Nightmare Fuel / Oxventure

The Oxventure

Quiet Riot

• As funny as it was, "Merilwen's Meat Grinder", meant as a trap to just weaken the attacking Knight Templar paladins, ends up outright killing one and seriously maiming four of them. While Prudence is outright rejoicing at this, Jane, out of character, is audibly wincing!
• The fight against the Order of Keeping it Down, from their perspective. Their order gets infiltrated, then turned on and absolutely massacred in about twelve seconds. Special mention goes to Merilwen, again, this time bursting out her armour and turning into a bear, swiping a man's head off, and then using Moonbeam to burn the Watch Commander alive.

Stop, Hammer Time

• Though Efelfrith's Chosen are Laughably Evil and (in this chapter) Obliviously Evil, their killing fourteen orphans is genuinely horrifying.

Spell Check

• As much as the Organ Theft is initially played for Black Comedy, Liliana proves herself a Bad Boss when Christopher Englebert XVII comes in with a "message", and her response is to order her other underlings to harvest his organs.

Peak Performance

• The gang initially go in with their cavalier approach... until they find out there is a dragon at the top of the mountain, far beyond their fighting skills even after having grown in strength. At that point, any noise the gang makes is treated as life and death, to the point their usually reckless approach is (bar one or two jokes) largely gone.
• The revelation of Vex's traps in "Peak Performance" is legitimately disturbing. To make matters worse, one catches Dob, though he survives. However, even Vex's death isn't implied to break the curse, and when Dob dies his corpse is apparently due to return to the peak.
• Also from "Peak Performance", though he very much deserved it, Vex's fate is horrific. To wit, he gets set on fire, stabbed through the foot with a melting rapier that pins him in place, entangled and left helpless to escape, screaming in terror as the dragon wakes up, swoops down from the mountain and obliterates him.

Exhibition Impossible

• The effects of Egbert's cursed mace. Being forcibly turned into an animal, and then treated as such by everyone around you despite still being sentient, is pretty horrific. Egbert himself feels ashamed by it as time goes on.
• During her exploration, Prudence finds a palantir-style orb and critically fails her roll to resist being lured into doing its bidding. Thankfully, she breaks out of it... but does take it with her.

Faire Trial

• During "Faire Trial", as Egbert faces off with Brawling Stan as his final trial, Prudence throws a dark orb that she stole from Victor Dietrich's museum into the arena. Unknown to everyone, when the orb rolls against Stan's leg, it proceeds to suck Stan into itself, leaving no trace of the minotaur behind. For all intents and purposes, Prudence had trapped Brawling Stan inside an orb since no one knows how to get him out yet.

Sect Appeal

• The truth behind the "Order Of the Blessed Lady": they've been kidnapping people to join the cult, with the plan to brainwash them and mutate them, all while enforcing a cult of personality that has an unspoken punishment for any worship beyond their "blessed lady", implied to be death or worse. To make matters worse? Liliana is the one responsible, at which point the Guild go Oh, Crap!. Though the gang stop the plan, she's aware they interfered.

Elf Hazard

• The revelation that the Eroan is a Knight Templar who has been killing anyone deviating from traditions by slapping iron broaches on them, cursing them to be hunted down by banshees. It's telling that the humour is very quickly snuffed out after this revelation until the bad guy dies. The only victim to this onscreen is the bad guy himself, but he gives a nasty demonstration of how this would look, and the ledger has multiple victims. This is made worse by the fact that, during a DM livestream with Luke, Johnny confirmed it wasn't just banshees that might have been lured in...
• The banshees themselves may not be the main villains, but Dob is terrified out of using them as a weapon once he sees their destructive power.

Bone To Pick / Bone 2 Pick two-parter

• In "Bone to Pick", it turns out the consequences for using Efelfrith's hammer are a lot nastier than the Guild realised. If they don't carry out the arcane ritual, they get absorbed into the hammer and will explode.

Tower Rangers

• Though "Tower Rangers" is quite amusing, it gets decidedly horrific when Liliana responds to some underlings infighting by summoning a storm of daggers and slicing them to death. Ellen, Luke and Jane are all suitably horrified even if Andy manages to keep it together.
• Also, the fact that the guild don't stand and fight or even hide nearby to rest before going back into the fray, but that they run.

