#K'varn

[mareastrorum]

Keyleth: K'Varn's a beholder. Vex: (gasps) Scanlan: A beholder? What's that? [...] Keyleth: Not only is K'Varn a beholder, K'Varn has been experimenting on himself and so he has armor grafted onto him, and the horn The horn which-- I don't know.

[Discussion/planning...]

Travis: Could you tell me what a beholder is first? Because I don't know. Sam: Big bad scary thing. Travis: With finger eyes? Matt: (grabs the Monster Manual) That's a beholder.

Laura: Oh, the thing on the front of the Monster Manual. Ashley: It's on the cover of a book. Travis: Worst possible scenario imaginable. Laura: That's all you could have said. Liam: The iconic creature. Taliesin: It's on the cover of Dungeons & Dragons Monthly right now. It is the cover model.

[thequeenofmyownscreen]

Oh, I forgot that it was Scanlan who called out Tiberius on his behavior during the K'Varn fight. He's extremely good at poking stuff, including wounds, this is an aspect of Scanlan I deeply love. Everyone kinda played this scene for laughs too, but him, and he's right : it's a clear point of contention !

[watchmachina]

Watch Machina continues this week with Campaign 1 episode 11, "The Temple Showdown"! From today, May 26th, until Sunday, June 1st, we're rewatching and reacting to the eleventh episode of Campaign 1, which you can watch here or directly on YouTube. You can also follow along with this Linkable Transcript over on Kryogenix, and if you plan to liveblog, don't forget to tag your posts #watch machina!

Please be advised: this episode features one of the players, Orion Acaba, being abrasive, selfish, and rude at the table during the fight against K'Varn, starting about three hours in. This is not a trigger warning; the episode is otherwise very good and the rest of the party is still fun to watch, but be aware that the atmosphere can get tense at times.

It's a long one this week! A little over four and a half hours, with the last hour and a half being the combat against K'Varn. If you'd like to skip the intro and announcements, they stop at 10:04, and the session starts at 13:42. The break begins at 1:39:31 and the second half begins at 1:48:13. (All timestamp links open a separate tab to YouTube.)

[cultofthewyrm]

K'Varn by Stephen Oakley

[burr-ell]

no but genuinely there's just something about the tentacled stitch monster that gets to me like. it used to be an elf, and when the party investigates the body they find he was wearing bracers of archery. this was an adventurer like vox machina and somehow he got found by k'varn and got mutilated and turned into a hideous abomination. like. yikes man, what a way to go

[justalittlebluetiefling]

Sometimes, I feel kind of bad for K'Varn.

[nilesdaughter]

Watch Machina Masterlist

I've been watching CritRole since 2016, so Vox Machina was the party I fell in love with. These past ten years of content and nine years of fandom have been so, so, so formative for me. So, thanks to @burr-ell and her @watchmachina project, I get to revisit my first and favorite campaign... and I'm dragging y'all with me, lol.

Please keep an eye here as I update with links to all my commentary posts as @lycaboros and I rewatch together.

Perc'ahlia Moments

General Commentary 1. Arrival at Kraghammer 2. Into the Greyspine Mines 3. Strange Bedfellows 4. Attack on the Duergar Camp 5. The Trick About Falling 6. Breaching the Emberhold 7. The Throne Room 8. Glass and Bone 9. Yug'voril Uncovered 10. K'Varn Revealed 11. The Temple Showdown 12. Substitute: CelebriD&D with Joe Manganiello 13. Escape from the Underdark 14. Shopping and Shipping 15. Skyward

[veldrune]

After casting her Scrying spell to locate the Horn of Orcus, Keyleth sees the beholder, K'Varn, and it's many eyes. Each one pulsing with its own unique power.

[meadowsofmay]

oh my god, tal was going THROUGH it when grog almost died during the k'varn fight, my poor guy

[essayofthoughts]

and because i cannot be quelled: wolf siblings au?

You do have your faves, don't you?

--

Percy never goes anywhere without at least one of the wolves. Even once they have Greyskull, even once they're hailed as heroes in Emon, he never goes anywhere without at least one of them for company.

Which is why, when they go to the palace to report on the events of the Underdark and K'varn, he goes with Vesper at his side. The rest are content to stay at Greyskull, sunning themselves in the grounds and, when the wind turns cold, the warm and sunlit temple to Sarenrae, but Vesper stays at his side through the streets of Emon and settles by the side of his chair in the council chamber.

So it is that, when the names of Lord and Lady Briarwood are mentioned it is not just Percy who is stunned. At his side Vesper bristles, hackles up, on her feet and leaning, trembling, against his leg.

It grounds him, that pressure, and he buries his hands in her fur, gets a grip on the scruff of her neck just in case.

"Shh," he murmurs, quiet enough only Pike beside him hears. When Pike glances down at Vesper, then frowns up at him, he shakes his head. "Don't worry," he tells her before working to soothe his sister. "Shh," he murmurs again. "Settle. Settle. It's alright. I'll have a word after."

Vesper's head turns, eyes dark and piercing as she watches up at him and when she nips his hand she's none too gentle about it.

"I know it matters," he says as quietly as he can. "It matters to me too. But we can't do anything about it if you get us kicked out. Hush now. Settle."

With a huff Vesper does, not slumped at his feet as when they're safe and relaxed but sat beside him at attention, head up, ears pricked, eyes forward as she stares, unblinking, at the Sovereign.

It is a long meeting.

