by Marty Abbe-Schneider (artist for Hero Club Podcast)

Many Decks of Many Things

“Get behind my thumb for safety!”

BBEG

The demise of Alister.

Battle Maps and Figurines!

Dominox bleeds cursed chains and his tail looks like a fire-breathing dragon. Rule of cool achievement complete.

LUDA!

Teven Klask

by Odd the Sun God

by Lady Rossë

Etymology Lore

Little note on kaitiaki, It’s not a Mercer original, it’s drawn very directly from Te Reo Māori. I’m from Aotearoa New Zealand, though I’m not Māori myself (just a Pākehā who does her best). Kaitiaki means more appropriately ‘guardian’ and the term it is associated with, kaitiakitanga, refers to the process of guardianship over nature and the environment in accordance with tikanga Māori. While this is about the right sentiment for druids, it’s sort of like greeting people at your local church with the word “priest.” Like, if we accept that they’re crudely using Te Reo Māori as a druidic thing (which, that’s a whole can of appropriative worms along with the divorcing of the concept from tikanga Māori that I shan’t open, they almost certainly chose the term when it was a home game), they are basically just greeting each other by saying “druid.” comment by Reddit user u/AdmiralPegasus

It’s my account’s cake day and we hit 1000 subscribers!

Across the interior of this chamber, the slowly rotating gem there spins tiny mag-lev figurine
INITIATIVE!
Teven at the top of the order, blade drawn and burning with rage says,
“I knew it from the moment we stepped in here, it HAD TO DIE!”

