Wandering in circles

"Kovath."

"Zarlazz?"

"This tunnel - it doesn't go anywhere."

"Well, so?"

"I mean, we're paying for these tunnels by the yard. Why is there a completely empty hallway with three entrances to the same room and -- forty-eight, forty-nine -- yes, fifty -- FIFTY yards of pointless twists and turns?"

"That happens sometimes."

"And that's somehow okay?"

"Honestly, the amount of time and effort we save on planning is worth five thousand yards of hallway." 

"...Huh."

Here we are walking in a looong circle.

This session (Chat log here) featured no combat just a great deal of trap finding.  And some laughing at the time wasted in the dungeon.  Traps triggered once, and were evaded and disarmed once. I wasn't super thrilled with how the session went just in terms of all the rolls exploring empty halls but the loot was okay.

First, they handled the loot from the fight with the dinomen last session.  Then they moved on and uncovered a secret door using See Secrets, then they uncovered a secret door that led to a hallway that led to ... 2 doors back to the room with the secret door.  The party managed to choose the one door that was trapped to open.  Teetonka triggered the trap but yanked his hand back in time to avoid the poisoned needle. (side note, I need to write up some more door traps, there aren't many in the traps book).  The party continued south to discover a trapped room (liquid ice sprayers in the ceiling).  Vondur got impatient (Impulsive swashbuckler) and decided to leap over the trap. He failed his acrobatics roll and had to burn a luck to escape an icy doom.  Teetonka started to describe how he'd disarm the trap but I cut him short so we could move on.  This is not ideal behavior on my part, players are encouraged by RAW to disarm traps in ways other than just "I roll traps" but I was in a hurry.  I went ahead and rewarded with CP as if he had spent the time and effort explaining how it would be disarmed (Exploits p.92).  Search checks were made and some hidden loot was found in the room (I hid it in a panel on the randomly generated balcony).  The haul wasn't bad:

• 11 eigth-gold, 21 silver, 174 copper ($2144)
• 2 gem like objects (probably tourmaline? Teetonka put these in her boot) 
• fine metallic shield with jeweled inlay  and edging of feathers (magical, effect not known).  
• Potion of Agility (Identified by Gharza sipping it. as a Half- Orc, she can make HT based alchemy pretty well)

They then spent some time considering how to get the Liquid Ice out of the ceiling, before giving up and returning to exploration.  The next room they entered was a boss level encounter: 21 Skeletons.

I've only done it twice, but I'm already getting pretty tired of these huge hordes of monsters.  The party opened the door, saw the skeletons and shut it again.  Stonemaul decided to pray to his god for help in smiting the undead menace.  I went ahead and let him roll based on Exploits p. 90.  The effective skill of 6 seemed unlikely to work out, but he did indeed roll that 6.  After some discussion of possible results, I decided to just throw a Turn Zombie spell loose on the tightly packed skeleton phalanx.  It helped out, all the skeletons started the fight down 4 HP and 4 of them spent the fight running from Stonemaul instead of pitching in.  At that point we called it a night and planned to pick up an a week or so.

This looms for next week

Thoughts: I need to make tokens for trapped doors so I can click to either spring or disarm the traps so things can move faster in this regard.