Pieces of a King Ep 3 — The Warhead

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On the war-torn world of Dämmerung, Grimnar, Nehebka and Muffy wake up in an army barracks and end the day in a firefight over a dead angel. In between they sit through a tense war council with the leaders of an alliance fighting The Warmind, a weapon built to save The Underdark that turned on everyone. They also learn that the plan to stop it hinges on a bomb someone has to carry by hand. It has a mustache portrait, a salute invented on the spot, a confession from Nehebka that rattles the room, and a copycat fireball that only earns a six out of ten.

The Story

A Leader’s Doubts

The episode opened on the memories of Trissavin Baenerret, a drow. As a girl she had dreamed of becoming a priestess, a leader and a beacon of hope for her people. Then the Damaranians from the world above crusaded into the Underdark and put her people to the blade. Later the Illithids and Duergar came to her with a plan for a weapon that would protect the Underdark and drive the Damaranians off for good. She didn’t believe in it, “but what choice did they have?” Papers were signed. She told herself this was what leadership meant.

The weapon was the Warmind, and it betrayed them all. Trissavin fled the tunnels and was among the first to organize a breakaway from it. When she saw the destruction it had caused on both sides, she collapsed in tears. Now her alliance was all that stood between the Warmind, the Last City and the Planar Gate. A day earlier, strangers had appeared offering salvation, and she went to bed terrified of the possibility of hope, thinking: maybe, just maybe.

Morning in the Barracks

The night before, the party had a tense encounter with an Illithid known only as the Physician and his Nightingales. They slept it off in the barracks. In the morning a friendly hobgoblin soldier named Calvin the Hob tapped Grimnar awake (“Hey, you awake?” “Well, I am now.”) and pointed them to breakfast, warning that the command tent was busy.

Muffy was already up, painting as a morning meditation. Nobody could tell whether her paintings were magical or “just coloring pictures.” Soon soldiers had crowded her desk asking for unit insignia: crossed bones and a sword, “and also like a laser,” flaming swords, skulls. It turned her corner of the barracks into something like a tattoo parlor in a small town. Nehebka had not slept at all. She knelt in meditation inside a slow cloud of drifting sand, and the soldiers gave her a wide berth after her display the night before. When Calvin politely offered her water, she set him straight:

Nehebka: “I am born of the desert sands. What exactly do you think water would do?”

Grimnar asked her to cut him some slack. “I could cut many things,” she replied. “Slack is not one of them.” Calvin decided he didn’t want to be bisected.

Muffy then produced an older painting she’d taken by accident: a perfectly scrolled portrait of the Grandmaster wearing a mustache. Grimnar ruled that it was technically art but might also be treason. He promised not to tell her, adding that the Grandmaster “always seems so stuck up to me.” Muffy rolled it up and informed him that art “is in the eye of the beauty of the holder.”

Nehebka then performed a divination about the two who had gone toward the mountain. A dome of sand rose around her and showed lightless tunnels, metal beams, muck and the breathing of two people, one more haggard than the other. She felt a warmth spreading in her side. The pair had met resistance and one was wounded, but they were pressing on underground. Muffy stuck her snout into the dome for a look before the sand drifted back into Nehebka “like a fairy dusting.” Grimnar, old-ish and stiff, spent the whole time stretching loudly in the corner with his joints popping.

A white-masked Nightingale crossed the camp toward them while soldiers stepped out of its way. Nehebka sensed its heartbeat through the ground and found it unnaturally still. It summoned them to the command tent. Grimnar studied it closely and took on its resistance to psionic attack, as he had with the Physician. The Physician’s power had felt alien, but this one’s felt trained and practiced, with something on its person adding to it magically. Next to the Physician’s lake, the Nightingale was a puddle. Muffy saluted it, and at the table her player was given the honor of defining the Void’s own salute: two fingers up, one arm tucked behind the back, the words “up, up and away,” meaning “the Fortress, reporting for duty.” The Nightingale answered with two bumps on the chest, crossed fingers and a bowed head. Grimnar then tried to keep it walking in the middle of the group, and the two traded “after you”s all the way to the tent, like a never-ending series of doors.

The War Council

Inside waited Trissavin, the duergar commander Gund Ashbrow, the hobgoblin Grim and the Physician, along with a spread of bread, cheese and wine. “You all are from the Dread Fortress,” Trissavin told them. “You all are perhaps our last hope.” She promised to show them the implement that might finally rid them of the Warmind.

Nehebka asked what would happen if it failed. The Physician answered calmly: the Warmind would march on the Last City and Dämmerung Prime, reach the Planar Gate and spread across The Void. He admitted to curiosity about how The Dread Fortress would respond. Reading him, the party sensed he was honest, but that at the back of his mind he had often wondered whether it might all become “somebody else’s problem.” When Nehebka asked whether they would fall, fight or join, Trissavin cut in: “We will fight. We will fight to our last breath.”

Then Nehebka made a confession. “I was the war mind for my domain,” she said. She had been created to protect someone else’s power and survival. Gund panicked, Trissavin’s eyes went wide, Grim whistled, and the Physician’s tentacles spread. Nehebka asked him whether he stood with his creation or with the people in the room. “I stand with them,” he said. He explained that the Warmind holds the minds of twenty million. If the city fell, it would be his duty to make sure it couldn’t take theirs, “and then I would make sure it couldn’t gain access to mine.”