Gnome Alone

• The fact that Liliana was not only able to track the Guild down, but also to bypass a spell that held back four banshees and project herself long enough to shoot the balloon down.
• The mind flayer that fights the party, when asked if it's kidnapping kobolds and gnomes to survive, admits that it needs to eat... but then adds it's happy to mix necessity and pleasure together.

Snow Mercy

• The entire premise of this episode. The kobolds have come to associate blizzards with disappearances... rightfully so, because their zombified kin turn up to snatch more of them, then add them to their ranks. When the Guild breach Dana's basement, there are a few dozen kobolds who've fallen this way.

Unreal EstateNaturally, as the Halloween Episode, there were going to be even more horrifying moments than normal.

• The first sign something's wrong is that the walls seem to close in and the usually flippant Corazon feels the temperature drop at least twenty degrees.
• The first buyer initially seems like a good deal, until they get to a training room. At this point, a sword-wielding training dummy comes to life and slashes the colonel in the throat. Dob's healing does nothing, at which point he bleeds to death.
• The second buyer is confronted in an art-room, whereupon a painting comes to life and some wolves pop out. One of the Guild attempts to paint the wolves so they're less intimidating, but this only serves to make the wolves even more deformed and uncanny, and no less murderous.
  • Corazon's solution is to hide in a fairground painting. This turns out to be less than ideal when he hears a warped fairground tune and a Monster Clown in art form starts menacing him.
  • A fire starts in the middle of this fight, at which point the painting catches fire while Dob and the buyer are inside.
• After saving the buyer, they hear a loud, pained scream from outside, to realise that Bismuth, of all people, tried shooting her to make sure she didn't hamper the buying efforts by spilling the beans to anyone else. Beware the Silly Ones indeed.
• The third buyer is a family with two children (which itself causes an Oh, Crap! in the Guild), who are oblivious to the harm to start with. It turns out the room contains a mimic, and Dob's attempts to save the dad actually steer the mimic straight into him. The mum and two children are understandably terrified and run for their lives.

Silent Knight

• The fact that the culprit of this episode was one of the Order of Keeping It Down, the same paladin order the Guild annihilated over two years ago in real time, back for revenge against the town for their defeat. Even with the Guild's best efforts, and without any backup or support of his own, he still comes frighteningly close to killing the town multiple times, including the children who almost get blown up directly.
  • What's worse is that besides the paladin being male, and desiring revenge, we know nothing about him.

Chart of Darkness

• It turns out that Wally, without any malicious intent but purely from ignorance, has made an escape room that is literally lethal for anyone not smart enough to solve it, using real poison gas and dangerous animatronic animals.
• Jack Crackson's monkey discovers the hard way that an animatronic snake is not an opponent it can outrun, and all that's left is a pair of cymbals.
• Crackson's benefactor? Liliana, telling the Guild to hand over the chart or prepare to be hunted down there and then.

Crawl Me Maybe

• Though most of the adventure is a lighthearted parody of dungeon crawls and made hilarious by a Meta Guy pointing out the narrative absurdities of said dungeon crawls, the plot takes a sudden and unexpected turn for the horrifying when Prudence's palantir-style orb, initially seeming to just follow Prudence around, jumps in a pool of magical liquid and starts moving of its own volition. The suddenly terrifying music does not help matters.

Orb-Pocalypse Saga - Epic Jail

• The state of Al-Cataz is not pleasant, to put it mildly. The prison doesn't segregate magic users from non-magical beings, will willingly imprison you for something as minor as being late in repaying someone for a round of drinks, and guard and prisoner deaths are not uncommon. That this is the start of the Astor family's fortune doesn't bode well, either.
• The presence of a cannibal prisoner apparently did not cause enough concern for the prison to separate him from other prisoners, until he ate sixty people. Though there is a bit of Mood Whiplash when the guards create a giant, man-sized chicken nugget for him, it's still a horrifying prospect.
• The fate of Drumsticks, an obnoxious guard who indulged in Police Brutality against the cannibal without checking whom he was antagonising. After he gets distracted by Egbert locking him in and legging it, he turns around to find a figure looming over him, and the gang hears a Sickening "Crunch!".
• Corazon and Prudence let loose a prisoner named Sully, after they get intel that he's reliable for causing distractions and respected by the other prisoners. It turns out that's only half-true; his idea of a "distraction" is to kill several guards effortlessly and raise at least ten of them as undead thralls to break free and start conquering G'eth, revealing "Sully" is short for "Sulpigius, the Scourge of Man". Thankfully, Egbert is able to use Command on him, but it was still very close.

