S07E21: The Gang Composes Themselves

## The Prelude

Before the episode recap, the gang learns that Kanye spent 3 hours over the weekend sorting nails.

> **DM**: You… found. A bucket. Of nails.
> **Kanye**: It was multiple buckets!
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Full story not captured for reader sanity.

## Previously on MCVFD

We have come to Limbo on orders from the Drakeguard to address the threat of He Who Sleeps. We’ve been running missions for the Limbo Drakeguard who were a little overwhelmed and stretched thin for resources. The main things we’ve been doing has been recovering monitoring stations, which help them understand the status of what’s going on.

We’ve now taken care of 4 out of the 6 monitoring stations. When we finished up the last one, we were visited by He Who Sleeps himself that night in a shared dream. He introduced himself as Colin, he tried to make himself look like not such a bad guy, and he also made it clear we had no hope of defeating him.

We went and saw the director and gave her a status update she was pleased with. Then we let slip that we knew her true name (Linda) and she was rather upset and then demanded we didn’t tell anyone. We may or may not have immediately shared that information.

We also gave the Limbo Egg to Qualish who put it into a machine which appeared to put it into a thing that kickstarted all of our apparatuses, which are now glowing alert.

At the end, we headed out for yet another monitoring station that had floated adrift towards Warrior’s Rest. Nobody knows much about Warrior’s Rest - the most we know is it’s like Phenomar, a stable space in Limbo that happens to be a Valhalla style arena of war for devotees of Gods of war. All these warriors spend their afterlife fighting each other for various deities. We also know that these warriors don’t pledge fealty to a particular god; they were granted a reward for entering, but the overriding rule is that when you fall in combat, you go and fight for the team that killed you.

When we arrived at Warrior’s Rest, we made sure to consume a Heroe’s feast before entering. As soon as we stepped in, we found all of our armor and clothing were turned gray. We see the remains of a monitoring station, hear a booming voice about “new challengers”, and get simultaneously rushed by 2 groups of warriors: red warriors on one side, blue warriors on another side, everyone charging at us.

## Session

Um runs up the monitoring station, getting ready to take a shot as soon as a gladiator is preoccupied by someone else. His opportunity comes soon, as the gladiators immediately charge towards our group. Gladiator Amadeus, wearing red, charges at Averlyth, hitting 2 out of 3 attacks.

Kanye spends a Superiority die to attempt a goading attack on Amadeus - the goad fails, but the damage still lands. Um takes a shot at Amadeus as well, but misses.

Gladiator Chopin, also wearing red, attacks Kanye, hitting 2 out of his 3 as well. He tries to knock Kanye prone but it’s not even close.

Averlyth drives her chariot backwards a little bit then tries to shoot her attacker with a Guiding Bolt. It misses, ricocheting off of Kanye’s power armor into the sky, harmlessly.

> **Averlyth**: Uhhh as an aside, after this combat is over, we should practice me ricocheting shots off of Kanye’s power armor intentionally, Iron Man / Captain America-style.
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Then she hits the blue button on her chariot, putting it into the defensive mode. The legs lift up, moving around like a shield.

Kanye attempts to make a challenging intimidation against the gladiators, with Nissa on the sound system for special effects. Amadeus, Bach and Chopin all fail, but Debussy isn’t impressed.

Gladiator Bach in blue comes sprinting in, missing his first two attacks on Kanye, but then hitting on the last. Debussy, also donning blue, attacks Charlie, but he misses all of his attacks.

Nissa casts Slow on all of the gladiators. All of them fail, taking -2 to AC and dex saving throws, and only able to make one attack a turn.

Um takes another shot at Amadeus, but misses this time around.

Amadeus wheels on Kanye and makes a single attack, but it’s not quite enough. He’s super frustrated and isn’t able to break out of the effects of the Slow. Chopin also makes a spear attack on Kanye but also fails. They’re both frustrated.

Averlyth casts Spirit Guardians to summon her “bees”. All of the gladiators are in range of them and will have to roll wisdom saving throws on their turn.

> **DM**: Do you do anything else?
> **Averlyth**: I cackle
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Kanye grapples Amadeus with his belt of grappling, narrowly succeeding. He decides to treat Amadeus as a weapon to smash Chopin. Because he’s level 11 now, he can do it a third time. Not only is Amadeus not bloodied yet, he is laughing with delight and having a great time. Kanye then does a flurry of attacks, but Amadeus is still not bloodied.