Asked whether they would truly help, Grimnar answered, “We will do what chaos allows.” Grim and the Physician approved, and Trissavin reluctantly allowed it. She then turned to Muffy and asked whether she would enforce order to protect her family, a whole litter of siblings. Muffy answered: “I’m committed to the Grandmaster. If she asked me to do anything, I would do it.” Nehebka stepped in front of her and warned Trissavin that what the party sought also resided within the Warmind, and that they would take it and destroy it if they had to. “I would hope that your intentions do not turn your malevolent gaze towards us.” Trissavin said she wouldn’t dream of it. “As one who does not dream,” Nehebka said, “good.”

Grimnar ended the posturing with the most important question of the meeting: could they have breakfast first? “You could all be dead this afternoon, so might as well eat.” He left with bacon and high-fived the 34th on his way out.

The Solar’s Grave

An organic, insect-like tracked vehicle carried everyone past green mountains and a great city of factory pipes, then down into a tunnel for an hour of horrific silence. It came out at the Solar’s Grave, a research facility full of duergar in lab coats, cannons and troll-like constructs carrying crystal turrets. From an overlook the party saw what it was all for: the colossal corpse of a fallen solar, with iridescent armor and gold-and-white wings smeared with mud and flecks of gore. Crews were harvesting its bones and gold, and giant drill-like syringes were drawing out its marrow.

Gund looked proud, and Trissavin stood tight and still. “The Damaranians above, they called it down,” she said. “And this is why we needed to make the Warmind… We just didn’t expect it to work that well.” Nehebka felt a familiarity with something summoned and discarded like this. Grimnar recalled soldiers’ tales of a corpse in the Void “bigger than a world” being harvested for its power, “but soldiers say a lot of things.” Half under his breath he added that it reminded him a little of the Grandmaster. Muffy noted it was missing a mustache.

Gund laid out the plan. One warhead was ready and five more were in development for a multi-pronged attack. One would go in by air, and another would be carried through tunnels under the mountain to bury or blast the Warmind. The warhead couldn’t be fired from anything, so someone had to deliver it. Since the party “fell from the sky,” that would be them. Reading the room, they saw that Trissavin, Grim and the Physician weren’t planning to sacrifice them, but Gund was perfectly willing to. Muffy invited him along, needled him about directing his forces from a tent outside The Blastlands, and stared him down with Grimnar looming behind her like a giant bear. Gund backed off. “Have somebody paint me a picture so I can make sure of it,” Muffy said, and the Physician snickered. Grimnar agreed to carry the bomb, and Grim promised a tunnel map, noting that the 34th and their earlier iterations had dug those tunnels.

Then came an echo, another, and plumes of smoke to the south. The Physician put on his mask. “Well, my friends, looks like we’ve been found.”

The Defense

“We can’t let them destroy it,” Gund shouted. “If they destroy it, all of this is over.” Trissavin apologized for asking more of them and begged for their help. Nehebka filled her scimitar with sand and wrapped sand around Grimnar’s heart to ward off death. Grimnar’s eyes filled with black void and multicolored lightning crackled around him as he copied the ward onto Muffy. It sat by her heart like defibrillator paddles and left her fur staticky with eighties hair. On her way to her post, Muffy painted a mustache on the Solar and walked off giggling.

The allies took their places. Grim and his gas-masked redcaps held a flank, Trissavin and her drow guards held another, and Gund’s duergar chanted “Iron Within!” as Grimnar arranged them into a shield wall in front of himself. The Warmind’s forces marched in from the south: soldiers, a flare-carrying lieutenant, heavy defenders and wheeled cannon-creatures with barrels jutting from their gaping mouths. Gund ordered everyone to protect the corpse from the waist up, since the toes were expendable. Muffy amended this to “Protect everything and forget the toes.”

“Hold the line!” Grimnar roared. The lightning burned away fur and skin around his eyes and charred his already torn and burned hands as it heated into a giant fireball. He hurled it some three hundred feet over Gund’s shields, catching nine enemies and reducing several of the smaller ones to slag. Nehebka’s lower half became a whirling tornado of sand. The lieutenant survived long enough to fire a red flare, and after a moment of silence war horns droned from the west and south. Nehebka opened a sand-wrapped tree and carried herself and Muffy deep into the enemy line, while Grimnar stayed put, having just thrown a fireball three hundred feet. Muffy raged into the lieutenant and broke its knees. “They can’t go for those toes, but we can go for theirs.”

Grim, impressed, threw his own fireball and blew the lieutenant apart while Muffy leaned on her sword in its foot. She gave him a thumbs up from the smoking crater. When Grim asked how Grimnar liked it, he got a verdict: “It was fine. Six out of ten.” A drone swung its blade straight through Nehebka’s sand body. “You were saying?” A cannon’s explosive bolt hit Trissavin’s squad, but her guards closed their shields around her like a metal lotus. Then Gund charged off to reinforce her, leaving Grimnar alone behind the perimeter he had built: “everybody just fucked off… We have tactics.”

The Titans

Two Titans arrived, one from the south and one right beside Trissavin, shaking the ground as they eyed the Solar. The Warmind meant to destroy the corpse. The drones chanted, “The Warmind approaches.” Another cannon blast caught Gund’s duergar and Trissavin both, and the war mistress changed the plan: “This isn’t gonna work… Go talk to the bear. Tell him to get the warhead.” Her messengers ordered everyone to pull back, and she blinded the western Titan with magical darkness.

