5E Play Report: The Lost Factory of Willy Wonka

A friend of mine, actually the player of The Batman in my TotSK sessions, decided to try his hand at GMing for the first time. The system of choice was 5E; my first time with the system, but I was willing to give it a shot.

We were told to prepare 10th level characters for a one-shot. I ended up making a hill-dwarf cleric of Moradin. Absolutely cliche, I know. To inject some fun inot the character, I decided that hill dwarves have Appalachian accents. It makes perfect sense. Further, I decided to not prepare Revivify or Raise Dead. This was a one-shot after all.

Though it was originally meant to be a 5 hour session, it quickly ballooned to more than eight. As an entry into GMing, it was a gigantic, high powered marathon, and I can only hope I can bring across some of the fun I had playing it.

The cast

Krellis, Tiefling Shadow Sorcerer

Doctor Aegon, Dragonborn Fighter

Suske, High Elf Rogue

Adam Beharim, Hill Dwarf Cleric

Edgelord, Tiefling Warlock


The Game

• The game opened with each of the characters receiving a gold-filigreed letter, informing them that great riches awaited them at at a certain mountain pass, at high noon on a certain day. The characters encountered each other for the first time, exchanged names. The warlock introduced himself as the Nameless One, and I thereafter named hi Edgelord.

Edgelord's player: I swear if you call me that one more time I'm going to summon a demon with your name on it.

• They found themselves standing in front of a giant door, engraved with giant dwarvish letters, along with a message, "Enter, if you can, by entertaining me with a little jam."

cdb/cdb/cddddd/ddddb
I've used the cursive Hebrew alphabet for puzzles before,
and it works quite well. Most people can't even identify it.

• The party deciphered the runes, and found they were music notes. The party hummed them together, producing a familiar melody as the doors swung open. They opened to reveal a long, dank corridor, reaching into darkness well beyond even the warlock's darkvision. The party arched through, avoiding holes in the floor, until the fighter at the back fell through one. He cut his foot on a spike at the bottom and made a save against poison. On closer inspection, it wasn't a spike, more like a striped cane... and it smelled distinctly minty. 
• A voice spoke in the party's mind, deep and unsettling. Under interrogation,it introduced itself as Willy... Willy Wonka. The warlock tried all of his languages, eventually hitting the nail on the head with Deep Speech. They carried on a short conversation, to which the rest of the party was not privy. 
• The tunnel ended in a deep pit, at the bottom of which was something soft. The party was forced to tie all their rope together and rappel down. They landed on grass, and a tunnel leading in the other direction. 
• The party emerged into a widening cavern, which suddenly exploded in light. Before them was an unimaginable sight; a green and inviting landscape of candy, marshmallow bunnies hopping about, gummy bear trees shading a chocolate river. And on the bank of the river, a gondola, just large enough for the party, which they obviously took.
• The current of the river slowly sped up, until the party reached a lake. No, not a lake. A whirlpool! The voice returned, singing a distressing tune. The party panicked. Adam, whose goal I had now decided was to seek a maximally honorable death, was ready to follow it down. The edgelord desperately wanted off the boat. At the last moment, Aegon slammed his greatsword into the river and anchored it, while Krellis froze it over with a spell. 
• After further conversation with Willy, the party, sans warlock, decided to follow the waterfall down. Adam melted the frozen chocolate with sacred fire, and the party tumbled down.. to safety. The warlock, after sending his imp to scout, subsequently jumped into the river and was similarly unharmed. 
• The party continued down the next tunnel, and found a room, before which was another dwarven rune puzzle; several letters with numbers attached, in a cubing parenthesis. Using in- and out-of-game knowledge, the party identified this as the chemical formula for gelatin, matching the jelly mushrooms visible in the tunnel. However, the party forgot about the cubing...

I wonder what this could mean?

• Suske snuck into the next room, only to find his feet sticking to the ground. Looking down, he found he had stepped in a Gelatinous Cube, which rose up to engulf him. Cue combat, with the party trying to defeat the cube without killing the rogue inside, who was quickly taking acid damage. The warlock kept wanting to summon a demon. Adam ended up getting the killing blow here, summoning a Spiritual weapon on the other side of the cube, which punched right through it and returned to his hand. 

Boo yah!

