Reminds me of the epic tale of a friend’s campaign where he started building an enormous quest stack for the players (they’d go to accomplish goal A, and along the way an NPC would say “I’ll give you what you need to complete goal A if you help me by completing goal B”, rinse and repeat until they have an arbitrary number of quests waiting in a queue). They eventually reached a green dragon who was guarding a magic tree they needed the sap from, and when the dragon said “I’ll give you some sap if you will perform a simple task for me…” The whole party snapped simultaneously and just screamed and leapt. The fight was hard but they ultimately killed the dragon and the catharsis was tremendous.
Sooooo, did you get the Item?
We did end up getting the item as the spell had brought the chest it was in to the astral plane, and it required a miniature version of that chest to bring it back, which we found on a desk, in the desk we also found a secret compartment with the item the halfling thought was stolen
