The most paranoia-inducing dungeon

[Strigon]

Freckles and scars aren't attractive?

Well, it's down to personal preferences; myself, I can appreciate some freckles.
Scars... less so, but it's hardly a deal breaker.

Of course, the point is kind of irrelevant; I think the implication was that she was obviously maltreated, and it caused her appearance to suffer; her face is ragged and scarred, with years of poor hygiene leading to a skin condition - I've heard some people refer to pimples as freckles, maybe this is the case?

[PrincessCupcake]

Well, it's down to personal preferences; myself, I can appreciate some freckles.
Scars... less so, but it's hardly a deal breaker.

Of course, the point is kind of irrelevant; I think the implication was that she was obviously maltreated, and it caused her appearance to suffer; her face is ragged and scarred, with years of poor hygiene leading to a skin condition - I've heard some people refer to pimples as freckles, maybe this is the case?

Actually, it's a little more open ended than that. Maybe she's mistreated, maybe she's just supremely self-conscious. The spell is just there so she can be in control of something, even if it is only her appearance. I used freckles because it is used to describe both the aftermath of a skin condition and a cosmetic difference that more than a few people freak out about having.

(And thus leaving the level of horror/silliness up to the tone of story.)

[goto124]

both the aftermath of a skin condition and a cosmetic difference that more than a few people freak out about having.

I imagine pimples would've fitted that better - many people love freckles, so the whole 'freaky appearance' thing may not get across as well as pimples would have.

For scars, it depends on how it's described. Could easily go both ways.

[Draconium]

If one of the players is an idiot and goes off on their own for whatever reason, have them end up in a room that appears to be a study of some sort, complete with a lamp, desk, and furniture. On top of the desk, there is a book, or more specifically, what appears to be a diary.

If the player decides to read it, it reads just like a normal diary, except that it seems to contain information on the dungeon that they're in that could be useful. However, after reading the first page or so, they feel their eyes begin to itch, as if from tiredness. As they read further and further, the itch grows worse and worse, getting to the point where it feels like there's something crawling in their eye sockets.

At this point, they have to make a Will Save. If they succed, they can read another page (or put the book down) without worry. However, every new page (or round), they have to make another save. When they fail (eventually), the itch causes them to snap, and they begin clawing their eyes out, desprate to relieve the itch.

At which point, they wake up. The itch is gone, and their eyes are normal, and they're in the center of the room. The title on the diary, however, is now blood-red. When they eventually get back to the party, the other members note that they appear to have scratch marks around their eyes.

The diary actually belongs to a powerful mage that kept personal secrets in it, so it was enchanted to appear as something else, and gave out an illusion to anyone who read it for too long. The blood-red title is actually the title's original color, and the scratch marks are from some rat that crawled across the character's face while they were under the illusion's effect.

Finally, have that player come across a similar-looking book in most of the dungeons he goes into for now. Watch him (and anyone who heard what was happening to him) freak out.

[JoeJ]

In a large cavern there's a lake, how deep is not immediately clear. In the middle of the lake, on a small island, is a chest. Near where the PCs entered the cavern there's a dock with a normal appearing rowboat tied up. The oars are in the boat.

[Kami2awa]

Nice simple one:

Put raised portcullises across corridors. Preferably with big rusty spikes on the bottom.

No, you walk under first.

[Dark Cider]

That one encounter you have in a dungeon, that seems too easy, or too good to be true. The person you are fighting almost bleeds to death, but right before that he summons something nasty, in my instance, Iuz the Evil, to come turn you inside out, literally. Anything like that seems to keep players on edge. With lingering combat music, and the, "is combat over?" From the party.

[dramatic flare]

Dolphins are evil.

Spoiler: EEEEVVVVVIIILLLLL

Show

Ahem.

Apologies.

Start off the adventure crossing a vew narrow chasms on the way to the dungeon.
Once in the dungeon, present them with a chasm too wide to reasonably jump. Attempts to anchor a line to the opposite side with a grappling hook all fail. Finally somebody tries to climb down or the rope ends up actually lying on the surface. Surface?

The chasm is a glass skyway.

