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A joke about chocolate breath turns into a sharp look at how fantasy worlds inherit bias—and what designers and GMs can do to fix it—before we throw Lyra headfirst into the Witherwild. The fight is fast and feral: a fungus-laced bear, a brawler’s surge, and a transformation that exacts a brutal price. Daggerheart’s stress and hope economy isn’t flavor text here; it shapes the story beat by beat and leaves Lyra with blood on her hands and a blue light in the distance.

That light belongs to a coastal medical camp wrapped around a lighthouse that drinks moonlight. Inside the stone walls, doctors in masks triage burns, ledger books stretch back centuries, and an elf with a cane resets bones with unnerving calm. Lyra sneaks through sealed labs and finds the red heart of the camp: a crimson lily whose twenty petals can depetrify the serpent sick—if you can live with the math. She also finds something worse: vials of the sickness itself, locked down like contraband. One theft later, the gates slam shut. The camp hunts a phantom. Rumors bloom. Procedure grinds on. And Lyra, restless and scared, frames a man who can’t prove a negative.

We sit with that choice. A week becomes a month. Lyra folds gauze, runs water, and learns names. She befriends a nurse, watches lightning climb a mountain, and realizes that safety can be a place you earned, not a place you found. When the convoy to Alura finally forms, she doesn’t go. We end on a time skip fork and a level up, with a debrief on why Daggerheart’s stagger feels fair, why 5e’s bloat nudges tables away from cohesion, and how a session zero can defuse party friction before it explodes.

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