After a month away, mostly due to burnout on my part (our last session was scheduled for the weekend I wound up working and I just did NOT have it in me to run a game), The Rotten finally met again and we got to introduce three new players, their characters, and a pair of NPC siblings. Unfortunately, only one of the original players could make it and he wasn’t the talkative one in the group, so I wound up doing a lot of talking to myself when introducing the core party to the group of two new PCs and their NPC companions. When it came time to introduce the final PC, she rolled really poorly on her “phase of the moon check” and the resulting lucky/unlucky check, ultimately revealing her lycanthropy in the one and only party of the labyrinth that has access to the night sky during what turned out to be the full moon. Thankfully, despite being tossed to the extremely-not-literal wolves (this character is a wereboar rather than a werewolf, after all), the party was able to subdue the lycanthrope enough that she was able to recover her senses, retreat from the moonlight, and take some precautions against potentially losing control of herself for the remainder of the night. After that, this group of now eight people talked about how to handle the fact that they’d wound up in one of the most dangerous parts of the first floor of the labyrinth while still exploring for treasure and came up with a plan that will allow players to come and go more easily from one session to the next as our rather large group of players deals with people who aren’t available to play every time. All-in-all, it was a successful session even if there wasn’t much forward progress made.
Our last session had ended with the party barely surviving an encounter with some raiders who’d become lost in the labyrinth, so we started with a quick review of the original party collecting themselves, making camp near the entrance to the labyrinth, and setting up watches. Unluckily, as we talked through that, I rolled a nasty random encounter on my “in-labyrnth night encounters” table and so I started reshuffling how I planned for the character introductions to go so we could at least get the full party together before said random encounter showed up. The group of NPCs and two PCs was first, since we’d written them into the game as just another adventuring party from the local village (the thus-far unnamed Sylem) that was just as well supplied but slightly less officially sanctioned. They arrived just after nightfall (it gets dark a bit early at the bottom of the ravine, where the entrance to the labyrinth they’re all using is located) and while there was some initial tension, we figured out that most of these characters at least knew of each other and could recognize each other on sight. There were a few introductions, some of them lacking since two of the original players were missing, but the group settled in pretty quickly even though both of the party-face people for each group were being played by me in the moment.
After some discussions about how everyone knew each other and the extent of how much each group knew about the other’s deal (and introductions to the two NPCs, a pair of brothers who both owed their lives to one of the PCs in the second group as a result of events from their shared past), this newly-enlarged party settled down for their second attempt at a long rest, only to be interrupted at the start of the second watch by the arrival of a strange tiefling woman who walked right past where their group was tucked down a side hallway in the labyrinth. Originally, this was just going to be the way the final player character got introduced, but we rolled for phase of the moon and got a ten out of twenty. Given that I had imagined it as being a roll to determine where the moon was from new moon to new moon, that meant it was a full moon. Not wanting to immediately expose this character’s whole deal, I had the player roll odds or evens to give them a chance to keep their secret: odds and it would be a new moon (the phase being rolled would have been full moon to full moon) but evens would have meant a full moon. Then, someone jokingly called for the player to roll a “d84” since we were in roll20 and the player did, getting exactly an 84. If that wasn’t a command from the dice gods to absolutely do what the player told me to and fuck the character right up, then I will never run a tabletop game again.
It was a bit of a rough fight to start, since the lycanthrope was resistent to non-magical damage (rather than having full immunity: a small homebrew ruling of mine given how often lycanthropy tends to come up in the early stages of my games), but one of the player characterss had a magical weapon, two more of the player characters did magic damage by default, and a fourth had sneak attacks to help boost his damage. They put some serious damage down on the wereboar tiefling and the fighter was able to not only stave off the tusk gore attack that would have potentially spread the lycanthropic curse, but survive a devastating claw strike with one hit point remaining. After that, the new wizard tried to put the wereboar to sleep, the rest of the team opened up a dialogue, and a lucky roll by the wereboar tiefling’s player allowed her to recover her mind and respond more calmly. After a round without violence, the party made space for her to get out of the moonlight and used the manacles she provided (which she’d acquired to use when when around other people and in a situation where she might transform thanks to this relatively new curse) to lock her up until the morning. Since this encounter could have EASILY gone very poorly and it was just luck that it did not, I decided to let this be the nasty encounter that I’d rolled for the party and we skipped through the rest of the night.
From there, we talked through my proposal to manage these new NPCs, PCs who couldn’t make the session, and get rid of the awkward divergence between the players being able to see the map and the characters not having access to a map of the labyrinth they were exploring. The two NPCs would form the core of a group that would focus on protecting a campsite and mapping the parts of the labyrinth the party had already explored (the core group had been leaving chalk marks to avoid getting lost or forgetting what they’d already explored). Any player characters whose players couldn’t attend would get shuffled into this group as well, thereby protecting the weaker of the two NPCs and ensuring that the parts of the labyrinth the party had already explored didn’t suddenly fill up with monsters or other adversarial explorers. We will see if they manage to keep the already-explored areas safe, but at least now I can stop reminding my players that their characters technically don’t know how to get around the labyrinth the way they do since they can see the revealed portions of the map. Now they’ll have something approximating the map we can all see in Roll20. Which means I need to get back to work on finishing it so they don’t wander into an area I haven’t already completed. I’m about a third of the way done at present and I’m never doing anything this complicated ever again. Never. This was Too Much for me and I’m the Sovereign of Doing Too Much. At least the next few sessions will be fun as the player characters settle in, explore further, and we all figure out if this exploration stuff is what they all want to be doing for the whole campaign. I’d be down with it, for sure. I’ve got so many ideas for this horrible labyrinth.