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Session by the numbers2h 36m · 22,055 words
At the tableSilasBruLelianaOliviaElspeth
Talk share
Topher
44%
Silas
17%
Bru
13%
Leliana
12%
Olivia
12%
Elspeth
3%
Talked aboutGeorge ×11Scarlet ×3Astro ×1
Superlatives
MVP: Leliana — “I guess I'll like kick some of the dirt with my foot kind of to the hole and then drop them in and cover it.”
Best joke: Silas — “I'm just imagining there's like a rich lady over like a property like I want you to put more white and gold s*** all over my property.”
Most chaotic: Leliana — “And Leliana is like, 'f*** that.' And hit the portal button.”

57: Two Sides of the Same Coin

July 17, 2026

Setting​

The button is pushed and there is no going back. Clinging to Bob, the whole party is dragged through the library's hidden gateway — the same shining door a naive young Leliana once walked through and came back as Helisanna. Rather than split the group, Topher pulls everyone through together. They tumble down a well of nothing, land hard in a mold-drenched mirror of the library, and step out under a sky of red lightning and roiling black clouds. This is an "upside-down" world, a pocket dimension away from Lord Bradicus's cameras and drones, and it exists for one reason: to walk Leliana back through the worst memories of her life until she is whole. No competition, no observers. Just the path, a guide who guards the door, and a ghost dog that eats anyone who strays.

Players Present​

  • Topher (DM)
  • Taylor Ramsey as Silas Fairbanks — Halfling Rogue/Sorcerer
  • Justin Hale as Bru — Goblin Artificer
  • Ali Leonard as Elspeth Cooper — Dwarf Artificer/Gunslinger
  • Luke Neverisky as Leliana Goldspring — Human Bard, walking her own memory trials
  • Ellis Taylor as Olivia Cooper — Dwarf Paladin, retired detective

Plot Events​

Through the Well​

Everyone spills through the gateway as if falling down a well, making Dexterity saves to land on their feet. Those who fail — Elspeth among them — eat 3d6 fall damage and land in a heap, her mold allergy flaring the instant she hits the ground. The library they climb into is the same one they left, but drowned: dripping wet, sheathed in black mold and fungus, its roof torn off and vine-like tubes rising from the floor. Silas, on Perception, spots shade-creatures — more solid than the ones the party fought before — hauling themselves up out of the dirt. He warns everyone over the "psychic phone" and climbs onto someone's back.

With the forest cleared away, Leliana can see the road to her family's cottage, and she can hear music. The two-mile walk has shrunk to a quarter mile. Confirming again that no drones or cameras followed them through, the party heads for the house.

The Cottage​

Inside is a memory: Mom, Dad (Josiah), and Leliana's brother Steven, playing an electric guitar strung with steel and painted with a blue crescent moon. Mom is cooking roast beef stew, Steven's favorite. It is one of the last times the family was ever together, and Leliana has walked part of this path before — this is how she first became connected to Helisanna.

The party's suspicion sharpens when they realize they all remember the shade damage identically, "a stone in our shoe," a shared reality-check that confirms the illusion. Leliana takes "Mom" aside, and Mom transforms: skin sagging away, hair curling to sticks, revealing an old green-skinned woman with blind crystal-white eyes and long nails. She is Straenona, the guide who leads travelers through the stops along the path.

The Guide's Bargain​

Straenona explains the rules like a grim Ghost of Christmas Past. She takes wanderers from one painful memory to the next, but she will not enter the final one. Stray from the path and the ghost dog — a phantom she also calls "Eg" — will eat you or transform you. To keep it at bay, she gifts the party a bone the dogs won't cross for a while. At the end of the path lies a Dead Forest where everything has died, and the only way through is to bring a new seed to replant it.

The party remembers they are carrying exactly that: a World Tree seed taken from an alternate-universe Scarlet's home. Olivia, ever practical, offers up sliced tomatoes, carrots, and PB&Js from her packed lunches. Food and curiosity buy Straenona's cooperation, and Leliana braces herself to keep walking. She should be far stronger this time through, having lived everything that comes after.

Steven Joins the Army​

The next stop replays Steven announcing he's enlisting — shipping to boot camp in Eldoran territory to make money and "make something of himself" instead of chasing music. Leliana, watching from the future, tries to steer him toward research or medicine, anything but combat, warning him of the war to come: "it gets awful... I've lived it." Steven waves it off. Eldoran soldiers are unbeatable, he tells her; he'll send money home, she should look after Mom and Dad, and the guitar is hers as long as she keeps playing it. After he leaves, Josiah weeps at the table.

