After a few weeks of delay due to my poor health, I finally ran another Dungeons and Dragons session for The Rotten Labyrinth. It was a bit shorter than usual, due to starting almost an hour and a half late, but we still got to do some stuff. There was a discussion of what to do next and how to avoid the monster that nearly took out the entire party, there was some deliberation about how to proceed with three of the more combat-inclined party members, a surprise combat encounter complete with magical compulsions, and then a bit of treasure at the end of a long passage, accessibly only via some kind of blood magic. It wasn’t the least-busy session we’ve had and the amount of ground covered does not amount to all that much, but a lot of stuff happened on the back end that was not immediately visible to my players so a decent amount of progress was made. I’ve also solidified that they’re all going to get a level-up with their next long-rest, since they’ve clearly reached the threshold for it after their last few encounters, but I find myself wondering just how long it is going to take them to explore this labyrinth or if there’s anything I could do to speed things up. As much as I enjoy having them work their way through traps and monsters and find treasure in what amounts to maybe an eighth, at most (and even that feels like a massive overestimation), of the entire first-floor of the labyrinth, I’m worried about how much actual time it is going to take to get them anywhere. Or to, you know, develop the plot. There’s really not a lot going on in this part of the labyrinth other than the introduction to the general mystery of it all and a plethora of random encounters.

Which, you know, still come close to killing them half the time and just turn into frustrating slogs the other half of the time. The encounters are supposed to be tough and resource-consuming, but my players seem to be having a string of bad luck that is turned the whole experience into a sequence of unfortunate failures. Thankfully, they rolled well enough when it came to tracking the creature that had attacked their camp the night before, so they were able to mark where it went in order to hopefully avoid it in the future. We shall see if that remains the case since it seemed to have an agenda beyond the death of the party, but right now, they were able to follow it’s trail to an unexplored part of the labyrinth and mark it so they wouldn’t accidentally wander into wherever it had gone. After that, they did some roll-free discussion of what to do next, ultimately opting to continue exploring rather than spend time dealing with traps they hadn’t overcome the first time they were encountered. Exploring new stuff meant the possibility of learning more about the dungeon or finding new treasure, after all, while dealing with old traps would probably only result in pain. Plus, there weren’t any lingering traps that were blocking forward progress, so there was at least some way around any thus-far uncleared traps. An easy decision, in the end, despite the long conversation about it (exacerbated by me realizing, twenty-minutes into the session, that discord was using my webcam microphone rather than my headset microphone, which meant my voice cut out every time I turned away from my monitor or got restless and moved into the other room).

Unfortunately, the good rolls ended there and the party’s explorations led them rather quickly into some kind of magical trap. It compelled the Barbarian to run forward, down one of the hallways, while summoning some kind of weak earth elemental (a gravel elemental rather than a rock or stone elemental) that immediately attacked the party. Thankfully, the Ranger and the Bard were able to make their saves and resist whatever had charmed the barbarian, but they unluckily did not fare well in combat. The Bard continued their sessions-long series of mostly rolling very poorly (the player rolled a LOT of 6’s!), missing their one attack as they chased after the Barbarian to render what assistance they could to the party’s main bruiser, but the Ranger was able to sweep in and hit the target. Unfortunately, since the Ranger uses a bow and the elemental was made of gravel, it was resistant to piercing damage and that’s the only kind of damage the ranger was capable of dealing, so this started a slug fest. The Ranger tried to back up, to stay out of melee range so he could keep shooting this creature, but it could just walk right through the walls and closed with him quickly. Thankfully, it didn’t do a lot of damage and had almost as difficult a time landing a hit as the Bard did, so the Ranger was able to shrug off a few hits while the Bard and the Barbarian returned to engage with it. Unfortunately, it was in a narrow hallway and the Bard didn’t have much in the way of ranged weapons, so the fight turned into even more of a slog before the party eventually emerged victorious.

After taking a break to bandage their wounds and recover hit points, the party carried on down the hallway the Barbarian HADN’T been randomly forced to run down and came upon their second random encounter of the day. See, I’ve got this whole massive table and every time the players take a long rest (and a day has passed), I roll for random encounters as things in the Labyrinth shift around. Some of that stuff is shifting itself, the creatures wandering around the labyrinth with goals of their own and nothing more than luck bringing them into contact with the party, but there’s a set of things that essentially teleport around the maze based on these encounter tables. There’s also a smaller table for things that crop up as the party explores (so I don’t need to have every inch of this place planned out before the party shows up there) and that includes a variety of things like monsters, other explorers, specific trap types, weird Labyrinth magic stuff, and so on. A lot of that stuff has different rules than the normal encounter table and the party lucked out by getting one such things. Rather than encounter the now-familiar prayerform tiles down a time-wasting dead-end, the party encountered one that told them they might gain something for what they’ve sacrificed. Past it, at the end of the twisting-and-turning hallway, was a treasure chest that had some kind of arcane lock on it (the Bard figured out that it was some kind of arcane lock but fell just short of knowing it was specifically the spell Arcane Lock) that had a small prong above the lock’s rune. Eventually, after much discussion and a failed attempt to leave with the chest (which would have had Consequences), the Barbarian pricked her hand on it, the chest popped open, and they found a sick magic axe inside.

Once she’d retrieved her treasure, the chest closed and locked itself again. Prompted by the Barbarian, the Ranger did the same thing and got himself a magic shield for his trouble. It wasn’t exactly something he wanted and maybe not as useful as the axe was to the Barbarian (it was a fun little custom great axe I made up once called “The Axe Of Stabbing” as landing a strike with it causes a little trapdoor on the head of the axe to pop open so a mechanical arm could spring out and stab whatever the axe struck), but it was still more powerful and widely useful than the item the Bard got when he pricked his palm. Which he wasn’t even sure would work, on account of the Bard not having flowing blood in the traditional sense, or in any kind of metaphorical sense, really. Life force, sure, but definitely not blood. Still, the chest seemed fine with this even if it only gave him a little ioun stone that grants a bonus to insight checks. Which is very useful, since flat-bonus items are very rare in Dungeons and Dragons 5e, but it is INCREDIBLY specific for an item that requires attunement, especially compared to the broader utility of a magic shield and a magic, stabby axe. There’s a reason all of this played out the way it did and I would love nothing more than to explain it here, but I must refrain for the time being. My players have no way of figuring this out, at least not yet, so I must keep my secrets to myself. I will say, though, that I’ve been keeping track of a lot of things since the party entered the labyrinth and a bunch of it paid off today. We’ll see how it goes in the future, but right now, the party has returned to camp to figure out what their cool new magic items do and maybe even lead their companions to where this chest sits so their allies can get cool magic items out of the cool magic chest for themselves. We’ll see how that goes next session.