Hello folks, and welcome the heck back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m delighted to be returning to The Legend of Vox Machina, as Grog and his companions square off for a battle that will surely kill them. Seriously, there’s like no way Grog can fight his uncle Kevdak – Kevdak’s wielding a legendary pair of knuckles, Grog already lost this fight back in the day, and he’s currently as taut and muscular as a strip of beef jerky. As such, I’m intrigued to see in what particular fashion Mercer “cheats” for this encounter, giving Grog some productive route forward while nonetheless making it seem like Grog himself earned this victory.

Skillfully laid deus ex machina is well and good in a traditional narrative, but relying on outside interference generally strips players of agency in a tabletop setting. I’m guessing Grog’s victory might serve as a payoff for his last-episode revelation (perhaps Pike will counter his “strength is looking after the little folk” with a “sometimes strength is looking after the big folk”), but I’m eager to find out how.

As for my own campaign, the bustle of moving furniture out of our old apartment and searching for a new one has made it difficult to schedule any new sessions, so I’ve instead been hard at work plotting out the last act of the campaign. This is of course an inherently fraught proposition, as player agency and a fully scripted narrative are naturally at odds, but we’ve fortunately journeyed far enough into the campaign that it’s essentially all payoff from here, meaning I can at least script the broad beats of the upcoming adventures. To be honest, it’s actually quite similar to a common strategy for writing novels: establish the big structural beats so you can be thinking long-term, but allow the characters to surprise you as you’re filling in the individual scenes and sections. This whole process has been so invigorating that I’ll likely start working on some original fiction again once this campaign wraps up, but for now, my mind is abuzz with final boss concepts worthy of the time my players have invested in this rambling tale. Now enough of that, let’s see what Vox Machina are up to!

Episode 10

We open with the Fey Realm Gang warping back into Whitestone, or at least the place Whitestone was supposed to be. Seems about right to gather up the whole group before resolving this whole Kevdak situation, particularly since Kevdak is tied to both the Chroma Conclave and Ripley

I assume basically none of this material was actually split during the actual campaign. For tabletop sessions, you can get away with a bit of splitting the party, but you’re not going to want to have half the group sitting on the sidelines and missing whole character arcs of their compatriots – after all, being able to comment and contribute to each other’s personal journeys is a big part of the fun. In contrast, television drama demands a clarity of focus that splitting the party can actually facilitate, as the audience doesn’t gain that much from five other characters offering commentary on a conflict that’s only truly meaningful to two or three of the leads

It turns out Whitestone is actually just hidden behind a magical veil. I imagine this simple beat of Vax pushing through the illusion involved a lot more dice rolls and swearing at the table

“The dragons have already taken Emon and Westruun.” We get a brief glimpse of the overall continent as portrayed on their battle maps. A clear sense of place was one of my top priorities in designing my own campaign, and I frankly regret not just designing my own continent from the ground up, rather than relying on a conveniently designed area of Faerun

Their allies reveal their three days in the Fey Realm amounted to three weeks here. That’s a very handy trick; it can be difficult to match in-session time to the pacing a continent-wide conflict requires, particularly when your party can avoid travel time by teleporting, so giving the dragons a three week head start via Fey Realm fuckery is a reasonably elegant solution

A scrying circle provides an easy transition back to Grog’s confrontation

“Never pick a fight you can’t win. History won’t remember a smear on an ax.” I gotta say, Kevdak’s making some good points here

“Do you still have your shriveled nutsack, or did you give that to the dragon too?” Love the “oh shit!” murmurs at this

Back with our gnome buddies, we learn Kaylie stuck around to see how this all plays out

Some nice choreography as Grog unsurprisingly gets the shit beaten out of him. If Grog indeed challenged a vestige-bearing mega-goliath to single combat in the campaign, I imagined it played out pretty similarly to this

Kaylie’s insistence on keeping an eye on Scanlan makes it clear they’ve some prior relationship, though Scanlan apparently has no idea what it is. In-campaign, I assume this was all plotted out between Mercer and Scanlan’s player beforehand; forcing major backstory elements on a player robs them of too much agency otherwise

