The game opens with people being jerks to the transcriber, as is long-established tradition.

DM: So last time you guys were victorious over the white dragon, and the kobolds, and the mephitis -- (pausing to give the singing Roskgild a look)
Roskgild: Keep going! That was the DBZ catchup music.

Roskgild complains about the volume of transcribed game reports and his lack of culpability in derailing. The DM awards XP for their last battle, which is not enough to level the five of them.

Soveliss: This is such a rip! 40 from second level!
Roskgild: Oh – is it? It’s only 300?
DM: Just – just! Okay! You know what? Just level up!
Roskgild: NO!
DM: If he’s gonna be a big whiny tittybaby bitch about it --!
Roskgild: (sadly) I don’t wanna look up stuff…

The group argues angrily. And starts leveling up. Roskgild discusses moving furniture as they do!

Roskgild: She’s like, ‘you’re gonna throw your back out!’
Soveliss: Spoilers, he did!
Cade: Threw his wrist out. It was furious, FURIOUS masturbation.
Soveliss: I think Hail of Thorns is a good spell for you.
Cade: Is it good for my furious masturbation?
Soveliss: Yes. Whenever you hit with a ranged weapon attack, the spell creates a hail of thorns that sprout from your-
DM: Wang.
David: Do we have a healer in the group?
Traenus: If you’re lucky.
Roskgild: If you’re nice.

Cade instantly adopts the spell as “Hail of Thrones” to Roskgild’s combined amusement and exasperation. After a long, long time, the DM finally gets the heck out of the bathroom and the game can at last begin!

DM: So five of you wake up in the barracks, in your room, and you hear the breakfast bell ringing.
Cade: All right, food!
DM: Oh right, I have to give you your loot from last time.
Cade: At the breakfast table, our loot, waiting for us.
DM: Your giant loot bag.
Roskgild: That’s what we eat.

They get some loot! The group mocks Soveliss for his habit of talking quietly.

Soveliss: I’m allowed to roleplay! Roleplay will not become subservient to transcription! Besides, I played Kurain, remember?

Yeah, he’s not fun to transcribe. The group gets other loot, including a Chime of Opening…

DM: And finally, it’s a gold necklace with eight carnelian beads pendant from it.
Soveliss: Aaaah! I RUN! Actually, I don’t think Necklace of Fireballs is that lethal in this campaign. I don’t think it goes off if it’s exposed to fire…

The group mocks Nadani for playing such a non team player. The transcription microphone promptly gets taken out.

DM: David, you’ve often heard the bells ringing from val Aren Keep, but you’ve never really paid much attention to it, although you were luckily deep in the woods when you heard the Uthmuri came over the mountains. The Uthmuri are big giant monsters kind of like a tarrasque.
David: Uh, size them up compared to me, would I be able to take one on alone?
DM: Hell no.
David: Then I’ll make my way through the forest AWAY from that group…
DM: Well, luckily they’ve already been vanquished and chased back over, but still you probably think it might be a good idea to show up, resupply, and see if the keep is still functioning.
David: I’ll continue hiding in the trees and look towards the fort.
DM: It does appear to still be standing. The bell is ringing in its normal fashion at the moment—
Roskgild: Is the bell going to give me any money?
DM: …No.
Roskgild: Then my character no longer has ANY interest in being here.
Soveliss: Damn.
Traenus: Burn!

Traenus gets up and walks into the kitchen.

Soveliss: No one did a DAMN thing to stop him from getting a soda.
Traenus: Y’all didn’t say anything! You could’ve stopped me!
Roskgild: I cast Hold Person! You’re not going anywhere, person who doesn’t wanna be here!

David advances forward to see workers repairing the keep wall, and immediately becomes convinced that the PCs were responsible. Well, given how D&D goes, that really isn’t a bad assumption.

David: At the moment I think I’m gonna remain in the trees and just idly watch the builders build.
DM: Okay, you can do that.
Soveliss: GET IN HERE AND PLAY WITH THE REST OF THE PARTY, DAVID!
DM: No, that’s fine. You can SMELL breakfast being cooked. Somewhere in the keep breakfast is beinbg – it’s the BEST thing you’ve ever smelled, because you’re probably surviving on nuts berries, twigs, and trail rations!
David: I have a bonus to get food, thank you very much!

