So I had an idea for a campaign about the PCs escaping an inescapable prison...

[Mr.Cobalt]

Picture this: there's this maximum security prison complex where every nation in the setting dumps inmates their own prisons can't hold, whether they're simply too strong or skilled for most prisons to handle, have a strong enough following that the local government is afraid to hold them within their borders, or especially if they are the worst of their worst- the ones to whom death is too light a sentence. Nobody has escaped there alive, so what little is known of it to the general public is mostly from rumors and urban legends. Said legends speak of multiple layers of security- less dangerous inmates are simply held within blocks of indestructible cells kept under constant surveillance, with guards and prison staff patrolling every hallway at all hours. More dangerous individuals, however, are kept in tailor-made sub-prisons designed to break their inmates mentally and physically to ensure they have neither the will nor means to escape.

The most controversial legends, however, concern the man in charge of this fearsome prison- a man whose name has been lost to history but is known now only as the Warden. Under this man's rule not a single inmate has ever escaped his prison, and every inmate regardless how powerful or insane they are has learned to fear him more than anything else in life. Some say there has even sprung up a cult within the prison that worships him as a deity, and the fear and worship he has accumulated over his career has in fact elevated him to some degree of godhood within the walls of his complex.

It is said that the Warden, like many deities, bestows favor upon his faithful worshipers, granting the guards divine magic and granting some of his most dangerous and devout "followers" some degree of freedom and power over the other inmates in exchange for their loyalty. The Warden's control over his domain is so strong, they say, that those that die within the prison walls before their sentences are served in full immediately rise as undead under the control of the Warden, with those loyal to the Warden becoming more powerful forms of undead retaining some degree of sentience and free will, while the rest are turned into mindless undead used for menial labor or cannon fodder. As the Warden himself allegedly says: "The Hells can't have you until I'm done with you".

Of course, while history says that this prison is inescapable, there are no small number of stories pertaining to attempts to escape with varying degrees of success. While all stories end in the prisoner's death or recapture, the ones closest to escape have several elements in common: in most, the prisoners in question were all either new enough, mad enough, or just plain broken enough that they no longer feared the Warden, or in some scattered cases the near-escapees were being wrongfully held or under the protection of some higher deity. In any case, the stories say, the inmate in question only escaped as far as they did because Warden's divine senses were blinded to this individual due to his lack of fear, which let them escape their bonds only as far as the prison's mundane and arcane security measures could allow.

Most people write off these stories as mere legend, though. After all, if this prison truly was inescapable, how could anyone have gotten out alive and sane enough to retell them?


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Ok, now that the background's out of the way, let's get down to business: I've got this idea for a campaign where the PCs are supposed to escape from an inescapable prison whose warden has become a demigod due to the inmates' fear of him. The PCs in question only have a chance to escape because the Warden's divine power mostly only extends to those who fear him and/or are actually guilty of what they got sent there for and they for whatever reason do not fall under those categories. That said, they only get a chance to escape because they still have the REST of the prison's security to deal with. And they probably have all their stuff confiscated on the way in, so that's bound to make things difficult. (I've also considered the possibility that they're breaking in for some reason, so that's another thing on the table)

But I digress, I need ideas for how to design this prison in a way that it's got all the trappings of an inescapable prison without being so game-breakingly secure that it can't make a good campaign setting. I've mentioned ideas including undead mooks roaming the halls, insane cultists dedicated to the prison's Warden, guards wielding some degree of divine magic (Paladin variants?), and various "enforcer" inmates as "boss" encounters. That said, I still feel like I need more input on this, be it more ideas, tips on how to make this setting viable as a not-necessarily-evil campaign, or feedback from DMs or GMs that have tried this sort of thing before and know what does or doesn't work with the players. So... what do you all think?

[the_david]

Well, you could turn it into a demiplane. You could even throw in some Planescape/Spelljammer/Ravenloft and have the players come from any setting.
You could also build the prison in layers, like an onion. That way, the players start at the bottom of the megadungeon, and have to find there way up. A maze level might be fun, with minotaurs ofcourse. (Because just one is never enough. Bonus points if you let the players think it's just one by using hit and run tactics.) Toss in a seemingly empty plain with a secret portal to the next demiplane and have them run circles for days.

But for the all important question, what game system are you planning to use? For D&D 3.5 I'd advice a heavy dose of Halastar's Teleport Cage. Demigods are relatively easy to build in Pathfinder, using mythic rules and the Divine Source path ability.

[Mr.Cobalt]

I had initially planned this for D&D 3.5, but I had considered the possibility of making it Pathfinder.

[the_david]

Just an idea for flavor, perhaps it's a prison run by Inevitables on the clockwork nirvana of Mechanus? Inevitables seem like the kind of creatures that would be able to pull this off, the only problem is that they might be too lawful. Aeons (Pathfinder) want to keep the balance so they would round up anything that is anoying their master plan and they will release you when they need you to restore the balance. In this way, they could even use Inevitables to do their bidding.

[Mr.Cobalt]

Just an idea for flavor, perhaps it's a prison run by Inevitables on the clockwork nirvana of Mechanus? Inevitables seem like the kind of creatures that would be able to pull this off, the only problem is that they might be too lawful. Aeons (Pathfinder) want to keep the balance so they would round up anything that is anoying their master plan and they will release you when they need you to restore the balance. In this way, they could even use Inevitables to do their bidding.

Inevitables could work- combine this with your idea of the prison being a layered demiplane with the entrance being in the center, I could see the outermost layer of the prison having windows and stuff but instead of opening to the outside like it should, it opens to a planar void (Astral Plane perhaps?) and is staffed by outsiders like Inevitables. Not sure if it really should be the Astral Plane though; the Warden's main shtick is that nothing ever escapes his prison- jumping "out" the window just lands you in the dead center of the negative space wedgie that is the prison, but due to non-euclidian spatial shenanigans it appears to encircle the prison instead of vice versa.

But yeah, I could imagine inevitables being a possible race for some of the more heavy units- before this I had mostly been thinking about classes more than races (though I had plans for a couple unique undead "bosses", particularly a Mohrg that worked almost like the Goliaths from Borderlands 2).

[the_david]

Heh, you know what the 2 most inhospitable planes are, don't you? The negative energy plane and the positive energy plane? Man, that would be evil.

[the_david]

I actually have a prison in a campaign that I never got to GM. I totally forgot about that.
The elemental demigod of fire Pyrax is imprisoned in a comet, cast away into space forever. A small part of the comet conveniently crashed down near a party of adventurers. The big chunk of ice reveals a fire elemental cleric of Pyrax. The fire elemental heads down to an abandoned temple to find a way to release his master, probably by letting the comet collide with a little blue planet. To stop the celestial bodies from colliding, the adventurers must find their way into the prisoncomet and defeat Pyrax.

Although all of this probably doesn't help you.