DM: “Hunnerd gold.” “Normilan needs braces.” “Hunnerd gold.” “Normilan needs braces.” “Hunnerd gold.” “Normilan needs braces.”
Normilan: No I don’t!

The DM recaps their fight with the bees; it takes like no time at all. He promptly injures himself eating bread. They continue on through the canyon, squabbling over minis as they go. Tasha forgets what gender Giles is. For some reason, a delayed blast fireball awaits them in the canyon, as it has for weeks.

DM: It’s a 14d6 minimum.
Cruroar: So we’re looking at a… if he rolls all ones, 14 damage!
DM: Half if you save!
Cruroar: Let me see if I save. Hold on a sec -- (rolling) I do not – oh, well, I rolled a natural 20…
Brunt: You save!
DM: I love how every time Cruroar tries to be an asshole about rolls, he succeeds despite all odds.
Cruroar: Whem I try to die, I don’t. But when I say, “I’m okay, I got 76 hit points with 8 temporary, I’ll be just fine.” 88 points of ice damage. Oh, well, I’m dead.
Tasha: Have we waited long enough to heal?
DM: No, considering exactly zero minutes have passed since you fought the bees.

They collect the honey, which leads them only to dire bear attacks and diabetes. The DM invokes the command word for diabetes, ‘Wilford Brimley’. Cruroar bemoans his inability to get a no-death run in Oregon Trail. As they travel, the river slows and becomes oddly clear.

Cruroar: Let me roll Knowledge(the planes). I may be using that roll wrong.
DM: There is potentially an extraplanar reason for this. But there are a lot of normal ones too…
Cruroar: I don’t have any of the talents that would be useful here. I could detect the water’s religion?
Tasha: I could try Survival.
DM: Well, if you want clean drinking water, now’s the time to get it.
Tasha: That’s okay, I’ll just cast Create Water.
DM: You can’t cast Create Water for that purpose, you don’t know HOW to cast Create Water for its proper purpose.
Tasha: I can’t create water to drink it?
DM: You don’t know how! All you know is how to cast it to create water over people’s heads. Apparently that’s all they taught you.

They spend a while trying to get around this limitation, which leads to furiously drinking a firewater elemental. But this gets them nowhere with their dilemma.

Tasha: I’m going to suggest we just keep walking.
Normilan: That’s the most sensible thing you have EVER fricking said.
Cruroar: Ten minutes later… all right, I guess I’ll just start my new character.
Brunt (furiously rolling)
DM: I love your preparation over there.
Cruroar: Do you have a roll for Survival?
Brunt: No, but I’m in front. I’m going to be Listening, Spotting, Balancing… Crafting, I don’t know, but I’ll be the one who has to roll first!
Normilan: Quick – I need a sheaf of paper!
Brunt: That’s why he tried to derail us with the clean water, just so I’d stop preparing for the roll that was coming.

The DM calls for Listen checks from Brunt, and also everyone else. Giles hears a rumble-slash-roar heading down the canyons.

Cruroar: “Time for a pee in my canyon.”
DM: Tasha, you hear it soon after Giles did.
Tasha: “I hear it! Soon after Giles did!”
DM: Tasha chooses to waste her commentary on making smart remarks, and swiftly all of you hear it as well.

Identifying it as rushing water, the group immediately proposes running (or hiding for some reason). Tasha whips out a grappling hook. Giles, who has Use Rope, rolls surprisingly well to lodge the grappling hook into the ground above.

Normilan: Into a passerby. “Waaah!”
DM: “Why am I here?!”

They begin scrambling up the rope. Cruroar ponders his imminent demise.

Eilnys: Why don’t you just fly up, buddy? Can’t you fly?

A long pause.

Cruroar: Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

The group, of course, cracks up.

Cruroar: I can imagine my character losing his mind and panicking…

Cruroar pretends to climb as the DM claims the check is unfailable, and promptly succeeds on it. Giles, of course, manages to plant his foot solidly in an animal hole and traps his leg to the knee. Tasha fails to free him.

Brunt: (sighs, then makes a ramming motion)
DM: Brunt dungeoncrashes him!
Brunt: He’s probably halfway there.

Tasha starts climbing, followed by Quirion! She rolls well for herself and keeps him moving, but as for the elf…

Tasha: Quiriom, with his +1… rolls a 2, with a natural 1.
DM: He promptly hops up, and I’d like to remind you this was not my fault, this was Tasha’s rolling, promptly slams his leg thigh-deep into the hole you all just pulled Giles out of. “I should have seen than coming!” he wails.
Brunt: Why don’t I just throw all of you up there?
DM: And just at this moment you see rushing around the curve a surge of rubble-filled water. Stones and broken branches and rocks fill the rushing stream as it crashes towards you.