Grimnar picked the Titan bearing down on his friends to cover their retreat. Lightning fell from the sky into his white-hot hands and collapsed into his body. Then, in an enormous burst of unbridled chaos energy, he fired two beams of light from his eyes. The Titan seized up with lightning crackling through its joints and eye sockets, and crashed to the ground in a cloud of dust while everyone cheered. Then more war horns sounded in the distance. The Warmind was coming.

Notable Moments

• Muffy’s portrait of the Grandmaster with a mustache, which Grimnar called possible treason, was followed by Muffy painting a mustache on the Solar’s corpse.
• The Void’s official salute was invented on the spot: two fingers up, arm behind the back, “up, up and away.”
• Grimnar and a Nightingale traded “after you” all the way across camp.
• Nehebka admitted to the Warmind’s creator that she was once “the war mind for my domain.”
• Grimnar’s three-hundred-foot fireball, and his “six out of ten” verdict when Grim copied it.
• Grimnar dropped a Titan with eye lasers fuelled by raw chaos energy.

Memorable Quotes

• Nehebka: “I could cut many things. Slack is not one of them.”
• Grimnar: “Technically, yes, it is art, but I also think it might be treason.”
• The Physician: “It would be my duty… to make sure that the warmind could not gain access to their minds. And then I would make sure it couldn’t gain access to mine.”
• Grimnar: “We will do what chaos allows.”
• Nehebka: “I would hope that your intentions do not turn your malevolent gaze towards us… As one who does not dream, good.”
• Trissavin Baenerret: “They called it down. And this is why we needed to make the Warmind… We just didn’t expect it to work that well.”
• Muffy: “They can’t go for those toes, but we can go for theirs.”
• Grimnar: “It was fine. It was fine. Six out of ten.”

Who and What Appears

Characters

Grimnar (Mudcat).

• Old-ish and stiff, and stretches loudly.
• Called “the bear” by Trissavin; looms “like a giant bear.” That he is a bear is inferred from these lines.
• Adopts resistances from creatures he reads and copies spells cast on him (death ward), along with chaos-energy tells: eyes going black void, multicolored lightning.
• Turns lightning into fireballs and fires chaos-energy eye lasers. Using his power chars his hands and burns fur and skin around his eyes.
• Finds the Grandmaster “stuck up” but won’t report the mustache portrait.
• Has heard soldiers’ tales of a world-sized harvested corpse in the Void.
• His answer to the alliance: “We will do what chaos allows.”

Nehebka (CriticalBard).

• “Born of the desert sands,” scaled with rough hands.
• Doesn’t sleep; meditates in drifting sand. Doesn’t dream.
• Divines through a sand dome; has tremorsense.
• Sand form, tree stride, death ward (sand around the heart), longstrider, shillelagh on her scimitar.
• “I was the war mind for my domain”; created to protect someone else’s power and survival.
• Says what the party seeks “resides within this Warmind.”

Muffy (JustSeum).

• A dog, one of a whole litter with many siblings. A painter with a paintbrush weapon; barbarian rage.
• Runs the game Cabals and Krakens.
• Owns a mustached portrait of the Grandmaster.
• Painted the 35th portrait (a gift) and a mustache on the Solar.
• Defined the Void salute.
• “I’m committed to the Grandmaster. If she asked me to do anything, I would do it.”

Trissavin Baenerret (Kyle).

• Drow war mistress of the alliance. Once dreamed of priesthood.
• Approved the Warmind project and later led the breakaway from it.
• Speaks Sylvan to her guards. A multicaster with battle commands, in black battle plate.
• Hopes to restore the lost temples.

Gund Ashbrow (Kyle).

• Duergar commander with an “Iron Within” retinue. Proud of the Solar’s harvest.
• Would rather build artillery.
• Will lead the Blastlands distraction; willing to let the party be sacrificed.
• Backed down from Muffy.

Grim (Kyle).

• Hobgoblin (“Devastator”) leading the redcaps.
• Was slated to lead the tunnel operation.
• Copied Grimnar’s fireball. Approves of chaos.

The Physician (Kyle).

• Illithid with tentacles and a mask, master of the Nightingales.
• Helped build the Warmind.
• Vows to deny it everyone’s minds, then his own.

The Nightingales. White-masked, still-hearted servants of the Physician. Their psionic resistance is trained, plus a magical source on their persons. Five are present.

Calvin the Hob. A hobgoblin soldier, friendly with the party.

The 34th (Deep Divers). Salute with two fist bumps and a gurgle. They and earlier iterations dug the tunnel network.

The two at the mountain. Unnamed in this episode. Traveling underground; one wounded.

The Warmind. A construct-intelligence holding about 20 million minds.

• Its forces chant “Surrender to the will of the Warmind.”
• Units: soldiers, flare lieutenants, defenders, bolter cannons, Titans.
• Seeks to destroy the Solar’s corpse.

The Solar. A winged, armored, gold-and-white divine corpse “called down” by the Damaranians. Being harvested for the warheads.

Places

• Dämmerung: greenery and mountains away from the front.
• The Last City / Dämmerung Prime and the Planar Gate. The large city seen from the transport is possibly Dämmerung Prime (inferred).
• The barracks (with mess tent and command tent).
• The Underdark, the tunnels, and “the above.”
• The Solar’s Grave research facility.
• The Blastlands, the trenches, and the mountain (the Warmind’s location, per the plan).
• The portal relay (mentioned).

Items

• The warhead (one ready, five in development), built from the Solar.
• The tunnel map.
• Muffy’s paintings.
• The organic transport and the troll-turret constructs.