The next cham has a skyway as well, except this one has a hole in the middle where a pane fell out.

[goto124]

Thing is, IRL, we can see glass. Also, what's holding up the glass walkway? Did someone cast an invisibility spell on it? Why would anyone do this?

[DaveSonOfDave]

One that I pulled off: the players were in water, and they kept hearing a splashing noise at random intervals. It took them forever to figure out that it was just them moving.

[JoeJ]

Our party had sent up camp in the woods once. Sometime in the middle of the night, the character on watch heard something rustling in the underbrush, but he couldn't see anything. He woke everybody up and we grabbed our weapons and built up the fire. Now we could all hear something moving through the brush. Still none of us could see anything, though. We searched through the woods a bit, getting jumpier and jumpier. This went on for about half an hour (real world time), by which time most of us had climbed up into the trees to hide. At that point, the creature we'd been frightened by finally came out into the clearing where we could see it. It was a rabbit.

[goto124]

Did they kill the rabbit and set its corpse on fire?

[JoeJ]

Did they kill the rabbit and set its corpse on fire?

I think we ate it.

[TeChameleon]

Wellp, one that I used during my brief tenure as Shadowrun GM had my players just about crawling the walls.

The setup was thusly:

They were sent into Chicago to try and find an abandoned bunker/hideaway. For those that don't know, in Shadowrun, Chicago is kind of a hellhole; it's known as 'Bug City' in-universe, after the massive invasion of otherworldly, demonic Insect Spirits. Between the Insect Spirits and the attempts to repel said Bugs, the city went from 'mostly thriving modern trade hub' to 'Fallout-style anarchic wasteland', complete with deadly radiation and huge bugs, although these bugs don't just kill/eat people, they also possess them and breed with them, although in this case, it's more 'breed' in the xenomorph sense than anything more traditional.

The PCs had prepared as best they could, getting demonic-insect repellent and a wide variety of tools, and after a bit of legwork, found their way into the tunnel system near where they thought the hideaway would be.

Naturally, since their GM is kind of a **** , they promptly blundered into a nest of Ant Spirits. Or rather, past said nest, and didn't realize it until they would have to go further to get out than to just keep going. On the far side of the nest, they found one tunnel that had been rather emphatically blocked off... by the Bugs themselves.

After burning through the barricade, the entirety of the Ant Hive went insane, committing suicide on the traps the Runners had left in waves to try and get at the opening. The Runners, not seeing a lot of other options, started to explore, since they had about half an hour/forty five minutes before the bugs managed to punch through the multi-layered traps they'd left along the tunnels leading to the hideaway.

The first thing they see on the other side of the barricade is an almost entirely empty room decorated from floor to ceiling in demonic bug innards, like somebody had dropped the Bugs into a huge (sideways) blender with no lid. Other than that, there was a bunch of loose paper piled in 'drifts' around the edges of the room, and that was about it.

A bit creeped out, they started to explore further in. The 'paperdrifts' were omnipresent, to the point that the Runners were basically wading in some spots. And they gradually became aware that there were rustlings that they weren't causing.

As they explored, they found evidence that the hideaway had been a hidden school for the magically-active children of the wealthy and powerful Initiates of the New Dawn (semi-)secret society, and that it had fallen a month or so after the Bug City incident began.

Aaaand then they found the main assembly hall, with scattered toys, drifted paper, a few other bits of detritus of a typical elementary-school-age assembly room, along with the huge ritual circle in the centre of it, the small corpses of what was presumably the entire student body of the school inside the circle (around a hundred of them), and the flensed corpse of the guy that had presumably cast the ritual just outside the circle.

It took a while before they were even willing to go into the room

They didn't actually find much in the assembly hall at that point, but when they regrouped at the main entrance doors, the biggest guy in the group (an Orc Medico) nearly got knocked off his feet as a huge slash appeared across the back of his armour. Just cosmetic damage- the finish was ruined, basically- but it was enough to rather seriously unnerve the team.

Now more than a little nervous, the group headed back to the opening they had come in, ready to fight off the Bugs if they broke in. Instead, the Bugs finally broke through the last layer of traps... and sealed the opening up with a wall three times thicker than before.

