Season 6, known in the Void as the Season of the Trials, was the season the Deathmatch reinvented itself. The Shadow King was in pieces, the Grandmaster was back on her throne, and the Arbiter announced that the days of “simple deathmatches where champions come to die for no reason over and over again” were over. Champions now arrived in groups of three. Each group was sent on a mission and then forced to fight one another to the death for the right to lead. The result was a short, strange and surprisingly warm season. It saw a murder mystery at a banquet, a mine full of neon worms, a lich grandfather, and a werewolf in a tavern back room. By the end the Void had three official teams, and at least two of them were already whispering about turning on management.
Background
The season opened in the weeks after the Arbiter’s return from death and the liberation of the Grandmaster. The Void was “freshly returned to order,” and the Acolytes rejoiced as Elusia Skypiercer once again sat atop the throne of the Dread Fortress. The danger had not passed, though. The Shadow King’s soul had been “torn asunder,” and the pieces of him were scattered about the Void. The Grandmaster’s answer was to build an army, and the Season of the Trials was how she meant to find it.
The Story
Murder at the Dread Fortress
The season began not in the arena but at a feast in S6E1 — Murder at the Dread Fortress (TTRPG Murder Mystery). Guests arrived on the “bloody carpet.” Among them were C.A. Bunga, a hip-high slice of buttered sourdough with a syrup mustache; Richard S. Skelman, the bony “Dungeon Designer and Keeper of the Year”; and Iris, a freshly dead bride whose stitches kept giving way. Before dinner the Arbiter put on a stage-magician show and raised a brand-new assistant out of a lowly worm. This was Thea, overjoyed to finally have a voice and immediately banned from eating hot dogs, until she asked whether eating one in reverse counted and the Arbiter conceded she could sit on them: “If it fits, it sits, I guess.” Then the candles went out, someone shrieked, and Thea was found face down in a bowl of gravy.
The investigation that followed was gloriously useless. It dragged in a doctor of dubious credentials who listened for thoughts by headbutting the corpse. It exposed a trench coat full of striking chinchillas, and it caught Stuart, the Fortress’s IT man and would-be wizard, pushing a fake lie-detector amulet. Finally Thea’s corpse told the Arbiter to “just use your weird time eyes,” and he rewound the evening to reveal the killer: Iris. The Arbiter had murdered her husband on their wedding night because the venue was double-booked for a Deathmatch and “I couldn’t lose the deposit.” Dessert was served as a platter of weapons. Skelman was blown down to a skull and a big toe. The Arbiter resurrected the husband, Tony, who proved to be exactly the gold-digger he’d been accused of being. Iris shot him point-blank with a rocket launcher, blasting pieces of Tony all over the walls and the guests. Thea crawled back to life with “a few more holes in me than before,” and the Grandmaster welcomed everyone to the season of the trials.
Ether Drifts, Part 1
In S6 Ep2 · Ether Drifts Part 1 · TTRPG One Shot (Team A mine mission), the Grandmaster found the Arbiter hiding behind a screen watching a stolen copy of Dune 2. He was eating popcorn out of a divot he’d knocked into Thea’s head. She kicked the TV over and demanded her champions. Out came Atlas, a hulking machine left with only fragments of memory; Copycat, a faceless shapeshifting spy; and Robbie Clark and the Hunger, an eight-year-old boy and an Eldritch Horror sharing one consciousness. The newly dubbed “Team A” was sent to the Ether Drifts at the edge of Void space to recover a vital mineral from a mine that had gone silent.
The mine turned out to sit beside the home of a colony of neon worms, still grieving the loss of Mayor Timothy and many others to earlier Deathmatches. Atlas broke down a door whose key was sitting on top of the frame, then injected the worm Theresa with Double Sun Cola. She ballooned into a monster that hunted them through the tunnels. Along the way a mediocre silver saucer abducted the team to probe their greatest fears, and Copycat turned out to have none. When The Box of Chaos smashed through the ceiling, Thea crammed its energy into Atlas. He became a ball of metal and pink-yellow fire, obliterated Theresa, and blew up his own head. The precious mineral was salt. The Grandmaster praised them for seasoning the Arbiter’s fries “very well” and summoned all three back for a Deathmatch.
