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

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

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

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

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