Transcript:Critical Role Campaign 2 Wrap-Up

Pre-show
MATT: Hello everyone, and welcome to tonight's episode of Critical Role, where a bunch of us nerdy-ass voice actors sit around and talk about playing Dungeons & Dragons.

ALL: (discordant yelling) We talk about playing Dungeons & Dragons!

MATT: Exactly. Welcome to our campaign round table wrap-up chat. We're about to get into that, but before we do, we have some announcements to get through, beginning with our sponsor for tonight and our final sponsor of campaign two, NordVPN. Sam?

SAM: I was not aware that we were doing a NordVPN ad. I don't have any hacker stuff. I have my car keys and a laser pointer. Okay. That's going to be what we had-- and my phone. This episode is sponsored by our friends at NordVPN, providers of the highest quality encryption for your internet traffic, and hides your IP and physical location. With 5,400 servers in 59 countries, it's easy to get better internet speed and protection with one simple click. Campaign three, can I have like a teleprompter?

MARISHA: Uh, no.

SAM: Okay. And it's available on every major platform including Windows, iOS, Android, and Linux. Go to https://nordvpn.com/criticalrole Go to https://nordvpn.com/criticalrole or use code criticalrole to get a two year plan plus a bonus gift with a huge discount and thanks to NordVPN for supporting our show. I apologize for not having any fun hacker shenanigans, but since this is a campaign two wrap-up, I thought if the cast wants to ask me any lore questions about the Nordiverse, feel free to hit me and I'll answer everything that's been burning-- Yeah, go ahead.

MATT: You know what, yeah, I have a question. Why did you make me wear that ridiculous helmet?

SAM: To mess up your beautiful hair.

MARISHA: Is the Nordverse continuing in campaign three, and more importantly, does Techno Spice return?

SAM: Let's just say: say you'll be there.

TALIESIN: What were the terms of my pact with Satan?

SAM: It was a freebie because Satan is a big Molly stan.

ASHLEY: What is Lie-nux exactly?

SAM: It's Linux, but no one knows what it is.

ASHLEY: Copy.

LIAM: How much fabric softener do you drink when you write these NordVPN ads?

SAM: None, but I do drink three pints of brake fluid.

LAURA: Why is BlackWillow69 the only man I've ever loved?

SAM: Come on.

TRAVIS: Ever since I ate that cake, I keep having nightmares about you laughing at me and throwing pickles at me. What was in the cake, Sam?!

SAM: It was a normal cake, but you really should check the vents of your house. I think some methane or carbon monoxide is getting in.

TRAVIS: Okay. I'll check it out. (laughing)

SAM: Matt, hack to you.

MATT: Thank you, Sam. We also have some announcements. Marisha, if you want to kick it off?

MARISHA: Yes. Yep. Not that one, that one's done now. This one. (laughter) Yeah! Tune in tomorrow, that's Friday. Tomorrow's Friday?

SAM: Yeah, it is.

MARISHA: June 18th at 7:00pm Pacific on Twitch and YouTube for our special Vox Machina versus Mighty Nein Battle Royale one-shot. (excited exclamations) This was unlocked as a Kickstarter reward for the stretch goals during the Legend of Vox Machina Kickstarter campaign. If you miss the stream, the VOD will be available YouTube-- On YouTube, not just YouTube, Sunday, June 30th-- June 20th. (laughing) I don't even know, are there 30 days in June? There are 30 days in June. And (laughs) tune in next Thursday, this is a lot, for the premiere of Exandria Unlimited. Exandria Unlimited is an eight-episode mini-campaign set in Emon nearly 30 years after the Chroma Conclave attack. It's going to be awesome.

SAM: Did you just-- did we just announce that now?

MARISHA: No.

SAM: Oh, okay, cool. (laughter)

MARISHA: It's wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey. We're so excited to welcome Aabria Iyengar-- (cheering)

MARISHA: -- to the GM seat, as well as all of our amazing ExU cast, featuring fellow veteran voice actors Aimee Carrero, Robbie Daymond, and of course, our very own Ashley Johnson, Liam O'Brien, and Matt Mercer.

MATT: I'm a player!

MARISHA: You're a player! Watch Exandria Unlimited Thursdays at 7:00pm Pacific, same bat-time, same bat-channel here on Twitch and YouTube starting next week on June 24th. VODs will be available YouTube on Mondays, So it's the same schedule that you're used to. It's the usual. And then of course the podcast version will be available one week after the episode airs. For more information on Exandria Unlimited, check it out at critrole.com.

TRAVIS: It came back and hit you!

MARISHA: Yes, it did.

LAURA: That was a lot you just had to say.

MARISHA: I have cotton mouth now.

MATT: All righty. Well, thank you, Marisha. I think with that, let's go ahead and jump into tonight's round table wrap-up of Critical Role.

(water bubbling)

(thunder rumbling)

(explosion)

♪ Role, Critical Role ♪

♪ Role, Critical Role ♪

♪ Role, Critical Role ♪

♪ Role, Critical Role ♪

♪ Role, Critical Role ♪

♪ Role, Critical Role ♪

♪ Roll the dice ♪

♪ The adventure begins ♪

♪ They were always beside you ♪

♪ Your nerdy best friends ♪

♪ And the DM to guide you ♪

♪ And they rise from the flames for the battles ahead ♪

♪ Villains beware because you're about to be dead ♪

♪ They got magic and flair ♪

♪ They got falchions and cunning ♪

♪ They don't see over there ♪

♪ There's a monster incoming ♪

♪ Inspiration is waiting, rise up, don't think twice ♪

♪ Put your fate in your hands, take a chance, ♪

♪ roll the dice ♪

♪ Roll the dice ♪

♪ Critical Role (roll the dice) ♪

♪ Critical Role (roll the dice) ♪

♪ Ooh, ahh ♪

♪ Can you answer the call ♪

♪ Diggin' deep in your soul ♪

♪ As the legend unfolds ♪

♪ Now it's your turn (your turn, your turn) ♪

♪ to roll ♪

(flames whooshing)

Part I
MARISHA: Hello! Well, how does Matt do it? Welcome back.

MATT: There we go. Got it in one.

SAM: He invented that!

MARISHA: Yes, he did. He did. He invented the welcome back. We're doing this campaign wrap up a little differently than last time. We're going to kind of do it as a round table discussion with the eight of us here. Answer each other's burning questions, answer the fans' burning questions. And yeah, check on some of the fantastic guests we've had over the course of the campaign as well. It's 141 episodes that we're covering, which is bananas.

SAM: Well, the first one was like six episodes.

MATT: Yep. You're not wrong.

MARISHA: I will be lightly steering this round table discussion, making sure we get through as much as possible and that we don't spend three and a half hours talking about Bowlgate.

TRAVIS: Although that would not be wasted.

MARISHA: No, we could talk a lot about it.

LIAM: We should spend more time on that.

MARISHA: Yeah, that's, yeah. We didn't spend enough in it.

LIAM: ♪ We've only just begun. ♪

MARISHA: Yeah. So here we are, guys. Arc one, all the way back at the circus.

MATT: Okay, so we're starting at arc one. Got it. I guess that makes sense.

MARISHA: Start from the beginning.

LIAM: Screw that! Who's on the Tal'Dorei Council?!

TRAVIS: Oh damn, he didn't waste any time.

SAM: Oh! We're in it! We're in it!

LAURA: We aren't allowed to know that still, are we?

LIAM: That's timeless!

MARISHA: Do we get to know that?

MATT: Well... The last one just died. So.

LAURA: (gasps)

SAM: The last one just--

TRAVIS: (screaming) No!

MATT: I told you.

LAURA: He said one died every time we ask the question and you just asked the question.

TRAVIS: We were not actually playing. The universe is paused.

MATT: No, there are people on the council.

LIAM: I'll kill them all right now by repeatedly asking.

SAM: You're not going to answer?

TALIESIN: Who was on the Tal'Dorei Council? (laughter)

TRAVIS: In memoriam.

LIAM: Monkey's paw.

MARISHA: Why didn't we do that? Like black and whites of the characters that have died in our campaigns.

MATT: That's actually pretty great, we'll do that in post. Yeah. Yeah, they're all dead now.

TALIESIN: Thanks for the Tal'Dorei Council.

MATT: Next question.

LIAM: Holy shit!

ASHLEY: Oh, so we can't know yet?

LAURA: We really can't know, huh?

SAM: Just give us one.

MATT: I'll think about it before the end. By the end.

LAURA and SAM: Okay, okay, okay, okay.

MARISHA: We get to ask him once in arc.

MATT: Yeah. (laughs)

SAM: Okay. Okay. Now what do we do?

TRAVIS: I want to start where we ended, which was with Mollymauk. So I want to know how much you knew about Lucien and how much of your character build did Matt take or add to it?

MARISHA: I agree.

TALIESIN: Nothing, motherfuckers! (cackles)

MARISHA: Lies! Lies!

TALIESIN: So yeah, no, I wrote nothing that was previous of waking up in the ground. Anything that would happen before waking up in the ground, I was nothing. Nothing, no name, no history, no nothing. It was completely blank. It started exactly from the moment that Molly woke up in the ground, found the carnival and took off from there. There was not a thing before it.

LIAM: Was the pitch for you, I want to make it all up as I go from a complete blank slate? because that's what it felt like in the best way.

TALIESIN: So, oh boy.

TRAVIS: What was the infamous Starbucks conversation that you guys talked about?

SAM: Starbucks? What?

TALIESIN: It was during the tattoo incident, if you all recall.

TRAVIS: Oh yeah.

TALIESIN: And we went to go get Starbucks across the street.

MARISHA: Oh wait.

ASHLEY: That far back?

MARISHA: When we were all getting our tattoos?

TALIESIN and MARISHA: Yeah.

MARISHA: Oh, wild!

SAM: We all got tattoos, by the way, audience.

ASHLEY: Wait, wait, wait.

ASHLEY: Yeah.

LIAM: Surprise. (laughter)

ASHLEY: That was far back.

TALIESIN: That was a long time ago.

TRAVIS: Yeah!

MATT: Yep.

ASHLEY: Because that was-- We hadn't even--

MARISHA: Yeah, had we started?

LAURA: That was right when we finished Vox Machina.

TALIESIN: Yeah.

MARISHA: Had we started filming Mighty Nein yet?

LIAM: I don't think so.

TALIESIN: No.

LAURA: No, no, no, no, no, no. We had just wrapped Vox Machina.

SAM: So you went to a generic coffee shop and started talking--

TRAVIS: Generic, non-branded coffee shop.

TALIESIN: This was a character I had started coming up with when Percy died. I was like, I've got a great idea for a character if Percy didn't come back, and this was the character I was going to bring in. And it was a seed that started because a friend of ours asked me about mermaids, and a friend who is obviously a mermaid fan. You know exactly who I'm talking about. And was like, "I want your take on mermaids. Go do a bunch of research on mermaids and then I want to hear you talk about mermaids for a thing I'm working on." And mermaids are fucked.

MARISHA: Yeah, they are.

TALIESIN: Holy shit! And then it crossed into my whole feelings on alignment issues, which I don't... I mean, they're great if you... I'm not dissing alignment. I hate alignment, though, personally. And I got into a discussion of I want something that breaks alignment entirely. And so I wanted to make a character that had no alignment to the point that if I picked up a weapon that used alignment, like only a chaotic evil or something, it wouldn't work. No matter what, it wouldn't work. And it eventually just came into the idea of, I want a body that the soul left and the body just kept moving. Just whatever was in there, got pulled out, went to the Raven Queen and the body just continued walking. And just no kind of the mermaid, the idea of no soul, none of that weird, no chaotic god elements or anything. Just somebody who is a total blank slate.

TRAVIS: And the tattoos.

LAURA: Oh wow.

TRAVIS: The eyes and the tattoos, they--

TALIESIN: I was coming up with shit.

MATT: Yeah, he just sent me the backstory.

LAURA: And you just took that ran?

TALIESIN: Yeah, woke up with--

MATT: He gave me a backstory. He said he woke up in the ground with nine red eye tattoos on his body.

TRAVIS: Get the fuck outta here.

MATT: And that's it.

TRAVIS: That's it?

TALIESIN: Yep.

MATT: It's a fucking gift.

SAM: But did you take the nine tattoo eyes and you're like, "That's going to be the big bad of the campaign?"

MATT: Kind of, yeah.

SAM: Whoa!

MATT: I had ideas; a lot of the themes in the campaign dealt with dreams and the power of dreams, the influence they have on people through instilling terror or inspiration, for driving people to create or become something larger or keep them tied through trauma and experience. So our dreams were a big, like, through-- If you notice throughout the campaign, I use dreams a lot for interactions with deities and gods and powerful figures. That was very much a thing that I rooted before we even started playing. And then when he gave me his backstory, I was like, "Okay, I'll find a way to work this in." And then as we began to start the campaign and go forward, I had an idea for the Somnovem and things, but tying it specifically to Molly's story happened fairly early in the campaign. The more I thought about, I was like, "That'd be kind of a fun thing to deal with."

LAURA: So if Molly hadn't died, they still would've come in the same sort of way? We would just sort of dealt with that soul in a different way?

MATT: How I initially had planned it was that Lucien, the original soul that was in Molly's body, after being shattered, found its way back, but had to go into another body, and is trying to get the original body with the nine eyes back. And so it was going to be, what was this movie? There was this old, I want to say Denzel Washington movie about this killer spirit that would transition from body to body through touch. It was a film from the late '90s or something.

SAM: Hunt for Red October.

MATT: Yeah, sure. Yeah. But anyway, I wanted Lucien to be this spirit that would jump from person to person and was a recurring antagonist, trying to find a way to kill Molly to take the body back or find a way to remove Molly from the body so he could take it back. And that was going to be a smaller ongoing villain until eventually things like Somnovem got revealed, and then Molly died. I was like, "Fuck!"

SAM: Or?

MATT: Or, yeah. And so I just let it sit simmer in the background for a long time, and it took a long time for you guys to go back and check on the body or check on the grave site. And so I was like, whenever they go back...

TRAVIS: You know, usually, they don't move. So that's why--

MARISHA: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

MATT: I know. That was what I was hoping for. So yeah, that's how that came together.

TALIESIN: I got a question just because it has been burning in my head for awhile. If anyone had ever cast Detect Undead around Molly, what would've happened?

MATT: It wouldn't have gone off.

TALIESIN: It wouldn't have gone off?

MATT: He's not technically undead.

TALIESIN: Okay, I was wondering if it was like that halfway thing that popped up.

MATT: The Hollow One?

TALIESIN: Yeah, the Hollow One.

MATT: No, the Hollow One was a halfway---

TALIESIN: Sure.

MATT: It was a halfway inspiration from Molly's story, but it was also intended to be a cool way to introduce an undead archetype for races in the game, and a pseudo-red herring for Molly's backstory. Because I knew everyone was going to be looking and poring through the book on that, and I was like, "Let me put this in there because I want to do it anyway, it's fun and because people are going to start thinking that that's where it comes from," which I think you did as well.

TALIESIN: I was like, "Is this what you did?" I mean, because yeah, we had that long conversation, and it was just. I'd love the idea of, like, there's nothing in there, that it's just total blank slate.

TRAVIS: The hollow man was Jamedi Cosko, right?

MATT: Yeah, the hollow one was Jamedi Cosko, yes.

TRAVIS: Did we ever figure out where the fuck he came from or what his deal was?

SAM: Is that this arc? We're not allowed to talk about that.

TRAVIS: Oh, sorry. I'm getting ahead of myself.

LAURA: We're not there yet.

MARISHA: It's loosey goosey. It's fine.

TRAVIS: Okay. I was just checking.

SAM: Unless you have something burning.

LIAM: I do, but go.

SAM: No, I wanted to find out more about Travis' character Fjord Stone. (laughter)

MARISHA: You know what?

SAM: Do you have a last name? Do you know more about yourself that you never told us? Where did you meet Uk'otoa? Was it a singles bar?

LAURA: Yeah, we never really found everything out about that, did we?

TRAVIS: Mm-mm. No. Talk about the fucking dream sequences. Did we ever have in the first campaign a moment where everybody left the table except for one person?

SAM: No. That was in--

TRAVIS: No.

MATT: No, we had that with you and the Raven Queen in Campaign One.

TRAVIS: Oh, that's true. We did. Okay.

MATT: That was the first time it had happened.

TRAVIS: I was really glad that that happened to Liam before. Did not like being the first.

LIAM: Those gods.

TRAVIS: He-- yeah. There-- He has-- I have an idea of the two races that make up Fjord's half-orc lineage.

SAM: Which were?

LAURA: You're not going to say?

TRAVIS: I'm not going to say.

SAM: But this is where we spill the tea.

TRAVIS: Yeah. I don't know. I don't know who they are. I don't know if mom or dad was one or the other or where they went or what happened or what those circumstances were. I kind of left that up to Matt. And I imagine at some point, I don't know when, I'll try and go back and right the wrongs of that orphanage because there was a shit criminal underbelly at the orphanage. They were using the orphans to make goods and using orphan labor and all this stuff. And you know, there were the Myriad and the Clovis Concord. And it could have been any one of those seedy underbellies, but probably go back and purge that at some point.

MATT: I would say, yeah. Would Fjord go back and--

TRAVIS: Oh yeah.

MATT: Clean that up?

TRAVIS: Oh yeah.

MATT: I love it. I love it.

TRAVIS: We're going to scrub all that squeaky clean, but I actually don't know how the pact happened. I left that up to him as well.

MATT: Well, the name, Stone, Fjord Stone, you just threw in your backstory and forgot about it for the entire game.

TRAVIS: I did. The very first backstory I gave you and then I'd never said it.

MATT: Yep. (laughs) So there was no real significance. Everyone tied it with like, "Oh, there's the Clay and the Stone family. Is he tied?" I was like, "Nah!"

TRAVIS: Yeah, I remember introducing myself. I was like, what's a name that was given to him at the orphanage? And they were usually, they'd give shit names. And I was like, "Well, I just won't say it. It's not mine. I don't claim any ownership to it." I just fucking forgot. (laughs)

MARISHA: Amazing.

SAM: Love it.

TRAVIS: I remember looking at Taliesin and being like, I mean, that can't just be a coincidence. He's like, "Nothing is a coincidence."

TALIESIN: Everything is a coincidence.

MATT: If this show and a lot of the things that happened are any sign, everything's a coincidence.

LIAM: Nein!

SAM: Nein!

MATT: For Fjord and his pact, it was a simple, and I go into it, I guess later with arcs and stuff like that as we go, but essentially, Vandran had entirely cut himself off from Uk'otoa. It was the final vestiges of that relationship. And then when the ship went down and Vandran was set to drown, essentially, although he survived, that was the final cutoff. The Sword of Fathoms fell into the ocean to be lost forever. And Uk'otoa went like, "Fine. You, are we-- Do we have a deal?" And in that floundering moment of panic and self-preservation, subconsciously, Fjord agreed to something and couldn't remember. And that's when he woke up on the shore with the Sword of Fathoms.

TRAVIS: Makes sense to me. I don't know if Sabian, the guy that set off the explosion on the ship was working for Uk'otoa or one of the pirating factions or whatever. So let's figure that out, too.

MARISHA: And we'll figure that out maybe... with a fan question!

ALL: Whoa!

MARISHA: We probably won't. But! To decide who's going to ask a fan question, I think we should roll for it.

LAURA: Ooh!

TALIESIN: I'm into it.

MARISHA: Why not gamify it?

TRAVIS: Oh, like with our dice?

MARISHA: Yeah.

LAURA: With our dice.

MARISHA: Who rolls the highest gets to ask a fan question.

SAM: Not me. I rolled four.

ASHLEY: I just rolled a natural 20. (cheering)

MATT: There you go.

ASHLEY: Didn't roll many of those during the campaign. (laughter)

MARISHA: Oh my god.

MATT: Been saving them for the end.

ASHLEY: Thanks for coming in!

MARISHA: When it mattered.

TRAVIS: Come on!

ASHLEY: All right, let's see here.

MARISHA: Yeah.

ASHLEY: Oh my god. I mean, I think this is a question for Matt.

MATT: Okay. Sure.

ASHLEY: By, or no, from @PryingBlackbird. "Who was the skeleton in the basement of the Leaky Tap, and was Claudia Sheed truly who she said she was?"

MARISHA: Yes.

MATT: Okay. Okay.

TRAVIS: Well, this is some old...

MARISHA: Yes.

SAM: I don't know who Claudia Sheed is.

MATT: I'm trying to remember. So, when you're staying at--

LAURA: She was the one that I was like, "Are you having sex?"

MATT: Yeah, the very, very beginning.

SAM: Oh, yeah.

LIAM: Caleb ended up with Nott underneath and did a whole little, "Blah, blah, blah. I'm going crazy and talking to you," and that body belonged to somebody.

TRAVIS: That's where the shackles were, right?

LAURA: Yes.

SAM: Manacles.

TALIESIN: Shackle #1.

MATT: I'm trying to remember. You guys-- I feel like I remember you guys knew that Claudia was using illusion magic, correct?

TRAVIS: Yes.

MARISHA: No. Yes. I think we did.

MATT: It's been three years, but yeah. Actually, Claudia, who may have had a different name, if I remember my old notes, which I don't, was from the Dynasty or at least originated from the Dynasty. Was a dark elf. And was a refugee from some of the conflicts of the Dynasty, and came here seeking refuge underneath the Leaky Tap. And the previous owner, who I can't remember his name, basically was like, "I'll take care of you." He was a terrible person. And basically kept her in indentured servitude. And was just an abusive owner of this inn. And then eventually she got fed up with it, killed him, that body belonged to him, hid it, and then through The Gentleman, managed to get forged documents that gave her ownership over the inn. And so now she became--

LAURA: Tight!

MATT: She basically took it over from the guy that was an asshole.

SAM: Nice.

LAURA: Good for her.

MATT: Which was a thread that might've come up, but you guys had stuff to do. I'm glad we got to talk about it now.

TRAVIS: Yeah, we were convinced that was some end-game shit. We were like, "Dead skeleton in the basement." (laughter)

LIAM: Before we move on from here, I have an arc one question as well. Up until like the second to last episode, I was tempted at some point to, in a quiet moment, to take out the sending stone that I carried for almost the entire campaign, that we got in our heist job shit.

MARISHA: Oh!

LIAM: Right around the time when Fjord held the sword to Caleb's throat, in the other house, we found a sending stone.

SAM: But just one.

LIAM: Just one.

SAM: Yeah.

LIAM: Who did that go to?

MARISHA: Oh, yeah.

LIAM: Almost talked into it 10 times over the course of the entire campaign and never did because I'd get sidetracked.

MATT: No, no. Fair enough. I'm trying to remember who--

TRAVIS: That was when we were trying to set up the-- Marius LePual?

LIAM: The judge.

MATT: Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah.

LIAM: It was in a merchant's home.

MARISHA: Yes.

MATT: Correct. Yeah. That was at--

TRAVIS: Marius LePual?

MATT: The brain is falling apart now at this point. No, no, no, not Marius.

LIAM: Marius LePual is sailor time.

MATT: Sutan.

MARISHA: The sailor guy.

TRAVIS: Oh, that's right.

MATT: No, it was Sutan.

MARISHA and LIAM: Lord Sutan.

MATT: Exactly.

MARISHA: That's right.

MATT: Who had ties to campaign one. At least the family line did.

MARISHA: Wait, what?

SAM: Did we know that?

TALIESIN: We did.

MARISHA: Do we know that?

TRAVIS: Yes. We've heard it once before.

MATT: Let me go through my notes here and find where-- I know I can find it. Some of these things are-- I haven't thought of in a long time.

SAM: A lot of this episode is people poorly remembering things.

MATT: Yep! (laughter)

LAURA: If anyone was trying to talk into the sending stone, would you have to go through all your notes or would you have, in-game, gone, "This is taking too long. I'll just come up with something."

MATT: I would have gone to break and then-- (laughter) And then come back. I want to say--

TALIESIN: Top of the episode.

TRAVIS: We talked about this because they had something commissioned. Oh, no. He also had the-- We bought the-- The ring of fire resistance was supposed to be for Lord Sutan, and then we bought it because he never came to pick it up because he got arrested.

MARISHA: Because he's super in jail. Yes.

TRAVIS: Because he's super--

LIAM: Super in jail.

MARISHA: Super in jail. Big time in jail.

TALIESIN: Should've baked it into a cake.

SAM: While Matt looks it up, should we do another fan question?

MATT: Yeah, so sorry. So sorry.

MARISHA: Yeah.

MATT: I'm almost there. I'm going through the old notes.

MARISHA: While Matt--

LAURA: We have questions for each other.

MARISHA: -- searches for three years, let's roll. Let's roll. Fan question.

TRAVIS: Oh yeah, roll, roll.

LAURA: Okay, okay, okay.

MARISHA: Super not me.

TRAVIS: 11.

SAM: Seven.

LIAM: Eight.

LAURA: Five.

TALIESIN: No, six.

ASHLEY: 13.

TRAVIS: You can't ask yourself a question. Sam, you got it.

SAM: No, you had an 11.

TRAVIS: You did too.

SAM: I had a seven.

TRAVIS: Oh, fuck! I was all comfortable. Ashley!

MATT: That's what it was. Continue. I'll tell you afterward.

ASHLEY: You found out?

MATT: I did.

TALIESIN: Too late, though.

MARISHA: After this question.

SAM and TRAVIS: After this question. @AlainaDanielle asks: What do you envision Yasha was doing in her times away from the Nein that weren't explained in the show?

ASHLEY: Oh, well, you know. I think--

SAM: Got to be something important. You kept leaving.

ASHLEY: Oh, yeah. It was certainly something.

TALIESIN: Even in the carnival. You would wander off from the carnival.

ASHLEY: Yeah. I think-- (laughter)

TALIESIN: Wing it.

ASHLEY: Let me wing it.

SAM: Did you check your notes?

ASHLEY: Yeah. Let me check my notes, actually, because each time was for a really, really good reason.

MATT: Oh, I set a terrible precedent. I've already ruined it.

MARISHA: We ask two questions and then answer two questions.

ASHLEY: I mean, I think keeping it in the story, I think that, you know, she went away because she was uncomfortable getting close to people and trying to deal with all of that. And I think would do little odd jobs here and there. I think she would visit brothels if she was lonely.

TRAVIS: Oh, shit!

ASHLEY: That's what was going around in my head in case it ever came up. But yeah, super, super important stuff that she kept having to leave for.

SAM: It was more like a mental health break than a mission that was calling her.

ASHLEY: I think so. And I think also it was just that every time Yasha would get in the group, there would be something like killing Beau, or something would always come up. And I think she was, for a really long time, in this shame spiral that finally she started to get out of because of the love and friendship of the group.

MARISHA: To be fair, we did only bring sadness and destruction for the first couple-- If you think of it from Yasha's point of view, we rolled in your life and then got the circus arrested.

LIAM: Got your buddy murdered.

MARISHA: Got your buddy murdered.

ASHLEY: Oh yeah.

MARISHA: Got you kidnapped by a slave trader.

ASHLEY: Yeah. That was a rough go.

MARISHA: (laughs) You had a rough time.

TALIESIN: I'd ignore my texts too, I suppose. (laughter)

LIAM: But she wasn't flying off to Tal'Dorei to join up with an acting troupe?

ASHLEY: No. I think it was all very private. And I think not getting close to people, just spending time alone, and yeah. I think that's where she was at, at least in the beginning. But that changed.

SAM: It did.

MARISHA: When we stopped killing your friends or getting them arrested.

TALIESIN: You ran out of friends to kill.

MARISHA: To kill? Yes. (laughter) Process of elimination, yeah.

MATT: That seems about right.

LIAM: So back to the sending stone.

