The session picked up mid-fight: the party still had goblins to mop up in the outer chamber of the dungeon, with the bigger threat already dead and only a scattering of goblin warriors and minions left holding corners. The plan was simple — finish the goblins, then find somewhere defensible enough to actually rest, because after everything already spent, everyone agreed on that much: they really needed a rest.
Mopping Up
Theren Vale and the rest of the party worked the last of the goblins room by room, tracking down stragglers who'd scattered when the fighting started. One goblin, realizing the fight was lost, tried to bolt down a side tunnel — and rather than let it go, the party debated briefly whether to spend a Hunter's Mark on a fleeing enemy before deciding it was worth it precisely because it was the only one still doing something. Between Theren's bow and Barzer's Fire Bolt, the last few holdouts went down and the immediate chamber went quiet.
That's when someone noticed the barrel.
The Barrel, the Vein, and the Nursery
Sitting near the last cluster of goblins was a barrel marked with a painted flame — a warning, in hindsight, that nobody heeded. Barzer put a Fire Bolt into it anyway. It smoked. It didn't do much. So he hit it again.
The second hit did plenty. The barrel had been sitting on a vein of "fire water" — a flammable spirit — that ran back into a hollow the party hadn't spotted yet. The explosion didn't stop at the barrel. It raced down the vein, igniting barrel after barrel in a chain reaction that tore through the goblins standing around it, melting skin and setting off explosion after explosion deeper in.
Then came the screams — and they were wrong. Too high-pitched. Several members of the party rolled Insight to make sense of it (one check landing at a full 21), and the grim answer came back: those weren't grown goblins. The chamber Barzer had just leveled had been a nursery. When the smoke cleared, the DM counted them out loud — one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight goblin infants, on top of the adults already caught in the blast.
The table's reaction landed somewhere between horrified and delighted at the sheer scale of it — nobody had expected "light the barrel" to escalate quite that far. Theren put voice to what everyone was thinking — "I don't think we're heroes" — and offered to hand out desperado club tattoos to mark the occasion. Barzer's own read on it was blunter: his character, by all accounts, did not lose a wink of sleep over baby goblins.
The dungeon, for its part, seemed to appreciate the show. Something ancient and Infernal murmured in Barzer's head in the wake of the blast — amused, low, chuckling — pleased with exactly what had just happened. It was unsettling enough that Barzer relayed it to the rest of the party rather than sit with it alone.
Into the Tunnel
With that chamber cleared — and thoroughly regretted — the party pushed on, working toward an opening that looked defensible enough to finally rest in. What they found instead was a wide cavern dominated by a stalagmite roughly twenty feet tall, its surface pitted with dozens of holes, most only a few inches across.
Nobody liked it. Someone floated the idea of a Web spell to seal the holes shut, then immediately walked it back on realizing a twenty-foot tube of webbing in a tight cave would trap the party as badly as anything inside it. In the end, curiosity won out the way it always does: Barzer put a Fire Bolt straight into the largest hole at the base.
Whatever had been sleeping in there wasn't sleeping anymore.
The Black Pudding
Initiative came up fast, with Selena leading it off with a strong roll and the rest of the party close behind. What emerged from the stalagmite was a black pudding — a corrosive ooze that had been resting inside the rock the whole time — and it was not happy about the wake-up call.
Nysera made her displeasure with Barzer known in the most direct way available to a druid with telekinesis: she used her bonus action to shove him five feet, trying to put distance between him and the thing he'd just provoked. Barzer, to his credit, didn't argue — "I allow it to happen because I deserve it" was about the extent of his defense.
It didn't save him. The pudding's acidic pseudopod caught him for 16 acid damage, dropping him hard enough that he was left with nothing but a wisecrack about his robes offering exactly zero protection. Elaris Moonveil handed out Bardic Inspiration to keep the retreat and reposition options open, while Theren kept Hunter's Mark — the pink marker on the map — locked onto the pudding, landing shots for solid damage even as the fight got messy.
Then the pudding did what black puddings do: after taking a solid hit, it split clean in half. Black pudding A stayed put; black pudding B peeled off toward Nysera, forcing the party to fight on two fronts in a cave already too cramped for comfort. Theren's Hunter's Mark shifted targets to keep pace with whichever half was still standing.
The fight ground on, and Theren took the worst of it, dropping to 7 HP before Elaris turned her attack into a bonus-action Healing Word that brought him back up to 20. Selena and Nysera kept chipping away with Sacred Flame and cantrips, and Barzer — down to his last spell slot — squeezed out what damage he could between fending for himself.
Black pudding A went down first. Black pudding B lingered a few rounds longer, landing a few more hits before finally failing its saving throw against Barzer's spell and taking a full 1d12 on top of accumulated damage. It dissolved into nothing. Combat ended with both puddings dead and no third split to worry about — a possibility the table joked about right up until it didn't happen.
Sealing the Tunnel
With the immediate area a dead end, the party turned to the practical problem: how to rest without something wandering in on them. The answer, grim but efficient, was the goblin corpses still scattered from earlier — the party started hauling bodies to block off one of the two open tunnels leading out of the chamber.
There wasn't enough material to block both, so the party had to choose. After some debate — and a brief detour into flipping a coin or rolling it out before deciding a coin flip wasn't good enough for a decision this important — they settled on blocking the vein that led back toward the wide-open area the goblins had been retreating through, on the theory that it was the more likely route for anything else in the dungeon to find them. The corridor they'd actually entered through stayed clear, kept as the only way out if things went wrong.
With the barricade in place and watches assigned, the party called it: a long rest, full HP and spell slots restored, with the plan to pick back up the next day at 2:30 PM.