Ether Drifts, Part 2
The season’s first true Deathmatch came in S6 Ep3 — Ether Drifts Part 2 — Team A deathmatch (Atlas v Robbie Clark and the Hunger v Copycat), fought on a low-gravity asteroid in the Ether Drifts. Atlas arrived only half-built, about knee height. He fixed that by wrapping his shell around Thea and becoming “Fatlas.” Copycat stole Robbie’s sticker book and then impersonated the Hunger’s mother, grounding it with “No supper for six whole centuries.” Atlas got a little blue pill out of the Box of Chaos to “keep you going all night long,” which he later called his “boner medicine,” while Copycat traded Doug’s collar for the Shield of the Golden King. Atlas then hurled a tanker ship called Mateship at his teammates.
The turn came when the Hunger seeded Atlas with spores. Atlas grew a mouth and, at long last, the butthole he’d never had (“an exit port of sorts”), and was absorbed into the unified whole. Copycat answered by becoming a black hole and swallowing much of the arena, Acolytes included, but Robbie and the Hunger “have seen the void before and are unmoved.” Robbie Clark and the Hunger won and named the team the Unbreakable Redacted Friends. Then they leaned in and whispered to their revived teammates: “We’re going to take these motherfuckers down.”
Tip to Tip, Part 1
In S6 Ep4 — Tip to Tip - Part 1 (TTRPG One Shot), Thea went missing on Deathmatch Day. The Arbiter’s tracker, which Stuart could never get working, put her in The Midnight Mausoleum in The Shadowlands. He sent “Team B” after her: Skelman, the conspiracy-minded failed Peloton instructor Richard Knottley, and the soda-slinging salesman Killy Yesman. The mausoleum turned out to be the Skelman family plot. Skelman met the zombie of Josephine, a lover he had buried alive, and Killy’s special red cola gave her one last heartbeat. Knottley got a weeping angel statue to cry pebble tears by calling it a “beautiful gargoyle,” and he invited it onto his radio show.
Thea had simply been playing hide-and-seek with Skelman’s grandfather, a lich who had turned the family crypt into a retirement dungeon. Team B took him apart. Killy landed a permanent blinding with soda in the eyes, Skelman dragged him into the Bone Zone, and the three combined into the towering “Bonetron” to wash him away with a firehose of cola. The team named itself Team 3D. Then Thea’s tail rang like a phone, the call “coming in through my butt and I have to poop soon.” Double Sun Cola HQ recalled Killy to a two-month retraining seminar for giving away too much free soda, which left the two Richards to fight “dick to dick, tip to tip.”
Tip to Tip, Part 2
S6E5, Tip to Tip - Part 2 (Richard Knottley v Richard S. Skelman, the leadership Deathmatch) returned to the mausoleum graveyard, with a Chinchilla Parliament in mustaches watching from the front row. Knottley could do no wrong. He won a dance-off on back-to-back perfect rolls, lost an arm to Thea’s rocket pack and grew a bony one, and became a skeleton powered by a stolen Peloton reactor. When Skelman punched him apart into a pile of bones, he simply became a ghost. He had Thea, who had moved into the Box of Chaos and pooped there, pelt Skelman with her poop (“Be the monkey you wanna be. Eat my poo.”). Skelman sucked him into a vacuum, traded him to the Box of Chaos, and subcontracted the angel statue to fight him in a trap-filled hallway. Knottley merged with the statue anyway.
In the end Knottley summoned a storm of Peloton bikes and pushed himself so hard that he faded away into the universe. Skelman was left as the winner almost by accident. “I’ve been this way for thousands of years,” he had despaired earlier, “and yet he ascends immediately.” The Grandmaster told him that “luck is part of winning,” made him leader, and accepted his name for the team: Team D.
