Fate of the Arbiter is the three-part story in which the Arbiter, the Grandmaster’s loyal right hand, is revealed as a traitor. A wizard who calls himself Toddleheim the Great, a tabaxi archer named Locket and a shapeshifting wanderer called Flynry are sent to rescue him and end up hunted across The Void in his name. It is a road trip, a heist, a betrayal story and a buddy comedy, often in the same scene. It turns the Arbiter from the friendly face of the Deathmatches into the show’s great schemer, and it ends with the throne of the Void itself on the table.
Background
The arc opens in the shadow of a disaster the three heroes saw with their own eyes. The Dread Fortress was attacked by an unknown enemy, and a Tarrasque burst through the wall of the arena. The Arbiter flew down to hold it back, while Lucien Brack and Monteclaire Dufresne fought off wave after wave of invaders. The Grandmaster refused to run. She stood on the sands and released the infamous Turkey Dragon, which scared off a red dragon. Then the Arbiter’s strength failed, and the Tarrasque bit down on him and carried him away.
Afterwards, the Grandmaster sent the three champions after him with a simple instruction: “Do not fail me.”
The Story
Part 1: The Rescue
The first chapter, S2 Ep1, Fate of the Arbiter (Fate of the Arbiter Part 1), begins on a crumbling bridge over a river of lava. The trio replay the attack in their heads. Toddleheim realises the Tarrasque was not flesh and blood but some kind of conjuration, while Locket only remembers being awed by the Grandmaster summoning “the turkey dragon of the horned devil of the waves and waves of devil dogs.” Crossing the gap takes teleportation, shadow-stepping, a rope tied to an arrow and one near-plunge into the lava. Only afterwards does Flynry notice the stepping stones off to the side.
At The Eastern Outpost, an old temple-pyramid on the border of the Grandmaster’s lands, a full army is camped for a siege. Flynry nearly loses his aunt’s bracelet to a cheating goblin in a dice game, then saves it, and pockets the goblin’s seven gold, by “revealing” a contagious beastly condition. The goblin, who flees because he’s “not vaccinated,” is Kenny. The commander turns out to be Orin, a werebear with an eye patch, who explains that a rebellion calling itself the Servants of the Void has taken the Arbiter. Orin owes the Arbiter everything. As a boy, he lost his family to werebears, and the Arbiter swore to avenge them “because… I can’t stand to see your heart break.” The story leaves Toddleheim in tears.
Before the march, Orin gives each hero a glowing healing pearl and shows them the treasure the outpost guards: The Box of Chaos. Flynry feeds it his pearl and quietly pockets a scroll that can coat him in dragon scales, telling no one. Locket prays for a new bow and gets a potion of storm giant strength instead. Then the army rides for an old dwarven castle carved into a mountainside. The army hits the front gate while the strike squad sneaks in “from the rear,” a phrase the table never recovers from.
Inside The abandoned dwarven fortress, the trio slip past stone guardians and spinning blades and solve a bookcase puzzle. At its heart they find the Arbiter, standing unharmed in a cathedral of purple light, and deeply annoyed that they got in so easily.
The Arbiter: “You think that I need rescuing? Look at me! You haven’t come to rescue me. You’ve come to die.”
He offers them a place at his side as kings and queens once the Dread Fortress is his, and calls Elusia “a waste of space.” When they refuse, he grows huge inside a vortex of chaos and orbiting boulders. He hurls Toddleheim’s own spell back at him, and his aura splits Toddleheim’s memories in two. Locket begs him to remember that he and the Grandmaster were friends. Orin bursts in, refuses to believe the Arbiter’s claim that the heroes are the traitors, and charges. The Arbiter disintegrates him on the spot: Orin’s legs explode into ash, holes tear through his body, and he crumbles with a final cry that sounds like Elusia’s name. Flynry reads his secret scroll just in time to shrug off a line of chaos lightning. Then a blue-fisted punch from Flynry, an acid splash from the bleeding Toddleheim and a flaming arrow through the head from Locket bring the giant down, and the collapsing chaos eviscerates him.
