Recap / Dice Funk Season 7 Wormwood

Wormwood is the seventh season of Dice Funk and takes place in an alternate Dark Sun setting. Specifically, the salt flats of Wormwood presided over by God-King Wolfram. Conduits are no longer commonplace, and having one makes you a god in the eyes of the people.

Starring:

• Lauren Morgan as Lola Beans, kobold ranger.
• Conrad Zimmerman as Brother Khorton, mul bard.
• Laura Kate Dale as Vindrass, thri-kreen cleric.
• Quinn Larios as Sabrina Wolfram, ice genasi sorcerer.
• Austin Yorski as the DM.

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Season 7 Tropes

• Acceptable Targets: Slavers and racists. At one point the party goes to liberate a bunch of slaves, and Austin emphasizes that they are fully justified in kicking the asses of the slavers because of how evil they are.
• After the End: Since Purgatory, the apocalypse has come, gone, and given way to a new society with no accurate memory of the pre-apocalypse.
• Animate Inanimate Object: The creature possessing the library can do this to organic material. It's been living in the wood and paper of the library, ambushing would-be scavengers.
  • After wounding the monster, the party gives it an (apparently organic) abalone mascot hat to possess so they can take it with them.
• Ambiguous Ending: Clear is simply described reaching the surface and leaving for parts unknown. Quinn considers her story over when she makes her decision at the seed of Yggdrasil and thinks of her adventures on the way back up as her epilogue.
• Anti-Climax Boss: The Abbott shows up in Absynthia and enters the same room as most of the party... but he recognizes Bramwell as a knight of the God-King and the rest of the party file out of the room pretending to be servants.
  • The God-King himself creates a proxy salt golem to investigate the spa after detecting the party there and runs into Vindrass all on her own. She destroys the golem without taking a single hit.
• Apocalypse How: Damage sustained to the Yggdrasil during Purgatory eventually causes it to collapse, which also makes the planes it holds in its branches fall on top of each other, creating a surreal new wasteland plane with bits from each of the former discrete planes scattered throughout.
• Back from the Dead: Every single conduit. Becoming one requires embodying a concept so much that it kills you; since each conduit loses their memories as part of the brain damage that occurs in the process of dying, none of them remember how this works once they come back.
• Bandit Clan: The bat-folk in the glass forest have shades of this. They apparently get their supplies mostly by mugging people traveling through the forest, although Diana, who seems to be in charge, implies that this is only really because merchants are too scared of the demon to come to them.
• Base on Wheels: God-King Wolfram's Castle is mobile. It looks like a medieval castle but it's built on top of a wrecked cruise ship and covered in salt; since the God-King controls salt, he can just telekinetically move the whole Castle.
• Bizarrchitecture: Harpe City is a skyscraper turned on its side. The lack of structural damage suggests it didn't fall, presumably appearing in Wormwood already sideways.
  • The foundation of the Castle is a wrecked cruise ship. This is to help it move across the sand.
• Blood Sport: Three of the player characters are introduced being pushed into an arena to fight in gladiatorial combat.
• Call-Back: After Clear sacrifices her power she has to climb back out from the bottom of the Yggdrasil and travels through the various worlds of previous seasons. The intro to each episode after this point is a vignette of Clear uncovering some part of each past season as she ascends.
  • On the second-lowest layer she finds an abandoned riverboat with an old-school ship's wheel bolted on top.
  • The third-lowest has a flying metal ship that looks a bit like a fat snake and a photograph of the family that lived on it.
  • The fourth-lowest is a city of shining lights with buildings that look like Harpe City put upright.
  • The fifth-lowest is a small stonework settlement full of personal items and unusual features.
  • The sixth-lowest is a massive ocean full of sunken ships.
• Continuity Nod: The gladiatorial arena used to be a Rallyball field.
  • The Athar use the giant language in communications. This dates back to their leadership historically being descended from titans, such as Abraham in Season 6.
• Cool Boat: One mode of transportation is through skiffs which act like sailboats but designed to move over the marshy ground of the salt flats. Sabrina acquires one and names it the 'Romance Dawn'.
• Cult: Brother Khorton is trying to start a following to keep himself safe from his former masters and possibly free the slaves. Due to his free-love message and charming personality it's really more of a sex cult.
• I Don't Like the Sound of That Place: After Austin reveals the map to the players, Quinn immediately draws attention to an area called the Gore Fields.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The first four episodes were originally subtitled 'Avellone' as a shout-out to Chris Avellone, whose work partially inspired both seasons 6 and 7. After Avellone was accused of sexual assault and harassment the cast decided to change the name of Season 7 to its original working title, Wormwood.
• Edible Ammunition: There's a type of melon which naturally produces a tear gas-like substance as it matures. It's use as a type of bomb is controversial in-universe. Actually eating one is probably a bad idea but it's still a fruit.
• Eerily Out-of-Place Object: Due to the eventual collapse of the Yggdrasil some time after Purgatory there are artifacts and buildings from other universes in odd places across the landscape. On top of that, the wasteland used to be a seabed and is now mushy sand and salt flats, meaning there's bound to be a Saharan Shipwreck or two.
  • Probably the most on-the-nose example of this is Absynthia, which is a pristine chunk of suburbia dropped in the middle of the wasteland.
• The Executioner: Wolfram has one in the arena, a pterran wielding an axe and wearing an abalone costume. See Future Imperfect for context.
  • As revealed by the God-King's conduit, the Executioner's conduit powers involve summoning spectral execution implements at people (i.e. a hail of stones, a crucifix, a guillotine).
• Everyone Is a Super: Weaver indicates that everyone has the capacity for psionics so long as they put in the effort; most people just don't know that's an option, and finding someone who can teach you is difficult.
