I did finish the dungeon on time, if by on time, we mean 5pm for a 7pm game on Tuesday last. Sorting out all the specific placements, quantities, and traps. Putting things in order, and leaving room for the party to go the completely opposite direction. Making sure the Guards and Wards were set up for fun, but not (my) frustration. Making sure all the rooms have descriptions, not just monsters. The party only got a couple of rooms in, but why is the other half of this post.
Travel. In general, I’ve just allowed my party to travel as needed. They occasionally rented horses, or just went on foot, to their various hunting missions. Or were staying mostly in the city for the main module parts. In this case, however, their target location was across a dangerous set of mountains. All but impassable by anyone on foot. And they didn’t want to waste time going around by land and sea. It is also too dangerous a place to teleport to, and no one has ever been there in the group to know the place or even scry on it.
So, I made them figure it out. They ended up finding a second Broom of Flying (50% chance it would have been an Animated Broom) in their hometown pawn shop, already having a small carpet, a broom, and a flying mount. This gave them enough flight power to slowly fly over the mountains. However, it was going to take them five and a half days. They had to figure out how to camp, so they tossed out spells until they found one of their Artificers had Private Sanctum. Not secure from physical attack, but they’re more worried about being scried on/magically ambushed. Physical security is the job of their ranger, who I think only rolled on survival check below 30 to find them safe places to put down for each night.
Direction was the last problem. One of them had access to artifacts from their destination, but I insisted he had to convince the owner of such to give it to him. I really like that NPC, and she’s not going to hand her treasures over to just any young whelp who asks. (It turns on the player was in such a hurry to handwave all these things because he’s going out of town in a couple weeks and this is his backstory quest, but we’ll just play boardgames when he’s gone if they aren’t through the dungeon this week.) This artifact allowed the cleric to use Find the Path, with a skill check each time because the place they are going is full of wild magic and the citadel itself is under a forbiddance, but the city around it is not.
So, they’ve arrived safely, and are plowing their way through the undead to find a dracolich holding a luxon beacon. One of the group posited a very interesting theory I may have to take into account about that situation. Until next time, friends.