Straenona warns Leliana that the next stop is where Steven dies, and offers to let her skip it. Leliana refuses and pushes forward.

The Lab​

The cottage dissolves into a sterile white lab under fluorescent light, each party member seated at a terminal running simulations. Steven — now Lieutenant Goldspring — is arguing with Captain Steel, a gaunt, androgynous, half-machine figure with a robotic arm and half a robotic skull. Steel demands his research. Steven refuses:

"Sir, Captain Steel, sir, I cannot share my research due to the extreme risk to human society."

The "harmonic alignment," he explains, would generate too much power to ever be contained or controlled; he had asked to destroy it and bury every lead. Steel is unmoved.

"Now that your eyes are open, I must close them."

Steel drives his robotic hand into Steven's skull and rips out his brain. Leliana's memory-avatar tries to fight — she casts frostbite, Steel counterspells it and tears out her heart, hitting her for 14 psychic damage in the present and jettisoning her soul from the scene. This is why, the first time through, she "went off the path" at her brother's death. The rest of the party scrambles for the data before it dissolves; Elspeth hacks the mainframe on a 23 Arcana and retrieves Lieutenant Goldspring's schematics — insisting loudly and repeatedly that she "hacked it for good," not as a lab villain.

The weapon comes into focus: a "moon laser" built on Steven's own fission-power research, twisted from containing uncontainable energy to directing it — layering multi-frequency energy like musical harmonics until it can be aimed.

"This is like straight up evil Nazi science." — Silas

The Funeral on Her Birthday​

The next stop is the military cemetery, the day before Leliana walked into the library. She sits between her mother and father as an Eldoran cleric gives the sermon. Captain Steel reads the will: Steven leaves the Blue Moon guitar to his parents and everything else to his family. Josiah hands Leliana a birthday card — the same card the party found among the dead months ago. The funeral falls on her birthday.

Leliana takes up the Blue Moon guitar, and this time it is real, with weight in her hands. Her memories are now complete, whole up to the day she stepped into the library. And in the back of the funeral, veiled and reading a newspaper, sits the phantom dog — revealed to be Straenona herself, a shapeshifter who was there all along.

Silas, who has spent months with both halves of her, offers Leliana the truest thing he can:

"Helisanna was like the rudest, most selfish person I've ever met. But maybe that was your coping mechanism... After having spent a good amount of time with both of you, this is the version I prefer."

The Dead Forest​

The scene collapses into the present. The party stands with Straenona at the edge of the Dead Forest — a mile-wide ring of dead trees behind a swamp moat, with a cleared path leading to an abandoned village. Straenona, it turns out, is no benevolent guide but a blood-magic hag who survives off the wanderers who never leave.

"I collect the bones of the phantom dogs and I turn them into little garden beds and I make little puppets from their skulls and I talk to them all through the day."

"No, I just use blood magic and suckers who stick around. I harvest their goods."

The abandoned campsite holds skeletons in tents and leftover supplies. The party pays Straenona off with root vegetables and a "brown" slushie substance, tries to teach her to germinate tomatoes, and agrees to stop leaning on such a terrible guide. Silas catches sight of someone bolting from the camp into the trees and gives chase — carefully, without leaving the path.

Ben Gunn​

The runner is Ben Gunn, gaunt and aged after two months in the forest, his mouth stained red. Leliana casts Message to coax him back — "Whoa, your voice is way different in my head" — and warns him off the trees and the ghost dog. Bru crowds into his space and smells blood on him: Ben has been eating things raw. He is a cannibal, but a threatened confrontation is set aside for now.

At the center of the village is a deliberate circle of runic stones ringing a patch of dirt that reeks of urine — the communal latrine.

"It's where we all pee... you need it for the nitrogen." — Ben Gunn

The runes are an ancient forest language older than Elvish or Gnomish, tied to bloodlines with deep ties to the fey. Leliana deciphers them: the circle marks the base of a Tree of Life, the proper place to plant the World Seed.

The World Tree​

After debating the World Seed against Olivia's tomato, the party plants the World Seed — with a potato tossed in for good measure. It erupts. Roots surge inward crackling with red lightning, and a massive World Tree rockets skyward. Silas spider-climbs, and the whole party — plus Ben Gunn and even Straenona ("I see your suckers later," she says, grabbing a branch) — ride it up through the cloud cover and an earthen ceiling in the sky.

