Sometimes you want to run from where everybody knows your name — our D&D Spectacular continued with two sessions in April

This time we’ve got not one, but two D&D games to recap, as things have been pretty crazy this April as we’ve run not one but two D&D sessions and two one shots — the second of which will be this Saturday, April 25, which you should definitely listen to on our Twitch channel. So, since I have to recap two episodes of this lunacy, let’s get straight into what happened, shall we?

Let’s take a moment to celebrate our cast of characters and the folks who play them each and every week.

• Kainehe, a Water Genasi Sorceress — played by Elizabeth Harper
• Mischief, a Tiefling Rogue — played by Anne Stickney
• Fizzl, a Kenku Bard — played by Michael “Mitch” Mitchell
• Mediel, a Dwarf Cleric — played by Deb Montague
• Wilyur Rustspark, a Gnome Mage — played by Joe “Lodur” Perez
• Zellan, an Elven Fighter — played by Cory Taylor

So, after the events that led the party to finally returning home to the Riatan, they appeared on a beach within view of the city of Piador. But it seems someone was waiting for them — namely one Wilyur Rustspark — or at least the evil being that had replaced him and taken over his life. Before the party could react, Evil Wilyur had seized a polymorphed Fizzl, cast a charm spell on him, and retreated to a safe distance while the party tangled with several devilish servitors.

This is where the counterspell conundrum of the first episode title came into play, and really it was amazing — as the demons cast a spell, Good Wilyur counterspelled it, the demon used its reaction to counterspell Wilyur’s counterspell, and Kainehe counterspelled that. It was pretty hilarious to watch even for me, the guy who was technically playing the devils. Devils ended up defeated, but the party had no choice but to retreat without Fizzl and try and work up a plan of attack. This led them to a local fishing village, a helpful inn, a dream face-off between Evil and Good Wilyurs, and the attack of a Balor.

Our follow-up episode saw Fizzl freed from captivity by a strangely familiar group led by a Kenku bard wearing an eyepatch. The party, escaping from the Balor fighting a Deva (a kind of Angel in the D&D cosmology) or at least a statue of one, ended up running into themselves — or at least the party of clones of themselves that had until recently been under the control of Evil Wilyur. Reuinited with Fizzl, the party soon beat a hasty retreat when Evil Wilyur showed up to help defeat the Balor, finding themselves heading inland away from Piador and towards an unknown destination. They then encountered a patrol from the Arc Jisan (the local magical university that controls the city) and ended up meeting three talking bears in a cabin in the woods. They then made a magical hidey-hole to take a rest and try and figure out what to do.

Also, Zellan’s axe can talk and it thinks everybody in the party is not all that bright. And Kainehe owns a shipping company worth several hundred thousand gold pieces, if the party can get to Marserra, a notably piratical town where Mediel’s cousin might be committing acts of piracy. Wilyur is down to work with pirates. Zellan is not. And Mischief still doesn’t know for sure if Caution the Tiefling Paladin is her mother or not, but her clone Trickery dyed her hair purple.

If you want to listen to the full run of the show up to this point, we have an archive where we have a bunch of episodes for you to listen in on.

1. The original, and completely inaccurately titled, One-Shot Spectacular
2. We’re On A Boat
3. Life’s a Beach
4. Try not to kill the Kenku, K?
5. Curse of the Dice Bot
6. A Moo-Ving Conversation
7. The Kenku of Chaos
8. Here Be Dragons (and Gith and Portals, oh my!)
9. The twist you didn’t see coming
10. The Curious Case of the Counterspell Conundrum
11. A very dramatic doppleganger dilemma

If you’re liking our D&D shenanigans, which we’ve been doing every weekend in April thanks to the kind patronage of Patreon backer Sixthousand, you can always support us on Patreon so we can do more of this stuff. And remember, we’ll be doing another D&D game this weekend, Saturday April 25, on our Twitch channel so feel free to tune in to hear Joe Perez run a game where people ride on robot ponies and I play a monk made of metal.