Another weekend down, another session of The Magical Millennium in the bag! As we have been for the last few sessions, we’re still in the middle of the Lock-In at school. This past session covered almost two hours of time, which would mean we’re actually picking up the pace if it weren’t for the fact that we weren’t able to finish up the final match of the dodgeball tournament and so didn’t REALLY get through a whole two-hour period. In the time we did cover, though, we got to see everyone except the Cleric run off to sign up for the “random party” Adventurer Escape Room activity. Only one player got randomly selected for a time slot they’d chosen, unfortunately, but that just means that everyone else will feel a bit more ready when they go to compete in the time trial version with their established party after the dodgeball tournament. We got a little bit of conversation between the Artificer and the Bard, a pair we don’t see much, saw the Cleric almost have a panic attack as they sought out some peace and quiet, and saw a fated confrontation between the Barbarian and Group B’s fighter on the dodgeball court (well, we saw the start of what the Barbarian’s player is describing as a fated confrontation with her character’s foil. I’m pretty sure it’s just some jock-on-jock competition, but we’ll have to see how it goes). After that, we managed to actually end on time since one of the players had to leave right away. Now, we’re looking at some potential scheduling woes as we approach the winter holiday season and must face up to the reality that skipping even one session means going a long time without getting to meet up again.

The scheduling woes are most likely the true villain that our collection of teenaged heroes will be facing until at least the new year. Two of our three upcoming sessions are the weekends following a major US holiday and one is right smack-dab in the middle of a lot of other holidays as well, so I’m not certain that we’ll play more than once between now and 2025. We made plans to play this upcoming weekend (as you’re reading this), so I’m hoping we’ll be able to meet, but the general wishy-washy nature of a lot of the “probably” responses I got did not convince me that we’ll actually play. We usually wind up cancelling in the last few days before the session when I get a bunch of responses like I did last week, so I’m trying to avoid getting my hopes up too much. It’ll be easier to take if we wind up cancelling and a pleasant surprise if we wind up playing (which is sort of my approach to all the tabletop games I’m in or running these days). Plus, it’s not like I’ll be skimping on my preparation or anything if I keep my expectations low. That work is already done and has been done for months now. At least as much as any prep I ever do these days, what with trying to leave room for improvisation and refocusing around my group’s day-of decision-making.

Outside of the sudden and quick ending right as the Player Character Party took to the dodgeball court to face off against a team of football players in the finals of the tournament, it was a pretty uneventful session. Perhaps most notable, in terms of lasting impact, was ironing out a little confusion with one player who had missed a few sessions in a row (which amounted to missing as many in-game days thanks to the group’s slow movement through that particular week), and then their character facing the consequences of their actions whether they intended for their actions to have consequences or not. Due to the player being out for a few in-game days, I had suggested that their character, the Cleric, just take a few quiet days to themself and the player took it a few steps further by saying that their character had actually disappeared without warning for a few days. I was able to walk them back a bit, since things would have been radically different in the party and the world of the party’s influence if their friend and party member had been suddenly missing without warning and had stopped answering messages. It would be a pretty heavy revision of those three days in a way I wasn’t comfortable with since it would have written something into the game about the other player characters that they hadn’t consented to or decided to do since they would have been, entirely without knowing it, ignoring a minor crisis in their friends’ life. A friend they all cared about enough to try to put together a Lock-In at school just to make them feel accepted and welcome. So, after a bit of talking, The Cleric’s player decided they’d just called in sick for a few days and refused to talk to anyone beyond the daily claims of being sick. Which is what came back to bite them in the ass when they found themselves near the guardian who had been in that guardian-teacher conference with them just a few days prior and who was respecting their established boundaries by not trying to talk to them for the time being, since that was clearly what the Cleric wanted. They were also the teacher supervising the quiet room at the lock-in, so they weren’t really going to talk to anyone anyway. That’d be antithetical to the whole idea of a quiet room, after all.

While that scene played out and we got a lot of narration from the player about their character’s emotional state, we had a bit more activity upstairs as the one player character to do the Adventurer Escape Room activity ran through a shortened version of the dungeon I’d built for the group to play through if more than one of them had gotten selected during the “random groups” stage of the experience. It was difficult to abstract down to a handful of dice rolls, some narration, and a couple open-ended questions, but I managed it on the fly. There wasn’t as much heavy description of the neat map I’d just gotten (I support TC Modern on Patreon and it has come through for me in every possible way for this campaign), but I was able to wrap the whole thing up in five to ten minutes rather than taking up most of the session like I’d originally planned. While the Paladin did that, the Bard and the Artificer talked about their respective projects and how much work it is to find the right questions to ask in order to learn new and useful things. The Barbarian ate some snacks and then used the “Meta Magical Sticker” I’d given all of my players who provided proof that they’d voted which cast Enlarge Person on them for a full minute, doubling not only her height, but quadrupling her weight as she reached and probably passed thirteen feet tall. If this wasn’t a magical school, she probably would have fallen through the floor! Instead, people took pictures, her player made a joke about examining her enormous hands, and a bunch of jocks rose to the “let’s go!” challenge she issued right as the spell wore off, so they all ended in a good-humored heap as the Paladin returned and it was suddenly time for dodgeball.

The mechanics of dodgeball were pretty easy to come up with for a one-off bit of fun. It’s an athletics or ranged attack roll to throw the ball, an acrobatics check to dodge the ball if it beat your dexterity-based armor class (magical defenses were allowed, though, even if mundane armor provided no additional protection), and a dexterity saving throw using your reaction to contest the attack roll if you wanted to catch it instead of try to dodge it. I had a few additional rules that never really came up to help simulate a sport with a magical twist, but I’m thinking of beefing them up a bit more for the last match before pushing my players to think more expansively than just attacking and dodging. After all, it wouldn’t do for the finale of the dodgeball tournament to end in a boring sweep as the football players who were literally built for a sport like this used their superior stats to just win in a single exchange. There needs to be tension! Drama! Some kind of musical cue in case The Barbarian and the fighter that her player has decided is the Barbarian’s foil wind up being the only ones left in the ring at the end of the match! Both teams won their way through three rounds of simulated dodgeball and it wouldn’t do to set aside all the drama and close calls from those first three games now that we’re finally at the fourth.

Next session, whenever that happens, we’ll be starting out with this final round of the dodgeball tournament and immediately moving along to the Time Trials for the Adventurer Escape Room experience with the fastest team winning a prize. I don’t know what that prize is, yet, and I’m going to need to do a bit of work on this time trial dungeon so I can figure out how to simulate it for other teams without needing to just run collections of NPCs through it time and again, but I think it’ll be fun. It’ll also be a chance for me to introduce a bit of a sub-theme I’ve been thinking about for a while now, now that I’ve gotten the main plot (or at least the main plot of the early levels of this campaign) rolling in the background, so I’m looking forward to how my players react to it. Or finding out that it doesn’t really land with them, which will also be interesting since it will mean I can take things a bit further than I planned to this soon. I’ll win either way! It’ll be great.