Eventually, after some extremely cautious searching that yielded a few clues (including a room with 'DON'T BLINK!' scrawled all over the place in a variety of substances, including blood), while the rustling intensified and there were occasional chlidlike giggles, they ended up back in the assembly hall, where a good perception check spotted a strip of kevlar that matched what had been torn off the back of the medico's armour... sticking out of one of the paper drifts.

Paranoia achieved. The team's archery sniper/face carefully brushed a bit of the paper away with an arrow subbing in for a ten-foot pole, and, when she found dusty pink fur under it, opted to just shoot whatever was in the paper drift rather than mess with it, and freaked out when the arrow slapped into the pile, then just sort of stopped and fell to the floor, like it had hit something soft but not actually penetrable.

Charging up to the pile, she swatted the paper aside, and found... an old, apparently perfectly ordinary, pink teddy bear. Cue animalistic berserk terror (the archer/face was an Eagle shifter, which in Shadowrun meant that she was actually a bird that had achieved human level intelligence and shapeshifting abilities, not a human who could turn into a bird) that fluked into the thing's elemental weakness, destroying the teddy. This, in turn, freed the blood spirit that had been powering it, which promptly attacked and was equally promptly dispatched, although its shrieking appearance had somewhat unnerved the PCs, especially given that it was clearly connected to the ritually murdered children.

Cue the slowly dawning moment of realization as the PCs looked at the circle again and realized just how many there were in it, and how many toys there were just in the room they were in alone. Along with the rather unsettling realization (on their part) that Raggedy Anne was just like the Weeping Angels, in that neither could move while being watched

The rest of the dungeon was mostly attempts at capturing and disposing of the various homicidal toys, along with trying to figure out what happened, and rather less paranoid. But getting there was definitely fun

[dramatic flare]

Thing is, IRL, we can see glass. Also, what's holding up the glass walkway? Did someone cast an invisibility spell on it? Why would anyone do this?

We can see glass if there's light bouncing off of it, but this isn't always the case. In a semi lit tunnel with no direct lighting on the glass, it will not be visible. The glass would be anchored into the stone of the dungeon itself, and it's there because the creator of the tunnel liked the sense of vertigo suddenly walking out onto it gave his guests.

Spoiler: This, except you can't see the fixtures

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[Strigon]

We can see glass if there's light bouncing off of it, but this isn't always the case. In a semi lit tunnel with no direct lighting on the glass, it will not be visible. The glass would be anchored into the stone of the dungeon itself, and it's there because the creator of the tunnel liked the sense of vertigo suddenly walking out onto it gave his guests.

Spoiler: This, except you can't see the fixtures

Show

I think the bigger problem with this setup is anyone who's seen Indiana Jones is going to have a guess almost immediately.
I don't know how big the franchise is internationally, but 'round these parts the odds of someone having not seen it is essentially zero.

[goto124]

it's there because the creator of the tunnel liked the sense of vertigo suddenly walking out onto it gave his guests.

Spoiler: This, except you can't see the fixtures

Show

That reminds me.

[Zwiebelchen]

Here are two suggestions simply based on geometry:

- have a room with pillars coming up from a seemingly endless pit; with just enough spacing between them so that you have to jump from one pillar to the next to cross the room ... have the pillars in a grid so that there is more than one path for the adventurers to take... and yup; none of these pillars is an illusion. It was just a crazy architect that likes to jump ...

- have the dungeon full of secret doors that always lead to somewhere else in the dungeon (but is always an easily accessable place) and otherwise serve no purpose ... players will go nuts in trying to find a secret door that actually HAS a purpose

[BootStrapTommy]

My players are headed to a pretty chaotic place in a couple of sessions.

Needless to say, this is my favorite thread and much of its suggestions may find their way into an upcoming dungeon...

[MrStabby]

So I was thinking of something like this for my next dungeon.

[Surpriser]

So I was thinking of something like this for my next dungeon.

I recommend the "Halls of the Mad Mage" module (freely available for download).

One of my PCs managed to end up on the end of a rope like a ballon, falling towards the sky...

The simple suggestion that they create a map of the dungeon can lead to paranoia if you have previously used non-euclidean geometry or teleporting traps.

