What follows is a short retelling of the not-even-quite-misadventures of a particular group of PCs from what was intended to be me running an adeventure module I had recently acquired - Chaotic Caves.
Anything but Chaotic, and especially not Caves
They've already broken out of the sandbox I originally prepped for them for running Chaotic Caves, instead hightailing it out of the town and back towards civilization.
This because they went to the other side of the river, had an unfortunate encounter roll during their first night camping an a charging goblin-analogue with it's d4 damage managed to oneshot their MU during the encounter.
As a result the party had sworn off from going into what was like 3/4 of the sandbox laid out for them, instead returning to town where I tried to give them something to do by having a local cleric hire them to hunt down a witch that was occasionally dropping by the town according to rumours.
They found the witch, had a nice little talk with her and even ate some soup as it was offered.
Upon their return to the town they dropped by the cleric to try to convince her that this is a nice witch so there's no need to do anything, which of course got them on the cleric's bad side.
That escalated since their new MU kept insisting to the magic hating cleric that the witch was a nice person which culminated in the party being given an ultimatum of either the witch dies or the village gets burnt down for heresy since locals are colluding and dealing with the witch.
After that they just up and left the town fearing the church might now come after them.
Out of the sandbox, and beyond
They since have travelled to another smaller village roughly half a week away from from the original sandbox location, a village where people are taken by a wave of interest in writing poetry.
An abandoned church with a weird marble orb of roughly one meter in diameter crashed through the floor of it, the orb growing physically larger the closer one gets to it and when poked with a dagger the blade would effortlessly disappear inside the object.
There too they heaved and hummed around the orb for almost an entire session before leaving it be and going back to the village.
The game is seven sessions in and the only adventure the party has had has been delving through a small series of barrow mounds which had a single monster inside it, a ghoul they slew on their first delve but due to their poor mapping skills they've dedicated another session to continue delving through.
At the very tail end of last session it took me "trapping" the party inside an abandoned stone hut with a single door, onto the inside of which was written "To Ynn by the way of Resting Woods" to get them to finally resign to doing something risky with their lives and try a bit of good ol' adventuring.
And even this is because outside the hut it's a downpour and the only ways out are the door that now leads to Ynn when opened from this side and the few shattered windows.
And even that is a maybe since we had already spent three hours of the session helping out with small tasks in a dingy backwater village surrounded by adventure hooks that nobody would look into or poke at, the only reason they even ran into this hut in the first place was that they wanted to move to a larger city and decided to cut through some forests and open plains rather than spend a month's detour on actual road.
I pray they don't remember the hut has windows they could crawl out through.