This post is a little late in coming. VERY late, technically speaking, since I seem to have forgotten to write about the first full session with my The Rotten group in the shuffle of moving the blog. And then last week, I started writing about the group’s dungeon experience and wound up writing about dungeons in general rather than the Dungeons and Dragons session that the dungeon featured it! Which means I’m a little behind when it comes to session recaps about The Rotten and we actually did quite a bit with the last two! We introduced our characters, established narrative connections, discussed the kind of game we were about to play, worked through details of what it meant to travel such a dangerous world, met some strangers along the road that bore a dire warning of what lay ahead, and spent the party’s first night camping outside beneath the stars. In our second game, we started down into a canyon the player characters were warned was dangerous, spent some time wandering around in the fog, discovered an eerie world within that fog, solved some puzzles, navigated through a maze based on vibes along, rolled a lot of natural 20s in an incredibly short period of time, survived our first combat encounter, and played around with some traps! It was a great time and only one of my players nearly died! Well, technically did die to the first attack roll in the game, but we all decided that was bullshit and we’d just not have it be a crit. Chaos then ensued, the party emerged victorious, and they learned a lot about the difference between rolling for something and working their way through a puzzle free of rolls. It was a good session! Not that the first one wasn’t good, mind you, it was just a lot of settling in and figuring things out rather than focused play. And, ridiculous string of natural 20s from this latest session aside, I’m just happy I got to start running my first proper, DEEP dungeon in a long time! And I’m definitely not stressed about it and how old patterns (which I mentioned in last week’s blog post about dungeons) seem to be repeating despite this being an easy-mode dungeon I haven’t even finished building yet!

Things started off easily enough. We talked about character names, solidified some connections, talked about looks, discussed what the characters knew about each other, and then chose to take the difficult, dangerous path that could maybe have better loot despite there being a perfectly reasonable and safe entrance from where they already were. After that, we talked about the Surface Travel encounter table and the fact that the community they were all a part of was buried underneath a tree that held a giant Roc’s next, discussed what it meant to live in a dangerous world where I’d explicitly explained they’d be started essentially in a higher-level-zone than their characters were built for, discussed what it meant if they rolled so unluckily on the encounter table (something like, say, the Roc is hunting people today) that it might just instantly kill them if they actually encountered it, and then finally moved on to our first skill checks to get around this hazardous world safely. The exact encounter they eventually got was “encounter travelers returning from your destination who bear dire omens of what lies ahead” and that was a lot of fun for me. Got to invent an entire gaggle of adventurers, some strange danger ahead, and radically alter the map in a way that I suspected I’d need to but got to pull the trigger on much sooner than expected. They then camped outside for the first time in our campaign, encountered no dangers, and we wrapped up the session since I was tired and it made sense to save the rest for our second session.

At the start of which the party awoke, traveled the last little bit of the way to the canyon they were seeking while the distant Roc that presided over their territory preened its feathers on the edge of its nest, and then began a slow, cautious descent into that canyon. Given that the community had elected to build a path over the surface to this strange canyon with accidental Labyrinth access in it, it was an easy road down. I got to drop some spooky hints about what might be waiting in the fog below, how the area had been polluted by strange, toxic magic that was leaking out of a strange metal pyramid that had fallen into the canyon and cracked open when the earthquake formed the canyon, and then plunged them right into it. A bit of bad luck meant that they spent some time wandering around before they started to notice that there was something off about the swamp. Despite the myriad tiny critter tracks and sightings of said critters making them, the bog was eerily silent. When they started to notice that something was off, not long after they started finally making progress, the party started trying to hide in the various trees around their location, trying to get out of the way of whatever big creature they suspected was scaring the swamp quiet. A few humorous rolls later, the players realized that they were making noises, but even the movements of the critters didn’t seem to produce a sound. One of them realized it was probably an illusion and two them were able to piece the magic making the world around them seem like a verdant swamp full of life rather than the skeletal, mostly-dead bog that it was. The third failed every attempt he made, so he was still having a difficult time accepting what was going on when the party finally reached the entrance into the labyrinth.

After a quick break, my players dove in. They picked a path, followed it, immediately encountered some slimes there to clean up after another battle and the very first attack roll, from one of the oozes, instantly killed the player character it was targeting by dealing thirty-three damage to him. Given that I’d picked these guys specifically to act as hard hitters with a low chance to hit (the party has pretty high Armor Class scores across the board), this was a devastating and unexpected blow that had me a little shaken. After all, if you read the post I linked above, you know that I haven’t really run any dungeons in a while because the last few I’ve run killed players–mostly due to a mixture of bad luck, poor player memory, and bad player choices, sure, but it felt like fate didn’t want me running dungeons since the very first thing I rolled in the dungeon was a player-killing hit. I decided to let my players know what happened, talk it through with them, and then collectively decide that killing a player character instantly due to a natural twenty and being two points short of a maximum damage roll was a dumb thing to do given that we were in session 2 and this was an unlikely series of events that only ever happens to my players because my dice knack means I tend to roll super high numbers (even if high numbers are bad). After deciding to just deal normal damage which knocked the player character unconscious, the player rolled a natural 20 on his Death Saving Throw, got back up with a single hit point, healed himself to full with a single spell, and then rolled another Natural 20 to hit the ooze that had nearly killed him and he killed it this time around. An absolutely wild consecutive three d20 rolls. Wild.

After that, the players settled in to exploring the dungeon, making their way through the maze I’d partially built, and finding themselves occasionally faced with traps that they were able to either circumvent or entirely avoid. They then went down the one path that had unclaimed treasure on it because there was a difficult to spot trap with higher-than-usual damage that had kept other explorers and adventurers away. The party’s rogue triggered it twice but got lucky and only took a small amount of damage both times, so they were still alive and conscious when their player asked me if they could just, like, try to cut all the triggering mechanisms rather than risk another failed attempt at disarming the trap. Which totally worked when I invited them to try it. After all, if they understand the trap mechanism enough to describe a course of action and don’t mind risking themselves or their path forward (should the trap get stuck in a position that bars forward progress), I’ll absolutely let them try to narrate their way through disarming a trap rather than rolling any dice. It’s rare that it might be a viable option, given the mechanical complexity of most traps, but I’m always happy to let a player try whatever they want if they’ll accept whatever consequences might come their way. After that, they opened the chest, got incredibly lucky on the loot table (got a bag of holding on their very first magic item roll!), and we wrapped up the session there as they turned around and started thinking about what path to take next. It’ll be a few more weeks before we play again, but that’s more time for me to work on the dungeon in whatever spare hours I can scrape together, with whatever spare spoons I can collect, so I’m content to let the real-world clock run out a little longer before meeting up with my players again.