MATT: To the sending stone, the other side-- My brain was like, it's one of three people that I got different things jumbled up. It was Ionos Jagentoth of the Jagentoth house of Shadycreek. Lord Sutan had deals with the Jagentoths. A lot of this campaign was throwing out a lot of threads and seeing which ones you guys--

TRAVIS: Jumped at?

MATT: Jumped at and went for and that would become the story. And so one of those was, if that's sending stone began to happen, it would be a conversation with Ionos Jagentoth and it would have led to probably a more Shadycreek Run-centric story and narrative there, and breaking apart that story thread element.

SAM: The Jagentoths were enemies of The Gentleman?

MARISHA: The Jagentoths were who employed--

MATT and MARISHA: The Iron Shepherds.

LAURA: So they were bad people.

MATT: Yeah.

MARISHA: And the Iron Shepherds were fucking with the trade route, I am getting this right, right? The trade route that The Gentleman ran. So The Gentleman was not really-- They weren't rivals, but The Gentleman was like, "Fuck these guys."

MATT: Yeah.

MARISHA: Yeah.

SAM: Cool.

TRAVIS: What a last name. Jagentoths.

LIAM: You fuck with the Jagentoths? (laughter)

LIAM: Before we get too far in, I also want to ask my best buddy Sam about the process of me just going, "You know what'd be cool. would be like a goblin and a rogue." It wasn't an order, it was just an idea.

TRAVIS: "It wasn't an order." (laughs)

LIAM: Campaign three is an order. I instructed him what to do, but the second one wasn't. But how did you arrive at what you created and did you start with Veth Brenatto or Nott the Brave?

SAM: I started with a V name because in campaign one, I had said, "Wouldn't it be funny if in campaign two I was called Vix?" as a joke. So for campaign two, I was like, "Okay, I'm going to be Vix." Just to fuck with Liam and Laura.

MATT: You're the worst.

SAM: But I couldn't come up with a good anagram with that. So I was like, "All right, at least I'll stick with the V." And so I came up with a V name and then, I don't know. I think I found Brave in there and I came up with Veth first and then sort of retrofitted it to be Nott the Brave. But no, my only motivating factor in creating Nott the Brave was, I know I was going to be a rogue like you had just done. You had done such a brilliant rogue and I don't know anything about D&D, but it seemed pretty archetypal in that you were a bad-ass and you were an assassin and so cool and fast and you dealt all this damage and you were so awesome. And I was like, I can't do that because first of all, I won't be as good as you were, but also you just did that. So I wanted it to be the opposite, like a nervous rogue or a scaredy-cat rogue or something, anything else. So I just was like, "Okay, I'll be a neurotic, jittery rogue." That'll be my thing. And then I was like, "Okay, why is she jittery?" And then I was like, "Oh, maybe she doesn't feel comfortable in her skin." And then I was like, "Okay, maybe it's not her skin. Maybe that's why." And then I was like, "How would she deal with that?" She would get drunk all the time. And so that's how I came about it, retrofitting it for just to be anything but Vax, basically.

LIAM: On a related note, the later game where you took on the fake name Bren, I thought I was losing my mind on camera and my brain was like, "Did Mercer tell him all my shit?"

MATT: I was like, "What?"

LIAM: "Why does he know that name?"

MATT: Where is he getting this?

LIAM: "What the fuck is going on?"

TRAVIS: Of all the fake names to take on, Bren?

SAM: I used several fake names. I used Veth, which you guys hadn't heard before. And then the next time I used a fake name, I used Bren. And then the next time I used a fake name I used Atto, Veth Brenatto.

LAURA: Oh.

MARISHA: Oh, you dick! I hate how smart you are. It pisses me off.

MATT: You're the worst.

SAM: But yeah, but then I remember, I think I saw a tweet about it, like, "What was going through Liam's head?" Because your face went crazy. In that moment you were like, (sirens blaring).

LIAM: I was also thinking of our audience too.

SAM: But I couldn't figure out why you were doing that.

LIAM: I was thinking of our audience, however X number of episodes later when they would find out Caleb's real name, looking back at this moment. So I was going crazy and going, "I'll see you in 60 episodes, guys." (laughter)

MARISHA: You did it with me too at one point, where you were making "Ain't no slow-regard" jokes. And you said, "Henry Thoreau-regard."

SAM: Yeah, and that's your brother's name.

MARISHA: My dad's name is Thoreau.

SAM: Oh, dad's name.

MARISHA: Yeah. And fully because of the game that you were playing, I was like, "He's kind of a narcissist. What rhymes with Beauregard? Thoreau? Yeah, I'll name him after Thoreau."

SAM: Nice.

MARISHA: And Thoreau was also kind of a narcissist, so it all works.

MATT: So what we're saying is you're a moderate medium and/or a clairvoyant, so well done.

SAM: There's no coincidences in our game. It's all kismet.

MATT: There you go. I like that.

TRAVIS: I have one for Matt.

MATT: Yeah?

SAM: That you just came up with?

TRAVIS: Yep. Totally. (laughter)

TRAVIS: I like this one. I see it and I'm taking it. So when when we chose crime instead of the other thing--

MARISHA: Yeah, this is a good one.

TRAVIS: What would have happened if we had chosen to become the Lawmaster's mercenaries rather than The Gentleman's offer of crime?

MATT: Oh, in Zadash.

LAURA: Like a whole other campaign.

TRAVIS: Yeah, because that was the big intersection.

MATT: Yeah, that was a huge diversion. So you guys had built up this relationship a little bit with the Lawmaster, a lot with the new High-Richter. And there was an option here where you could have pursued a very strong Empire-based story and basically becoming the classic mercenaries for hire by the better folk of the corrupt Empire. And that narrative would have brought you guys probably deeper into Rexxentrum a lot earlier and other parts of the Empire and rooting out corrupt elements, speeding to get involved with the Cerberus Assembly a lot earlier.

TRAVIS: Ooh, boy.

MATT: And I was planning for that to intersect with you guys beginning to work with the Augen Trust, which is essentially the secret spy network of the Empire, who worked for the crown but also works on their own at the crown, and butts heads with the Cobalt Soul, but also occasionally they work together on things.

MARISHA: Yeah, that would have been fascinating.

MATT: And the Augen Trust-- This is actually kind of funny, I get to say it. The leader of it, Schreiber, who's in the campaign guide was supposed to be Matt Colville whenever you guys got to the Augen Trust. He was going to drive up and basically guest NPC the head of the Augen Trust--

LAURA: And we just never got to it.

MATT: -- to hire you guys on. And we had lunch talking about it. We were throwing emails back and forth. He did this awesome write-up of the people that work below him. And then you guys instead went to Xhorhas.

TRAVIS: (laughs) Crime! See ya, Colville!

MARISHA: Oh no!

MATT: I texted Colville, I was like, "So, things went a little differently. So when they come back to it, whenever they get back in the Empire-- no? No, they've gone full Dynasty now. So, sorry, buddy." He's like, "That's how it goes." I had him on speed dial for that and just had to tell him, "I don't think it's happening, man."

TALIESIN: I just remembered and I have to hit this in. What the fuck was up with Gustav? I just have to know. I just have to know what the fuck-- What the fuck was up with Gustav?

TRAVIS: Oh god. Yeah.

MATT: Okay. So Gustav, he was the one who made the original deal with Kylre, the devil toad. And it wasn't because he was like, "I want to work with a demon," but because when he encountered this thing, they had a discussion and like devils do, like certain fiends do. And essentially Kylre said, "I can make your carnival something great if you can bring me people to feed."

TALIESIN: Ooh.

LAURA: Oh!

MATT: And at the time, the carnival was not doing well. And Gustav was like, "I can't give you people. I can give you those that will likely not be missed," from his perspective or those that are already on their way out. So the infirmed or the old, which is why if you look at all the notices, it says, these people are not allowed because he wanted to make sure that nobody accidentally died during a performance. He would just bring them to him to feed him as part of this deal they made. And then he lost control and then Kylre caused all this horror. And everything went down and essentially Gustav just felt genuinely guilty. He had locked himself into something at the time, not really thinking it through, and it went on so long and so many people, very much like Seymour from Little Shop of Horrors, yeah. It just got too much for him. And then when you guys managed to take care of Kylre and free the carnival from this, he was like, "I can't go forward with this guilt unless I do my time." And so you guys are like, "We can get you out. You're free." He's like, "Nope, this is where I belong. Everyone else in the carnival's free to choose their paths. And this is where I'll stay." So that was what was going on with Gustav. He was just wracked with guilt for making a terrible decision that led to many people dying.

TALIESIN: Yeah. Okay. Fair.

TRAVIS: We tried to save his ass for forever. We're like, "We'll break him out. We're going to get the money."

MARISHA: Yeah, and he's like, "I'm done."

TRAVIS: Oh, he's a shitty person.

MATT: Yeah, he just really fucked up.

TALIESIN: Definitely fucked up.

MARISHA: Well, I think that is all the time we have for arc one, you guys. But we are going to take it to everyone's favorite cabbage enthusiast, Brian W. Foster, for an interview with everyone's favorite Estelle Getty stan, Khary Payton. Roll that beautiful cabbage footage!

BRIAN: All right, I'm here with fan and cast favorite, Khary Payton, who is zooming in from the lovely undisclosed location where he is-- where he is being kept safe from the undead.

KHARY: Yeah, yeah, we're sort of out in the middle of nowhere, which is actually kind of beautiful.

BRIAN: It looks insanely gorgeous, man, peaceful.

KHARY: Yeah, exactly, exactly, I can't complain.

BRIAN: Just a few questions about your time on Critical Role Campaign 2. Want to start with asking you what the inspiration was behind Shakäste?

KHARY: Oh man, well, I always loved Shaka Zulu. He was this great warrior king, African warrior king, I always loved the name Shaka, and so I thought it can't just be Shaka, though, you got to give it a little spice, got to give it a little something. Sha, sha something, Shaka, Shaka, Shaka, Shakäste. I don't know, it just sounded good when it came out of my mouth, you know.

BRIAN: Yeah.

LIAM: Everything does.

MARISHA: Yeah, it does.

BRIAN: Uh-huh.

KHARY: And so that's kind of how I came up with the name, and-- As far as the character was concerned, I wanted him to be blind and I wanted him to see through the eyes of a bird, and I thought that a hummingbird would be perfect. and I thought that a hummingbird would be perfect. There's so many in southern California. Wherever I lived, there always seemed to be hummingbirds that would fly in and out of your life. The last thing that I wanted from Shakäste is that I wanted him to sound like Bootsy Collins.

BRIAN: Yeah, yeah.

KHARY: And so those were the three things that kind of pulled it together for me. And with that voice, it just kind of, the characterization just comes right out of Bootsy.

BRIAN: Yeah, exactly. I love it. You were able to be on a few episodes of the show and even one of the live shows that we did.

KHARY: Yeah, I got to do the live show. I was so excited to be free. I jumped on a plane. I was like, "Hi, I'm there, just tell me when and where," and it was awesome.

BRIAN: We kept you a surprise for a couple of days, and then I remember being upstairs at the live show and when Matt described the bird flying around, a lot of people in the crowd, they knew, they knew you were coming out. At that moment they were like (gasps). Yeah, it was so great, it was so great.

KHARY: I could feel it like a hurricane. I could feel it like a gale force wind on my face.

BRIAN: Is there anything about Shakäste that didn't get revealed during your time on the show that you want either the Critters and/or the cast to know about him?

KHARY: I think, oddly enough, for such a mysterious character, I think that you actually got to know who he really was, I think that you actually got to know who he really was, in those moments, maybe not concrete bits and pieces about where he was from and how he got there, but the essence of Shakäste. And the truth is is that you already noticed without me saying, but he's a lover not a fighter.

MATT: (laughs) BRIAN: Yeah, Nefertiti.

MATT: Bless him.

KHARY: Yeah! (laughs)

BRIAN: What do you think Shakäste's up to now? And what do you think his legacy is? Or what would you want his legacy to be, for him to be known for? And what do you think he's up to now?

KHARY: I always would go to this, I laid up this Charlie Rose interview with Deepak Chopra, and Charlie asked Deepak Chopra, he was like, "What do you want to be remembered for?" And he said, "Oh, I don't need to be remembered." And I just thought that that was, I thought that that was some next level shit. You know what I mean? But I feel like Shakäste, that's the way Shakäste lives his life, you know?

BRIAN: Yeah.

KHARY: They're like, "Thank you," they're like, "We appreciate it," and he says, (shushing), and he disappears into the mist, and giggles about it, you know.

BRIAN: Yeah, I love that, I love that, man. Thank you so much for catching up with us and talking about Shakäste. Such a good time having him on the show and having you there, and I know that the cast loved it.

KHARY: Yeah, he's absolutely one of my favorite things that I have ever been a part of creating.

MARISHA: Aw!

KHARY: He will always hold an incredibly special place in my heart.

KHARY: He will always hold an incredibly special place in my heart. And I love that I made him an older fellow, because I feel like one day, I'm going to have glassy eyes and a big white afro and I'm gonna be floating over somebody somewhere.

BRIAN: Yeah, you are. That's amazing. Thank you, man, appreciate it.

KHARY: Thank you, dude.

MARISHA: Thank you so much, Khary and Brian. I miss Khary. It's been awhile.

ALL: ♪ It's been awhile ♪

ASHLEY: Oh no.

MARISHA: All right, y'all. Arc Two: The Bad Guys. This was when shit started getting real.

TRAVIS: Started getting real.

MARISHA: I know.

LAURA: This is the arc that we disappeared.

MARISHA: Yeah.

LAURA: (fake sobbing)

TRAVIS: Way to go, Laura.

LAURA: Yeah, you too, baby. It wasn't just me.

LIAM: Where did you get that baby? (laughter)

LAURA: Hmm.

MARISHA: You said you have a Kiri question?

LAURA: I did, I had a Kiri question, but I don't know if it's this arc. But here's the thing. After we left and then I was messaging Kiri, one of the times that we were talking to her, she said that she had built something in Hupperdook and I just want to know what it was that she built.

MARISHA: That's right.

MATT: Sure.

TRAVIS: Meat grinder.

MATT: That's a perfect example of one of the many things that wasn't planned and then it came out and then in my head, I was like, "Well, I got to figure out what that means."

LAURA: Yeah.

MATT: That happens a lot.

LAURA: We never got back to Hupperdook to figure it out.

MATT: No, no, you didn't. But I was like, "What--" I was trying to think because it's Kiri, One of the things she would have heard based on where she was that she would say? "I've built something." because she'd been around Tinkertop, the tinkerer over there and I was like, "She'd say that. Oh god, what did she build?" And then I thought about it and I was like, "Honestly? It's a music box," because that's what she was gifted when you guys left and so she probably made her own music box.

LAURA: Here I was thinking she made some giant weapon of destruction and she made a music box.

TRAVIS: That kills people.

LAURA: Obviously, it plays the music and then when it stops, it shoots a dagger out.

MATT: Yeah. (impacts)

TRAVIS: (gurgling)

MATT: (laughs)

SAM: It plays "Mambo No. 5."

TALIESIN: Could learn a song to sing while she slowly stabbed them.

MATT: Exactly, yep.

TRAVIS: ♪ Boom chicka, boom chicka ♪ (laughter)

TRAVIS: (screaming)

LAURA: That's all, that was my question. I needed to ask it.

MATT: It's a good question.

MARISHA: Well, how about this? Let's start off with a fan question for this one.

MATT: Sure, yeah.

TRAVIS: Are we rolling?

MARISHA: Let's roll.

LAURA: We're rolling.

MATT: Natural 20.

ALL: Ooh.

LAURA: Damn, I got a 19. I thought I was going to win that one.

MATT: Uh-uh.

MARISHA: Ooh.

SAM: Take it, Matt.

MARISHA: High roll, take it.

MATT: All righty. Oh, interesting, let's go ahead and do this one.

SAM: He's going to ask himself a question, isn't he?

MATT: "Matt--" yes.

MARISHA: Yes!

MATT: No. Laura and Travis. @Levensom on Instagram writes, "Travis and Laura welcomed their son during the early part of Campaign Two. Did their journey as parents influence how they approached their characters and relationships? Jester specifically saw a massive shift in her relationship with her mother while Fjord changed patrons from the evil Uk'otoa to the more nurturing Wild Mother."

SAM: (whispering) Uk'otoa.

LAURA: Oh man. I don't know if I even registered that it changed my relationship after Ronin was born. But I do know that I was pregnant with Ronin at the tail end of Vox Machina Campaign.

MARISHA: Yeah.

LAURA: So I was thinking about that when I was creating Jester's full backstory. So I'm sure that influenced why she had such a tight relationship with her mother and everything, yeah. I don't even think I realized that until just now.

TRAVIS: Yeah, we did Grog's One-Shot and the two people that everybody went into the tavern the first time we met, there was a green half-orc gentleman and a blue tiefling.

LAURA: And they had a baby, and you were trying to kill the baby!

LIAM: I'm sorry I didn't get there. (laughter)

SAM: Is that why Jester didn't know who the dad was? (laughter)

MARISHA: Oh!

LAURA: That's why Jester's father was really powerful.

SAM: Ah yes, good answer.

LAURA: Thank you.

SAM: Good answer.

TRAVIS: I don't know if it affected-- Every parent knows this, there's the time before you had a kid and afterwards, and all of the moments that you see in movies and TV shows and stuff where a kid is part of the stakes and the drama, it's so much different after you have a parent. I remember we saw Endgame after Ronin was born and I was like--

LAURA: You lost your shit.

TRAVIS: -- audibly weeping at the "I love you 3000." I was like (sobbing). And I think just looking back at the backstory and seeing how much the idea of parents or somebody that didn't love him enough to keep him around or whatever the circumstances were. Maybe it wasn't even a choice and they were just both killed. I think it just deepened it a little bit. But with the Wild Mother, it wasn't so much about looking for a parent. He was looking for those father figures in the game, which I could certainly identify with in my life. The people that you look and you're like, "Okay, who do I want to fill those positions for me as I'm learning about becoming a man and a friend and all those things?" And so it was interesting just moving around from Vandran to Caduceus to all these different people that could teach him something. Because you'll always have to be learning.

MATT: That's awesome.

TRAVIS: Yeah.

MATT: Yeah, I like it. Good answers! (laughter)

LIAM: It was scary when they were gone.

MARISHA: Oh, for sure.

LIAM: Didn't like it.

TRAVIS: We didn't like it at all.

LAURA: No.

MARISHA: Well, of course.

LAURA: It was real hard.

MARISHA: Yeah.

TRAVIS: I don't know if we've talked about it, I think we talked about it on Talks a little bit. We were sitting at home with a brand new baby and you guys are taking on Lorenzo and it starts trending downwards and we're like, "Man, this is crazy to be here watching this unfold live. This is a weird feeling. Oh, this is going real fucking south. Do we text them, do we text them?" And it was just (swooshes). We were like, "Well, that happened." (laughter)

LAURA: Just staring at the screen like, "What do we do?"

TRAVIS: Are we responsible for Molly's death?

SAM: Did you blame us? Were you like, "God, they're so stupid?"

LAURA: Yeah, totally.

TRAVIS: Blamed Taliesin.

TALIESIN: Fair.

LAURA: We were like, "Run away! Run away!"

TALIESIN: Very fair.

MARISHA: Was he born on a Thursday? Was he born that day?

TRAVIS: No--

LAURA: Oh, he was born on a Thursday.

TRAVIS: He was.

SAM: But not that day.

TRAVIS: You went into labor on Tuesday and he was born on Thursday.

LAURA: Yeah, but it wasn't that Thursday. It was the Thursday after.

MARISHA: That's right, that's right. Because we weren't anticipating you guys being gone for that Thursday. You went into labor earlier.

TRAVIS: It was the fight against the robo-jailer in Hupperdook was the one.

LIAM: Yeah, the ball.

MARISHA: That's right.

TRAVIS: The ball, yeah.

MARISHA: And you guys were being like-- I think we were still puppeting you guys and then you guys got kidnapped.

LAURA: It happened a lot earlier than expected.

MARISHA: Yeah.

TRAVIS: I was like "Cool! Cool, we'll handle it." I had a sunset prepared!

LAURA: Yeah.

TRAVIS: Didn't make it, didn't make it. Came early.

MATT: Oh well. Well thank you, good question.

MARISHA: And yeah, were you in New York, or? I feel like the time difference was wonky and you woke up to panic or something?

ASHLEY: Yes, I feel like there was something where there were lots of texts. (laughter)

ASHLEY: More than usual, where it's like you look at our thread and it's 127 texts, and I'm like, "Something bad happened." (laughter)

MATT: Oh no.

ASHLEY: Yeah.

TALIESIN: No joke is that funny.

SAM: Did you get one text from Ashly Burch saying, "I got you back?" (laughter)

SAM: "My revenge was well-planned."

ASHLEY: I did not.

TRAVIS: Was Lorenzo supposed to die in that fight or was he supposed to be a longer--?

SAM: He wasn't supposed to.

MATT: Yeah. I had thought that if he could escape, he was-- Once again, tying into more of the Jagentoth narrative. If he had managed to escape and you guys were tied a little more into the Shadycreek Run elements there, he would have been a recurring vengeful creature and now knowing the faces of the individuals that essentially ruined a very profitable portion of the Jagentoth's business structure, then they would begin seeking you down and you had now made enemies of another criminal syndicate while working for a criminal syndicate. It would have been its own unique narrative path but then you managed to wipe him and everybody else in that stronghold out. So there was nobody left to really report back about who had done it. Just them to pick up the pieces.

LAURA: They just disappeared.

MATT: Yeah, and you guys just vanished into the night. So you nipped that thread in the moment.

LIAM: Can I just jump on a fan question?

MARISHA: Sure.

LIAM: That I really want to know?

MARISHA: Yeah.

LIAM: Alex--

TRAVIS: You got to roll for it, though.

LIAM: That's 14.

MARISHA: You're the highest out of everyone that rolled.

MATT: Well done.

LIAM: @AlexLamoroVA asks, "The Mighty Nein encountered a mosaic relief of three creatures."

LAURA: Yes!

SAM: Huge thing.

LIAM: "Each with three eyes, totaling nine eyes. These being Uk'otoa, the Leviathan Lord; Desirat, the Twilight Phoenix--" (whispering) Phoenix! and Quajath, the Undermaw." (deep voice) Undermaw! Did these have anything to do with the supposed nine eye prophecy visions that the Nein had or was it simply coincidence?" And then I'm going to tag on my B-question, was there any path in this game where we would have had to face Uk'otoa?

MARISHA: Yeah.

ALL: (whispering) Uk'otoa.

MATT: Okay, there's a lot in that one.

LAURA: That was a lot of questions.

SAM: Hey, don't blame Liam, blame @AlexLamoroVA.

TRAVIS: Thanks a lot, Alex!

MATT: Ugh! So the nine eyes between those three entities was intentionally a red herring that early in the story, putting some parallels in there because I like putting separate parallels that confuse things a bit until they begin to clarify. So you namely, because you picked up on it.

TALIESIN: Oh yeah.

MATT: But there was a possibility if Uk'otoa had been released that then you had-- still bound to a sea entity and one of its champions meant that you were now an indentured herald, essentially, to start helping him expand his domain and possibly help the other two entities that he's pacted with between these three and helping them be released as well.

LIAM: Oh, they're buddies?

TRAVIS: Should've done that. We fucked it up.

LAURA: Can I ask a side question, a part B to Liam's-- a part C to Liam's B?

TRAVIS: I don't think he was even finished the A and the B.

LAURA: I know, but this is also part of that one. Were the three-- the song in the carnival that they were singing, was it talking about those three creatures?

MATT: Yes, it was, yeah. Those were all performances that essentially were early layering in the mythology of those three entities. Because I had actually written those three entities before I had decided on the Somnovem having Nine Eyes. Once again, that inspiration came from Molly's backstory coming in. So I'd already established their mythology and then the Somnovem thing came in and then that became nine eyes, I was like "Okay, we have nine eyes here and three creatures, I can go ahead and put against all three of them nine eyes and just make it a weird parallel." Yeah, that kind of a vibe. So it was meant to throw off the scent a little bit, but also just make things seem maybe more connected and when you chose a specific path, maybe that would be unveiled and who knows? Maybe if I'd gotten inspired down the road, I could connect them all, but it didn't seem to. Nothing's set in stone when you're DMing. For those who know. If you DM, if players do something unexpected or something in the narrative comes up that's much cooler than what you had planned, then you're like "Yes, that is now the story." So I could very well have tied that all together, but there wasn't much. Uk'otoa never got released--

SAM and LAURA: (whispering) Uk'otoa.

MATT: -- and there wasn't-- every time. There wasn't much of a heavy pursuit for the other creatures other than just seeing the reliefs. So it wasn't a necessary thing to introduce.

TRAVIS: I seriously thought about it, but the vomiting seawater made it impossible. If I could have kept it tucked under, I would have let that bitch out.

SAM: You should've!

MARISHA: Really?

TALIESIN: I was really shocked you didn't, because knowing you.

LIAM: I was ready for it.

MARISHA: Yeah.

TRAVIS: I'd wake up puking water and be like, "Nothing's going wrong!" (retching) "Everything's fine!"

LIAM: I know it only firms up once you make it real and we didn't get there, but spitball it in your mind, tarrasque is here, Uk'otoa is here, here, here?

MATT: Uk'otoa is about on par, if a little under, comparatively.

TRAVIS: With a tarrasque?

MATT: Yeah. He's a lesser idol. He's essentially around the demigod level.

MARISHA: More than the kraken?

LAURA: Wait, wait, wait.

MATT: Probably equal to or a little higher than a kraken. Stronger than a kraken.

LAURA: Stronger than Artie?

MATT: On par in some ways, if they were to go toe-to-toe.

LAURA: Dang! Can you imagine if we got an Artie fighting on our side in that final boss fight? Mother bitch.

LIAM: He's lazy.

LAURA: Damn you, Divine Intervention.

MATT: He's distracted. He's got a lot going on.

LAURA: He's distracted.

MARISHA: Too many mai tais.

MATT: It's a balance standpoint, too. There's only a certain point where I'm like-- Yeah, if a cleric can just call their patron in to fight alongside them, the one who gives them all their power.

LAURA: Divine Intervention though would've helped.

MATT: Well, Divine Intervention, that's a circumstance where you can give a momentary reprieve to that balance rule.

TRAVIS: That never works.

SAM: Dun dun dun.

MATT: I still cannot fucking believe that, you Dark Lord warlock son of a bitch.

LAURA: We're not in that arc yet, shut up.

MARISHA: Two successful Divine Interventions all campaign?

MATT: Three.

MARISHA: Three, thank you, Dani. So one was you and Vokodo.

SAM: (whispering) Vokodo.

TRAVIS: No.

MARISHA: The final one.

LAURA: It was always them.

MATT: Then there was the one to find the entrance.

LIAM: Find the door, also Caduceus.

LAURA: Also Caduceus.

MATT: Aeor, it's crazy.

LAURA: Final one, also Caduceus. I never successfully--

MARISHA: You never had any?

LAURA: No. Artie--

MATT: If it was anybody else, I'd be like "How?" With you, I'm like, "I get it."

LIAM: Cinematically perfect, though.

LAURA: Yeah, it really is.

TALIESIN: I finally found some--

LAURA: He's always with me and yet he never fucking listens.

MATT: And it's entirely on brand.

LAURA: Yes, it totally is.

LIAM: That Kids in the Hall sketch where the guy comes in to rob the house and he's like, "Where's your stuff?" Over there." "That's so far." (laughter)

MATT: But yeah, so Uk'otoa was never meant to be a combat encounter at the lower levels. If he was released, that would have been maybe a late game thing or it would have been less about fighting and beating him and more about trying to reseal him. It would have been more of a tactical series of roleplay encounters that would have-- we're talking God of War style. You're not even trying to damage the creature; you're just trying to get to these things and then reseal these bits. It would have been a whole different thing.