Balance checks ensue! Quirion, of course, is in deep trouble. Normilan, who made his Balance check, grabs the elf before he can be swept off, but the two soldiers are knocked down!

DM: “Help us, mighty Tasha!” they cry as they are battered down.
Brunt: Where is your god now?
DM: Each of them makes a desperate grab for the banks, trying to find anything to hold onto, but both of them fail. The DM retires those dice.
Tasha: AFTER he killed the mooks.
DM: They’r e not dead yet, but they continue to be swept away. They’re not dead yet, just carried off.
Normilan: “BURY YOURSELF IN THE HONEY!”
Brunt: But you can see under the surface of the river is an aquatic owlbear skeleton ready to fight them!
DM: And a shark, for no reason.

Cruroar tosses one a rope, bemoaning his stats as he does, but with a good roll he has saved the other mook! The party clings on until the rush subsides, sustaining no further losses. If nothing else, their path is clearer now! The guards drag themselves back, one with a blatant concussion that Tasha makes Quirion cure.

DM: Looking at your soldier, Quirion reaches into his robes, pulls out a ring with a bunch of different holy symbols on it, flips through a couple till he come to the symbol of the Pack, then lifts it up to invoke the healing magic upon him.
Normilan: I love it!
DM: “I gotta be respectful of their religion!”
Brunt: Till the mummy says, “Oh, the language of the slaves.”
Tasha: “Thank you, Quirion, for tending to that.”
DM: “Always a pleasure to save you use of your valuable spell slots yourself, my lady.”
Tasha: “Exactly, that’s why I use you.”
DM: He knows the score.
Normilan: That’s true, but, I dunno… Meanwhile, back in the camp, “I’m not following that bitch any more.”
DM: What’s he going to do, get up in the middle of combat and heal? Hell no! You travel onwards.
Brunt: Yep. This could be old JRPG style. If Brunt takes a right-hand turn, everyone takes a right-hand turn, and we have a party snake everywhere we go.
DM: You travel on for about an hour, before Cruroar, up above, is the first to spot –
Normilan: A giant ballista. THOONK! “Uh-oh.”

The canyon widens up ahead, building into a lake that probably got dammed by debris during the flood, explaining the rush of water. They see a large figure standing by the water; the PCs promptly identify it as a manbearpig holding a Final Fantasy crystal. They move up to about a hundred feet away, still sheltered behind a curve in the canyon. Giles sneaks ahead, and hears words in a language he doesn’t speak. At last he gets the visual: ugly large creatures, green-skinned and weirdly thin.

Normilan: Grimlocks?
Brunt: I was thinking grimlocks. It’s Arkapatang!
Normilan: We’ve already encountered grimlocks, so probably no.

Giles returns to tell his comrades of these creatures, while Tasha once again attempts to stealth-renounce her god. Eilnys, based on this second-hand description, isn’t entirely certain what they are.

Brunt: We can’t sneak up on them, because clankety clankety, so do we want to move forward or go around?
DM: (as Final Fantasy victory music suddenly plays) Welp, you guys won. I don’t know how, but..
Cruroar: Wait, we won the battle already? Great job, guys!
Brunt: Actually Golbez did it for us while we were trying to decide what to do.
Cruroar: I told you not to bring it up, Delta Maneuver.
Brunt: He wants the table cleared, so there’s going to be combat if we continue up. Probably combat that’s going to happen after I’m incapacitated by whatever—
DM: Oh, you’re drowning for some reason, I forgot to mention.
Brunt: Hmm, do I stabilize…
DM: Yes. I rolled it for you.
Brunt: No you didn’t, I rolled it for you.
DM: (shaking dice in his hand without rolling them) You stabilize. Let’s combine a bunch of jokes, why don’t we?

They advance forwards and into initiative! The players have, by now, identified the trolls, who eye the PCs with slavering hunger.

DM: Both the trolls begin chanting the same word in that strange tongue you don’t understand.
Brunt and Eilnys: Food! Food! Food! Food!
DM: Hee hee, no translation is necessary.
Brunt: Where’s my burrito? Where’s my burrito?

