After what feels like months (because it has been three months since we first started, given that we’ve played about once a month due to holidays and scheduling issues), my The Magical Millennium campaign finally cleared our first dungeon! They even did it without anyone dying or staying unconscious for very long! It was great! There were some close calls and a lot of bad conveyor belt related rolls, but they managed to clear it all in the end. We started the session with a check-in to remind everyone of how much time had passed (and a bit of frantic scrambling from me because D&D Beyond didn’t save the state of my encounter from last session), the party proceeded to kill the remaining clouds of energy, the Paladin beefed it on the conveyor belts repeatedly, the characters emerged from the virtual realm to get some notes from the person overseeing their game, and then they all settled down to sleep for the night before we wrapped up the session a couple hours early. It was nice to be able to bring the dungeon to a close, even if we didn’t play a full session (mostly due to the Super Bowl being that day), so we can hopefully start fresh in a brand new week when we all play again. Our next session will start with a bit of a time skip and a quick conversation about the highlights of what each character did during that time skip, but we’ll be moving on pretty quickly from there. My hope is we’ll be able to start off with homecoming week right away, since that’s a big day for high school students, and I want to get moving a little bit faster than we have been. We’ve been playing for a year now (or will have been, at the time of our next session), and we’ve only covered two in-game weeks! We’re moving so slowly!

Despite taking a little while to get going thanks to D&D Beyond not saving the state of the encounter I was running (which is the first time it’s ever done that), the rest of the combat part of the dungeon went pretty smoothly until right about the end. The player characters didn’t take much damage as we picked back up and they killed a couple of the little lightning cloud spirit thingies that had been living in (and partially powering) the machinery at the factory they were exploring. Things actually looked to be going pretty well for a while there, as the party gathered together and moved from dealing with their own groups of lightning spirits to dealing with the spirits collectively, but then the party had to all move to the last two machines in the northern portion of the factory. Most of them made the move okay, but the Paladin had to jump over some conveyor belts, to get out from between the machinery and back on the approved and safe paths marked out on the factory’s floor, and she kept royally beefing it. One roll would be great and then the next would be garbage. She’d absolutely fail to leap over the conveyor belt despite incredibly low Difficulty Classes for those maneuvers and then ace the dexterity saving throw needed to stay on her feet as she came into contact with a conveyor belt running at a hazardous speed. It happened so many times in a row that she stopped trying to do fancy maneuvers and still messed up on the simpler ones. It brought a much-needed comedic element to the end of the fight, but it was a bit rough considering that her character showed up to help fight the last of the little lightning spirits and got immediately knocked out by it.

After that, the party was able to save the Paladin and, as soon as that was done, the dungeon ended and they were brought out of the virtual reality/illusory environment they were in. The person who was overseeing their dungeon run/escape room adventure gave them a little advice and constructive criticism (all stuff I would have liked to say but needed a way to deliver to the characters rather than the players), and then gave them their score in addition to their time. It took the party just a bit over three minutes, maxing out their time bonus, but they lost a lot of points for getting so hurt and taking so much damage between the environmental hazards and the combat. They still came in first and we’ll talk during the next session about what they got for setting and holding that record, but it was good to be able to point out that reckless pursuit of a single goal might have unintended consequences that seem like they’re irrelevant until it’s too late to do anything about them. After that, the party spent some time talking to each other about what happened, answering texts from the people in their lives, got a snack, and then settled down for the night, either to sleep or to do one last bit of hijinks with their other friends. It was a pretty quick wrap-up of the session, since one of the players had a super bowl party to get to, but I walked the rest of the players through the questions I planned to ask at the start of our next session, post time skip, so they’d have the time they needed to think up their answers.

I don’t have as much prepared from this point forward as I’ve had up to this point. I’ve got a few ways the initial plot points I introduced, the damage to the barrier around the Hellmouth and some stuff that seems to be only in the background right now, will develop over time, but where things go from here is going to largely depend on the interest and direction of the players. After all, I’m here to focus the camera and provide detail while they’re the ones truly directing where the action goes and what scenes are next. I’m sure that the answers I get from them about the time skip stuff will provide a decent amount of clarification for what my players are interested in doing from here, but I won’t have that for another week (as of this being posted) and so can’t really do any preparation work for it. I should probably focus on my other campaign instead, since I’ve done basically no work on that since our last session, but I’m not as inclined to work on that one most days. Making a labyrinth is difficult, time-consuming work! And while I will absolutely make it simpler in the future, that doesn’t help me much right now. Anyway, I will still have plenty more work to do in this campaign, The Magical Millennium, whenever that prospective player finally gets back to me on whether or not she actually plans to join the group. Assuming, of course, that she’s still interested, as the month of general silence I’ve been getting from her has me thinking that she’s probably not interested or up for it anymore. Time will tell, of course, but I have to do my best to wait until then. Which sucks. I want something fun to work on now!