Holy crap roleplaying! The Hunnerd Gold campaign begins and is immediately booed. The DM recaps the previous adventure, adding in that they defeated the griffin, because he feels two rounds of combat isn’t worth it.

Cruroar: Listen, the DM finally saw that awesome movie Lucian brought that one time and realized he didn’t need to have us fight more, he just describes the battle.
Lucian: Oh, that Kevin Sorbo movie? Ah! You finally watched it!
Cruroar: ‘Roll initiative. And that’s when it finally happened—‘
DM: ‘Cruroar threw his mighty blade out!’
Cruroar: I don’t have a sword.
DM: You do now!
Lucian: It didn’t even have that much description. It was, ‘The battle began. And after our victory…’
Normilan: That was one of the two great movie moments with Lucian back in the apartment. The other one was…
Lucian: Dragon Ball.
Normilan: ‘That was the B version of Ernie Hudson. Oh crap, that WAS Ernie Hudson.’
Cruroar: No, Ernie, why?!
DM: At least it wasn’t that werewolf movie. (scornfully) Anthony Hopkins.
Brunt: Oh, the one with –
DM: Shirts vs. skins werewolves.
Normilan: I remember you went to see that and had nothing but bad things to say about it the very next week.
DM: No, no, it was because I wandered in while someone was watching it. It started in the middle of a kinky S&M torture scene where they tried to pray away the werewolf gay or something.

The cold gloom of a haunt descends on them once again now that the fire is out. Lucian struggles to go comatose, but still has 1 Wisdom left. With the ghost weakened they elect to explore further. With a wide hall and a servant’s entrance to choose from, they choose the latter. The group debates the mental stats of the Scooby Gang.

Cruroar: Let’s start with the door.
Normilan: The door is probably the way we should go. The ghost thinks, ‘Hey, these guys are gonna think they’re high and mighty, they’re gonna go down the big hallway, not the servant’s hallway.’ Though this IS the DM, and he probably thought in a meta fashion.
DM: I know that you know that I know…
Normilan: Hallway it is!
DM: I know that you know that I know that you know…
Normilan: Seriously, the doorway.

The oil-soaked, swollen door is jammed in its frame. Lucian attempts to burn it open.

Cruroar: Perhaps one of our more powerful, more hit-pointed individuals could open the door…
Normilan: I mean, I put my hand up, is it like—
DM: Roll a Relex save!

Normilan passes, and as the door bursts into flames he takes only 3 damage. But the fire is starting to spread! They hurriedly don’t throw water on the oil fire.

Normilan: Let’s exacerbate things. Grease!
Lucian: Blow on it!
DM: The fire blows back with just as much force as you blew on it with.
Giles: Can we basically make a dry area around it?
DM: What will you use?
Normilan: I got this extra flour here. (mimes an explosion) Castle explodes, we’re done. Now WE haunt the castle ruins!
DM: I hope it was the castle that was holding him here. He was mad because of all the oil in it.
Normilan: We can haunt it together with him.

They throw chalk at it. Lucian bounces of the door with a poor Strength check, but Eilnys and Normilan double-team the door and bash through it. The DM picks at their hatred of tapestries as they burn. Traveling up a staircase, they find themselves in a passage behind the main walls, which holds doors concealed from the main area because eww, servants. The DM calls for Spot checks.

Brunt: What does Eilnys see? I’m just gonna skip to the part where she rolls a 20 and…
DM: There is detritus on the ground. Most of it decayed, though not as decayed as it should be. However, as you’re looking, one piece of paper has not decayed, and it catches your eye. Cruroar, the same is true for you.

The DM hands them actual pieces of paper, and they quickly realize they need to find more pieces of paper and assemble information! A cold wind blows from the master bedroom, though it doesn’t actually impede them.

Giles: If we reach the door, I’m going to check it for traps.
DM: You do manage to reach the great door unimpeded. The crest that you don’t recognize, being from a kingdom that fell countless years ago, symbolizes some history or legacy here.

Giles finds a trap! A magic trap. Cruroar blasts it with Voracious Dispelling, but the door is still locked!

DM: Hi or low, Cruroar?
Cruroar: Hi.
DM: (rolling)
Cruroar: (picking up his character sheet) Normilan, where’s your lighter?
DM: Welp. This is a twist. (reaching for the critical fumble deck) That doesn’t work. It’s hard to critically fail as a ghost… As you rattle the handle, a ghostly hand lunges through the door, passes just a fraction aside of your face, and abruptly the mage armor which is still coursing around you causes the hand to glance off in a way that it did not expect. In a most undignified fashion, the rest of the ghost floats through the door.
Normilan: “Uh. Hi.”
DM: What do you do?
Brunt: Why is it the more you build up one of your awesome NPC bad guys… something just happens to turn them into a meme or something.
Cruroar: Quickly! Wand of Magic Missile!