• Emboldened by this victory, the party continued forward down a steep slope, which the sorceress frosted over to create a slide. At the bottom was a laboratory, replete with glassware and alchemical agents. An exit led out, and sounds reminiscent of dwarven work songs, but twisted, came from that direction.
• Blocking the exit were three candies, green, blue and red, which Willy's disembodied voice told us he wanted us to test. After protestations from the warlock to let the imp eat them all, the sorceress tried the green one. It was the Everclear, and it turned her skin invisible... and nothing else. 
• The fighter stepped up to try the other two. The red one was red-hot and cinnamony, and on a failed save, he became irrationally angry at the party. He slashed at the warlock, but managed to return to his senses immediately after. After the party prevented the warlock from frying him, he also tried the blue one.
• It was Laffy Taffy. He failed his save and started to laugh uncontrollably, attracting the attention of the voices in the next room. Duergar, but even further twisted, with orange skin and green hair, marched in formation into the laboratory. 
• The warlock, with an incredible initiative roll, drew a magic circle on the ground in front of the entrance, and summoned a demon. A Vrock manifested, his wings scraping the low roof of the lab. A long combat ensued, with the party trying desperately to attack without leaving the tiny circle, while the demon ripped and tore the creatures apart, and wrestled with one which had Enlarged itself. 
• The warlock ended up losing control of the demon over the course of the combat, and the party booked it back through the tunnel entrance as the alchemical ingredients mixed into a toxic cloud. Luckily, the positioning of the circle prevented the demon from following. 
• After the cloud and demon vanished, the party moved on to the room the Duergar came from. A great factor with sloshing rainbow liquids, evaporating and condensing, conentrating themselves until drop after drop fell on a single candy, sitting on a pedestal in the center of it all. 
• Willy Wonka's voice reappeared, and called this candy, the last he wanted us to test, 'The Jaw Breaker.' Once again, Doctor Aegon took the lead and swallowed it. One more failed save, and the blue dragonborn began to expand. He swelled to immense size, and the intense internal trauma nearly killed him before the party, mage hands and all, succeeded in giving him the mother of all Heimlich maneuvers, concentrated chemicals literally seeping out between his scales. 
• After a breather, the party found themselves down another slide, and in a dome-shaped cave. Stalactites covered the entire ceiling, and the exit was a pit going straight down. Two potions, one red and one blue, sat on a table, with another message from Wonka, "One is poison, one is not. Choose wrong, you drop. Choose right, rise to the top."

• Deciding that rising to the top in this room would be a bad idea, and dropping may be useful, Adam took the plunge and tried one. After all, his resistance to poisons made him the best candidate. He inspected each, and finally downed the red one. 
• He chose wrong. He immediately began to levitate uncontrollably, and only the fighter's immediate grapple held him down. Downing the blue potion, the party was able to feather-fall down the pit, while Doctor Aegon and Adam combined their newfound position to gently fall, like a child holding onto a balloon. 
• The next section was a narrow tunnel, pervaded by the smell of dank water and a sense of general unease. Crawling in single file, the party came to a fork. A wider tunnel led to the left, but was covered in guano, while the narrow tunnel continued to the right, which they took. 
• The party found itself dodging small holes in the tunnel floor, until the rogue once again stepped in something... a Black Pudding, which slowly crawled up his leg. 
• The resultant panicked fight was less about killing the ooze (which they succeeded in doing, though only half got incinerated) and more about getting past each other in a tiny corridor to escape a creature with spider climb. Eventually, the party managed to delay the pudding and book it.
• The party then came to a wider cavern, a pool at the center. Force fields came down on the exit and entrance, and the cause of the bad feelings on this level was discovered; an Aboleth. It singled out Adam, whose sailing background (a sailing hill dwarf, chew on that) and desire for an honorable death found its climax here. The warlock wanted to parley and find some way to sate its hunger and bring down the field, but Adam was having none of it. 

Uh oh

• 
  He railed at the creature, dared it to do its worst. It reached up and grabbed him with its tentacles, which he successfully escaped from. Before diving back in to do battle with the creature, the texture of the water made him suspicious, and he cast Detect Magic. The whole thing was covered in illusions and it became clear that the aboleth was a fake, though the tentacles were real, but mechanical. 
• Continuing forward, the party now found themselves in a room with a multicolored pad and a circuit box. The voice of Wonka reappeared, telling them to step of the platform, which would bring them to the end of their journey. The party, obviously skeptical, broke into the box to examine its mechanism, and determined it was a mechanomagical apparatus maintaining a sealing spell. Tired of waiting, the warlock stepped up to the plate and... stepped on to the plate. 
• A beam of energy shot out towards him, and he succeeded his save. That may not have been good news, however. Without a target to absorb the excess magical energy, the sealing spell broke, and so did one wall of the room. Jumping into the fray like the Kool-Aid man, a twenty-foot rock candy golem assaulted the party. "This is Brutus," said Willy. 
• The ensuing combat was long and hard, as the rock crystal golem was resistant to most physical damage, and had over 300HP. The party got lucky, avoiding most of its hits. Adam was doing some real haling for the first time, Agonizing Eldritch Blast remained a sturdy damage dealer, and Suske found new and inventive ways to use the Hide action in an empty room. 
• Finally breaking the golem down, the party was surprised when the floor immediately gave out beneath them, and they found themselves in a giant underground dome, with 'Thunder' written in neon above it. In the center of the arena was Willy Wonka, who berated the party for killing his minions and golem, and gave his intention for bringing the party here. He was to find a good successor for his factory, which he grew tired of, but only one could survive to inherit it. Oh, and did I forget to mention, the candy cane carrying and top hat wearing, purple bedecked Willy Wonka...
• was a GODS-DAMNED BEHOLDER!?

