1/31/2-2/18/24, rest 2/19, active 2/20
PC: Gwendolyn, Cleet, Legany, Galt
Hench: Amadayo, Mahin, Madrof, Chase, Terry, Mike, Freddy, Cleric_02, Thief_03, Thief_04
The last time we played, the session ended on a cliffhanging revelation that “Oh shit, that pool in the dungeon turns gold into platinum, we have to go back!” Despite knowing better, I chose to stop time until the next session. I didn’t want to abstract the return to the dungeon which ACKS has rules for and there was tension over the pool being active for a limited time.
The entire session was overcoming the challenges of stopping time in a living world. It was exacerbated by the fact that my domain level patrons/players started a war with each other that had been going for about a month in the background. As the players began to interact with more of the world that had been moving into the future, the inability to really alter events that already transpired was telling.
Avoid stopping time in a fixed time game if at all possible. The preservation of the tension over the pool was not worth the clunky session catching up to the living world that had already moved on.
Anyway, the group got their supplies together and went right back to the dungeon. They brought every gold piece they could muster on the off chance of being to convert it to platinum in the pool. The sailors of the “Keef Richards”, Cleet the Mage’s boat and veterans of this trip, rubbed silver coins gotten from the dungeon for good luck as Galt dove into to secure the group’s safety line to the underwater dungeon.
Once the group got in it was pretty easy to descend to the deeper levels. The stairs were all located in the same room. The challenge was that going deeper meant tougher obstacles. The overall mission of the dungeon was to retrieve a spell formula somewhere in the dungeon but they had yet to locate it.
It was easy to locate the pool room but they arrived to find a pack? Clutch? Gaggle? Definitely a gaggle of giant draco lizards vibing around the boiling water of the pool. Previously, the water had been a whirlpool, so there was a red flag there, but of immediate interest was the very large potentially deadly lizards.
The party was surprised, all except Cleet, who fired off his signature move the hypnotic pattern spell. The crew didn’t really know the disposition of the lizards but given the surprise round chose to act rather than react. Several of the lizards were mesmerized but the remaining two closed on and started chomping on the front line. After a pretty tough battle in which Legany the Barbarian was downed, the remaining lizard broke morale and fled.
Experimentation with the pool went poorly, the party learning that the bubbling liquid was actually acid of some kind. The transformation magic was dead and I chose this moment to relate to the party that in the AD&D DMG, the magic pools that convert gold are one use only. I had generated this dungeon using Appendix A of that book and it was the second such pool they had found historically.
With the pool checked off, the group descended to the unexplored 4th level of the dungeon. Their first explored room away from the stairs revealed these massive bug creatures with prominent foreclaws that scared them very much, so they heroically closed and spiked the door shut and courageously went the other direction.
The door to the next room was dried and brittle in an environment that was humid, sticky, and gross. Legany asked questions about fire or heat, which was smart, but there was no obvious heat radiating from the room or anything. When the party broke in, they found an empty, dry, and brittle room with an exit.
I’m a soft DM and asked several times what they were doing before entering the room. They didn’t send their thief in to search for traps, so when the group walked through as a whole the fireball trap that dropped from the ceiling was pretty scary. When the smoke cleared, Terry and Freddy the henches and Cleet the mage were toast and the rest of the party was quite wounded.
After the lizards, bugs, and fireball trap the group was very hesitant to continue so they bounced. Back in town they buried their dead, bought some healing, and hired some henchmen. They pivoted here trying to find a quick score through rumors and this is where the pain of catching up to the stop time issues ramped up.
The party long ago had tried to save Maisie of Millon from bandits or something around the city of Valestrian but learned that she had apparently run off to marry Lord Eros Tyring of Blackhold. Fast forward over a year to the very pregnant Maisie being present in Bellport for the birth of her child. There were some public comments and announcements in the Discord server from the Patron running Tyring about the situation so the players latched on to it as a potential hook They were convinced that Maisie needed rescuing and contrived for Gwendolyn to get a meeting with her and play music for her and braid hair and have pillow fights or whatever girls do.
It was nice to have knowledge of the principals in question and what they had done, but it was disappointing that the players could not really change the course of events leading up to the current date because we stopped time.
Convinced that Maisie was not a prisoner and earning an invitation to the reception after the naming of the child, Gwendolyn went back to the bar and chilled. Meanwhile, the others were tailing Chimichonga Applesauce (player generated name) the taxman and learning where he lived. That night, they broke into his house, rounded up all the staff into the cellar, and planned to educate Chimichonga about the thieves’ guild terms.
Somewhere in the chaos, Cleet the mage escorted the taxman to his boat and planned a very different intimidation tactic. While the party stripped the guy’s house bare of easily stolen valuables, Cleet’s new boat the “Going Nowhere” sailed out to sea with a magically sleeping government official stowed away. When he awoke, he found himself on the docks in a foreign town with a strongly worded suggestion to get on board with the thieves’ guild or next time won’t have a happy ending.
The party regrouped and counted their ill-gotten gains, got their reward from the thieves’ guild, and FINALLY CAUGHT UP WITH THE CALENDAR.
Musings:
Stopping time in a 1:1 game is not worth the squeeze most of the time. The exception that I can think of is if session play goes very far into the future. That works better because there are less moving parts stuck in a weird time paradox. It’s just the party and not the ENTIRE WORLD. If you can’t tell I was pretty frustrated with myself for stopping time.
The session went in an interesting direction, with the players craving some kind of score. The dungeon is tough in the deeper levels so having a fallback is an option, but if they want the big score, they’ll have to get in there at some point. I probably over-rewarded for the thieves’ guild thing but some interesting events happened there that will potentially develop into threads later.
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