Lessons from the Mists: Session 28 - Fidatov's Maze

Welcome back to Lessons from the Mists! This week, the heroes continue to explore the ruined Fidatov manor, corrupted by a terrible curse. Let's get started!

The Recap

Kane is pulled into the mirror, where he sees a repeating, fractal version of the art gallery he just was pulled from. A violent, shadow version of himself stands in front of him, but he easily destroys it with a well placed Sacred Flame spell.

The other heroes enter the mirror dimension and each of them put down their dark reflections. Within the mirror dimension, Angvar finds the crest of Valetian Fidatov that splits in two when he picks it up. With that in hand, they return to Barovia and continue to explore the rest of the mansion.

The heroes discover a piece of Marilena’s journal in her private study that details the ending of the courtship between Dmitri Krezkov and Marilena, as well as how to access her family’s crypt at the center of the maze: complete two crests of Valetian Fidatov at two fountains hidden in the maze. She decided to end it early because she sensed he was only in it for her money. Later, they find the corpse of Marilena Fidatov in a private salon, where her spirit rises from the corpse, surrounded by a warping energy, and declares all the people that came to her ball to be vultures, and they were only after her treasury, and flees to her family crypt.

The heroes ascend to the second floor, and begin to hear slurping, ripping sounds coming from behind one of the doors on the second floor. Ylenia moves toward the sound to get a better idea of which door these creatures might be in, but a critical failure on a stealth check means her foot fell through the rotted wooden floor. At that noise, five ghouls burst out of the southern doors and swarm the heroes. It’s initiative!

Ylenia is flanked by two ghouls while the other three engage the other heroes. Angvar and Kane flank one ghoul and dispatch of them quickly, and then Kane uses Turn Undead to make all the ghouls frightened of him and flee. Ylenia, though fighting two ghouls, calls upon the Morninglord to bless her strikes and smites both of them, leaving them at low HP so Mary Sue Ann can clean them up with magic missile.

Ylenia is hurt from the ordeal, so the heroes seek a safe place to rest. They explore the northern part of the mansion, and find a master bedroom. Over the course of a short rest and exploring the master bedroom, they find a secret door in the closet that opens to a hidden shrine of the Morninglord. In the shrine, the corpse of Taltos hangs by a noose from the chandelier. In his pocket is a note he left that details the horrors he witnessed after Marilena’s poisoning when the surviving guests of the ball turned to paranoia, infighting, and murder. It ends with him declaring that he “wishes to join his lady.”

The heroes finish their short rest and go to the maze. Its walls are overgrown, thorny, and over 15 feet tall. They must make ability checks to navigate the maze and find both fountains within. They manage to navigate through the maze easily to find the first fountain, guarded by two hell hounds and a demon that consumes sources of light called a lightthief. It hides at the start of the encounter, then teleports inside of one of the orbs of light above Kane produced by Mary Sue Ann’s dancing lights. It consumes the light, causing it to explode and dealing radiant damage to everyone. The heroes are hurt after being burned by the hell hounds’ flaming breath, but decide to press on further into the maze before resting again. Angvar sets one half of the Fidatov crest on the fountain and they hear a grinding of stone at the center of the maze. They press on to the second fountain.

Navigating the maze to the second fountain leaves the heroes drained as the strange curse upon the Fidatov manor saps upon their psyche. When they arrive, they find the fountain broken and the whole area flooded. A large mass of rotted vegetation sits atop the ruined fountain, which begins to undulate and attacks the heroes when they arrive. A shambling mound! It’s initiative!

Angvar is attacked by an undead water logged body in the swampy earth, who attempts to pull him under, but he shrugs it off. Ylenia is pulled into the shambling mound which begins to devour her. However, with Mary Sue Ann’s fire magic, Angvar’s magical spear, and a blight spell cast by Kane, the shambling mound is significantly weakened. Ylenia manages to cut her way out of the shambling mound’s digestive sack of churning acid, and the bog bodies retreat back into the morass.

Angvar places the second crest of Valetian Fidatov on the ruins of the fountain, which opens the crypt at the center of the maze. The heroes find it within the maze, and rest outside before plunging into its depths.

And that’s where we left it!

So How Did the Session Go?

Due to some player schedules, this was a shorter session than usual. Energy was a little lower from my end because I was feeling under the weather this week, but overall I think everyone still had a lot of fun. We had just gotten back from a long break and had two sessions of nearly pure roleplaying, so to have a session with four combat encounters and some exploration felt like a good change of pace.

For this session, I gave myself a challenge. I have been watching a lot of videos by Mystic Arts, a fantastic YouTube channel about running D&D, and one of the more important bits of DMing advice, especially for 5th Edition D&D, is that this is a game of resource management. The stakes of combat rise a lot higher when you do not allow long rests in between each major combat encounter. The way you measure an “adventuring day” in this case is not literally 24 hour increments, but the time and encounters between the heroes completing a long rest. There are lots of methods in order to achieve this by homebrewing resting rules. I really enjoy his Dadi’s solution with “excursion resting” which brings it closer to Draw Steel’s Respite rules (check out my write up of the Delian Tomb for Draw Steel here!). Essentially, you have to be in a safe place, like a settlement, in order to take a long rest. Any rests in the wilderness, dungeons, or what have you only give the benefits of a short rest.

