Part of creating this massive labyrinth has been coming up with a variety of encounters for the characters (and players) exploring the labyrinth. Some of this is basic traps, random monster encounters, and bits of loot spread around the labyrinth in as close to a haphazard manner as I can manage while still making use of the space properly. Other stuff is what I like to think of as “The Big Deals:” things that could have significant impacts on the group or that change locations as time passes (and, usually, could still have significant impacts on the group). So far, the party has run into one Big Deal of each type, but they only just achieved that in our most recent session when they found a trap that had the potential to slowly kill them while also giving them a chance to learn huge, significant, and important details about the world as a whole. It was a difficult trap to avoid once they (literally) stepped into it, but it was one with a bunch of red flags raised around it, there to warn my players about what they were going to find, so they would be in a position to choose whether or not to step in the trap. Like players everywhere, they still chose to step in the trap so I got to share some information about the world around them and they still managed to get out with only a single level of exhaustion rather than their entire life force drained away. All-in-all, I think it was a pretty successful session and an all-but-perfect deployment of the first of many Big Deal traps (though I suppose there is another Big Deal trap out there that they already tripped, but it only became a Big Deal Trap once they chose to interact with what was supposed to be a mixture of set dressing and world lore). Coincidentally, it was also the first Big Deal anything that I made when designing this labyrinth.
Continue readingThe Rotten Labyrinth
Breathing Life Back Into My Tabletop Games
As part of getting my life back together following the dual function of working antidepressants and some rest, finally, I’ve begun the slow, laborious process of getting my two tabletop campaigns up and running again. One has met already, to talk through things, and the other failed to achieve sufficient player availability, so we’re going to try again in a couple weeks. It’s been so long since I really thought about my two campaigns that I genuinely struggled to get back into the right headspace for them. I was able to do it, thanks to extensive preparation and a review of my notes, but I was still picking up the pieces of it all as we sat down to review what had been going on, refresh ourselves as to what the plan was, and ultimately decide how we wanted to proceed in and out of character. I plan to do something similar for the other one, but that campaign spun up in the middle of my worst brain fog and depression this past year, so trying to pick up those pieces feels a lot like groping around in the dark for something that might cut me if I’m not careful. I’m not worried about remembering something that would upset me or anything, but there’s a certain gingerness I feel when thinking back to that period of time because it’s one of only a few blurry periods in my memory and all the other ones are minefields of forgotten/potentially-repressed trauma. It’s difficult to fight the feelings of nervousness such periods of forgetfulness inspire in me while also trying to actually remember what was going on and what I was thinking at that time.
Continue readingThe Hit Point Method Of Finding Traps In The Rotten Labyrinth
In this latest session of my “The Rotten Labyrinth” Dungeons and Dragons campaign, we kept things pretty short. My players tried to revisit a magical source of treasure, one of the player characters sulked instead, the party continued to roll horribly enough that they blundered into a few traps, they found two new sources of treasure, decided that chopping through a wall was a better idea than looking for secret doors in a move that would eventually be revealed to be much less expedient than they thought it would be, and discovered that sometimes the dungeon giveth danger disguised as magic items. One of my players also joked about keeping track of how much damage they’ve taken after chugging what turned out to be a potion of poison rather than a potion of healing and having their character knocked unconscious for the second time that hour despite starting the hour at full hp. All of which happened in just about two real hours because one of the players had to leave early and, following the interrupted night’s rest (the encounter with the strange memory-stealing ooze), the rest of the party decided to just call it a day after their trapfinder and healer got knocked out twice in maybe an hour of exploration. Which gave me the opportunity to give them their next level-up, courtesy of surviving so many nasty encounters, and now we’re primed to start the next session fully rested and with an unknown group approaching from outside the labyrinth.
Continue readingRandom Encounters Are A Double-Edged Sword In The Rotten Labyrinth
After a few weeks of delay due to my poor health, I finally ran another Dungeons and Dragons session for The Rotten Labyrinth. It was a bit shorter than usual, due to starting almost an hour and a half late, but we still got to do some stuff. There was a discussion of what to do next and how to avoid the monster that nearly took out the entire party, there was some deliberation about how to proceed with three of the more combat-inclined party members, a surprise combat encounter complete with magical compulsions, and then a bit of treasure at the end of a long passage, accessibly only via some kind of blood magic. It wasn’t the least-busy session we’ve had and the amount of ground covered does not amount to all that much, but a lot of stuff happened on the back end that was not immediately visible to my players so a decent amount of progress was made. I’ve also solidified that they’re all going to get a level-up with their next long-rest, since they’ve clearly reached the threshold for it after their last few encounters, but I find myself wondering just how long it is going to take them to explore this labyrinth or if there’s anything I could do to speed things up. As much as I enjoy having them work their way through traps and monsters and find treasure in what amounts to maybe an eighth, at most (and even that feels like a massive overestimation), of the entire first-floor of the labyrinth, I’m worried about how much actual time it is going to take to get them anywhere. Or to, you know, develop the plot. There’s really not a lot going on in this part of the labyrinth other than the introduction to the general mystery of it all and a plethora of random encounters.
Continue readingDanger Coming Home To Roost In The Rotten Labyrinth
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 readingMessing With Powers Beyond Your Ken In The Rotten Labyrinth
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.
Continue readingThe Rotten Labyrinth Reveals It’s Greatest Secret Thus Far: Steve, The (Not So) Little Guy
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.
Continue readingComedy 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 readingRandom Encounters And Slightly Less Random Treasure In The Rotten Labyrinth
Another week, another Tabletop RPG session! Last weekend, we got five of the six players together for The Rotting Labyrinth and started diving deeper into said labyrinth. We talked quickly through what was going to be the format for the group now that we’ve got so many players, caught the players who’d missed the last session up on who everyone was, and then I sent them on their way, deeper into the labyrinthine depths, in search of more treasure. After they spent a little time figuring out what direction to explore next, they eventually worked their way through three different little events. In one, they find a Non-Magical?/Magical? Tent Kit, in another they find a pair of curiosities with small tidbits of information about the purpose of the labyrinth and what might be at its center, and in the final one they find some kind of fake treasure that was supposed to distract them from the secret room–which they also found immediately–so that the undead spellcaster inside could bust out, trap people on the other sides of the door, and force everyone to fight some kind of ghostie creatures in close quarters. The party’s bad luck with rolls continued, but the monsters in this fight also had terrible luck so the fight dragged on for quite a while as both parties occasionally chipped away at each other. All of which made for a very full day of adventuring.
Continue readingIt’s Party Time In The Rotten’s Labyrinth
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.
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