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.
Between sessions, I’d spent some time talking with the player whose character had gotten petrified. I wanted to figure out how she felt about it and what she wanted to do, so I could suggest a course of action when we had that conversation as a group. I also had the player put a character together so she’d have someone to play if the group decided they didn’t want to leave the Labyrinth, which is exactly what happened. The conversation started in-character, as the players who hadn’t been around for the last session got caught up on the events of the session prior, starting with their now-petrified ally, jumping back to the start, and then ending with the specifics of the battle that result in the petrification. From there, the group rolled some checks to see if any of them knew how to reverse petrification, rolled another set to see if they knew anyone who might be able to help their friend, and then a final set to figure out if they knew anything useful to direct their actions from that point forward. It took three sets of rolls to get results we could work with due to a lot rolls that just fell short of the targets I set, which means they’re off on one of the worst paths they could have picked, unfortunately, given that passing any of the prior checks would have directed them to something more likely or would have provided information they could have relied on more heavily than “maybe there’s a cure in the labyrinth.”
After that, as the party moved back into the depths of the labyrinth, I narrated the arrival of the player’s new character, a normal guy type character who lost his entire group to dangers deeper in the dungeon and only stopped running when he ran into the party. He’s completely lost, has no idea where his friends are, has no idea where he is, and is now aligned with the party in hopes of finding his way back there and, you know, surviving with a new group of heroic explorers. It was funny to see just how much distrust the party was throwing around as they talked with this guy, considering how little they’d shown towards the lyncanthrope barbarian who had almost spread their curse to another person in the party (the target of the attack had rolled exactly the number they needed to pass the save), but the player did a good job of accenting and answering their suspicions. Sure, he was just some panicked guy, but this labyrinth is strange and full of dangers, so he couldn’t hold their suspicion against them. Eventually the party settled on having him walk in the middle of their group, just in case he was up to something, and moved on with their exploration.
Not long after that, the party rounded one of the MANY corners in the labyrinth and the person in the lead found himself just around the corner from some unknown creature that was clearly trying to stay hidden as they approached it. After a bit of cautious approaching and some less-than-successful sneaking attempts, the party came face-to-face with a goblin-esque creature that looked like a normal goblin except that it have been stretched out so that it was over nine feet tall. It’s limbs were long and wiry, it’s torso gracefully arched, and it’s ears were longer than you’d believe possible, none of which was super helpful since it didn’t speak the same common trade language that everyone else did and even only spoke a strange dialect of the Goblin language. Luckily, two members of the party spoke Goblin and were able to quickly figure out how to communicate with it despite the dialectal differences. This creature, who introduced himself as Steve, was incredibly afraid of the party and refused to believe that they weren’t going to attack him based on his past experiences with other people he’d encountered in the labyrinth. The party tried to convince him that they wouldn’t do anything to hurt him and were on their way to doing that by offering to take care of some problem he and his people (hidden somewhere deeper in the labyrinth) had, but I had to stop because I could hear every type of siren approaching my apartment and, when I went to check out what was going on, heard the low buzzing noise of my building’s fire alarm going off.
As it turns out, it was a relatively minor elecrtical fire, thanks to the first signs of it being spotted by the person in that apartment, but it could have easily been so much worse. Our best guess by the end of the ordeal, was that their thermostat had been wired poorly and, when it when to turn on that day, actually shorted out and started firing sparks into the wall’s interior. Thankfully, the fire department arrived in time to cut open the wall and douse the tiny fire that had started by then, but it was a really close call. Since I didn’t know how long it would take, I told my players that we’d just call it there for the day. We were only about an hour away from normal quitting time anyway, so I jotted down a few notes about what was going on, promised to kepe my players updated about my situation, and then went to go stand in community with my neighbors while we waited for the all-clear to go back inside. Which we eventually got, but I stuck around since I was kinda friends with the folks whose apartment was the source of the problem and didn’t want to abandon them before we knew if they’d be able to go back inside. Which means I’ve got most of my prep from my last session ready to go for this upcoming session and all my players will hopefully be able to pick up their discussion with Steven right from where it left off. I really want to spend some more time on the “Goblongs” I invented and what their lives are like as residents of the labyrinth. There’s still so much to build and develop and we’re just on the first floor still!