SAM: It sounds like a fun strategy game involving Uk'otoa.

MATT: Jesus.

SAM: Where you use your wits to keep him locked away and away from your sailors.

LAURA: ♪ Keep him locked away ♪

MATT: Anyway, next question.

LIAM: Lock Riegel away.

MARISHA: I am curious, speaking of the pirate arc.

TRAVIS: Yeah, yeah.

MARISHA: Going to Darktow.

LIAM: So much fun.

MARISHA: Darktow was the coolest, I wish we had more time.

SAM: I know.

TRAVIS: We had one fucking day.

MARISHA: One day, we got tossed out on our asses.

SAM: We were too efficient.

TALIESIN: One day, we're going back.

MARISHA: We got to do a Darktow one-shot or something, right? We got to go back.

MATT: I'm down for that.

LAURA: Oh my god, yes, please.

MARISHA: All the shit that I threw out from Beau about being here tracking Avantika because I'm here with the Cobalt Soul, and I was just rattling all that shit off the top of my head to hope that he would believe that I was essentially a Fed just looking for him and then he was like "Oh yeah, I know some Feds, they're great." What's his deal with the Cobalt Soul?

TRAVIS: He's connected.

MARISHA: Yeah.

MATT: And to be fair, this is another moment of going this wasn't a planned part of his backstory, but in the moment when you present information and the way you've created a character, they connect in a way that makes sense, you go with that instinct. And so for him, I see the Plank King as a self- professed intellectual. He's somebody who tells people how smart he is and really reads the trades and likes to talk about all the trivia that he collects and probably hires a lot of people at Darktow to bring political information from the world to him and gives them a few gold just so he can feel like he's a little above the rest of the the riffraff of Darktow and can rattle off long words and lord over that aspect. So I see him as someone like that.

MARISHA: You can tell by his scalped wig.

MATT: Yeah, well that was the fun dynamic is he is that, and then he's also a cutthroat killer.

MARISHA: Yeah.

MATT: And then I thought of the fact that The Revelry had started by a bunch of merchant sailors and sailors who were completely over all the political corruption of the Clovis Concord and all the different merchant guilds that were essentially squeezing all the sailors dry who were shipping all throughout this coastal area and The Revelry started with the people breaking away from that. So I think in his mind, Wyatt was like-- over time was like, "The Cobalt Soul. They would have taken that down. They're doing the good thing and I think honestly, they're probably cool with what we're doing." And he's just picked up this slow-building respect over time for the Cobalt Soul as this entity that he's built up in his mind that probably does not mirror at all the actual group, but in his head, he's like, "Yeah, they're the few good guys out there and I bet if I got to meet somebody higher up there, we'd do some cool work together and fuck up these people in the Clovis Concord who've been bullshit." That's how I envisioned it. So when you mentioned that, I was like--

MARISHA: He has a parasocial--

MATT: Yeah. He has a parasocial relationship with the Cobalt Soul and was like, "Okay, you're cool." It's like someone who reads a bunch of nonsense stories somewhere and then somebody, their grandfather wrote them, and you're like, "Oh, I know nothing about you as a person, but this weird connection means you're cool in my book and do what you want"-type of scenario.

MARISHA: You work for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory? Dope.

MATT: Yeah, yeah.

MARISHA: Awesome.

TRAVIS: We're going back there.

MARISHA: Yeah.

LAURA: I never saw any fan art of the Plank King.

TRAVIS: There was a little bit.

LAURA: Really?

MATT: Yeah.

LAURA: Ugh! I never saw any!

LIAM: Not a lot, but a little.

MATT: There's some cool ones, too.

LIAM: Yeah. What I was going to say is one of my favorite things about this game is that you can plan all this stuff. I thought of Caleb ages before we started this campaign and the same thing for Campaign Three, ages before we started but you can play and play and play and then mid-game, just off the cuff, something will happen, you'll have an idea, and you'll in the moment be like, "This is a real thing," and then it just bounces back through your entire past and becomes real. Like Nott/Veth with drowning, which I think you said was never a thing you thought of initially but you did it in the moment.

MARISHA: Yeah.

LAURA: Jester with sweets.

LIAM: Jester with sweets, Caleb--

SAM: You just came up with that?

LIAM: I never imagined Caleb being a good dancer.

SAM: Fjord forgetting things. That's something that you came up with on the fly, right?

TALIESIN: Clay with tea.

MATT: Clay with tea. Really?

LIAM: Clay with tea?

TALIESIN: I was waiting to come on and I'm like, "What am I doing? I guess I'm making tea for everybody."

SAM: Oh, cool.

LAURA: Oh, wow.

MATT: I love it, that's so great.

TALIESIN: Yeah, I was like, "I don't know."

LAURA: That's amazing.

LIAM: And that's central to Caduceus.

TALIESIN: Right?!

LIAM: And you just pull it out of your butt.

TALIESIN: Yeah.

LIAM: And then it solidifies, it's great.

LAURA: Yeah, it was only because you said, "I've never seen you eat anything other than sweets." So I was like--

MARISHA: That's right.

LAURA: "Well, that makes sense, sure, let's go with it." (laughter)

MATT: I love that.

LIAM: Sometimes 10 minutes into the game, one of the other players will create a defining characteristic about your character and it becomes canon!

SAM: That you're stinky?

MARISHA: There it is.

TRAVIS: Dirt wizard!

MARISHA: There it is! Dirt wizard!

SAM: "Oh look, he's covered in dirt and smells." "I'm really not." "Yes, you are."

LAURA: You smell a lot, actually.

MARISHA: It's true, though, you're writing backwards as you're writing forward.

LIAM: And then it stays forever, it's really cool.

MARISHA: Yeah.

TALIESIN: Like a nickname in high school, it just happens.

MATT: Yeah.

LIAM: That's what that was.

MARISHA: Shall we roll for this last fan question?

TRAVIS: Yeah, let's do it.

MATT: Sure.

TRAVIS: I'm switching the dice up.

MARISHA: Oh shit.

LAURA: Nope.

TRAVIS: Natural 20.

MARISHA: Oh! Natural two.

TRAVIS: Bow before the eye. Sam! This is for you. From @NicoDrazian, "What was going through Nott's/Veth's head during the time Sumalee was on the show as Nyla?"

LAURA: Nila?

TRAVIS: Nila. Why did I say Nyla?

LIAM: Nila.

SAM: Because you can't read.

TRAVIS: I'm in love with Nala from The Lion King. Somewhere my brain freezes.

MATT: You also weren't there for her go.

TRAVIS: That's true. "Since she had a great goal of finding her husband and son, just like Nott, did she feel a drive to help her find her son and husband or did it pain her to see them reunited again?"

SAM: A little of both. First of all, Sumalee was so good on the show. It was just fascinating to watch her work and act and be. Early on in the game, I think Nott was very motherly. Well, throughout the game she was motherly, but it turns out when you play D&D for awhile, you kill a lot of people. And so it got harder and harder to be like, "I'm the mother who wants to protect all children and value parenting and stuff," because you're just killing people nonstop.

MATT: Yeah, that's one of the issues in the game that I need to work on as we go forward.

SAM: Yeah. But I think she viewed Nila as a fellow mom on the right path and wanted to help her along, and it probably made her feel bad that she wasn't making as much progress towards getting back to Luc and Yeza as she could. But she was playing the long game and waiting for Caleb to get strong enough to change her back, which I assumed would happen at some point and then it did! Amazing. (laughter)

SAM: It took a long-ass time, though.

MATT: Yeah, it's something you got to earn.

SAM: But it was totally worth it and such a cool thing. Thanks, Matt.

MATT: Yeah.

TRAVIS: You know it's true, I don't even think we watched all of the episodes during those first six to eight weeks of-- All parents will know this, those first few weeks of a new child are, like, blackout. You just don't-- you're not sleeping.

LAURA: Even if we had watched them, we wouldn't remember them.

TALIESIN: You might've.

TRAVIS: There's no sleep.

LAURA: No.

SAM: Luc was, by the way, I almost named my son Luc in real life, that's why I chose that name for--

MATT: Oh, no way.

TRAVIS: I love that.

SAM: Yeah.

MATT: Wow, I feel real bad now. (laughter)

MARISHA: Oh, shit!

LAURA: Yeah.

MATT: I already felt bad.

SAM: It's my son's great-grandfather's name.

TRAVIS: Oh, amazing.

MARISHA: Well, before we move on to arc three, to top off this discussion of arc two, I think we can all say the campaign would have been deeply different had it not been for a certain dwarf fighter. Brian had a chance to chat with good old Ashly Burch, AKA Keg.

TRAVIS: Keg!

MARISHA: Take a look.

BRIAN: All right, I am here with undoubtedly the fan favorite and cast favorite guest of Campaign 2, Ashly Burch. (laughter) and cast favorite guest of Campaign 2, Ashly Burch. (laughter) Welcome, how are you?

ASHLY: Thanks for having me, I'm good.

BRIAN: You got your--

ASHLY: I'm very skeptical that I'm the fan favorite--

BRIAN: Oh, well, I definitely--

ASHLY: -- given certain events.

BRIAN: I definitely haven't said that to everyone who's come on to be interviewed.

ASHLY: Oh, right, right, right.

BRIAN: So it's, you know, it's not a big deal.

ASHLY: (laughs)

BRIAN: Thank you for coming on to talk about your character, Keg, who was--

ASHLY: My pleasure.

BRIAN: -- such a big part of this campaign.

ASHLY: Unexpectedly. (laughs)

BRIAN: And in so many ways that we will definitely get to. But first, share with the folks, if you can, a little bit of the inspiration behind Keg, when you were first asked to come onto the show.

ASHLY: Yeah, so my inspiration behind Keg was pretty simple. I found out that female dwarves could have beards, that could grow beards. And that was basically the entire motivation. I want to be able to grow a beard!

BRIAN: That was just like-- I got to do it.

ASHLY: And I also liked the idea of her having sort of a tough front, but secretly being a coward.

BRIAN: Yeah.

ASHLY: That was the other, that was really the combination.

BRIAN: Yeah, had you played someone like that before? I know oftentimes with RPG, sometimes we like to use that as a way to really explore something we haven't before. Have you played a character like that? Or was Keg kind of the first for you?

ASHLY: I think Keg was kind of the first. I guested on Critical Role a few times before Keg. So I also wanted her to feel distinct from the other characters that I had played, as I guested. And most of those were pretty, you know, brazen, loud, whatever. And so, yeah, I wanted to try role playing (chuckling) which led into a very interesting occurrence. But I wanted to try role playing a character in that world, that maybe isn't as apt to fight as everyone else is.

BRIAN: What was your favorite moment of your time on Critical Role? And then I'll tell you mine, of your time on the show. (laughter)

ASHLY: I have a feeling I know what yours is.

BRIAN: No, I'm kidding. Yeah, because you were around for GenCon. You were around for an arc, a little bit of an arc there. So what moment was your favorite? And if it's different than Keg's, tell us what Keg's was as well.

ASHLY: Well, Keg's is obvious. Keg's was gettin' lucky.

BRIAN: Gettin' a little action.

ASHLY: (laughs) My favorite, I think was when I read my apology letter to Sam. My favorite, I think was when I read my apology letter to Sam. I just had the thought that she would have little cracked glasses, and be kind of illiterate. And I sort of, that endeared her to me. So I liked that moment.

BRIAN: That endeared her to everybody. Not for long, though, unfortunately.

ASHLY: (laughs)

BRIAN: Was there anything about Keg that didn't get revealed during the game that you wanna make sure the Critters and/or the cast, because the cast is watching this right now, too, that the cast would want to know.

ASHLY: I was kind of hoping that Keg's friend, who had the amulet that she gave to Sam's character. I was kind of hoping he would be imprisoned in that prison at the end, or something.

BRIAN: Yeah.

ASHLY: I just, I liked the idea of this relationship of someone who believed in Keg and was wrong, kind of, at first, you know. Saw something in her that she wasn't ready to fulfill, sort of, that she was too scared to sort of blaze that trail that that person had sort of set for her.

BRIAN: What do you think Keg's up to now?

ASHLY: I think she's trying to do good. I think she's probably taken a cue from her new friends, and is trying to sort of travel the world, righting wrongs where she can. And I think she's okay at it. I think it's like a 50-50 split, where sometimes she's genuinely noble. Sometimes she makes things worse than when she got there, but her heart is in the right place in a way that it wasn't before.

BRIAN: I'm going write that down, because you just described me perfectly.

ASHLY: (laughs)

BRIAN: What do you think, what do you hope that Keg's legacy is, ultimately? Known for doing what you just said?

ASHLY: I think so. I mean, I think the thing that I liked about Keg as a character is that, man, does she fuck up. I mean, she fucked up pretty hard on her first game! (laughs) And had really dire consequences.

BRIAN: Yeah.

ASHLY: But I think the fun thing about her is that you get to see her stumble, and then try to not fuck up again. And I think, hopefully by this point, especially since Molly was resurrected, people have forgiven her.

BRIAN: Yeah, I think so.

ASHLY: I think that being her sort of legacy of being a fuck up, and then hopefully earning forgiveness with your actions.

BRIAN: Thank you so much for coming on and spending a few minutes with us talking about Keg, and for coming--

ASHLY: My pleasure.

BRIAN: -- for coming on Critical Role, and leaving such a legacy for two characters. (laughter) Thank you, Ashly.

ASHLY: Thanks for for having me. Always a pleasure.

BRIAN: You're so welcome. You're so welcome.

MARISHA: I hope she feels vindicated. (laughter)

LIAM: That was adorable.

MARISHA: She's so cute.

TALIESIN: She's the best. She'll send messages on occasion like, "There's a Mollymauk cosplayer on this train. Should I move? What do I do?" (laughter)

TRAVIS: Apologize.

TALIESIN: Stay still.

MARISHA: They won't notice.

TALIESIN: Wait until they got off the train no matter how far it goes. No.

MATT: But that's amazing, though.

TALIESIN: Occasionally, we get the best texts. (laughter)

MARISHA: Well, now we're getting into arc three which is the Bright Queen's Favor. This is full Xhorhas. We met Essek.

MATT: Yeah.

LAURA: Hot boi.

MARISHA: ♪ Hot boi. ♪ And we... walked through a worm tunnel to get there.

MATT: Yeah, you did. Yeah, you traveled far beneath the surface.

SAM: Oh, that's right.

LIAM: Yeah, it was so disorienting when we came out on the side of a mountain, and just watched dunamancy for the first time, and it was just-- It just seemed so strange.

TRAVIS: That was the chair, and then the tunnel, and then the tunnel, and the tunnel, and the tunnel.

LIAM and MATT: Yeah.

TALIESIN: Yeah, that's the whole section, like going way into the darkness, felt like Disneyland to me. It felt like when you're shifting to another land.

MARISHA: Oh, sure.

TALIESIN: You're walking underneath the bridge, and suddenly like, "Oh, it's New Orleans now, apparently." (laughter)

MATT: It's where you met Spurt!

LAURA: Oh, Spurt!

MARISHA: Spurt.

TRAVIS: For, like, two seconds.

MATT: Yep!

LAURA: It felt very much like that part in a video game where you get to an area, and they go, "You can't go this way. You can't go this way," and in a video game, you'd have to turn around and find another path, and we just kept going, "No, let's make this part work," you know? And did you have to like completely rework a whole arc, because we shoved ourself into Xhorhas so quickly?

MATT: I mean, yeah, but also that's why I love the game. You know, my favorite moments are when I'm caught off guard, or when-- I'm not trying to put up barriers to stop you guys, but I'm trying to logic out the challenges that would be before you to make this a really difficult choice. And if you guys continue to persist and find clever ways to bypass those barriers, then I'm going to reward you for it, and just throw my shit out the window, and figure something else up on the fly.

LAURA: Right.

MATT: So yeah, you know, other than-- Think no one's more disappointed than Matt Colville that guys went to Xhorhas. (laughter)

MATT: (laughs) But yeah, it was just an interesting path to follow, and continue to go through the Underdark, to go through these tunnels, and then find yourself in Xhorhas, and it completely shifted the direction of the campaign in a really cool way. Getting involved with, you know, Xhorhasian terrain, and the Dynasty a lot earlier than I initially anticipated. And from the perspective of just wandering into it, as opposed to any direct political impetus to get you there. It was really interesting, and not at all what I was expecting. So yeah. (laughs)

TALIESIN: The more walls you put up, the more likely we are to be like, "There's something that you're protecting over there that's awesome."

MATT: Oh, I know that. You think I don't know that?

TALIESIN: Every challenge is like, "Clearly this is everything." (laughter)

LAURA: What was the chair?

MARISHA: What was the chair?

LIAM: Yeah, you can fess up now. Tell us, tell us.

MARISHA: Tell us what was the chair.

LIAM: Tell us your secrets, all your secrets.

MATT: So.

TRAVIS: No. (laughter)

SAM: Let me check my notes.

MATT: There was a really, really nice mahogany tree once. (laughter) And somebody with some skill, with a saw, and a sander was like, "I got an idea."

TRAVIS: I love this story.

MATT: No, next question. (laughter)

MARISHA: Well, I'm curious, because-- and you've loosely touched on this before-- that Essek was kind of supposed to be a bad guy, and then we made friends with him, and his heart grew three sizes that day?

MATT: Yeah, you totally Grinched that motherfucker.

MARISHA: Yeah.

MATT: Yeah--

MARISHA: What was his plan?

MATT: Essek-- Essek was designed to not be a major antagonist, but to be an antagonistic force in the world. You guys barged into the Kryn Dynasty and gave this extremely sought after, thought-lost artifact that is intrinsic to their entire culture and religion. And as soon as you did that, Essek was like, "Well, first off, I know how they got that beacon, and I'm attached to this. I'm the one that smuggled it out, so I need to get in real close with these people and keep an eye on everything they do, because they're now the biggest loose end on my guarded person." You know, it's like committing murder and someone walks in and is like, "I found a boot in your yard," and he's like, "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!" You guys brought this in, and he was like--

TRAVIS: Fuck, fuck, fuck!

MATT: "I have to get to know them well." He immediately was like, "I'll take care of them. I'll work with their business. I'll figure out what they're going, and I'll be their--"

LAURA: Liaison.

MATT: "-- chaperone," essentially. And so it was him just trying to cover his ass while also trying to figure out what you were up to, what your connections were, how much you knew. And then the more he got to know you guys, because his whole goal was just to keep this thing going with the Dynasty. He was fed up with a lot of the political structure of the Dynasty, or come to think of it, sorry, with the, with the Assembly He was start up with a lot of the Dynasty's zealotry, and he doesn't really have any formal interest in the Luxon, and he thinks that it's misguided. He thinks that that there's a lack of interest in seeing what Dunamancy can actually do, because everything is regimented instead by the cultural history of it, and he just wants to advance to see what is possible, and he found partnership in the Assembly that way. But you guys kept, like, inviting him over for dinner, and asking about his--

LIAM: We really scrambled his eggs.

MATT: Yeah.

LIAM: For real when we left him, I was like, "Well, I really hope that-- I see things that I have in common with him and I empathize, but he's going to need years to unpack his shit, or he's not, or he's just going to bend back and do all the things he was doing before without us." And then the time we met up with him again, he was a changed man.

MATT: Yeah. Well, he was still struggling. He didn't know who he was, and at a certain point, your guys' interaction showed him that he could be better, and he was struggling with being convinced that it was too late for him. And so it was this idea of like, "I've already fucked up my entire life, and I didn't realize it until I found people that actually cared to look past my position and my abilities." And he'd been a solitary figure his whole life except for his relationship with his brother. He didn't get along with his parents. He didn't get along with most people in the Dynasty unless they helped him maintain and advance his position of power and influence, and so you guys fucked him up.

LAURA: Is that why he wasn't consecuted?

MATT: Yeah, he refused to do it, because he didn't believe in it, and he had odd theories about how consecution would affect the dominance of use and manipulation of dunamancy.

LAURA: Ooh.

MARISHA: So his lying about it was just about going along with the zealotry and not--

MATT: Exactly, because he didn't want people to think that there was something up.

LIAM: Yeah, staying part of the tapestry around him.

MATT: Exactly, a large part of his early times was just trying to deflect and misdirect and like, "Don't look at me, I'm just here, just so you're paying attention. I got nothing to do with any of this. That's weird, huh." Then the more you got to know him, he eventually let that fall away. Yeah, I was not expecting any of that.

TRAVIS: Neither were we.

SAM: He's such a cool character.

TALIESIN: Yeah.

MATT: He became so much more of a central character than I anticipated, too. He was fun to role play. I really enjoyed whenever he got pulled into the story, it was awesome.

TALIESIN: You made him float, man, what else were we supposed to do?

LAURA: Yeah, I know, right?

SAM: It's all you have to do.

LIAM: Nobody asked to be floats in this campaign.

LAURA: The minute you described him and everyone's like, (tuts) "He's hot," you know we're going to interact with him.

SAM: All you have to do is make a character that does one cool thing, and they don't attack us immediately, and we'll love them forever.

LIAM: Right.

LAURA: It's so true. "Are you powerful? Awesome, you're our friend." (laughter)

MARISHA: He reminds me of, remember in From Goth to Boss, on IT Crowd, that guy, and how they would just sometimes when he entered and exited rooms, they would just put them on the dolly, and pull him out.

MATT: Yep.

MARISHA: That kind of reminded me of what when he just floats.

MATT: That's a good reference. (laughter)

MARISHA: Well, how about a fan question?

LAURA: Ooh.

MATT: Okay!

MARISHA: Roll those dice.

MATT: Natural 20 again.

MARISHA: What?

SAM: You just asked one.

MATT: I did.

SAM: I don't know.

MATT: Well, I answered one. Liam. Melin, I think it is, or Melin-- my apologies-- asks, "While he never voiced this in game, Caleb's feelings for Jester have been an important part of his journey. Did he ever come close to confessing? How was playing such a long lasting, one-sided love after our last campaign's bittersweet ending for a Vax and Kiki?"

MARISHA: Dish, dish, girl.

LIAM: I was never going to do romance of any kind, one-sided or otherwise in this campaign, because I felt like we really explored that pretty heavily campaign one. I think you'll remember that Jester--

ASHLEY: Don't you make eyes at her! (laughter)

LIAM: I'm looking at the tape.

ASHLEY: She's mine now!

TRAVIS: "She's mine now!" (laughter)

LIAM: I think you all remember--

MARISHA: You keep fighting over me, oh my god.

LIAM: -- that Jester drove Caleb nuts at the beginning of the campaign, and so it was nothing that I ever expected at all. And then when they were in, was it Rexxentrum wherever the dance hall was. And I alluded to this earlier, dancing was never anything that I imagined for Caleb, but it was just like, and you were asking him to dance, Jester was asking him to dance. I was like, "Oh, this could be an interesting way to like sort of seed my story, that we're not really around yet." And there was something about, not the dancing, but the way that Jester treated him kindly after the fact like his response was to be like, "I'm going to go fucking vomit in a street, and just be by myself," and she wouldn't let it happen. And that was just like this first little moment where someone was like-- Everyone in the Nein-- I want to answer another question while I'm answering this. I wonder if we had gone that different direction that we talked about earlier where we didn't go crime, and we had gone into Rexxentrum earlier, and if Caleb had started interfacing with his past earlier, I think he would have had a gnarlier, more severe trajectory in this campaign. If he had touched his past sooner--

MATT: I see that, yeah.

LIAM: -- it would have changed what he was, but he spent way too much with the Nein, for when we finally did catch up to them, it was too late, that he'd already been healed enough by the Nein, it didn't matter. And everyone in the Nein had an effect on Caleb, they all had their love like in different ways; Yasha, he could relate to. Caduceus was like a guru that confused but inspired. Fjord, who Caleb thought was real hot at the beginning of the campaign, was a great leader--

LAURA: Super hot.

LIAM: -- and, like, just I don't know, I feel like he was his closest friend, outside of Nott, early in the campaign. Beau brought tough love. Veth was this ultimate support no matter what happened. But what started to happen with Jester was that she was treating Caleb like the person-- She was treating him as if he was the person he should have been. Like none of it had happened. And he became like-- It just got in him, but he would have never wanted to saddle her with all his shit. And the difference, like-- There was also point in the campaign where I could see, in Yasha's absence, Beauregard warming up to her, and I already quietly been thinking and going like, "Well, I'll just have this little thing that maybe fans will see," and some did early on, like it was silent. It was all silent. And then I was like, "Well, Travis is never going to do it." Oh, Travis just came online, so the entire side of the table quietly like, "Oh," at Jester for a while.

MARISHA: Hey Jester, when do you have a second?

LIAM: But Caleb knew that Beau and Fjord would've been far better for her, because they would have put aside anything for Jester and made her their number one. And Caleb knew that, as much as she like changed him and helped him in a very specific way, and and he quietly fell in love with her and like a Jane Austen, I'm never going to say it. That he would never have set aside the things that he was trying to do. He would never have set aside trying to either get back to his parents and fix that. He would never set aside trying to undo the Cerberus Assembly if he were strong enough, so, like, that was too all-consuming, and so he would never wanted to saddle her with it, so it was always going to stay inside. And there were multiple times in the campaign where Jester teasingly needled Caleb, and I was terrified that you would say the word "Insight check," multiple times.

LAURA: I think I did it once.

LIAM: Well, you must have rolled really low when you did--

LAURA: Yeah.

LIAM: -- because I did my best to like pull faces at you, and poo poo it, and do something silly to dodge out of those situations.

LAURA: Are you secretly in love with me?

LIAM: And yeah, you said that, and I went like (blows raspberries) that's fucking ridiculous with my face, and we moved on. (laughter)

LAURA: It's so funny when you joke about the whole table being in love with Jester because Jester had, like, no concept of it at all. Her whole upbringing was everybody being in love with her mother, and her whole, and she knew she's so different from Marion, in her appearance, and the way she presents herself that-- To her, that is what people want, that's what everybody would be in love with. And so there was never-- She would never have thought in a million years that Beau would have been interested, or that Caleb would have been interested, or that Fjord would have been interested. She tried to be Marion and when she was coming on to him in the early campaign, and obviously, it did not work. So she was like, "Okay, then-- Nobody's-- That's not going to happen for me." So it just like turned off in her brain, like nobody will.

TRAVIS: There was a moment where that stopped, too, because like you doing the thing that you thought your mom did and that worked, you know, Fjord's like, "I've never been flirted with before, I don't know what this is. Stop doing it." All that behavior stopped, and you like let the happy Jester fall away. Like, I think it was on the sea, right, like with the jellyfish scene. And then it all happened.

MARISHA: That's when you started crying. There was a few times where there was these moments of Jester smiling, but tears were streaming down her face.

TRAVIS: Yeah.

MARISHA: Trying to be the happiest person in the room. And then, yeah. I don't know. Jester always had this, but I think why Jester is so enigmatic, and so easy fall in love with is because she is the purest person in the room, so that it invites this kind of--

LIAM: Which doesn't even mean innocent, it just means the purest person--

MARISHA: Pure, yeah. It's just very endearing and it got in the way-- and this is almost going to sound condescending-- but almost in the way that a child is where if a little girl runs up to you, and they're like, "Look at this card, I think I want to cover the whole thing in glitter." You kind of have no choice, but to be like, "Yeah, that's a great idea."

LAURA: Yeah.

MARISHA: Cover the whole thing, and like, even if it's bad. She felt like almost like the perfect exercise for "Yes, and-ing." Like, the concept of "Yes, and-ing," because half of them were terrible ideas, but you were like, "Yeah, brilliant."

