This time, it was only three weeks between sessions for my recently resurrected Dungeons and Dragons campaign (the one I call The Leeching Wastes) and it was only three instead of the originally planned two because two of the players got sick. Which means this is the first time this group has had two consecutive sessions in way more than a year. In this session, after a quick review of what happened during the last session and a much longer process of updating player tokens on Roll20 and figuring out stuff for NPC tokens, we got right into it. We rolled initiative for a fight, the players realized that the enemies were super focused on the one NPC the party needed to keep alive, we started a skill challenge to cross from the edge of the territory to the party’s target location, one character flubbed a skill challenge super badly, the entire party fought against nature, and then they all discovered the world outside The Grove (where the player characters live) in was stuck in a time loop. I finally got to reveal that I had Majora’s Masked my campaign by giving them a haunted moon, a messed up time loop, and a (relatively) young being with godlike powers that listened to all the wrong prayers for all the right reasons, all as a result of stuff that had come up in our game of The Ground Itself that wrapped up in December of 2022. Sure, I had some of god stuff in mind prior to that, but I’d planned to keep it on the down low until a bit more time had passed so I wasn’t burning through every idea I’d had at the outset of the campaign before the party hit level five. But, when the narrative builds itself in that direction, who am I to deny it?

All of which is to say that it was a busy session, especially considering that I ended it about twenty to thirty minutes early. We got through all of that in about two hours–which is a bit cut down from our total play time, thanks to the all of the recap and token stuff from the beginning of the combat encounter, along with a little bit of fighting with DnDBeyond since it wasn’t behaving the way I expected it to after over a year away from it. The first battle was pretty simple, but was drawn out quite a bit by a ton of bad rolls. I was rolling worse than I’ve ever rolled in my life (I even got a double ones on an advantage roll) and one of the players filled their dice jail and even had to put DnDBeyond in dice jail since the site’s digital dice kept rolling so poorly for them. Two of the players rolled fine most of the time, but there were a lot of moments where bad rolls clearly dragged the fight out much longer than it should have gone. I figured it would take a few minutes, but it took the better part of an hour. Even after the fight, one of my players and I couldn’t get any relief from it. I think, out of dozens of rolls, I had maybe five that rolled above a ten on the die. Sure, one of those was a natural 20, but I rolled a double-digit number of 1s in the same session.

Once that long, unexpectedly difficult fight ended, the players formed up and I explained the nature of the skill challenge for them. See, the forest is warded against a force of active entropic decay I called The Rot and the NPC the party needed was a druid who had been born with the adapted-to-living-things version of it called The Warp. Everything in the forest was mobilizing against her, trying to prevent her from reaching the core of the forest–since she registered as carrying The Rot to the forest’s senses, such that they are. Which is unfortunate, because that’s exactly where the party needs to take this druid so she can perform a ritual to help The Grove heal from the damage done to it by someone bringing capitalism into it (and a whole lot of natural resources out of it). According to the being that oversees this enchanted and warded forest, The Sentinel, they need a druid to advance the seasons in this Grove where each quadrant had been locked into a form of seasonal stasis (time advances but the season does not). This would, supposedly, help the forest heal more quickly than The Sentinel could manage with its own power alone. This NPC druid, a Warp-Touched elf named Paelotta, is someone the party met before and was supposed to be coming to The Grove anyway, escorting a bunch of other people that she’d helped to evacuate from the path of a horrible monster the party had already been fleeing, so it made sense for them to run into her outside The Grove. She couldn’t get in, after all, since there was a barrier around The Grove to protect it from outside intrusion while The Sentinel was busy working. Plus, of course, the time loop that had locked everyone into eternal night as the moon began to rise the instant it began to set prevented her from doing any kind of work to move around this bubble, get inside it, or even continue following the party once they hit the moment when the moon was evenly split between eastern and western horizons.

The party only discovered the time loop when, after a rough failure on a skill check left them exposed to an attack that greatly slowed their progress through The Grove, their druid friend vanished from the party’s side. They’d started late into the night and only had a little time left anyway, so it might have helped that they weren’t as far away from the border as they might have been if they’d succeeded. I’d tried to set things up so they wouldn’t need to spend a lot of resources to clear the first hurdles, but I didn’t plan for the idea that they’d spend their resources anyway, to guarantee success in the face of uncertainty. So they cleared the first two hurdles quickly, ran into one they couldn’t spend resources to succeed on (and then failed horribly because the player rolling was having luck almost as bad as mine), and then had another fight that cost them even more resources before the first looping of time kicked in. I should have given them less time in this first loop, so they would be closer to the edge when the NPCs they were travelling with vanished the first time, but I figured it was close enough as it was. Which was also wrong because it also wasn’t far enough to make them want to long rest, either. Turns out my vision of what was going on in The Grove was very different from what some of them thought was going on. We were able to talk through it at the end of the session, as the party returned to pick up the NPC (one of the players realized what was happening mere minutes after the NPCs vanished, without me needing to provide any additional information) and made plans during a short rest for their second attempt at passing through The Grove. I think we’re all on the same page now, but I’m a little nervous that everyone is maybe not as enthusiastic about time loops and all the fun (AND COMPLETELY INCIDENTAL) Majora’s Mask parallels. I love a time loop. I love a cursed/haunted moon. I love a bit of misguided divinity with no checks on its supposed omnipotence and omniscience. This is exactly my shit, which is why I’ve tried to pick this game back up again after so much time.

I’m sure my players would tell me if they were unhappy about what was going on. I don’t think any of them are the type to sit and stew on something they’re not enjoying when I’ve been very clear that I’m willing to adjust things here and there so we can all have fun. I mean, that’s the point of playing a game, after all. To have fun, whatever that looks like for you and the people you’re playing with. I just have bad anxiety sometimes (especially lately) and this doubt is a hard voice to simply silence. Still, I’m excited for our next session in a week or two (we haven’t picked a definite date as of writing this) so we can dive into this iteration of the time loop and figure out what comes next. After all, the ritual is simple and healing the forest should require no work from them after that point, but the time loop and haunted moon are only tangentially related to that, so who knows what they’ll have to do about the god messing with things. I mean, I’ve had the god explicitly state that she’ll undo the time loop when The Grove is fixed because she set it up in answer to the prayers of the people in The Grove who were all struggling with the chaos caused by the damage to the forest, but who knows what else she might get it into her head to do! There’s so much potential out there, now that this particular can of worms has been opened.