Only Bards

The session opens below decks on the East Haven ferry, where the "normal wear" Kaldur chopped at last session finally produces its tenant: a Mind-Master Duergar. Dreadie misfires an older-edition Thunderwave that doesn't push but blows a foot-wide hole in the hull, flooding the deck. The Duergar — small enough to climb through — stabs Dreadie in the crotch, splitting his dick clean in twain, and uses mind-mastery to make Rico take a 13-damage swing at Scales. Scales answers with a Bloodborne-flavored Steinhardt teleport-slash, Kaldur chops the Duergar in half, and Roadie wedges leather armor into the hole and mends the boat shut while standing up to his belly button in freezing lake water. The ferry survives. It also doesn't sail today. Scython the drunk ferryman buys the "Duergar did it, not us" cover story.

Rocket sleds up the northwestern coast. Rico, driving, Looney-Tunes face-plants the party into a snowdrift, but Scales nails his landing like a pro drifter. They find Bot Withers' keelboat frozen offshore and his body thawed by wolves — with a six-pointed snowflake carved into his forehead. Rico's religion check lands it: this is a sign to Cryonax, not Aurel. The cold entity in Icewind Dale got a rebrand nobody told the party about. Roadie strings Bot up by the armpits into the rigging to protect him from the wolves on the way back.

Keen elf eyes spot a tower nearby holding a bound-and-gagged tiefling. Rico shoulder-rolls through the window with his greatsword — "like a white-trash kid with a knife from the gas station" — and unties her. She's Felith, a Children of Splintered Ice spy, and the "cultists upstairs" line is bait. Felith buries a dagger in Rico's back; he nearly bleeds out, Dreadie saves him with Cure Wounds, Roadie quadruple-grapples and chain-locks Felith and her partner, Rico puts a Moon-Bolt crossbow shot through her face, and the last cultist tries to leap off the fourth story. Scales catches him alive and delivers a flaying monologue so grim — "we will remove your tendons and play them with our lead guitarist's guitar" — that the cultist starts praying to die. He gets his wish. On the way out, Kaldur finds a hit list signed by "Ice Knife" — the Wet Trout owner, Nemitra.

Back in East Haven, Captain Argiloth arrests Nemitra on sight. Kaldur declares himself part-owner of the Wet Trout by "foredeck" and spends the afternoon acting-barkeep. Roadie slips a packet of gorilla-panic — now confirmed basically PCP — into Rico's moonshine. Rico sees the whole band as gorillas trying to rape him, pulls his greatsword in the bar, and has to be grappled by Kaldur and mind-whipped unconscious by Enjee, then dumped in the warm outhouse. Meanwhile Dreadie beds a half-orc barmaid named Natty, writes a song called "Fat Bottom Orcs" in the kitchen between rounds, and gets snatched mid-trout-pie by William Moon into a private room — "my two disciples." Dreadie refuses discipleship a second time and leaps out the window.

Morning of Burning Man gig. Captain Argiloth walks the band through East Haven prison. Introduce William O. Cosby — a Lathander-blues prisoner who presses juice "made up right here in the toilet" on his visitors, ten vials of dry poison on his sheet in flavors (grape, tutti-frutti, pudding). Dzan the Red Wizard, scheduled to burn in four hours, offers everything in exchange for freedom; Rico tries to convert him to William Moon and nearly springs him before Enjee shuts it down. Dzan still gives up the real intel: the Chaos Wolf is still bound by Gleipnir, Uror's Shears is the only tool that can cut it, Skaldholm (west of the Purple Rocks) holds the deepest Fenrir lore, and his simulacrum is in the tundra guarded by a wight — recover it and his lair below the Lucky Liar in Lonelywood opens. Roadie ketamines him so the burning will be bearable. Dreadie persuades Argiloth to make it a double burning and throw Cosby on the second pyre.

200-person crowd — biggest show the band has played. Enjee locks in four-on-the-floor, Kaldur's bass holds the pocket, Natty climbs on stage mid-set and straddles a cannon "like Cher on the Battleship" while Scales lights her up with pink-and-violet Faerie Fire, Dreadie debuts Fat Bottom Orcs, Rico shapes a crescent moon with Dancing Lights, and Cosby's charisma-13 screams actually harmonize. Then Roadie, triggered by the smell of burning flesh, collapses behind cover and accepts a guitar pick from one of last session's hallucinated-but-actually-undead Adidas-hooligans. His frosted tips grow back into dreadlocks, he transforms into a different man entirely, and he shreds a two-minute solo nobody can locate. He drops the pick, reverts. Band crits the performance. Both prisoners burn to a crisp in harmony.

Roadie, hollowed out afterward, confesses the backstory he's been running from: he used to play rhythm in Lich Brisket, a Limp-Bizkit-styled band fronted by a lich called Dreadwurst that burned the "non-nookie compliant" crowd alive at Bloodstock '99. Roadie quit, Dreadwurst is still angry about it, and the pick-of-the-undead-hooligans is a leash. His stated plan: "I got some shears. I'll cut his fucking head off." Havel the agent cheerfully announces gigs pouring in across the Ten Towns — the Uphill Climb, Northern Light, Hook Line and Sinker, Luskan Arms in Targos, the Five Tavern Center fight pits in Bremen, the Blue Clam in Termalane once the gem-mine trouble clears (Kaldur's Dumathoin lead, right on his route). Dugan's Hole has been overrun by cultists; locals have crossed out the "Hole" on the roadsigns and written "Hell." Rico vows to put the Hole back in Hell. East Haven, as Havel puts it, is now cream-pied.