TRAVIS: Don't do it in the car. Oh, you did in the car.

MARISHA: It's okay, we can vacuum it up.

LIAM: Never share the stage with children, animals, or Jester Lavorre.

MATT: Yeah. There you go.

LAURA: Also, I feel that people are drawn to somebody who sees the best in them, right? You're drawn to somebody that loves you, and she just has an unconditional love for like everybody--

LIAM: She changes everyone she meets, including a hag in a hut.

MARISHA: Yeah.

TRAVIS: Yes.

SAM: Which was why it's so surprising that you told me that you were having an illicit affair with Orly the whole time. (laughter)

SAM: Like an elicit sexual--

LAURA: I do not think that was going to come up in this particular--

LIAM: Turtle power.

LAURA: That's why he dressed as Orly for Halloween.

MARISHA: Even, I think back--

MATT: Still the weirdest episode I've ever role played. (laughter)

LIAM: There's one last element that I want to touch on that, and because of the way it relates to Essek and Astrid and Eadwulf. Caleb's start with Astrid and Eadwulf was like they were aggressively intelligent, and driven as fuck, and hot, and that did not go well for Caleb, that fucking burned him worse than anything ever could have. And Essek who Caleb thought was so, like, intellectually attractive and sexually attractive, and he was really drawn to him, but that was like, "I've done that, and that's going to-- I put my hand on that stove and it fucking burned my hand off. I can't--" Jester was so different than anything that he'd been wrapped up in before, that it was like aikido. It just, like, disarmed all of his defenses.

TRAVIS: Yeah.

LIAM: Anyway, that's the end of that.

MATT: Well, thank you for the question.

MARISHA: How about another fan question?

SAM: Another fan question.

MARISHA: Sure, why not. Oh, why does that keep happening?

TALIESIN: Oh.

SAM: 12.

MATT: Four.

MARISHA: 12.

LIAM: Balls.

TRAVIS: 14.

TALIESIN: 19.

MARISHA: Ooh, Taliesin, go.

TRAVIS: I've got one for Matt from BlueSnake462. "It was mentioned that everyone was surprised when Liam gave up the Luxon." That's true. What were your original plans for the party and the Luxon, and how were they changed in the moment of handing it over to the Bright Queen, and, as an extension, how would the campaign have been different if the party had never gained the favor of the Bright Queen?" I imagine we'd be dead, but I'm not-- That would've gone very poorly.

MATT: It's an interesting point. So I had introduced the beacon to your path, hoping that you guys would take it, because it would just be this constant magnet for trouble to have this extremely important focal point to this growing conflict between two political, you know, nations essentially, and having to keep it secret, keep it safe while everyone is looking for it. And people who happen to catch it are like, "What's that?" You know, it's trying to hide something that does not want to be hidden in a lot of ways, very One Ring-esque. And so I was excited that you guys ran with it, and there was a lot of unique bartering that it could allow you, based on how long you maintained it in any of the interactions you went with, both within the Empire or within the Dynasty, but you were the caretakers of it. You could have kept it your own. It could have led to a lot of research and creation of dunamantic spells and abilities for multiple people, if it had been held for a long time. All of you could've, in some way, shape, or form begun to dabble in dunamancy beyond just, you know, the arcane casting elements there. But it would've had the challenge of you constantly looking over your shoulders, constantly in the threat of being hunted down, and having characters come into your life, that would have probably eventually either discovered, or been seeking it within your space. And that was going to be the interesting pull of it. So when you gave it to the Bright Queen, that all went away. (laughter) But conversely, you immediately bought, you game sharked the enemy side. Where, like-- Part of the intent was to go in into Xhorhas and realize after all this propaganda from the Empire that's been fed to you about the Dynasty, and how bad they were, and how's Xhorhas is a place of demons, and murderers and such. And you go there and you meet these people and realize "No, they're actually just like everyone in the other side, in some cases, even better," and that's all just bullshit propaganda, but it was going to be a way of you earning your way up through the structure, and meeting people, and possibly doing jobs, and earning favor in certain spaces. And maybe even never even encounter the Bright Queen beyond you know, one time, but then you immediately got caught, brought to her, and I was like, "Well, this will be the one time they meet her, if they can manage to convince her to take her under and assign them to somebody, or break free, or whatever." You gave her the beacon and became immediate heroes.

TRAVIS: Whaddup, Big Q?

LAURA: Yeah.

MATT: So yeah, it greatly changed the trajectory in a really, really cool way, and it went from like this Empire-based narrative, and like, you know, the slow discovery of how things are not what you thought the other side to: Fuck the Empire. Now we're here, now we're on this side, and then that led to the discovery of, over time, that, you know, things are bad in the Empire, but there are still good people there. And it became this straddling the line of, you know, what do you ally with, if at all. So yeah, they made a really, really cool story that I wasn't expecting to hit a lot of those layers and that--

TRAVIS: It was so cool to be on both sides of that, because we had backstage passes to both concerts. Like, first it was Dynasty, and we thought it would be Empire, and then we went back to the Empire, we were like, "Hey, we have this thing, you want to fuck with us or what?" Its gave us all this clout.

MATT: Yeah. It changed things a lot. I think how it would've been different to go off my earlier point on that, too, is-- Climbing through the Dynasty as people mostly from the Empire, outward facing would have been a climb. It would've been challenging, and it would've been making a lot of allies, and trying to continuously prove yourselves as not the enemy, not working for the Empire as spies. And yeah. It would've been a much harder path, but you cheated. (laughter)

SAM: I love Xhorhas. I loved the Dynasty.

MATT: Oh, me, too.

SAM: I wish we could have spent more time there. I mean, we spent a lot of time, but--

TALIESIN: We have a winter home now.

MATT: You have a house there, like there's--

SAM: I know, but we never got to go back.

LAURA: I know. Whatever happened to our housekeeper?

MARISHA: Yeah. How's our housekeeper?

TRAVIS: Oh, the fucking housekeeper.

MATT: The housekeeper quit.

LAURA: No!

TRAVIS: She quit?

MATT: Well, you stopped paying her! But I'm sure if you--

LAURA: But she had a free house to live in.

TRAVIS: That back pay, though. You got to hang her around--

MARISHA: We paid her a bit in advance.

MATT: You did.

MARISHA: I think we paid her one month in advance.

MATT: Yeah.

SAM: We're so cheap.

MATT: In my mind--

SAM: It's not real money.

MATT: In my mind, she left, but if you were to return and pay backpay with some on top, she'd probably come back. The Xhorhaus is still there. You guys still have friendship and you know, and station--

TRAVIS: A tree growing out of the roof.

MATT: Yeah, like, that house is still yours, so.

LAURA: We're, like, the worst neighbors just, like, everybody hates us.

SAM: Yeah. You never mow the lawn.

LAURA and MARISHA: Yeah.

LIAM: Once or twice a year, they get together for a week, and a reconvene.

TRAVIS: Yeah.

LAURA: Don't we have daylight coming out of our tree, like, something that everybody hates there, and it's like, "God--"

TALIESIN: There's lanterns in the tree that make it glow, but it's not like it's--

LAURA: Bright, it's not bright?

TALIESIN: I'm sure it attracts a lot of insects.

LIAM: So we're not like National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation? (laughter)

SAM: It's so gross, like algae all over it.

TRAVIS: The insects are like, "Yes, perfect."

TALIESIN: It's self-maintaining,

TRAVIS: It's like nutrient rich.

MATT: It's like living in a humble neighborhood, and all of a sudden this giant house gets built on the corner, and some 20-year old YouTuber moves in, and just keeps throwing parties. That's you guys.

SAM: The influencer house.

TALIESIN: Ow!

MATT: I hate it! I hate it. I hate it.

MARISHA: No!

ASHLEY: Not!

TALIESIN: That's not cool.

ASHLEY: You take that back.

SAM: Hey, everybody! (laughter) [Inaudible] check it out.

MATT: Oh, I hate it.

TALIESIN: Nice Linux phone. (laughter)

TALIESIN: Sorry.

SAM: Do we need to ask this last fan question? I'm going to just do it.

MARISHA: Sure, do it.

SAM: At--

TALIESIN: Oh yeah.

SAM: -- @arvyarv, or arvyarv asks, "Who exactly was in the pile of bones that Caleb instantly incinerated with a Flaming Sphere, leading to the tearing of a character sheet on camera?"

LAURA: Oh!

SAM: Didn't that happen in the first campaign, too?

MARISHA: Yeah, in the Underdark, or in the tunnel.

SAM: Didn't we instantly kill somebody who was kind of important?

MATT: Yeah.

TRAVIS: Tomb of the Unknown NPC.

MATT: Yeah.

SAM: Who was this one?

MATT: If I recall correctly, this is when you guys were going in the giants'--

LIAM: Caleb's aunt and uncle.

MATT: Right, yeah.

MARISHA: Oh god, finishing the job.

MATT: No, I think you guys were just in Xhorhas, and you guys were leaving Rosohna to go inspect the giants' den in the Vermaloc.

LIAM: We went into a fort, right? And then the fort we went to--

LAURA: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

MATT: Correct, because the giants were forced out of their home and then occupied the mining camp there at the fort. So you went there, and yeah, there was a goblin that essentially was like quietly, and secretly living in there, living off the scraps that the giants left behind, and was just this looming NPC that was going to be a source of information about what dangers you could face here, about what's happened to the giants.

SAM: It was a cute character, wasn't it?

MATT: And yeah, and present information about Vince Nuthaleus. Who was-- That was when you started finally following the thread that led to Obann, that led to everything there. And the device that he had placed in there, the goblin was like, saw him place it, and was going to begin to give all this information to set you on that path and then... ashes.

LIAM: Yeah, man. I have a purpose.

SAM: Cute floppy ears.

LAURA: Who's it going to be in Campaign 3, I wonder?

LIAM: Your character.

MATT: You still eventually found the thread in a roundabout way, but I was like, "Well, okay." That's a temporary dead end to--

MARISHA: Speaking of the Nuthaleuses, before we move on from this arc, I have to know. I know Dani Carr has to know. Who was Verin, Essek's brother? We never got to meet Essek's brother.

MATT: Yeah, you didn't.

MARISHA: And in my head, he's also super hot.

DANI: (muffled) Yes, he is.

LAURA: Obviously. (laughter)

MATT: Obviously. Yeah. He's the himbo of the family, in my mind.

TRAVIS: Oh, keep going. (laughter)

MATT: You know, he's the younger, taller, the more athletic brother of the family.

TRAVIS: No clothes.

MARISHA: Shirtless all the time.

TALIESIN: Also floats.

MATT: No, no, no. He walks on the ground.

SAM: I thought he would float, but like at a side angle, like on one wheel.

TALIESIN: Like on a snowboarder.

LAURA: Yes, yes.

TRAVIS: 'Sup, girl.

MATT: Essek floats. He--

MARISHA: He wears Vans.

MATT: Yeah.

MARISHA: Just like. (laughter)

MATT: Oh my god.

MARISHA: Yeah.

MATT: He's just constantly drifting. He's just like (whooshing).

SAM: Ah, cool!

MATT: No, no, he's just, you know, as opposed to his brother, who's very much eschewed the Dynasty culture, and his parents were very deeply steeped in the culture. Verin rides the line where he understands why his brother is the way he is, but he also believes a lot in the Dynasty, and the faith that the Luxon and the whole idea gives. And he, like, partially believes it, but he's like a, "Yeah, I'm Christian kind of, because I was raised on it, but I'm also not evangelical."

LIAM: Does he have a Luxon rock band?

MATT: Probably yeah, yeah. He's got a little puka shell necklace, with a little symbol of the Bright Queen on it. Yeah.

MARISHA: Luxon Talk. (laughter)

SAM: ♪ The beacon will rise. ♪

MATT: But yeah, he's-- (laughs) Oh my god! This has gotten away from me entirely, to no one's surprise.

MARISHA: I love this. I love this headcanon.

MATT: Yeah, no, he's he stationed in Bazzoxan--

LAURA: ♪ -- If they hear that I'm a beacon for you. ♪ (laughter)

TRAVIS: Oh wow!

MARISHA: "I'm a beacon for you."

TRAVIS: Somebody was real deep! (laughter)

ASHLEY: Oh man.

MATT: We'll live it there.

LIAM: Oh, my cheeks are red. (laughter)

MATT: Yeah, he's stationed in Bazzoxan. He's not like an upper-upper ranking warrior, but he's pretty well respected. And he was the only bond that Essek had before any of you was with him growing up. He was like the brother that kind of got him, and they got along okay in a family that Essek did not get along with at all, and was surrounded by people he didn't get along with.

TRAVIS: Would we have ever crossed paths with him?

MATT: You would've, if you had probably spent more time, or asked around for more people of station in Bazzoxan, but you guys only stayed there for a night and then defaced property and then left. Which happens.

TRAVIS: It's what we do.

MATT: Yeah, I know, it makes all the sense.

LIAM: The Mighty Nein are the Rolling Stones.

TRAVIS: I'm sure we left a dick in our wake.

MATT: You did.

LAURA: Yeah.

MATT: Yeah. You changed the sign of the inn you were staying in.

LAURA: Yeah, what did I change the name to? I don't remember.

MATT: I don't remember either.

SAM: Balloxan, I don't know,

MATT: Probably.

LAURA: That sounds about right.

LIAM: So many dick signs.

MARISHA: Well, before we move on to arc four, we should check in with Sumalee Montano. (cheering) The firbolg druid that reminds us why you should never piss off your mother. Let's take a look.

BRIAN: All right, I'm here with Sumalee, the cast and fan favorite guest of Campaign 2.

SAM: (laughs)

TRAVIS: Jesus.

BRIAN: Undisputed. How are you, my friend?

SUMALEE: I'm doing okay, thank you.

BRIAN: Good, it's so wonderful to have you back.

SUMALEE: Thanks.

BRIAN: And talking about your wonderful character from Campaign 2. I know we've talked a little bit about this before, but for those who don't know, and haven't seen you on Talks Machina, tell us about the inspiration behind Nila, if you will.

SUMALEE: Definitely part of what inspired me was my dad. He's, for sure, like, the guy who instilled in me my love of nature and my love of animals and trees, and he's literally a tree hugger, and so am I.

BRIAN: Yeah.

SUMALEE: Like, when I found out that I was pregnant, like in real life, not as Nila, in real life, I literally went out to the woods. I went out to these like amazing, to Muir Woods, actually, in northern California, and I literally just, like, hugged the tree. (giggles)

BRIAN: No way, I love it.

SUMALEE: I literally like, "Okay, give me your goodness. Give me, you know, share with me your strength," and I-- That's just where it, yeah. So my dad definitely instilled that in me.

BRIAN: What was your favorite moment of your time on the show?

SUMALEE: I'll kind of roll it up into one thing, which is how much everyone embraced me. It made me feel so-- Like, at the table, made me feel so welcome and so comfortable to do something that I'd never done. And literally, like, between Matt guiding me through the character creation, between his amazing storytelling, and then the gifts that always came up. Like, I mean, Ashly, I can't remember exactly what she did, but she basically was like, "Will you say the word 'fuck?'" And I'm, like, that was the perfect, like, set up, You can't script things like that. You can't expect things like that. But when you're playing with people who are so generous, and so understanding of the game, I just felt like everybody, you know, everybody-- It felt like a big warm hug when I was on set.

BRIAN: Yes, yes. Is there anything about Nila that you didn't get to reveal during the game that you want the Critters and the cast to know?

SUMALEE: Every once in awhile, when Nila gets bored, she's tempted to nibble on stuff in her smell bag.

BRIAN: What kind of stuff?

SAM: Ew!

LIAM: Edibles!

SUMALEE: You know, because the smell bag has a whole, you know, it has all sorts of things in there. We had talked about this on Talks before.

BRIAN: A litany.

SUMALEE: It's got everything from the placenta that carried my son, to--

TRAVIS: (yelling)

SAM: (gagging)

SUMALEE: -- you know, mosses and bones of creatures, or animals that I had a special relationship with. But every once in a while, it smells good to Nila. And so when she's sitting there, sometimes nothing to do.

BRIAN: Yeah, curiosity.

SUMALEE: Yeah, you smell it. And you're just like, "Hmm, how would this work if I just tasted, gnawed on that bone just a little bit."

BRIAN: I thought of that with a couple of dog treats that looked really appealing.

SUMALEE: Right, it's exactly the same thing!

BRIAN: What do you think Nila's up to now?

SUMALEE: (sighs) I think. I decided that I wanted to have another baby. So like I have, we have another baby firbolg in the family.

BRIAN: Okay.

SUMALEE: I think we've gone back to our home tribe.

SUMALEE: I think we've gone back to our home tribe. However, before we left, we grafted this cool like plant that was able to protect the temple, and keep anything, like any of the encroaching evil plants, and evilness away. Of course, I checked in with the smell bag to make sure that it was going to hold, and that we would be okay going back. Once we had another baby, it was like I'm gonna go back to the home tribe.

BRIAN: Yeah.

SUMALEE: Check in and come back every so often, but we use the smell bag to make sure that everything will stay safe.

BRIAN: Is okay. What do you hope that Nila's legacy is?

SUMALEE: You know, family, family comes to mind first. I think not just the family you're born into, I think not just the family you're born into, but your found family. You know, people always talk about how important that is. And to me, like the Mighty Nein were Nila's found family.

BRIAN: Yeah. Well, you played such a memorable character, and I know the cast was so lucky to have you, and grateful to have you on the show for Campaign 2. And thanks for coming today to talk about Nila some more. We really appreciate it.

SUMALEE: It's absolutely my pleasure. And because of you guys, I have become a huge D&D fan. So, I like, I play it with my family now.

BRIAN: Yes.

SUMALEE: My son is totally into it. And that is such a lovely gift for me.

BRIAN: That's mission accomplished. That's mission accomplished then. Thank you so much, Sumalee.

SUMALEE: Thanks, Brian.

LIAM: Oh dear.

SAM: Wow!

ASHLEY: Yeah.

MARISHA: I love that she's playing with her family.

TALIESIN: That's the win.

MARISHA: Oh, I love it! All right, you guys, before we jump into arc four, we're going to take a quick break.

SAM: Oh.

MARISHA: See you back in a second.

Break
(aggressive rock music) [dramatic percussion music] [harp glissando]

MATT: I'm really excited to be able to step in as a player, which is a rare experience as it is, let alone a player in my own world, which is a very unique thing. This is the first time I'm kind of handing the reins off of a part of Exandria to somebody else.

LIAM: I have no idea if we're going any place we've been before, or to see corners that we didn't get to poke around in. And I'm curious to see it sort of given to us through the lens of a new GM.

ASHLEY: When we were talking about wanting to find a new GM to have this space to tell their story, Aabria was, hands down, all of our first choice. She is such an incredible storyteller and she's just an incredible addition to the team.

MATT: She had such a uniquely fantastic flair for really expressing narrative and drawing you in and following the players' instincts and weaving the story out of that magic of what's happening now. As we found ourselves kind of coming to this particular project, there really couldn't be anybody else that I can think about trusting it to.

LIAM: It's been cool watching Aabria sort of find her sea legs just for that chair and that corner of the table, and then finding her vibe with all of us, too. It's really cool.

AABRIA: Let me jump in, because I have a lot of thoughts because there is nothing both cooler and more actually terrifying than having-- being given the gift of Tal'Dorei, which is a place that I'm familiar with, but then I have to sit next to the dude that made it while I'm like, "Here's what I think of your place now, and I'm in charge and if I change something, mine's true." It's exciting, it's terrifying. (laughs) I'm Aabria Iyengar, and I am the Game Master of ExU, Exandria Unlimited. I'm Aabria Iyengar, and I am the Game Master of ExU, Exandria Unlimited. Some of you may know me from other games and streams that I've been on, including Dimension 20's Pirates of Leviathan, Pirates of Salt Bay, over on Saving Throw, and a hundred thousand one-shots 'cause I stream everywhere. It's my whole bag. I'm just extremely online, I think that's what it is.

AIMEE: I think it's crazy that they picked me, but I'm really happy to be here. We're going to get halfway through and they're just going to be like, "We don't know what happened, somehow she got in," but it's just the imposter syndrome. My name is Aimee Carrero. I am an actress and I came to this world through my voiceover work. I play Elena of Avalor on Disney+, and She-Ra on She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, and I am now a cast member on Exandria Unlimited until someone kicks me out.

ROBBIE: To dip into something that is new, that is brand new, that still calls on all the skills that I've had most of my life, incredibly exciting. And it's so much more fun than I even thought it would be. Like, I knew it was going to be fun, but I didn't know it was going to be this fun. So as soon as we got those first few clean playthroughs out of the way, it all falls together and I'm literally like, "Is it Thursday yet? Is it Tuesday yet? When do we get to play again?" I'm pumped. My name is Robbie Daymond. I'm a full-time professional voice actor, rad dad, undercover nerd, theater kid, and now a D&D player for Exandria Unlimited. What!? What is happening? I'm so excited!

LIAM: I've been excited for Robbie to join since we started talking about making this new show and picking friends to join us. He's quick on his feet, he's charming and hilarious, fucking phenomenal actor, and he really is just sort of everything that I wanted in someone who is going to be spending a long time with us.

MATT: It was waiting for the right time to go ahead and kind of fold them into our geek space, and when we were discussing the development of Exandria Unlimited, it was the perfect time. It's the perfect time.

LIAM: With Aimee, she is coming at this with, like, 150% energy. And the character that she's been toying with in these early games has been riveting.

AABRIA: She came in with such a big concept that it ended up being like this sort of fundamental heart of what we're doing, and I think that's a cool thing for her character, and going through that arc, but also just, like, a huge testament to someone who's not experienced at the form, but is an excellent storyteller.

ASHLEY: I adore her. I think she's incredibly smart. She's so funny, and she's taken to the game so quickly.

AIMEE: I got the first "How do you want to do this?" Which honestly, like, I didn't think it was going to mean so much to me, but it's really one of the highlights, I think, of my whole professional career. The experience of explaining how I was going to finish off this character, everyone, it was like I was taking all the help I could get, and at the end I was like, "This is literally like someone walking you through your first orgasm." Like, I just didn't know how to do it, and it felt so fucking awesome. And then at the end I was just like, "All right, Chinese or Italian?" It was just the best. I will remember that forever.

ASHLEY: I don't know what's going to happen in the first game because we've already played so many games that I feel like would be ready to put onto the internets. that I feel like would be ready to put onto the internets. I can't wait for our audience and our Critters I can't wait for our audience and our Critters to meet this new class, and if they don't already know Aabria, they will, 'cause she's incredible. And to meet Aimee, and to meet Robbie, and I think our audience is going to love them and I cannot wait for this game.

[upbeat flute music]

ASHLEY: I have so many flowers to bring to her.

MARISHA: You know I'm in love with you, right?

SAM: Case closed.

LAURA: Hello, bees!

TRAVIS: I would like to rage!

TALIESIN: Life needs things to live.

LIAM: But I am no friend to the Empire.

MATT: In this realm, there are unlimited stories to be told.

AABRIA: And just as many storytellers to tell them. [climactic orchestral/choral music]

LAURA: Hey, Critters, Laura Bailey here. Let's see what's up in the Critical Role shop. (upbeat music) Oh my gosh, it's so amazing! Ooh, look at this, look at the details, ooh! The cuteness! It's overpowering! I mean, The Traveler always says, impulse purchases are a good decision. Roll an investigation if you want, it's basically perfect. So click on over to the Critical Role shop. Don't worry, there's a few more minutes in the break. You've still got time.

(suspenseful orchestral music)

DANI: (sighs) I just want to watch my Critical Role!

TALIESIN: For your consideration, this is the face of a Critter whose craving their Critical Role content. But for this sanctimonious shipper, time misled them like a trip to the Feywild. They now have come face-to-face with existential dread, a fear of sardonic spoilers. Let us lead them across the bridge into a realm of bright shadows where, even if one misses the live viewing of their favorite program, they can still watch it on-demand if they bear the mark of a Twitch subscription to the channel. That mark, a mysterious sigil of emoticons made by the Sage, ArseQueef. In this land of shadow known as the Twitch Subscription Zone, no shipper, Fan-fic-er, or please name my kitten litter Critter has to feel like a bitter fritter. And so ends another meandering digression, a complicated parody promo down an indistinct highway to the region we call the Twitch Subscription Zone. Subscribe. Twitch Prime, subscribe. Gift subscribe. Subscribe. (tense orchestral music) You should check to see if you've left the oven on.

Part II
MARISHA: And welcome back. (cheering) Jumping into arc four. This is, like, Yasha's big arc. This is Obann and the Chained Oblivion. And was this all Happy Fun Ball stuff? No.

TRAVIS: Almost.

DANI: Mm-hmm.

MARISHA: A little bit, thank you, Dani. A little bit. We went back to the Happy Fun Ball, I think? Yeah, yes.

TRAVIS: We played this game for a lot of fucking years.

MARISHA: We did! (laughter) So many.

ASHLEY: It's hard to separate it all, because it all is just one, I mean.

MARISHA: Yeah, it all bleeds.

MATT: An amorphous jumble.

ASHLEY: I mean.

MATT: Yep.

ASHLEY: Yeah.

MATT: It's part of the fun.

TALIESIN: For a year, it was the only thing that happened. So it really is strange on that.

ASHLEY and TALIESIN: Yeah.

MATT: Yeah, you're not wrong.

SAM: Oh god.

MARISHA: That's so true.

TALIESIN: It's the only marker of time I have.

MARISHA: Yeah.

TRAVIS: I can kick it off. I want to know what Yasha and Obann's history was.

ASHLEY: I might be curious about that, too, because a lot of it-- Obviously, Yasha was, I mean, there for, but, you know, mind controlled and puppeted.

MATT: Yeah, so from how I interpreted the story was, after Yasha had left the Dolorav, and had a bit of a psychological break at some point from just like the trauma and the wastes. Kind of went feral in the wastes of Xhorhas. Very much not using language much, living by killing and eating whatever came her way, and aimless and wandering. And Obann, who had begun the plotting in the name of the Angel of Irons. He didn't know it was the Chained Oblivion, it was just this entity that came to him and spoke to him. This being that promised an undying future, if he could just begin to corrupt these fanes and call together these undying warriors that were brought to him through visions. And the one that was closest to him at the time as he was traveling through Xhorhas when this came to him was this lost feral, undying proto-angel. This being that wasn't quite at the level of strength to resist death, but had the promise to do so. And it was his charge to train her up. And so that's when he found Yasha as this feral being, and left his mark and essentially took her mind and will as his own and began to train her up by sending her in as his bodyguard. And also going to all these different fanes of just general arcane leyline power, much like how there are these leylines of magical energy that shift and cruise across Exandria, like the Northern Lights in an invisible spectrum, except to those who can understand magic. The ziggurat beneath the Whitestone was at one of these nexuses. A lot of these older structures were built to gather and use these spaces where the magic is strongest and where things converge. He would use Yasha to begin to corrupt some of these fanes in the name of the Angel of Irons, and in doing so, began to lead this hungering, the subtle hunger corruption throughout the land. That's why the early parts of the campaign had this theme of things going mad over the need to devour and the need to just consume and grow. So keeping that theme going. But yeah, so in this time, Yasha was essentially his right-hand man. I think I've said it before, but very much like Purple Man and Jessica Jones. He would just like, "All right, kill that for me." And she would go and do it. But a lot of that and the trauma of that experience, her brain protected her by not recording this time period, until eventually she took--

ASHLEY: What happened?

MATT: It went too far and she broke free, and he lost her in the wastes. And that was where she found the Storm Lord. The Storm Lord was the first entity to reach out at this broken statue of the Storm Lord, and helped heal her mind a bit, and give her a direction to go.

