It took a little while, but we finally had another session of The Rotten Labyrinth. This session included none of the original players from the campaign since they were all busy with other things, but I’m trying to find ways to have these games happen more often than we skip them, so I ran with half the crew and figured that would be good enough. Which it was! I had to tweak a couple encounters a bit to suit the group, but I was able to do that without too much of a problem. It’s much easier than usual, given how many of them have similar defense and hit point values and how even the “weakest” among them is still pretty tough. And they’re all level two now, so I could go a bit harder on them without as much of a concern. Which I should be doing anyway, considering that they opted for the high-risk, high-reward entrance to the labyrinth. So, with just three players, they set out to fill in more of the map, ran into some traps, got some cool loot, literally disarmed a trap, and then fought a single creature that wound up giving them all a rougher time than I expected. Technically, everyone is still alive. At least so far as most people would define “alive” even if there’s some room for interpretation. That said, we all had a lot of fun, were frequently busting up as a joke made it through the entire session while still being funny, and even the unfortunate events of that final fight weren’t enough to dampen the group’s spirits.

The session started innocuously enough, with a brief discussion about the hand-off of active player characters. Two of the players from last time continued into this session, so we also took a moment to talk about the logistics of what would be a pretty busy adventuring day for the two of them. Given that this is a Labyrinth and a significant part of the game is exploring it slowly and cautiously, not a lot of time is passing as they wander around. Every so often, something comes up that could take a bit more time, like a trap or something particularly interesting in the environment, but even most of that stuff doesn’t take a lot of time compared to how roughed up they are after each battle. Typically, when you’re designing a dungeon like this, you want to consider the finite resources it will cost your players to accomplish whatever their goals are or overcome whatever obstacles you’ve created and balance that against the actual passage of time through a day so that, by the time they’re low on resources, it has been long enough that it makes sense for them to consider taking a rest. In this game, since they opted for the high-danger entrance, that balance is incredibly skewed towards the resource-expenditure side of things, so the party has wound up spending a lot of time in camp before they can actually rest again. So, rather than move them along quickly, I let them take some time at camp, take a short rest, and eat up some of their day so that, by probably the end of this session or the next one, they’d be ready to take a rest for the night.

Once they set out, though, they started moving pretty quickly. Which, unfortunately, didn’t work out great for them because they wandered into some traps almost immediately. While this team is probably the best-suited for combat in the tight spaces that make up this floor of the labyrinth, they’re not terribly well-suited for finding and disarming traps, in that none of them have actually invested in those skills beyond their basic attributes. Which means that they almost blundered into a trap before I could call on them to set up their marching order and make their exploration skill checks and then immediately blundered into a trap after that since they rolled so poorly. I think only once did a player roll high enough to actually have a decent chance of spotting traps, but even then there was little they could do about it since none of them had the right tools to disarm traps. Which meant there was a lot more breaking of traps and bypassing of traps than usual. The most notable of these was a spear-trap that the barbarian eventually “disarmed” by triggering and then breaking the spears off from the mechanism that stabbed them towards the pressure plate. Which means the party got a decent collection of old but still very nice spears that they then broke down even further into javelins. Which they then proceeded to use, to great comedic effect, to find and attempt to deal with every single obstacle in front of them. It worked really well, for the most part, until they encountered a razor wire trap that, thanks to a bad roll, cut through one of their javelins.

Since the mighty javelin, solver of every single problem they’d run into up to that point, had failed and they were a little nervous about trying anything else that ould maybe backfire on them, they opted to try going around the trap via a different path, which worked out pretty well for them! That is, of course, until they found themselves down a corridor that had a monster at the end of it. Prior to that point, they’d been actually avoiding what sounded like some kind of monster that was squelching around the dungeon, choosing not to see what might be taking up space in an area they’d already explored (leaving whatever critter might be there to the other half of their group, the mapmakers, to deal with should they encounter it), so they hesitated when they encountered the strange creature that was crouched in the end of the hallway, facing away from them and visibly in some kind of distress. While they figured out what to do about it, I was frantically rolling on my various encounter tables to figure out what this was because I’d added a “monster” note to my map but not actually figured out what the monster was (I’m in the middle of swapping over from a “expect this party” style of encounter building to a “make something adaptable to the party that’s present in the session” system). I wound up rolling basilisk stats and decided to go with the D&D 2024 version, which had almost the same stats but had turned it’s petrifying stare into an activated ability rather than a constant threat should any player actually look at it. It felt more fun to run the combat that way, and less threatening for a group of level two players who, admittedly, had pretty good constitution saving throws thanks to their high constitution scores and two them having proficiency in those saves. If there was ever a group to be able to brush off petrification, it would be this group.

Petrification, and basilisks in general, are a bit of an odd duck in D&D encounters. Despite the relatively low danger rating of those creatures, they can have incredibly long-lasting and deadly impacts on a party. Just like ghosts, for that matter. Basilisks can petrify a player character if they fail two relatively low constitution saving throws in a row (one on the basilisk’s turn, in this case, and one at the end of their next turn), which is a condition that can only be removed by mid-tier powerful magic that is usually right on the cusp of what the most powerful NPCs available to a group of low-level adventurers can provide. Should any of the players become petrified, it would likely result in a rather significant change to the course of the campaign since they wouldn’t have access to that kind of NPC yet, might not have the resources to pay for that kind of service, and might wind up needing to do whole quests about it. Which is why that is exactly what happened to this group. One of the player characters, thanks to a pair of bad rolls at the VERY END of the combat encounter, was petrified. It was the kobold wizard (who is tied with the barbarian for having the highest constitution score), so thankfully he’s easy to move around, but now the party has retreated to their campsite and needs to figure out what to do now that one of their companions has been turned to stone and none of them posses the means to fix that. I don’t know how the next few sessions will go, but I’m interested to find out what the party comes up with. I’ve got plenty of ideas, of course, but that just means I’m ready to offer solutions for good rolls or direction for good ideas. I can’t do anything if they players don’t get the ball rolling on their own, first.