Season 7 - The Season of Vigilance

Season 7, officially the Season of Vigilance, was the Grandmaster’s answer to a Void where, in her words, “things are changing” and “danger is edging along.” Its Deathmatches were standalone fights, each stranger than the last: soup champions, catfish wives, cheese-hunting rats, wrestlers who refused to break character and a wizard’s tower worth killing for. Running through all of it was a new arrangement at the Dread Fortress. The Arbiter declared himself “upper management” and handed the job of finding champions to Thea, his little pink imp, with predictably chaotic results. Along the way the season produced a resurrected chinchilla god, a co-championship between a grandmother and the grandson who killed her, and the first time the Dread Fortress’s own skull ever spoke.

Background

By the start of the season, The Arbiter had taken on Thea, the worm he had plucked from the soil and turned into an imp, as his assistant. In the first episode he announced that he had “delegated” the task of gathering champions to her, despite the fact that she cannot read or write. He also reminded the Grandmaster that he had “kind of saved your life”: in the days of The Shadow King, the Arbiter died stepping in front of the Shadow King’s attack on Doug, then came back. The Grandmaster was not impressed. “There’s no Grandmaster and Arbiter,” she told him. “There’s the Grandmaster and then the Arbiter.”

The season’s name and the Grandmaster’s warning about coming danger quietly point toward Fil, the God of Fate, whose threat the Arbiter had already described to her. Through the first nine episodes, though, the danger stayed in the background, and the blood stayed front and center.

The Story

S7E1 — A Soup Served Cold

The season opened in S7E1 — A Soup Served Cold — DeeDrah v Gazpacho Man Andy Gammage. The Grandmaster rallied The Acolytes with a speech about unity and remembering who they are, then admitted the fights are “very much so for show.” Thea’s portal delivered DeeDrah, a one-named warlock, and Andy Gammage, the “Gazpacho Man,” Intercontinental Cold Soups Champion, who wanted his mortality back so he could face his treacherous old friend Mean Gene. On a blood-soaked castle rampart under a full moon, Andy pulled a steel chair out of his elbow crease, gave DeeDrah a barbed-wire noogie and swallowed her magic beam in two gulps, a first for the arena.

The fight escalated through a mechanical bull, a sympathetic chinchilla and the first appearance of Gerald for the season. Andy sacrificed his championship belt for a sleeveless jean jacket, and DeeDrah sacrificed her chinchilla, which Gerald needed to finish his boots, in exchange for a dragon-slaying sword. In the end it came down to rock, paper, scissors with life and death on the line. DeeDrah threw paper, Andy threw scissors, and he drove his soup ladle through her eye. The Grandmaster poured her own bowl of gazpacho over the body, an “unending fountain” in her honor.

S7E2 — Under the Oil Tree

In S7E2 — Under the Oil Tree — Big Business v Bog Boy, the Grandmaster was practising Spanish insults (“It’s not an accidental death”) when two champions with a real grudge arrived. Big Business was a towering, money-bleeding construct who wanted to pave a swamp into a shopping mall and win back his “fish wife.” Bog Boy, the Freak of the Creek, was a gnarled turtle who claimed squatter’s rights to that swamp and carried the fish in question, a catfish named Clementine, in a tin bucket. On a snowy mountaintop graveyard they traded shovel-hands, oil-tree theories and a snowstorm named August. Meanwhile Doug the Pug, wearing a tiny crown, charmed Clementine from the stands.

Bog Boy finally punched Big Business in the groin and knocked his head off, then proposed to Clementine with a nut from the wreckage. Then her mother, the swamp witch Griselda, arrived to forbid the match: Bog Boy had broken his promise to turn everyone into frogs. Her price was steep. She fused Big Business’s scrap metal into Bog Boy’s body, leaving the turtle half robot, with his enemy’s voice in his head asking, “You ready to do some business?”

S7E3 — Chinchilla the White

S7E3 — Chinchilla the White — Akumu v Jinx began with the Arbiter scolding Stuart, the Fortress’s IT man, in his hot little closet of screens. The champions were Akumu, a hard-drinking half-elf who woke up in a ditch and whose “blood is half vodka,” and Jinx, a gamer in a unicorn onesie who thought none of it was real. On an orange asteroid in The Ether Drifts, Jinx tucked a freezing chinchilla into her onesie to keep it warm. Akumu drop-kicked hers into the sun.

That chinchilla came back. After Akumu cut Jinx in half, a familiar furry face descended, shining in platinum: “I am no longer Chinchilla the Gray. I am Chinchilla the White.” It stitched Jinx back together, and the Grandmaster immediately banned any further revives. When the Box of Chaos appeared, Jinx sacrificed 396 channel points, while Akumu sacrificed her grandmother, who is also a bottle of Bailey’s, and received the legendary axe Thaneater. Akumu finished Jinx with a surprise volley of eldritch force, and tiny worms pulled the body underground. The Grandmaster closed with a reflection on death as “just one more chapter in our books.”