They stomp off his hands to carry home his eight cursed rings as proof, and march out through a cheering army that never learns the Arbiter turned. Back in the Dread Fortress, they set the bag down before a silent Grandmaster. She begins to smile, and keeps smiling, until her image melts into mist and the Arbiter steps out of it. The hands and rings shrivel to nothing. The real Arbiter had been “ten steps ahead” the whole time. He declares that their “betrayal” will be known far and wide, then drops them through a portal onto The sands of the arena in front of the roaring Acolytes.
Part 2: Sands of the Arena
S2E6 — FoTA - Sands of the Arena (Fate of the Arbiter, Part 2) starts with something the arena had never seen: the champions refuse to fight each other. The Arbiter is genuinely rattled (“If the Grandmaster was here, she’d be appalled”). So he moves the show to his own arena, a dark temple high above a city, overlooked by a colossal statue of himself. “Do you know how hard it is to find someone who can make a statue that large?” he asks. What they beat in the mountains, he tells them, was “merely a visage… a golem, a stand-in, a mist.”
From a garish black throne, eating grapes, he raises a Deathlock and a pack of vampiric kobolds. Toddleheim enlarges himself and melts a kobold with acid. Locket turns briefly feral and terrifying, which leaves Flynry slack-jawed. Flynry roars at an undead thing that doesn’t care about his fists, and Locket finally puts an arrow through its skull. The Acolytes, chanting for chaos, summon the Box of Chaos onto the field. Flynry sacrifices the bracelet he nearly lost gambling for a suit of armor. Locket gives up a healing potion, and the Box, sensing her need, offers her a choice for the first time. She picks a medallion that reads minds, and it reshapes itself into a heart-shaped locket. She turns it on the Arbiter. He knows she is probing him, and he crushes the stone banister until his fingertips bleed. “We must stay strong,” Locket whispers. “I think we’re breaking him.” Toddleheim gives the Box his blood and a confession: he once lost control in a bar and burned it down, killing everyone inside. In return it offers him one firestorm.
The second wave brings a night hag, vampire spawn, three more Deathlocks and werewolves. A porcelain doll, Dolly, also floats up beside Locket, burns a rune into her and becomes her temporary friend. Toddleheim closes his eyes, goes back to that burning bar, and unleashes a firestorm that wipes out the undead, and poor Dolly with them. Then hooded figures in the crowd drop onto the field: soldiers from Orin’s outpost. With them comes a werebear in black plate carrying two swords made of solid Void-gloom. He is Lyrus, Orin’s son, and he heard everything. “You murdered my father. And I will have your head. But maybe it’s not today.” He slices reality open, and the heroes flee.
What follows is a breakneck chase through portal realms, with dozens of werewolves on their heels. They pass a fever-dream mountain pass, a hub of portals including a fountain of blood, a plane of chaos where falling wolves stretch into strings and vanish, and floating tiles over nothing. Locket is duplicated by a glitch in time, and her mirror twin burns to cinders in her place. Flynry hauls Toddleheim up from the void in “that Scar–Mufasa moment,” and Lyrus dives into the void after the falling Locket. They tumble out onto a city street, where the closing portal cuts the hag clean in half and splatters the street with her. In the final scrap, a burning werewolf bites Toddleheim. His heart stops, he bursts out of his skin as a werewolf, and somehow he keeps his own mind. “You’re not the only one,” he tells the delighted Flynry.
Lyrus leads them to a hidden blacksmith shop, The Faithful’s hideout. There he names his small band: the Faithful, sworn to save the Grandmaster from the Arbiter’s influence. The heroes don’t tell him exactly how Orin died. The blind dragonborn The Seer, who hasn’t made a magical item in over 25 years, forges each of them a gift. Locket gets a jeweled choker, Flynry a compass that opens paths to other planes, and Toddleheim a ring and a potion that takes twelve years off him. Across the realm, the Arbiter stands alone in his empty arena and ages his failed werewolves to dust: “We will be victorious. And one day, we will rule D20 Deathmatch.”