"This is pretty metal." — Leliana

When the roots connected, the Dead Forest linked back to the birth of Helisanna — and Leliana finally understands. She and Helisanna are not two people, but two extremes of one person; she is both. Using her guitar, she can now switch between the Leliana and Helisanna personas at will — bard or warlock, one or the other, no blending yet. Becoming truly whole is a journey still ahead of her, but the guitar, a birthday gift built for exactly this, is the key.

The Capital of Eldora​

The World Tree bursts up through a park in Eldora's capital city, and the party climbs out into a hyper-advanced world: hovercraft, drones, a space shuttle launching from the harbor, glowing lamp posts, shimmering shape-shifting fabrics, and citizens with cybernetic red-glowing eyes. Meanwhile, on the distant game-show feed, vines and tomato plants and a giant potato are erupting out of the library floor — the far end of the same seed.

The city is powered by five giant floating crystals of iridescence arranged in a pentagon, one at the spaceport, beaming purple energy down to distributed pylons. Elspeth immediately scouts them as sabotage targets. The inner ring is affluent and mostly human; the outer worker rings are diverse, with dwarves running shops — but goblins are conspicuously absent from every work crew, and halflings, gnomes, and orcs serve as labor.

The party disguises themselves to blend in: Silas as a human child, then a street urchin, with Leliana posing as a wealthy jogging mother and the others as nannies and children. Their old cover — winning Bradicus's contest — is void, since they never actually won it, so they'll need a new story and must stash their weapons and magic items in the portable hole to slip past the city's magic detectors. Their contact Finnegan points them to George Cooper ("Georgie Boy"), now embedded in the city guard, to be met at a bar on the outskirts called the Sexy Peacock, where soldiers gather after their shifts. The session ends as the party walks in the door.

Notable Character Moments​

  • Leliana's whole journey is the session. She walks back through her brother's enlistment, his murder, and his funeral on her own birthday, taking real psychic damage each step, and comes out the other end understanding that she and Helisanna were never two people. Luke's character carried the entire night, and the guitar in her hands at the end is the proof.

  • Silas choosing the person over the memory. After watching both halves of her for months, he tells Leliana plainly that the rude, selfish Helisanna was a coping mechanism and that this — the whole version — is the one he prefers. It's the emotional anchor the whole memory-walk needed.

  • Elspeth's mainframe hack, punctuated by her insisting over and over that she did it "for good" and not as one of the lab's villains, is the comic release valve in the darkest scene of the night — and it's the roll that pulls Steven's schematics out of a dying memory.

  • Olivia's packed lunches turn out to be a plot device. Sliced tomatoes, carrots, and PB&Js buy Straenona's cooperation, and her steady practicality keeps the party fed and moving through a hell dimension.

  • Bru sniffing out the cannibal. Crowding into Ben Gunn's space to smell the blood on him is peak Bru — reckless, direct, and exactly the check that reveals what two months in the Dead Forest turned the man into.

  • Everyone riding the World Tree up through the sky, spider-climbing and grabbing branches as red lightning crackles through the roots, is the triumphant image the memory-walk earns. Even Straenona hitches a ride.

Themes​

  • Grief made walkable. The upside-down world is a machine for making someone relive their worst memories until they can hold them. Leliana can't become whole by avoiding her brother's death — she has to sit in the lab, in the cemetery, on her own birthday, and only then does the guitar work.

  • Two halves of one whole. Season-long, Leliana and Helisanna have been treated as separate. This session collapses that: they are two extremes of one person, and wholeness isn't picking one — it's learning to move between them without splitting apart.

  • Knowledge as a weapon. Steven's research was meant to contain an uncontainable power; Captain Steel murdered him to aim it instead. The moon laser runs on the same harmonic principles as music — a chilling rhyme with Leliana's own art.

  • Guides who feed on the lost. Straenona helps for a price, and the price is everyone who stops walking. The Dead Forest is full of people who trusted the wrong guide, from the skeletons in the tents to Ben Gunn eating raw in the trees.

Session MVP​

Leliana — This was her episode start to finish. She refused to skip her brother's death, took psychic damage reliving the lab and the funeral, retrieved the Blue Moon guitar with real weight in her hands, deciphered the ancient runes that marked the planting site, and walked out the far side finally understanding that she and Helisanna are the same person. The World Tree that broke the sky and delivered the party to Eldora's capital grew from the seed she chose to plant at the end of her own path.