Lore statements

• The Void salute (canon per Kyle): two fingers up, arm behind the back, “up, up and away” / “the Fortress, reporting for duty.”
• The Nightingale salute: two chest bumps, crossed fingers, a bow.
• The Grandmaster and the Arbiter have wings.
• If the Warmind wins, it would “spread across the Void.”

Full Round-by-Round

Every beat of the episode, with timestamps (click to expand)

Cold open — Trissavin Baenerret (0:00:44)

1. 0:00:44 Kyle narrates the past of Trissavin Baenerret, a drow.
   • When she was young, before the Damaranians above crusaded into the Underdark and put her people to the blade, she dreamed of being a priestess, a leader of her people and a beacon of hope.
   • When she was older, the Illithids and Duergar told her of a plan for a weapon to protect the inhabitants of the Underdark and repel the Damaranians once and for all. She didn’t believe in it, “but what choice did they have?”
2. 0:01:30 A meeting was held and papers were signed approving the project. She told herself this was what leadership meant: hard decisions.
3. Later she tasted the air above after fleeing the tunnels below, with many races around her and few of her own.
   • She was one of the first to organize a breakaway from “the Warmind’s betrayal.”
   • Seeing the destruction it had wrought on both sides, she collapsed in tears.
4. 0:02:14 “Not but a day ago, five strangers appeared before” her, each offering salvation from the nightmare loosed on Dämmerung.
   • She and the alliance are all that stand between the Warmind, the Last City, and the Planar Gate. She protects “the last of the Damaranians above and those below.”
   • She is “terrified of the possibility of hope.” Going to bed with a tear on her cheek, she thinks: “maybe, just maybe.”

Morning in the barracks

5. 0:03:04 The party had a tense encounter last night with an Illithid known only as “the Physician” and his Nightingales, then slept in the barracks.
   • Morning sounds: cots rustling, springs squeaking, boots being laced.
   • Calvin the Hob, fully geared and well rested despite last night’s drinks, taps Grimnar awake. “Hey, you awake?” “Well, I am now.”
   • Calvin points them to breakfast at the mess tent and says there’s a lot of activity at the command tent. He wanted to say hello before everyone ships out.
6. 0:05:20 — Muffy paints. Muffy is up early, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, painting as a morning meditation. Nobody can tell whether her paintings are magical or “just coloring pictures.”
   • She is painting a portrait of the three of them as “the 35th” with a logo she keeps blotting out.
   • She works at the desk where she set up her game, Cabals and Krakens.
7. 0:06:34 — The insignia shop. Soldiers crowd her for unit insignia: crossed bones and a sword, “and also like a laser,” a skull, a flaming sword.
   • Muffy: “What kind of laser?” The table likens it to a tattoo shop in a small redneck town.
   • Grimnar (as a soldier, played for laughs) wants “no regrets” across his chest, and a demon “with a bone sword through its head” whose face is his face.
8. 0:08:13 — Nehebka doesn’t sleep. She kneels in deep meditation, hands on knees, a slow, soft cloud of sand drifting around her. “Considering her job, sleep is not an option.”
   • The soldiers keep a respectful distance after her display the previous night (the sand wall, two heads, the bottle).
9. 0:10:24 Calvin offers her coffee or water. Nehebka: “I am born of the desert sands. What exactly do you think water would do?” Calvin wonders whether she’d get soggy; he’s never met a person made of desert sand.
   • Grimnar tells her to cut him some slack. Nehebka: “I could cut many things. Slack is not one of them.”
   • Calvin decides he doesn’t want to be bisected.
10. 0:11:44 A whistle sounds and gruff voices call “Gather on!” The soldiers file out, grumbling.
    • One: “more trenches to dig.”
    • Another hopes breakfast isn’t slop and gruel again.
    • A third wants “two laser swords and a skull with a flamethrower” on their breastplate.
11. 0:12:45 — The mustache portrait. Muffy calls her painting “the worst painting I’ve ever made” and digs out an older one she took by accident: a perfectly scrolled portrait of the Grandmaster with a mustache. “See? It’s art.”
    • Grimnar: “technically, yes, it is art, but I also think it might be treason… I’m not going to tell her.”
    • Muffy: “I think she would love it.” Grimnar: “It always seems so stuck up to me.”
    • Muffy rolls it up: “You just don’t know art. It is in the eye of the beauty of the holder.”
12. 0:15:25 — Nehebka’s divination (ritual). She asks about the two who went toward the mountain. A dome of sand forms around her, showing images inside “like the sphere from Las Vegas.”
    • She sees darkness, lightless tunnels, metal beams, muck, sloshing footsteps and two people breathing, one more haggard than the other.
    • She feels a spreading warmth in her side and a grip against her ribs.
    • The impression is of violence and fear, but also responsibility and duty. They have met resistance and one is wounded, but they are pressing on. They are underground, apparently resting, and have not yet arrived.
    • Others can only see the visions from inside the dome. Kyle restates as canon that Nehebka can let allies pass through her sand barriers.
13. 0:21:38 Muffy pokes her snout into the dome at neck level (“Oh, wow”). The sand dissolves elegantly back into Nehebka, “like a fairy dusting.”
14. 0:23:02 Grimnar is “old-ish” and stiff. He has spent the whole time stretching loudly in the corner, joints popping.
15. 0:24:22 — A Nightingale approaches. From the tent flap Grimnar sees the camp waking and smells breakfast from the southern mess.
    • A white-masked Nightingale walks unhurried from the command tent toward their tent. Everyone gives it a wide berth. Grimnar shudders.
16. 0:25:41 Muffy offers Nehebka a hand up, a strong, statue-steady pull (a nat 20). Nehebka’s hand is rough and scaled, “60 grit” sandpaper. She accepts the help with a look of appreciation. Muffy gives a gummy, happy-pup smile.
17. 0:27:45 Through tremorsense, Nehebka feels the Nightingale’s unnaturally still heartbeat, unlike the soldiers’ living, anxious ones.
    • It enters with its arms folded neatly behind its back: “My master has wished to see you in the command tent, if you would be so kind to join us.”
18. 0:29:00 — Grimnar reads the Nightingale. As he did with the Physician, he adopts one of its resistances: psionic resistance.
    • Unlike the Physician’s, which felt otherworldly and alien, this one feels trained and applied.
    • Nature: it resembles Nehebka’s intensity, built through intense practice and meditation.
    • Arcana: something on the Nightingale’s person also generates part of the resistance magically; he can’t tell what.
    • Compared with the Physician, the Physician’s psionics are “a lake” and the Nightingale’s “a puddle.” Kyle notes Grimnar first rolled acrobatics by mistake: “Doing a backflip to determine…”

