Another wonderful session has come and gone with my players in The Magical Millennium. While we seem to be skipping every-other-session due to holidays, that’s about what I expected (so much so that I did zero preparation for the last session we skipped since I was all but absolutely certain that we would wind up canceling) and I’m very hopeful about things picking up in the new year. We’ll see, of course, but I think we’re finally going to be making some forward progress again. As much as I love all the stuff we’re doing and seeing in this endless Lock-In (which has been going on since October), I’m ready to move on to the next thing. Still, we’ve had a lot of fun in this school-event-turned-adventurous-teen-corral so far and that pattern shows no signs of changing after our latest session. This time around, we had an amazing set of rolls that started off the final match of the dodgeball tournament we began in our previous session, an unexpected downbeat as the time I’d set aside for a drawn-out final match was unexpectedly free that one of my players managed to put to EXCELLENT use, and then our first dungeon! It’s a virtual reality dungeon/escape room adventure experience, but my players took the gentle suggestion that this one would be competitive to absolutely dive in with a level of focus and teamwork that I’ve never seen in them for ANYTHING ever. Seriously. Every time these kids are stuck together, something happens to make them hate each other or deepen the existing fractures in this group and they threw that all aside so they could absolutely wreck this competition. It’s amazing and I’m so excited to continue our game in the new year!
We started the session with a pretty brief recap. Outside of the major events of the previous session (me abstracting a virtual dungeon adventure down to five minutes and a dozen individual rolls and the start of the dodgeball tournament), not a lot had happened that was noteworthy. As in, I didn’t write much of it down in my notes since it was mostly just us having fun, goofing around in-character, and having little interactions where the important part is the relationship building, not necessarily the specifics of how the relationship building happened. There was plenty more of that this time, but it was mostly kept to the brief moments before the final match of the dodgeball tournament happened and in the hour the characters had to kill between winning the dodgeball tournament and starting their turn on the virtual adventure time trial. Lots of little talks, a few gentle rebuffs, one not-so-gentle rebuff as a character overstepped their bounds, and a bit more talk about what they’re all looking for in the rest of the night. Before all that, though, they all got so incredibly lucky in the dodgeball tournament that they won it before the first back-and-forth had finished (which represents a minute of real time). The opposing team was made up of star athletes who rolled with at least a +7 bonus to their relevant stats, which doesn’t help when they’re all targeting different people who all successfully use their one reaction per “round” to catch the ball, getting the player throwing it out. Only one player was left on the other team by the time the player characters’ turn came around. He managed to hold on, thanks to a good reflex save of his own and a couple bad rolls, but the party’s Barbarian was able to get him out in her first actual chance to throw in the tournament (she kept getting picked when I’d roll for targets, which unfortunately made sense as she was the only one on the party’s team that looked like an athlete). Given that it took all of a minute for this party of mostly non-athletes to win against the team everyone but the party assumed would win, the entire collection of students ran out of the bleachers to hoist the party on their shoulders in celebration.
After that was finished, the party talked through what to do with all the time they had now and I let the players know that they’d be entering this virtual reality game as if they’d all taken a long rest. While all that was happening, though, one of the player characters was texting her brother as her player and I messaged back and forth on discord, filling in a little information about what was going on outside the lock-in. After all, while it would be easy for us, the players and you readers, to forget that there was a huge crisis brewing outside, all of the characters would still have the day’s events on their mind. They could hardly forget the day their parents’ nightmares stepped into reality as the always-glowing barrier around the massive Hellhole north of the city cracked and broke open, even with the fun of Shrek movies, tons of food, and exciting sports events. Once her brother got back to her, the player character learned that not only were their parents still working on whatever was going on (they’re the children of one of the adventurers who’d helped defeat the lord of hell that was trying to use the Hellhole to take over the world of mortals and a liberated devil who’d helped them and been freed by them), there was some new ward over the entire thing that prevented divination magic from seeing within it. Which was where I got to pay off the “magitech” stuff we’d been building into the world since any cameras would be based on divination magic and wouldn’t be able to see anything inside at all, even if the person holding the camera could just see through it normally. It certainly made for an interesting situation! Other than that, they weren’t able to learn much and we decided to move on without spending too much time in the moment. Well, other than the Bard who decided to go get some pictures for the school paper to use if anyone wrote about the lock-in or needed some pictures of Students Doing Activities.
From there, with the second half of our session, we dove into the virtual reality event! I’ve been sitting on a few fun maps I got from being a supporter of TC Modern (Tom Cartos’ Modern TTRPG map-making Patreon) and I got to deploy the factory one I’d been sitting on for a while now as I described a production facility that was slowly going haywire. The students were charged with rescuing the employees still stuck inside, figuring out what was going on, and stopping it if they could, all while on a thirty-minute timer since the climbing speed of the machinery would cause them to blow up if they kept going at that pace for another half of an hour. The party dove right in and while there was a bit of initial fumbling while the party waited for people who could solve the Door Problem to have their turns in initiative, they quickly fell into line, divvied up the factory, and spread out to find the missing employees. And a bunch of the environmental traps, mostly by accident at first. The first player in noticed all of the machines burst with electricity at the top of the round (on initiative count 20) while they were luckily still one step outside of the area of effect. The next player character, who saw that the catwalks above the floor were safe from that electrical burst, decided to run up the nearest flight of stairs and discovered that a lot of the power cords dangling from the roof would send a bolt of electricity in their direct if they got too close to them. A few additional instances of this revealed that it was the power cords tied to the machines that were bursting with electricity below and that it seemed to be coming FROM the machines rather than the outlets above the machines. And that the number of dangling cords made it difficult to notice which cables were which without taking some time to pick them out.
After that, the party started moving towards where they’d been told the employees were waiting for rescue, some of them at an all-out sprint, and others splitting off to check out other routes through the maze of pathways, traps, and electrical discharges. Or, in the Bard’s case, to start digging into what was going on here since figuring out what was going on was part of stopping the time. They’d win if they rescued the employees, but the time trial required them to exit from the game to stop the clock and that would only happen if they figured out what was happening or they were all “killed” in the game. So, as we wrapped up the session, we have the Bard in the manager’s office, digging into what happened, the Artificer looking for danger, the Barbarian and Paladin right by the employees, and the Cleric running north to investigate a corner of the building the party hadn’t looked at too closely (all which failing saving throws against getting zapped). They’ve nearly accomplished one of the major objectives and figured out most of the passive rules of the dungeon/encounter, all in maybe thirty seconds of in-world time, so I’m sure they’ll start to figure the rest of it out in the next session and, as we get used to what is going on, will begin to pick up the turn-order pace. After all, the time to beat is fifteen minutes. Sure, that’s 150 rounds in combat in Dungeons and Dragons, but there’s a LOT of running around they’re going to need to do if they want to get the employees out alive and relatively unharmed. Regardless of how it goes, I’m excited to see what they decide to do and if their current cooperation can last! No matter how it goes, I’m going to have a great time once again.