ASHLEY: When we've been working on the comic book, and I forgot about this in the last game that we played, but you had said the amount of time that she was with Obann, that I didn't realize it was that long.

MATT: Mm-hmm.

ASHLEY: Can we say how long it was, or do you want to?

MATT: I gave a vague space. I mean, I considered it to be the period of like a year or two. Like it was--

ASHLEY: Which was longer than I thought.

MATT: Yeah.

ASHLEY: Yeah, it's a long time to have somebody in your head.

MATT: Yeah, so like the way I interpreted it was there was a lot of growth of Yasha's during that time as this controlled persona that was lost when she broke free and became herself. That experience was essentially shunted from her mind to heal. So there is a time period in that lost time where Yasha was operating at a very powerful level under his control. But that's how I interpreted it, at least. So that was my intent for it.

ASHLEY: Woo!

SAM: Juicy. Juicy.

MATT: Yeah, and he wasn't looking for her. He thought she was lost and was like, "Well, I have to go find out what the next undying champions of the Angel of Irons are." And then when you crossed paths with him again in Xhorhas, outside of Rosohna, he was like, sorry, no, it was Rosohna. He was just like, "Oh, oh, that's convenient. I wondered where you got off to. Hmm, you got some friends with you. You know what, follow me. Maybe you can do some of this work for me," type thing.

MARISHA: Okay.

LAURA: I have a-- Oh, sorry. No, you go.

MARISHA: Okay. Going off of this, this is technically I think an arc one question, but. It was Trent Ikithon, right, that eyeballed Yasha up and down and was like, "Oh, you. Come talk to me, I want more with what you're about." What did Trent want with Yasha?

MATT: So Trent is the kind of individual that will subtly cast Detect Thoughts, or his variation of the Detect Thoughts spell in mixed company, just to see what's behind everybody's exterior.

MARISHA: Oh interesting.

MATT: So he just like in party atmospheres and social atmospheres--

LIAM: Creepy.

MATT: He has a way of of doing that in a subtle way where he'll just be like, people are talking, he'll just lean over and then pierce into their thoughts a bit, just to get a feel. Sometimes to draw secrets that are useful for blackmail in the future, or to figure out what things might be secretly being planned behind the scene so he could be ready. You know, he's just one of those paranoid-type individuals. And with Yasha, there's just something about her presence he was like, "She's curious." So he did that and picked up shreds of her past that even she probably had lying dormant, that she-- He was like, "That's, there is. For an individual that was in the middle of the Zadash Harvest Close Festival celebration and now we're sitting in this room. There is some dark shit in your past." And he senses the angelic blood, the celestial blood. And was like, "You are intriguing, and I don't fully know why, but I'm just curious." And that was as far as it got, because then you guys ran off and he clocked it. But that was what went down there.

TRAVIS: Be honest, he read Veth's thoughts and hear, ♪ Never going to give you up ♪ ♪ Never going to to let you down ♪

MATT: Yeah, essentially. (laughter)

LAURA: Kind of a side note to all of that.

MATT: Mm-hmm.

LAURA: The Laughing Hand, who was with him, was very similar to a lot of the things that we ran into in Aeor.

MATT: Mm-hmm.

LAURA: What was the connection there? Like, was it, did the Laughing Hand come from that?

TRAVIS: Oh, that's right.

MATT: No, different entity, but. Hmm, how do I put this? There is an intentional, subtle threads of connection. Cognouza, the living city, the Somnovem and the whole Cognouza Ward, that was happenstance. That was circumstantial, its creation. The scattering of the thousands of minds that lived there, The scattering of the thousands of minds that lived there, and the combining them in madness and destruction, and then slowly climbing their way back to a semblance of combined sentience and emergence, wasn't the Chained Oblivion's doing, by any means. But as time went on, it had a unique enough parallel where it caught his attention, so he was just helping it along in ways. Helping form those dreams, helping inform the shape it would eventually take. I like to imagine the Chained Oblivion as not this extremely-- How do I put it? This extremely well-plotted out entity of will that has machinations of intricate plans, upon plans, upon plans. It is more of just a force of destruction, devouring, and nothingness. And anything that fits into that realm, it will twist intent. It will twist perspective. It will do whatever it can to seep into it subtly. And Angel of Irons was one path that, honestly it was more informed by Obann, I mean than Chained Oblivion. The idea of like, this is a little esoteric, but like, the idea that if you-- Stephen King's It. The creature takes the form of whatever is the scariest to whoever perceives it, you know? And there are different stories that tell that. Chained Oblivion, when it begins to corrupt somebody, this corruption, this entity, this thing that is is Chained Oblivion's influence, takes the form of whatever the creature thinks it might be looking for. And that's how it ends up masquerading in my mind and my world as different cults, as different figures, as different ways that it just undermines society. And so the Angel of Irons was a creation of Obann looking for something to follow and it allowed him to create this entity that he was looking to, without knowing really what it was. And to the same point, Cognouza became something that he just subtly wanted to happen because they had a similar-- He knew would've come to a goal of his, which is the annihilation of everything, and darkness forever. And so that was actually why Kingston, or sorry Kingsley's, towards the end of the campaign, that one little memory I threw in there of, you know, weird, lingering memory of the birth of the city. You see these black chains shattering in this ancient will. That was the Chained Oblivion losing its subtle investment in Cognouza.

LAURA: Oh cool!

TALIESIN: Oh boy.

MATT: So that was my way of tying some things together, but not making it, "Aha, the bad guy the whole time has still been the Chained Oblivion!" I wanted it to stand on its own, but still be a subtly influenced by.

MARISHA: So it's like creative human subconscious gone horribly awry?

MATT: Yeah, that's how I believe it operates. You know, it doesn't--

LAURA: Was-- Oh, sorry.

MATT: No, go ahead, go ahead.

LAURA: Was there ever a time you guys thought that the Traveler was influenced by the Chained Oblivion as well?

TRAVIS: The Traveler?

LAURA: Yeah. Did you guys always know that it was going to be Arty?

TRAVIS: Fuck no!

MARISHA: No, well, I feel like I had an inkling. I had an inkling. I wasn't afraid it was connected to the Chained Oblivion, though.

LAURA: Okay.

TRAVIS: Felt like a bad guy parading as a semi-good entity.

SAM: I didn't think it was the Chained Oblivion. I definitely thought it was something nefarious.

MARISHA: Yes, nefarious, yes!

SAM: Like there was an evil force that had been sort of puppeting you your whole life, and we were going to figure out it was evil and fight it away and then free you. But nope, he's just a doofus.

MARISHA: Yeah. (laughter)

ASHLEY: Well, wait, wait, to that because there was something that we missed that I wanted to ask. When did you decide to have Sprinkle be inhabited occasionally by Artagan. And then were there other NPCs that were also secretly Artagan?

MATT: Okay.

MARISHA: Oh, that's a good question!

TRAVIS: Oh shit.

MATT: The introduction of a crimson weasel, which doesn't exist in D&D lore, was intentional from the very beginning to be Artagan's anchor to her.

LAURA: What if we hadn't bought him? You just knew--

MATT: Oh, I knew you were going to buy that! There was no way you weren't going to buy it.

TRAVIS: You bought a blink dog, you bought a fucking owl, you were going fucking pet shopping!

MATT: And if you didn't buy it-- This was part what I had planned was even if you didn't buy it, you would've ridden away, and an hour later, it had stowed away in your bag. It would've, you know--

LAURA: I wasted money. (laughter)

TALIESIN: That's what you take away from this?

MATT: That's the Vex coming through on this. That's campaign bleed.

SAM: I think that's the Laura takeaway.

MARISHA: Your final takeaway of Sprinkle is what a waste of cash? (laughs) After everything he's been through!

TRAVIS: Immortal, stuck by you the whole time.

SAM: I spent 12 gold!

MATT: Yeah, so it was the idea of, like, because of the unique relationship with Artagan or the Traveler, he couldn't be around all the time, and it didn't make sense for him to be continuously focused on you because he had a lot of things going on with everyone else who he had taken into the fold, and dealing with his own crisis of the mess he had made unintentionally. That was his, "Here's your walkie-talkie band, where I can just check in on an app and be like, 'Oh, she's okay.'" You know, and occasionally come through her. So yeah, and I was planning to have more NPCs show up as Artagan references, but a lot of time I just forgot about them in the middle of the scene because that's what happens when you're playing. Yeah. But there were a couple of NPCs throughout the game.

MARISHA: Oh shit.

SAM: Was the minotaur one of them? (laughter)

MATT: I think there was-- I believe there was a child at one point in the game, I can't remember where, that was like green eyes, red hair. And there was the innkeeper in Shadycreek Run, who was Artagan guiding you towards Caduceus.

LIAM: Oh wow.

MATT: In that area. Another individual with pale skin, red hair, green eyes, who was very interested in what you were doing and guiding you in the--

LAURA: That was when we were kidnapped. And I think when we were watching that at home, I was like, "I think that's Artagan. I think that's the Traveler."

TRAVIS: I thought you were just pregnant, or just like post-partum.

MATT: I thought you were pregnant.

TRAVIS: Sure, it's the three hours of sleep we're getting every day. (laughs)

MATT: Yeah, I had intended to weave him into NPCs more than that, but just never got around to it. I think two's fine. It worked out as a fun reveal.

MARISHA: How about a fan question?

SAM and MATT: Let's do it!

SAM: I'm rolling.

LIAM: 19.

MARISHA: 12.

LAURA: Natural 20.

LIAM and MARISHA: Oh!

TALIESIN: Natural 20. (gasping)

MATT: Roll again.

TALIESIN: Roll off.

LAURA: Whose dexterity is higher?

TRAVIS: No.

SAM: "Whose dexterity is higher."

LAURA: Motherfucker.

TALIESIN: Nine.

LAURA: Three.

TALIESIN: Oh well.

MARISHA: How about you get the first one and you get the second one?

LAURA: I like it.

MARISHA: That feels good.

ASHLEY: Here we go.

TALIESIN: Okay, I'll take this one for Marisha, from @_alexanderdean_ (IG). from @_alexanderdean_ (IG). I don't know, there's a lot happening there that I don't know how to say. (laughs) (British accent) "How do you envision Beau moving forward with the Cobalt Soul?"

MARISHA: Ooh!

TALIESIN: "Would you picture her taking a leadership position, or would she want to continue adventuring and exploring?"

MARISHA: Well, Alexander, you sound super hot.

TALIESIN: (British accent) Thank you, I am.

MARISHA: Yeah, I envision Beau as now that she's gone through all of this with the Mighty Nein, and gone through this coming of age journey, because you know me, I love my coming of age stories. That she's in her Saturn Rising years now where she's like, "Oh, no, this is what I want to do. This is my career path." Like, when someone gets out of like, "Oh, fuck this day job, I hate it." And now they're like, "It's no longer a job, now it's a career." And I think Beau is willing to go in on that for a little bit. So, I mean, even in the pirate arc, I was like, "I don't know, maybe she'll still adventure and be loosely involved with the Soul." But I think after everything and the corruption in the Empire that we want to try and seed out, I think for a while, she's going to be a full working-class, shoulder pads, stilettos, pencil skirt. She's going to be a career woman.

ASHLEY: Yes!

LAURA: Amazing.

TALIESIN: You would've made a great pirate.

MATT: Top-end Expositor.

LIAM: Carly Simon, Working Girl.

MARISHA: Yes, yeah, well, kind of.

TRAVIS: Perm, get her a perm?

MARISHA: Kind of. Yeah, she would look great with a perm. But still maybe the half-up thing, but a poof.

LIAM: ♪ Let the river run ♪

LAURA: No, terrible, that sounds terrible.

TRAVIS: It's awful, but let's encourage it.

LAURA: No.

MARISHA: Well, Ash and I were talking a little bit at the end of game and--

ASHLEY: We had some textings.

MARISHA: Yeah.

MATT: Did you?

ASHLEY: We did!

MATT: Share!

ASHLEY: Yeah, we're planning of what our-- It's obviously-- Ending the campaign, we were together, and seeing where would we go with that. And Marisha being like, "What does Yasha want?" and "What does Beau want?" You know, and I think we talked about it and Beau wanting to be a career woman, and going hard with Cobalt Soul. And I think just Yasha being supportive, which we talked about at the end of the game, I think Yasha was really tired, and just tired of fighting, and sort of getting to the place of just being like, "I just want to just chill out for a while."

MARISHA: Yeah.

ASHLEY: We discussed some other stuff, which maybe, I don't know.

MARISHA: Yeah, we'll see.

ASHLEY: We'll see.

SAM: What is it? Tell us, tell us.

LAURA: This is the time, please. I want to know!

TRAVIS: Look at you guys communicating in your healthy relationship. (laughter)

ASHLEY: Yes.

MARISHA: Yeah. Yasha embraces her domestic side is more or less.

ASHLEY: Yeah.

MARISHA: I was like, "Will you? It's going to be a lot of long hours, this new job."

ASHLEY: It was really dramatic texting.

MARISHA: "I might be coming home late, but if you'll be there for me."

ASHLEY: Yeah.

MARISHA: "Keep a plate of food at the stove"

ASHLEY: I really think Yasha would be there for her. I really think that we just went with it, but.

TRAVIS: What does this Swiffer do?!

LAURA: That's amazing!

TRAVIS: What the fuck is this button?!

MARISHA: "Are you comfortable living in Rexxentrum? I know it's not, you know. Would you move there for me? I want to talk this with you, it's a big job opportunity."

ASHLEY: We talked about a lot of it.

MARISHA: Yeah.

ASHLEY: I think there was also another thing that I was like toying with for, I think. We were funny texting about it with other stuff, but I think eventually I feel like Yasha probably would have approached Beau at some point, or together they would have decided of maybe we want to adopt.

MARISHA: Yeah.

ASHLEY: Like, I think being the "Orphan Maker" was a weird thing for her, and I think she wanted to repair that.

MARISHA: Yeah.

ASHLEY: So, yeah, that was something we discussed of like I don't know, maybe. In so many ways. We were like, "Should we adopt Kiri? Should we, like--"

MARISHA: We went full-on. We were like, "Maybe Kiri is happy with the Schusters and her life in Hupperdook. "

ASHLEY: "Maybe she's happy there."

MARISHA: "We wouldn't want to uproot her life. She's just about to start middle school. That's such a big time for her."

TRAVIS: (as Beau or Yasha) "You want to come live with us?" (as Kiri) "Go fuck yourself!"

MARISHA: Yeah. "Okay, all right, no, you're happy here."

ASHLEY: But I mean, it's just like the two of us to be like, "What do we want? What do we want for our lives? Babe, anything, anything."

MARISHA: "Anything, I just want to be with you. I just want to be supportive."

ASHLEY: Yeah.

MATT: So sweet.

ASHLEY: The best, the best.

SAM: Love it.

MARISHA: Could you imagine like Yasha in like a little apron, though? And I'm like, "Honey, I'm home."

ASHLEY: In your pencil skirt and your shoulder pads.

LAURA: Be much better parent than what you were exposed to.

MARISHA: Exactly.

TRAVIS: If Fjord goes and tries to fix the orphanage, maybe we're like, "We'll take two."

SAM: Take the orphans.

ASHLEY and MARISHA: Yeah.

SAM: The Orphan Taker, yeah.

LAURA: Give them a better life.

MARISHA: The Orphan Taker?

SAM: I like it.

ASHLEY: Yeah.

MARISHA: That's so cute.

ASHLEY: I feel like that's the unexpected path, but I feel like there's a part of Yasha that's like, "I'm going to be a mama now." Just take everybody in and take care and protect.

MATT: I'm a big fan of just like the, on top of your guys' relationship, but like the Beau and Caleb sunsetting as a team to take on the corruption in the Assembly. Because that's the thing, like I thought about how far we would explore that in our game.

LIAM: Mm-hmm.

MATT: We've all talked a little bit like on an independent basis about like, what you wanted out of the game, where things were going, what your characters interests were, and what things you wanted to resolve. And I knew that the immediate element of your arc, the constant fear of Trent Ikithon was going to conclude to a certain degree sooner than later.

LAURA: (cackles)

MATT: And so the moment you guys took those necklaces off, I was like, "This is going to be interesting." But the rest of that job, I was thinking about if, would that be a worthy post arc to pursue? But so much of the group, the characters had already gone through major arcs, and had gotten to a point of comfort, and rest, and completion with their story. And to go after the Empire and the Cerberus Assembly is such a big goal that would take a lot of time and a lot of careful bureaucracy.

MARISHA: Yeah.

MATT: It would've felt weird to try and shoehorn that in as an arc, where only some of the group is really heavily, fire-ly invested in it.

LIAM: It's really a Beau and Caleb thing.

MARISHA: Yeah. And we're filing so much paperwork, and we're going to court hearings. It's super bureaucratic.

TRAVIS: There are delays, and delays, and delays.

MARISHA: Getting permits. You know how tough that is.

LIAM: Role play zoning.

MATT: Yeah, but I like that as a sunsetting gesture of--

TRAVIS: Awful.

MATT: As this major story comes to a close, their story just begins the intense process of really tearing things down from the inside. And who knows, maybe one day we'll want to come back and explore something like that down the road. But I don't know, I thought it was a fun beat that you both ended that on.

LIAM: It'll be interesting to peek in in some way, like five years later, 10 years later and see where things are at.

MATT: Mm-hmm.

TRAVIS: I got one on resolving. The only creature I think in both campaigns that we fought twice, but didn't go and kill or get killed by was that fucking white dragon--

MARISHA: Oh my god!

TRAVIS: Gelidon.

MATT: Oh yeah, yeah.

TRAVIS: Like--

LIAM: That's a one-shot.

TRAVIS: Can you tell us now what the glowing shit in his cave was?

MATT and MARISHA: Her.

LAURA: It was her.

TRAVIS: Her. Fuck, I did this every time! Her.

MATT: Yes.

TRAVIS: In her cave?

SAM: We found some tech, right?

MATT: Correct. Gelidon's lair, like a lot of dragons' lairs are just collections of things that they've either stolen victoriously or recovered that seemed to have worth and interest to them. And as you know, Gelidon hunts to the north around Eiselcross and that various region. So at some point in the past, Gelidon had uncovered, whether intentionally or in passing, some Aeorian weapon that still had some functionality to it, and brought it back to her lair, and kept it as like a trophy decoration. And if anything she really felt was an intense threat, maybe try and see if it's functional, but namely just a decoration.

SAM: How big was it?

LAURA: The Pew lights.

MATT: Yeah, kind of, yeah.

LAURA: It was two big purple pulsing things, right?

MATT: Yeah, two big lights. It was encased in mostly ice, because the whole lair's under ice. But beneath it, you could see this metallic structure with the pulsing lights behind it. That was just this--

TRAVIS: Were they like those proximity things where the end of the campaign that would go off if you got too close to it?

MATT: No, no, they were two parts of an arcane cannon. Not unlike the one that you guys saw in the Happy Fun Ball, but a larger siege version of that.

TRAVIS: Oh.

LAURA: Would we have been able to put it together and use it against her?

MATT: If you had somehow found, if you had somehow investigated deeply what it was about. Come up with a clever way to get her out of her lair in time to figure it out and set it up, then, yeah, you could have totally used it against her.

LAURA: Dang.

TALIESIN: That wasn't going to happen.

LAURA: That was not going to happen. No, we were in too much terror and panic to ever--

TALIESIN: Yeah.

TRAVIS: Ancient dragons live forever. We'll know about those for campaign 3.

SAM: Yeah, I figure our characters will just be like, "Let's go! Let's go hunt white dragon for no reason."

LAURA: Can I ask my fan question that I rolled the 20 for?

MATT: Oh yeah!

ASHLEY: Yes, yeah.

LAURA: Okay, good, because I really want to ask this. Matt, from @Jasonlee007 on Instagram. "What would have happened if the party had released Halas?" Because I've been dying to know this one, too.

TRAVIS: That's great, that's a good one.

MATT: That's a good question. Halas, purely selfish entity that would have been thankful that he was released. Whether it be in his body or whatever body he took.

LAURA: Yeah, would he have tried to take over one of ours?

MATT: Oh yeah, until he got back to his body, and then after the body was gone, who knows what would've happened? Whether he would have transitioned into the automaton that you had created or something else. Like, he would've found a body and gone off. But Halas would've just gone. Halas would have been a campaign three problem. (groaning)

LAURA: Shit!

TALIESIN: You love doing that, and we keep making it not happen.

MATT: That's okay.

TALIESIN: Yeah.

MATT: That's okay. But that's part of--

TRAVIS: "Campaign three problem," what does that mean?

MATT: Meaning, it's a creature that has no interest in what you're doing here. And from Halas' perspective, you let him free. He's like, "Cool, thank you. I don't know who the fuck you are, but I have more things to deal with right now, bye."

TRAVIS: Being over thousands of years, or a thousand years.

MATT: Yeah, and then that becomes a possible antagonist force in the next campaign.

SAM: And Halas still exists, right? Just--

LIAM: Yeah.

SAM: -- is locked away--

MATT: Still locked away in a pocket plane.

SAM: -- in another dimension that no one knows about.

MATT: Mm-hmm.

MARISHA: We just left him on hold.

TALIESIN: I could spend a whole campaign in that ball, by the way, that's amazing.

LAURA: Oh my god, I know.

TALIESIN: That's like getting locked in a Tardis. I mean, like, I could spend a hundred years.

MATT: And you guys only saw like 20, 25% of--

SAM: Do you know all of rest of the ball? Like, did you have it mapped out in your head?

MATT: I have the loose structure mapped out. Just like a very, very loose idea. And then I detailed out the area that you guys were focused on.

TRAVIS: Yeah.

MATT: And had just enough for if you began to wander off that path, I could roll with it off the seat off my pants. But, you know, I haven't had time to flesh, nor a reason to flesh out the entire thing. But who knows, maybe if the-- Once again, such artifacts tend to trade hands off and through time, maybe there'll be opportunities in future games.

LIAM: Would you want to speak to why-- maybe you want to keep this secret in case you could use it later-- but why he was in the gem at that moment? Like, did he whoopsy himself in there, was it?

LAURA: I think that's what you said, he had accidentally.

MATT: Yeah, here's the thing, when you're a creature that is that powerful and you have created your own domain on this level, there-- sometimes, the simplest things get overlooked. And this was purely as part of this intent to create this ritual that required this specific kind of gem. And he went and had it custom made. He's focusing on all this stuff and was like, "Oh, I got this, built this thing. I now have this domain of this chained astral dreadnought. Within here's the perfect, hidden chamber for me to go ahead and create this ritual to further expand my domain and capabilities. All right, for this ritual I need this specific gem. I'm going to hire this person to make this gem. All right, I'm going to focus on this." And somebody that he really pissed off, somebody that was deeply, deeply against Halas, got wind of what he had commissioned, and essentially had this gem cursed in a very, very hard to read way. So when he tried to complete his ritual, instead it Magic Jarred him.

SAM: Nice.

MATT: It pulled his soul out of his body, and imprisoned it in this gem. And he was just stuck there, until somebody managed to find the ball and then wander into an astral dreadnought and check on him.

TRAVIS: Like you do.

MATT: Yeah.

LAURA: Like you do!

SAM: That's us!

MARISHA: So one--

LAURA: Go team!

MARISHA: One more big thing before we move on, because I know we're getting long on this chunk. But I feel like it's just too big of a thing to not address.

MATT: Okay.

MARISHA: Is Fjord and the intimidation of holding the sword over the Kiln and all of that connecting was Caduceus and the Star Razor and piecing-- It was a cool combination of the two of you coming together. But I don't know, I think I just am curious what would've happened if that would've all backfired.

LAURA: Like, if he had actually intimidated Uk'otoa instead?

MARISHA: Yeah.

LAURA: (whispering) Uk'otoa.

MARISHA: (whispering) Uk'otoa. Is there a chance that Fjord could've continued with Uk'otoa?

TRAVIS: Yeah.

MATT: It wouldn't have worked in the way that you would have scared Uk'otoa down and been like, "Yes, sir, Fjord, whatever you want, sir." Uk'otoa's not going to do that. But I think with a high enough intimidation check, it would have gained his respect for the will that you exhibited in the face of something that he knows is much larger than than you are. So, if anything, it would've made him go, this is what I was thinking in the moment, was he'd been like, "Okay, here are your powers back. Now I really want to keep you."

TRAVIS: Yeah.

MATT: Because at that moment, the situation was so strained that while there was still his hooks in Fjord, there was enough of that, "We don't like each other. Are we going to break up," type of a feel that it was just enough room for the Wild Mother to swoop in and go like, "Child, I've got you." If you had done that and really pushed that intensity with Uk'otoa, Uk'otoa probably would have wanted to keep you even more. And the process to the Wild Mother and conversely, to becoming a paladin and would've been a much harder process of now trying to absolve yourself of Uk'otoa. Because right now, Uk'otoa is less interested in you as a person and more interested in what you carry.

TRAVIS: That's fucked up, man.

MATT: The key to freedom.

TRAVIS: I'm a great person.

MARISHA and LAURA: (laugh)

TRAVIS: No, I think then that's totally it. If he'd gotten his power back, I don't think I would've done the Wild Mother paladin thing at all. Like, he just wanted them back. The first time was in Xhorhas. And I told you at the break when the powers were gone, and I ran outside and was looking in the rain puddle or whatever, I was like, "What if I just leave?" And you were like, "Do you want to?" And I was like, "Kind of," and he was like, "Then do it and we'll see where it goes." Because I was just going to go put the third orb in and summon Uk'otoa, and get my fucking powers back.

MATT: Yeah.

TRAVIS: And it was just a matter of what-- I can't remember what happened after the break. But they came back relatively fast. That first time was like a threat, like a shot across the bow, and I was like, "Oh shit, I need to have a backup plan if that happens again." Like, what do I do to try and leverage my powers back? And it didn't work at all, but I was also like, "I don't like this position. Fuck this, this deal sucks. Let's just wipe the slate." (laughs)

MATT: Yeah, it was fascinating.

MARISHA: I mean, that's still in reflection on the entire campaign and maybe our show, one of the coolest things. And I don't know. I think I just, the balls of throwing away your class is just fucking amazing, and I don't know if I could do it.

LAURA: Dude.

TALIESIN: Into a literal volcano.

TRAVIS: I mean, we always leave those little holes in our backstory for him to come in and do his thing. And so I was just like, "What if you just wipe it?" (laughter) Then see what happens.

MARISHA: Hard drive reboot.

TRAVIS: Yeah.

MATT: That was great.

TALIESIN: Best purchase ever.

TRAVIS: I love the red button, even if it means delete.

LAURA: So proud of you for--

MARISHA: Yeah.

TALIESIN: Well, I mean, it's the secret gift of Caduceus Clay. He explained it to you at one point of how fate works, of the notion of watering the tree, because you know what kind of tree it is. And maybe it's going to-- Which if you actually think about it for 20 minutes, is basically Clay going, "This is a D&D game." Like, literally he's just, he's just explaining that this is a D&D game. So yeah, if you believe in that kind of fate in this world, you understand it's like Animal Man. You know exactly that you're in a comic book. So it was like, "Oh, a broken sword. Well, clearly I need that." Yeah, it was just. (laughter) Clearly, clearly this is important, or else it wouldn't have been for sale.

TRAVIS: Like a ring of fire resistance.

LAURA: Exactly, like a ring of fire resistance. It will pay off in the end.

MARISHA: Okay, we have to move on because there's a lot to get to. But first, Mica Burton spills the tea on her time in the campaign. Rule number one, evil dies. Rule number two, roll the clip. (laughter)

BRIAN: Hello. I am here with undoubtedly the fan and cast favorite guest of Campaign 2, Mica Burton. Hello, Mica.

MICA: Hi, Brian.

