Season Seven of Dungeon School was our first entirely online program. Run through Zoom and Google Classroom, it proved a particular challenge to keep all of the students focused on everything that happened in a given game session, and the writing class component proved equally difficult to deliver. We still managed some legendary adventures, and there were indeed some very fine stories turned in and revised. The nice part was being able to set up one of the play tables in our imaginarium, which meant being able to use heavier materials and doing more complex models.
I started out the year by allowing the students to pick two teachers to aid them in their quest. One teacher to stay behind and guard the anchor to the ship and help guide the students home. Another to accompany the students into whatever realms or spaces their adventure might take them. The heroes of Elementary chose Old Man Jasper to stay behind and hold the statues in place to keep the gates open, and Alomir Mahar, to follow them into the depths below, in the dragon’s belly. Due to popular demand, and a student submitting art and writing to ensure it would happen, they were also accompanied by Sgt. Snuggles, Captain of the Stuffy Legion, and lieutenant to the Queen of Monsters herself.
With the repair of The Lady’s Fate well underway, teams are selected to enter into the dragon/ship’s spirit body, to reopen the chakras that were still locked after the events Season Five. The svadhishthana is just below the dragon’s navel, and once served as the school’s cafeteria and recreation hall. Now it stands utterly sealed, locked beneath a complex puzzle designed to specifically defy the nature of the school. The brass locks at the center can only be opened by moving the huge crustacean statues into place, but the statues get heavier the more one learns about them, quickly making trouble for the more inquisitive students. At first that statues glide easily across the floor, so much so they’re forced to chase them down. Every attempt to study the style of the carvings, to read the runes etched into the stone, or determine just what they are made of made the statues heavier and heavier.
Once the statues had been placed and the guardian within pacified by Sgt. Snuggles monster hugging powers, our heroes climbed through the looking glass and into the space below. An identical sphere stood poised upon a carved wooden map, a pair of huge hands waving gently to either side as though gently drawing power. In the corners, rubble blocked the passages beyond.
Our heroes asked Alomir to explore beyond the rubble to one side of the orb, while they started their exploration down a corridor filled with a heavy, powdery ash that clung to their clothes and skin. When they wound their way through the long, ash-lined hallway, they found a strange mechanical creature starting at them, looking startled. In the moment of confusion some of the players ran, some attacked. The startled creature vomited magma onto the floor, which instantly set the heavy ash alight, including the ash coating our heroes. Some took cover through the illusory back wall, past the hallway filled with misaligned mirrors to discover a workroom, others made their way back to the map room.
Those who doused themselves in the fire wing workroom’s quenching water discovered (through reckless curiosity) that the water in the bottom of the smith’s chest led into the large pool in the water wing. Meanwhile, the rest of the party charged headlong into the opening of the water wing, setting off dozens of steam dart traps and exploding the treasure chest those traps had been protecting. Luckily some of the trove of tea inside the chest was saved, though most was ruined – soaked and steeping in a thousand tea-bag slurry.
Those who came in the front way found another bio-mechanical monstrosity prowling the halls. The creature had a tea cup hanging from one of its huge steel horns. At the pool our heroes explored two long hallways discovering a tea kettle over a pit trap, and a glittering blue stone that poured out water when it was touched. In the pool itself they discovered a shy elemental that played with them briefly but hid when the others arrived. They met when those who came in front lured the bio-mech beast past the pool and into the pit trap.
With the tea set and water stone in hand, they went looking for a hidden room (like the smith’s workshop in the fire wing) and discovered a kitchen where animate ingredients assisted them in baking trifles and making tea before taking a long rest. A player who was continually obsessed with the map room returned there as the others settled into the secret kitchen for a long rest, to discover that blue light was shining from the windows in one quadrant of the map.
Just before the long rest, one of our heroes had the idea of putting the water stone into the flame source in the fire wing. The room filled with scorching steam so quickly it started to put out all the fires and disable the fire bio-mechanoid (a walking forge). The players fled, hoping the water would eventually put out the flames while they took their rest.
When they woke it was to a world of thick, cloying, unpleasantly warm fog. They could barely see their hands in front of their faces as they plucked their careful way through invisible rubble, bumping into walls. They were quickly lost, unable to find their way, or even each other, in the ever thickening fog. Until our druid came up with the coolest use of Control Water I’ve ever seen. She used the Part Water application of the spell to push their way through the fog to the water stone and pluck it from the flames.
While the flames were low, they took advantage of the bio-mech’s exhaustion to align the array of mirrors that ran through hall outside of the hidden workroom, using the tile patterns of the floor tiles as a guide. Another visit to the map room revealed that the previously flickering light in the fire quadrant now glowed as steadily as the water section of the map.
Our heroes begin to see the patterns. Four elementally themed rooms, each of which has an infinite source of its element, a hidden workspace, a portal to the elemental wing widdershins, an elemental guardian, and a bio-mechanoid creature. Feeling as though they had the pattern mastered, they split into two teams.(I did try to warn them) One went into what they assumed was the earth wing. The other followed the path they had sent Alomir on into the air wing.