• 02:25:20 Dominox’s Lair Action yoinks the team (Except Orym, Dorian, and Braius)
• 02:28:32 Essek sounds a little like Bronson Pinchot saying, “I will not be having this.”
• 02:28:39 Travis:“Scuse!” (Daggerheart reference)
• 02:28:43 Travis:“Grab your butt and run.” Sinbad reference
• 02:31:33 Dominox is thrown and unfortunately lands on Fearne.
• 02:34:48 More bromance between Dorian and Braius.
• 02:35:33 Marisha is quick to cast Counterspell to save Teven.
• 02:36:08 Travis brings out the counter-jinx trash talk for Marisha’s dice and it works.
• 02:36:51 Braius drops the act and declares himself the Herald of Asmodeus.
• 02:39:44 When Matt says “bow low” it sounds like Bolo. Coincidence?
• 02:42:21 You see a lithe figure in long blue robes. Platinum long hair, and a withered black hand that has gold caps along the fingers, who looks like they’re rushing in your direction. As soon as you come through, they stop and go,
  “What have you done, what are you doing? We have to stop it now.”
• 02:44:10 Marisha:“…shit! Tits! Bonus action, Form of Dread!”
• 02:44:45 Fearne goes marsupial and Wildshapes into a mint green wombat and pouches the crysta. When Chetney arrives wombat makes the gesture for “uppies” when Chetney arrives
• 02:55:03 Imogen telekinetically chucks Chetney (Fastball Special reference?)
• 02:58:30 Teven swinging for the fences
• 03:01:10 Liam:“I leapt up and stabbed him right in the crotch.” The Gooch Garrote.
• 03:02:28 Orym on the effects of the speed potion feels like a hummingbird
• 03:09:10 Dorian’s clutch dance magic, Otto’s Irresistible Dance.
• 03:10:04 Bromantic embrace
• 03:10:25 In the focus of concentration on the missing stone that it’s bound to, the appearance of Ludinus, and the chaos all around it, it forgets to use Legendary Resistance and (is currently the massive, terrifying, nearly 20-foot-tall, long-sealed great demon, used as an implement of arcane power by the ancient mageocracy of Aeor, recently unleashed to tear through and destroy the Ruby Vanguard and Ludinus’ plot here in Aeor) begins to cut a rug.
• 03:15:08 Fan Art Moment Riverdancing Dominox bleeding cursed rusted chains from its wounds.
• 03:16:25 Part of the set next to Sam falls over.
• 03:24:10 Essek:(to Ludinus)“Hello…It’s been a while.”
• 03:24:36 Laura nudges Liam to have Orym look up Essek’s robes as he floats past
• 03:26:45 Ashton recreates the Office Space scene where a printer is destroyed
• 03:31:07 Matt gets a killing blow as an NPC and gets to ask himself “How Do I Want To Do This?”
• 03:31:39 Teven there, holding up his blade in front of the gate, the swirling chaos of the Abyss beyond with Dominox crushed to it’s knees from the Gravity Fissure. Now trying to reach up to claw back out of the gate as it’s swirling around. Blade in the air, he says,
  “Ah, my Lord. I smite thee, ancient evil. Fair play in your name. See you never again.”
  Brings the blade up and drives it into Dominox’ chest. As it hits, he’s going to leap in the air carving it in half. As it does, it lands and the body splits and begins to burn to ash on the form of the Abyss where it dissipates forever on its plane. Dominox sundered.
• 03:31:16 Braius asks Teven for his autograph.
  Teven:“Those are rare. (I better not see this on eBay!)”
• 03:41:48 You step down this extended, wide, echoing hallway until eventually it opens into this massive dome chamber. The ceiling itself cracked heavily and you can see it’s still held firm, but along the dome there are patterned globes of a quarts-like crystal, a lattice, like an umbrella that spreads out around it. You can see numerous gold beams that connect between them with extremely intricate, scattered runes that seem to interconnect all of these like a web network.
  Within the dead center of this wide, circular chamber, lies two massive statues of robed mages holding lanterns. One of them fallen and broken, the other still holding against time, holding against the memory of the historical fall of Aeor. You can see them both flanking a central, damaged, metallic dome construction with massive rivets and textured arcane technology around it. It’s next to that Ludinus stands, arms crossed, looking out at you with a soft smile.
  “Welcome to the Occultus Thalamus. The high mages of the Age of Arcanum were the greatest minds of Exandrian history. The call to innovation created great societies of ingenuity, ambition and endless potential. Using the gifts of the gods bestowed upon them, they began to unravel the great secrets of the universe. Prideful, perhaps, but beautiful.
  And they feared it.
  Once the child becomes the parent, often those in power can grow resentful, and they did. When more came crawling around, a war of omnipotent children bickering, these brilliant minds had to adapt, focus to implements of war beyond just implements of progress. When the divine threatens your families, your children, the very future of life as you know it, they reveal themselves as the enemy.
  I saw it. I was there in the final days of The Calamity. I watched mountains brought to dust, whole countries set aflame, the tantrums of the gods wantonly murdering and massacring the majority of all civilizations on Exandria. When the dust had settled and their rivalry paused, the few of us that survived wallowed in the dust and ash and spent centuries trying to rebuild from what scraps we could find, while they vanished beyond their gate to protect us, or perhaps to hide from us once they saw what was capable. I survived, watched as a child, acknowledged what they wrought as they fled to the mystical hideaways.
  This world has been manipulated, duped in its opinion, it’s understanding of divinity. For those that write the history books are those in power and there is no power higher than them. There’s a reason they fear me. Some of it’s Predathos, yes, but I found something equally important here. Sometimes the most important weapon in information. These mageocracies, in many places, had ways of recording things, knowledge, history, some lost to time. But Aeor created the Thalamus, a device that recorded the spiritual memory of all in the city, including those that brought it low. I’ve spent a day or so studying this and I found something, something I think you want to see.”
  He reaches over to the cracked central dome and places his hands near it, and as he does crackling noise it begins to open up. Mist billows out and you watch as this light green orb emerges. An endlessly fractal network or threads of arcane power, layered upon themselves over and over again, and it drifts beyond them.
  “Within here lies the memories of Aeor. Fractured, but enough. And what I will show you, I will show the rest of Exandria.”
  As he changes the hold on the sides of his hands, the orb begins to spin rapidly, whirs loudly. It begins to brighten. This light begins to burst and pulse. All of you feel instinctively like you have to recoil as the very space around you is entirely filled with light. Your spirit is filled with light. Your mind is filled with light. All there is is light.
  BLeeM arrives and Matt gives him the GM chair
  Light.
  In a space beyond the real, there was (made of light) a palace. Which is to say a garden, or a fountain, or a mirror, or a heart, or more than any of these, an idea. A swirling nebula of glimmering potential, cresting eternally upon the threshold of being. But if it aids you, Exandrian, to imagine what the mortal eye can never see, envision then, as I have said, a palace. It’s floors the dancing stars in unmapped orbit. It’s ramparts light and ice and fire. Its hallways memory and time. Our story begins at the ending of the infinite, at the doom that pierced eternity. Fractured images of a lost world and of the ones who lost it. Remember now a place which was not less, but rather more than real. Remember tragedy, betrayal, calamity, downfall. In the recording of this memory, may the answers to many questions lie. But one question yet and shall forevermore remain:

