After a couple lengthy breaks for the holidays, The Magical Millennium finally met up again! This time, we spent the entire session running through a virtual reality “escape room” type adventuring experience. The party’s goal was to find the four employees stuck in a factory where all the magitech machinery had gone haywire and then safely guide them out of the building. They had gone through a few rounds in the previous session where, thanks to their decision to split up and cover as much ground as possible, they’d found the first three employees AND a safe route to the front of the building. This time, they got an unconscious employee back on his feat, convinced the three employees they’d found that they knew a safe route out through the front door, found the fourth employee, found and fought an electric ghost, lost more faith in adults by uncovering the secrets of the cost-and-safety cutting manager, discovered they could have been shutting down the dangerous machines this whole time, and managed to get all of that done in a touch less than two in-game minutes. It was a pretty wild, busy session as I did my best to ride herd on the group, striking a careful balance between ushering people along and letting everyone have fun since I realized fairly quickly that we probably weren’t going to finish the rest of the virtual reality dungeon in this single session. I think I did a pretty good job of that, getting through twenty busy rounds of a dungeon while keeping the information flowing as the group solved the mysteries of why the factory was going haywire and briefly touched on the last secret of this gamified experience that would let them go wild in the VR Dungeon Sim they were trying to win. After all, this is a timed competition! They need to finish in first place so they can show up all their rivals and haters. At this point, I mostly just hope that they don’t overextend themselves and lose as a result of taking too many risks. They’ve got the time to be careful!