The Hunt for #2, Part 1
In S6 Ep6 — The Hunt for #2 - Part 1 — Team C (Frigidum, Bob the Barbarian, the Duke) v Billy, the goblins, chinchillas and Thea drank every drop of alcohol in the Dread Fortress, the Grandmaster’s secret stash included. To save her performance review, Thea recruited Team C on her own. It was made up of Frigidoom, a refrigerator exposed to radioactive waste; Bob the Barbarian, a four-testicled barbarian from Florida in very short jorts; and The Duke, a rat-man magician who pulls anything at all out of his hat. They were sent to Emmery’s Tavern for a resupply of Emmery’s patented “number two” ale, brewed from grain dried with sheep dung, with “hardly any shit in it.”
Emmery wanted something first: whoever had been ripping out his customers’ throats. After a drinking contest, a one-eyed fox handed over a clump of coarse hair from its vest pocket. A table of dragonborn, Tabitha among them, pointed to a bald regular who came in every two weeks with the full moon. That regular was Billy, a werewolf who had been sitting in the back party room the whole time. The fight brought flying wombats that hailed down frozen, perfectly cubed poop, a twenty-foot gator named Denise, and a blast of the light inside Frigidoom. Bob finished him with the spinning “Ultimate Denim Gator.” Thea could tell Billy was dead “because he pooped his pants.” The three wanted to share leadership. Thea thought that was stupid and booked them a Deathmatch.
The Hunt for #2, Part 2
The season finale, S6E7, The Hunt for #2 - Part 2 (season finale). Team C final - Frigid Doom v Bob the Barbarian v the Duke, opened with the Arbiter as an accountant on the eve of tax day. Thea had fed all the receipts to Doug. The Grandmaster sent Team C back to Emmery’s Tavern, where Billy’s corpse still lay, with the instruction to “destroy this place.” Bob unleashed a Viagra-fueled trouser snake, an Ass Jaguar, the ancient Florida tradition of swinging and, once the Viagra hit its four-hour limit, an explosion of blood from his jorts. The Duke wore a loaded diaper, threw a shit bomb, and called in nuclear strikes and a gun-toting New York hood rat. Frigidoom fought with a cleaning cycle and Cheeto-lime-jalapeño dust.
Frigidoom swallowed the legless Duke whole. Then a final chaos event set a group of children in the corner hurling insults (“Refrigerators are dumb!”) that pierced metal and flesh alike. Frigidoom died dreaming of the touchscreen he had finally received. Bob was fading too, beaten “by a pack of children,” when the Grandmaster’s hand came down on his shoulder. He had inched out as the last survivor. Bob the Barbarian won and named the team the Triforce Dong Danglers. The Duke pulled a flag from his hat showing three connected dongs.
Wounded Warrior Project: Capture the Flag
A charity crossover, × Wounded Warrior Project, Capture the Flag charity crossover (title not in metadata), brought the arena to the Wounded Warrior Project. Acolyte donations could buy chinchilla kisses, chinchilla kicks, curses, Box of Chaos items, or a mini-boss. Two teams of three raced through a gauntlet in the Dread Fortress. Solid, Grog the Malodorous and Beans the Terrible made up one team; Pyxis, Perry and Dave the Doom Duck made up the other. The gauntlet included a kitchen that had to be eaten clean, a room of knife-cuddling chinchillas, and a potion puzzle. Grog farted his way across the chinchilla room, and Dave pooped in front of every chinchilla bed, earning a steak knife in the butt. A donation then turned Thea into a giant purple worm: “I am Thea! I am the Abyss Devourer!” She was slain and later resurrected.
The gauntlet ended in a last-champion-standing brawl on the Fortress grounds. Perry shoved Beans into the Box of Chaos. Grog killed Perry, and Perry took Beans with him. Pyxis, praying to the moon, avenged his slain family by dropping onto Solid’s head. The hellish duck pointed his butt at his enemies and shot out fireballs, a “flaming turd” that had already hit Pyxis, and a final one that burned Grog to ash. Dave the Doom Duck won, rolling happily in the grass: “They kicked me out of hell. I’ll make a new hell.”