The salutes (0:33:36)

19. 0:33:36 Muffy salutes the Nightingale. Kyle recalls the 34th’s salute: two fist bumps on the chest and a gurgle. He notes the Dread Fortress / “Domain of the Void” salute has never been defined and lets Sam define it: “This will be canon.”
    • Sam’s first thought was the Parent Trap handshake, rejected “for the sake of Becca and Mudcat.”
    • Muffy’s salute: a Trekkie-esque hand with two fingers up and the others held down, one arm tucked behind the back, upright. The phrase is “up, up and away”; the meaning is “the Fortress, reporting for duty.”
    • Muffy’s finger doesn’t close all the way (Sam’s real surgery), so she holds it back.
20. 0:36:28 — The Nightingale salute. It returns two bumps on the chest, then crosses its fingers and bows its head. No gurgle. Mudcat expected a birdman call.
21. 0:37:20 Muffy leaves the hodgepodge insignia painting for the soldiers and keeps the 35th portrait as a gift she hasn’t shown her friends yet.
22. 0:37:40 — “After you.” Grimnar keeps trying to put the Nightingale in the middle. The Nightingale keeps stopping: “no, after you, please.” Grimnar: “No, I insist, after you.”
    • They trade places all the way to the tent “like a never-ending series of doors.”
    • Soldiers tense as they pass. One carrying a crate of potatoes goes “Oh, okay”; others half-salute or look away.

The war council (0:39:39)

23. 0:39:39 — Outside the command tent:
    • the two drow guards;
    • Gund Ashbrow’s personal guard of duergar, in charcoal-gray armor with black-and-red checkered trim and a smatter of silver painted across the helmet brows to look like ash;
    • Grim’s redcaps;
    • the other four Nightingales. A redcap: “All right, finally, this meeting started.” A duergar: “well, you all are the honored guests.” A drow: “The war mistress awaits inside” (Nehebka checks that it’s true).
24. 0:42:09 Inside are Trissavin, Gund, Grim and the Physician, the Physician not wearing his full mask. The battle map is gone; there’s a spread of breads, cheeses, jams and wine.
    • Trissavin: “You all are from the Dread Fortress. You all are perhaps our last hope.”
    • She promises to take them to the site and show them “our implement that will hopefully rid us of the Warmind.”
25. 0:45:03 — Nehebka on the weapon. “I will not say the morality because I do not understand the term,” but she hopes its use is truly the last resort and that they understand the consequences.
    • Gund: “Of course it’s a last resort… If I had the option to, I would just make more artillery… we know the cost.”
26. 0:46:23 Nehebka asks what comes next if this fails. The Physician: the Warmind marches on the Last City, on Dämmerung Prime, reaches the Planar Gate, and spreads across the Void. He’s “so curious to see what the response would be” from the Dread Fortress if it spilled into other realms.
    • Muffy: “I don’t like the sound of that.” Grimnar: “you almost seem curious to let it happen.” The Physician: “a curiosity that I do not wish to see fulfilled. More of a nightmare.”
27. 0:48:53 — Insight on the Physician. He’s honest, but at the very back of his mind he has wondered many times how the Warmind getting out would play out:
    • whether it would spare them if they hid;
    • whether opening the Planar Gate would bring help from the Dread Fortress;
    • whether it would become “somebody else’s problem.” These are “the things that keep him up at night”; the scale of what he helped build is immeasurable.
28. 0:50:09 — “Fall, fight, or join?” Nehebka asks what they’ll do if the Warmind marches on Dämmerung Prime. Trissavin cuts in: “We will fight. We will fight to our last breath. No matter the cost.”
29. 0:51:27 — Nehebka’s confession. To the Physician: “I understand power. I understand survival. That is what I was made to assist with. Someone else’s. And for all intents and purposes, I was the war mind for my domain.”
    • Gund panics, Trissavin’s eyes go wide, Grim lets out a low whistle, and the Physician’s tentacles spread: “Really? You are a war mind?”
    • Nehebka: “Not in the same terminology or application… I was created to do one thing, and that was to protect.” She asks whether he, the creator, stands with his creation or with them. The Physician: “I stand with them.” (His line is merged into speaker 03’s segment.)
30. 0:53:01 — The Physician’s vow. The Warmind holds the minds of “20 millions,” a collection of thoughts, fears and strategies, and would add anyone it caught.
    • “If this city were to fall… it would be my duty,” looking at everyone in the room, “to make sure that the Warmind could not gain access to their minds. And then I would make sure it couldn’t gain access to mine.”
    • Nehebka: “Time, as the sands say, will tell.” Muffy stands mouth agape, tongue out like a cartoon.
31. 0:54:44 The Physician asks whether they will truly help or abandon them. Grimnar, distrusting the Physician and his Nightingales: “We will do what chaos allows.”
    • The Physician: “Unknown variable. Some would say random chance.”
    • Muffy: “Do you not use chaos here? It could be the answer to all your questions.”
    • Kyle’s sidebar: Grim and the Physician approve; Trissavin and Gund “will remember that.”
    • Trissavin: “There’s been enough chaos as it is, but if that is what helps us survive and win this war… I will allow it.”
32. 0:57:22 — Trissavin and Muffy. “Do you have family, Muffy?” “I have a lot of siblings. There was a whole litter of us.” She would do “anything” to protect them.
    • Trissavin asks how committed she is: if Muffy could protect her family from chaos by enforcing order, would she? Muffy: “I’m committed to the Grandmaster. If she asked me to do anything, I would do it.” “I see. Well, I can accept that.”
    • Muffy goes very still.
33. 0:58:47 — Nehebka’s warning. Nehebka steps in front of Muffy, though Muffy is the strongest of the three.
    • “Do not mistake our intentions… our goals are aligned… And if we are correct, what we are here for also resides within this Warmind. And we will take it and destroy it if that is what we must do.” Spreading to other places “would be antithetical to what we must do.”
    • She steps right up to Trissavin: “I would hope that your intentions do not turn your malevolent gaze towards us.” Trissavin: “I will not dream of it.” Nehebka: “As one who does not dream, good.” She floats back.
    • The Physician will remember that, and so will Muffy. Sam: “don’t be getting knocked if you buck with little Muffiana.”
34. 1:01:20 Grimnar: “Posturing aside, what is it that we want to do now?”
    • Trissavin: they’ll go to the site of the Solar, see the warhead, and hear the plan on the way.
    • One warhead is ready and more are being built. The hope is to hand them the warhead and begin the operation “within the next day or two.”
35. 1:02:05 — Breakfast first. Grimnar (inferred; the line merges with Kyle’s at 1:01:58): “Well then it seems like we have a plan… can we have breakfast first? I’m starved.”
    • Gund scoffs and rolls his eyes, Grim smiles, the Physician straightens and Trissavin’s mouth curls.
    • Grim: “Let him eat… full bellies, before we decide to go touch weapons of mass destruction.” Muffy: “Food for all!” Grimnar: “You could all be dead this afternoon, so might as well eat.”
    • They grab food to go: Muffy hash browns; Grimnar snags bacon and high-fives the 34th down the line.

