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!

Things started off a bit slow while we waited for players to show up, caught up with each other, and then tried to remember what had been going on last time. It’d been about six weeks since we’d last played (our longest gap to date, tied with one other six-week gap), so it was a bit of a struggle to reinsert ourselves into the fiction, but my players had taken sufficient notes to get themselves back on track and I had plenty of my own to get the right tone set from there. Since the players had found the employees the previous session, it was a quick decision to get the three of them together and moving towards the exit. The Paladin spent one of her two precious spell slots to bring an unconscious employee back to a relatively healthy state and the Barbarian interrupted the woman who was still in her office doing work as normal while she waited to be rescued. After a bit of a conversation, the Artificer showed the employees the safe path they’d found and started leading them down it. After a single turn, they decided to break off from that and dashed away to help the Bard as she searched through the manager’s office for information since the Barbarian, between attempts to find glitches she could exploit to hack the magical VR simulation, was ushering the employees down the safe path. Over in the office, the Bard had a strong start, finding the manager’s password written down in his day planner, but her attempts to find information on the computer were incredibly slow. It takes a long time to look through a messy desktop and while I said it would take ten whole rounds to do that, I’m not sure I could find a file I wanted in that little time on my OWN computer, much less a complete stranger’s disastrous desktop.

While this was going on, the Paladin and the Cleric spent their time looking for that fourth employee. By then, there were only three rooms left unchecked and they just so happened to pick the room the fourth employee was in last. It was unfortunate, but it didn’t cost the group more than a dew rounds, which is what the party needed anyway, while The Bard searched and the Barbarian shepherded the far-too-relaxed employees towards the exit. The Paladin eventually found this employee, an electrical engineer contracted to fix the machines when they need maintenance, passed out in the power room, his scorched jacket still smoking, as a ghost made of electricity stood across the room, half in and half out of the generator that was powered by it. There were some brief attempts to communicate between the two, but nothing that the Paladin said seemed to land and she was unable to hear a word of what it looked like the elemental spirit was trying to say. So she healed the unconscious employee, helped get him out of the room, and then went back to confront the now-angry spirit with the Cleric at her side. Which meant both of them got blasted by the spirit when it reacted to the two of them trying to interact with its generator. I have to give them credit, though, because they both tried to keep helping it and only gave in to the need to fight it when the Bard, with the Artificer’s help, found the manual for the generator and shared that the fix for this “problem” was “percussive maintenance.”

So, with a collective sigh and a little more faith lost in the world of adults (even if these adults are fake, clearly being depicted as bad, and only existing so there is some kind of easily scaled adventure to send people on using this VR adventure simulator), the Paladin and the Cleric started to beat down the electric spirit. As that battled raged, the Barbarian finished her escort duty and joined the fray just in time to get the final blow, coincidentally stealing the kill as the employees, now safe near the front door, slowly filed out. The Artificer and Bard, though, had moved on to the machines that were still crackling with electricity despite the galvanic spirit’s disruption. The Bard had read that each of those machines needed a battery type device to convert and store the electricity sent to them by this exploitative generator, so she was joined by the Artificer as they both started checking out the machines. They quickly figured out how to shut down the machines such that they would expel a small thundercloud entity of some kind that seemed to exist only to discharge electricity, a thing they confirmed when it began to attack them. Thankfully, getting it free from the machines turned off the electrical discharges that had almost killed one of the trio of employees and a few lucky hits dispatched the first few of these animated scraps of power in a single strike each. The next few, as the heavily injured Paladin and Cleric joined the Barbarian in tackling the machines near them, proved much more difficult to dispatch. Which didn’t stop the Cleric from running off on their own and barely surviving a tangle with another of these things.

That’s about where we left off: two and a half minutes into this little VR simulation as the party recklessly pursues their goals, reassuring themselves that dying in this escape room adventure won’t hurt them in reality as they heedlessly try to set a world record for finishing the made-up adventure of this local VR Escape Room company. I’m a little worried about them, given that these things have a way of cascading once they start to turn bad, and I’m not sure they’ll be able to swing the victory at all if they stay as fragmented as they are. They could be systematically moving through these as a whole group, one dangerous bundle of electricity at a time, if they were willing to take a little more time, but their desire for complete and total dominating victory seems to have overridden their good sense. There might be a bit more to it, what with how much is going on in their lives and how they’ve had so many out-of-control adventures that they’ve all narrowly survived, but right now, all I can see in my mind, as I imagine the campaign, is the Cleric running north toward two still-operating machines with only two hit points and an incredibly low armor class. It’s going to be a rough end-of-the-adventure for them all, no matter how it turns out.

Beyond that, the next session is supposed to be the first session for our new player, but they haven’t been responding to my messages much lately and I’m running out of time I can spend catching them up and helping them make a character. With work as demanding as it is and the looming specter of maybe [definitely, as of editing this] needing to work this weekend, I’m just not sure I’ll be able to fit them in without draining more of my energy than I can afford right now. I’m barely keeping myself going as it is since work pivoted directly from physically demanding work to long days, mentally demanding work, and a steady increase to my stress every day. And that’s without factoring in how stressed I am from what’s going on in the world! All that’s really keeping me together is my tabletop games and Final Fantasy XIV. Anyway, that’s imagining problems where there aren’t any yet [I was right to do this, though, as it turns out], so I’m going to end today’s post about The Magical Millennium with the note that I’m still super impressed with this group’s teamwork. They’re delegating, communicating, and cooperating in a way that they never even come close to outside of the moments they’re functioning as an adventuring party. I love it.