Either way, I’m beginning to see where this is going, and it seems like a delightful way to once again impress on Scanlan that actions indeed have consequences

The threat of Pike’s head being squashed is about as stark of a “I must be strong for my friends” prompt as you could hope for. And as expected, this prompts a flashback to his mentor asking that persistent question

“I would like to rage!” A little inorganic in a non-tabletop scenario, but you gotta give the man his catchphrase

After an impressive rally by Grog, Kevdak just turns himself giant and proceeds to again beat the shit out of our boy. Nice sense of physical space in this battle – I’m always pushing myself to include more unique terrain dynamics in my combat encounters, and this fight is thoroughly demonstrating the dramatic advantages of that approach

That said, this episode is also demonstrating this production’s most persistent aesthetic failing: it’s too damn dark! Make some concessions to readability, please!

Scanlan has an appropriately metal composition for Vox Machina’s triumphant arrival. Having a bard in the party offers some delightful diegetic musical opportunities, as The Witcher has well demonstrated

Even their combat styles are more barbarian-themed than usual: Keyleth just mauling people as a tiger, Vex literally holding an arrow in her hand and driving it through a guy’s skull

God, Vax’s powers are so busted. The rogue at my own table is already quite powerful, so I can’t imagine how impossible to kill a rogue with his legendary armor and teleportation daggers would be

Very nice of Vex to set up this walking-away-from-an-explosion shot for Percy

Keyleth sets up a wall of roots, the enemies start to climb it, and then Vex sets the whole thing on fire. The kind of emergent combo attacks that feel immensely satisfying in both a mechanical and character-bond sense – stuff like this doesn’t always necessarily follow the rules as written, but I’ll always make an exception for cool acts of teamwork. It’s hard enough to engineer situations where such collaboration is rewarded – when it emerges naturally, you gotta embrace it

I’m actually trying to plot out more such opportunities between my players and their closest allies for the last act. A sequence of our rogue and a close rogue ally fighting back-to-back and then comboing off on a miniboss came up two sessions ago, and my players are still talking about it – the more I can facilitate such rewards, the better

After Grog nearly severs Kevdak’s arm, Kevdak rips it the rest of the way off and beats him with it. A move I’ll always consider the height of badassery, ever since it first dazzled me watching 008th MS Team on Toonami

Fantastic play as Vex snags Grog in her pocket dimension, tosses the crystal skyward, and releases him for a plummeting attack on Kevdak. My own system-breaking player has repeatedly designed ways to abuse DnD’s fall damage rules – if I let him, he’d be playing a character who consistently plummets two hundred feet to turn his enemies into paste

Ooh yeah, split him straight in half. Kevdak’s not walking that one off

The next scene serves as a reprise of Grog and Pike’s first meeting, echoing the shot compositions of Grog’s first, failed battle with Kevdak

Grog takes the knuckles from his defeated foe. The crowd loves it!

Grog then wisely elects Zanror as the new Stormlord. If you’re not careful, it’s pretty easy to find yourself with a cult or army or something in DnD; it’s important not to just plot out fiendish villains to defeat, but also characters like Zanror or Cassandra who can pick up the pieces after your messy adventures

At the festivities afterwards, Keyleth attempts to snag a dance with Vax, but he’s too muddled up with raven business to take the offer

Pike looks on with a frown as Kaylie seems to put the moves on Scanlan

And out come the ropes. Alright, what has this man done to you, Kaylie

Oh god. Oh no

And Done

Yep, it’s his rightfully vengeful daughter. Well, after a campaign’s worth of smirking at danger and damning the consequences, giving Scanlan a daughter-shaped embodiment of all his failings and foolishness seems about right. They tried speeches, they tried sphinxes, they tried nearly killing him – if a daughter is what it takes to slap some seriousness into him, so be it. I’m eager to see how this catastrophic misunderstanding by Scanlan plays out, but also plenty satisfied by this episode’s mix of excellent Grog beats and overall party interplay. Vox Machina actually feel like a genuine team at this point, the camaraderie of their players neatly illustrated through the interplay of their battle tactics. And if this is the kick Scanlan needs to get his shit in order, they might even start looking like genuine heroes!

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