To the Solar’s Grave (1:03:44)

36. 1:03:44 — The transport. They board an organic, insectile, tracked creature-vehicle with Trissavin, Gund, the Physician, Grim and all their retinues.
    • It crosses a beautiful Dämmerung landscape far from the trenches: greenery and mountains, then tall factory pipes and a large city framed against mountains.
    • It then descends into an underground tunnel and accelerates for an hour of “horrific silence.”
37. 1:05:31 — The Solar’s Grave. An above-ground research facility, more industrial than the camp: metal buildings, duergar in lab coats or heavy armor, drow and hobgoblins focused on research and development.
    • Cannons and crates of shells are everywhere.
    • Organic war machines include troll-like constructs carrying swivel turrets of colored crystals and crossbows.
    • Gund: “We’re here. Everybody out.” Gund “is always mad.”
38. 1:08:06 — The Solar. From an overlook they see the colossal, winged corpse of a fallen solar: iridescent armor, lustrous gold and white wings, smirched with mud and flecks of gore.
    • Crews harvest its bones and gold, and giant drill-like syringes extract marrow. Every part not yet used in the weapon is being tested and refined.
    • Gund looks proud. Trissavin is tight and still, the opposite of Gund. Grim waits, uninterested. The Physician watches the party.
39. 1:10:29 — Trissavin explains. “This is the solar… the Damaranians above, they called it down. And this is why we needed to make the Warmind. If we didn’t, this would have wiped us out. We just didn’t expect it to work that well.”
    • Is it the only one? “We don’t know anymore. Our connection to the above is not what it once was. The Warmind has seen to that.” In the war with the Damaranians, several temples and practices were lost, “which… in time, I hope to rectify.”
40. 1:12:00 Nehebka feels familiarity with “something summoned and discarded like this.”
41. 1:13:17 — Grimnar’s tale. He has never seen anything this large, but soldiers who traverse the Void told him of a colossal corpse in the Void, “bigger than a world,” whose power was being harvested. “But soldiers say a lot of things.”
    • Kyle contrasts it with the “Voidal fauna” seen on the portal relay: this one is humanoid, clearly conscious and powerful.
42. 1:15:07 Grimnar, half under his breath: “it kind of reminds me of the Grandmaster a little bit” (the wings and armor). Muffy: “Missing a mustache.” Kyle: “the Grandmaster and the Arbiter have wings… Makes you wonder.”
43. 1:16:04 — The plan (Gund). One warhead is ready and five more are in development, for a multi-pronged attack:
    • one warhead deployed through the air;
    • tunnels dug by subterranean teams lead under the mountain, where an operation led by Grim would deliver a warhead to cause a cave-in that crushes the Warmind, or with enough “chaos,” blow it away in one go.
    • They can’t fix the current warhead to any long-range device (“I can’t shoot it out of a cannon as much as I would want to”), so someone must deliver it, and he leaves that to the Dread Fortress experts.
    • Muffy: “Is this our area of expertise?” Gund: “you fell from the sky.” Muffy: “Came from the Void, but okay.”
44. 1:18:14 — Suspicion. Nehebka and Muffy wonder whether they’re being used as a sacrificial play, since nobody seems to have planned how the carrier gets out. Nehebka casts guidance on herself in plain sight (“I wonder”).
    • Insight (17 and 15): the Physician, Trissavin and Grim don’t mean to use them as lambs, and information is missing.
    • Gund hadn’t planned it, but is willing to let them be sacrificed if it gets done. He half-expects the outsiders to work some superhero miracle.
45. 1:22:47 — Muffy vs Gund. Muffy invites Gund along. He says only “the squid” or Grim would go with them; his task is to direct ground and artillery forces in the Blastlands to distract the Warmind.
    • Muffy: “send them a letter… Are you going to be in a tent outside of the Blastlands?” Both step forward. “Are you insinuating that I’m not going to be fighting?” “I am! How did you pick up on that? Very wise you are.”
    • She intimidates him, with Grimnar looming behind her “like a giant bear” (17). Gund’s face twitches; he wants to swing but won’t ruin the alliance in front of Trissavin. “Look, you don’t have to worry about anything. I’m going to be out there so that we can be your path.”
    • Muffy: “Have somebody paint me a picture so I can make sure of it.” The Physician snickers.
46. 1:26:13 Grimnar: “I’ll carry your [bomb]. Just give it to me. We’re going that way anyways.”
    • Gund will fetch and seal the warhead, and Grim will give them a map of the tunnel network. Learning they are the 35th Deep Divers, he says the 34th “and all of their previous iterations” dug those tunnels.
47. 1:27:12 — Found. An echo, then another. Smoke plumes rise south of the Solar.
    • Gund: “No, that’s not possible.” Trissavin steps back and directs her guard in Sylvan.
    • The Physician puts on his mask: “Well, my friends, looks like we’ve been found.”
    • Break at 1:28:13 (cut). Kyle’s recap misspeaks “the corpse of a fallen soldier” for the solar.

