Dungeon Brainstorming 1: Temple of Fire

Bwade

I'm looking for a little help in designing a dungeon's traps and encounters to sap my PCs of all their wonderful casting, but not be too terribly frustrating or time consuming. The setting is an ancient temple which can only be opened for a distinct period of time. The PCs will be forced to rampage through the temple to reach the prize and still have time to get out, but the Prize Room will have a trap/encounter which will be painful but not fatal to get past without the casting of spells. Now, I could go ahead and just put the entire room under an Antimagic field, but that'd be cheating, no? Basically, I'm just looking for small ways to nickel and dime away the party's spellcasting abilities, since the party is composed mostly of spellcasters (1 wizard/sage, 1 artificer, 2 clerics, a rogue and a monk). The temple is built into the side of a live volcano, if that gives anyone thoughts to spring from.

Alatheon

The book Dungeonscape for 3rd Ed D&D has some cool ideas for trap encounters. The important thing is to find a way to keep the whole party actively engaged -if it can only be resolved with spell casting, the rogue and the monk will quickly grow bored with nothing to do.

My first thought is a summoning trap a room or corridor with several glyphs that summon creatures who attack the party until the glyphs are disabled. Each of the glyphs can be overloaded by channeling some number of total spell levels into them (maybe a spellcraft or knowledge check to reduce the amount they need to spend) or disabled by the rogue. I'd say make some glyphs arcane and some divine, so the party has to allocate the correct resources to disabling them, as well as deciding who should fight off the beasties and who should deal with the trap.

Another possibility is a big room with strong enemies (magic resistant?). The party could win in a straight up fight but it would be hard -let them find several big weapons or traps in the room that they can activate with spells to devastate the enemies. That gives them the fun of kicking serious butt, while accomplishing your own objective. Just have a plan in place for when they inevitably try to take the weapons with them.

gnunn

The simplest thing I can think of for nickle and diming folks traveling through a volcano is to have rooms with extreme heat & open pools of lava. Anyone failing a fort save in them takes heat damage & is fatigued, endure elements negates the risk. This could help burn off low level spells. You could also throw the opposite problem at them in one room. Perhaps the arcane cooling system overloaded turning one room into a solid block of ice. Melting it with a torch will take forever, but fireball or searing light will do the job quicker.

When I want to devise puzzles for my players, I often make use of logic puzzles or riddles and then work them into the game world. (e.g. in a beholder's lair, my players stepped onto a series of floating platforms that comprised a sliding block puzzle. In order to get across a subterranean chasm, they had to shift the blocks until the proper one was released to float across. Depending on the type of puzzle you use, you could require a spell to power it up, to retrieve components etc.

Bwade

These are great ideas, made greater by the fact that I'm using Monte Cooke's spell point magic system (Unearthed Arcana) as opposed to the level system. I can't believe these sorts of things didn't occur to me to begin with. The best I could come up with were arcane traps that, when sprung, cause their targets to lose spell points.

igornappovich

these guys already covered it pretty thoroughly. My only other suggestion is to think about breathable air-- not sure of your magical physics, but it could be possible for a magic flame to burn up all the breathable oxygen in a closed room, tunnel, or area-- or burn up enough to make passing out a dice roll worthy risk. Magic would be the only recourse for the players to survive, assuming they dont have technological gear like scuba or space suits.

They could devise something on their own (you said they have an artificer- maybe a magical device) that perhaps is powered by spells or mana to help them breathe. Or with some creativity they could come to the conclusion that they have to create water, move it around with them, and breathe in it in order to avoid a certain level/ hall/ inferno room etc. That would be create water (or wall of water), tensors disc or telekinesis, and breathe water at the very least.

If the water started to get hot enough to scald they would have to keep it cool via cold spells/ cone, wall of ice, etc.

gnunn

When I responded originally, I was on my lunch break at work, and so did not have the link to my "favorite puzzle website":http://www2.stetson.edu/~efriedma/puzzle.html for brainstorming obnoxious puzzle challenges.

DarkMagus

Bookmarked!!

Thanks. :)

Duskreign

Thanks, gnunn! You just made my players' lives that much harder! :D

Bwade

can you give an example of how to use one of these puzzles in a game setting? I'm a little slow and I'm not getting how to be effective with them *shame*

gnunn

@ Bwade- Sure! My adventure log entry "here":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/the-westerlands/wikis/session-31 includes a trapped puzzle latch on a door. Scroll to the bottom of the entry to see an image of the latch and the description of how it played in game. Click on the image to go to the page for the particular type of puzzle from the website I previously linked.

gaaran

Hey Gnunn, what do you use for the maps in your adventure logs (well at least the one you linked to here anyway)?

Alatheon

One problem I find with logic puzzles in game is that they rely almost exclusively on player ability rather than character ability. I'd recommend figuring out a way for characters to make intelligence tests for hints to the puzzle, and you should remind characters with below average intelligence of their deficiencies. The fighter with an INT of 8 being played by a really smart player should probably not solve the puzzle faster than the INT 20 wizard.

gnunn

I actually have pdf copies of the D&D dungeon tile books. I made this map by cropping images from some of the pdfs and assembling them in Gimp... or maybe Fireworks. Then I added some elements (corpse, scorch marks & sunrod) I got of the Dundjinni user forums. It turned out pretty well, but I have to say that cropping and scaling the clips from the pdfs was a major pain. Perhaps if I hammered out some front-end work and built up a library of them it would be easier, but I found the method too time-consuming to keep using it.

Efficient but attractive mapping is one of my ongoing frustrations. I LOVE making maps, but have not yet settled on a technique.

gnunn

Alatheon, I completely agree with your first assertion. I do allow my players to make int, or open lock checks in this case to obtain hints about the puzzles. These hints will never provide a complete solution. As to the second part, I am hesitant to make a player play dumb. You can build a pretty genius comedic moment if the learned wizard and the streetwise rogue have been struggling over a problem and the dumb-as-a-rock orc barbarian comes up, takes a look at it and immediately knows the solution. In fact, I'm pretty sure this has happened in my campaign at some point.

That being said, the choice to include puzzles like these should definitely be based on the personalities and roleplaying styles of your players. In my case, I have several who love solving them and some who take bathroom breaks every time one appears. Also, apparently one of my players is a world-ranked Rubix Cube solver, so I find I actually have to step up my game when designing this sort of encounter.

RaseCidraen

Gnunn, that's phenomenal... now I just have to figure out how to work it into an online campaig---errr.... shhh... Dusk, Gaaran, you see nothing... :P

Poutine_Paladin

Oooh, can I see?

Duskreign

lol