BRIAN: Let's talk about Reani, your character from Campaign 2, that you later named your cute little puppy after.

MICA: Yes, I did.

BRIAN: Tell the folks at home about your inspiration behind her.

MICA: Hilariously, my inspiration was just I don't want to play something that I always play in Dungeons & Dragons. So let's play a race I've never played, a class I've never played, a personality I've never played, and an alignment I've never played, and see what happens, which--

BRIAN: Across the board, yeah.

MICA: Across the board. In hindsight, it was hilarious because I was nervous as hell, obviously, because it's Critical Role and I was like, "Let's just go outside the box, let's just do something I've never done before." And then day of I sat down at the table and I was like, "(drawn out) Fuck." I don't know what I'm doing.

BRIAN: Yep.

MICA: But I think it was fun to flex my role playing muscles and do something super, super different and try aasimar, try a druid, you know? It was awesome.

BRIAN: And also, too, sitting there at that table with those nerves knowing that everyone there has also felt that moment. Usually like the first five episodes of a campaign or whatever. Just like, what is my character? What am I doing? Why did I... Yeah.

MICA: It's so hard because I thought I was only going to have one episode. So I was like, "How do I get comfortable and used to who Reani is right now. I have five minutes. Go." And I think that was the most nerve wracking part of it. Honestly, like, what she sounded like came to me at the table.

BRIAN: Ah, yeah.

MICA: You know, what she personified came to me kind of at the table. Because I did a lot of backstory and a lot of work on who Reani was, but I thought that if I got too much in my head I would fuck up and then everybody would hate me. So I was like, some of it has to be spontaneous. Don't preplan everything.

BRIAN: Do you have a favorite moment from the episodes that you were on that sticks out? And if Reani has a different favorite moment, than then share that with us as well.

MICA: Oh, no, our moments are the exact same which was sleeping with Beau.

BRIAN: I figured. (cheering)

MICA: I knew, since I'd known Marisha, I was like, I know that Marisha plays a disaster lesbian. And the only thing I had in my mind was like, Reani's bi, I'm sure Marisha plays a hot character, I really hope that they get along. And through the three episodes, we kind of naturally got along and Reani's disaster bisexualness ended up crushing on Beau.

BRIAN: Yeah.

MICA: And so I think that having all of the stars aligned on my last episode, that Beau returned her advances, even if it was just for one sweet night, I was like, yes.

BRIAN: Mm-hmm.

MICA: If I could complete anything in my stint at Critical Role, it would be fucking Beau. So, you know.

BRIAN: Is there anything about Reani that didn't get revealed during the game that you want the cast and the fans to know?

MICA: I think it kind of got more revealed during Talks, but I want everybody, especially the cast and everybody playing those characters, to know that the Mighty Nein changed Reani, a hundred percent. Like, she came out of the gate with this black and white morality, follow your god and listen to no one else. And this, this and that. And just in the three episodes of hanging out with them, knowing how they think, feeling attracted to Beau, knowing that... Like, also seeing Caleb and feeling like there's something behind his sad eyes. Because she's very intuitive. And having that talk with her angel--

SAM: Joke's on her: there isn't.

MICA: -- that things are okay, it's okay to not completely follow him to a T. She makes some morally gray decisions now. Like in my mind, she went on to probably do some things that she may not have done before meeting them. You know? She doesn't think all evil deserves death necessarily, but she does want to still continue to fight crime and do good.

BRIAN: Yeah, yeah. Makes sense. It makes sense. What do you hope Reani's legacy is?

MICA: I mean, other than fucking Beau. I hope her legacy is just kind of like this bright spot of sunshine in an otherwise, you know, can be kind of harsh campaign.

BRIAN: Yeah.

MICA: You know, I always see people drawing Reani with sunflowers and she has the sparkles and she's very peppy and she has a high-pitched voice and she's blonde, you know? So I think that in our literal world of sadness and darkness and the campaign's world of sadness and darkness, I hope that Reani was this bright, sparkly sunflower of gay energy that brought the smiles to people's faces. of gay energy that brought the smiles to people's faces. And I don't know, also she took on a dragon and lived. So like that's a dope legacy. Like, she...

BRIAN: That's true.

MICA: She is-- I don't wanna toot my own horn, but Reani is a big part of the reason that they survived that encounter.

BRIAN: I think somebody probably wrote a song about her.

MICA: I would hope so.

BRIAN: It's canon. It's in there.

MICA: It's canon. They boned. Let the girls bone.

BRIAN: #ItsCanonTheyBoned.

MARISHA: I'm just everyone's trophy, just crossing them off my list.

TRAVIS: Oh, jeez.

LAURA: Wow.

MARISHA: Just talk about me some more.

LAURA: You're everybody's favorite moment.

MARISHA: I am everyone's legacy.

TRAVIS: Oh god. (laughter)

TRAVIS: Setting up franchises.

SAM: She made interesting points, many interesting points. But one was that it's interesting that the Mighty Nein, who are these morally ambiguous characters and who make bad decisions all the time, influenced a lot of characters in positive ways even though we weren't making... good decisions?

MARISHA and TRAVIS: Yeah.

SAM: But I think our bad decision-making showed all these other characters, guest characters and NPCs and stuff, that it's okay to mess up or something.

MATT: Or something.

TRAVIS: Or what not to do.

LAURA: That's a good way to look at it.

TALIESIN: Somehow we were not a cautionary tale. We should have been a cautionary tale over and over again, but we kept not being the--

MATT: I wouldn't say you avoided being a cautionary tale, but it definitely didn't become your calling card.

TALIESIN: No.

LIAM: Certainly a catalyst for change.

SAM: Yeah.

TRAVIS and MATT: Yes.

MATT: I agree with that.

MARISHA: Wasn't there a pretty good fan breakdown halfway through the campaign, probably over a year now, about the Mighty Nein are the Robin Hoods of D&D campaigns? We did morally gray things, but we also more or less always had the best intentions of the civilians and the populace, and I mean, point in case, how many people, how many NPCs were supposed to be villains that we turned into our friends? It was more than just Essek.

MATT: That's true.

LAURA: We're the definition of chaotic good.

MARISHA: Yeah.

SAM: We also killed a bunch of innocent people.

MARISHA: We did.

LIAM: We mangled a horse.

MARISHA: We did, oh my god.

TALIESIN: Yeah.

MARISHA: Pour one out for Waterloo and Toilet.

SAM: Toilet and WC.

MARISHA: And WC.

SAM: Yeah.

LAURA: Buddies.

SAM: Horses we killed.

MATT: Look, man, having mounts in this game is rough.

LAURA: Yeah.

MARISHA: What happened to our moorbounders?!

LAURA: (gasps) Our moorbounders!

MARISHA: Wait, we heard them get eaten by harpies.

LAURA: Was that the moorbounders? No.

MATT: That was the horses.

MARISHA: No, those were horses.

MATT: Those were horses in Campaign One.

MARISHA: Wait. (laughter)

TRAVIS: On the way to Whitestone before the behir.

LAURA: I really thought that was this campaign.

MATT: That was six years ago, Marisha. (laughter)

TRAVIS: Oh no, oh no.

MATT: We've gone back, we've cycled back.

SAM: Where's my horse from Campaign One?

LAURA: What did we do to these horses? Because I totally thought they were eaten by harpies.

MARISHA: We totally murdered these horses. How did these horses die?

SAM: I think they just died.

TRAVIS: They were just horses, they just died.

TALIESIN: Like every mount in every D&D game, they died of starvation or got eaten.

TRAVIS: Natural prey for everything.

LAURA: Didn't our moorbounders just get set free? That's what happened.

MATT: I have to look back.

LIAM: I'm sure they went to a farm in Xhorhas.

MATT: I don't know.

TRAVIS: I don't remember what happened to the fucking moorbounders.

MATT: I've got a lot to concentrate on. The whereabouts of your pets, not my problem.

MARISHA: We left the moorbounders in Bazzoxan, right? We traveled across the Barbed--

LAURA: Yeah, yeah, and we left them.

MARISHA: We left them and never came back.

LAURA: I think they probably gnawed through their ropes.

MARISHA: And just fucked off.

LAURA: They were wild.

MATT: After a while, some nice couple in Bazzoxan were like, "Well, nobody's picking them up. I guess they're ours now."

TRAVIS: And then the moorbounders ate them.

MATT: Ate them, yeah, yeah.

TRAVIS: "Come here, little--" (screams) (laughter)

MATT: The weirdest Unsolved Mysteries episode ever.

SAM: We also befriended yetis.

MATT: Yeah.

SAM: And owlbears.

LAURA: Yeah.

SAM: All kinds of friends along the way.

TRAVIS: And a particular witch.

TALIESIN: Yeah.

SAM: That's right.

MARISHA: Oh, this was the Isharnai arc.

LAURA: Oh, yeah.

MARISHA: This was the cupcake.

TRAVIS: Right. (laughs)

MARISHA: Another epic moment.

LIAM: Is Isharnai ever going to snap out of it, realize what happened, or just send postcards to Jester?

LAURA: I always wondered and we never really checked. I did send her cupcakes.

MATT: You did.

TRAVIS: Does the spell keep going forever?

LAURA: Yeah, it just takes hold until they-- But she's so powerful, who knows?

MATT: Hags keep things close to the chest.

LAURA: (nervous laugh)

SAM: What does that mean?

TRAVIS: The campaign's over.

MATT: I don't know, what does that mean?

LAURA: I know, I'm terrified that's how Jester ends years later.

MATT: All I'll say-- The campaign is over, you're right. All I will say is no, the hag is no longer under the spell.

LAURA: But she still loves Jester!

SAM: She likes Jester.

LAURA: We're friends. She loves her cupcakes.

TRAVIS: I don't like creepy--

MATT: There is a level of respect and interest in being outmaneuvered, but that doesn't absolve their attention. So yeah. In my mind's eye, yeah, they'll probably cross paths again.

LAURA: Okay.

ASHLEY: Ooh boy.

TALIESIN: You have a nemesis.

LIAM: Maybe don't pass through there again.

ASHLEY: Yeah, just leave it.

MATT: Yeah, she totally has a nemesis, yeah.

LAURA: Oh my gosh.

LIAM: Frenemy.

LAURA: The anti-Jester is the hag.

TALIESIN: Yeah.

LAURA: That's exciting.

TALIESIN: It is.

LAURA: Well, I still keep sending cupcakes. So what about sending messages to her? Would she have let on if I was sending her messages? Like, "So what are you doing? Miss you so much." (laughter)

MATT: She probably would've responded in kind, just as you would have expected.

LAURA: Okay. Oh no.

TRAVIS: "I'll see you when you least expect it."

LIAM: Can we talk about--

MATT: (as Isharnai) "Enjoy your breakfast."

LIAM: -- in late campaign, we kept seeing corrupted woods in many different places. So what's the connection? Is there a connection between the corrupted wood in the Aeorian ruins and in the woods?

MATT: Correct, yeah.

TRAVIS: Blooming Grove stuff?

MATT: Yeah, in the Savalirwood. The areas where more of the lore would unveil weren't necessarily pursued and I like the idea of there being, I don't like every answer being answered. I like there being intriguing tidbits that you find and if you go down that rabbit hole, you might find more information. But also it adds more to the uniqueness and mystery of it. But in my head, there was likely an Aeorian experiment during its heyday that was trying to create purely arcane plant life. Like imagine creating a type of bush or algae that in its own right could be consumed or processed and almost in a residuum type of way, enhance someone's magical capabilities or be utilized to replace components, expensive components for spells and so there was a lot of odd experimentation with creating this new form of life that continued to fail and continued to fail and they got closer and it continued to fail and before they had a chance to complete and actually succeed in their experimentation, Aeor was destroyed. But there were facets, relics of this research that were still maintained and locked, untouched in this time and some of these relics found their way southward or fell out of the city while it was being destroyed and so one of these artifacts from this research period was uncovered or brought to Molaesmyr, the major elven city in the Savalirwoods and along with it was some sort of arcane detonation. I'm keeping the the details of it vague because like a lot of things here, they are plot threads like the Wildemount Guide and I want people to be able to explore them in their home campaigns without feeling like now I'm completely wiping away whatever they created for their story because now it's canon. But something was uncovered and accidentally detonated in Molaesmyr and when it did, it unleashed one of these failed experiments that didn't necessarily create new life, but it just corrupted it wholly and that changed the entire forest and it would have spread even further beyond that, but since then, the destruction of Molaesmyr, some of the sentinels and druids left over that went Bysaes Tyl, which is one of the refugee elven cities that was developed thereafter from the ruins of it, they sent sentinels out to cut the woods back and to keep it from spreading beyond while they try and figure out maybe some way to reverse it. But it's still such an aggressive thing that doesn't get enough funding and interest from the Empire and it's utilized by the Shadycreek powers as essentially a fog blanket from being pursued by Empire interests and those that would stop them in their criminal activities.

TRAVIS: They won't pursue them into that area because it's so fucked up?

MATT: Yeah. That's why Shadycreek Run is built within the edge of the forest. So if anyone tries to come in, they're like "Follow us in."

LIAM: Still sounds like "Shitty Creek".

TALIESIN: Was it just a dimming of the power of the Blooming Grove was why it was getting eaten up, or?

MATT: Well, essentially, as this corruption continued, it began to gain power or began to find unique ways to mutate and push past the protective boundaries of the Blooming Grove and began to push into it and would eventually take it, in which all presence of the Wild Mother would be completely dissolved from within there. All the life would be taken over and it would have just become another part of the Savalirwood and this leftover, empty ruin of a once sacred place and so it was through the Wild Mother's visions and through your doing and the help of the Mighty Nein that you were able to find a way to essentially reverse and keep at bay this corruption and might even end up being in my mind, depending on what Caduceus wanted to do or interact with, what you discovered and placed there with the Wild Mother might be a key to maybe eventually reversing the corruption in the entirety of the Savalirwood. But this is just the first step--

TALIESIN: That's exciting.

MATT: -- in that process. Once again, another long-term goal, should he want to do it or he interfaces with an elven scholar that comes there being like "How is this still here?" And Caduceus is like--

TALIESIN: I don't know. (laughter)

MATT: And then together, you maybe help them out. But that was the ideas behind that corruption. It was meant to be this unanswered, fully unanswered mystery alluded to, elements discovered, and a fun little lingering facet.

TALIESIN: Just terrible hydroponic experiments gone horribly wrong.

MATT: Yeah, pretty much.

TALIESIN: This is what happens when you try and hydroponic wheat grass apparently or something. (laughter)

TALIESIN: Magic wheat grass, whatever.

MATT: Yep.

LAURA: Can I ask you a question, Marisha?

MARISHA: Sure.

SAM: Unrelated to the campaign, though.

LAURA: Completely unrelated. What are you doing later?

TRAVIS: Making out with Beau.

MATT: Keep it in the game! Why is everybody--!? No, I'm just joking.

MARISHA: You, too. (laughter)

MARISHA: Okay.

LAURA: You said on your date, I think it was on your date that you said "I fell in love with you in Kamordah" to Yasha.

MARISHA: Yeah.

LAURA: What was the exact moment? Is there an exact moment? Because you said it was, you know?

ASHLEY: I fell in love with Beau in Kamordah.

MARISHA: You fell in love with Beau.

ASHLEY: Yes.

MARISHA: Yeah, okay. I was like, what did I say?

SAM: But when did you fall in love with Yasha?

MARISHA: There's an element of a little bit of-- it's tough because Beau was attracted to Yasha out of the gate and was a pig about it in those early games because that's the only way that Beau knew how to have any type of meaningful romantic discussion was to just be like "I'm going to be a pig about this." But there was--

LAURA: (gruff) This is my love language.

MARISHA: Yeah. I think it was when-- she really started taking note when you talked about collecting the flowers for Zuela. Zuala. Zuala, and I should know the name of your dead wife. (laughter)

LAURA: You guys are going to get divorced.

MARISHA: Yeah (laughs).

ASHLEY: Babe, uh--

MARISHA: Yeah, seeing that and then there was this other moment later on that I think locked it in. When it was when you bought the dog statue in Rexxentrum.

ASHLEY: Oh!

MARISHA: Just something about that moment.

ASHLEY: Well, that's the sweetest.

MARISHA: Being in this magic shop and everyone's buying things. I think that's where we bought the celebones.

LAURA: Yeah, and the oops--

MARISHA: And the oops, oops-stones.

LAURA: And the chuckle dust.

SAM: The dealer who was actually three kobolds.

LAURA: No, no, no, no.

MATT: No, no.

MARISHA: That was great, though.

TALIESIN: I forgot about that.

LAURA: Okay, since I remembered it wrong, you didn't say it, you said it, well then, what was your moment?

LIAM: I love how aggressive that question was. (laughter)

TRAVIS: I want to know--

ASHLEY: (aggressive) I love you!

SAM: Just answer something! I don't even know what I'm asking, just answer it, god!

MARISHA: Talk about romance and love.

ASHLEY: Okay, so that moment when we spent time with your family.

SAM: Great family.

ASHLEY: Great, great fam.

MARISHA: Very healthy.

ASHLEY: I think I was just so frustrated with how your dad was with you and I was so, just me just so frustrated and I'm like, why is this happening? Why am I-- Why am I? Oh, because I love her. So I think it was just like, it was the beginning of that, like I need to protect my people, but this is a little bit more of a-- It's crossed over to something else.

LAURA: So did you fully recognize at the time it was love or were you like, I have this emotion and why do I feel protective?

ASHLEY: I mean, that's so hard to say.

LAURA: I know.

ASHLEY: You know? You know what I mean.

LAURA: It's not a switch for most people.

ASHLEY: Yeah. I think I was-- I mean, Yasha was clearly already feeling some kind of thing for Beau, but I think having that feeling of oh, I'm going to tell your dad off or do something negative in this moment because I have a lot of feelings in here and I don't really know what this fully means, but I think, I don't know, I think she probably went very thinking about it internally and was like: Oh, this is a lot. This is a lot more than I thought it was.

LIAM: (like Owen Wilson) Oh wow.

ASHLEY: (like Owen Wilson) Oh wow.

MARISHA: Yeah, I think I have a similar moment because I think learning about you collecting the flowers and learning the sensitive side of Yasha, and then you left because of the Obann stuff, when you got mind-controlled and there was the big debate about is it Yasha? Is it really Yasha, or is it something else? And Fjord and I were team like nah, fuck that, maybe she's evil. We don't know her. We don't know her at all. And Beau jumped on that train because she was hurt in the same way and Beau responds to those things by being like, "Fuck that person" if she's deeply hurt. And same thing, I had a similar reflective moment of, "Why am I taking this so personal? Ohh."

ASHLEY: Ohh. (like Owen Wilson) Oh wow.

ALL: (like Owen Wilson) Wow.

MARISHA: Let's ask a fan question.

LAURA: Why is it so much fun to do that?

TRAVIS: Fan question?

MARISHA: Fan question.

TRAVIS: Time to roll.

MARISHA: Hiya!

SAM: Fan question.

MARISHA: Natural one.

TALIESIN: Natural one.

LIAM: Five.

LAURA: Seven.

SAM: 16.

TRAVIS: Oh!

MATT: 18.

MARISHA: Oh! Matt.

MATT: Sam.

SAM: Yes, Matt?

TRAVIS: Oh, you shouldn't have.

MATT: @sapphicyooh, I believe I said that right or I didn't and I'm sorry, "How do you think Veth/Nott's relationship with the Nein and her family would have changed if she was incapable of breaking her curse? Would she have ever entertained the idea of leaving the group if she did not break the curse?"

SAM: You guys know this from playing with me. I'm always entertaining the idea of leaving the group. (laughter) That's my default thing.

TRAVIS: Get met out of here. (laughter)

SAM: No, I've talked about this in years past. I think in any campaign, if you really think about it, all the characters should leave. I mean, it's horrible. You're on a endless nightmare. (laughter) Of death and pain and anguish and near death. At some point, you should just leave. It's bad.

MARISHA: It's just toxic.

SAM: If Nott couldn't be changed back-- I mean, she was hopeful. She was confident that Caleb would find a way eventually once Caleb got strong enough. So I think she was in it for the long haul, but towards the middle of the campaign, I was definitely thinking about: All right, well, what if this doesn't happen? And I was playing this concept of maybe she'll just become full goblin and let it take over her. Not intentionally let it take over her, but after, I just assumed that if you're a goblin for so long that you start forgetting what it's like to not be a goblin and so I don't think she would have left the Mighty Nein because that wouldn't have solved anything. But I think she might've just given up or started to forget who she was in the past. Maybe even forget about her family and stuff.

LAURA: Oh wow.

SAM: Which would have been super sad. But luckily, Caleb is the (as Veth) greatest wizard ever and so smart and so handsome and figured out a way to do it. I also got worried mid- to late-campaign that the only way that Nott was going to be able to change is if Caleb found the power that he was looking for, which is the power to go back and change the past, go back in time and alter stuff. I thought that was maybe the way that he would have solved Nott's predicament and his own and that made me super scared because I did not want you to do that, to go back and change anything, even if it meant me. Because I just felt like all the growth that Caleb had made and all of the new person he had become, if he went back and tried to undo some of it, he would've accidentally undone all of it or undone the good bits and so that would've been an interesting choice. If you wanted to use that technology on me, I probably would've resisted because that was my one big thing I did not want you to do and I'm so proud of you in the last game there for burning your past. It was perfect.

LIAM: Let's talk about time travel because I will-- Part of me will always regret not having pushed that button because it's so fun to push the red button and I'd been planning it. I didn't know if I would do it, but I'd been planning it since the beginning of this campaign and had what I thought was a really good plan that would work and shared it with Matt over time because I'm like this is a crazy thing to try to go back and I'm not going back to kill myself. I have an idea to make everything work, but I want you to be aware of what I'm planning and every spell that I picked had a purpose. Widogast's Vault of Amber was designed to be a refrigerator to carry two bodies back with me.

TRAVIS: What?

LAURA: Oh wow.

LIAM: To replace my mother and father with. I wasn't dead set on this, but I thought there was a very good chance that Caleb would've been forced to fight Astrid and Eadwulf and they would be the dead bodies that I would bring back with me.

LAURA: Oh shit.

MARISHA: Dang.

TRAVIS: Unpack that one. (siren noises)

MARISHA: Yeah (laughs).

LIAM: After a while, that wasn't it. So I thought, well, maybe there'll be two bodies from the Aeorian Ruins or maybe I'll have Jester paint me two skeletons. All the illusion magic which Caleb did beautiful, lovely things with were so that he could disguise himself as a random student and create a teenaged Bren and walk up to the house and have the illusionary Bren talk to mom and dad and invite us in and break the news and then we were going to go outside and be invisible and watch it happen from the distance, so that they would realize that I was telling the truth and then I was going to take them to Tal'Dorei and have them live in Emon or something quietly and I was going to shove a bunch of jewels in their hands so they could take care of themselves and say: All right, come here every Tuesday every week of your life. Well, not every week of your life. In 17 years, start coming to this fountain and eventually I'll be here.

TRAVIS: Jeez.

LIAM: And it would've worked. It would've worked, but I couldn't--

SAM: (whispered) It wouldn't have worked.

LIAM: If I had done it earlier--

MARISHA: There's no way.

LIAM: -- he might have risked it maybe, but the bigger things got, and the bigger things got, and the bigger things got, there's a chance that Trent could've had someone speak to the bodies if he was that paranoid a person, to go speak to those bodies in the ruins and that could've fucked things up in some way and changed something somehow or something that I'm not even imagining.

SAM: So wait, you're saying that Caleb did not do it because of logistics, of practical concerns of it not working?

LIAM: No, the repercussions would have been devastating to the world.

SAM: To the world, but what about to Caleb? That's all that my character cared about was saving you from fucking with your past because you didn't need to. You need to look forward.

LIAM: Well, that happened, too, because when Trent fucked with Bren's mind and made him think that-- Bren was trying to be a patriot for his country. He was gung-ho to do whatever the Empire needed, going in not knowing that it would be that and his parents sent him off to do that and in his mind in present day, he did the opposite. He betrayed the people of the Empire. If you can't protect your own parents, if you're going to have children murder their parents based on lies to create hardened assassins and super-soldiers, what are we even fighting for? Ultimately, Caleb in his mind became a patriot not in the way that he imagined, but in the right way and while he'll never lose the wound that he caused himself because somebody abused him, undoing the government, fixing things in the present day and teaching responsibility and stewardship to people that would follow in the same path that he did is way more of a service to the people of the land that he's from. is way more of a service to the people of the land that he's from. So it was both those things, but then step back for a minute, as a D&D player, I like to go back and fucking try to mess with time and see what happens. Now my question for you is, now that I've spit all that out: What was it like just to have a player with a backstory and a goal What was it like just to have a player with a backstory and a goal that could potentially unravel everything? What were you thinking about all this time?

SAM: He already had that with Grog. Grog could unravel everything with just a single draw of a card.

TRAVIS: That was my bad.

LIAM: There was no planning for that.

MATT: That's a pretty good analogy, actually. It's scary as fuck.

TRAVIS: You're welcome.

MATT: So it was very much a-- I'm more invested in giving you the opportunity to make the choices that you want to with your character than I am to guard any sort of fear I have of how it may change the story that I've worked on, if that makes sense. So as we got closer to the end of the campaign, I'm not going to lie, I spent a lot of time reading research papers on time travel and diverging timelines, single timelines, trying to--

TRAVIS: Sure you did.

MATT: -- to shore up a lot of my past understanding of a lot of theories based around its capabilities or lack thereof and consider what avenues it may be and even enforce unexpected limitations on it that would cause you to have to think on your feet if you were to attempt it. Some of the earlier notes you uncovered in Aeor spoke of how some people came back and said it was very physically taxing to do so within their own timeline and others just didn't come back. So I wanted to definitely institute a challenge to it as opposed to just a thing that would happen. Whether that would be a stopgap to Caleb doing anything too crazy and unraveling the whole timeline or keeping it consistent enough because you only had a certain amount of time to do what you wanted to do. I was considering these checks and balances, but I knew it would be a late game opportunity and at that point, I wasn't going to deny something that you had long built your character to want to explore. So I just did my best to try and prepare for the possibility and when we crossed that bridge, see what happened.

LIAM: I've been scared the entire campaign of it, wanting to go toward it.

MATT: I was waiting in our final episode for you to pull a fucking card from the Deck of Many Things by actually time-traveling with Essek in that final bit. I was like all right, here we go. Let's see where this goes.

LIAM: I've rehearsed it in my mind--

MATT: Yeah.

LIAM: -- 50 times and I agonized for the six month's lead up to the end of this campaign and I think that Caleb did that to take it out of his own hands and Essek's and anyone else, but I also think that for the next 20 years, once a day, he'll go, "Maybe it would've worked."

TRAVIS: You broke the Elder Wand.

SAM: You fucked up.

TALIESIN: You could've found out that you can't travel back in time further than the point that you'd learned the spell. And then you're like: whelp, there's the wall.

TRAVIS: What were the other rooms in your tower?

TALIESIN: The Einstein Theory.

TRAVIS: I know we only saw two of them.

TALIESIN: You can't travel further back than when time travel was invented.

SAM: Half the letter that Veth wrote to her son was to you saying, "Don't do it." (laughter)

TRAVIS: Whatever you do.

LIAM: The rooms of the tower were, so his childhood home, which you guys saw. Number two was his first classroom at Soltryce, which would have looked like an old medical amphitheater where he just learned a lot of the ropes. Third was the dance hall that you guys had been to and if you stood in there long enough, you would start to faintly hear music play. Fourth was Astrid's bedroom at the Academy where the three of them and the two of them would spend nights together. That's right. Studying, too. Five, I guess I should flipped the order of these, but five was an abandoned tower at the Academy that Trent used when he was trying to punish them or tell them they were worthless. He would shove the three of them into this abandoned tower with no insulation or heating at night and they would be freezing to death and that's how they became intertwined romantically because they were huddling together just for warmth, trying not to die at night.