I typically don’t like to change homebrew rules halfway through a campaign. Dadi also has some great dungeon crawling rules that hearken back to some old school styles of dungeon crawling play that I plan to implement during Castle Ravenloft or the Amber Temple (you can find them here), but I didn’t want to change to excursion resting. I DID want to increase the amount of combat encounters in a single “adventuring day”, so this was my attempt to do that and strain the resources of the heroes so they had to plan how to use them most effectively.

So let’s walk through the encounters I built, how I ran them, and what I learned from this experiment.

I’ve used an encounter with evil mirror versions of the heroes in a previous campaign. I can’t remember how I did it then, but I knew when I was building this one out, I did not want to copy their character sheets. I instead opted to just use four shadow statblocks from MCDM’s Flee, Mortals! This encounter ended up being MUCH easier than I intended, but I did not fudge any die rolls, change HP, or anything in order to make this harder for the heroes. They spent very little resources on this fight, but if I was to run this again, I think I would change the encounter objective to be a kind of “defend a point” where the weak shadows just kept coming after the heroes until they completed a predetermined number of rounds. That way they can still have that opportunity to kill a lot of weak creatures (non minion creatures!), but not have it be anticlimactic. I could tell my players were expecting a much harder encounter, but I knew I had harder encounters coming down the line, so I played the encounter where the dice fell. No shadow was able to take any turn, they rolled a terrible initiative and on each of the heroes’ turns, they just were able to kill them using their action.

The encounter against 5 ghouls on the second floor of the manor was technically optional. If the heroes decided to not investigate and were stealthy enough, they could bypass the encounter. When Ylenia rolled a 1 to stealthily approach and figure out what door they were behind, I decided she would start the first round restrained as her foot fell through a rotted part of the wooden floor and she would be unable to get it out. That left her open to the ghoul attacks that were laying into her, and each of the heroes got a ghoul to deal with. The ghouls from FM! had many abilities that limited movement and actions, so the heroes had to spend their actions and choose their targets more thoughtfully. This encounter worked really well! Drained the heroes a fair bit, but when Kane used his Turn Undead ability, it completely changed the tide of the battle in the heroes favor.

MandyMod writes in her posts on Fidatov manor that mazes are really hard in D&D, and puts her solutions to the maze problem, but I decided to simplify it even further and just make getting to each fountain a group ability check, then a fight at each fountain. If the heroes fail, it takes significantly more time to reach the next fountain and they take a bit of psychic damage, further pushing into their resources. That’s another thing I haven’t talked about yet: At the top of this session, I told my players that the way of solving this mystery is only after the poisoning occurs, during the night because they were floating around the idea of finding more clues or solutions when the time loop resets. This gives them a ticking clock: Solve the mystery before day breaks. The short rests and time in the maze all tick down the clock significantly.

The first combat encounter was against two FM! hell hounds and one lightthief, a demon who can teleport inside light sources then extinguish them, dealing radiant damage and removing darkvision from anyone nearby. I described the fountain at the start of this encounter, as basically a bit of throwaway narration, that the fountain is still running, strangely. The hell hounds have abilities that light people on fire if they fail a save against their burning breath. Halfway through the encounter, Ylenia’s player declared loudly “We are so stupid! We could just be jumping in the fountain to put out the fires! That’s why you described it as still running!” and I simply smiled - because I did not plan for that at all! But it was a great idea to deal with the hell hound’s breath, which they utilized after the enemies were all defeated. Follow your players’ good ideas. Make them just work. The encounter worked really well, but drained the heroes’ resources more than I was expecting, due to some poor saves and really good damage rolls on my end. They decided to push on!

The second encounter was against one FM! shambing mound and three bog bodies, also from FM! This was a much easier encounter than I expected, because Kane used a blight spell against a plant creature, the one target that spell is especially effective against. I also forgot I originally planned four bog bodies to support the shambling mound, but decided to not implement the fourth when I saw the heroes were enjoying making more clear progress in this encounter as they cut down the bog bodies one by one. Rules as written, the shambling mound has two HP pools: one for the creature itself, and one for the engulfing sack that can be damaged and free an engulfed creature. The shambling mound was at low enough HP and the sack was at full HP when Ylenia’s turn came around, so I decided she could get the final blow on the creature. This encounter was easier than expected, but I could tell the players were really enjoying it after the slug fest of the hell hound encounter, so I was more lenient with the rules here. I’d like to see how this encounter would play out if I played it more strictly.

The party rested twice in this session, once after the shadows and ghoul encounter, and then again after the maze encounters. Between each rest, there was one easier combat encounter and one slightly harder encounter, but they still haven’t long rested. I think the secret to both more encounters in an adventuring day AND in a single session is just to make the combat encounters simpler and easier. D&D 5E is a game of attrition and resource management. The stakes will increase naturally over time as the heroes drain themselves and have to pull out crazier stunts to save their asses in the final confrontations. I think my experiment to test this “D&D is a game of resource management” by encouraging players to push on for more encounters while also making those encounters smaller stakes made this a great success. Really happy how this session went because it taught me a lot about how to get out of the “everyone go nova at the start of combat” problem a lot of 5E DMs have.

Run more combat encounters, make each one you run easier and simpler so they are faster and punchier, and put your players against a ticking clock of some sort so they feel like they have to push on or else something bad happens! That will allow the game to shine a lot more by forcing players to make tough decisions.

Until next time!