Things took a turn for the intense during my group’s latest session of The Magical Millennium. What was supposed to be an easy job standing guard for a few hours outside a warehouse while it was cleaned up so some pests couldn’t get back inside turned into an intense and almost deadly combat encounter. The general framing for this was that the party, all first-level characters and in their first semester of Magical Ability school, signed up as guild members sponsored by the school as part of their second week of class. They were tasked with going on an adventure as a group, spent some time picking out a few from the Magical Ability Level 1 group, and then tried to fit in their other homework and social activities between the three jobs they’d taken. For reference, all “class” powers in the D&D system use, in this world, either woven magic (spellcasting) or ambient magic (everything else), so their school teaches them how to harness their powers as the students figure out the extent of their powers and their willingness to live a life relying on said powers. This adventure and the interviews I’ve covered extensively in past posts, were meant to get the characters (and the players) to appreciate the guild system. The idea was that they would learn about the protections it affords to both magical and non-magical people, the way it helps people find an appropriate tier of labor for whatever job needs doing, and provides the guild members with a means of ensuring no one swoops in to steal work out from underneath them. Unbeknownst to my players, they picked the one job of the six on offer that was build in as a cautionary tale about blindly trusting in the system they’re buying into. Thankfully, though, they all escaped with their lives even if the group feels even more fractured than it did after the last session (which is saying something since at least one player made a back-up character after that one).

To put it plainly, the intent was for the player characters to quickly discover that the job they’d taken was not exactly what the listing had said. It had originally advertised taking place at an abandoned warehouse, but the warehouse was still in operation as a storage space. They were told that fighting was possible, but they quickly learned that the critters within the warehouse were infernal-touched rats (with horns and everything) rather than some less dangerous pest. There was also no mention of the scale of the problem and, when the rats got chased out of the building by the crew that would go about destroying their nests and sealing up all the rat-holes, they quickly learned that this building was occupied by hundreds of rats. There was a lot that was worrying going on, from an in-game perspective, but the players and their characters pushed forwards. Two of them hung out on top of the detached office (which was a trailer like you’d see on a construction site), one of them stood guard at the door, and the third patrolled a bit. The one standing guard (the Paladin) eventually stepped away, found a bunch of snakes, and used her Yuan-Ti ability to befriend snakes to recruit a little swarm of serpents to help fight the rats (which wound up being probably the best choice any of the party made since that little half-swarm of snakes really chowed down on some rats). The Artificer even used their tinkering ability to make a bunch of stinky cubes (that smelled like the stuff the pest control people used to chase the rats out of the building) to keep the rats from trying to sneak back into the warehouse through the little gaps and holes in the side of the building that had allowed them inside originally. They came up with some great plans and executed on them well.

From an out-of-game perspective, however, I was sweating bullets. See, I built myself some little tables to roll on at the start of these jobs. I have sets of categories for the different type of jobs, most of which I’m going to keep to myself for now, but the relevant ones for this type of job included things like “How Many Possible Foes,” “How Many Stages,” “Stage 1 Behavior,” “Stage 2 Behavior,” “How Many Show Up In Stage 2,” “Primary Combat Tactics,” and “Secondary Combat Tactics.” All of these tables are meant to make it easy for me to set up and run encounters for creatures that don’t possess intelligence in the way that you or I consider it. It would have to align with the creatures’ goals, but I’m an expert table builder and had enough options to account for that. What I didn’t account for was immediately rolling the worst possible results. I got maximum results on the number of foes, rolled two-stage fight (options went between two and the number of hours they’d be standing guard minus one), rolled “all flee” in Stage 1, rolled “All Return” in Stage 2, rolled “All attack different foes” in primary combat tactics, and then rolled “Attack until there are no more targets before pursing primary goal” on my secondary combat tactics roll. Which means that the four rat swarms fled initially rather than one or two staying to fight the players (who would be able to rest for a bit after that fight) and then all four swarms returned with combat tactics that would lead them to attack all targets until they had nothing left before going after their primary target (the door back into the warehouse). Shortly after the fight began, I rolled a pair of crits that instantly knocked out the artificer who still had healing to spend and the Paladin who could have done plenty of damage on top of keeping allies alive with their lay-on-hands ability. The fight instantly went from being annoying to being potentially deadly.

Thankfully, one of the player characters is the child of wealthy and powerful ex-adventurers, so she used the panic-button phrase her parents had given her to summon help (from her mother, this time) who killed the rats right after the Artificer used a point of Raw Potential (a homebrew system that gives my players’ characters extra little abilities they can use or lose forever in exchange for changing one roll per point into a natural twenty) to come back to consciousness and revive the paladin. Which means the fight ended with all of them on their feet, at least, even if they were upset they had to be rescued. Immediately after that, the party started talking through what had happened and how they’d failed while I had the player characters’ mother, a Tiefling named Inga, go speak to the male centaur who had posted the job. Things started turning acrimonious as the group started arguing about what systems had failed to allow them, a bunch of fifteen and sixteen year-olds, to wind up in such a dangerous and almost-deadly position, so I had Inga return with the information that this job had been deliberately misrepresented on the guild job page. She, an approved veteran guildmember, would act as witness to the complaint they could file and make sure that they’d be paid like the job would have paid if it had been listed correctly, but this started a bit of a spiral as the player characters began to realize that maybe everything wasn’t as perfect and safe as they’d thought it was. After all, what was stopping anyone from misrepresenting a job on the guild board? What was stopping people from lying? Why was the high school so willing to just toss them into the deep end on this whole adventuring thing? Sure, the student healthcare they all had covered resurrections should they die in the course of their studies, but why were the worst stories they’d all heard about limb loss and heavy damage (that was also fixed by the school) rather than about the deaths that had probably already occurred?

With those questions in mind and half an hour past the scheduled end of our session, I sent them all home with a last image of their characters as they prepared for the last of their three jobs that was supposed to start at eight the next morning. It was a rough session, where things went as badly as they could go, but my players are all good sports about this stuff and every single one of them delivered on some excellent roleplaying as they all fought and bickered about the world they lived in and what they had thought was the world they lived in. I’m excited to carry on from here, to see what happens to these simmering tensions as we move into what is probably going to become the first big plot-adjacent moment in the campaign. After all, everything up to this point has been foreshadowing, worldbuilding, and establishing systems. Time for us to get into the meat and I can’t wait to see what my players do with it now that I’ve seen what they’re capable of getting up to on their own!