Traenus takes the entire bacon tray, netting the others and casting Command on them to make them go away for a round while he snarfs it. Soveliss punches him in the stomach so hard, bacon shoots out his nose.

Soveliss: Man of the cloth, my ass. Man of the cloth napkin.
Traenus: “Eggs, please.”

The players vigorously complains about Soveliss’s quiet voice, while David at last approaches the guards. Cade lapses into a bizarre Roaring 20’s accent, while David passes the guards and heads into the dining hall!

David: A dining hall, that’s an interesting first place to take me.
DM: Yes, well, that’s where the baroness is right now, amongst…
Soveliss: The rabble.
DM: The rabble, yes. The rabble of her defenders. A hooded and cloaked person which… I think that’s you, Quinn.
Cade: How’s the pitas, Traenus?
DM: (who had brought the very large cookies in question) They’re not pitas!
Cade: Yes they are. Until I have a bite.
Traenus: They’re gonna be pitas for a while.

The DM describes the baroness in her usual glowing terms, so Soveliss helpfully punctuates the description with sound effects more appropriate to a Red Hot Riding Hood cartoon.

Cade: Roll your eye check. If you fail it, your eyes pop out of your sockets.
Soveliss: What is that, a Charisma saving throw?
DM: Yeah!
Soveliss: Oh, 9. AH-OOOOOGHA!

David describes himself as the most generic ranger imaginable, and the baroness greets him (the DM only requiring 4 attempts to get her name right).

David: “I heard that you guys have dealt with a pretty big attack recently?”
DM: “This is true, we lost my father in the attack.”
Soveliss: We all get this meta wrong, we think this is Nadina’s replacement character. It only makes sense!
David: “I’m very sorry about that. I’ve been wanting to help defend both the wilds and the human settlements around them, and alone… while I can track very well, it’s kind of hard to hunt alone. I was hoping I could lend my assistance to a bigger group party and help make a difference.”
DM: “Well, these gentlemen have lent their swords – well, weapons, such as they are, to my service. I’m certain you would be welcome amongst them.”

Cade and David chat rangery business for a moment, with a digression taken to clear up the exact nature of the noble hierarchy around here.

David: “I think I will be able to help greatly with you, Ms. Baroness, and with this group.”
Roskgild: Ms. Baroness.
Traenus: Hee hee, Ms. Baroness.
Roskgild: Cobra!
DM: COBRA!
Cade: CooooBRA!
Soveliss: Someone doesn’t have ranks in Persuasion.
Cade: Nowhere to run! Nowhere to hide!
Soveliss: Break on through to the other side!
Traenus: I stand and bow and say, “If the Baroness wishes you to join us, I will welcome you.”

A pause.

Traenus: And he’s gone.
Soveliss: Yep, Nadina’s character all right!

While they wait for David to come back, the discussion veers off to going into Traenus’s room and burning his TV while watching ponies on it. The invocation of ponies immediately summons David back, of course. Soveliss and Roskgild talk very quietly, prompting the DM to hurl things at the former.

Soveliss: Don’t aim for the work laptop, DM!
DM: I was aiming for your forehead!
Soveliss: Well your aim is terrible!
Cade: That thing is huge! Barn, Soveliss’s forehead, the rest of the world.
Roskgild: That’s no moon!

Cade’s attitude turns into misplaced anger, as is his wont.

Cade: ‘Would you part an old man of his stick?’ Fuck yeah, I will, damn wizard! Think you’re fucking slick! The hell he think he is? I’ll part any old man from his stick…

The Baroness suggests they go to the graveyard to help bury corpses, the recent battle having overwhelmed the castle’s ability to inter them.

Roskgild: They certainly won’t rise from the grave and provide us with a fighting encounter…
Soveliss: What are the odds?
Cade: I travel to the graveyard. I see a mound of dirt. I click it.
Roskgild: The odds are none, because Cade already did that to us.

