Thread by @WhatDoIKnowJR

The monthly Saturday #DnD5e game went extremely well again. Everyone leveled up to 2nd level, and they set off into the wilderness to find a dungeon whose location was kept secret from them, but was being transmitted to the wizard's apprentice they had with them.

The dungeon is guarding the Eye of Vecna. I took a page out of 13th Age and made it a Living Dungeon, one that was created specifically to move from place to place to keep the eye hidden.

In keeping with my name-dropping of famous D&D people, when the party started digging to find out who created the dungeon, they discovered that it was initially created by Tasha.

We did the traditional "check for random encounters each day" and "track your rations" for this trip, but I made sure the trip was only five days, so we only needed to worry about 10 days of random encounters and tracking rations.

Because they had an encounter in the middle of the night one night, I asked them if they wanted to sleep in and get a full long rest, and add a day to the trip, or go the next day without the spell slots they used, and they pushed on.

That meant that they had to forage for one day of food, and they were so excited when the paladin rolled high enough to feed everyone for the day. It was great.

I told them that normally there would be a chance for them to get lost, but because they have a ranger, they wouldn't add extra days to their trip because they wandered off the path.

I don't like that ability being an absolute, but because 50% of the group hasn't played D&D before, and 50% hasn't played since 3rd edition and they were very young, they actually appreciated that just having the ranger along made the trip easier by default.

For one encounter they ran into twig blights that were already in the camp, waiting for nightfall to animate and attack the party. One of the players wanted to roll History on the creatures, so I gave them the whole backstory of the Gulthias Tree.

They also had a stirge fly into camp one night and start drinking the paladin's blood, and then ran into a kobold inventor and the inventor's bodyguard. This was the night after the stirge attack.

The druid found out that the kobolds had accidentally caused the stirges to fly away from their nest by testing an anti-stirge scented candle near a nest. The druid woke up the paladin to make sure the kobolds weren't a threat.

The paladin had the kobold show them all of his inventions to make sure he wouldn't use them on the party, and we had a blast going through each of the items in the inventory and having the kobold explain how they worked, sometimes in a painfully obvious manner.

"What's this?"

"A scorpion on a stick."

"How does it work?"

"If you want to put a scorpion on someone, and you can't reach them, you hold the end of the stick, and then reach out to them."

The dragonborn paladin appears to be incapable of asking the wizard's apprentice NPC to do anything without intimidating him, so he was in fear of his life through the entire adventure. Except once.

When the reached the living dungeon, they were super careful, although I appreciated the paladin's player when she suddenly said "This dungeon is like that god damn space slug from Empire Strikes Back!"

They were extremely cautious propping the dungeon's maw open by placing rocks in the corners so that it couldn't snap shut on them. There were multiple membranes, nubs, and bone spurs that worked as the door handles and levers in the dungeon.

The paladin cast Heroism on the wizard's apprentice than asked him to explore the hallway that led to a left and right sphincter. When he wasn't afraid, he was almost recklessly willing to pry open the sphincters until they figured out how to use the bone spurs to open them.

The party ran into Mindkiller Whelps and Zombie minions from the @helloMCDM Flee!Mortals playtest, because I wanted them to have some combats where they could run into multiple opponents without worrying too much about being outnumbered.

While the Mindkiller Whelps can't crawl inside your head like the regular mindkillers do, I explained that ability to them while also explaining that these were minions and what that meant.

They also really liked that zombie minions pop back up once after you drop them, because that felt very zombie-like to them for the fight, and they were really excited when they figured out they just needed to take them down twice to keep them down.

They figured out a puzzle where an organ deeper in the dungeon was generating electricity for a trap in a hallway they needed to traverse, and then talked to the brain at the core of the living dungeon.

Despite fervent negotiations, and the players remembering mid-argument that they didn't want the Eye of Vecna to give to the Skull Lord, they wanted it to keep the Skull Lord from getting it, the Living Dungeon told them that if they find the Sword of Kas, they can have the Eye.

It also told them that their artifact, the Orb of the New Moon, is actually a demi-plane seed that is keyed to erupt in the presence of powerful undead. If they had presented it to the Skull Lord, they would have been trapped in a demiplane prison with the Skull Lord.

The party wanted to know how the dungeon would keep the Eye safe if they could make it through their traps, and it showed them that it had an Elder Brain Dragon in stasis that it could "thaw out" if it needed to do so.

Beyond the dragonborn paladin's adversarial relationship with the poor wizard's apprentice, we also had a great moment where the druid woke up during the encounter with the twig blights, and was only casting spells with enough range so that she could stay in bed during the fight.

The Living Dungeon gave them a book with the location of the Sword of Kas in it, as well as four gifts (uncommon magic items). The party now has their first bag of holding, as well as an amulet of non-detection, and a ring of mind-shielding.

What has been really interesting is the degree to which this group asks questions and tries to make plans in a manner that people would consider "old school," without any real prompting. They want to learn as much as possible and mitigate as much as possible before acting. Mostly

There were still moments where the monk would decide everyone else was taking too long and just enter a room or make a decision to put herself in danger.