My now-Wednesday group, currently playing The Leeching Wastes, has now met four times in a row! What a record! This time, what was supposed to be a short ritual turned into a whole-session activity that was incredibly emotionally fraught. The cliff-hanger from last time, an abysmal saving throw result, wound up snowballing first into a bit of confusion about the reason the party was there at all, grew further into a bit of inter-party misdirection, and then finally landed as a combat encounter that I didn’t expect to go as poorly as it did. I mean, I know I say this a lot, but I really don’t expect quite so many unlikely things to happen in the tabletop games I’m running despite apparently being a magnet for this kind of improbability. Nothing useful for winning the lottery or having a fortunate life. No. I just attract incredibly unlikely but still possible outcomes but only in tabletop games I’m running. I’m going to avoid speculating about how that’s reflected in my life (I already talk to my therapist about that more than enough), but it really was staggering how a part of the session I expected would take half an hour wound up taking the full hour and forty-five minutes we played (we got another later start since I was finishing up dinner and we were still chitchatting for the first half an hour). I was absolutely mechanically prepared for things to go horribly wrong since a game like this needs stakes for the victories to mean as much as they do, but I was not emotionally prepared. I was not mentally prepared. I had to pause quite a few times to figure out how to proceed or, at the very least, where to find my notes about how to proceed since we have once again taken something I expected to come up later and dropped it onto third level characters.
To get a bit more specific, last session, right as we were wrapping up, I prompted a player to make a Wisdom saving throw as they entered into the hollowed-out tree trunk that held the magic circle for the ritual they needed their druidic ally to perform. I didn’t tell the player why back then, but only because I didn’t want them to spend two weeks stressing out about what it would mean since what they were saving against was the influence of a massive, horrible, undead monstrosity that was trapped at the center of the tree. This monstrosity, kept there by the life force of the druids who made the tree and the grove surrounding it, has a connection to this character because she counts as an undead due to a death-defying encounter she had with a creature of the same sort a few years early, and so it forced her to save against a Suggestion spell. Which she absolutely bombed, so much so that even my incredibly lenient mechanics for this weakness couldn’t help her. The only consolation was that at least she hadn’t rolled a natural 1 or gotten a total result equal to or less than zero, since that would have put the creature’s vile cunning behind her actions rather than her own (which meant she didn’t have to attack her allies as she attempted to carry out her orders). Instead, she did her best to convince the party’s allied druid to perform a second ritual, on top of the one that party was there to see done.
The first ritual was a simple one, meant to move the seasons forward in the specially warded grove they’d only recently begun to live in. They’d been asked to help make that happen by the being that tended to this grove (The Sentinel) since it would be able to heal the tree and restore balance much more quickly if the seasons advanced than if it had to work through the odd semi-static moment the quadrants of the grove where caught in. The second ritual was the basis on which the whole tree, and therefor the prison for the nightwalker at its core, had been formed and performing it again would renew that magic. It would also unfortunately release the undead horror, at which point it could simply walk away before the tree was reformed unless there was something around to hold it in place. Which there was not, at the time, unless the party somehow managed to marshal The Sentinel and its Guardians before the ritual had been completed. Which they probably could have done, if they’d survived long enough to even try it, since they were able to call up The Sentinel to remind them of what they were supposed to be doing. They were confused, you see, because the charmed character, the party’s rogue and sorcerer, was suggesting the allied druid should perform multiple rituals instead of the single ritual the party had been told was required three sessions earlier. Even after The Sentinel confirmed the single ritual and then left, that character kept pushing and almost convinced the whole group until they realized that the first ritual had probably done what they wanted on its own.
From there, the charmed character decided to try the ritual herself since she was pretty certain she wouldn’t be able to convince everyone else to go along with it and that the party’s allied druid would probably side with the majority over her, especially because that druid had sounded so uncertain about what the second ritual was meant to accomplish. From that moment onward, every roll was bad for the group as a whole. Either the charmed character rolled super high on her actions against the party or the party rolled super low on their actions against her. Despite being last in initiative order (which is funny since she has such high dexterity), she survived four full rounds of everyone else trying to push her out of the circle, knock her out, or otherwise disrupt her magic ritual. Hell, she even succeeded on the check to keep the ritual from falling apart the one time she got pushed out of the circle, despite needing to get an eighteen on a skill check that she had no bonus with. She rolled an eighteen exactly. The only roll that worked out was the last-ditch, “please don’t destroy the campaign I’ve been setting up by killing the entire party” saving throw I’d baked in. Which she barely succeeded at, beating the number she needed by one.
This last roll represented the intervention of the goddess that she is currently aligned with, that had intervened years ago to save her life at the behest of the paladin who had just sacrificed her own life to save this player character (they were first loves trying to escape the nightmare situation that the player character had grown up in). This as-yet unnamed goddess is the goddess of twilight, of time, of endings, and of things in-between, so she as able to move what would have surely been the player character’s end away in time, saving her and granting her a bunch of powers as an unintended side effect. Now, just as the ritual was about to complete, the player character managed to break free of the spell enough to cry out for help in the silence of her own head and the goddess offered to bring that blow home to her in order to prevent its completion. The damage undealt would arrive in that frozen moment in time and could still easily kill her. After all, the blow not only hurt, but drained life force and the player character was already so weak (she had one hit point remaining). It could have easily killed her permanently, in a way nothing in the game could have undone. Still, both the player and the player character answered with no hesitation that they needed to be stopped.
Outside this moment of frozen time, the rest of the party had been trying to stop their sister and friend from completing this ritual. They had torn their hearts apart as they did whatever they felt they must to prevent this horror from being unleashed. The brother pleaded with his sister. The brother’s lover reminded them all that they would do whatever they must to protect people from a nightwalker attack. The druid ally and her protector tried to make sense of what they were seeing and fought to protect the place that was supposed to become their home. Right as it seemed like they’d failed, the charmed character was knocked to the ground by a sourceless blow, the ritual came to an end, and they were left to pick up the pieces. It was a dispirited group that bound their friend’s wounds, that carried her away from the ritual circles, and that slumped to the ground, exhausted, to rest while they waited for her to wake up so they could figure out what had happened.
After that, we packed it in. We talked about what had happened a bit, discussed our plans for the next couple of sessions–which will bring the end of the arc I’m running and then potentially usher in the other DM and the next arc of his campaign–and then went on our ways. Except for that player and I, since we needed to talk about what the future looked like for their character after taking a massive blow like that. It was a lot to absorb, to be completely honest. I was not expecting things to play out that way. I had expected this character to be stopped in short order and for the party to figure all this stuff out in the first thirty to forty-five minutes of the session so we could move on to what’s up with the moon. Instead, this took all our time and energy and we’re going to be right back in the shit at the start of our next session. The glorious, incredibly dramatic, and exhaustingly fraught shit. I really love tabletop roleplaying games!