We’ve had another session of my incredibly maze-focused Dungeons and Dragons campaign, The Rotten Labyrinth and this one was a bit of a doozy. Well, from a certain perspective. Most of which I can’t actually post about because it features stuff that my players have yet to discover, chief amongst them being the ramifications of what they did in this last session. Sure, we all started with fun and games as we slowly reassembled where negotions with Steve the Goblong had been before all the sirens and the fire alarm had forced all thoughts of tabletop gaming from my mind. He safely led them through the maze, carefully pointing out that they should just follow him and not poke around other hallways that much since those paths weren’t definitely safe like his were, Which was immediately punctuated by the party finding a trap and then failing to disarm it by enough that they set it off instead, which triggered not just a normal trap, but a new secondary trap that was right next to it. They all survived thanks to some healing, but they stopped exploring other hallways after that, obediently followed Steve to the place he said there was a problem his community of Goblongs needed solved, and then wound up performing a religious ritual at an alter to a representative of the god of mazes and pathways and whatnot that this whole labyrnith had been built to worship. Once that was done and the strange tinnitus-like ringing noise had faded, Steven revealed his true movement speed as he quickly left the party behind. Which is fine for most of the party because the ones who performed the ritual can’t get lost in the labyrinth any more now that they have been magically connected to it. Like I said: it was a bit of a doozy.

It didn’t take that long, objectively speaking, to get things figured out when we started playing, given that I had been making up most of the Steve the Goblong interaction as I went the session before. My notes about the encounter with the creature marker I had one the map were “little guy,” “suspicious of the adventurers,” and a whole lot of other stuff I still can’t share since the case of Steve the Goblong hasn’t entirely been resolved yet. After all, he escaped the party after they did what he wanted them to do, which heavily implies that there was maybe more going on than there seemed to be from the outset. It really was too bad that most folks weren’t too suspicious of him and the ones that were kept rolling incredibly poorly during every interaction they had. So they decided to follow him despite him promising them absolutely nothing and then, despite that, also tried to poke their noses down every other pathway they crossed with immediate and negative results. They found a trap, identified how it worked, failed to disarm it, and then failed even more so at disarming, such that the rogue set it off and got critically hit by the spray of darts that resulted. The bard managed to drag him away from the subsequently ticking wall next to where the rogue had been standing, healing him up as they went, but only the rogue got far enough away that the magical explosion from the trap didn’t send rubble from the now-shattered walls shooting out at him.

After that, the party followed closely behind Steven the Goblong, avoiding the traps they encountered along their path thanks to a great deal of markings on the stone of the labyrnith that outlined how to bypass the traps that hadn’t been disarmed. They followed him so faithfully that they even considered avoiding locked chest that was just off to the side of the path they were on. After a bit of out-of-character debate where multiple players posited that Steve the Goblong was my attempt to move them through the labyrinth more quickly and that Steve’s words were me speaking to the players, I told them that a good GM speaks to the players through consequences, not NPCs. Which was the first of my twice-hourly reminders to consider the consequences of their actions, which has basically become my mantra in this campaign. I mean, one player character is more-or-less permanently off the board thanks to getting petrified. Sure, I didn’t expect that to happen, but there’s a reason a creature like that was present in an area they could have easily reached while being level one characters! They went in the dangerous side of the labyrinth! They chose the risk of death in exchange for a great possibility of reward and have gotten their butts kicked in almost every single fight since then, only ever barely emerging victorious.

Anyway, they followed Steve deeper into the Labyrinth to a room that was at the end of another series of prayer tiles, which turned out to be a chapel of some kind, complete with a single wooden bench and the signs of other benches that had been removed or maybe never even installed. The room was emitting a strange high-pitched noise that Steve said was bothing him and his people, which seemed to originate from somewhere near the alter at one end of the room. The party quickly discovered that the altar was carved with all the text necessary to perform a ritual service in the name of the god the labyrinth had been created to worship and that the noise seemed to be coming from within the strange statue that sat on said altar at the point where the columns of text converged. I tried my best to make it sound ominous, talked about the strange magic protecting it from the party’s barbarian attempting to smash it with her axe and how the ranger was able to touch it with an arrow just fine, but the party quickly gave up on inspecting the altar and decided to just perform the service contained on the altar, with the character who could read it leading some of the rest of the party in worship. The barbarian and the bard are the only ones who abstained from the ritual, so now the ranger, fighter, and rogue feel a sense of comfort and warmth while within the labyrnith and can no longer get lost while within it. Which is probably very useful for navigating within the maze, but has many consequences yet unseen now that they’d all performed a religious ritual in service to a god that, according to everything everyone knows, has probably turned away with all the others in order to try to silence a strange ringing noise.

As the party started to pack up and follow Steve towards what they all assumed would be his community, Steve the Goblong seemed to be moving faster. The party positted that it was because Steve knew they were familiar with this part fo the maze and everyone who suspected otherwise rolled incredibly poorly on their insight checks. Which means they only really noticed how much faster Steve was moving once he was almost a full corridor ahead of them. At which point it became clear that the only person who could maybe catch him was the rogue who couldn’t see in the dark and didn’t grab a light or anything in order to quickly follow him. So Steve ditched them in the maze and now they’re fully aware that maybe Steve was doing the whole “just a little guy” routine to put them off their guard. They aren’t lost, thankfully, since they’ve got the three ritual-performing folks who can lead the party back to their camp, but they’re definitely a bit adrift now that they’ve performed this ritual and lost Steve. Whatever they hoped to get from him will not be forthcoming, it seems, and now they’re aware that there’s stuff just wandering around the labyrinth that is more devious than traps and perhaps more dangerous than just being killed. We’ll have to see how it goes, though, because I was reeling from so many of them performing the ritual and how unexpected it was that they performed it at all (the rogue hates magic so much that he has considered refusing healing!) and needed some time to figure out what comes next.

Don’t get me wrong, I had a great time, but this is really going to be an instance of unintended consequences coming for the party in time. I’ve got most of that stuff figured out at this point (and only now because I did not expect them to so completely deviate from what I understand about their characters that I didn’t bother to prepare anything longer-term than immediate results and some value statements about what tenor the long-term consequences would have. I will fully say that it’s not gonna be good. Well, from a certain perspective of “good,” anyway. They’re not going to get struck dead or anything like that, but it really was just such an unexpected outcome! There were so many other options at the altar and the party never even got to the point of investigating things that I could hint at any of them beyond the implication that interacting with it nonviolently was going to be easier than trying to smash it. Most stressful of all is that there is the potential for a TPK down the path we’re on. I told my players it would never come out of nowhere and that there’d be plenty of signs, but maybe I need to reevaluate what I consider a sign of danger given that half my players didn’t even bat an eye at performing an unknown ritual at the altar of an absent and largely unknown god. I hope we don’t get there, but I’m still feeling off-balance from how out-of-character this whole sequence of events was. I’ll be the first to say that characters rapidly change during the first dozen or so sessions of playing them as players get a feel for the person they’re embodying, but usually if a player repeats something multiple times, it sticks through thick and thin. It’ll all work itself out in the end, I’m sure, but it really felt like just on doozy of a session…