The Billowing Hilltop - A D&D Podcast · Dungeons & Dragons

Episode 259 – One of These Days I’m Gonna Sit Down and Talk to Paul

August 21, 2025·56 min·4 clips

It gets a 12, it hits armor class 25 — holy fuck, this is round seven, everybody.

1. This is episode 259 of The Billowing Hilltop Podcast, a comedic Dungeons & Dragons actual-play show, picking up mid-combat on the Katzenjammer planetoid. 2. The regular cast plays under nicknames including Johnny, Dan, Paul, Viking Graham, and Spider Lucas, with GM Mike recapping that Burple has already been digested and excreted by a piranha demon. 3. The core action is the party's race to deliver a necronite crystal to a hearth spirit inside the planetoid before it's destroyed, while fending off piranha demons and a floating, dispel-casting skull. 4. Uncle Buggy uses Stone Shape to tunnel through walls in stages to reach the hearth spirit chamber, eventually reappearing through a three-foot-high aperture. 5. Parker kills the last piranha demon with a single quarterstaff hit and picks up the necronite crystal to carry it onward. 6. Sessions counterattacks a piranha demon's claw-and-bite combo with a magic "crushing coin," landing a 27-point hit, and later calls lightning on the skull with little effect. 7. The floating skull turns out to be resistant to physical and lightning damage, described as possibly a projection, hologram, or figment with no physical form. 8. When Buggy drops the necronite crystal into the hearth-spirit's brazier, the skull grows a spine, ribs, arms, and legs into a full skeletal warrior and blasts Buggy with green fire, dispelling his Death Ward and Freedom of Movement. 9. The party scrambles back into their vehicle, the apparatus of the Quallish, moments before the planetoid detonates behind them with them narrowly escaping. 10. The group confirms afterward that they successfully performed an "anti-Kios" by disrupting a planetary conjunction the villains Kios and Lashana were relying on. 11. The hosts debate at length how a piranha demon could digest and excrete Burple's full gear, including a sword and a mandolin, without damaging itself, landing on an owl-pellet comparison. 12. The party pays 24,000 to 25,000 gold pieces worth of diamonds to cast True Resurrection and bring Burple back to life. 13. Upon resurrection, the hosts riff on what Burple smells like, settling on a talcum-powder "new baby" smell rather than anything worse. 14. The patron Hestetestapod welcomes the party back and lays out several possible objectives: retrieving a fragment of the Rod of Seven Parts, the Hand of Asmodee from a man named Dahl Quethos, and a dangerous Sphere of Annihilation. 15. Hestetestapod explains the primary threat is a Vortex of negative energy tied to the boneyard beneath the Temple of the Grey Woodsmen in the city of Frosthanger. 16. The party debates whether to pursue the low-combat Sphere of Annihilation errand first or head straight into Frosthanger to fight through undead-infested streets. 17. The tone mixes genuine tactical D&D combat and worldbuilding exposition with constant crosstalk, in-character bickering, and tangents about anatomy and smell jokes. 18. The format is a five-person live actual-play session with a GM narrating combat and NPC dialogue while players debate tactics and strategy. 19. Longtime listeners of the campaign who enjoy detailed tactical combat resolved with heavy banter would enjoy this episode. 20. New listeners unfamiliar with the campaign's ongoing plot about Kios, Lashana, and the Rod of Seven Parts may find the planning section hard to follow.

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