Tasha hurls boulders at the trolls, leading to some discussion as to how Tasha wipes her butt with an ice axe. Brunt questions if the trolls ate the dam and they wonder if they can bribe the trolls with food. One troll gouges Eilnys for 16 and then bites her for 8. Eilnys dismisses every incidence of damage. A troll swipes at Tasha in turn. Brunt goes for the bull rush, which bounces off his tower shield .

Brunt: This is the tradeoff for not being able to sneak anywhere. I’m like a scout walker before the Ewoks figured out how to trip it.

Brunt dungeoncrashes the troll, confused that he has not been nerfed yet – and shocked as hell that he’s up to 8d6 for his dungeoncrash damage. The group worries that he’s about to collapse the canyon on them. Normilan is up.

Cruroar: (heartily) Maybe you should try fire damage. I don’t know why you should though…
Normilan: I have one spell of fireball.

Watching the regeneration clues Eilnys into the troll vulnerabilities, and luckily is still coherent enough to communicate this. …not a ton of interest happens, till around when Cruroar crits with an eldritch blast for 28.

DM: The troll takes the blast to the center of its chest. A massive bruise forms as it slumps against the cliff.
Cruroar: Should I shoot it again just to make sure it stays down?
Brunt: I dunno… I want to dungeoncrash it Scott Hall-style.

Cruroar fires at the other troll. His dice shoot off the table and into the void.

Normilan: We can not keep dice on the table, period.
DM: It’s too crowded.
Cruroar: We have plenty of table! It’s this chair!
Normilan: You remember what happened when we had a containment unit for the dice? They still went everywhere!
DM: I’m just saying, if the table were less crowded it would be better.
Tasha: Fine. I’ll stop coming to hang out.
DM: FINALLY! God!

The terrain hampers Tasha’s efforts to go heal Eilnys. She instead checks her inventory, discovers alchemist’s fire listed, and gleefully prepares to down a troll.

DM: But it takes a move action to whip it out. You’re gonna have to throw it from the back.
Cruroar: OH DEAR GOD!
Normilan: And here come the 1s!

The DM explains how to deliver a coup de gras with the fire, though the group isn’t certain how much the troll will regenerate in a round. Eilnys ponders activating her Devastation Gauntlets, leading everyone to make jokes about Hulk hands and Thing Rings. Raging, Eilnys activates a healy cloak, while the rest of the group debates just how much force it takes to move an Immovable Rod. (Which moves from 8,000 lbs of force.) Eilnys stubbornly refuses to look up the activation time of her cloak, leading the DM to yell at her.

Eilnys: Does my base attack bonus count to confirm a crit?
DM: Someone choke her.

Eilnys then misinterprets the rules for a phoenix ash threat crystal, and the DM has patently given up at this time. The trolls go!

DM: The troll on the ground… grunts and twitches, but does not stand.
Brunt: That’s provoking SOMETHING!
DM: It’s provoking the wrath of the players.

The troll rends Eilnys a lot, but Normilan’s Toughening Transmutation feat sucks away over half the damage. Brunt attempts to surge out of the water and promptly rolls a natural 1.

Brunt: And I’m drowning.
DM: Brunt goes face-first down in the water and sinks beneath it. He is mildly inconvenienced. Would you like to take your move action to stand up?
Brunt: (considering, while the other players laugh) Not really. It’s too embarrassing.
DM: Or perhaps you’d care to swim upstream!
Normilan: You could totally play it off. “Damn, that’s deeper than I thought.” It’s not like any of us are going in there.

Normilan drops down a flaming sphere on the troll. Giles and the DM argue over the necessity of a roll to hit for a couple of minutes, till Giles puts an arrow into the troll and then snaps a bowstring. A brief pause occurs as the players fix the sad droopy weapons on the minatures. Quirion moves, then crochets for lack of any better action. Cruroar blasts! The DM motions to indicate the troll taking the hit to his shoulder.

Tasha: Everything seems to hit him in the shoulders.
DM: Because I refuse to punch myself in the crotch demonstratively, that’s why. The troll grunts, and its teeth finally leave Eilnys’s scalp as it slumps to the ground. In a sort of sitting posture. Its weigh leans heavily on her.
Normilan: See if you can knock it over. Just don’t roll a 1.

The DM rules that they swiftly coup de gras the trolls with the alchemist’s fire. The DM describes the trolls as very definitely malnourished, now that they have a chance to examine their foes.

