As this slowly becomes my most-consistent Tabletop Group (it benefits from having 6 players and only needing 3 to actually play), The Rotten Labyrinth has returned to high-form with our second repeat session post-taking-a-break. We had it all this past week! There was a combat encounter that almost went very poorly and likely would have ended differently if not for a lucky crit by one of the players! We had a bevy of traps, some avoided and some carelessly tripped! We had our first instance of the party being split! We had a creative application of some magic based on something the party had learned previously! We had glorious treasure, plenty of close-calls, and a dedication to the party’s chosen mission the likes of which I had not seen before! Everything went exactly according to plan, by which I mean that the party alternated between fucking around and finding out, and driving towards what they thought was their best path forward! Unfortuately, the first floor of this labyrinth is a maze and they may have overestimated their ability to get where they want to go by moving in cardinal directions! They found some dead-ends, skipped some interesting paths forward, and flirted with multiple instances of learning something about the labyrinth without ever pursuing it further. All-in-all, it was a pretty fun session! The first one I’ve run in months that acually used almost the whole time set aside for us to play. Today, I’m very worn out from all that talking and game-running, but I’m excited to see where they go next now that they know simply walking (map) west and (map) south will not get them to their destination.
We started off with a quick recap of the previous session, talking about the strange, (literally) enchanting room the party found, and then launched right into things. Since the party had already cleared out a bit of the path they wanted to take to their next destination, we rolled them forward to that point once they were done with their eight-hour rest (to get rid of a level of exhaustion, a hack I’ve put in to deal with the fact that playing in this labyrinth deals with things on a very different time scale than most other D&D dungeons or play). The party immediately rolled well and handled their first dangers with aplomb, finally breaking the “one person always rolls bad” curse they’ve been operating under for a few sessions now, and managed to make their way safely forward as a result, avoiding a trap that hadn’t been there the first time they passed trough (when they were following Steve The Goblong), and actually making a tiny bit of progress before they got distracted by treasure. You see, rather than carry on toward their intended destination, they turned south the instant the passageway widened up and followed it to the end where they found a large prayer tile, a VERY ornate chest, and a small gargoyle-looking thing on top of a pillar. The Gargoyle did not respond to their attempts to interact with it and the chest, while trapped, did not seem to be particularly difficult to handle. Until the player character making the roll got a natural 1 on their attempt to unlock it and sent off the trap. This trap, overlooking one of the most valuable loot troves on this floor, launched a fireball out of the gargoyle-like statue’s mouth that hit the entire party. Thankfully, everyone but the barbarian is quite dexterous (the barbarian is only fairly dexterous) so they all managed to pass their saving throw, and the barbarian had enough hit points that they weren’t much worse off than the rest of the party following the damage. Once they’d picked themselves up of the floor following the explosion, they were able to get the treasure out of the chest after a few tries and earned a pile of coins and some potions for their trouble.
After that, the party pressed on back toward their original path and, thanks to a pair of bad rolls this time, walked right into a trap meant to separate the party. The person in front succeeded on the saving throw, allowing them to chose which side of the trap (a segment of wall dropping from the ceiling to block a narrow passage) they ended up on, but their player reasoned that this guy (the Rogue) would probably just dive forward rather than backward, so he was cut off from the party and stuck in complete and total darkness since someone else carried the lantern for him. After seeing a strange, dim light in the distance, he decided to sit down where he was and wait for his companions to find him, ignoring the otherwise total darkness he found himself in. On the other side of the wall, the party turned their attention towards the two paths leading south from where they were, figuring one probably led them toward a place they could meet up with their missing ally, but they immediately found themselves confronted with a trap similar to the one that had separated them from their friend. Another really poor roll set this trap off, despite the party’s attempts to skillfully bypass it, and the person leading the group failed their saving throw this time around, cutting them off from the remaining half of the party. Thankfully, he had darkvision and could follow the passageway to the larger hall were his ally was waiting, pressed against the section of wall that had cut them off from the party. There was some immediate mistrust of each other, given that this labyrinth has shown to wield illusions, but they were able to confirm that each of them was being confronted by their ally, just in time for the last two party members to bust down the wall using a well-placed Thunderwave spell. The Barbarian, despite some good rolls, was unable to hack down these walls, despite her previous success at doing just that elsewhere, making it clear that there was something different about these walls. Whatever it was didn’t hold up against that thuderwave spell, though, as evidenced by a trap the party had encountered some sessions prior that the party’s Bard rememberered, meaning the party could finally be reunited and carry on toward unexplored territory!
Most of this exploration was fairly banal. There wasn’t much in the large hallway for them to find and they ignored all but one of the branches leading off it. This one they explored to sate the curiosity of the party’s Rogue, but they ignored every other part of it once they’d reached the end of the one specific branch they’d picked on that side of the hallway so they could return with their loot to continue moving southward until they reached the end of this wide passageway. There, they were confronted with additional side passages and no other way fowrard, so they picked one to explore and quickly found themselves in front of another treasure chest. This one did not appear to be trapped and was easily opened, but as the rogue reached in to grab the strange, ornate shackles held within, the chest revealed itself to be a mimic and attacked! It was joined by a second, larger mimic that I’d brewed up that was basically a cross between a mimic and a piercer (a creature known for looking like a stalagtite that would drop on any unsuspecting prey that passed beneath them) so it could hide in a smoother environment like a dungeon. The surprise round didn’t go super well for the mimics and while the party had elected to not take a short rest after the fireball trap, they eventually won out thanks to a massive critical hit from the Ranger (who had dice to stack for the hit), some quick healing from the Bard and Rogue (who is playing a custom “field surgeon” type subclass), and the resolute wall of the Barbarian keeping the party’s softer, squishier members from being eaten. After that was done, they collected their new treasure, took stock of their injuries, and we wrapped the session for the night. I was exhausted after three and a half hours of running the game for this group, so I didn’t really have much more left in me at that point anyway. It’s an important skill, knowing when to stop, otherwise your GMing becomes about filling time rather than hitting beats or accomplishing goals. Definitely one I look forward to practicing in future sessions as the party continues to explore! Maybe after they get another long rest in, though, given how beat-up they are.