Me: I knew it!

• The boss fight began. Adam rolled high on initiative, tying with Wonka and going first by fiat. He let go of the spell slots he had been holding on to the whole session, even when the party went without full health. Insect Plague on Wonka's position, Spiritual Weapon at 4th level to knock him in the head. If he could just get in close, he as going to inflict fistfuls of d10s in necrotic damage on this bastard. He charged forward, just outside of the anti-magic cone and... got petrified by a legendary action, turning fully to stone in the second round. 
• Uhm. Crap.
• The fight was a sure TPK. The sorceress was put to sleep. The rogue was lifted telekinetically into the air. The cleric was as good as dead. The fighter was busy moving people into the cone to remove status effects. The warlock was only good for Eldritch Blast. I had come into the game with a character and player attitude prepared for death, and it looked certain. 
• Then, all of a sudden, it wasn't. In the face of immense odds, the party came together to kill Willy Wonka (new sentence! woo!). The sorceress was the standout damage dealer. The warlock had been tossing 30-40 damage cantrips all day, but she hadn't done anything flashy. That's because she had been saving her spell slots, and now she unleashed all of them. 
• Twinned and Quickened Cones of Cold, which Wonka failed his saves against, dealing 100+ damage every round. She cast these three times in as many rounds, dealing ~350 damage. That would have been enough to kill a regular beholder on its own (max 266HP rolling), but Wonka had his health just about doubled. 
• The warlock kept putting out the reliable damage. When he got charmed, he transformed the fighter into a young gold dragon, who drowned the beholder in fire. Even the cleric's statue got in on the action, serving as a hiding spot in the arena for the rogue to get several sneak attacks from. But in the end, the killing blow did go to the nameless warlock, who capped off the night with just the right quip. 
• "When you see my boss, tell him Zachariah sent you," as he blasted Willy Wonka with infernal fire. And there was much rejoicing. Wonka's staff was an extra rod of anti-magic, with which the cleric was depetrified, and much healing was had that day. 
• His hat held the key to a door at the end of the dome. Beyond it, were piles, and piles, and piles of treasure. 

Takeaways

As a first go at GMing, this was ambitious and flashy and very, very long. An eight hour session is nothing to sneeze at for any GM of any level, and for a newcomer it's altogether inadvisable. Likewise with the sheer number of encounters. Still, our GM handled it all with a good deal of grace. 

Since this is an old-school blog, I should put a few words in that direction. This first experience with 5E has confirmed much of what I had heard of the system, and I now understand that Eldritch Blast is not simply a meme, but a way of life. I'll put a more focused post out later on my full thoughts from an old-school perspective. 

One place where the design of 5E was stark was in its difference to OSR was in the fights. For one, they were very long, and the analysis paralysis of brand new tenth level characters did not by any means help. But more importantly, they were instant and to the death. I had heard all this before, but now I'm seeing it with my own eyes. With the exception of the aboleth, which the party was obviously suspicious of, no attempts were made to negotiate with the Oompa-Loompas, or to get the cube to release the rogue without killing it, or to convince Wonka his plan was flawed, except for a wayward persuasion roll. 

Actually, even starker was the way fights ended. No effort was made to flee to live another day, or retreat to a more advantageous position, or surrender. Enemies in 5E don't seem to value their lives, and I'm convinced this is an issue with the design, not just a new GM. It's also related to the fact that all characters, including support, are really built around combat, and nearly all the excess time spent in character creation is related to combat options. 

Still, I had a great deal of fun, though I now have a great deal of work to catch up on that I thought I could get done yesterday. I've met a couple more great players, who I may rope into my playtesting for my underwater campaign rules in the coming months.