Orb-Pocalypse Saga - Wrangle in the Tangle

• When tracking down Tinniswood's men, the gang discover that there is an aboleth on their tail. Though it's more likely to just be a denizen of the body of water it was in, Johnny notes it could have been following them for quite some time. Later, when it ambushes Tinniswood's camp, it curses four men so that as they run out the river, they are unable to breathe air. Dob's decision to give them Mercy Kill, while horrifying, was probably a genuine mercy.
• Though there's also Black Comedy from it, Christian the Hornbill's eagerness to poison and kill the bandits is disturbing.

Orb-Pocalypse Saga: Season Finale

• Liliana leads her army up the mountain to face off against the Adult White Dragon that scared the party and finished Vex off. Despite the army taking some losses, the dragon loses, which raises the question - what does it take to kill Liliana?
• Liliana faces off against Vocatus and effortlessly takes him down. Despite the resistance from the golems against the clone army, Liliana manages to take Vocatus's power from him, turns his wine monsters against him and has them tear him limb from limb.

Oxventure Presents Blades In the Dark

In generalThe general setting of Volisport is itself a pretty nasty place to live, lending itself well to a Darker and Edgier feel. Anyone who dies has to have their spirit harnessed quickly because otherwise their spirit comes back as a ghost, the police are notoriously brutal and corrupt and gangs are disproportionately powerful in the more anarchic parts in the city. The worse part? Outside the city is worse, raising the question as to what happened to G'eth.

• We later find out "The Brighteners" had something to do with it, which led to a calamity that wiped out a lot of the old world, in turn leading to events which caused many nonhumans from the D&D world to become considerably rarer.

The Dreadful Dimmer Sisters

• The ransom demand arrives as a wet, sticky bundle wrapped in Barnaby's coat. The crew immediately guesses that there's some part of him inside, and sure enough, it contains his entire forearm, causing Zillah to drop an F-bomb. It's thankfully just an illusion, but the Dimmer Sisters make it clear they're ready to send the real thing next time.
• The Dimmer Sisters' experiments are horrible, ranging from merging ghosts of different species into mismatched monstrosities to brainwashing them into serving as a sort of password-protected security system - and since they use these systems on doors and switches throughout their base, they must have a lot of ghosts enslaved.

One-Shot Wonders

Dread

• From the get-go, although there's still comedy, the stakes are much higher than D&D, and as player characters start to die, their actor leaves the table, contributing to the feeling of a Dwindling Party.
• When Madison uses the radio, she only hears garbled words from the other end, leaving her and the others genuinely unsure whether they're being told to hold their position, or keep moving.
• The first tower collapse of the session comes when Andy tries but fails to pull out a block, leading to Mike, Luke and Ellen all watching in horror and then despair. This leads to...
  • Killian tries to pull Eric out of the boat, he gets his footing wrong, slipping and leading to them both falling into the river. Just when we think Killian might have still made it, he suddenly snaps his neck against a rock, and is killed instantly. Before anyone can do anything, the werewolf grabs him, impaling his chest and dragging his corpse away.
• The second tower collapse of the session comes when Ellen can't get the tower pull right. This leads to...
  • Madison, utterly exhausted by the last day or so and frustrated with Brad's loud snoring, goes some distance away and goes back to sleep there. She wakes to find the werewolf above her, and doesn't have time to scream as it kills her. Brad then wakes up to it gnawing on her dead body, only recognising her mangled torso.
• The werewolf is, to date, one of the few TTRPG antagonists the players have fought that came close to winning. Only some very lucky pulls of the Jenga Tower stopped this from being a Total Party Kill.