[MrStabby]

I recommend the "Halls of the Mad Mage" module (freely available for download).

One of my PCs managed to end up on the end of a rope like a ballon, falling towards the sky...

The simple suggestion that they create a map of the dungeon can lead to paranoia if you have previously used non-euclidean geometry or teleporting traps.

Heh. It seems like there are quite a few things in common between my plans and his.

My plan was to try and have the dungeon self contained but folded up on the inside surface of a Klein bottle, with occasional open topped rooms where you could see to the other side.

One thing I was nervous of messing with was things like endless staircases going up and down. My players would abuse them to create super-accelerated-slinky-cannons or similar to blow holes in the walls.

[Tarlek Flamehai]

One thing I was nervous of messing with was things like endless staircases going up and down. My players would abuse them to create super-accelerated-slinky-cannons or similar to blow holes in the walls.

Serious updraft, gale wind, up the stairs?

[LnGrrrR]

One thing I've done is to pass notes to people. "You feel strange... suddenly you put your hands to your mouth, and realize you don't have one. It is as if one was never there." The player roleplayed it wonderfully, and his fellow PCs were really freaked out that he suddenly stopped talking and began miming everything to them. It didn't help that he was a warlock who started fighting melee instead. Other notes might be something like, "You don't know the rogue exists, will exist, or has ever existed. Pretend he's not there." or "You hear a loud buzzing outside the room, and it sounds like it's getting closer," or "You feel the heat in this room, to the point where you are sweating. And it's getting hotter." Try to mix in things that sound like they could actually be "hidden info" from a DM.

[Surpriser]

One thing I was nervous of messing with was things like endless staircases going up and down. My players would abuse them to create super-accelerated-slinky-cannons or similar to blow holes in the walls.

You can alleviate this problem by having the stairs be narrow, rather flat and with sharp turns. Any projectile will simply not have the space to accelerate to meaningful speeds. Just as long as they don't pour down water and build a dam for free energy...

[MrStabby]

You can alleviate this problem by having the stairs be narrow, rather flat and with sharp turns. Any projectile will simply not have the space to accelerate to meaningful speeds. Just as long as they don't pour down water and build a dam for free energy...

Yeah, I have learned to never hand out decanters of endless water as loot.

[Strigon]

Yeah, I have learned to never hand out decanters of endless water as loot.

I've had rather the opposite experience; simply putting a decanter in a dungeon fills my players with fear for some strange reason

[goto124]

What, they don't try to loot it?

[SpoonR]

- have the dungeon full of secret doors that always lead to somewhere else in the dungeon (but is always an easily accessable place) and otherwise serve no purpose ... players will go nuts in trying to find a secret door that actually HAS a purpose

Have secret doors that really are shortcuts between roughly two pairs of rooms. Empty, calm, and unnaturally quick corridors. Make this part of the dungeon look like an abandoned mansion. Ballroom, kitchen, etc. Have lots of heavy but inexpensive knickknacks - candle holders, heavy piece of metal kinda sorta shaped like a hand crossbow. Put the BBEG in the center, he is immune to everything except certain of the items in the nearby rooms (BBEG is an egotistical hoarder, he keeps his bane close so no one else has them). Maybe require something to open the doors - token from a room maybe?
See how long it takes the players to realize it's a game of Kill Doctor Lucky (or Clue, if you want).

Have one or more rooms with furniture, wall hangings, table with food, etc. The food on the kitchen table looks to still be steaming hot, everything looks like the owners stepped out seconds before the PCs arrived. Outside the room, have a few piles that are mostly ash, with some recognizable bits of bone. If they touch anything, the stasis goes away and hundreds of years of decay catch up - nothing but random useless scraps left. Bonus points if they find a magic item (now broken) that caused this, and later see others that look fine - maybe on standby waiting for some event.

Make everything insectoid. Orcs with compound eyes. Cows that look like giant aphids, etc.

[JAL_1138]

Enemy corpses disappear the instant no one is observing them, even if everyone just blinks at the same time. The bloodstains they left don't disappear. Sometimes there are drag-marks that lead to the nearest flat wall.