Sometimes, you build a little something for yourself into one of your games. A silly little thing. Something fun, perhaps even just for you, to keep things interesting and provide the opportunity for some levity. Sometimes that’s a fun little NPC, sometimes it’s a stupid pun you’re building towards, sometimes it’s a situation meant to catch your players off-guard, and sometimes it’s all three of those things at once. In my most-recent session with The Rotten Labyrnith, we talked as a group to get on the same page, in-character and out, about what to do with the player character who had been petrified in the session prior. After that, the party set out to continue exploring the labyrinth keeping in mind their stated hope of finding a cure for their petrified ally and ran into the player’s (potentially temporary) replacement character. Shortly after that, and what felt like an awful lot of distrust for some random guy who ran out of a deeper part of the labyrinth in a panic (distrust they didn’t extend to the wereboar barbarian who showed up, immediately transformed, and attacked them), the party carried on, found some more stuff, and ran into a strange figure crouched in a little, half-hidden corner of the part of the maze they were exploring. Just as things started to progress in talks with this oddly long goblin (who had the most “little guy” energy I could muster), my building’s fire alarm went off and I had to evacuate, cutting the session short and bringing our play to an end without me getting to deliver the joke I’d been building towards. I wound up sending it in the text chat once I was outside and knew what was going on, but it just wasn’t the same.
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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.
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