Time for a downtime session!

In these Campaign Diary posts, I talk about the campaign I play in and how our most recent session went!

What’s SBotLL?

SBotLL is the campaign I play in! It’s been running for over three years now. There are two parties: one on the surface and the other in the Underdark. I play on the surface squad as the elf bard Finnith, with my two friends playing the dragonborn rogue Nala and the tiefling ranger Allora.

Recap

Last session, the party completed their journey back to the Amastacia manor. They managed to travel through the oncoming winter storm as the temperatures rapidly dropped, and snow began to fall.

On the final day of travel, the party encountered a huge six-legged lizard, a frost salamander. It used its breath attack and froze Nala, breaking off her right wrist and hand as well. Finnith was able to somewhat heal and unfreeze her, and the party rushed back to the manor so she could receive medical care.

During this session…

We had about two months of downtime in this session. Finnith did some research on a variety of things, Nala recovered from her injury, and she also was able to commission and receive a prosthetic hand. The party made use of the dream spell to contact NPCs who weren’t at the Amastacia manor, and we had some roleplay scenes with present NPCs as well.

Overall, the party was able to decompress after a long stretch of adventure after adventure. We were also able to get some information and some other miscellaneous questions squared away.

Using Downtime

We haven’t used much downtime before. Actually, this is our first downtime session, and our characters are level 12 at this point. We’ve gone from adventure to adventure. This is mostly because the quests we’ve undertaken have had personal significance to a PC or have had some other sense of urgency to them.

Downtime helps pace out the campaign across a longer stretch of time. We’ve gone from level 1 to level 12 in about two and a half months, so a two month period of non-adventuring time is pretty significant.

Out of character, this downtime also helps us sync back up with the evil-aligned party in the Underdark. They’re getting closer to finding a way to the surface, so we’ll need to be on the same timeline when they get here.

Thanks for reading!

How does your group use downtime? Do you handle downtime in a session or between sessions? I’d love to hear your thoughts!