Three licks to the center of a tootsie roll pop: Summer D&D session 3, part 1

Same Bat Time

Session 2's end found the rookie adventurers taking an extended rest in a formerly ghost-filled hallway. Normally I try to end sessions on at least a minor cliffhanger, either some surprising revelation or the start of a combat--it gets the players excited for the next session and leaves them with at least some idea of what they'll be doing. I managed to do this in session 1, ending with a tease of the encounter with the mud lord, mostly by accident, but I couldn't get one for session 2.

This is more due to scheduling than anything else--unlike my previous campaign, which played a set day every week for a set time, and thus I planned every session to last that time and could plan the end appropriately, we play this summer campaign on a much more ad-hoc basis, essentially getting together when we can and playing until people need to leave. Without a good idea of how long any particular session is going to last, cliffhangers become much more difficult to pull off (although I did manage to half-way establish one at the end of session 4).

Trap, Crackle, Pop

Session 3 began after the player's first extended rest. I used the opportunity to try to recover a little bit of the sense that this hallway was not just a corridor where some ghosts once hung out by describing the characters experiencing disturbing dreams of ghosts--my personal explanation, though the players didn't get this and thus it was rather useless, was that after surviving the intial trap they were immune to further illusionary attacks, but their minds were more vulnerable in their dreams. I also started my work on connecting the players into the ongoing story, by having the party's deva (a reincarnating embodied angel) dream instead of what he quickly figured out was the Keep's past, implying that in some past reincarnation he had been at the Keep. The players also seized on the memory--of soldiers fleeing back down the hall towards where the players had entered--as foreshadowing of something particularly dangerous ahead of them.

First, however, they had to make it through the remaining traps. I had originally planned for the first level to have multiple paths through multiple traps, simply because I am trying to create more open-ended encounters and nonlinear paths (though honestly your players will always create their own paths as long as you give them the leeway to), but in the end the t-junction the characters found at the end of the hall became something of a false choice (at least as the players experienced it).

The players went right first and found a classic fantasy dungeon staple: an open room filled with fire crossed by a narrow beam. The fire was illusionary, of course, but once again I failed to have come up with a way of sufficiently hinting at this (and once again it didn't really matter). The skill challenge to cross the beam went quite well and produced an interesting and surprising narrative despite the failure of the trap's intention. The two acrobatic characters, a ranger and a rogue, crossed with little difficulty, leaving behind the less agile wizard and cleric. They found on the other side of the beam a passage of magical darkness that they could physically enter but could not find any way of seeing in. Cleverly, they came up a plan to stab a javelin recovered from the bullywugs into the mortar between the stone bricks of the walls and tie a rope to the end of the javelin, ensuring that they could make their way back. I had not considered this possibility (though it obvious in retrospect, of course), and so I quickly improvised a way to trap the players despite the rope.

Originally the dark room was supposed to lead quickly to the next and ultimate trap, the disassociation of the darkness necessary for the next trap to work well. With the rope, however, the players could reasonably find their way back to the fire room; thus I came up with an illusionary wall that only appeared to those who had passed far enough along the passage, trapping them there but allowing others, such as the eladrin wizard who realized he could fey step across and promptly came after the others, to follow the rope through to the other side--and become trapped as well.

The cleric, meanwhile, decided to explore the left option, which led to what I called in my notes the "crushing room", inspired, as my players quickly identified once the trap was sprung, by the trap from The Temple of Doom. I tried to introduce another hint to the illusions by describing to the cleric how the room was empty, but as he entered he tripped and found skeletons at his feet that had not previously been there (they had been hidden by the illusion until he made physical contact). Fortunately (or not), after activating the trap and realizing that the walls were closing in, the player rolled phenomenally and managed to shove open the door far enough to escape. (If the character hadn't escaped, he would have after taking some damage ended up in the next trap with the others--though I never quite came up with an explanation why, given that the previous trespassers had simply died in the room.)

Mirror's Edge

After a short interlude in the darkness whereupon I separated the players by describing how as they proceeded further their other senses dulled as well, eventually reaching the point where they could no longer tell if they were still touching each other, the players arrived at the final trap, a situation I had immediately thought of when I began contemplating an illusionary dungeon but feared would be easily spotted and extremely difficult to pull off well. Luckily, unlike everything else in the dungeon, this trap came off far better than anything I had considered possible.

I explained that the players awoke in two separate groups, both in small lit rooms and both surrounded by a number of monsters. I then asked the players if I could separate them--playing the two encounters out in two separate physical rooms as well--to enhance the feeling of separation. Trusting their DM, the players accepted with little second thought. I did explain as we went that this was something some DMs did, and explained my nervous and more frequent than normal pauses and considerations and combat note-taking as my having never split a party before in this manner--all of which was true, if missing the real point.

I alternated between groups each round; some of my players suggested it would be faster to just do multiple rounds with each group and then switch, but I brushed this off by saying I didn't want to make the others wait too long. Once again, I think the newness of the players and their trust in me as the DM and knowledge base of D&D traditions helped a lot; experienced players would recognize immediately that this was a very odd situation and probably would have caught on much more quickly.

As was, the players completed the encounter without recognizing the trap. The contigencies I had planned for, such as the players attempting to speak to the monsters (the monsters' responses would just be unintelligible angry growls), never came into play: the players simply attacked until they killed the monsters, or, in one group's case, was felled by the monsters. Then I described to the wizard's group how he finally got a grip on the strange magical aura that seemed to be permeating the entire level--and saw through the illusions that were the monsters, now revealed as their own party members.

It was a fascinating fight to run just for the strange dynamics of it as DM: I didn't do any normal tactical thinking for the fight as I made no decisions except for the one real monster in the room ( a fell taint drawn by the illusions), and so my energy was instead occupied with keeping track of who was attacking whom, who moved where, how much damage they did, and figuring out how to translate all that into the other group's map. It also gave me a chance to play with describing monsters I don't normally use--the stand-ins for the party consisted of a dark creeper (the rogue), a koa-tua whip (the wizard), a troglodyte crossbowman (the ranger), a foulspawn seer (the cleric), and a basilisk (the ranger's beast companion).

The players' reactions--both during the fight and after--were also immensely gratifying. During the fight they grew frustrated with me over the monsters' unusual healing abilities (especially when after "killing" the dark creeper it stood back up on its next turn) and high damage (all players used their daily attacks during the fight) and eagerly claimed the loot they were sure to get once the encounter was finished: "I want his staff!" After the fight, the players worked their way through the descriptions of their respective encounters, figuring out what monster action corresponded to their own, and generally reveling in how fooled they had been. They were so generally pleased and surprised by the encounter, in fact, that we decided to simply break and go to dinner rather than attempt to immediately continue the game.