Giles: Congratulations, you killed a bunch of starving opponents.
Normilan: Well, they were gonna eat us, so.
Cruroar: The only time we ever felt remotely guilty about killing anyone was killing that group of level 1 gnome adventurers. Just stomping them!
DM: You popped three of them with one lightning bolt.
Brunt: My hands were clean of that…
Cruroar: It’s okay, gnomes are evil.
Normilan: That’s their DM’s fault for putting them up the against a CR out of their league…
Tasha: I feel bad for those guys who were standing guard at the mill, and Brunt dungeoncrashed into the wall and made their head explode. And Brunt was like, “I don’t want to harm you!”
Brunt: I didn’t know it was 4d6 plus twice my strength! And even when he told me that, I was like, what am I gonna roll on 4d6? It’ll be like 8.
DM: “I’ll roll low.” Pshoo! “I’ll roll low the next time.” Squelch!
Brunt: So we vanquished the trolls. Let’s go find their hoard. And get Orcrist and Glamdring.

A mini is dubbed the Stop Sign cleric, and the PCs do indeed go off to hunt the trolls’ lair. It is unpleasant.

Cruroar: If she’d passed her nature check, she’d realize they were definitely having orgies in here to pass the time.
DM: Yes.
Tasha: Ohhhh, thank god I failed that nature check.
DM: I’m sorry, you have a +10 bonus for being Tasha and thus intimately familiar with orgies.
Tasha: “Ah, just like home.”
DM: “Right down to the smell. And the trolls.”

They loot the lair, find money, and a sword that Brunt is immediately disgusted by because it is a gaudy show sword, according to the DM.

Brunt: Brunt’s not disgusted by the cash value associated with this blade. Ah, trash drops!

They also discover what is blatantly a Heward’s Handy Haversack, but fail to recognize what is happening. There are arrow inside! Do the PCs dare pluck one out?

Normilan: ….Quirion!
Brunt: Ohhhh!
DM: “Welp, Lady Tasha’s off taking a whiz, so I’ll investigate!” He pulls out an arrow.
Normilan: I was actually going to put my hand in there, I wasn’t actually gonna tell Quirion to.
DM: “Oh, welp. Too late, I’ve already done it!”

They find not only arrows, but a javelin and a longbow in the other compartments. The players continue to derp on this, so Quirion explicitly tells them what it is and what it does. Giles is called on to make a Search check for some reason.

Brunt: You find a shallow grave, and a ghost is haunting it. We now have to fight the haunt. Are you just rolling the loot now…? I’m kidding…
DM: You find Brunt’s death.
Brunt: Gee, that’s all it took, a Search check?
DM: Giles, it occurs to you there’s something a bit odd – it looks like the trolls ripped the hides off some large creature and were using it as a chair-slash-mattress. However, it occurs to you there’s something off about it, and think to go and lift it up. It turns out although they’ve been using it as a pillow area, the core of this little sleeping-sitting chamber is not more hides, it is in fact something metal. In fact, it is a pile of something metal!

They’ve found a suit of plate mail. Bloody plate mail full of old inhabitant. Setting Quirion to cleaning it, they move off to find the next loot depository, in so many words. They travel on for several hours, as the canyon grows into ridges on either side that would have been difficult to traverse.

DM: Ahead of you, you all hear splashing, coming from around the bend. If you had to guess, you’d say something was in the water, moving around.
Cruroar: Guys… I think it’s an undead pool party. It’s the only thing it could be.
Giles: Of course it’s an undead pool party.
Brunt: An undead pony party.

Naturally, they send Giles ahead to scout, while Cruroar attempts to feed the DM snacks he probably shouldn’t eat. The DM angrily throws them across the room to remove all temptation, and Giles rolls a Move Silently of 30. Giles spots a lake with a feathered creature splashing in the water, while two more of them preen their feathers with wicked beaks.

Brunt: Why didn’t the vampire tell us that half the shit in the Monster Manual lives in this fucking canyon.
DM: Consider how many times the vampire actually traveled down this canyon.
Cruroar: If this were a TV series it would’ve flashed back to him, sitting there. “Oh, I should have told them about all the creatures.”
Brunt: Or was this the vampire’s plan to level us by the time we get to the skull lord? “They’ll have no trouble with him by the time they get out of that canyon.”
Cruroar: “Good thing I didn’t tell them about this path!” There’s just a path that says ‘easy path to the forest, no monsters’.
DM: At the beginning the skull lord was like, “nya ha!” and reversed the arrow signs, the one that said ‘shortcut’ on it.

The DM calls for Knowledge(arcane) checks. Several are rolled well!