Chopin takes some damage from bees, then tries to attack Kanye. Then Debussy takes some damage from bees and attacks Charlie. Both of them are still slowed.

Nissa looks disdainfully at all of the warriors, and then looks at Amadeus and disses him in particular.

> **Nissa**: This doesn’t look like Warrior’s Rest, this looks like Warriors Worst
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Amadeus is so overjoyed by Kanye’s novel tactic, he’s completely unaffected. Nissa then spends a bonus action to give Um some bardic inspiration.

Um just remembered he’s level 11 so his last 2 rolls should’ve been 19 instead because he was proficient. Oh well, he’s going after Chopin now, and only needs to roll to see if he’s getting any critical successes.

It was not critical, so he hits him normally with 2 shots. Chopin is now thoroughly bloodied because literally everyone has attacked him, including other gladiators.

Amadeus takes some damage from bees while he’s grappled, so he tries to escape. Kanye’s able to keep grappled. Chopin gets stung by bees and then tries to stab Kanye.

Averlyth summons her Spiritual Weapon to hit Chopin. She misses him, but keeps her weapon out.

Kanye tries to knock Amadeus prone twice, failing both times. After 2 failures, he decides to take his frustration out by hitting Chopin with Amadeus.

Bach attempts to stab Kanye after some murder hornets get to him, but like everyone else he barely misses. Bach is no longer Slowed, however.

> **DM**: Debussy is going to… oh but first, he’s stung by bees.
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Debussy is stung by bees. Then he tries to stab Chopin but critically fails, and is still Slowed too.

Chopin is almost dead. Amadeus is laughing maniacally with blood dripping out of his mouth. Bach and Debussy are fine.

Nissa insults Chopin: “You were probably picked last on the team, weren’t you?” He dies from embarrassment.

> **Kanye**: What was his name? Chopin? What letter was Chopin?... I know how to spell Chopin
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> **DM**: It’s C
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> **Averlyth**: He’s dead now, it’s fine
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> **Nissa**: HE WAS ALWAYS DEAD
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Um, who we now know literally cannot miss, targets Debussy now that his original target (Chopin) is dead. He’s hit hard, but not quite bloodied yet.

Amadeus resists the murder hornets but attempts to escape again. He succeeds, falling to the ground. He’s still slowed though, and can’t do anything else.

Averlyth swings the spiritual weapon at Debussy. She hits, bloodying him.

Kanye looks around for the healthiest gladiator - Bach - and then attempts to grapple him. He succeeds, dealing force damage and wielding him with his tattooed mustaches. Then, ambitiously Kanye grapples Debussy with his arms. After some complex calculus, Kanye decides to hit them together.

Bach is stung by honeybees this time. He successfully escapes the grapple, but he’s still slowed. Debussy takes half damage from the bees this time. He also manages to slip free.

Nissa continues making fun of the gladiators, telling Amadeus how we’re the new kids on the block and we’re beating them up. He takes half damage, laughing the whole time, “You’re right!! You guys are kicking our asses!!!”

Um now debates who to target.

> **Um**: Someone’s not grappled, right?
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> **DM**: No one’s currently grappled, they’re all free
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> **Um**: Oh uhhh Amadeus then, I haven’t shot him in awhile
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Um kills Amadeus.

Averlyth takes another swipe at Debussy, but misses since she was thrown off by how stoked Amadeus was to die. Kanye follows up by grappling Debussy successfully, but then failing to knock him prone. Kanye goes for his usual instead, hitting Bach with Debussy. Debussy is now bloodied, Bach is not.

Bach endures the bees, then turns towards Kanye and performs a flurry of spear strikes, hitting only the last one. Kanye takes less damage because it’s physical and then ripostes. Bach quickly retreats out of the radius of the bees, Kanye is now bloodied.

> **DM**: Nissa, you have an opportunity to make an opportunity attack if you would like to.
> **Nissa**: …. With my hands?
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Nissa is too surprised and does not take the opportunity.

Debussy endures bees and then escapes a grapple again, then follows Bach out of the radius of the bees.

Nissa continues snarking at Debussy, poking fun at how we’re decimating the gladiators. He takes damage from the insult and runs away from her, tears in his eyes.

Um prepares to shoot at whichever enemy engages in melee combat with someone else, to get the benefit of his sneak attack.

Averlyth spends a bonus action to move her spiritual weapon up next to Bach, but then misses her slash at him. Kanye also targets Bach, missing once then hitting once. Um’s opportunity reveals itself, and he sends some hefty bolts at Bach. Bach sprouts a crossbow bolt out of his head, but he’s technically still alive.