Normilan also shoots magic missiles, and the spectral being flees through the floor. They turn their attention back to the door only to discover Giles has no ranks in Open Lock.

DM: Normilan produces a crowbar.
Normilan: And I beat myself over the head. ‘This incompetent group, I can’t--!’ No.

Popping the door, they enter in a dark and cold room, with a lot of flavor text. They settle in to begin searching, and beging vigorously rolling natural 20s and mid-30s on their checks. The DM distributes many shreds of paper to them.

Normilan: Seriously? Seriously? Seriously? The blank?! How do you know which side is right?! THERE’S TWO BLANK CORNERS! DM, we’re going to have talks. Are there two pages?! There are two pages, aren’t there?! YOU ASSHAT! These two are identically torn in the exact same pages! There are two goddamn pages!
Lucian: Seriously?!
Cruroar: There might have been three pages, it was a pretty thick packet he ripped.
Normilan: No one said anything about puzzle time…

The DM makes Lucian roll a Wisdom save. Perhaps unsurprisingly, with his current Wisdom mod of -6, he fails and is promptly possessed. He immediately fails to stab Brunt in the back, and Lucian encourages them to view this as betrayal and murder him.

Cruroar: “Looks like we got another possession!”
Giles: “Damn it! Not him again!”
Lucian: How do you know? As far as you know I just betrayed you all!
Normilan: Because he did it before!
Lucian: FEEL FREE TO KILL HIM! I can make a new character!

Eilnys punches him, and then Cruroar attempts to dispel the possession. Eilnys and Lucian obstinately refuse to run their brawl, but the dispel succeeds (and harms Lucian). Normilan, who has been paying this all no attention, threatens to shove the paper pieces down the DM’s throat.

Lucian: I look to Brunt and I say, “Apologies, orc! I was not myself.”
Brunt: “It happens more often than you think.”
Lucian: “What, people trying to stab you in the back?”
Brunt: “That too…”

They plumb further into the suite, checking the next door for traps and finding a crude scythe rigged to slash. Giles reveals he has Disable Device and promptly jams the trap. Into the bedroom they head, finding it full of penalty-inflicting dust. Their Search checks prove up to the task, however, and they find many more pieces of paper. Assembling them sucks in much of the group (the rest are lost to their phones).

DM: I’m interested in finding out what you learn from your fragments.
Normilan: Me too!
DM: What happens if you can’t find them all?
Normilan: What happens if I punch you in the face?
Cruroar: Is that you talking or an NPC?
DM: Quirion is just mocking you guys ruthlessly…

Lucian attempts to take off for another room and is gang-tackled by the entire party. Normilan reaches the limits of his patience.

Normilan: I’m just going to force that ‘for’.
DM: I like that. ‘I don’t care any more. We’ve got this thing that blames everything on, oh, I don’t know, the dwarves.”
Lucian: You know what would have really screwed us? If he printed the front and back on one page.
DM: That would’ve been too easy.
Lucian: You think so? I think it’d be harder since you wouldn’t know which side is which.

They choose the nearest suite to enter, thinking it might belong to the consort of the castle. Brunt proposes he dungeoncrash the entire castle to smithereens. Giles reports no traps; the DM cheerfully attempts to sabotage all confidence in Giles, so Cruroar dispels the door anyway. The door and the room itself all seem unusually preserved and feminine.

Giles: I don’t trust this room at all.
Cruroar: Detect Magic…?
DM: Necromancy everywhere?
Brunt: So is this some kind of stasis magic? Chronomancy? Did I say that right? That’s a thing in D&D, right?
Normilan: That’s in second edition, sadly.
Brunt: Oh, there’s a bag of beans!
DM: Yes, and I’ve never converted a thing.
Brunt: There’s a bag of beans II in here.
Normilan: I’m not saying you wouldn’t, I’m saying there’s never been an official thing for it.
DM: Never been an official Birthright thing either.
Normilan: I’m aware of that.

Searching! They fail to solve the riddle and the DM ends the campaign with evil laughter, apparently. Normilan starts reading from what they have so far, relating a tale of a god being killed! The players connect this to what they know of the God of Prophecy becoming the Mad God. They begin searching for more and more, till the DM finally tells them explicitly that they have all they are going to find. With an Intelligence check, the DM offers them a clue by switching their mismatched dates about.

Cruroar: “From that day forth, our people will be free of the countless prophecies foretelling our doom—“ and the chair fell.
DM: ‘Aww, look what you made me write!’
Cruroar: “Praise the Visionary who showed us the path. Praise…”
Normilan: Meanwhile… “Damn the Visionary!”

They’re missing a piece, so the other characters keep rolling and rolling till the DM finally tells them they can’t find the damn thing with Search checks. The tale in the diary pages really stretches their noodles, and they huddle to discuss the many revelations and hints within it!

