The party tries to turn “we survived” into “we actually help people,” building a small relief fund with the Golden Oracle and putting real coin into freed prisoners’ hands. Then a thieves’ cant warning hits like a cold slap: Meake is about to get hammered. They race north and arrive too late for “normal.” The city is frozen mid-panic, white kobolds patrol the sky, and hidden wards erase anyone who moves wrong. Stealth lasts exactly as long as it can. When the patrol finds them, the street explodes into a brutal fight, and the only question left is whether they can hold the line long enough to reach the hatchery.

Music: Shadowfell - Evernight Background by Supernova Collective https://supernovacollective.bandcamp.comLicensed under Scrybe Quill Context Licensehttps://www.scrybequill.com/license

A purring door leads to a kill-room: cages, a pirate captain with a monster of a “pet,” and Bernadette Follis broken in a cell with an arm missing. What follows is pure trench-fight D&D, where the floor turns into a hazard map, Mecoo keeps getting dragged back from the edge, Nefir burns himself down to keep a kid alive, and Bramble erupts out of captivity with Sydan’s fire at his heels. When the dust finally settles, it isn’t just loot and prisoners being hauled out of Tricadia, it’s a daughter being carried home. Two weeks at sea, one hand-carved replacement, and one high-level miracle later, the party gets something rare: a win that actually feels like it matters.

Music: Conclude the Heist (Escape Theme) by Supernova Collective https://supernovacollective.bandcamp.comLicensed under Scrybe Quill Context Licensehttps://www.scrybequill.com/license

This week the stream didn’t get taken out by Streamlabs, Twitch, or YouTube, it got taken out by Forge. Servers couldn’t play nice with Cloudflare, half the table couldn’t log in, and the duct-tape fix was VPNing to Canada… which worked, right up until my PC started dumping RAM like it was trying to hit a high score and the stream died anyway. In the recap, the party bags their fourth key after dropping a nasty two-headed hook-hand horror, gets jumped by moon wraiths, and then Bramble goes full werewolf and has to get non-lethally put down and locked in a sarcophagus until someone can cure him. And for the DM Deep Dive, I get into power builds: why I don’t allow “named” internet builds at my table, and how one broken character can warp the whole party’s fun.

Tricadia stops being a “rescue mission” and starts being a pressure cooker. The party fights a memory-chewing oobleck that turns thoughts into fog, pushes through wards that snuff out their safety nets, and keeps cracking cages open while the whole cave system trembles like it’s listening. Outside, the SS Sadness is trading cannon fire with two hostile ships, and the escape route keeps shrinking by the minute. Then the last unopened door purrs back at them, and behind the bars sits a face Cliff recognizes: Bernadette. One move from here decides whether this becomes a clean extraction… or a very loud obituary.

Music: Deep Blue Sea Blues by Clara Smith https://www.openmusicarchive.org/browse_tag.php?tag=bluesPublic Domainhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/

Tricadia doesn’t give refunds. Tim flatlines into a spell-sick trance, the party’s gadgets go quiet, and suddenly it’s just muscle, prayers, and nerve in a cave built to punish mistakes. They stabilize who they can, eat the guilt of who they can’t, then turn the whole operation into a controlled hit: bait the tunnels, learn how the oozes “think,” and fight them on their own terrible terms. Down below, every door is a coin flip between freedom and a hidden rune, so the crew clears rooms, disarms traps, and hauls eight unconscious prisoners up the ladder in brutal relays. By the time the crate slams into place and the tide starts whispering about a rowboat, they’ve bought a breath… not an ending. The deeper hatch is still there, the slavers still exist, and Tricadia is about to find out they came to finish the job.

Music: Victorian Mystery by Scrybe Quill https://www.scrybequill.com/Licensed under Creative Commons BY Attribution 4.0 Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The stream finally behaved, but I still managed to hand myself a new headache: three behind-the-scenes mechanics I now have to build clean inside Foundry so they don’t slow the table down when they hit play. In the recap, Nefir gets tossed back into the room like the universe is done borrowing him, Grashka drops a quiet truth that makes everything feel sideways, and the party keeps moving through Karra’s stronghold while very intentionally not opening the door that leads to a lich. A blood-fed amphora spits out angry spirits, the halls throw grief and claws in tight spaces, and by the end they’ve got a third key in hand and the uncomfortable feeling that the stronghold is done playing nice. Then in the DM Deep Dive, we get real about scheduling: what you can commit to, how to talk about it like an adult, and why flaking kills more campaigns than any monster ever will.

The Crown’s “anti-pirate” assignment turns into a wet, ugly grind the second boots hit Tricadia. A storm-soaked wreck offers nothing but rot, so the party pushes into the caves, lays a mean little welcome mat (shadows, ice, and Tim’s beloved caltrops), and forces the pirates to fight on terrible footing. Steel, spirits, and a very personal slime problem turn the choke point into a blender, and the crew claws their way through… only to find the real gut-punch waiting deeper: cages. One bad hit, one trapped lock, and the rescue mission suddenly has consequences you can’t undo. Now they’ve got survivors in hand, blood on the floor, and tunnels still breathing ahead.

Music: Cursed Island by Ivan Duch https://ivanduch.com/Licensed under Ivan Duch's Music License Agreementhttps://ivanduch.com/licensing/

Fresh off the Platinum Keep’s verdict, the party doesn’t get a victory lap, they get a sentence. Annabelle points them south toward the Tricadia Islands to gut a pirate problem, and she staples a very official, very earnest paladin to their hip: Nefir Eques. A new ship, a new captain, and a new routine follows, right up until the ocean reminds everyone it has its own predators. Something with eyestalks drags along the hull, beams carve panic into the water, and the crew finds out fast that “probation” still bleeds. By the time the S.S. Sadness finally drops them on a jungle beach beside wreckage, they’re exhausted, underfed, and very aware that the real punishment is waiting inland.

Music: Spirit's Refuge by Ivan Duch https://ivanduch.com/Licensed under Ivan Duch's Music License Agreementhttps://ivanduch.com/licensing/