Murder Dice - A 5e Dungeons & Dragons Podcast · Dungeons and Dragons

Murder Dice - The Gates Ep. 52

·1 hr 1 min·5 clips

The party falls through the gate into a stormy ocean and hears Boots shouting from a boat.

The table opens in a glorious state of mess. David comes in as Dungeon Master and the cast immediately turns the room into a joke machine, with everyone interrupting, correcting, and spiraling into nonsense before the scene can really settle. A tattoo promise hangs over the whole thing. That old bit comes back quickly, with the show revisiting who got a murder guy's tattoo, who still owes one, and how this may be the penultimate episode before the final stretch. Then the gate situation takes over. The players need to get across, so the episode becomes a mix of movement, dice rolls, and half-serious arguments about which checks count, who can climb, and how much mercy the god of the table is feeling. The boat is the obstacle. One character tries a misty step and the table goes straight into rules forensics, talking through whether teleporting counts as stepping, whether flying changes anything, and how much of the moment will simply be decided by the dice anyway. Mostly, it is. The crew keeps throwing rolls at the problem, with athletics and acrobatics checks turning into a little relay of success, failure, and the kind of dumb confidence that shows up right before someone eats rocks. Sandy has a rough time. A rope gives way, someone scrambles, damage gets tossed around, and the whole thing plays like a classic tabletop stunt where the mechanics are serious but the tone never stops sneering at itself. That balance is the point. The show lets the scene stay grim and stupid at the same time, so the listener gets a proper fantasy obstacle course without losing the loose, half-broken table energy that defines the series. No one is trying to sound polished. The cast keeps drifting into side jokes, bodily nonsense, and quick riffs, then snapping back when the rules or the danger demand attention, which gives the whole chapter a live-wire feel. By the end, the trip is done. The group packs up, finds there are no horses, blames Darius for apparently killing them all, and heads into the final stretch with the mood set squarely on an ending. The last beat is half threat, half punchline. That is exactly why it lands, because the episode knows the show is nearing the finish and still refuses to stop being a bunch of friends talking shit while the world burns around them.

As heard by us

A filthy, funny late-campaign scramble that keeps turning rules chatter into momentum.

Murder Dice turns the run to the gates into a messy, funny sprint, with filthy jokes, old tattoo bets, and a boat crossing that only a long-running table could make this chaotic.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Play this if you want a penultimate dungeon crawl that keeps tripping over its own jokes.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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