DM: In a chorus, Cruroar, Normilan, and Quirion all lift their fingers. “Owlbears!” they say.
Tasha: Skeleton owlbears!
Brunt: Well, they’re going to be skeletons in a minute. Where are the prey animals in this canyons?! And why didn’t the trolls just come eat some owlbear!
DM: You traveled for five hours, dude!
Brunt: When you’re a troll, and you can’t die, and you’re hungry, maybe you try moving a little farther from home…

They begin settle up the battle, while Brunt mutters bitterly about magebred ghost tigers for no clear reason.

Tasha: Are you still flying?
Cruroar: Yes!
Tasha: Are you ALWAYS flying?!
Cruroar: I don’t want to forget!
DM: As you come around the corner, the owlbears all jerk their heads up and turn, taking note of you. And then they let out a horrible noise between a screech and a roar.
Tasha: Two trolls come running down the way. “What’s going on?!”
Normilan: “Food food food food food food food!”
Brunt: And they begin eating the owlbears!

The players begin inexplicably worrying about how to kill trolls that aren’t even there. Normilan, quick to act, goes for overkill with Manyjaws! One owlbear moves to gouge Eilnys, which is deemed the inherent penalty to balance out her high initiative rolls. The mooks attempts to charge into the fray, leading Tasha to order them back. Brunt wards off an owlbear’s efforts with his tower shield! Eilnys contemplates raging.

Brunt: Save a rage for whatever’s lurking around the next bend of this hell canyon!
Eilnys: 14 points of damage!
DM: You drive your axe into its chest. It drives into a muscle, but the sheer ropy strength of the muscle fiber prevents it from being a fatal blow. With a howl, the owlbear strikes at you. Ooo!
Brunt: It’s a howlbear.
DM: Now you must make a grapple check!
Brunt: Everyone wants to eat Eilnys! Literally everything is trying to eat her!
Giles: Is there an easy target?
Normilan: Do you have a mirror?

The characters continue to pile damage on the owlbears, and one of them manages to grapple Eilnys. The characters realize these owlbears surely have class levels in Reaping Mauler and despair! Brunt deploys his bull rush! One owlbear wanders into the mooks, while another is in pain!

DM: Quirion… realizes he’s in melee range of that owlbear. “Uh-oh. I’m experiencing brand new things and they KIND OF TERRIFY ME!”
Cruroar: “There’s something coming out of my butt!”
Eilnys: “I think it’s poop!”
DM: “As an elf, I’ve never done this before, so I’m not familiar with it!”

Quirion casts a spell called Moonlust, which makes an owlbear stand in fascination for a few rounds. But it turns out that any hostile actions nearby can easily break it.

Tasha: As he casts it, I’m gonna have Quirion yell out to no one bother that one.
DM: “No one make any attacks any more! I’m not sure what I was thinking with this!”
Tasha: Well, I didn’t know what it meant to be fascinated.
Normilan: None of us did…

Tasha brutalizes an owlbear with an ice axe, cutting it in half. The DM describes this in great detail.

Brunt: A minute ago that thing was just playing and being an owlbear.
Tasha: Those creatures are just wandering around, not hurting anybody, and what do we do? “I NEED YOUR EGGS!”
Brunt: Well, the designers shouldn’t have put it in our way.

A guard plays dead, so the owlbear that is standing next to it attacks Normilan instead. It puts some pain on him, but…

DM: It misjudges the distance! The staff that is slung over your back whacks you in the eye, and with a roar of pain it lets you go and stumbles backwards.
Normilan: Excellent 1.
DM: Cruroar. Brukroar! Ookla!
Brunt: Use the Sun Sword on it. I used to love me some Thundarr… Ariel, do your own spell that’s the one thing you know even though we have you along because you’re a sorceress. Just shoots yellow bolts out of her hands.
DM: Cruroar’s familiar pops up out of the ground. (making a noise approximating those from Herculoids monsters Gloop and Gleep)
Cruroar: Leave it alone.
Brunt: You went from Thundarr to the Herculoids. Thundarr LOOKED like the main dude from the Herculoids, but was not.
DM: I know, but the Herculoids amuse me so much more.

Brunt decapitates an owlbear, lopping its head off dramatically, and they swiftly finish off the final owlbears.

Brunt: We’re cleaning this canyon out so thoroughly we’re going to turn it into a summer resort.
Tasha: Giles… how the hell did you retreat all the way back here, dude?

The session is over! Experience and glory come to the PCs in spades! But will it all pay off…?