SAM: That's nuts.

LAURA: Buddies.

LIAM: No.

LAURA: "No."

LIAM: They just held each other through the night more than once and it just grew out of that.

TRAVIS: Sure.

LIAM: Not in that tower, but because of the intimacy that formed there. Six was a locked chamber in Trent's private estate outside of Rexxentrum where they got the crystals shoved in and where they did really awful, awful things.

SAM: And fucked.

LIAM: No. Seven was his sanatorium cell and like a tethered bed. It was just like a squalid, lonely hospital room. Eight was the one room podunk jail where Caleb met Nott.

SAM: Yay!

LAURA: Aww.

MARISHA: Good times.

LIAM: Nine was The Nestled Nook, which you saw.

TRAVIS: You talked to somebody up there. You talked to somebody one time.

MARISHA: In the jail cell.

LAURA: He talked to himself.

LIAM: To myself.

TRAVIS: It was just you?

LAURA: Yeah.

TRAVIS: Okay.

SAM: And Uk'otoa.

LAURA: Didn't you walk into the fourth room? It was the fourth room.

TRAVIS: The beginning.

LAURA: You walked into a room and you said you saw a crumpled bed or something.

LIAM: That was Astrid's bedroom.

LAURA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember.

MARISHA: Hey, Sam.

SAM: Did she have a poster of O-Town up? (laughter)

TRAVIS: O-Town. Wow! 98 Degrees and O-Town.

ASHLEY: I'm a butterfly.

MARISHA: You rolled-- (laughter)

ASHLEY: Was that O-Town?

SAM: "Liquid Dreams," I believe.

ASHLEY: Sugar baby.

MARISHA: Yeah, I'm a butterfly.

TRAVIS: ♪ Sugar baby ♪

ASHLEY: Is that O-Town?

TRAVIS and MARISHA: ♪ Come my lady, come, come, my lady ♪

SAM: It's not O-Town.

ASHLEY: That's not O-Town?

SAM: I don't know.

ASHLEY: Whatever.

SAM: Dani!

MARISHA: Dani, do you know O-Town?

SAM: Dani.

DANI: (muffled) That's what y'all need me for?

SAM: Yep.

TRAVIS: I want to see the best of your powers, Dani!

SAM: Dani, we need O-Town lyrics now!

MARISHA: Sam, you're up in initiative. Why don't you ask our last fan question?

SAM: Okay, Marisha. @PodlingSongs asks Marisha, "How does Beau feel about her little brother after meeting him?"

MARISHA: Now I feel trapped.

SAM: "Does she have any plans to remove him from the horrible home environment she grew up in?" Judgemental. "So he doesn't end up with as many problems as she does?"

MARISHA: Oh yeah. Oh man, little TJ. Yeah, definitely. Oh man, this is probably going to get too real for a second. TJ is loosely named after my younger cousin, who was also named TJ, but Thoreau Jr. ended up working. My cousin's name was Timothy Jr. and he died of an overdose several years ago, very young age on his dad's couch, it was ridiculous. He was 19, died of an overdose. So yeah, I unintentionally slash intentionally named TJ after my cousin and in a weird roundabout way, to answer the question, yeah, kind of. (sighs) Maybe it was a little bit of my own way to get a little bit of closure and I don't even know if I realized I was really doing it at the time. So there was the moment even when I was thinking about leaving as Beau or if, with Isharnai and everything and if Beau didn't make it, that's why I had that conversation with Veth and it was like "Hey, if anything ever happens to me, you're a mom, you've got a kid that's the same age as TJ or at least close to it. Will you watch him? Will you take over? Will you do, I don't know, just something?" So yeah, there was definitely a time that I was considering, totally projecting as Beau if I could have done something to maybe save him out of this fantasy hell that he was in. Doing my own rewriting of time and nothing that I got to do in real life. I didn't get to save TJ or pull him out of the shitty circumstance that he was in. Yeah. Yeah, and I didn't put that much weight into it in the moment or in backstory writing, but then in the moment, I think it just hit me a little bit harder. Because I was anticipating going in with resentment to the whole situation, like: Fuck you, Mom. Fuck you, Dad. Fuck you, new kid. I don't know you either; you're not my brother. And then it was just this whole totally different reaction of--

LAURA: Oh no, I love you.

TRAVIS: Uh-oh.

MARISHA: Yeah, oh no.

TRAVIS: Uh-oh.

MARISHA: Exactly, uh-oh, I love you, oh no. Need to protect, that type of thing. Oh god, you are my flesh and blood and there is that deeper connection there. So yeah, what ended up starting off as just this own way in my head to honor my cousin and let him live on in this weird fantasy crossover world ended up translating into those ways a little bit more. Anyway, that got way heavier than I was anticipating.

TRAVIS: I love it.

LIAM: You can invite him to Rexxentrum for two weeks and he can never go home.

MARISHA: Yeah, I kind of envisioned that. Let him get through school. When you're an adult, I want to be your cool older sister and I'll show you the big city when you're old enough. I'm going to take you out drinking. I'm going to be like your first beer, you know? Whenever, you know, it's a fantasy world. So I'm sure the drinking age is like 14, you know?

MATT: I'm not commenting. (laughter)

SAM: You never asked.

TALIESIN: You're going to godmom him.

MARISHA: I'm the godmom, yeah.

MATT: I'm not specifying any drinking ages in Exandria. They vary from place to place and not by my choosing.

LIAM: Some people live to be 2000, so it's-- and some only 80 years.

MARISHA: It's hard to say.

MATT: Yeah, in Kraghammer it's, like, four.

MARISHA: Depends on where you're from, yeah.

LAURA: (laughs) "It's, like, four."

MARISHA: Well, on that happy note!

SAM: Yeah!

MARISHA: How about we move on?

SAM: Sure.

MARISHA: We're in the home stretch, you guys. This is the final arc we're about to talk about. But before that, we have a very special, very special guest interview for you. Take a look.

BRIAN: All right, I'm here with the legendary Chris Perkins, obviously the fan and cast favorite guest star of Campaign 2. Chris, tell us a little bit about your favorite moment or your favorite part about guesting on Critical Role Campaign 2.

CHRIS: (high-pitched) Hello, Brian. Dying.

BRIAN: Absolutely. I think that's pretty much it. I think that's all we had for you today, so thanks. Thanks for coming on, Chris. Appreciate it.

CHRIS: I was three days from retirement.

BRIAN: Oh no. (laughing) Oh no. Wait, 14 days is retirement? (laughter)

CHRIS: I'd love to stay and chat, but I got to poo.

BRIAN: Okay. thanks for joining us, Chris. Appreciate it.

CHRIS: Bye!

MARISHA: Yay!

TALIESIN: That was amazing. (laughter)

SAM: Perfect.

TRAVIS: Come on.

MARISHA: His interview was about as long as his time in the campaign. (laughter)

MATT: I love it.

SAM: Wow.

ASHLEY: That's amazing.

TALIESIN: Burn bright, burn briefly.

MARISHA: Yeah. (laughs) Live Fast, Die Young: Spurt.

MATT: I'm so glad he was game for that.

LIAM: Yeah.

MARISHA: Oh my god.

LIAM: Better to spurt out than to fade away. (laughter)

TRAVIS: Is that the only time we've had somebody die, stand up, and walk out of the table, or walk away from the table?

MATT: Yeah, I think so. Well, no.

LAURA: Aw.

TALIESIN: Yeah!

MATT: Yeah, he wasn't even supposed to be a guest on the show. He was just there to do Between the Sheets and that kobold was just an NPC that you guys were going to encounter and he was here in the studio and I was like, "Hey, you want to be a kobold tonight?" (laughter) And he went, "What?" I handed him the sheet, he went, "Okay." And he made magic. I loved it, I loved it so much.

LIAM: I only regret that that I couldn't one-shot him before we had a chance to talk. (laughter)

MATT: There's always the next campaign.

TRAVIS: One-shot NPCs, I just need a PC. (laughter)

TALIESIN: And, out.

MARISHA: Well, we are now in the final arc of the campaign. I do have a huge question to kick this off with.

MATT: Yeah.

MARISHA: If we would have gone back to see Henry Crabgrass, how's he doing? (laughter)

MATT: I'm not terribly, I think I looked it up at one point, the lifespan of crabgrass.

LAURA: (gasps) Don't you dare.

SAM: He doesn't die. He can spread.

LAURA: Don't you dare. He lives on.

TRAVIS: He's got roots.

MARISHA: Yeah.

LAURA: Generations.

MATT: What I was going to say--

LAURA: Okay.

MATT: -- is upon looking at the lifespan of crabgrass, which I believe is a few weeks.

SAM: You monster!

MATT: You wouldn't find Henry Crabgrass, but you'd find later generations of Henry Juniors and other crabgrass that have spread--

TRAVIS: Henriettas.

MATT: -- spread and continued to speak on the joys of consent and the wonderful people that came by that one time in the rain and talked about things and asked how they were doing. So.

TALIESIN: You would've been a generational legend at that point.

MATT and TALIESIN: Yeah.

TRAVIS: Jester would have been a god to Henry at that point.

MATT: For like a square 15 feet, just in this one patch--

MARISHA: She hath returned!

MATT: -- on this hill.

TALIESIN: Yep.

LAURA: I think once every year, Jester goes back to that spot just to hang out with the crabgrass.

MATT: I dig that.

TRAVIS: And Fjord is worried. (laughter)

LIAM: (as a Crabgrass relative) Have you heard the good word of the old ones? (laughter)

MARISHA: It does feel like she's got to be their god, right, to Travis' point?

TALIESIN: How many generations between visit at that point?

MATT: (as a Crabgrass relative) "My grandpa told me about you. I didn't think you'd be this pretty." (laughter)

LAURA: Can I pet you?

MATT: "Consent, please."

SAM: Amazing.

MATT: I don't know where the fuck he came from.

LAURA: Best character ever.

TRAVIS: Final arc. We were getting eyes. What was the highest we got to, six?

LAURA: Five, I think.

TRAVIS: Five?

ASHLEY: Beau, you had the highest amount.

LAURA: You both had five eyes.

MARISHA: Both ended with five?

LIAM: You caught up with me in the battle.

TRAVIS: If you hit nine, what would happen?

MATT: Oh, hold on, I have a list.

TRAVIS: We had a text thread, by the way, you two don't know this.

SAM: Oh yeah!

TRAVIS: We had a text thread that didn't have you two on how to kill you motherfuckers.

MARISHA: What?!

MATT: What, are you serious?!

TRAVIS: We had a whole plan to take both of you out.

MATT: That's amazing!

LAURA: Who was going after who.

SAM: We assumed you were going to be turning on us.

TRAVIS: Go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep.

SAM: My plan, not to bring it back to the darker place, my plan was to make you think that your brother was there--

MARISHA: Yeah.

SAM: -- and in peril so that you would just be distracted and go after him.

MARISHA: That probably would've worked, yeah.

ASHLEY: That's why I was on Caleb duty.

SAM and LAURA: Yeah.

TRAVIS: Right.

ASHLEY: Not to protect, I was going to take you out!

TRAVIS: We switched it up.

MARISHA: You swapped roles.

LAURA: So Fjord would've gone after you, Yasha would've gone after you.

TALIESIN: I had a spell that would've pretty much ended you.

TRAVIS: You probably would've thought Yasha was going to--

TALIESIN: The one where depending on many you HP you have it's a different effect.

LIAM: Oh, right, right, right.

MARISHA: I respect the fuck out of that.

SAM: All right, if someone hit nine eyes, Matthew.

MATT: So, the path incrementally increased. So one was mild telepathy, 120 feet to somebody else with an eye. Darkvision at two. You can see through illusions at three. You can choose to peer into the ethereal plane at four. At five, you can scry into the eye of another person. Not their eyes, but another eye on their body.

ALL: Wow.

MATT: Which Lucien was using you both to keep tabs.

LAURA: Oh my god, yeah.

MATT: At six, you could sense all beings with minds within 300 feet of you. So anything that had a mind and a consciousness, you just at all times knew where, stealthed or not.

TRAVIS: That's nosebleed stuff.

LAURA: Oh jeez.

MATT: At seven, you get his ability, Rend Mind, where you can grab something and do 10d10 psychic damage, I think it was, the grapple. The thing that he killed Vess with and did to you, at seven. At eight, you can control the minds of other people with eyes.

SAM: Wow.

MATT: And then at nine you got the Cone of Antimagic. But at nine, you also became an NPC under my control.

SAM: Yeah, cool.

MATT: So when I said there was a timer, that's what I meant. Because eventually, if all of you started getting enough eyes, the tides would have begun to shift.

TRAVIS: That would've been brutal. We would've had to smoke one.

LIAM: Could there be more than one with nine, or is that just like, there can only be one, Highlander-style?

MATT: In this instance, there could be more than, yeah. You're not the Nonagon, you're not the chosen, but at that point, you are completely under the influence of the, what was then the Neo-Somnovem, or Cognouza Incarnate. So yeah.

TRAVIS: And reading the book jump-started it?

MATT: Yeah, yeah. You viewed the pattern.

TALIESIN: Did the amulets work at all?

SAM: Yeah, that was my question.

TALIESIN: Yeah, with Lucien.

MATT: With Lucien, it worked when Cree tried to scry on you, but when it came to the eyes, it was less divination and more of like an astral connection. So the necklaces did not necessarily prevent Lucien from looking in on the two of you.

TALIESIN: All right.

TRAVIS: It did half its job. Trent didn't know for a while.

LAURA: Yeah.

MATT: It kept Trent at bay for a long time.

LAURA: Clutch.

TALIESIN: That'll do.

MARISHA: Yeah.

MATT: Man.

MARISHA: So Cree ended up having five eyes, or did she also have nine eyes?

LIAM: She had five, I thought.

MATT: She had five, I think, yeah.

MARISHA: So what did he-- I was afraid that after a certain point, the threshold would get lower and lower and eventually I could just, you know, Molly-- Lucien could turn any of us into a Cronenberg monster. Is that what he did to her?

MATT: She was something else. She was--

MARISHA: What?

MATT: No, meaning in the sense that she had been someone bound to him so strongly and for so long that this had less to do with the eyes and more like when she was brought within a moment of her life, he was able to unleash the chaos of the pattern within her. Which means, in theory, technically, if any of you had nine eyes, or a large amount of eyes and then went to zero and he had the inclination, maybe you could have done that. But that would have been unfair from a balance standpoint. It'd be like, "Oh, you took a lot of damage and now you're a flesh beast in the final battle for no reason that you could have expected necessarily." That would have been a little unfair, from a balance standpoint.

TALIESIN: Long-term exposure kind of thing.

MATT: Yeah, it was intended to be more of like, because Cree was so connected for so long that it enabled him that extra step.

TALIESIN: Did Cree have the tattoos when we met Cree? Did Cree have had eyes tattoos that we didn't see?

MATT: Oh, yes, but they were hidden.

TALIESIN: Okay, cool.

MATT: Correct.

TRAVIS: They were hidden?

SAM: Does it matter where the eyes are or is it sort of random?

MATT: No, it's random. Legitimately, I was just trying to pick interesting places every time they came up.

TRAVIS: That wasn't the gooch.

MATT: I know some people were-- That you know of. There were some in the final battle I didn't specify.

SAM: Yeah.

TRAVIS: Okay.

MATT: Lucien's like, "Ugh!"

LAURA: Scrying into it.

MARISHA: Scry-- Yeah, yeah, yup.

SAM: It's so moist, so moist and dark here.

MATT: And salty, it's salty, vinegar, uh. But no, I just started just choosing locations at random because often there wasn't a pattern to it and often I didn't expect an eye to happen or things like that, so I just threw it out there. Which is so funny when I said forehead for you. I didn't even think about Scanlan in season one. And then I saw that in some of the fan art, I was like, "Oh fuck, that's really funny!" Completely unintentional.

SAM: It's my mission for campaign three.

MATT: Completely unintentional.

SAM: Just got to get an eye.

LAURA: Got to get that eye.

MATT: But yeah.

TRAVIS: What about in Aeor, Steve Rogers? What was the damn robot's name?

SAM and MARISHA: Devexian.

TRAVIS: Devexian. What ever happened to that guy?

SAM: How's he doing?

MATT: Devexian's doing great. Devexian managed to bring about and rouse a number of other long-slumbering or dormant Aeormatons.

LAURA: And they had a big automaton orgy.

MATT: You have now officially re-introduced the Exandrian version of the Warforged into Exandria.

LAURA: Sick!

TALIESIN: Whoa!

SAM: Wait, where did we lose Devexian? In Eiselcross!

MATT: Yeah, in Aeor.

SAM: Wow.

MATT: And with that, there is now a slew of freshly awoken Aeormatons, many with new memories that are walking out into the icy fields of Eiselcross to find their future and fate in the world.

TRAVIS: About how many, would you guess?

MATT: I don't know.

TRAVIS: Fuck.

SAM: On a scale of one to Terminator. (laughter)

TRAVIS: Yeah. On a scale of one to T-100.

LAURA: Oh my god.

LIAM: Other Aeorian stuff. And maybe Luxon stuff, too. First, the blue bubbles.

LAURA: Yes, the blue bubbles!

LIAM: What was up with the blue bubbles?

ASHLEY: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

MARISHA: Oh my god.

MATT: Okay, so they were created by an errant attempt at protecting the city in its moments of destruction. As with Aeor and Eiselcross, magic is strange, especially around Aeor specifically. And there were a number of wards, protective wards that didn't function as intended and then when the ruin crashed, they malfunctioned through something-- a combination of odd, localized arcane bullshit, essentially. localized arcane bullshit, essentially. And I'm trying to think of the word and it escapes me so bullshit's what I went with, there you go. But what it did was it sealed a random assortment of people around the city into stasis indefinitely. As to how these fields can be brought down, there are ways to do so, but they're extremely challenging to ascertain. And I'm being vague on it because it is another plot thread left in the Wildemount guide for those who explore Aeor and I don't want to define something that people can interpret for their own campaign in different ways.

LIAM: And is it 100% from the city? I had always wondered if the woman in the theater had tried to do it herself, or if she was just going like, "My people!" and then she got bubbled by the city.

MATT: Well, she got bubbled in the middle of doing something else. The bubbles weren't her creation, but she was in the process of trying to protect people.

TALIESIN: I regret not breaking her out of the bubble. I bet that would have been a terrible, terrible mistake.

MATT: It would've been interesting. I mean, who knows? Maybe they would have become a friend. Maybe they would've become an enemy. Maybe they would've rapidly aged and turned to dust in a matter of seconds.

ALL: Ooh!

MATT: Who knows?

LAURA: Cool.

MATT: But that mystery remains in the ruins of Aeor.

LAURA: Ooh, what if when we let all the spirits free, they came out of stasis in the bubble, but they're just trapped in the bubble for eternity?

MARISHA: Oh, that would suck.

TALIESIN: In theory, it's better.

MARISHA: Yeah.

TALIESIN: I would rather be in the bubble than in the city, to be fair.

MARISHA: For eternity? Oof.

LIAM: Can we ask for anymore clarity on the Luxon

LIAM: Can we ask for anymore clarity on the Luxon and its dispersal through the world, or is that still shrouded for future generations?

MATT: Sure, we can talk a little bit on it, yeah. So as it stands, the Luxon was an entity, is an entity that existed pre-pantheon, pre-founding of Exandria, essentially a being of light that was born at the point of creation of the universe as it may be. Couldn't understand itself. It just knew it was and was light and heading into darkness. And occasionally it would pass by other things of light. And eventually it came upon this lonely rock. And it felt lonely and this rock seemed lonely, but together maybe they could do something. And the Luxon began to embrace this world. And the world began to, essentially, fight back in a weird way. It gave its warmth and light to this planet and then the elements begin to erupt. This is all the creation myth of the Dynasty and the Luxon idea. But essentially Luxon wanted to understand itself. It was like, what am I? And if I can bring life to other things, maybe it can tell me what I am. You know, I'm only defined by the observations of things outside, if I don't know what I am. So if I can create things that could look back and be like, you are this, then I can know what I am. But there were the issues of this elemental chaos, this planet that began to just roil with nothing. There was nothing there that it could grab ahold of and speak with. There was no consciousness here. So it essentially broke itself up and scattered itself throughout the world in hopes that one day-- Gesundheit.

LAURA: Thank you.

MATT: Gesundheit. One day, something would find and reassemble it. And when it did, it could have then asked the question, "What am I?" This could be a long philosophical conversation, but this is the really, really truncated version of it. And so each of these beacons that are found, the Luxon gets closer to being reassembled.

TRAVIS: Jeez, that's some long-game shit!

TALIESIN: Wow.

MATT: And who knows how many beacons there are in existence?

TRAVIS: Pre-pantheon?

MATT: Yeah.

TRAVIS: Pre-Calamity?

MATT: Yeah.

TRAVIS: (screeching) Matthew! Brain bubbles, I don't need it.

MATT: Which, if I'm going to be perfectly honest, it can be a very beautiful time of enlightenment. It could be like an Evangelion where Rage takes up the spirits and goes away. Who knows? There's a lot of theories that I like to keep vague about on what that might be in the long-run lore of Exandria of what the Luxon being reborn would mean for the world. It could be a very good thing, it could be a very bad thing, who knows? But that mystery is what keeps the Dynasty excited to bring about this new place of enlightenment and these Umavi, these perfect souls are the ones that are essentially through the life cycle, the continuous of becoming a perfect soul, can be the ones to impart this knowledge into the Luxon once it's born. And conversely, people who are on the outside of the culture are like, this is almost a doomsday cult. If they're going to build their god and then end all life?! What's the end game here, you know?

TRAVIS: That's some big Prometheus shit.

MATT: Yeah, so that's very much the vague, esoteric philosophies behind the Luxon and the Dynasty. Yeah.

LIAM: So we were toting around in the sewers, a mote of an ancient sentient light. a mote of an ancient sentient light.

TALIESIN: Primordial of the cosmos. Primordial intelligence.

MATT: Correct.

LIAM: In a suitcase.

MATT: Correct.

SAM: That's us. That's what we do.

TALIESIN: Love it.

MATT: So that's that.

MARISHA: That's a lot to unpack.

MATT: You asked me, you asked me.

LIAM: I didn't think you were going to answer.

MARISHA: How about a fan question while we unpack that? (cheering)

SAM: ♪ Fan question of the week! ♪

MARISHA: Yeah, let's roll.

LAURA: ♪ GIF of the week! ♪

MATT: That's a six.

MARISHA: While we roll, I would like to thank Tricia geekgirl7924 for more or less asking the, "Who are the people in the blue domes?" question that we already got to.

LAURA: Hey, check it out, nice!

MARISHA: Shout out to you, Tricia, you were ahead of the curve.

SAM: 15 over here.

LAURA: 17.

TALIESIN: Four.

TRAVIS: Natural 20. (gasping and clapping)

LAURA: Have we gotten natural 20 on every fan question?

SAM: Yes, because the fans are all natural 20s.

TRAVIS: That means something.

TALIESIN: Where were these rolls?

MATT: We do have a 40% chance of--

SAM: Shut up.

LAURA: Still.

TRAVIS: This question is for Laura. It's from--

LAURA: Me?

TRAVIS: Yeah. Caeodos? C-A-E-O-D-O-S, oh my gosh. "The Traveler told Jester that he would be able to take her to other realms. Do you think in the future Jester would go on an adventure to other rounds with Artagan and if so, where do you think they would visit first?"

LAURA: Oh man. I mean, yes, definitely.

MATT: I think so, yeah.

LAURA: Yeah. I mean, she really wants to go to the Feywild. She really, really wants to see it. I know, at least I imagined that when they were growing up together, he would entertain her with stories of the craziness that happens there. And so she just has all these fantasies in her mind of what it must look like and be like, so she really wants to see it.

MATT: Which is hilarious when you consider that you telling Artagan, "Take me to the Feywild!" is like meeting a person in the big city who got out of the small po-dunk town. You're like, "Take me to your parents' house in the middle of Minnesota." He's like, "No. There's a warrant there for my arrest, I'm not going back.

LAURA: Yeah.

TRAVIS: What about afterwards? What about after?

SAM: What other realms?

LAURA: I don't know.

SAM: I don't actually know all the realms. I don't know how to play D&D.

LAURA: Can we go to the water world?

SAM: Sure. Kevin Costner.

TRAVIS: Didn't we get an invite to the--

LAURA: Where would Arty want to-- Yeah, we have an invite to go see that djinn in the water world.

MATT: Yep, the marid, Xundi.

TRAVIS: Oh yeah, the dude that was powering the steam.

MARISHA: In Nicodranas?

LAURA: Which, by the way, I totally thought when I was creating my backstory that my dad was a djinn. I thought he was a genie that had turned himself human-looking to go and got entertained and it ended up being a thing. And so I was just completely--

SAM: Based on what?

LAURA: The backstory that I wrote.

SAM: Oh, you put that in the backstory?

LAURA: I don't know if I did, but in my brain I was like, "Yeah, that makes perfect sense." I don't know, did I write it in my backstory?

LIAM: Are you my mother?

MATT: I think you alluded to something, but you didn't specifically say, "My dad was a genie!" I don't think you were that overt about it.

LAURA: Yeah, so yeah, I just didn't expect it to be The Gentleman. Side note that doesn't have anything to do with it. But yeah, wherever he would want to go, Jester would be pretty much up for it.

MATT: Honestly, the Jester and Artagan relationship is very much crossing into Doctor Who territory. Straight up, "Where would you like to go?"

LAURA: Oh my god, that's amazing.

MATT: It's straight up what it is.

TRAVIS: Well, and I know Fjord's going to, there's stuff to do with Darktow and to stay on the sea. But what is Jester going to do?

LAURA: In her later life, what would she want to be?

TRAVIS: Yeah. I mean, you can chill with me if you want, baby, but you know, you're crazy.

LAURA: I know, you guys have this whole text thread and me and Travis haven't talked at all about like what our future entails.

TRAVIS: I know, I feel like we fucked up, except we live together, so.

LAURA: Yeah. (laughter)

MARISHA: Step one, moving in.

LAURA: I have this text thread, but he's just not responding to it. I don't know what it means.

TRAVIS: I'm literally in the same room.

SAM: Do you think they'll stay together?

LAURA: I mean, I think so, yeah. I think they definitely are, would they? What does Fjord think, are they staying together?

TRAVIS: Oh totally, but I mean, you have things you will want to do.

LAURA: Well, yeah. I mean, I imagine that Jester would be an artist. I mean, I imagine that Jester would be an artist. Like, she would just keep getting better at painting. I want her to open an art gallery in Nicodranas and paint giant murals of all of the crazy landscapes that she's seen in her life, of different battles, of things that people wouldn't believe are real, but they all are.

TALIESIN: On buildings you don't own and have not gotten permission to paint.

MARISHA: Yes.

LAURA: I mean, partially.

TALIESIN: Banksy shit.

LIAM: Like Banksy.

LAURA: I know, that's kind of what I was hoping for.

MATT: Jester going Banksy makes all the sense.

MARISHA: I'm so here for this.

TRAVIS: Super famous.

LAURA: I think I texted you that I wanted her to have all these really, really rich clients that she just fucks with because, yeah.

MARISHA: They're like, "I want a portrait," and you give some sort of modern art piece that's just a bunch of shapes and you're like, "That is a portrait."

LAURA: There you go.

MATT: I was going to say, until the one day, your most vibrant piece gets purchased for too much money. And you're excited to meet the seller and a young woman with short blonde hair whose hands are behind her back shows up. (as Celia) "I'm here to pick up my piece." That'd be cool.

