Session 20
What happened today was the kind of gaming that can only truly happen in a long term campaign.
Back in session 9, 70 days ago irl and 7 months in game, the party let out some ghouls on floor 2 of the dungeon, and I was faced with a worldbuilding question: can baboons turn into ghouls? Given they can turn to skeletons, I figured yes, but I went with no, as somewhere I read that undead are what happens when "men" die, and that has a specific definition in D&D.
Second question: would a platoon of ghouls win out against 8 feet tall, four-armed baboons? I wasn't sure, so I played the ghouls as if they were a party, rolling randomly for which direction they would take. Somehow, after a series of bad surprise checks and saves, they got the drop and won, so I restocked floor 2 with that.
The players only figured that out MANY sessions later, and today they used the feathers on floor 3 to beat the ghouls on floor 2. That wasn't my intention (I forgot about the feathers), and it wasn't Barton's intention, but through serendipity that's what happened. Was it boring that the players had polearms and a perfect method to corner the enemy and beat them to death without any risk to themselves? I don't think so. Had that been in the module, maybe, but all of this only happened because the pachinko ball that is an RPG campaign fell the way it did, and that's what makes RPGs my favourite hobby.
Like, it's a matter of minute choices that mount up. Does it matter that I'm tracking the weather day by day? When it's all clear, no, but when they were about to be caught at night on a snowstorm that covered the ground with 7 inches of snow? Then it absolutely does. I could have just slapped the ghouls as encounters on the random encounter table and called it a day, but then they wouldn't have the feeling that they changed something in the dungeon permanently.
The Weasels are also noticing how strong they are now that they're steadily mid-level, and how the upper floors of the dungeon just aren't as dangerous to them as it used to be... and yet, Lykourga today was one roll away from getting killed by a thrown axe.
And all of this has just been floors 1 through 3, which they're steadily dominating. Yet it happened just as I predicted: the level ups have slown down considerably now that to level up a single character costs 8k gp; a king's ransom to level up a roster of 7. There will be diminishing returns the more they stay around the upper levels, and they've already started talking of refurbishing floor 1 to suit them... but will the 9 HD huge dragon let them? And would the Weasels turn their back on it? Winter has arrived in Arden Vul and it doesn't seem like that snow will melt any time soon.
