the will of the Warmind”).
• Types seen: grunts / Warforged Soldiers; a Blade Scout with a blade arm, javelin launcher, snare trap and signal flares; two giant treaded walkers.

The Grandmaster and the Arbiter. Absent: they have left the fortress to deal with “something big that could kill us all.”

The Shadow King. Believed dead and “scattered across the Void,” but his power may be accumulating.

Places

• The Dread Fortress:
  • breweries and training pits;
  • Grimnar’s office and Nehebka’s chamber;
  • the courtyard (with a gallery mentioned);
  • the domain of dread, “the Realm of the Arbiter”, the scholarly wing where he presides with his retinue of knights and researchers;
  • Stolas’s equatorial, with its galaxy door, eye-orb doorkeeper and Void-view ceiling;
  • the portal relay room (five gates and an arrivals/departures board);
  • the goo pit, the resurrection tube or goo.
• The orc skull mouth and the plains of lava, under the chaos storms.
• Planar veins: tubes of force through the Void, with the Void’s creatures outside them.
• Dämmerung: southeastern edge of the Void, constant dusk, overcast, iron and dirt. The front line between the constructs (gear banners, brutalist structures) and the living (lavender/silver, carmine/orange banners).
• The Rust Blood Alliance encampment and its goblin tunnels: an Underdark-like population of kobolds, duergar, drow and goblins.

Factions

• Knights of the Void / the Void Domain: the Grandmaster’s rangers, who range out to find, extinguish or contain threats. Multiple squads were deployed.
• Dread Knights / knights of the domain of dread: higher ranked.
• The Rust Blood Alliance: the living defenders of Dämmerung.
• The Warmind’s construct army: a gear-and-half-gear emblem.

Items

• The relay stone: Skypiercer arrow with descending wings, concentrated chaos energy, a one-use beacon that activates the nearest gate. Muffy holds it.
• Muffy’s brush and palette.
• Nehebka’s bronze scimitar.
• The mustache portrait of the Grandmaster.
• Zzhitopp’s Conan-parody comics and bead map.
• Goblin smoke vials.

Lore statements

• Travel in or out of the Void needs a court of mages or chaos artifacts on par with the Arbiter and the Grandmaster. The Arbiter has documented cases of entering and leaving.
• Void travel needs exact coordinates; without them you can be lost in the Void.
• Realms enter and leave the Void “all the time”, so maps use movable beads.
• Souvenirs from a realm make the portal back to it easier.
• Arrival through a vein should be gate-to-gate. Landing in a battle means something went wrong.
• Resurrection inside the fortress via the goo pit is “common knowledge” among staff.
• Leaving the vein is like swimming in a black pool full of sharks.

Quotes by character

Grimnar Stormclaw (Drew)

• 0:02:43 “You can’t run from our traditions any longer.”
• 0:03:32 “You know that taking this shape is not our way. You must accept who you truly are.”
• 0:04:53 “We both know that I was touched by chaos. As a child… I hear his voice inside of me.”
• 0:21:44 “Do we have to do this every time? It’s Grimnar Stormclaw.”
• 0:29:05 “I know that you’re anxious to leave, but perhaps it is not the will of chaos just yet.”
• 0:34:23 “Of course we are. But he’s dead. The Arbiter killed him.”
• 0:40:01 “Chaos will guide my steps wherever I go. It is not for me to decide.”
• 0:43:30 “You will look after my brother while I’m gone… because he is an idiot.”
• 0:44:23 “Sometimes he gets a little gassy if you let him have cheese.”
• 0:47:43 “Please guide my feet and give me the power to accomplish your will.”
• 0:51:07 “Allow me to be your vessel.”
• 1:37:46 “Maybe it is you who should submit to the will of chaos.”
• 2:25:51 “You are an emissary of chaos. Sent here to deliver us. I thank you.”
• 2:29:02 “Come with me if you want to live.”
• 2:39:24 “We are emissaries of the Dread Fortress.”

