Talk about a cliffhanger - yesterday's weekly game ended early, due to one of my players having to leave the table early, right about 5 rounds from me performing a TPK on the group.
It was the perfect $&^%storm of the party ignoring the hints I was dropping, the mage using up his spell slots to read runes that didn't hold any information after already figuring out what they were for the first time, and also said mage failing his spell check to cast a fireball he didn't have the levels for and it exploded on the entire party (more on this in a second, though). And let me tell you, I dropped SO MANY hints - a rough sketch of the dungeon drawn by an escaped slave that included the words BIG BAD in the appropriate location; "accidental" mentions that they are facing a drow cleric and her minions (not just the one they can see when they enter the room); "no, it's not been 16 hours since your last long rest, but you could definitely take a short rest" was ignored; I even let the ranger tell me his Primeval Awareness ability works in a way it doesn't (which will be fixed next game) and marked the map they were using to track and showed them there were even more monsters leading up to the Big Bad and in the Big Bad room itself.
The party is deep inside a drow cleric's Spirit Guardians spell (half movement inside 15ft of the caster, plus 3d8 damage every round, Wis save for half damage), the mage is out of spells, everyone is very low on HP (the rogue had gone down from the fireball backlash and been pulled back up with a medicine check and a quick application of Potion of Healing, but still not a lot of HP), and then there are the 3 quaggoths that have yet to enter the fray. Pretty dire, right? Fortunately for the party, though they don't it yet, I made a few mistakes right at the end of last adventure, and those I will fix. Namely I couldn't for the life of me find the scroll mishap table in the DMG - pg140 - so the fireball won't hit the party, maybe; I will give the mage back his few casts of Comprehend Languages I really didn't realize he was wasting; and my notes are that the cleric is being escorted by grimlocks (CR 1/4), not quaggoths (CR 2), so those will also change.
The situation is still very dire, even with the changes I am going to enact, but I'm not going to deus ex machina a rescue for the party - I made my mistakes, but the party made theirs, and they have well and truly stuck their foot into the bear trap. They're going to have to get themselves out of this mess, or TPK. Now, I'm not totally heartless mostly because a TPK means I gotta rewrite the first 6 levels of this particular campaign (yes, yes, I'm "grand theft game mastering" and using a couple of pre-made adventures, but still), so while I won't pull a deus ex machina, I may merely capture whichever characters go down in the ensuing stampede (the players have talked mostly of escape and evasion, not standing their ground to the bitter end) and allow the party to enact a daring rescue after they've regrouped and maybe gotten some backup from the locals. Or I'll have a thrilling tale of a TPK and the next adventure I'm working on next week. sigh
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