In the earth wing, they encountered a huge, musky, fungus that ran with viscous sap. The earth wing’s treasure chest sealed off behind it. They only tried to touch this mushroom once. As the monks fingers slid through the syrupy sweat pulsing from mushroom’s spongy surface, his fingers appeared to melt. I assured him he took no damage, but also asked him to make three death saves. He only succeeded on the third and was knocked unconscious.
Once the monk had recovered, the earth wing team made their way around the corner, only to encounter the earth bio-mechanoid, a modular plow creature that charged them on sight. A little trial and error revealed that while they could not touch the other mushrooms in the space, each of which brought on different weird changes. The first made it possible to hear the thoughts of other creatures, including the bio-mech, but doubled the time it took to say or do anything. Another pulled a character’s spirit from their body. Another healed all harms. Messing with the mushrooms became more of a priority for a time than tricking the plow into pushing the mushrooms infesting the room into the huge fungus blocking the earth wing’s treasure chest.
They would eventually come to unlock the chest and find an elaborate mechanism inside, capable of creating an infinite variety of clothing given the programming cards, fabric, and fastenings. Assembling the machine was an interesting puzzle for them to work on in parallel to getting all of the mushrooms cleared so the earth elementals that wear the costumes could make their way back into the earth wing proper.
Meanwhile, The tornado room, where vortexes of wind are fed trapped shut a chest (it took them most of the year to open this one). Fighting their way up wind into the Piano room, our heroes encountered the air bio-mechanoid. The eye on each side of its cube-shaped body began to fire beams of burning red light at them. Some backed away, but one brave student darted upwind and into the hidden room they’d deduced must be on the other side. In the concealed library, they found their teacher Alomir unconscious, crushed under a smashed bookcase. Looming over him was the now infamous Vivomancer’s Lieutenant, the despoiled special operative who has plagued students since season 5.
Caught in the act of trying to smuggle Old Man Jasper’s pet spirit out of the school, the lieutenant tried to bolt, only to have his prize ripped from his hands. In the ensuing chase, Jasper’s pet (the Sigil Antianimus, meant to be destroyed at the end of season 3, it was instead given to Jasper as a gift by students) changed hands several times as the students steadily beat back the despoiled officer. Little did they know that he was hoping to draw them away from the air wing, where he had left an anchor for more of his kind to come through.
The Vivomancer’s lieutenant proved a wiley opponent, leveraging the terrain, traps, and magic items to befuddle and isolate the party so it could pick them off one by one. Our heroes, having believed they knew all they needed to complete the dungeon-wide puzzle and complete their repair of the svadhishthana. It had been too long since their last rest and too many minor injuries had piled up. It seemed briefly as though the despoiled warrior would manage to defeat our heroes and escape with the sigil antianimus.
A few turns of careful maneuvering found their foe standing in front of the rubble that had once blocked the air wing. A little magic, and a lot of brute force brought the whole mass of stone down on top of him. He barely survived, but was completely immobilized, allowing our heroes a few minutes to interrogate him about the Vivomancer’s plans before his thrashing attempts to escape brought more stone down on top of him, crushing boney, chitinous carapace.
With the earth, fire, and water wings all repaired and purified, our heroes gathered their strength to invade the air wing proper and put an end to the despoiled menace. Thanks to a quirk of Dungeon School (I reset every character’s HP to max whenever they level up) our heroes had the resources they needed to survive and hopefully succeed at forcing the despoiled invaders out of the school. Upon entering they discovered that the despoiled had opened a portal of twisted flesh, its putrid mouths literally vomiting their forces into the room.
In a move that surprised even me, our monk went through the portal and into the Vivomancer’s realm itself! Luckily, this student had done quite a bit or writing over the year, steadily upgrading their elemental staff, an artifact meant to reflect their character’s style of martial arts. The weapon allowed him to break the portal from the otherside, though it was able to quickly regenerate itself, he did prevent anymore of the despoiled forces from getting through to overwhelm his friends on the other side.
While his teammates fought the despoiled forces to a standstill, then slowly pushed them back, the monk watched an ever growing number of despoiled approach from all sides towards the self healing portal. He made a fateful choice, again totally unexpected. He swung his staff with all his might and broke it against the portal. The blast unleashed as the elemental artifact shattered with the force of three drafts of a novella written over the course of eight months of classes.
It tore the Vivomancer’s poisonous touch away from the school, not only scouring the portal and the despoiled pouring forth from existence, but snapping the surviving students back into the school proper. Upon the golden disc of the svadhisthana, our heroes mopped up the last of the despoiled infection and the last of invaders. The monk, however, was trapped. His one way home sealed by his own heroic sacrifice, he set off into the Vivomancer’s corrupted land, hoping to recover their lost teacher and find a way home.
Will our heroes be able to rescue the lost teachers, and their missing friend?
We’ll find out next year, on Dungeon School Season 8