Nehebka (CriticalBard)

• 0:07:36 “The sand provides the sand… I may not be where the sands reside, but the sands are with me, for I am it.”
• 0:10:29 “I am in the middle of my meditation… Is that important or can it wait?”
• 0:38:37 “Are we walking into a problem bigger than you can imagine?”
• 0:42:09 “Then let us be off.”
• 0:56:25 “The sands have guided us here, and the sands tell me to decapitate you if you do not put us through to where we need to go.”
• 1:15:23 “So what can you do with your artistic talent?”
• 1:17:19 “There is a warrior within you.”
• 1:17:31 “Then perhaps said warrior should be protected… Are you a fan of consumption or would you like it to just take hold?”
• 2:12:12 “The only one that I serve is the Lord, and you are not him.”
• 2:13:26 “It permeates all. Do not fight it.”
• 2:40:23 “Not all things that bleed are good.”

Muffy (JustSeum)

• 0:15:47 “What do you mean? I think it’s gonna be great… you can see her pores.”
• 0:16:35 “Thank you. Thank you. See, you have to appreciate it more.”
• 0:20:08 “You couldn’t get rid of it even if you tried.”
• 0:31:04 “How long did this one take?… I can still see all of the lines.”
• 0:42:58 “Don’t treat me like a child.”
• 1:05:27 “How do we not die?”
• 1:07:40 “Last time I went swimming, I almost drowned.”
• 1:16:48 “Ta-da!”
• 1:37:15 “Oh, you don’t look very good!”
• 1:59:52 “Be free, my paint, be free!”
• 2:02:03 “It’s your turn.”
• 2:28:04 “Magnifique.”
• 2:36:24 “Nothing an artist can’t do.”

Knight Commander Stolas (Kyle)

• 0:27:24 “Oh, that’s not right… Oh, this can’t be good.”
• 0:31:38 “Something is shifting within the Void. Something that is quite concerning.”
• 0:32:33 “Something big that could kill us all, end quote… we have a separate world ending catastrophe to deal with.”
• 0:33:33 “These things always come in twos… I fear that this may be an enemy of old.”
• 0:34:35 “Shadow King, dead, right? Scattered across the Void itself. So we believed.”
• 0:38:54 “If I did not trust all of you as my chosen Knights of the Void, I would not ask you to do this.”
• 0:39:48 “To range out, to find threats, to extinguish them, or to contain them.”
• 0:40:16 “This will be your ticket home… break the stone and we’ll know to bring you home.”

Grimnar’s brother (Kyle)

• 0:03:03 “I study underneath the Arbiter, I’m a scholar and a mage.”
• 0:05:07 “You are touched by chaos or you just happen to be a seven foot tall bear man on a flat plane?”
• 0:05:53 “I give you the verbal lashing, you give me the physical lashing… that’s the brotherly dynamic.”

Dread Commander Caim (Kyle)

• 0:09:19 “Ah, Nehebka, there you are… in this dark, dank place. Come, come. We have much to discuss today.”

The elvish Dread Knight (Kyle)

• 0:18:46 “I’ve always appreciated your artwork… Perhaps a little higher next time.”
• 0:20:04 “Keep that creative spirit of yours alive… I have a feeling that we’re going to need it in the coming months.”

Zzhitopp (Kyle)

• 0:53:37 “Who the hell draws this stuff? Awful.”
• 0:57:00 “I don’t want to get sent back to the goo pit.”
• 1:01:48 “Well, Zzhitopp, you did it again, you bastard. Another beautiful portal.”
• 1:03:17 “The more stuff that we have from a place, the easier it is to go back to it.”
• 1:03:31 “Please don’t bring me any sort of fecal matter.”
• 1:05:41 “Keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. No flash photography… stay within the vein.”
• 1:09:20 “Have fun, don’t die.”

The constructs (Kyle)

• 1:25:25 “Surrender to the will of the Warmind.”

Grym (Kyle)

• 2:24:27 “Friend or foe?”
• 2:35:52 “Music to my ears.”
• 2:39:40 “If it’s made of metal… it’s gonna try to kill you.”
• 2:42:52 “Name’s Grym, by the way. You’re welcome for the save. Oh, and welcome to the Rust Blood Alliance.”

Canon notes

• “Something big that could kill us all” is Fil.
• Bec was not at Pieces of a King.
• Nehebka’s “Lord”/“Pharaoh” is CriticalBard’s own lore. People in the Void worship entities that exist in their home realms outside it.
• The hells exist both inside the Void and outside it, because realms have collided. “Scattered around the hells” and “scattered across the Void” are both true.