Game Report: Some kind of wacky game show

After the high trauma and dark foreboding that had taken place after the last three or four sessions, it was time for a filler episode, to ease the transition back into Dark Town. After having three weeks to think it over and unable to come up with a solution that wasn’t inherently silly, I decided that I might as well just throw them in a labyrinth and see where they come out.

Don’t do mazes. Mazes are hard.

After walking away from the disaster area that was once the Blood Caravan, the party finds…a bag in the middle of the field. They approach with caution, only to find a letter inside which congratulates them on finding the bag and asking for a small amount of gold to be placed in the bag. They do so, and when they open the bag again, they find a different note, a small chalkboard, and a potion. So, they now have constant access to a store, at least, a store that only provides relatively small items.

They walk a ways only to find a set of obelisks in a square. After determining that there is no noticeable problem, they walk into the obelisks anyway, and suddenly huge blue walls pop up around them. They hear a buzzer, assume that there is an arena fight on their hands, and take positions. Only after three minutes of standing there do they realize that nothing is going to be entering their little room, and so they start touching the walls and find the entrance to the rest of the maze.

The maze routing was…difficult. Each walk through the maze took ten minutes of drawing, moving, redrawing, moving, in a tedious experiment. They eventually wandered into a large room with something in it. In this case, werewolves. Well, werewolves and shifters, which come closer to furries on the scale of furiousity. They decided to take down the werewolves first, and a well placed Icy Rays freeze the shifters out of range. A well-planned, well-executed fight, and they walked away a little weary, but overall fine. After dispatching the werewolves (who disappeared the second they fell), a noise sounded, and one of the obelisks noticeably faded. They came to the conclusion that it was one of the “teams” in this little game they found themselves in.

They wander around some more in the damn maze, and find a room that’s obviously a trap, filled with rot scarab swarms and a poison trap wall. They remain confined to one side of the room, and, in a brilliant move, covered the trap wall with a wall of fog, preventing it from attacking because it lacked line of sight. (I agree that it shouldn’t work that way, but the rules say they do, and I agree with them.) Eventually the grab the key they need from the wall and dispatch the beetles, although the constantly ongoing damage the room presented left them all a little worse for wear.

After more walking around (like I said, no mazes), they come across a third room with a third key, this one being guarded by demons. They approach cautiously, the fighter using his mad metagaming skills to determine that there were in fact five demons that needed to be dealt with despite only seeing two, and they managed to handle the demon monkey and the quartet of “red demon babies,” mainly because of tactical mistakes by the bulgura. Minutes after cleaning up the mess, a second team shows up, this one composed of a dragonborn fighter, an elven ranger, a tiefling wizard, and identical halflings who seem to always be pickpocketing…badly.

After agreeing to combine efforts, they move to the center ring, where a hydra waits for them. The hydra fight went so far as to prove how the fighter class is on a level extremely well equipped against hydras, a problem that I don’t think they considered. While it had a huge swath of hitpoints, it lacked damage, only dealing a pittance against its intended targets each attack. While it could make four attacks, and had threatening reach greatly hindering melee fighters trying to get up to it, the fact is once a fighter is there and has it marked, any attack the hydra makes against any other target provokes an attack from the fighter. When there are ten combatants going against a single target, and the majority of them agree to wildly jump in and out of melee range, provoking opportunity attacks…well, let’s just say that they are no longer afraid of hydras.

After that victory, they were entitled to fabulous prizes, which I wasn’t prepared to give to them, so I just told three members to pick out new cool duds, and they were theirs. The maze faded away, the fourth team was revealed but immediately teleported away, and they chatted with the others for a bit, eventually agreeing to sidetrek into the Salt City to look around. For completely irrational reasons.

Lessons Learned: Filler episodes suck. For one, mazes are hard and unnecessary, especially when they exist just to be a maze and not to have any actual value. So, no labyrinthine areas without a purpose again. Also, the players are way too smart. Every encounter was easily completed due to their own cleverness, which is awesome in one respect, but also it feels like I’m not challenging them hardly enough. I really need to step up my strategic game.

So yes, there is a lot to recover. I’m just glad I didn’t throw in anything I need to retcon.