Roskgild is disgusted by the mass grave, or at least finds it tacky. Soveliss attempts to roleplay, and the group’s expectation that he’ll deliver a pun that he didn’t even have prepared causes him to collapse into a gibbering ball. No, really, this isn’t comical exaggeration, he really did.

DM: What you hear from behind a pile of corpses isn’t what you’d think. It’s not, “Mmmmmmmm,” but more, “AOROAOARA!” Like a bear – actually a bear.
Roskgild: A bear has been attracted to the bodies? The ONE soldier that had peanut butter in his knapsack.
Cade: Calm down, bear, we prevented ALL the forest fires.
Soveliss: He just wants a pick-a-nick basket!
Roskgild: The rangers can identify it as an actual bear. If it is an actual bear.
DM: You hear disgusting sloppy crunching sounds.
Roskgild: Okay, that’s not a regular bear, then.
DM: The rangers can try to identify the bear, there are some tracks…

It’s a polar bear! The rangers argue for a while over they’ve managed to identify the bear, even though the DM explicitly tells them they have.

Roskgild: What is a polar bear doing here?
Soveliss: We’re up north.
Roskgild: Yeah, we’re not in Hawaii, where polar bears don’t go…
Cade: It’s kind of odd for a polar bear to go this far into a human camp.
Soveliss: Maybe it’s depressed. It’s a bipolar bear.
Traenus: Oh god.
Roskgild: Ohhhhh.
Soveliss: THERE they are.
Cade: He’s back on the show…

The DM shoves snickerdoodle into Soveliss’s mouth to shut him up, which chokes him rather unpleasantly and severely damages his voice. He rambles on in the voice of Richard Harris Dumbledore for a while.

Soveliss: “Soon I’ll die and be replaced… by Michael Gambon. But before that… I have some last minute points. To the polar bear…. 50 points. 1000 points… to Ryan Stiles… and now… if you would read the credits in a style of my choosing… I choose Voldemort. Good afternoon. Good evening. And good night.” (collapsing onto the table) Huh. I can’t actually stop talking like that. None of that was actually forced, it was all coming out naturally, that’s the alarming thing…
DM: It is a large white bear with its muzzle kind of gooey with blood, because it’s been eating the dead soldiers!
Roskgild: Ugh, it’s rabid.
DM: It’s not rabid, it’s just disgusting.
Roskgild: Well, it’s saving us some work.
Traenus: Well, that’s one way to look at it…
Cade: Let me try my ANIMAL HANDLING!
Soveliss: Natural 1! (miming slapping the bear around)
Roskgild: Animal Handling is just shooting arrows at it.

Cade rolls terribly, while David rolls even worse. David quickly casts Speak With Animals to bypass the rolling, but Quinn jumps in to try to Intimidate it… somehow. Since Quinn has absolutely no idea HOW he is doing this, David gets to talk anyway.

David: “Hey. You’re eating our guys.
DM: “MEAT?”
David: “Yes you.”
DM: No, the bear said, “Meat?”
David: “No, they’re my friends.”
Cade: No, they’re meat.
DM: “Friends dead, meat now!”
David: “There’s meat in the forest.”
DM: “That meat run away, this meat here.”

…it goes like this for a while.

Cade: I think we should impress on this bear that if he continues to eat the meat here, he will be the meat there… (pausing) That wasn’t good.
Traenus: Long pause.
Soveliss: Let’s just say that if he continues on like this, he’ll find conditions here UNBEARABLE!

The group hates Soveliss. Cade deploys the Chime of Opening to open the bear’s stomach – out comes Alec! The conversation… goes back to the bear being an idiot. Cade angrily fires an arrow into the ground to Intimidate the bear!

David: I’m guessing you probably needed a 14 to hit the ground precisely like you wanted to.
Roskgild: 10 plus the ground’s Dexterity.
Cade: “LEAVE, bear! Killing you would be unfortunate!”
Roskgild: Killing the ground?! What’s the ground’s roll to RESIST?!
Cade: By the way, when you were walking to town, the ground resisted your footfall. You fell.
Soveliss: The earth actually has a pretty high Charisma, too.

