Up on the Mountain, After the Flood Session 2
Getting into it
The party at level 1:
- Ama Ekström - Folklorist, Mage (Alchemy, Animism)
- Bugs - Mime, Rogue
Nadine - Pilgrim, Priest of The Fates (Chronomancy, Divination)Player not present this session- Vex Ire - Marine, Mage (Chronomancy, Shadowmancy)
It's tough to be unhappy with a session in which the players trapped a giant spider in a time loop and then melted it with acid1.
The party completely explored the Dragon Shrine, including getting the secret healing perfume locked behind a door that required two magic gems to open. They fought a handful of smoldering skeletons that hurled fire and the aforementioned giant spider. A note written by one of the caretakers of the shrine indicated the Citrine Clot, a magic gem that could maybe be used to save the dragon Sutomemnon Vituperation from the corruption of the Enchantment, was in the possession of a wizard last seen in a town a few dozen miles away, giving the party their next objective. The also found a corpse with a couple of bags of coins and a map to a location that is currently very far out of their way.
Ama insisted they leave most of the treasure they found in the shrine so the dragon could begin rebuilding its hoard. The party still got 2gp2 from the corpse, plus a magic censer that can cause things to catch fire and a bottle of perfume with healing properties.
Nadine was engaged in a theological discussion by Cyrene, last caretaker of the shrine, so wasn't able to venture into the shrine without being terribly rude.
Rookie mistake: I made a dungeon crawl without random encounters. I'm leery of how much action 1st-level Weird Wizard characters can handle, and with the encounters I had already planned I felt that adding random encounters would be too taxing on their resources. Of course, this made the actual dungeon exploration feel stale. Without the threat of something popping out at them unexpectedly the characters were just going from room to room hoping to see something interesting. I can think of a couple of potential remedies for this. I could just add in random encounters, but that doesn't sit right with me currently - Weird Wizard does not contain procedures for random encounters in dungeons and I don't want to go adding one right now. The next solution is just to make spaces more interactable - have more rooms with things worth poking at, some of which bring their own danger. I think that's ideal but of course requires more work from me and I'd need to pay more attention to pacing the dungeon. The last option, and the one that kind of intrigues me the most, is to just reveal the mundane rooms on the map to the players in chunks provided there aren't any rooms with encounters or traps in the way. That should streamline the whole process by cutting down on the players having to narrate their characters going from room to room with no real stakes. There's an argument that the friction in having to go room to room is part of the game, but without the tension created by wandering monsters I don't think it quite works.
The map fragment they found was zoomed-in to a section of the large hex map they have with a new point of interest that wasn't previously marked. The players found the location very fast, but I still prefer that to just revealing the new point and telling them where it is. I liked making the players work with the hex map a little, so next map they find will be hand-drawn with a few landmarks and they'll have to translate the location to the hexmap.
Using Weird Wizard's suggested zone rules for a dungeon crawl (at least when the party engaged in combat) worked fine. No reason to consider adjusting that for now.
The question I always have when I read out-of-context TTRPG snippets like this is how much was the system, how much was the GM, and how much was the players. As the Sage, putting the spider in the room was the extent of my involvement here. Trapping something in a time loop and then melting it with acid is something any 1st level Mage can do in Shadow of the Weird Wizard, provided they take the Novice-level spell Entrap in a Time Loop from the Chronomancy tradition and the Corrosive Globule talent from the Alchemy tradition.↩
Still a paltry reward for a Weird Wizard party but not the pocket change 2gp would be in a D&D.↩