Part 3: The Hall of Fates
S2E17 — Fate of the Arbiter - The Hall of Fates — Toddleheim, Locket and Flynry reach the Grandmaster picks up months later. The trio are seasoned members of the Faithful, fresh from a mission involving tacos that came to life. Kenny is back, now missing an arm and very wary of Toddleheim. A charming elven “knife smith,” Baptiste, throws a silver dagger past Locket’s head and leaves her blushing under her fur. Frank, the orc chef, offers his verdict (“I think the knife was his penis”), then stirs his stew with a battle axe and seasons it with dirt. Lyrus reports that the Grandmaster hasn’t been seen outside the Dread Fortress in weeks and that the Faithful’s messengers keep disappearing. If she won’t open a door, they’ll make one: a route through the sewers under the Fortress.
After a detour through the market, which ends with Flynry buying a dubious mood bracelet and slipping it over Kenny’s stump, and sending Frank a giant spoon “not to use his axe,” Kenny leads them down the pipes. The stench makes Flynry vomit (“I’ve lost my tacos”), and the rats come out to clean it up. Kenny shoots out of the pipes first, lands in a pool of magical sewage and melts away, schematics and all, his raised arm and mood armband last. “Don’t let his death be in vain,” Lyrus says. “He showed us the dangers of this place.” The heroes press on through acid, a tide of fleeing rats (Flynry pauses to pee into the acid) and a towering shit monster of a sludge elemental that sprays them from its “shit cannon.” Flynry finishes the elemental by dipping his fists in muck, letting Locket set them alight with an arrow, and ramming both fists down its throat until it explodes into a shit fireball. Locket rebuilds Kenny’s lost map from memory and leads them up under the Fortress, past a hall of statues and lightning mirrors.
Beyond an unlocked door, which really was just an unlocked door, lies the Hall of Fates, a corridor of floating mirrors. Lyrus has heard rumors of it: a place to see your true desires. Flynry, who has never had a home, sees a great family feast and maybe grandchildren and is pulled in, until his friends shatter the glass. “Flyn, we’re your family now,” Toddleheim tells him, then kneels beside him on the steps. Lyrus is not so lucky. His mirror shows the moments before his father’s death, and he dives in to help and is gone.
A portal at the end drops them into the Grandmaster’s throne room. The Arbiter is eating a turkey leg while she lectures him on stretching. She believes the heroes and puts her sword to his neck, and he confesses everything.
The Arbiter: “The Tarrasque, the attack on the arena, it was me. I kidnapped myself.”
He sneers that she has grown soft, reminds her that she killed her own uncle for the throne, and hints that the champions don’t always get to go home. Then he snaps them into an ice-covered mirror of the throne room, filled with Deathmatch champions he has won over or “touched by my shadow.” The Grandmaster tells them the mirrors in the Hall are a living beast, not a portal, and that Lyrus can’t be counted on for now. The Arbiter mentions Orin with a shrug: “He’s no more real than the dust at your feet.” Rather than fight fourteen champions with no witnesses, the Grandmaster dares him to settle it openly.
Aftermath
The Grandmaster proposes a tournament for the Grandmaster title, her champions against his, out in the open. The Arbiter can’t resist a wager. If he wins, he takes her title and throne, and she becomes his Arbiter. “In one week’s time, my champions will do battle versus whatever riffraff you can come up with,” he declares, “and we’ll see, once and for all, who will control D20 Deathmatch!”
When the arc closes, Orin is ash, Kenny has dissolved in the sewers, and Lyrus is lost behind the glass of the Hall of Fates. The Faithful’s three champions stand beside the Grandmaster with a tournament one week away.