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.
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Random 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.
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