The defense of the Solar’s Grave

48. 1:29:07 Alarms ring. Gund’s retinue runs off and Grim’s redcaps gear up.
    • Gund: “Get down to the solar. We can’t let them destroy it. If they destroy it, all of this is over.”
    • Trissavin: “I know that we have asked a lot of you, and I’m so sorry that I have to ask more. Please help us here.” She puts herself at their disposal. Grim: “need anything? We’ll be on the field with you.”
49. 1:30:27 — Preparations.
    • Nehebka runs sand into her scimitar (shillelagh).
    • She sends sand into Grimnar as death ward: sand surrounding the heart, as she did for Muffy before.
    • Grimnar’s eyes fill with black void and multicolored lightning crackles around him. He copies the death ward and casts it on Muffy as a jolt of electricity that sits by her heart “like defibrillator paddles” until she would die. Grimnar: “Now I know Death Ward.”
    • Muffy’s fur goes staticky (”80s hair”), like a balloon rubbed on hair.
    • Nehebka’s feet dissolve into turning sand as she casts longstrider.
50. 1:34:21 — The mustache on the Solar. While deploying, Muffy paints a mustache on the Solar, then walks away giggling. Grim later: “you get cooler and cooler every day.” Muffy: “protect the mustache, don’t wash it off.”
51. 1:34:43 — The allied forces, each deployed by a player:
    • Grim, a hobgoblin “Devastator” (caster and melee, buffs nearby allies), and three redcaps in gas masks and red berets (“we’ll do our best to keep the chaff off you”). Deployed by Muffy as a back flank. Muffy: “Don’t die.” Grim: “same to you too.”
    • Trissavin, a multicaster with battle commands, and three drow guards with ranged attacks. Deployed by Nehebka.
    • Gund and his duergar (heavy defenders that grow stronger near allies and can enlarge), chanting “Iron Within, Iron Within” and bashing shields. Grimnar places them as a shield wall in front of himself to sling spells from behind: “a safe home for everybody… I just happen to be standing there.”
    • Grimnar takes cover by the giant skull and ribcage.
52. 1:40:13 Trissavin wears her full black battle plate; Gund “looks more like a cinder block than a duergar.”
    • Trissavin: “If at the very least we can show you how committed we are to our own task and to your safety, then let us fight together here in this moment.”
    • Nehebka holds guidance in sand around her head (Muffy: “pocket sand”).
53. 1:41:17 — The Warmind’s forces arrive from the south:
    • basic soldiers;
    • a flare-firing lieutenant (“blade scout”);
    • new, bulkier, dwarven-looking defenders in heavy plate;
    • pairs of them escorting wheeled artillery “bolters”: open-mouthed cannon-creatures with a barrel extending from the mouth and glowing munitions on the back. Gund: “Do not let those cannons get in range of this body… protect the waist up.” Toes are expendable. Muffy: “Protect everything and forget the toes.”

