So once more the (now balanced) party headed off into the dungeon.
After some circling around, the party found themselves at a T intersection. T intersections are, along with locked doors, are mind-killers (apologies to Dune). They are obviously not sentient themselves but their mere presence has the effect of a powerful spell, Power Word Overthink.
After a fair bit of arguing, Sally convinced the rest of them to shut up and let her sneak ahead and check for traps. And I have to say it’s a good thing she did, because there was in fact a pit trap to the right. The trap itself was 40 feet away, so Sally’s thief, Gal, was well out of the torchlight of the rest of her party, so they couldn’t see what was happening. For the first time, I took one of the players into another room. Of course (and this is the fun part) I told her to bring dice.
Quick aside about how Wizards and Weasels works. Darkvision is not an ancestral ability; it’s a class ability, and only thieves get it. Which is pretty handy seeing as how difficult it is to sneak up on someone while carrying a torch.
Anyhow, Sally brought dice, and discovered the trap. The rules for Wizards and Weasels recommend that rolls for finding and disarming traps be made ‘in the blind’. That is, you let the player make the roll, but behind your screen so that they have the satisfaction of having the roll be in their hand, but since they can’t see the roll, they don’t know whether or not they were successful. Since she rolled well for finding, I told her she found a trap and what kind of trap it was (a pit trap). Her disarming roll was not so good, but was close, so I told her that she failed, but knew she failed. If she’d rolled really poorly, I would have told her she’d succeeded, in which case hilarity would have ensued.
All of this meant that Sally’s Gal came back to the party, and told them that they couldn’t go right, so left it was, breaking the spell of indecision.
Going left, as it turned out, took them to room 6a (with the goblin that had finished them off last time), which featured that other mind-killer, a locked door. Sally listened, heard three goblin voices, and the party spent the next half hour concocting increasingly improbable plans of attack. When they had settled on their worst of the approved plans (honestly I couldn’t even follow it, but it involved charging in, faking a retreat, and then a ‘reverse ambush’) Sally went to unlock the door, promptly dropping her lock picks noisily (she rolled a one) at which point one of the goblins, Nod, opened the door to see who was there (he was expecting the night shift).
No plan survives first contact with the enemy. -- Everyone who has made a plan.
The ensuing fight was a mess. Phil’s fighter, Kohlrabi, charged in, running Nod through and continued into the center of the room with Nod still hanging off his sword, at which point he was set upon by the other goblins, Zod, Mod, and Fod, no doubt horrified to see their co-worker cut down so close to shift change.
The rest of the battle was fairly touch and go, but Useless Lou actually managed to cast a few timely cure wounds spells into Phil to keep him upright, Sally snuck behind Zod and lodged her dagger in his skull. Phil cut down Mod, and when Fod was about ready to retaliate, Harry summoned a swarm of lesser weasels into Fod’s trousers, killing him (but not quickly, sadly for Fod).
As Fod was messily devoured, I consulted the Random Annoyance Table and rolled a 67, which is described as “Mysterious Wizard appears, says something cryptic, and then disappears”.
I described the wizard appearing in a puff of blue smoke, and was about to say something, but then panicked. I’d never really played an NPC other than a shopkeeper before, and thought that the moment deserved more than a bad Scottish or Irish accent, which is what I always fall back on (more or less interchangeably).
It seemed like a suitable point to end anyway, with the mysterious wizard about to say something, so I called it a night.
***
Afterwards, nursing a stiff drink after my wife had gone to bed, I thought about my father, and the room he used to guard. He never talked about work (other than about how it was a good, steady career for a young goblin like me) and I wondered if he’d ever had to hold off a marauding band of adventurers, or if he’d ever seen his coworkers hacked to death, or worse, devoured by weasels. He’d never let me go to any of the bring your kids to work days. I wonder what I’d have seen.