LIAM: And then she stabs you!

MATT: Yep. She sharpened the end of it into dick shiv. (laughter)

MARISHA: Dick shank!

MATT: You just got divved!

TRAVIS: There's a sharp dick!

LAURA: I have a new nemesis!

TRAVIS: That was a dick shiv.

LAURA: Oh my god, this is amazing.

TALIESIN: Baba Yaga and gold dick.

LAURA: I feel like this is like a Birds of Prey movie waiting to happen. They become a girl group of crime fighters.

MATT: This is amazing.

LIAM: What was in Alpha? What was an A?

SAM: A?.

TRAVIS: Yeah, the question mark.

MATT: It was another Aeorian ruin.

LIAM: Aww!

TRAVIS: But why did it have a question mark?

MATT: Because it was a newly discovered one. Meaning, like--

TRAVIS: They hadn't gone down there yet.

MATT: Yeah. The previous ones were confirmed ruins where people had already delved and was confirmed. The question marks next to A were because somebody recently had discovered what they believed to be an Aeorian ruin, but it hadn't been confirmed enough to be included as a confirmed destination on the map.

TRAVIS: Would those have been far more dangerous to go down into?

MATT: Yes, because that one had been barely uncovered and would have probably--

LAURA: It kills me that we didn't get to explore all of it.

TRAVIS and MARISHA: I know.

MATT: Yeah, believe it or not, I don't flesh out each of those locations unless you go there, because I have my limits and I like occasionally having time to eat and sleep.

SAM: Don't spoil the illusion. We expect that you do all this stuff and if you don't tell us, we just will believe.

MATT: Right, but occasionally I also want to remind people out there, be human. Self-care.

MARISHA: I have a question that I have been dying to ask since it happened in the campaign and you even said, save it for the wrap-up. It's also a fan question from Ayden Mitchell. What would have happened if Essek and Caleb failed on that check?

LAURA: Oh my god, the--

MARISHA: With the mini beacon, with the little blinking rock.

MATT: Oh, with the dunamis gem?

MARISHA: And he was like, we're going to try and reverse time and get our one little refresh. And we're all going to hold hands and kumbaya.

LIAM: Yeah, it was a natural 20 and a super high roll from Caleb, but if it had been two and a three from us.

LAURA: It was a 40 DC check.

MATT: It was super high. If you had failed it, what it would have done was it would have sent all of you one day forward instantly. So as opposed to getting a day of rest in a second, you would've had no rest a day later.

ASHLEY: Oh, god.

MATT: Which by then.

TRAVIS: Two points of exhaustion?

MATT: Well no, no time would've passed for you, necessarily. But you would be a day later, which means Lucien and Cree would have already gone to Cognouza, they would have already installed the gems, and you would have gotten to the Astral Sea to realize that it's not there and would have discovered that it's already made its way to Exandria. And would have been visible in the stratosphere--

SAM: ♪ Makin' its way! ♪

MATT: -- and beginning the process of converting and consuming.

LAURA: That came down to a roll? We could've been--

TRAVIS: Whoa!

SAM: If the city came back to Exandria, was there a path for us to try to fight it?

MATT: The same encounter, yeah. But it would have been steadily stronger, but you would have had the process now of gathering allies and really getting eyes on this. Because it's one thing if you're telling a few people "We're going to fight this weird city in the Astral Sea," and most people are like, "Cool, good luck with that." If you're like, "We're fighting that thing right there that is visibly devouring the world," then you can call in the horns and people to help out. But at that point also it becomes a much bigger threat. You guys basically cut it off in the just after the emergent stage, like the egg had just hatched, if you will. That would've put you in a place where it would have been adolescent and hungry. So it would have been a very different circumstance.

LIAM: Let's hear it for the nerds.

MATT: Play with time magic, weird shit.

MARISHA: I've got the IFB in, so I think only I could hear. It was Dani under her breath just now going, "That would've been really bad."

MATT: It would've been cool, it would've been really cool, but it would've been really bad.

SAM: Did Dani whisper to you about O-Town yet?

TRAVIS: It was Crazy Town.

MARISHA: Oh yeah!

SAM: Crazy Town was the band.

ASHLEY: Crazy Town.

MARISHA: Crazy Town.

SAM: Not the same as O-Town.

MARISHA: Hang on, Dani, what were you going to say? You were about to impart some Lore Keeper knowledge.

DANI: The check had happened after Cree was dead, and after y'all had already taken away one of the threshold crests.

MATT: Oh, right, right. Then...

SAM: Really? We were already in the city?

ASHLEY: Wasn't it?

LIAM: That's how I remember.

MATT: That's right you were, you were.

SAM: How did we have the time travel thing? Oh, because they brought it with them.

LIAM: We had them all with is.

MATT: That's right, it wasn't before you came through. You guys were actually in the city.

SAM: So it still would've skipped a day.

ASHLEY: But it was after we had already seen Molly, right? No.

MATT: Right, no, that would have been set for when you guys first acquired it in the city, which is when I had set that path. Then, at that point--

SAM: City still would have had the beacon.

LAURA: You wouldn't have been able to get back, though.

SAM: Oh, because we got rid of one of the beacons.

LAURA: One of the threshold crests, unless he had more than we knew about, which was possible.

MATT: No, no, that's a valid point.

LIAM: He could create anything he wanted out of dreams.

SAM: But he could've gone back in that day, gotten another threshold crest.

MATT: There could've been-- I wouldn't have wanted to cheat you out of the process of denying one of the crests, necessarily.

SAM: Bad stuff would've happened.

MATT: Yeah, I would've had to figure it out. Sorry, that setup was what I had written in my notes when I had first introduced that time gem as what would have likely happened. But it happened much later in the process, so I would've had to figure out what would have transpired at that point. It probably would have been less dangerous, but still would have been complicated.

MARISHA: I mean, you would have had a day on us. A day in those-- 24 hours is a lot of time in those moments.

TALIESIN: There's a lot to do with a living city in 24 hours.

TRAVIS: Can I ask a question? Those statues that were all out in the open wastes, that were seated in that circle, the circuit.

MATT: Yeah.

TRAVIS: Where the hell did those come from, what the fuck were those?

MATT: It was just some weird old magic.

TRAVIS: Okay.

LAURA: That was the seer magic, right? That's how I aged.

MATT and TRAVIS: Yeah.

MATT: Yeah, that legitimately was an ancient ritual site from the Founding, as old as the gods that just, in my mind, just appears at places in the world at odd times. And whenever that question is asked in that-- what's the word I'm looking for-- that transaction is given, and it grants whatever the request was, then it just disappears, and then appears somewhere else in the world spontaneously. It's very Phantom Tollbooth-esque, but yeah.

LAURA: Ooh, we might find it again.

ASHLEY: Wait, what were those big old-- in the Barbed Fields? The huge spires that we couldn't figure out what they were, but they were... Did those mean anything?

TRAVIS: Yeah, the big spikes?

ASHLEY: Yeah.

MATT: That's just part of the Barbed Fields. Those were created during the Calamity, during some of the greater battles between the Betrayer Gods and the Prime Deities. Some of the forces were unleashed in ways that essentially flash-eroded the landscape, and left behind only the hardiest of stonework, and in some cases blasting upward in these curves. Imagine these things were much thicker in time, and then over time, began to just erode away into these thinner spires. And some of them were just jagged bits that were jammed up from impacts in the ground.

LAURA: Cool.

MATT: A thousand years before, it might've looked a little more jagged, a little more thick rock. And now, it's just begun to erode away and leave these weird hook-like spires and points.

MARISHA: Mmm. (tablet thuds)

SAM: Ah!

MATT: That's how I envisioned it to be.

TRAVIS: The ice spider in the cave that we never fought.

MARISHA: The ice spider.

MATT: That bitch was just dead.

TRAVIS: It was dead?

MATT: Yeah, it passed away in its cave.

SAM: Oh, because we sealed it in?

LAURA: No, it was already dead.

MATT: It was already dead. It was just staring forward because it had just died in its own nest, and you guys saw it and snuck out.

LAURA: Was there stuff in the room we could've totally gotten?

MATT: Yeah, there was stuff in there.

TRAVIS: Nobody thought of that.

MARISHA: (panicked groans)

TRAVIS: Oh, it didn't move. Seal it up.

LAURA: Ugh!

MARISHA: Just a dead corpse of a spider.

TRAVIS: It was Bernie.

MARISHA: Yeah. (laughs)

TALIESIN: I mean, it was a spider.

TRAVIS: It was.

MATT: To be fair.

MARISHA: Giant.

MATT: It was very nice of you to entomb it and give it a proper burial.

LAURA: Oh!

MARISHA: Did you know? Is that what you thought?

ASHLEY: I thought it wasn't doing anything. Because it was one of those that was like, "You're still-- You're not doing anything. Are you looking at me? No, you're not. Oh, you are, but (groans)."

MARISHA: Yeah. (laughs)

ASHLEY: Oh, that bothered me.

SAM: Would Trent Ikithon have come to help us?

TRAVIS: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We went around on that one a lot.

MATT: Ooh. Yeah.

LAURA: He would have?

MATT: Yeah.

TRAVIS: Yeah, but...

SAM: But, like, sincerely?

TALIESIN and TRAVIS: But.

MATT: Not sincerely like, "I'm here to help you." But he would have accepted the invitation, and probably brought along Astrid and Eadwulf. Out of genuine interest in one, learning more about you all directly, especially based on the dinner that you had, and basically, being able to directly psychologically profile each of you to continue to work into Caleb's psyche, and essentially reinforce the trauma, and convince him to begin to question himself, and wish to entwine himself with the old pack, if you will, and to use you all as a guide towards some of these secrets in Aeor that you seem to be stumbling towards or uncovering. So yeah, he would have definitely agreed and gone with it, and it would've made for an extremely gross, extremely tense, very unique dynamic as you went in, and likely, depending on how you reacted, or if there was too much of a threat, or a point where he decided that this was no longer going to be a beneficial venture for him and his crew, would've staged an ambush, not unlike the one that in the final episode was. His eventual plan was, "I'm going to get Caleb to break and come back, or show me that he's a liability, and wipe him out."

LIAM: I pitched that idea to Essek because Caleb believes that Trent, if they survived what they were doing, Trent was going to make a run at him eventually, and better that it happened in an icy field in the open, and not in his tower, and not at the Sanatorium, and not in any of his haunts where he knows the battlefield. And there was reason to believe that Astrid and Eadwulf were going to fall the way they did. So I thought better to get all three of them away from the established world that they know. It'd be easier for Astrid and Eadwulf to turn on him way far away from home. So it seemed like we could kill two birds with one stone.

LAURA: In that final battle, when I used the Charm spell on Astrid when I was controlling her, and you said there wasn't really a big change, was she fully planning on betraying him from the get-go or...

MATT: She was following the winds.

TRAVIS: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yep.

LAURA: Okay.

MATT: It was-- Astrid's a complicated character.

LIAM: I love those two.

MATT: Me too, they're yeah. I'm a little bit sad they didn't travel with you only because it would have made for some drama.

ASHLEY: Let's play it again. (laughter) Let's just do like a--

TRAVIS: Load a save point.

MATT: Yeah. Load the old save.

ASHLEY: From the save point, and then just--

MARISHA: Yeah.

LIAM: Back it up!

MATT: Astrid still definitely has a connection to Caleb, Bren, as does Eadwulf, but it's like having an old flame you haven't seen in 10 years, and you've changed so much in those 10 years that it's just that memory of something you once had is there, but you're not who you were.

LIAM: No.

MATT: And so--

LIAM: That was never going to get anywhere.

MATT: That was never going to be a thing unless Caleb really went in on it. But it was-- Yeah, she is-- She has goals. She wants to climb that ladder. She has her reasons. And she hates Trent, as anybody who has undergone what you all did does, but also knows how useful it is to be that close to him, until either he helps her get to a level that she couldn't accomplish without him or he shows enough of a moment of weakness that she can take it from him. And she was full-on going along with the destruction of you all until the tides changed and then switched. So by the time you cast that spell, it just further cemented where she was teetering.

LAURA: Nice.

LIAM: Also, a related question, now this is backing way up. In my backstory, I left something kind of vague, and I don't know what it really ended up being in your mind, but a woman snapped Bren out of it after 11 years in the Sanatorium. Who did you decide that was?

SAM: I think it was Trent in disguise, no?

MATT: Trent wanted you to believe that. I believe it was-- I believe it was genuinely a boon from the Moon Weaver. It was this individual who through faith, through a moment of clarity, a lucid moment, which this individual did have from time to time, but in this lucid moment, saw your sadness and recalled some of their clerical past, and freed you from that mind state before succumbing to it. But of course, Trent claimed it as part of his manipulation because he wanted you to believe that he orchestrated everything in your life. Because if you begin to feel like all you've done was stumble forward through his plan, then why is there any reason to buck against it?

LIAM: Hats off to you because after first contact, not early in the campaign, but first solid, in-the-open contact, you had me thinking like, "Well, whatever I do is he was gaming it to be, so what do I do?"

MATT: Yeah, to an extent, some of it was.

LIAM: Job well done.

MATT: That's how he works. That's why he's such a horrible, horrible, horrible person.

LAURA: The one villain we won't try to convert.

MATT and MARISHA: Yeah.

LAURA: So fuck that guy.

MATT: Yeah, fuck that guy. He's one of the worst of the campaign. But yeah. Like a lot of very abusive people in power, will take actions to control the lives and thoughts of others, and then take credit for things that they have no involvement with to even further solidify that idea. That's exactly what he was trying to do.

TALIESIN: Ew.

SAM: Is there any special meaning to the fact that I was given a handkerchief from Doolan Tversky before the campaign began?

MATT: So if you look in the Player's Handbook.

TRAVIS: Wow.

MATT: If you look in the Player's Handbook, they have a list of trinkets you can roll for, like one out of a hundred. And I think you rolled for that when you were creating your character to see just what random trinket you started the game with, and it was a handkerchief with a random name monogrammed on it. I think it's in the Player's Handbook, I'm pretty sure. I think there's one here. Just want to pull it up because I'm now wanting to make sure that I'm thinking of the right thing.

MARISHA: In the OG Player's Handbook?

MATT: Yeah.

MARISHA: The PHB?

MATT: PHB, yeah.

LAURA: That's why I had a sequined glove with me all that time.

MARISHA: Oh!

TALIESIN: What?

MATT: Yep.

LAURA: That was my random thing I rolled.

MARISHA: Oh my god.

TRAVIS: I love that he can turn to the page with-- He just grabs a place to open--

MARISHA: Almost precision, yeah.

TRAVIS: -- And there are five such lists there.

TALIESIN: It's a blank book.

MATT: Yeah, you rolled an 81, a purple handkerchief embroidered with the name of a powerful archmage.

SAM: And that was one that was a powerful archmage.

MATT: That was a member of the Cerberus Assembly, and not one of the ones that is steeped in evil corruption. I'm not saying they're good, necessarily, but they're more of one of the quirkier members of the Assembly which--

SAM: But there was no crazy backstory on how I got it. It was just it changed hands a bunch of times.

MATT: It changed hands a bunch of times, you stole it off somebody or picked it from a place.

SAM: Cool.

MATT: Somebody might've, like,-- Something like it dropped on the ground during an event in Zadash like, "I got the archmage's handkerchief," and they keep it in their house on a shelf unit.

SAM: I robbed them.

MATT: And you just stole it from them.

SAM: Sure, sure, sure.

MATT: Not knowing.

TRAVIS: I got one from way back.

MATT: Okay.

TRAVIS: Episode 19, the orc that was in the house as we were traveling, he had all the tanned hides and stuff. What was his deal? Was he my dad?!

MATT: No, he wasn't your dad. But he was a retired warrior for the Empire who had earned his way up, and then, honestly, hated its political structure and hated the bigotry inherent, hated just the history around it, and decided to just build a cabin out in middle of nowhere, had enough, had earned enough respect within the Empire that nobody bothered him, and he just lived the simple life out there. And I placed it there as a possible encounter and if Fjord had interacted with, to become a possible mentor figure or to help him learn about embracing his heritage because you had written in Fjord's backstory about how he was picked on in the orphanage for his lineage and stuff. So I wanted this to be a possible mentor character if that ever happened, but you just hid the whole time.

TRAVIS: I did.

MATT: So you never interacted.

TRAVIS: The blacksmith popped up later in Xhorhas, though.

MATT: Well, the blacksmith became my, well, he never got this character, so I'll take some of these threads, and these themes, and carry them over into this NPC. Sorry.

TRAVIS: Very thoughtful.

LAURA: Sorry, microphone.

MATT: Sorry, microphone, I apologize to the mic a lot. I tend to bludgeon them a lot. Yeah, so that was the intent.

LIAM: So Kris Kristofferson was in there, and you just walked on by.

TRAVIS: I fucking-- I thought about that forever afterwards.

TALIESIN: Yeah.

TRAVIS: I was like, "Why didn't go in?!"

LAURA: Did you have a whole backstory for Fjord's, like how he ended up in the orphanage? Was that stuff that you had already decided and we just never got to that thread?

MATT: I decided in vague bits, but also I didn't want to flesh it out too much unless he wanted to pursue it.

LAURA: Right.

MATT: I followed your lead in this, and we talked about it a little bit, but I never got the sense that Fjord was super eager to get the details of where he originally came from as much as he was about the people that made him who he is.

TRAVIS: Yeah.

MATT: And so, there's always a curiosity, and if you really wanted to pursue it, then I was willing to flesh that out. But I always gauged, based on our conversations, that Fjord was a little more immediate and forward thinking about who he was, and who forged him in his formative years. No matter who his father was back then, and I think the theme, a couple of times in the campaign, that doesn't make you a father, that makes you a donor.

TRAVIS: Yeah.

MATT: The father's the person that was around to help make you who you are, and for him, that was very much Vandran, so. That, to me, was more important to flesh out.

TRAVIS: Great.

SAM: In his service to the-- I'm sure we have to wrap this up soon. In his service to the Matron of Ravens, has Vax'ildan ever seen any or witnessed any of our exploits of the Mighty Nein?

MATT: Probably.

LAURA: Oh my gosh, he was around, and we didn't know it.

MATT: I mean, none of you had necessarily the connection or the impetus to look for a being who walked between the planes like that. But I would imagine some of the more important villains that befell you, those whose spirit wasn't locked in an existing pact like Avantika and such, were probably ushered across by a masked figure clad in black that just walked between where these eyes could see.

LAURA: Did Eadwulf serve the Raven Queen?

MATT: Eadwulf did, yeah.

LIAM: Yeah.

LAURA: Oh, Vax is probably around for Trent's death then.

MATT: Trent's not dead.

LIAM: He's not dead.

LAURA: (gasps) Trent's not dead!

LIAM: His hands are glued together.

SAM: His hands are glued shut and so is his anus, I think.

LAURA: Oh, in my brain.

TRAVIS: But in Vax's timeline.

LAURA: In my brain, we killed him because I hate him so much.

MATT: You?

MARISHA: Yeah.

MATT: You thoroughly ruined him.

LIAM: Yeah.

TRAVIS: Yeah. He's going to wish he was dead.

LIAM: Yeah.

LAURA: Is that going to haunt Caleb forever to know he's alive? Or do you feel good about the fact--

LIAM: No, I mean, there's no "good" about it, but the right thing was done, and that's-- He would rather be dead.

SAM: The collar's around his neck, but you can turn it on and off, yes? Can you take that?

LIAM: It auto-tunes him. (laughter)

TRAVIS: He has a little remote, so he's always like

SAM: Eternal T-Pain.

TRAVIS: (garbled speech)

TALIESIN: Got some LEDs in it, lights up depending on the music.

LAURA: We just throw celebones.

MATT: I was going to say, just glue a few celebones to it.

TRAVIS: (garbled) That's right, turn around.

MATT: Party tricks.

TRAVIS: -- Garmin.

MARISHA: Yeah.

MATT: My god.

MARISHA: Turns into a Garmin?

SAM: Who's on the Tal'Dorei Council?

MARISHA: Who is on the Tal'Dorei fucking Council?

MATT: Do you want this to be the last question?

LIAM: Yeah, I think.

MARISHA: Sure, any other burning questions?

LAURA: Well, I have one more.

MARISHA: Go.

LAURA: Did Marion and The Gentleman?

MARISHA: Oh, yes!

LAURA: What becomes of them?

MATT: I think that they--

TRAVIS: Oh no.

MATT: -- Re-sparked their romance, and spent some time together, and then began to really realize that their lives have diverged to a point where his lifestyle is dangerous, and he is intrinsically tied to it. And so, they went their separate ways. She went back to Nicodranas, and he stayed there. Then orchestrated his false demise a few years later, and left his crew under the care of Ophelia Mardoon who wanted to be done with Shadycreek Run.

LAURA: It's like Princess Bride. (excited squeak)

MARISHA: Faking his death.

MATT: Yeah, and so now, his previous crew have become part of Ophelia Mardoon's network, and she's absconded from Shadycreek Run to take over for him.

TALIESIN: That's nice.

MATT: And eventually, he shows up as a patron, looking a little different, at the Chateau.

LAURA: Oh!

MATT: And there, he--

ASHLEY: Come on.

MATT: He retired incognito with her in Nicodranas.

LAURA: That's the most beautiful story.

ASHLEY: Oh my goodness.

TRAVIS: (laughs) Dani's losing it.

LAURA: I'm losing it. (fake sobbing)

MATT: Hackneyed, maybe. But I don't give a shit.

TRAVIS: I was accepting it, I was accepting it.

LIAM: Now.

MATT: Now, the Tal'Dorei Council.

SAM: Oh one, at least one member.

LIAM: All of them.

LAURA: I know, well.

MATT: I'll give you a few members, how about that? I won't give you the full council.

TRAVIS: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

MATT: But I'll give you a few.

SAM: This is everything.

ASHLEY: The full council?

LAURA: Huh?

MATT: There are, officially, six figures of the main council.

SAM: Six [Inaudible].

MATT: And a number of ambassadors. Yeah, there's Ambassador Deirdrik Greyspine from Kraghammer. There's Ambassador Syldor Vessar from Syngorn. But they're not members of the council. They're peripheral.

LAURA: They're lesser than.

SAM: Oh, okay.

MATT: Correct. There is still Guardian Tofor Brotoras is the Master of Defense still from campaign one. Getting a little older in the years, but still a sturdy, stern figure. There is the Hearthmaker Edelbern Cleareyes, who's the Master of Development, a goliath from the Rivermaw Tribe, which was what eventually their herd returned to. And then they left with a penchant for trying to make society better, and joined them and became, worked their way up to the council.

TRAVIS: What?

MATT: Arcanist Allura Vysoren, we know is the Master of Arcana.

SAM: Natch.

MATT: Seeker Assum is no longer there. Seeker Assum stepped down from the role of the Master of Information.

LIAM: I assumed.

SAM: Well, when you assume.

MATT: Yeah, there you go.

TRAVIS: Terrible.

MATT: To this day, it still haunts me. But the mantle was taken up, and he mentored the new Master of Information, Seeker Odessa Tal'Dorei, the daughter of Uriel and Salda Tal'Dorei.

MARISHA: Oh, wow!

LAURA: Cool.

MATT: Who has taken up charge to be the new Master of Information in the memory of her father who gave his life during the fall of Chroma Conclave.

LAURA: That's beautiful.

TRAVIS: Love it, I love that.

MATT: And let's see who else is-- Oh, there is Arbiter Brom Goldhand, Master of Law.

SAM: Yeah, he's still there.

MATT: Still around, getting real old now. He's the real old crotchety one of the whole council that the rest kind of deal with, but, you know, he's fine. And there is the last but not least, the Master of Commerce, the Coinmistress Vex'ahlia de Rolo. (yelling)

MARISHA: Master of Coin, oh.

TRAVIS: That's fucking great!

SAM: More titles.

TALIESIN: Oh, yeah.

MARISHA: More titles.

TRAVIS: Coinmistress. Goddamn it. I don't need this, Matt. Do you know what you've done?

TALIESIN: So happy.

LIAM: DuckTales theme song, she's swimming in gold.

TRAVIS: ♪ Life is like a hurricane ♪

SAM: Wow.

TRAVIS: Oh, shit.

MATT: ♪ 30 years later, they're still ♪ ♪ Both fucking in their gold coin bin ♪ (laughter)

TALIESIN: Yep.

LAURA: Yep, yep, yep.

SAM: Rich people.

TALIESIN: Yeah.

TRAVIS: Damn. She glowed up.

LAURA: Yeah.

TALIESIN: We know too much.

MATT: Yeah. The kids are fun, though.

TALIESIN: Oh, the kids are really fun.

MATT: Anyway.

MARISHA: Well, I guess that's it, you guys. Another campaign come to a close.

MATT: Oh man.

SAM: (like Owen Wilson) Oh wow.

MARISHA, LAURA, and ASHLEY: (like Owen Wilson) Oh wow.

MATT: That's how it ends. Not with a bang, but a terrible impression.

LIAM: Not like this.

LAURA and MATT: Not like this.

MARISHA: Six, yeah.

LIAM: But we really are putting it to bed.

TALIESIN: Let's come back and do some one-shots sometime, go to Darktow.

LAURA: Yeah.

MARISHA: Yeah.

TALIESIN: Kingsley will be happy to see you once he's Plank King.

MATT: Honestly, I'm totally down for revisiting some of the Mighty Nein, maybe down the road.

MARISHA: Yeah.

MATT: Maybe a ways into the campaign three. We take a short arc or something, and revisit these characters a few years down the line. I think there's a lot of fun things to come back to that aren't major unresolved plot threads. Just fun future things that maybe we can touch on.

MARISHA: And we did a summer trip to Dalen's Closet with VM. I feel a summer trip back to Rumblecusp, but maybe a Darktow.

MARISHA: Right.

MATT: Bar-regard, what was it called again?

MARISHA: Oh yeah, The BeaureBar.

MATT: BeaureBar, that's the one yeah.

LAURA: The Fuckin' BeaureBar.

MARISHA: The Fuckin' BeaureBar, yeah. Yeah, I imagine after Beau does 10, 15 years for the Cobalt Soul, her and Yasha are like, "We're so tired, let's just retire." And then Beau just ends up selling timeshares on Rumblecusp.

LAURA: Oh my god, okay, but wait. What if all of the Mighty Nein eventually just--

ASHLEY: Retire.

LAURA: Retires on Rumblecusp?

ASHLEY: I'd love this for them.

MATT: And it's kind of great.

MARISHA: It's great.

LIAM: Caleb will take the time to put in a circle on the island, a Teleportation Circle.

LAURA: We can just run the fucking resort.

MARISHA: Yes, yeah.

ASHLEY: Yes.

LAURA: That's our thing.

MARISHA: Live music on Friday nights.

SAM: Do we want to run it? Or just like have someone run it.

LAURA: I wanted, I-- (laughter)

MATT: Jesus.

LAURA: They own the resort, how about that?

SAM: Thank you, thank you.

LAURA: All right.

SAM: I can get behind that.

MARISHA: Founders.

TRAVIS: They founded an LLC, it's managed by a branch of the company.

MATT: Oh my god.

TALIESIN: Nope.

MATT: I hate this now, this was a mistake. All of this was a mistake.

TRAVIS: Our LLC S corp [inaudible], it's fine.

TALIESIN: Burn it all down.

MARISHA: And on that note--

MATT: Trash it. Garbage.

SAM: "And on that note."

MARISHA: And that note, check in with your local real estate agents, look into timeshares, and that's all the time we have for today. Thank you so much for joining us. Don't forget to love each other. And is it Thursday yet?

LAURA: Oh man.

MATT: Love you guys!

TRAVIS: Yeah!