Rat-race or psychological game

[YPU]

Ok, in the campaign I will be running quite soon the players more or les will be in a mind-flayers experiment. Now, the island they are stranded on will have a very ‘lost’ feeling to it. So, here is my request. Build a room or series of rooms that test the players in some way. An good example: the party walks into the room the moment they try to open the door on the other side a pillar pops up in the middle of the room it has a hourglass in/on it that is running down fast. There is a lever, command word, whatever, something that has a red button feeling to it. When this happens pop up a clock or something that clearly lets the players feel the time it ticking, when time starts running low, they will hid the button, put the time back where it started and let it tick again. When the time runs out the door simply opens. Adding in a rumbling sound or maybe a gurgling sound like that would help as well. Now that’s the kind of think I would like, what sort of freakish mind meddling encounters.

[cferejohn]

If you can find them, go get as many of the Grimtooth's Traps books as you can find. Just page after page of cleverly designed traps (some with a distinct Rube Goldberg flavor to them). Looks like a "best of" is available in a book from Sword and Sorcery:

http://www.flyingbuffalo.com/catalyst.htm

Also, rent and watch Dark City. It's a fairly similar concept (which I shant give away any further)...

[magic8BALL]

Its a lot of mucking around... but I've had a room consitsing of 6 or 8 solid moving blocks where the space in the center of the room should be. With a movement speed of 30ft, there was only one way to get hit by only one block, 20ft there was two wasy to get hit by two blocks... any faster and you were waiting for blocks to get out of your way before you caould proceed... any slower, or the wrong path... certain death. My PC's loved it... they just followed the dragon they were chasing (who slaughtered them afterwards... but thats not the point)...

You could mod somthing like that... everytime you get hit by a block, you get a flash of a Mindflayer looking down on you, and if in mine you'd die, in yours there could be a "wake up tied to a chair in the middle of a darkened room" thing... with tenticles...