> **Um**: Finish him!
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> **Averlyth**: It would’ve been funny if we heard that from the Warrior’s Rest megaphone
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> **DM**: OH NO I was supposed to be doing that this whole time, it’s even in my notes
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Kanye overthinks it and swings at Bach… missing him.

He improvises, using the blunt end of his weapon to bludgeon Bach in the face. It knocks the bolt deeper into his skull. Bach is now dead.

Kanye runs to catch up with Debussy, who turns around and spears him.

> **Kanye**: haha wow this wasn’t what I wanted at all
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Kanye bleeds, laughs and looks into Debussy’s eyes while making his best Amadeus face.
Nissa gets a little excited and decides she wants to try stabbing things. She reaches down and makes a good try, but ties go to the defender.

> **Um**: I was not expecting to have another shot, but I will shoot him. Unexpectedly :D
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Um expectedly kills Debussy, ending the fight.

As the last gladiator drops, we hear the announcer go: “Killing Spree!”

We have a few minutes to collect ourselves before we hear another announcement: “Combat has ended for the day, fighters report to your new teams”.

The lights dim artificially, as if it were twilight - there’s no sun, and we can still see Limbo outside of the dome. Suddenly, all of the “dead” gladiators stand up. We watch their wounds knit together as they walk up to Kanye and Nissa.

> **Gladiators**: So, who’s the leader here?
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> Averlyth vaguely points at both Nissa and Kanye
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> **Gladiators**: Oh it’s going to be one of those teams, is it?
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We decide Nissa is in charge. Amadeus is ribbing Kanye, gleefully talking about the fight.

They ask us what our team color is. Nissa looks over at Averlyth and answers “Black”.

We watch as our clothes, armor, even the chariot turn various shades of black before our eyes. The fighters shrug, press a button on their armor and we watch as their armors turn black too.

Gladiators: So what’s your team name??

Nissa pulls out a branded coaster.

Nissa: Welcome to the Mulmaster County Volunteer Fire Department!!!!

Kanye makes air horn noises

Gladiators, blankly: … We uh, usually just go by color here, how about Black team?

Kanye: Black team!!!

The gladiators ask where we came from. We tell them we’re newcomers, and they look shocked, asking if that was our first time.

> **Gladiators**: What God do you worship?
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> **Nissa, Averlyth in unison**: Bane
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> **Gladiators**: That’s, uhhh not a God of War
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The gladiators notice our wounds have not healed up automatically, and then realize we maybe are not supposed to be here.

They start showing us the ropes to Warrior’s Rest; Amadeus is having a blast at how little we know.

They teach us that everyone here worships a God of War, and you wake up here if you die in battle. The only rule is that when you die, you wake up for the team that killed you. There’s usually only 2 teams here, red and blue, but there’s currently a yellow team that’s kinda unusual.

Averlyth asked how long the yellow team has been here. They’re also relatively new (couple of months?), and they’ve grown a lot recently.

Um asks how long the structure has been here for - sounds like a couple of weeks. As far as they know, the yellow team and monitoring station are unrelated. Nissa asks if they know who leads the Yellow team. Sounds like they don’t know the name, but he’s wearing a mask and it’s made out of gold.

> **Nissa**: oooOOOOhhhh, a worthy adversary
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> **Um**: We defeated him in a different way a week ago
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> **Gladiators**: Are you sure it’s the same guy? He’s been here awhile
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> **Averlyth**: Um, it’s a different guy
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> **Nissa**: Smallaboat!
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Nissa asks now what happens? They say usually we go to base… except we don’t have one? Nissa gestures for Woodhouse to enact the portable meeting room, which contains everything you need for a meeting, including pastries. All of these battleworn warriors are very impressed. Kanye pulls out the coasters to protect the table.
Kanye asks if anyone ever fights after hours? Like what would happen if Kanye tried to punch someone right now. Amadeus gets a cocky grin and says Kanye could try it and find out. Kanye asks if there’s a scoreboard? The gladiators say it’s not really a score thing.

> **Kanye**: So it’s not really a contest then?
> **Gladiators**: No, I guess it’s really more like an opportunity :D
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Kanye asks if we could do a night ops type attack at night. The gladiators frown and look deeply uncomfortable, but we believe nothing would technically stop us. Kanye explores this train of thought at length before stopping.
Averlyth gives Kanye a Bane sticker for asking really good questions. Kanye keeps his gold stars from Nissa on one arm, Bane stickers from Averlyth on the other.