S7E4 — The Cheese

In S7E4 — The Cheese — Sila v Ol’ Pumpernicklejack, the Arbiter found the Grandmaster playing chess with Claude, the janitor (“Everybody knows the French play chess exceptionally well”). He had kept Thea away from champion duty this time, and he produced Ol’ Pumpernicklejack, a tiny, blood-hungry redcap pulled straight off the toilet, and Sila, a rat in a blue scarf searching for “the cheese.” In The Midnight Mausoleum, Sila robbed graves, turning up the bones of the minotaur champion Tormiir. Then she found her long-lost best friend, Chuck the Cheese, who had died playing hide and seek in a grave. She used his body as a weapon.

The fight survived a swarm of The minitaurs, a lava flood and a coffin raft ride before Jack’s lava-heated boots rocketed both champions onto the Grandmaster’s balcony. The Arbiter picked them up by the scruffs and punched them across the Void into Emmery’s Tavern. There Jack teleported into the overflowing toilet, burst out dripping brown sewage like “a fecal monster,” and cut Sila down. Her last wish was “Cover me in cheese.” She sank into the brown muck, and the bartender obliged with a pot of fondue.

S7E5 — Rock and a Hard Place

S7E5 — Rock and a Hard Place — Iowa-Ska v the Pebble opened with Thea and the Arbiter arguing about labyrinth design (“No toilets”). The champions were Iowa-Ska, a feathered, middle-aged dragonborn fleeing 30 years of middle management with a polearm, a supplement-stuffed fanny pack and a leopard companion who may or may not have been there, and The Pebble, a wrestling dwarf who would not break character. In The Chinchilla Forest, among chinchillas the size of moose, the Pebble produced a steel chair shinier than the Arbiter’s, outscreamed Thea at karaoke and earned her as his personal shield. She took a magnum condom filled with Iowa-Ska’s poison breath, burst on her like a water balloon, and later clenched his halberd between her butt cheeks and hung off its tip.

The Pebble then hot-tagged in his minotaur rival Imbe, and Iowa-Ska roped Imbe like cattle. A chinchilla stampede was led by Frank, who threatened to call his union rep, and the workers later stopped mid-fight for a regulated hibachi lunch. Iowa-Ska’s final vision turned the Pebble into a video game he once loved, and he drove his halberd through the Pebble’s barbed-wire tramp stamp. Thea quietly dragged the fallen wrestler to the locker room with a potion at his lips.

S7E6 — Bone Force

For S7E6 — Bone Force — Jerry Bonesman v TD, Thea gave the Arbiter a Father’s Day bouquet of organs from his secret lab. They settled on “Papa.” Her glittery fart-portal delivered TD, a serene construct “training denizen,” and Jerry Bonesman, a skeleton avenging every low-level skeleton ever slain by adventurers. In The Duck Village, TD layered ward upon ward and then sealed itself inside an unbreakable dome of force. Jerry spent several rounds punching it, doing math on a notepad, and polymorphing Thea into a giant pink T-Rex with a wand from the Box of Chaos.

Then Jerry asked whose skull sits outside the Fortress. The Grandmaster revealed its name, Seavold, and when Jerry channeled it, the skull’s call pulled the fight onto the Fortress’s front lawn. Seavold spoke for the first time in history, dismissing Jerry as “but an ant to me,” and attacked them both. The Arbiter, chair in hand, threatened to kill them both if nobody died. TD’s tripled lance of psychic force disintegrated Jerry as their hands, bone and metal, met. “Training complete,” TD said, its eyes shifting to green: “And this is just phase one.”

S7E7 — A Father’s Son

S7E7 — A Father’s Son — Agatha Middlebrooke v Lug Hardblock began with Thea still stuck as a T-Rex, wrecking the Fortress, until the Arbiter smacked her back into shape. (“Just a knockoff wand.”) The Grandmaster blamed him for the Box of Chaos. “I put a guy’s soul in that box,” he replied. “I’m not responsible for what comes out of the box.” On an asteroid in the Ether Drifts, sweet-natured warlock Agatha Middlebrooke faced Lug Hardblock, a giant-growing rich boy desperate for his father’s approval. Agatha conjured a dozen illusory dads to tell Lug they were proud of him, and her cat, Lord Cookie Mill, did all her fighting. Lug spiked her into a crater, where she crushed 60 members of a hidden worm civilization, the same worm people whose mayor, Timothy, died long ago.

When Lug cracked her space helmet, Agatha died on purpose, then returned as a ghost with a revelation. She was Lug’s grandmother, and the cat was his father, whom she had cursed into that body. She possessed Lug long enough to make him hug himself, and Lug blasted the cat apart like a firework. Given the choice to keep fighting, Lug chose freedom instead. A flustered Grandmaster crowned them both as co-champions.

