Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’ll be delving back into the adventures of Vox Machina and company, as they work to defeat the evil that they themselves kinda-sorta accidentally unleashed. Isn’t that always the way of it, though? You defeat one evil dragon, think you’ve done something good, and then some entirely other evil dragon decides to fuse itself with the corpse of your quarry, becoming a dread-creature of power beyond imagining. It’s enough to make a hero want to hang up their +2 sword and just take a load off, letting someone else save civilization as we know it for a change.
There’s certainly an inherent tension in the construction of a D&D campaign, a balance necessitated by the party’s simultaneous need for heroic validation and dramatic incentive. How do you as a DM keep going bigger while still validating the party’s prior process, telling them in the same breath “that was some glorious, consequential heroism you just did” and “also, things are now worse than ever before.” At what point do unintended consequences shift from feeling “earned through recklessness” to “inflicted by a hostile narrator,” and how do you manage that balance while both surprising and validating your party’s expectations? These are questions whose answers depend on a million factors, and which must be approached with a distinct tactic for any given player party – and that very variability is what makes DnD so endlessly interesting to me as a storyteller and game designer. No puzzle so compelling as one without a defined solution, so let’s get back to the board as we conclude season three of Vox Machina!