The road to the Platinum Keep comes with glitches: skipped memories, a fractured divine lifeline, and new names stepping out of shadow with plans that don’t care what the party just survived. Dragon unity is forming under Naltharion, eggs are vanishing into unreachable ice, and tattooed orc warbands are suddenly everywhere the rifts used to be. The Company takes its next assignment with one big question hanging over it: if someone can cut off Sune mid-sentence, what else can they silence?

Music: Castle Ravenloft - Ambience Background by Supernova Collective https://supernovacollective.bandcamp.comLicensed under Scrybe Quill Context Licensehttps://www.scrybequill.com/license

Meake turns into a frozen killbox and the party learns the hard way that “saving the kids” is exactly when the real monsters show up. A white dragon clings to the orphanage like a bad omen, two razor-smiling agents run the fight like a performance, and Nero gets ripped out from under everyone in a blink of portal-light. By the time the dust settles, the orphanage is a crater, dragon eggs are in pieces, and even Sune’s comfort gets cut short by something sharper. Next stop: the Platinum Keep, because this is bigger than a raid. This is coordinated.

Music: Dragonlance - Krynn Background by Supernova Collective https://supernovacollective.bandcamp.comLicensed under Scrybe Quill Context Licensehttps://www.scrybequill.com/license

This week the stream didn’t fully die, it just buffered enough to be annoying and then, right at the end, Foundry hit me with the ultimate disrespect: I refreshed during a RAM spike and got stuck “logged in” but unable to control my own game. No backup DM profile, no clean fix without dropping the server, so we limped it across the finish line and I added “admin backdoor” to the to-do list. Then in the DM Deep Dive, we get into the real table-killer: when a player isn’t having fun but won’t say it. How to spot it, how to check in without putting them on blast, and how to fix what you can without burning yourself out trying to save everyone.

Meake doesn’t get “attacked” so much as it gets claimed by winter. Kobold patrols circle a city turned to teeth and rime, winged wyrmcallers rake the streets, and a drake’s breath turns the fight into a slow suffocation. Tim gets yanked skyward, Mecoo gets swarmed and dropped hard, Cliff keeps hauling people back from the edge by sheer stubborn grace, and Bramble tries to answer the chaos with weather itself. Then the whole mood shifts as something far bigger roars nearby, and even the kobolds decide surviving is a better hobby than winning.

Music: The War of Pandesmos by Supernova Collective https://supernovacollective.bandcamp.comLicensed under Scrybe Quill Context Licensehttps://www.scrybequill.com/license

The party tries to turn “we survived” into “we actually help people,” building a small relief fund with the Golden Oracle and putting real coin into freed prisoners’ hands. Then a thieves’ cant warning hits like a cold slap: Meake is about to get hammered. They race north and arrive too late for “normal.” The city is frozen mid-panic, white kobolds patrol the sky, and hidden wards erase anyone who moves wrong. Stealth lasts exactly as long as it can. When the patrol finds them, the street explodes into a brutal fight, and the only question left is whether they can hold the line long enough to reach the hatchery.

Music: Shadowfell - Evernight Background by Supernova Collective https://supernovacollective.bandcamp.comLicensed under Scrybe Quill Context Licensehttps://www.scrybequill.com/license

A purring door leads to a kill-room: cages, a pirate captain with a monster of a “pet,” and Bernadette Follis broken in a cell with an arm missing. What follows is pure trench-fight D&D, where the floor turns into a hazard map, Mecoo keeps getting dragged back from the edge, Nefir burns himself down to keep a kid alive, and Bramble erupts out of captivity with Sydan’s fire at his heels. When the dust finally settles, it isn’t just loot and prisoners being hauled out of Tricadia, it’s a daughter being carried home. Two weeks at sea, one hand-carved replacement, and one high-level miracle later, the party gets something rare: a win that actually feels like it matters.

Music: Conclude the Heist (Escape Theme) by Supernova Collective https://supernovacollective.bandcamp.comLicensed under Scrybe Quill Context Licensehttps://www.scrybequill.com/license

This week the stream didn’t get taken out by Streamlabs, Twitch, or YouTube, it got taken out by Forge. Servers couldn’t play nice with Cloudflare, half the table couldn’t log in, and the duct-tape fix was VPNing to Canada… which worked, right up until my PC started dumping RAM like it was trying to hit a high score and the stream died anyway. In the recap, the party bags their fourth key after dropping a nasty two-headed hook-hand horror, gets jumped by moon wraiths, and then Bramble goes full werewolf and has to get non-lethally put down and locked in a sarcophagus until someone can cure him. And for the DM Deep Dive, I get into power builds: why I don’t allow “named” internet builds at my table, and how one broken character can warp the whole party’s fun.

Tricadia stops being a “rescue mission” and starts being a pressure cooker. The party fights a memory-chewing oobleck that turns thoughts into fog, pushes through wards that snuff out their safety nets, and keeps cracking cages open while the whole cave system trembles like it’s listening. Outside, the SS Sadness is trading cannon fire with two hostile ships, and the escape route keeps shrinking by the minute. Then the last unopened door purrs back at them, and behind the bars sits a face Cliff recognizes: Bernadette. One move from here decides whether this becomes a clean extraction… or a very loud obituary.

Music: Deep Blue Sea Blues by Clara Smith https://www.openmusicarchive.org/browse_tag.php?tag=bluesPublic Domainhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/