S7E8 — Private Bathrooms

S7E8 — Private Bathrooms — Livid Lady Lin v Gandor Thalion Umbrae opened in the Grandmaster’s private bathroom, where she was pooping and had waited half an hour for Thea to bring toilet paper. The Arbiter’s portal to the arena opened directly from her toilet onto a snowy peak. There, two rival wizards fought over the lease on a hundred-floor wizard’s tower: the buff, foul-mouthed Livid Lady Lin and the pompous orb-ponderer Gandor Thalion Umbrae. Lin’s spells included a gust of baked-bean fart wind and a summoned spirit of Gandor’s own mother, who threw her bunny slipper at him for “pondering them orbs.”

Gandor turned into a portly cartoon dragon and roasted his mother with his fire breath. Lin dodged the same blast entirely. When he tried to counter her final lightning bolt, she won the magical tug-of-war and the lightning bounced back, exploding him into glittering pipe dust. Lin won the lease. Then the Arbiter killed her with a single “Power word kill.” He wanted the tower for himself, since his lab was “getting kind of cramped.”

S7E9 — Necro-Nightmare

The season closed with S7E9 — Necro-Nightmare — Squiggles v Ray S’urdead. Thea had promised the chinchillas triple pay to haul a Halloween basket, and she produced champions she proudly called “really awful.” Squiggles was a gnome pool caretaker in floaties who had died “like, four times” to krakens. Ray S’urdead was a manicured Halloween necromancer whose voice made the Grandmaster blush. In a moonlit graveyard, Ray raised the Oogie Boogie Man, only for the Box of Chaos to land on it. He then fed Gerald an undead chihuahua named Pixie in exchange for a fireball. Squiggles survived everything with ridiculous luck, healed himself far past his limits, and did what the Arbiter thought no one had ever done before: he robbed the Box of Chaos outright, climbing in and taking a ring that turns spells back on their casters.

Ray’s final gambit called 58 vengeful spirits from the graves. Squiggles’ ring sent all 58 back at the necromancer, and when the cloud cleared only half of Ray’s jack-o’-lantern locket remained. The Grandmaster buried it a few inches down and crowned Squiggles as a grand champion “who shows that even the most unexpected winners can pull through. If he can do it, so can you.”

S7E10 — Thea’s Revenge

S7E10 — Thea’s Adventure broke from the weekly fights for a one-shot. The unions had won Thea one day off a year, and the Arbiter took her to the candy land of Sugar Hills with an errand list she couldn’t read. She stole Emmery’s 1994 Pontiac Bonneville, drove it down the sidewalks, drowned an old man in icing and ran over a badly built warforged walking backwards. Inside it was her little brother Theo, a worm who had spent eleven years searching for her. The truth came out. Thea is a worm of the Hollow in The Ether Drifts, sent to kill the Arbiter for Mayor Timothy’s death under a blood oath. The Arbiter had not picked her by chance: Fil had given her “control of that moment” in exchange for a future handshake. “You fucking idiot! You’ve been talking to Fil!”

The siblings’ attempt on his life ended with Theo’s Thermopolis vaporizing them both and all of Sugar Hills. The Arbiter rewound time and made a deal. He handed over Strako, Timothy’s real killer, and gave the worms front-row seats and royalties. Theo got hands, and Thea was named the Dread Fortress’s ambassador to the worms, in a pope hat. Theo’s second Thermopolis took Strako with him. In Dried Blood, Thea reported to the worms’ council with her brother’s ghost in a crystal orb. Once the siblings had gone, Old Todd called them traitors and opened Mayor Timothy’s plan to step 20: “Call Fil.”

S7E11 — The Cat’s Meow

The deal sent the weekly fights to the worms’ doorstep. The first Deathmatch of the new era had to be held at the Ether Drifts, with Old Todd and the worm delegation in the front row, and S7E11 — The Cat’s Meow — Zhora Bloodfang v Bezil was it. Thea found both champions. Zhora Bloodfang was a six-and-a-half-foot half-orc barbarian who wanted to restart her dad’s bakery. Bezil was a foot-tall winged cat with copper-dragon blood who wanted a kraken. The Arbiter called him a house pet, and the Grandmaster took responsibility for him. Both champions opened with natural 1s. Bezil’s meow turned two of Zhora’s hits aside with Silvery Barbs, and he clawed her left butt cheek on a natural 20. When she raged and crippled his paw, a copper dragon ancestor appeared in the clouds to tell him to get his shit together. He killed her with a flaming hairball.