“Is It Thursday Yet?”

♪Episode Song References♪

ᕕ( ᐛ)ᕗ

• 00:30:00 Billy Joel - You May Be Right
• 00:54:54 Dorian knocks Shave and a Haircut
• 01:38:55 Vanessa Carlton - A Thousand Miles
• 01:42:30 Dorian:“…losers, baby.” Beck - Loser
• 02:40:10 Rolling Stones - Paint it Black
• 03:24:10 Disturbed - It’s Been A While

Highlights

• 00:28:59 Imogen seeks the entity and seems to retcon increasing the range of her spell.
• 00:31:10 Imogen’s nightmare
• 00:34:43 “Destroy the pinion”
• 00:35:26 Teven Klask is indeed in the process of searching the exterior of the chamber.
• 00:38:52 Teven:“You’ve bound your energy to that of my master, the Lord of the Hells. The thread of fate that pulls you through the Great Matron’s skein now runs dark with his (Asmodeus’) influence. The smell of brimstone will now follow where you walk and would you need aid, whenever you need his help, perhaps he might be there, at a cost…Mind you, I wouldn’t be against you racing into our fiery embrace below, but it seems you have things to accomplish. But when you’re done, I’ll be waiting.”
• 00:44:20 Travis and Marisha:“Jesus!”
• 00:48:24 Ashley:“Drink it. Taste it.”
  Laura:“Twist it.”
  Taliesin:“Lick it.”
  Laura:“Bop it.”
• 00:50:45 Fancy looking cloak with chains and partial scale mail and potential tetanus infection from rust is found in a barrel and immediately put in the hole. It smells weird and not in a good way.
• 00:52:05 The runes on the table are draconic and would be used as a safety mechanism for volatile magic or materials being worked with.
• 00:55:45 Sam’s Return! Behind the second silver door is a closet with an injured minotaur surrounded by shattered glass and ceramic. (Bull in a china shop metaphor?)
• 00:56:47 Liam:“I hope this doesn’t awaken something in me.”
  
• 01:00:24 Braius immediately recognizes Teven somehow and feels he can trust the group.
• 01:04:16 Dorian offers to help Braius, “May I?” and they are immediately shipped.
  Matt:“Happy Pride.”
• 01:04:43 Robbie rolls three 7s for Cure Wounds and is thanked with a brief shoulder rub from Sam, “Powerful magic from a powerful man. You got me halfway. I’ll take care of the rest with my own hand.” and casts Lay on Hands.
  Liam:“Still better when somebody else does it.”
  Fearne:“Braius, what are you doing here in this closet?”
  Braius:“…I like your knees. They bend the way mine do.”
• 01:08:31 Ashton’s nightmare.
• 01:10:42 Ashton:“You know, you can just fucking talk to us. You don’t need to play these fucking head games. It doesn’t make us like you. Make a deal.”
• 01:14:09 Braius:(to Teven)“…and she is with you.”
  Fearne:“Well, that’s not entirely-”
  Braius:"Are you two? touches fingertips
  Teven:“We are bound, yes.”
  Laudna:“Lean into it.”
  Fearne:“Yes, we’re bound. We’re So bound.”
  Teven:“I am also bound to many.”
  Fearne:“That’s totally fine, cuz so am I.”
• 01:15:29 Dorian:“This is so fun. It’s almost like he was built for us!”
• 01:17:19 Essek points his finger over from beneath his fur coat towards the walls of the chamber outside of that other brass door and there are these foot-wide, black, they look like windows, like portholes almost. You peek through and you realize there was a glass there, a protective thick glass. As you look into it, below you, a large square-looking sunken chamber with three elevated platforms about 10 feet off the ground. You see fallen rubble and the roof is slightly off kilter. You see so many chains strewn across the floor and the walls, tangled and pushed into each other, woven chaotically around. You see these glowing massive glyphs on the ground that pulse in unison. In the very center of this chamber is a 25-foot tall cylindrical machine (that itself just completely consumes the center of the room). You can almost feel the vibration in the wall and the proximity vibration noises. As it does that, you can see bits of crackling energy that spark off to these spires around us (these multitudes of Aeorian tech spires throughout the center chamber). In the middle of it, hovering in the air and slowly rotating, you see this quad-spire platform that is spinning in the air, and in the middle, pulsing, a small purple crystal (the Pinion of Service).
• 01:20:18 Braius:(to Dorian)“You know, you’re not going to mess with a bard, buddy.”
• 01:20:34 Braius:“Wait, there’s a difference?”

