Because version numbering is a meme that will never die: Summer D&D session 3.5

The Last of the Traps

When we returned from dinner, the characters had just recovered from a fight against themselves and discovered a way out of their illusionary prison. This short corridor led to what was originally planned to be one last illusion, more annoying than anything else--a hole in the floor of the corridor and the apparent doorway out on the other side, with the quick revelation that the "other side" was actually just a blank wall and the hole in fact led to the next level--that once again fell flat on its feet (and once again, to no detriment to the party, thankfully).

The last actual trap--the gnome's security system of pressure plates and magic crossbows (straight ouf the DMG, for once)--sparked some unintentional but welcomed humor as after detecting them each of the group managed to get across the pressure plates--except for the exceptionally agile rogue, who fell flat on his feet and activated the crossbows. Further humor ensued when the rogue asked as they fought the crossbows if the doorway was in fact still open--yes, I responded, hoping to give the party an opportunity to end the encounter quickly if they wanted to. They disabled the crossbows anyway.

The Voice in Your Head

The characters finally entered the meat of the Keep, beyond all the defenses. The first major detail I described was of a tinny voice shouting at them from somewhere distant but all-around them, a voice angry at their breach of the facility and ordering them to leave. The cleric attempted to negotiate with the voice once the players realized it could hear and respond to them, but quickly realized they would get nowhere.

I originally liked the idea of the characters being able to convince the voice that they were servants sent by the "master" it kept referring to, a bluff that the cleric in fact tried, but I was forced to discard this when I considered that a successful bluff would leave force a radical alteration for my plans for the dungeon. This was due to early plans focusing more on puzzles than combat--essentially, the players would have been helping the voice (a robot placed in charge of the facility in the gnome's absence, they would eventually find) restore the facility to functionality rather than just exploring its ruins and fighting the remnants of its production. I am still intrigued by this idea (and it would have led to far more sinister implications later on), but unfortunately I couldn't come up with ideas for puzzles that I liked enough and weren't simply following what the voice told them to do and so fell back on combat, a system which 4E of course handles much better.

Robot Factory (Minus the Machinist)

Players always grapple on to ideas you don't expect them to, hanging on even as you try to make clear that you have no plans for that eventuality--which is really your fault as a DM anyway; they should be allowed to cling onto the ideas they come up with based on what you've presented them. In this case there were two things the players grabbed on to: the ruins of the robot assembly line, which, accepting unfortunately that I was not about to deal with the players getting it running again for their own purposes, I simply had them able to start long enough for it to fall apart completely; and a "clockwork mechanism" they recovered amid rusted debris in a storage room, an item which I originally intended as simply a useless gadget to be sold (i.e., a clever way to give the players gold in a place where there would not reasonably be much gold to be found). The mechanism, a much more ambiguous item, has instead become a part of my ongoing plans.

The cleric also opted to spend the gold to use his Unseen Servant ritual and order it to search the storage room (and later the other rooms) instead of searching it themselves (although in the ten minute casting time I would have allowed them to find all available loot); I embraced this plan by having it find the mechanism immediately and wait for it to turn up the rest of the room's loot (4 healing potions) until after he returned to check up on it. Rituals are a part of 4E I feel are unfortunately under-used, and I continue to consider steps to make them easier and more useful. The PHBII classes' ritual casting features are a good start, and one that I plan on passing to my PHBI class players, allowing clerics to cast Gentle Repose once per day without components and wizards (supposedly the ultimate ritual casters after all) any ritual they know up to their level once per day without components (though this of course requires restrictions on creation levels to prevent enchanting item abuse--perhaps a limitation to only rituals with a set component cost?)

After a brief visit and raid of an armory, the players moved on to the next room, which did not come across as planned, to possible detriment. I described the room as full of mechanical equipment built around a low long metal table--intending but failing to evoke the imagery of Frankenstein's lab. This was, in fact, the "animation room", the place where the gnome's robots, after assembly in the construction room the characters already explored, were brought to "life". The players didn't figure that out (which was my fault, of course), and although this did not have negative consequences at the time, I fear it will come back to bite me in the ass later. (Of course, most of them read this, so now they know and will theorize accordingly, I suppose.)

Damned Respawns

The exit of the players from the animation room triggered the next combat encounter, the only actual one on the Keep's second level: a group of security robots (Warforged Soldiers and a Captain, leveled down) sent by the angry voice still yelling at the characters for their intrusion. The quirk to this encounter as the nearby open doors to a storage room where dozens more unactivated robots stood ready, with another activating on each turn, supposedly leading to a desperate in-combat skill challenge to close the doors before too many robots emerged.

But while the players quickly recognized the panels they needed to reach to close the doors, the Captain's tactical positioning of itself in front of the panel and his high defenses made the struggle instead simply to kill the Captain. The main culprit of this was the lack of forced movement powers among the party: although the wizard has Phantom Bolt as an at-will, the Captain's high defenses made it too difficult to use. As a result, I simply stopped adding robots after a number of rounds, though I continued to describe the threat of the activating robots, and the first few rounds proved to put enough fear in the players to make them very thankful when they did manage to kill the Captain and close the doors, at which point the session ended with the characters in bad shape--the party's rogue, downed during the fight with no remaining surges, managed to roll a 20 on a death save and thus was walking with 1 HP--and the players anxious and worried about what lie ahead, presuming a looming boss fight with the voice overhead and requesting an extended rest that I informed them (following the rule of needing twelve hours between extended rests, but also knowing that there was no further combat coming) would not be coming.