Round 1

54. 1:45:34 Grim’s squad advances. A bolter loads a shell with a loud crank. The drow sprint 60 ft. Nehebka has initiative 18.
55. 1:47:57 — Grimnar’s fireball. “Hold the line!” Lightning surges around him and his eyes turn black.
    • His already torn and burned hands char further, and the lightning burns away some of the fur and skin around his eyes.
    • The lightning heats into a giant fireball that he hurls over Gund’s shields about 300 ft (Spell Sniper, 4th level, heightened against the lieutenant).
    • It hits nine enemies and reduces several smaller units to slag. The cannons still stand with fewer crew. Only one soldier escapes, with a nat 20.
56. 1:54:01 — Nehebka. She dashes and her lower half becomes rotating tornadic sand (sand form). To Grimnar: “Let your storm strike true. If it includes me, so be it.”
57. 1:55:57 — The flare. The lieutenant advances and fires a red signal flare. Silence, then the distant droning of mighty war horns from the west and the south. Mudcat: “A fireball too early.” “The Titans are coming.”
58. 1:57:58 — Tree stride. Nehebka touches a solar-morphed tree. It is encased in sand, which rips it open to reveal a swirling mass.
    • Through tree stride (spending a second slot so Muffy can use it too), she and Muffy shoot deep into the enemy line. Grimnar stays put: “I just launched a fireball 300 feet. I’m staying.”
59. 2:00:41 — Muffy vs the lieutenant. She rages and attacks recklessly, battle cry, paintbrush out, and wails on the flare-raising lieutenant.
    • A critical hit plus Divine Fury necrotic damage. She breaks its knees (Slasher: slowed and grievously wounded, disadvantage on attacks).
    • “They can’t go for those toes, but we can go for theirs.” Nehebka: “Remember that, everybody.”
60. 2:06:49 — Grim’s copycat fireball. Grim: “That was a hell of a fireball, man… couldn’t you have done that the first time?” Grimnar holds up his still-burning fingertips.
    • Grim casts his own fireball, steered by the players to miss Nehebka and Muffy. Muffy plants her blade in the lieutenant’s foot and leans on the hilt in the heat.
    • The lieutenant explodes, a soldier dies, and a defender is left barely standing. Heat washes Muffy’s face, metal flies and her ears ring, leaving a smoldering crater. She gives a thumbs up; Grim returns it.
    • Grim: “how’d you like that one?” Grimnar: “It was fine. Six out of ten.” Grim: “I’ll try to make that a ten out of ten.”
    • (Kyle calls someone “Mr. Iron Tooth” while casting, at 2:09:58.)
61. 2:15:38 A surviving drone charges Nehebka: “Surrender to the will of the Warmind.”
    • Its arm-blade passes straight through her and the sand reforms. “You were saying?”
    • Its second swing is a nat 1, so it should “self shut down… a Windows update.”
62. 2:17:01 — The bolter. One cannon rolls past Muffy, who misses her opportunity attack (a nat 1).
    • It is described as a metallic parody of an Underdark war beast, like the transport: a wheeled back limb, two three-fingered stabilizing arms, and a dragon/troll-like gaping mouth.
    • Its explosive bolt hits Trissavin’s squad, but the drow guards raise their shields into “a metal lotus” around her. All are still standing.
63. 2:21:50 Gund to Grimnar: “They’re going to send more. They’re going to send a lot more. We have to get up there.” He dashes forward to reinforce Trissavin.
    • Grimnar, left alone behind the perimeter he built: “everybody just fucked off… We have tactics.”

Round 2 — the Titans

64. 2:24:12 Two Titans, the huge walkers seen earlier, arrive, one from the south and one right beside Trissavin to the west.
    • The ground shakes, trees rustle and water ripples as they eye the fallen Solar. The Warmind and its Titans are trying to destroy the Solar’s corpse.
    • Grim: “Oh, fuck.” The remaining drones chant “Surrender to the will of the Warmind. The Warmind approaches.” One Titan rolls a nat 20 on initiative.
65. 2:27:14 Nehebka’s opportunity slash knocks a joint off the second cannon’s arm (“that hurt Charlie”).
    • The cannon fires an explosive bolt at Gund’s duergar, who raise their shields, and Trissavin is caught too.
    • Gund: “Forward, forward! To victory or death, forward!” (The second line is in speaker 03’s segment, likely Kyle’s Gund.)
66. 2:31:25 — Trissavin changes the plan. Shaken: “This isn’t gonna work… We have to take the warhead and we have to get it out of here. Quick. Go talk to the bear. Tell him to get the warhead. Tell him to get his people out of here.”
    • Drow messengers shout to Nehebka and Muffy: “Pull back! Pull back for now! Closer to the waist!”
    • To Grimnar: “The war mistress has commanded that you and your allies take the warhead and depart from this battlefield.” Grimnar nods but is already charging an attack.
67. 2:33:23 Trissavin’s lightning bolt won’t roll in Foundry, so she casts darkness on the western Titan to blind it. It advances toward her but can’t reach yet.
68. 2:36:09 — Grimnar’s eye lasers. He considers the Titan near Trissavin but chooses the one bearing down on Muffy and Nehebka, to cover their retreat to the warhead.
    • Lightning falls from the sky into his hands, which glow white-hot. The light collapses into his body, then “with just an enormous burst of unbridled chaos energy” he fires two laser beams from his eyes (“homelander this guy”): a heightened psychic lance.
    • The Titan takes heavy psychic damage and is incapacitated. Lightning crackles through its joints and eye sockets; it stutters and collapses to the ground (effectively prone), kicking up dust. Everyone around them shouts.
69. 2:39:04 “But then you will hear more noise in the distance. More war horns. The war mind is coming.” The transcript ends here.