  • Alternatively, anyone has the capacity to become a conduit; doing so means finding something that defines you and letting it overtake you. It's also questionable how much of 'you' is left afterwards. This knowledge isn't particularly widespread, however, and most people think conduits are hereditary.
• Fantastic Racism: Thri-kreen are particularly oppressed by God-King Wolfram's regime. There are also conflicts between different animal people based on who eats who; shrike aarakocra, for example, seem to like picking on kobolds and thri-kreen.
• Fog of Doom: The nitrogen elemental in the windmill. Being made of nitrogen it's completely invisible and attacks people by blocking off their oxygen.
• Forbidden Zone: The Glass Forest has this reputation. It's full of God-King Wolfram's guards, there's ostensibly a murderous demon living there, and it's where Lola was captured immediately before the start of the season. Most of the party would prefer to stay far, far away. So obviously that's exactly where Sabrina wants to take them.
• Future Imperfect: The people of Wolfram's city assume that the Rallyball field has always been used for gladiatorial combat. They also think the mascot was the executioner, meaning their own executioner is dressed in an abalone costume.
• Giant Corpse World: The known world is revealed to be just one layer of numerous planes that collapsed on themselves when the Yggdrasil died. The now-singular universe is contained within its dead trunk.
• God-Emperor: Wolfram, the God-King. Due to being a salt genasi and living on a salt flat, he has total control over his domain.
• The Greatest Story Never Told: People eventually assume the God-King was killed by extremists from the Path of the Joining who then disappeared. Since none of the party ever takes credit, this becomes the assumed truth.
• Hybrid Monster: Denise Wolfram creates her own chimera which she names the Denisian Chimera. It consists of a hippopotamus, mosquito, cassowary, and roundworm. Oh, and it breathes white phosphorus.
• Kicked Upstairs: Marcel Wolfram's mother was involved in the Athar uprising, so Marcel was given the job of administrating Harpe City to keep him away from the God-King. It technically is a promotion, but Marcel is well aware that he was only given the job to get him out of the way.
• Last Fertile Region: The Gore Fields. Yup. In fact, it's called the Gore Fields because there's constant fighting to control such a resource. Turns out the dead left out to rot fertilize the soil even more and result in a juxtaposition of beautiful greenery and absolute carnage.
• Lighter and Softer: Far more upbeat than the canonical Dark Sun setting. Also a bit moreso than past Dice Funk seasons; Austin's said that Wormwood will have a straightforward Big Bad and be more like traditional D&D than previous seasons.
• Living Structure Monster: The monster in the library. It can possess and control organic material, and has been using the wooden floor, furniture, and paper to kill scavengers.
• The Mafia: The aarakocra smugglers in Harpe City are organized this way, complete with a boisterous, cigar-chomping pelican as The Don.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: Numerous, mostly thought up on the fly by Lauren. Possibly due to the intersecting form of the season being Combination.
  • Saltupine - salt-infused porcupine.
  • Bumblesloth - sloth mixed with bumblebee.
  • Shorse - horse with razor-sharp teeth and fins.
  • Dracocat - giant cat with leathery dragon wings.
  • Olligator - otter mixed with alligator.
  • Chox - head and upper torso of a fox with chicken wings and legs.
  • Hydra-Giraffe - giraffe with multiple regenerating heads.
  • Pangloris - slow loris covered in pangolin armor.
  • Seel - giant seal/eel hybrid.
  • Serpopard - leopard with elongated serpentine limbs.
  • Hedgerat - hedgehog mixed with a rat.
  • Bweagle - cross between a blue whale and an eagle.
  • Komodo Lion - komodo dragon with a big mane and paws.
  • Bosprey - bear-osprey.
  • Panda Turkey - panda with turkey talons.
• Mundane Horror: Subverted. Basically everyone assumes something horrible is going on in Absynthia because everything feels too normal. It turns out it really is exactly how it looks; largely shallow suburbia.
• Ominous Mundanity: A place near Absynthia is referred to simply as 'The Spa'. It's not initially clear how dangerous it actually is, but the context implies it's not for the faint of heart.
  • Made even more complicated by the fact that it seems to have once been a functioning spa before guests randomly stopped checking in. Now it acts as the home of Denise Wolfram, her son, and her numerous experiments.
• Pocket Dimension: Sabrina's mother talks about a shard of a plane that remains untouched by the apocalypse and plans to escape there herself.
• Power at a Price: God-King Wolfram can unlock someone's conduit powers but doing so will kill them in a couple of days.
  • According to Pendergrass, becoming a conduit on your own costs you your personhood; you lose memories of your past and are consumed by your obsession. Although as Lola and himself prove, you can at some point at least seem fairly normal again.
• Rock Monster: The creature in the dentist's office looks like one but it turns out to be made of tooth. The dentists were harvesting new teeth from its back before it killed them all.
• Slain in Their Sleep: No one who sleeps on the salt wakes up. This is later revealed to be the work of the God-King himself; as the conduit of potential, he steals theirs. It doesn't kill them outright but they whither and die soon enough.
• Suburbia: The Tarek community of Absynthia resides in a section of the suburbs that has been deposited on the salt flats and their culture resembles the suburbs of 1950s America.
• Theme Tune: Both the intro and outro are Going Nuclear by Miracle of Sound.
• Wham Line: At the end of Episode 9.
  Lola: Aw, y'know, if you guys're all gonna be so fuckin' stubborn- I'm the Conduit of Animals, 'kay? Cool? Is that cool?! Is that alright?!
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: The series ends with one with the exception of Clear, who is simply described reaching the surface and leaving for an unknown destination.
• Womb Level: The underworld Amy and Clear dig their way into is made up partly of flesh.
• You All Meet in a Cell: The group meets in the gladiatorial arena meant to be their execution. The only exception is Sabrina who they meet during their escape.