After a bit of a break from sessions, my Dungeons and Dragons campaigns have finally begun to happen again. This past weekend (as I’m writing this and two weekends ago as you’re reading it), the campaign I’ve been calling The Rotten came together to do a little more labyrinth exploration, which involved making their way into their first proper hallways, finding some faded text carved into some large stone tiles, finding more faded text carved into smaller stone tiles, avoiding a few traps, fighting some undead that had been animated by the ambient magic just outside this part of the labyrinth, fighting some local raiders who were half-starved but who still nearly took down the party, AND discovered signs pointing them toward some long-forgotten religion! What a fun little session it was! We also talked about adding a few more players to the game–to help pad things out a bit when people can’t make it to a session–started inviting people, got three immediate “yes” responses, and then talked about what it would look like to have three more players. I’m still fairly confident that we’ll rarely have six players at the same time, but it’s bound to happen a few times, other than our next session when I’m hoping to bring them together to handle new character introductions and whatnot. If it happens too often, it might be difficult for some people to participate, what with all the extra faces and voices, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. I’ve got a lot of experience running a bigger group, so I have some ideas to help keep people engaged and interacting if it comes to that.

Last time, our party found and entered the labyrinth, did a bit of basic exploring, almost died, dealt with some traps and then got super lucky on a bit of loot that no one else had claimed prior to them. Picking up from there this time around, the party opted to follow a single path for a while rather than continue their old habit of thoroughly exploring every little pathway. As the party’s Bard put it, they all wanted to get into some larger, more-open spaced hallways, so they pushed forward for a bit in hopes of finding one. Which they did, but not after finally running into the strange animated corpses that had been hiding in a section of the Labyrinth just to the south after the party first showed up and scared them into hiding. This group of skeletons, one of which had access to some kind of magic, seemed like normal undead except for how their gear was badly degraded in an odd way that seemed to leave bits of fabric in decent condition and yet had almost completely eaten away their weapons. As they fought through this small collection of foes (and effortlessly shrugged off all but one of the spellcaster’s spells), the party realized that these skeletons had come from outside the labyrinth after the strange chaotic energy that was flooding into the maze didn’t react to their magic. That, plus the atmospheric acid that had occupied the ravine (a result of the random magic leaking into said ravine) just a couple days prior explained why there were these odd skeletons here and why their clothes, which had likely once been hidden under armor, had outlasted their weapons.

Once those skeletons were put down and the bard had absolutely obliterated the strange magical pact token the undead spellcaster had been carrying (suspecting that it might belong to the Lich King Besk, but not verbalizing that to his companions), the party left the piles of bones behind and quickly found their way into the larger hallway they’d long been desiring. As they walked down it, peering into entrances back into the twisting, turning maze of small passages, they eventually found an intersection that was a little different from the others. This one was made up of a single large stone tile and the edges of it had been carved to display some text that was currently too faded for any of them to make out. As they carried on, trying to see how far they could get with this larger section of hallway, they found another one that was a little bit less faded, enough so that one member of the party was able to determine what alphabet the text was using. Unfortunately, they didn’t read the specific language in question and the one player whose character who did understand that language had forgotten that his character could read it and had also rolled so poorly on all his checks that I didn’t feel like I should remind him.

As they carried on, they realized the larger hallway didn’t lead anywhere up north, so they followed a loop down to the south and decided to investigate a side passage rather than carry on into the hallway. Here, they found more instances of faded writing on the ground, but this repeated every time the hallway switched back and forth as they followed this plain, rather boring path to its end. Which, thanks to a bit of keen intuition by the player leading this stroll, meant the party stopped just one step short of being dumped down a pit. The rogue tried to disarm the trap, but was unable to do so, so the Bard took his heavy backpack, tied a rope to it, and tossed it onto the pressure plate. This worked as expected, but then the text on the wall in front of the party, at the end of this winding passage, hinged upward and dropped a metal plate into the pit. The party tried to catch it, but they fumbled the catch at the last minute and barely avoided falling in themselves. Thankfully, the metal plate survived the fall, the party was able to retrieve it, and some lucky rolls revealed that it was a prayer form of sorts. Using it as a key now that one of the characters realized he could read it, the party was able to decipher the text on the floor tiles in the passageway they were in, learning that whatever else this labyrinth was, it was also a sort of active prayer to a god none of them recognized. The act of walking that path, stepping over each of the prayer stones in the floor and activating that trap at the end of the passage had completed some kind of prayer. It wasn’t a strong prayer, without the blood and potential loss-of-life that would have come from someone falling into the pit, but it was enough to start to unsettle the party as they realized that there was maybe more to the labyrinth than a place they could go to collect treasure or supplies for their home.

After that, as the party went looking for the larger stone tiles in an attempt to decipher what those ones indicated, they ran into a group of half-starved, shrunken raiders who try to mug them for everything they had. The party decided to try to flee rather than fork over their goods, but the raiders were able to quickly catch up to them. Injured from previous battles, two of the three party members went down quickly and the third, the party’s ranger, surrendered in an effort to save his own life and maybe be able to save the lives of his unconscious companions. The bandits, who were starving and rolled a natural one on their “don’t turn your backs on adventurers” intelligence check, took the party’s backpacks and immediately dove into the food they found, stuffing their faces while the ranger healed the party’s rogue so the two of them could exchange weapons and then quickly jump on the distracted raiders. This worked out perfectly for them and they made quick work of the heavily-injured boss raider and her two underlings before eventually bringing the bard back to consciousness. There, as the party caught their breath and started to eye the raiders with a mind toward looting, we left things off the for the week.

I’m incredibly excited to start getting into what is going on with the labyrinth as a whole since there was absolutely no way I was going to put something huge like that into the game and not make a whole big deal out of it. It will likely be a long time before the party figures everything out, since there’s limits on how much they can glean from the information available to them on the first floor, but they’ll maybe be able to figure something out, if they look in the right places and can survive the traps, tricks, and transient monsters as they wander it’s various passages and hallways. And we’ll have new players next time as well! So much potential for fun with this group as it doubles in size! I hope everyone will get along. I’ve played with all these people at least a little bit before, but two of them are not people I’ve run a game for so I’m not sure how the dynamic will shake out yet. Still, the worst thing that could happen would be starting the game over with a smaller group after this one implodes, so I’m sure it’ll be fine one way or another. That isn’t even a likely outcome! I’m sure we’re all going to get along great and have fun together. After all, who doesn’t love a mysterious labyrinth?