> **Um**: And I very very rarely give friendly pats on the back.
> **Kanye**: And I remember every one.
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The gladiators ask us for our game plan? Averlyth asks if the gladiators can draw us a map. Amadeus shrugs, walks up to the whiteboard, then draws a very rough diagram that’s effectively just a couple of colored circles. There’s a big red camp, a big blue camp, and a yellow camp. Then he adds a tiny square for the monitoring station and then draws a tiny black circle to represent who we are.

They ask us for our strategy, Nissa says we usually like to fight and win. Some of them think that’s wise/funny, others seem worried we don’t have a tactic in mind, and start asking if we’re here to cover more ground, or just increase our head count, or what?

Averlyth asks if there are objectives on the map - good reasons to cover ground - or if they should just go for headcount. They’re still confused why we’re here without a clear goal. We deliberate a little, and then decide it’s fine to tell them the truth: that we’re here for an extraction, and we’re looking for the people that were on the monitoring station before.

This answer seems to clear a lot up for our the team members, and they reveal that “those guys were weak” and got gutted the first night. It sounds like they died, came back, and now are on Yellow.

There’s a pause as the team contemplates if that means the Gith worship a God of War ??

Averlyth questions if this means we can’t do our extraction, as they died in here. It sounds like they’ll be obligated to attack us and wouldn’t be allowed to leave while they’re on another team, but they could leave the Dome if we got them on our team.

DM: I love that the three of you - Kanye, Um, Nissa - are all grimacing about the idea of killing the Gith, whereas Averlyth is just nodding like “yeah, of course, this makes sense”

Averlyth starts grilling Amadeus on other teams’ tactics since they were just members of Red and Blue– apparently this is a huge faux pas. She follows up by asking, What would make a satisfying fight with them then?

Amadeus says they’d enjoy Kanye’s strategy of being swung around and smashed into things. Averlyth presses – what kinds of tactics do those teams tend to use? Scouts, sneak attacks, spies, etc? Amadeus remembers how little we actually know about what’s going on here, and tells us about factions.

Factions form by splitting off from their old team– usually the new team’s color is close to the old general’s colors (like cyan from blue), but rarely does the color go so far away from the original color.

We learn that Warrior’s Rest is designed to equalize to two teams.  If there are multiple equally balanced teams, there is an awkward tension, because no one wants to make a move in case the other teams form an alliance. Yellow hasn’t shown an interest in any alliances, but don’t have the headcount to take on one team without being attacked. They’ve been gaining ground via guerilla style raids to slowly get members.

This is also why when new contenders were announced, both red and blue tried to grab us for members.  We would probably get wiped out if we tried a frontal attack on any of the other teams.  If we’re trying to recover our friends, maybe we should scout yellow? But we’d get our asses kicked if we tried normal battle.

Averlyth: is it bad form to leave the dome and come back, to bait people to the edge of the dome?

Answer: NOT KOSHER.

Kanye: How many in each camp?

We think each team has hundreds, roughly balanced.

Averlyth asks how alliances usually happen. We hear that the generals meet, all sneaky like, but it’s not unheard of.

> **Averlyth**: so, more sneaky, less smashy, to stay on people’s good side? Hello titanic growth.
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Kanye asks how many could we conceivably kill in a day then? Amadeus thinks we couldn’t get a lot of headcount because we’d get their attention, and then they’d show up and smash us. Averlyth asks how big Warrior’s Rest is. No one is using vehicles or horses, everyone is on foot for combat, and you can see camps from each other.

DM clarification: When someone is on a team, they are compelled to fight for the team they’re on. BUT, these gladiators are all bought into the game itself– they’re here to fight and be awesome, not to have team pride in your team winning.  They like it here, this is their heaven.

Averlyth pokes her head out of the meeting room, makes a scryball, and sends it over to yellow camp. It looks around for 10 minutes getting a visual on the camp.

There are a bunch of yellow tents, patrols around the perimeter of the camp, rowdy warriors eating and drinking. Around one campfire, a less bulky-looking, subdued group that is probably our missing Gith.

In the center is the biggest, fanciest tent. She sees people coming and going out of it.

Just before the spell ends, the curtain of the tent pulls aside and a man wearing extremely ornate yellow armor steps outside, wearing a golden dragon mask. It looks like a gold version of the mask Biggeboat was wearing.  It’s clearly a different dude given his body type, however– he is jacked, wearing massive armor, carrying a huge hammer on his back, giving orders to folks in the camp.