An orphanage stoop, a splintered argument, and a boy who won’t take a gift back. Bricks bake in makeshift kilns while names and nerves harden—Squee Squee, Celeste, Jesse, Zachariah—hope hammered out of clay. Somewhere between goodbyes and good intentions, Cliff’s rations keep vanishing, leaving only a smear of something wrong.Across the bridge, metal gleams and politics sharpen. Bahamut’s garden lends a lighter heart; the council trades sealed letters for slow promises. Raids mapped, patterns found, and rumors that bite. With weeks of deliberation ahead, the question lingers: how far will they go to bend a dragon war—and what’s already eating at them from the edges?

Mid-session the stream flatlined—hard cutoff, no countdown—and we smash-cut back in to our biggest live crowd yet: 24 on YouTube. After that, the show ran clean. Cameras behaved, audio stayed sane, dice didn’t melt machines. Quiet hero? I ripped out the brittle automation and went manual: fewer gremlins, faster flow, momentum on tap.

In the story, Mecoo and Nefir left the Platinum Keep with coin and a quiet directive pointing toward Menest—the city of vanishings. The council’s math turned uglier: the broken portal will reopen elsewhere unless a dragon seals it, and fresh rifts pull orcs like a tide. Cliff chased traces of Sune while Tim mapped a plan to feed worship instead of throwing bodies at a god; a gold-dragon priestess learned the hard way that a certain sigil burns; Bramble kept vigil till dawn; Stepping Stones tilted on its hinges; and by morning, the mark was headed for the Oracle’s elders. In the DM Deep Dive, I lay out how we balance our RP lean with punchy combats: when talk carries, when steel snaps the stalemate, and why the only win condition that matters is whether the table cares.

The broadcast gods took a swing. Mid-fight, the stream flatlined, the VOD sealed itself like a tidy little coffin… and we cold-started back into carnage with no intro, no countdown, just adrenaline. In Tech Diaries, I walk you through the crash playbook—why momentum dies, how to necromancy it back, and the safeguards that keep a severed signal from killing the story (crash slate, local record, split hotkeys, pin-the-link, go).

Then the knives turn inward. In the Recap: a vision of chains and a goddess dimmed, a mark that isn’t just a mark, a spymaster with smoke for answers, and three doors no one wants to open—Menest, the Oracle, or the hunt for an ember that might save a god… or light a fuse. Deep Dive closes us out: Fences, Not Cages—how limits at the table (flight, water folk, banned options, yes even Silvery Barbs) keep the ride fast without caging the players. No answers here. Just the ticking. Come hear which door opens—and who gets pushed.