• 01:21:27 Does Matt almost pull another Shivering Quift?
• 01:24:12 Looking at these glyphs on the ground, best you can ascertain, part of this is a containment abjuration and other facets have a transmutation (for the purpose of manipulating and extracting power).
• 01:24:38 Travis misses catching a flying bug with his hand and pretends to throw it in his mouth.
• 01:27:07 Ashton suggests the smashing solution
• 01:28:18 As Matt gets into the description of Dominox’ newest incarnation, a small girl with long hair, Travis signals his time to leave the table out of fear (The Ring is known to be a particularly scary movie for him). The entire team sees the same thing this time.
• 01:29:22 After choosing doors and winning prizes, the analogy is completed as Ashton says,

“Let’s Make A Deal!”

• 01:29:42 Laudna:“She’s Fun-Scary!”
• 01:31:42 Dominox:“I was hungry.”
• 01:32:49 Braius’s Blessing: “Oh Lord, please guide us in battle ahead.
  Don’t let the little girl terrorize the old man.
  Let us find our quarry.
  That we may bring you glory.”
• 01:36:22 Chetney accompanies Teven down some stairs,
  “Fuckin’ chisels out, baby!”
  He nods and you see a grin pull across his mouth. The sharpened teeth exposed as he tightens the grip on his blade. The two of you begin to descend the stairs that curve downward into an open metal doorway that leads into the darkened chamber. The only light sources you have are those glowing glyphs and the electrical buzzes of the nearby equipment that’s surrounding and are a part of the central Nox Engine. The occasional arc sending a splash of light across the room and casting instantaneous shadows that vanish as soon as the light does. You begin to step inside and that smell, that strange metallic buzzing smell that you caught on the weird cloak that you acquired.
• 01:42:00 Dominox:“So, hungry.”
• 01:47:20 Because of logistics on the large stage, we get to hear the whisper Matt would have given Ashley for her rolling a 31 on an Insight check on Dominox:
  It is hard to read a being of pure Abyssal chaos kept in darkness and shadow for 1,000 years, broken and half-given-to-madness. Here it gives to you a truth that you can sense is false. There is a desperation to her voice and a focus on this crystal that is borderline obsession.
• 01:53:33 Braius:“Are you single?”
  Imogen:“Oh, I’m not sure.”
  Marisha gets up to leave
• 02:00:10 Dominox’ True Form
• 02:01:27 Liam:"I only chanced it because the demon was grabbing Pop-Pop.
• 02:02:30 The cast of Animated Objects: Boaty, Ropey, a series of cosplay helper objects, and new member Doory. (Laudna casts Animate Object on the door to open it.)

INTERMISSION

Dorian and Braius Bromance.

(Twitter Fan Clip Compilation)

maybe it takes two people to check a demon for a hernia… You Don’t Know

No! Too Sexy!

Marisha’s Fan

“BODY HORROR FAN”

Fan Art Gallery: Piercing Through History

by SmallBearArt

by Xandrik

by TealBird5

by FunScaryy

*by Cielbenn

Marisha’s Fan

After Matt voices 3 NPCs: Mother (Prism’s Raven), Dynios (Prism’s sentient spellbook), and Pâté (Laudna’s undead construct)