Sometimes, you build a little something for yourself into one of your games. A silly little thing. Something fun, perhaps even just for you, to keep things interesting and provide the opportunity for some levity. Sometimes that’s a fun little NPC, sometimes it’s a stupid pun you’re building towards, sometimes it’s a situation meant to catch your players off-guard, and sometimes it’s all three of those things at once. In my most-recent session with The Rotten Labyrnith, we talked as a group to get on the same page, in-character and out, about what to do with the player character who had been petrified in the session prior. After that, the party set out to continue exploring the labyrinth keeping in mind their stated hope of finding a cure for their petrified ally and ran into the player’s (potentially temporary) replacement character. Shortly after that, and what felt like an awful lot of distrust for some random guy who ran out of a deeper part of the labyrinth in a panic (distrust they didn’t extend to the wereboar barbarian who showed up, immediately transformed, and attacked them), the party carried on, found some more stuff, and ran into a strange figure crouched in a little, half-hidden corner of the part of the maze they were exploring. Just as things started to progress in talks with this oddly long goblin (who had the most “little guy” energy I could muster), my building’s fire alarm went off and I had to evacuate, cutting the session short and bringing our play to an end without me getting to deliver the joke I’d been building towards. I wound up sending it in the text chat once I was outside and knew what was going on, but it just wasn’t the same.
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