--

[mareastrorum]

Toothy Maw count: 7

Honorary mentions to date... Toothed Maw: 1 Maw with teeth: 1 Toothy Fangs: 1

[thequeenofmyownscreen]

This episode is really not the best of this arc (which is, arguably, the lesser arc of Campaign 1 in itself) : a little boring, a lot of cross-talks and bad jokes that aged poorly (that Suggestion on Lady Kima...), a lot of Orion trying to take the cover onto himself only. The only really positive thing this week is that Keyleth's Scrying was clutch in learning what exactly K'Varn is.

I'm glad that next week, we're finally almost out of the Underdark ! Even if I know we have to suffer more of Tiberius' and his actor's nonsense soon.

[exandriacityshowdown]

Round 1 Stage 6 Poll 7

Port Damali, Wildemount: Port Damali is a large, lively port city on the Menagerie Coast. It is the hometown of Fjord of the Mighty Nein. The Mighty Nein once visited very very briefly during a teleportation "mishap" involving the Teleportation Circles of the Cobalt Soul. 

image from the mighty nein origins: fjord stone by selina espiritu and diana sousa

Yug'Voril, Underdark: Yug'Voril is an ancient Underdark city, far beneath Tal'Dorei. In 810 it was occupied by a group of illithids but apparently the structure predates them. Vox Machina traveled here in search of K'Varn.

image by andy law from tal'dorei campaign setting reborn

[watchmachina]

Watch Machina continues this week with Campaign 1 episode 10, "K'Varn Revealed"! From today, May 19th, until Sunday, May 25th, we're rewatching and reacting to the tenth episode of Campaign 1, which you can watch here or directly on YouTube. You can also follow along with this Linkable Transcript over on Kryogenix, and if you plan to liveblog, don't forget to tag your posts #watch machina!

The VOD is a little over four and a half hours, but the session itself is only three; at 3:22:08 there's a cast Q&A, so if you'd like to stick around for that, feel free to watch to the end! If you'd like to skip the character intros, they stop at 16:30. The break begins at 2:05:03 and the second half begins at 2:14:10. (All timestamp links open a separate tab to YouTube.)

[educationaldm]

Lady Kima being launched at the Beholder K’Varn. From the Critical Coloring book, link below.  Donations to The Pablove Foundation are much appreciated. https://give.pablove.org/give/243316/#!/donation/checkout

[burr-ell]

@meiloorun-notthefruit replied to your post “yeah, hot take, if you haven't watched the first...”:

Wait if anybody wants to respond to this i have never watched c1 and i am having the time of my life with this week's episode, what is an example of the group actually mad? im curious

​Sorry it took me a minute to respond to this! There's a pretty good writeup of the issue on r/HobbyDrama (though it does have one or two minor errors), but I'll give you the short(er) answer.

So originally, Vox Machina actually had eight members: Percy, Grog, Scanlan, Pike, Vax, Vex, Keyleth, and Tiberius Stormwind, a dragonborn sorcerer played by Orion Acaba, another voice actor who'd done work on video games and anime with the rest of the cast. For a variety of reasons, Orion rather quickly developed a nasty case of Main Character Syndrome, and frequently did things that genuinely angered the cast. A couple notable examples:

When the party fought and defeated K'Varn, a beholder, in 1x11, Orion had Tiberius exit the fight for a plan to rally a group of mindflayers to their cause (which failed), and eventually returned, landed the final killing blow on K'Varn, and generally acted like an ass about it, leading to Marisha demanding to know why he was being so rude and unpleasant.

In Vasselheim in 1x16, in order to escape from a trap, Vex had to fire a nearly-impossible shot and rolled a 35, meaning it was guaranteed to happen and was going to be an incredible moment for her, and Orion had Tiberius insert himself to "help" using Telekinesis. The entire cast yelled at him indiscriminately for it, and while Matt was able to thread the needle live on stream, the atmosphere was generally very tense.

The nadir of them all, 1x27. This one's a twofer:

I don't know if you've watched TLOVM, but the Briarwood arc had just begun at this point, and all the party really knew about the Briarwoods was that at least one of them was a vampire. (I can't remember if they knew Delilah was a human necromancer by this point.) So Tiberius goes on a HUGE shopping trip to buy—among other things—every mirror he can in Emon, and the conclusion most people have drawn, quite reasonably, is that he intended to use them to make a massive light array to just drench Whitestone in sunlight and fry all the vampires. He also tries to write his family in his hometown of Draconia to bring the Draconian army into Whitestone to take care of things for them. Both of those things are frustrating to watch in the moment, but especially so when you realize that they're attempts to essentially speedrun Percy's entire arc and make Tiberius the hero. This and the other things he was doing already took up a ton of solo time, and Travis (known hater of shopping) eventually snapped "how about you get nothing else, and we move on?"

Then, the grandaddy of them all: while the party was discussing what to do and Vex was formulating a plan, Orion announced out of bumfuck nowhere that "Tiberius is getting a half-chub". Every single person at the table was appalled, and you can feel the change in the air if you watch the scene. Travis and Taliesin are both visibly furious; Sam, Marisha, Liam, and Matt are completely taken aback; and Laura looks incredibly uncomfortable. Tiberius had never established this aspect of his character at all the way Scanlan did, and after everything else there was very little patience anyone was going to grant him.

These are just isolated moments; Orion had overall behaved rather unpleasantly on-air and did a lot of metagaming (the reason he left the K'Varn fight was that he knew what beholders were and thought Matt was out to get him), and Matt once explicitly said after Orion left that he used to cheat on his dice rolls. Going from episode 27 to 28 is such a palpable shift in tone and atmosphere, and it's unsurprising that two episodes later they would announce Orion's permanent departure.

So yeah—if you've watched those scenes, you have a much better metric for what the cast's genuine anger is actually like.