While not as potentially momentuous for the entire campaign as the session prior, our most recent meeting of The Rotten Labyrinth was also pretty important for all the present player characters. What started out as some plans to regroup, rest, and then take another pass at the labyrinth turned into a chaotic delay as all of that was interrupted by two random encounters during their night’s rest. I rolled incredibly, uh, portentiously on the encounter table, during their watches, and while one event went unnoticed until the morning, the other was an attack on the party that almost ended in disaster as one of the stronger monsters wandering that part of the labyrinth finally showed up. The battle itself was a bit of a mixed bag, featuring both a ton of players being knocked unconscious, but also featuring a ton of players getting back into the fray just long enough to make a difference. It really put a damper on the plan for one of the player characters (the Bard) to grab the petrified player character (the Wizard) and leave for their Sylum in search of help ending the petrification. We even had that player’s new character prepped and ready to go, but we never made it there because the monster showed up and disrupted all my plans for the session. Still, we got a lot done and now the players are faced with three new problems they’re finally aware of: who touched their character’s stuff while they slept, why did that blob show up to steal their characters’ memories, and why was one of their characters unable to leave the labyrinth during the battle?
Continue readingCombat Encounters
Comedy Gold Before Disaster In The Rotten Labyrinth
It took a little while, but we finally had another session of The Rotten Labyrinth. This session included none of the original players from the campaign since they were all busy with other things, but I’m trying to find ways to have these games happen more often than we skip them, so I ran with half the crew and figured that would be good enough. Which it was! I had to tweak a couple encounters a bit to suit the group, but I was able to do that without too much of a problem. It’s much easier than usual, given how many of them have similar defense and hit point values and how even the “weakest” among them is still pretty tough. And they’re all level two now, so I could go a bit harder on them without as much of a concern. Which I should be doing anyway, considering that they opted for the high-risk, high-reward entrance to the labyrinth. So, with just three players, they set out to fill in more of the map, ran into some traps, got some cool loot, literally disarmed a trap, and then fought a single creature that wound up giving them all a rougher time than I expected. Technically, everyone is still alive. At least so far as most people would define “alive” even if there’s some room for interpretation. That said, we all had a lot of fun, were frequently busting up as a joke made it through the entire session while still being funny, and even the unfortunate events of that final fight weren’t enough to dampen the group’s spirits.
Continue readingI Played So Many Tabletop Games Last Week
Last week was a pretty active week for me, in terms of tabletop gaming. Three of four possible games happened and I enjoyed each of them in incredibly different ways. While I’ll save my ruminations about my every-other-week game of Heart: The City Beneath for Friday, I have plenty to write about from the Elden Ring themed game of Dungeons and Dragons 5e I played last Thursday and the game of Pathfinder 2e I played two days later. As I’ve mentioned before, the Thursday game is one that has been going on for a while and meets at least somewhat regularly. I’m still fairly new to Pathfinder 2e and the group I play with every other Saturday, but I’ve been settling in well despite our scheduling issues and enjoying the somewhat more intense roleplaying that game provides compared to the encounter-heavy Dungeons and Dragons game I play. The two of them make for a lot of fun experiences since I’m very comfortable with D&D’s rules, so I can just relax and enjoy some silly combat stuff, and I’m always happy to do a bunch of roleplaying, so I’ve got a fairly easy environment in which to learn Pathfinder 2e a little better. I’ll admit that some of my knowledge gains in that game feel a little futile given that the remastered version of the game is coming out soon and I’ll have to unlearn and relearn a lot of stuff when that happens. Especially since some of that stuff is what I’ve been very focused on previously since my character, a rogue who dabbles in alchemy and tons of crafting, apparently lands in a lot of areas being reworked from one edition to the next.
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