Running Threads
A new era of Deathmatches. The Grandmaster’s goal all season was “my greatest armies as we continue to defend the Void” against what remained of the Shadow King. Every team followed the same pattern: a mission to prove themselves, then a Deathmatch whose survivor became leader and named the team. “Even if they die, we’ll bring them back,” she said, “but I want them to be willing to go that far.” Some of the new faces seemed half-familiar. Thea felt she’d seen Team A “in some sort of dream or maybe a nightmare,” and Atlas reported “Familiarities acknowledged.”
The Arbiter, turning over a new leaf. Back in his place at the Grandmaster’s side, the Arbiter tried to be “a little bit better.” He apologized to Iris for murdering her husband, though he noted the man had been robbing her. He still told Stuart that his dream of joining the magic department was “never gonna fucking happen.” He hid from work, was nearly parted from his beloved Italian leather shoes, gained an alias on a platinum card (“Arbiter J. Wilkinsmith… The third”), and once let slip that he “should have let the Shadow King just…” before thinking better of it.
Thea, newborn. Created at the season’s opening feast and murdered later that same evening, Thea was about seven weeks old by the finale. Over the season she served as a popcorn bucket, a backpack, Atlas’s core, a prom date Skelman turned down, a Box of Chaos tenant who paid her rent in teeth, and a giant worm. She chased gold stars, saved her farts in a jar, recruited a whole team by herself, and was still only allowed to eat hot dogs backwards.
The Box of Chaos. The shadowy, yellow-eyed occupant of the Box grew increasingly fed up with champions. They kicked it open, threw it, and used it as a football. “You gonna knock first or what?” Its gifts ranged from a blue pill and the Shield of the Golden King to golden dice, smelling salts, a Trident of Fish Command and a Hat of Vermin.
Chinchillas, Stuart and the D20 family. The Chinchillas went on strike for pizza parties, sat in Parliament with mustaches, and hurled painfully accurate insults from the stands. Stuart took the blame for every broken tracker, laggy feed and muted microphone. Doug ate the receipts, wore a collar that was traded to the Box, and was kept well away from the Hunger, which “really likes puppies.” Goblins in tiny tuxedos served dinner, and Double Sun Cola kept turning up wherever Killy or Atlas went.
Aftermath
The Grandmaster closed the finale with her goal met: “We now have our three teams.” These were the Unbreakable Redacted Friends under Robbie Clark and the Hunger, Team D under Richard S. Skelman, and the Triforce Dong Danglers under Bob the Barbarian. Team D’s business was unfinished. Killy Yesman was still away at Double Sun Cola’s retraining seminar, and Skelman vowed to get “our third Dick” back. The Grandmaster promised that Knottley would return “in his fleshy state next time around.”
The new teams were not entirely loyal. Robbie Clark and the Hunger had already rallied their teammates to “take these motherfuckers down,” and Atlas updated his directive to match. After the finale, the Duke made his intentions plain:
“But for now, I will be a simple rat henchman, waiting and watching and plotting everyone’s demise. I hope you’re listening, Arbiter. I’m coming for your soul and your throne soon.”
Episodes
- S6E1 — Murder at the Dread Fortress (TTRPG Murder Mystery)
- S6 Ep2 · Ether Drifts Part 1 · TTRPG One Shot (Team A mine mission)
- S6 Ep3 — Ether Drifts Part 2 — Team A deathmatch (Atlas v Robbie Clark and the Hunger v Copycat)
- S6 Ep4 — Tip to Tip - Part 1 (TTRPG One Shot)
- S6E5, Tip to Tip - Part 2 (Richard Knottley v Richard S. Skelman, the leadership Deathmatch)
- S6 Ep6 — The Hunt for #2 - Part 1 — Team C (Frigidum, Bob the Barbarian, the Duke) v Billy
- S6E7, The Hunt for #2 - Part 2 (season finale). Team C final - Frigid Doom v Bob the Barbarian v the Duke
- × Wounded Warrior Project, Capture the Flag charity crossover (title not in metadata)