Poignant silence.

Roskgild: Here it comes…
Soveliss: It has a lot of NATURAL MAGNETISM!

Roskgild makes a noise not unlike a teakettle. Quinn finally manages to get the bear to back off just by getting up in its face.

Traenus: Well, at least it worked. I was about to Thunderwave the shit out of this bear!
Roskgild: Yeah, I was about to breathe fire.
Quinn: I roll 25 to growl at him as he walks away.
Soveliss: Oh, now you’re just provoking it.
Roskgild: Here it comes! Roll for initiative!
DM: He turns around, charges at you, slams his paws on the ground in front of him, and growls right back. And you hear him go, “Leave me be!”
Soveliss: “Why did you do that?”
David: “Let the bear go!”
DM: And then he’s going to turn around and saunter off.

Complaining about bear puns, they bear the burden of BEARying the bodies. Cade complains about the work.

Cade: I’m gonna roll my attempt to dig. Let’s see here.
Soveliss: I like how you immediately go for the fumble deck.
Cade: Because it’s gonna happen. My 8 Strength, am I strong enough to dig dirt! (rolling)
Soveliss: (bursting into laughter) It holds true! Every time Cade angrily tries to fail something, he rolls a natural 20!

The group finishes up quickly and returns for a delicious and hearty lunch. The regent gossips with them, to their slight disease, while the group again mocks Nadani for taking off. The group acknowledges how delicious the food on the gig is, at least, while eating corpses and getting mummy rot from them.

Cade: To the female-only baths! They’ll never know.
Soveliss: Well, this adventure writes itself.
Traenus: …Aiden?
Cade: He’s already there.
Soveliss: ‘I’m ALWAYS on duty!’

Roskgild spends a while trying to figure out if he sweats; the group concludes that dragonborn pant and also see with their tongue. The baroness approaches Roskgild to inquire what he’s up to. Also Quinn implies he’s whacking it.

Roskgild: “I have no need for the bathing facilities. All the bathing I need comes from the sky.”
DM: (to Soveliss, as he brings up some music) God damn it, Soveliss!
Traenus: Stop with the porn music!
DM: No, he pulled out the sexy jazz.
Traenus: It’s the same thing.

The regent abruptly appears and defenestrates the baroness despite the total lack of windows on the roof. Traenus demands rooftop romance, to Roskgild’s bewilderment, but she only has curious young girl questions. They relax the rest of the afternoon.

Roskgild: I keep forgetting she’s not THE Baroness, she’s Baroness what’s-her-name… She doesn’t come up in black leather.

Of course, as everyone expects, the dead show up to wander into the courtyard at the beginning of the night, irritating everyone because they wasted the day burying them.

Cade: I didn’t see that coming. We were just burying bodies and now there’s undead.
Roskgild: If we had burned them…
DM: If you had burned them there wouldn’t be any zombies.
Roskgild: There’s a really unhappy bear out there somewhere right now.
Soveliss: “Oh, that came back up on me…”

The group leaps into the fray! Soveliss dives into the fray, attacking successfully and then burning ki to use Patient Defense. Cade fires, and then Traenus very dramatically turns undead.

Traenus: “BACK, ye undead, lest ye feel the fury of the stooooorm!”

At least one of the undead are turned, provoking an AOO from Soveliss as it turns to flee, and then Roskgild moves up to breathe fire over three of their enemies for mild damage. Quinn strikes one, but the zombies prove as perpetually resistant to dying as the players are familiar with.

Traenus: You know, for a split second you kind of looked like Weird Al Yankovic.
Soveliss: Huh. That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.
DM: Soveliss, what’s your AC?
Soveliss: 17!
DM: Oh, it just hit you. But it didn’t just to damage. Seven points, it goes bitchslap! Your pretty face!
Roskgild: Oh, you got slammed.