Thea duct-taped Zhora back together, and the Grandmaster offered Bezil four krakens to kill her again. A cowboy squirrel named Jameson, who hates Bezil over some begonias, joined Zhora’s side and shot Bezil’s draconic spirit apart. Scarred from forehead to lip and down to one hit point, Zhora hugged Bezil to death. He peed on her as he died (“That’s called scent marking”). She won twelve bakeries and made Bezil her bakery’s mascot.

Running Threads

Thea’s promotion. The season’s biggest throughline was Thea’s job as champion-finder. The Grandmaster called her “a potato of a brain,” and Thea pointed out that “if you just let people think you’re stupid, you don’t have to be in charge of anything.” Over the season she ate a champion’s contract and pooped it back out, made an unauthorized commercial, served as a wrestler’s human shield and spent an episode stuck as a T-Rex. She also vacuumed up two dead wizards to piece them back together as “my greatest puzzle.” Along the way the Acolytes learned that her blood is teal and changes with her diet. Then S7E10 revealed what she had been all along: a worm of the Hollow sworn to kill the Arbiter. She ended up as his ambassador to the worms instead, and by S7E11 she was picking champions to impress her own people and duct-taping one back together.

The Grandmaster and the Arbiter. Their bickering ran all season. He insisted they were “partners,” and she insisted they were not. In the third episode he snapped, “I should have left you in Cor’thun,” and she answered, “You’re as good as Doug.” He revealed a ledger of everyone who owes him favors, a book with “kill” scratched into the cover (in which he wrote her name), and his motto, “When you can, you should,” tattooed across all three of his nipples. His beloved Italian leather boots clacked through nearly every opening, and his trademark metal chair was upstaged by the Pebble’s shinier one. Doug later delivered a set of brand-new chairs that the Arbiter now has to wait until Christmas to get.

The Fortress staff. Stuart, the IT man, took the blame whenever anything broke, earned PTO, a pay cut and a promised bonus, and was never actually fired. Claude, the janitor, turned out to be the Grandmaster’s chess partner, though Thea remains sure he is an evil wizard. The Goblins got a foam pit out of the taxes, and delivered parchment on demand.

The chinchillas. The Chinchillas were firmly unionized by the second episode, and the season kept proving it. There were training simulators, mandated breaks, a hard-hatted foreman mourning a chinchilla kicked into the sun, a hibachi lunch mid-fight, an avalanche that stopped for lunch and a demand for triple pay. Three of their number were lost: one sacrificed to the Box and two launched into the sun. One came back as Chinchilla the White.

Doug the Pug. Doug watched from a wagon, a crown, a pillow or a seat beside the Grandmaster. He flirted with a catfish, had his own official sanctioned cheese put up as a prize and approved of champions he liked. The Arbiter kept insulting him, and the Grandmaster kept defending him: “He can’t even breathe correctly.”

The Box of Chaos. Gerald was busier than ever. He finished his chinchilla boots, drank a grandmother, took a skeleton’s hand because he was “building something,” and took a chihuahua into the box. He also handed out the polymorph wand that turned Thea into a dinosaur. In the finale, Squiggles simply climbed inside and helped himself. “I don’t think anyone’s ever stolen from the box before,” the Arbiter said.

The Acolytes and their slushies. The Acolytes shaped every fight, hurling blue slushies at their favorites, piling misery on champions they hated and sometimes gifting a champion one moment to break the rules. Their love made Lin’s slipper-throwing mother devastating, and their hatred of Lug was so strong that the punishment he took was tripled. Rock, paper, scissors became the season’s deadliest game, deciding the first episode outright and appearing twice more.

Lore of the Void. Several fights expanded the setting. The worms of the orange asteroid returned as a hidden civilization in a crater and lost 60 of their own. Then they turned out to be the Hollow, Thea’s people. They won front-row seats and royalties, and the first Deathmatch of the new era was held on their home. The Dread Fortress’s orc skull was named Seavold and spoke for the first time. Emmery’s Tavern reappeared with its “number two” barrels. Even the minotaur Tormiir’s grave turned up in the Midnight Mausoleum.

Where Things Stand

The season is still running. Its early fights left loose threads behind. Bog Boy now shares his body with Big Business. TD walked away promising that its training was only in “phase one.” Agatha and Lug both survived, grandmother and grandson united. Thea is still at work on her puzzle of wizard dust, and Ray S’urdead is dead for now. The Arbiter got the hundred-floor wizard’s tower and plans to knock out the west wall and expand.

Since Thea’s revenge, the larger danger the season’s name hinted at has moved closer. Thea still owes Fil a handshake, and she keeps a burning note from Theo that she can’t read. The worms’ council, who thanked her to her face, called her a traitor behind her back and is preparing to call Fil itself. Meanwhile the Deathmatches have moved to the worms’ asteroid, where the first fight ended with a half-orc baker wearing a dead winged cat as a stole.

The Black Tome

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