Normilan: Okay. This was a fantastic waste of time.
DM: (slapping a book shut and standing up) Welp! See you next week!
Normilan: What do we need to do with this information?
DM: Jesus Christ! I just gave you a massive expositional infodump on the campaign’s history and you’re like, ‘duh, it’s a waste of time!’.
Normilan: I wanna know what it has to do with this ghost!

The group, certain the ghost is watching them, begin yelling their questions into the walls and floors to get his attention.

Brunt: The time for talk is now or never. Or he’ll just kill us. That would be something, we go to all this trouble and the DM accidentally kills us.
DM: You step outside, into—
Brunt: Cold!
DM: It looks and feels almost like a torrential windstorm, but after a moment you realize it’s not exerting any pressure on you. It’s quasi-real, midway between an illusion and just an echo.
Normilan: So we kinda see the wind affecting things, but…
DM: Yes. The castle itself is being shaken by this wind, but you guys are not. The ghost rises out of the floor. “My… journal…”
Normilan: “Who!? Who is the Visionary?”
DM: “My journal… the Visionary I will destroy. I will see him dead.”
Normilan: “Whooo is he?!” Why is this my catchphrase in this campaign? ‘WHOOOOOO?!’

The ghost angrily rants that the Visionary fulfilled all the prophecies of doom and gloom he promised to avert, but they determine quickly he can remember nothing but his vengeance. The DM calls for Spot checks.

Cruroar: Why can’t it be, like, ‘sense with my emotions’? Can’t I handsome my way through things?
DM: Giles, you alone among everybody are able to see through the ghost’s ethereal form, what he holds in his clenched fist.
Normilan: Ah, he’s got the paper. Why does that bit gotta be the best part?
DM: …why do you fucking THINK, Normilan?!
Normilan: Because it’s got the answer, I know. ‘Gimme 5!’

After a lot of buffoonery, Giles manages to reveal to the others that he hold the final piece. The DM calls for a Diplomacy check, and allows Cruroar to roll in lieu of Brunt. Both he and Normilan roll a natural 20.

DM: So you guys are going to Phoenix Wright tag-team this guy. “I cannot read this. There is a name here I do not know. If I surrender this to you, you must swear to slay the one who is written on here.”
Normilan: ‘Normilan – GOD DAMN IT!’
Cruroar: ‘Cruroar. All right, boys, let’s go!’
Normilan: Which one? There’s so many in the world.
Cruroar: Cruroar, common as mud!
DM: King Aundon.
Cruroar: “Know that the name on that page will be brought to justice, even if we have to find his grave.”
DM: Luckily, your high Diplomacy roll covers your weasel words. Your very carefully chosen weasel words.

The ghost vanishes, leaving the crumpled paper behind. Normilan unfolds it, and reads the name written on it.

Normilan: Papa John?!

Dead silence.

Brunt: Not really…
Normilan: No no.
Brunt: Okay.
DM: Ruin the moment. Ruin the fucking moment.
Normilan: Is that the elven king? Or is the other guy?
DM: It’s the other guy.
Normilan: Oh, it’s the old guy.
Brunt: Oh no…
Normilan: Keyvarin Lassarin was the fucking Visionary.
Brunt: He wanted to live forever.
Normilan: Oh, that’s true! What an asshole!

The question of who gave him the sword is raised, though they have no idea what to do. Or where to go.

Cruroar: The only ally we have that probably won’t kill us right away is that dragon. Let’s go back to the dragon. Let’s ask him for help. ‘We got some journal entries from the past, I’m sure you’ll love these!’

Normilan Mends the paper, and they use that to make the DM print out a clean copy. They lapse into a long tale of Spindlethrift Community College, apparently. They angrily declare all grey elves to be jerks, and decide they’ve achieved all they can here. It gets weird.

DM: In the Holocaust of the future, you’ll all be chipped like pets.
Lucian: Oh, we got lo-jacked.

It gets redacted. The DM doles out experience for the sessions to the tune of 5k. They attempt to level up and determine they are… not quite there yet. Normilan bemoans his lack of access to teleport.

Lucian: I’m sure it’ll end up with one of us in a wall.
Cruroar: It’ll just be you, Lucian.
Normilan: Let’s see how many characters we can get Lucian to roll up this campaign.
DM: You keep trying to teleport back to the castle, there’s just a line of legs sticking out of the wall. “Oops, added another one.”

Cruroar somehow commits suicide. Brunt attempts to hearth. The DM attempts to claim that Keyvarin Lassarin is in fact Normilan from the future. Brunt insists Normilan is the Visionary and the land.

DM: Everybody is Keyvarin Lassarin. There’s just lots of chronomancy involved. The timeline is collapsing around you now because Tasha died.

On that mad note, the game comes to an end. What will our heroes do next time?