Soveliss reminds the DM that he was dodging, and the zombie ends up rolling a natural 1 on its second d20 and rips itself apart. David promptly rolls a 26 to hit.

Soveliss: If I were David, I’d REFUSE to go back to 3rd Edition…

Cade casts Hunter’s Mark, then snipes a zombie for reasonable directions. Four of them are still up, so Traenus hustles forward.

Traenus: We’re gonna Thunderwave the shit out of them. “YOU did not RUN! FEEEEEEEEL the fury!”
Soveliss: So much for stealth!
Traenus: Not with me around!
DM: Two of them go flying. One does not stand back up. One looks like it should have died, but doesn’t.
Cade: I wish I was a doctor. ‘Sorry, ma’am… you’ve got the Thunderclap.’
Roskgild: My axe rings out!
Soveliss: Ding, fries are done.
Roskgild: Chopping the one that did not fly back for 15 points of damage!

It dies, naturally, and David finishes off the next one to claim the battle.

DM: And you turn around to see the baroness standing in the door, white as a sheet.
Traenus: The baroness! I thought you said the bear, I was like, “Why is the bear there?”
Soveliss: That’d explain why it was so white. Polar bear.
DM: “I suppose we’ll have to start burning our bodies now. I’m sorry.”
David: “That’s what it sounds like. Is there any explanation to why they came up?”
DM: “Other than the fact that Uthmuri do strange things to magic… that’s the only thing I can think of.”
Cade: “Perhaps if we had a cleric with some Knowledge(religion)—“
Traenus: Shut the fuck up!
Roskgild: Are you just not even bothering to hide your taking shots at him?

The idea of a necromancer is raised, and Soveliss examines the bodies to check for influence of that sort but finds none. Cade complains angrily that his throwaway characters last forever while the characters he envisions great potential for gutter out quickly. Back they head to the graveyard!

Soveliss: It’s that bear. He took levels in necromancer to get revenge.
Traenus: That’s a crazy-ass bear.
Cade: It seems like it would have been better for the bear to bring the dead bodies to himself instead of sending them at us.
Traenus: That’s true…
Soveliss: What part of revenge is unclear here?
Cade: I know, but he could have food…
Soveliss: He’s clearly dumber than the av-er-age bear.
DM: It’s true.
Soveliss: We got the special ed polar bear, I don’t know how that happened.
DM: You DID get the special ed polar bear.
Cade: Damn it, I forgot! Was he holding a Coke?!
DM: No.
Cade: Damn it!

Fog rolls over the graveyard, and they see shambling bodies. A pie crumb takes Soveliss low once again, and Cade gleefully rejoices in how long the ‘but the X was POISON!’ meme has lasted. The conversation dissolves into musical reference. Soveliss creeps through the fog, finding no actual bodies in the fog and the graves disturbed – by the bear.

Soveliss: The necrobear theory is starting to sound a lot more plausible, thank you!

Soveliss explains the concept of Resonance, a setting term that isn’t terribly unlike wild magic, to explain what is afoot here. Unwilling to track the bear down and kill it, they return to the castle to report back to the baroness.

DM: You go back and report, and she just looks kind of terrified, because sixteen-year-old girl faced with zombies.
Roskgild: We should stop telling her things. We’re traumatizing this—
Traenus: But she needs to know.
DM: Yeah, she needs to know. She’d be like, “I wouldn’t want you to not tell me, please. I’d rather know. This way I can better protect my people and my lands.”
Cade: “Sadly, for the moment and the foreseeable future, no buryings can occur.”
DM: “Like I said, we’ll just have to burn them.”
Cade: Feed them to the local wildlife.
Soveliss: Feed them to the Sharkticons.
DM: “I thank you all for your diligence.”
Soveliss: (quietly) “That is what we are here for.”
DM: What?
Soveliss: That is what we are here for, god damn it!
DM: WHAT?
Soveliss: Fuck you, Baroness, fuck you!

Someone goes to Slytherin house for some reason, and the PCs receive loot from a completely arbitrary source. With a delicious Bag of Holding now theirs, David kills everyone by putting a Portable Hole in it, and the game ends.