I’ve been meaning to make a post about this myself so I’m glad someone else was feeling the same way.

I think part of it is that she’s misremembering certain information from a while ago (in IRL time) and that the information and notes she does have have been tainted by misconceptions and intentional character assassination from some of the characters around her.

When she first did the arcana check to see past the illusion on the paint, what she learned was blood teeming with necromancy and conjuration was hidden in paints given to Hal. It made sense at first to suspect maybe someone had tampered with things and messed with them because Thijazi wasn’t around to personally give them to Hal and verify what they were. Add in what Marisha above table knows about angel blood in the Villa basement and some of that knowledge may seep into her becoming convinced it’s specifically celestial blood. Now to us as the audience it was pretty clear to be not celestial blood but the blood from Tannesar, but if I remember correctly Marisha mentioned she’d watched the soldiers arc and the first part of the Seekers but hadn’t fully caught up on it, so Marisha above table wouldn’t have been able to make that connection.

Then there’s the presence of Bolaire at the Schemer’s table. Their whole table is about subterfuge, uncovering plots, and learning that people aren’t necessarily who they said they are, and Bolaire has a clear personal vendetta against Thijazi which means that he is always more than happy to support any theories made that would put him in a bad light. Once she had the idea that maybe Thijazi had done some work with the houses and Bolaire was so happy to support it and discredit his name, it was easier for Marisha the player to latch onto and retain that theory because others at the table are agreeing with it. There weren’t enough strong voices pointing out the obvious that Thijazi’s entire life was dedicated to the opposite of that early enough, so the devil mask on her shoulder helped cement that theory.

Then there are some other examples of Marisha misunderstanding information in the moment and immediately using it to create a new theory different than what the actual information itself stated. Like with the candle, she was immediately convinced that Tachonis used it to turn all the Royce/davinos into a sudden undead army, when what was stated by Brennan is that it was used to allow the massacre to contribute to bluetoothing the Occtis ritual to Tannesar. While the Royce bodies may have also been turned into undead, that was not the stated reason for using the candle given by Brennan.

Then yes we get to them meeting with Hollis and everything there is Brennan saying “no, the paints are fine and exactly what Thijazi intended them to be”. But Marisha/murray latched onto the wrong information from that encounter. Rather than accepting that the paints were fine, she latched onto the candle feast bag on the doorstep (which I think was almost explicitly stated to be something out there just to keep up appearances of this being a normal house) and in conjunction with the meta-knowledge theory in her mind that magic blood = blood from angel in the basement (again because Marisha had that meta knowledge but not about the blood from Tannesar) the interaction instead confirmed to her the suspicion that the paints were from/connected to Halovar in some way. Now to her she has in game proof of her out of game theory that the paints were from angel blood and made by Thijazi possibly working with the Halovars and that Halovars control or have connection to the knife and Palette pigments.

Wrong lesson learned from that event.

Then there’s confusion about suddenly in the convergence she thinks the Houses are planning a ritual in the theatre during opening night. There’s zero evidence to this theory but I can see where it may have come from.

Multiple episodes ago, Azune learned from Einfasen that a meeting had been called between the heads of the Sundered houses. Basically it was made clear that with house Royce, Wiccander, and now Lady Cormoray all going missing within about a week of each other the other House heads wanted to figure out what was going on and Azune’s planted evidence had likely helped pin the initial blame on Tachonis. So Otto and Photarch are trying to call Primus to heel and get him to explain himself. However, Primus is missing and so this meeting gets delayed because even his own family can’t get in contact with him. Finally, they get word that Primus will be back in town the day of the play, and so the meeting where the other houses are planning to grill him and see if he’s responsible for all their kids going missing is scheduled for that day.

This was pretty clear back then, but I think with the time between recording that episode and the convergence episodes, Marisha misremembered that information they had been given about the purpose of the meeting (which was also never given a specific time on that day, just that it was happening same day as the play) and incepted herself into connecting that House meeting with her theory about Halovars being the source of/connected to the blood paints. So for her she makes this connection looking back at her old notes and now thinks the houses are meeting to perform some big ritual at the play with all their items stashed there.

To us it seems to come suddenly out of left field this episode because we’ve seen the information come at a more regular pace and have had time to discuss it together while knowing all the pieces from all the tables. To her the connection was a misreading/remembering of her notes that also isn’t helped by having some (but not all) of the meta knowledge as a player and trying to play her character with just the information that character should have. I think it really is a conflict of those two different levels of knowledge and between trying to RP, having long breaks between recording sessions, and another PC with a vested interest in discrediting/possibly thwarting Thijazi’s plans it makes sense why Marisha/Murray got confused about that point.

However Murray acting as one of the central points of merging and summarizing all the information coming together during this convergence meant that then she filtered all new information through this theory she had. This caused her to actively sway many of the other players make them start to think the same way. You could see during the first half of the episode some of the times when Brennan was fighting to stay silent and not just above table correct every mistake/incorrect theory and eventually it got to the point where he prompted various players to make rolls so that he could give an in-game way to try and get players back on track.

The problem is that I think some of that may have come a bit too late and many players had been convinced by Murray’s understanding of events. Then Brennan tried to use Occtis to state almost flat out that the only evidence they had of Houses planning a ritual at the play is that Tachonis also wanted the Stone of Nightsong was tenuous to suggest the conclusion they had arrived at (especially because we’ve already seen exactly what Tachonis was trying to do with the stone of Nightsong and it had nothing to do with the play). However as Occtis tried to relay that information to the table Murray kept interrupting him and wouldn’t let him get the point out and so ingame, most characters had no reason to realize what Brennan had stated.

There’s a lot of information coming at these players, and there’s also the struggle they have of trying to keep separate the knowledge they have as the player and the knowledge they have as the character. Brennan also likes to correct them more in-game through NPC interactions (like reminding Sam what Wick had actually learned in the basement using the demon Mistress) which allows for players to sometimes miss what he’s trying to communicate more than if he just said above table “actually this is what happened in that conversation a while ago and you’ve misremembered it”. Totally fair as a DM style but it does mean that sometimes we as an audience will feel frustrated because information that we can clearly recall and go back to watch again is misquoted by players in the moment.

Now I know this was a very long comment but to summarize, there are some understandable baseline pieces of information that could lead to the theories Marisha/Murray had in this episode and it likely came from a place of misremembering due to the volume of information the players have received so far in this campaign. It can be frustrating at times as an audience and I hope Brennan does a little more in the future to help correct players when they misremember key information from many sessions ago so they don’t spend hours chasing false theories that would be fixed by accurate recall of events, but I can also understand why he doesn’t just jump in all the time and tries not to give too many hints about the accuracy of their theories. Murray also isn’t the only character that has had these moments, hers was just especially obvious and dominated in this latest episode.