The most paranoia-inducing dungeon

[MrStabby]

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.

Oh, I like the drag marks to the nearest wall. That is a nice touch.

[Strigon]

What, they don't try to loot it?

I mean, they tried the first time.
When they identified it, they had the wizard - with abysmal strength - try it on its highest setting. he got knocked flat on his back, as per the rules, and it only got worse from there.

To make a long story short, not only did they almost die, but they had to abandon much of the other loot, and put a nearby village in very real danger before they managed to stop it. They consider the things death machines now, and refuse to have anything to do with them, on any setting.



Anyway, why stick to corpses? Maybe a creature runs from them, turns a corner, and disappears - simply leaving behind the same bloodstain mentioned before.

[Balain]

Not sure if this was mentioned. Last time we played, the floor the party was in was tiled with different colours. During the big fight in the room the party went out of their way to make sure they didn't touch any other coloured tiles. There was nothing special about the tiles

[Madbox]

Have an ancient tomb, but all of the booby traps have fallen apart from centuries of neglect. Make sure the players know this, with pressure plates that are stuck in place, trip wires rusted or rotted through, etc. Then have one or two highly visible traps in pristine condition, right before a room filled with treasure.

[Lord Torath]

I mean, they tried the first time.
When they identified it, they had the wizard - with abysmal strength - try it on its highest setting. he got knocked flat on his back, as per the rules, and it only got worse from there.

To make a long story short, not only did they almost die, but they had to abandon much of the other loot, and put a nearby village in very real danger before they managed to stop it. They consider the things death machines now, and refuse to have anything to do with them, on any setting.

Really? Don't they top out at 30 gallons per minute? That's only 4.01 cubic feet per minute. That's like a creek 4 feet wide and 6 inches deep moving at 2 feet per minute or about 1 inch every 2 seconds. A 10'x10' room would be 1 foot deep after about 25 minutes. Hardly the sort of thing that will threaten to fill a dungeon, let alone a village...

Regarding the Glass Walkway, a hole would be easily visible. The refraction at the corners would make it easy to see. If you rounded the edge to try to avoid that, you'd get light reflecting back at you. Making the whole thing out of permanent Walls of Force is an option, but Detect magic will show them.

[Strigon]

Really? Don't they top out at 30 gallons per minute?

Actually, it's 30 gallons per round.

An easy mistake to make, but one that makes a huge difference.

[goto124]

... that's DandDwiki...

[DCraw]

As you enter the cavern you see "Beware the tomb of Gai G'x" scrawled in blood above a stone doorway. The blood is glistening, still fresh. There are no other bloodstains or signs of what could have written it. What do you do?

[Strigon]

... that's DandDwiki...

Sorry, still not used to the etiquette on sources.
In any case, I checked my DMG to make sure; my copy says 30 gallons per round.

[goto124]

Oh, even the DMG book says per round?

Since one round is 6 seconds, and one minute is 60 seconds, leading to 10 rounds in one round...

The Decanter creates 300 gallons of water per minute!

[Lord Torath]

Which is still pretty slow as far as flooding a dungeon. Now it takes 2.5 minutes to raise the water level in a 10'x10' room one foot. So you can fill one 10' cube in 25 minutes, which is 250 rounds. I bet you can do a lot in 250 rounds. If your dungeon has 100 of those 10x10 squares, then after 1 hour, the water will be about 3 inches high. And 10,000 square feet is a pretty small dungeon. This all depends on your dungeon layout, of course.

Above ground, however, that's still a pretty small creek. That's 0.6684 cubic feet per second (40 cf/min). With our previous 4' x 6" creek, that's still an average current speed of 4 inches per second.

But I'm a math geek. I like digging this far into stuff. Your game may vary.

[Strigon]

Which is still pretty slow as far as flooding a dungeon. Now it takes 2.5 minutes to raise the water level in a 10'x10' room one foot. So you can fill one 10' cube in 25 minutes, which is 250 rounds. I bet you can do a lot in 250 rounds. If your dungeon has 100 of those 10x10 squares, then after 1 hour, the water will be about 3 inches high. And 10,000 square feet is a pretty small dungeon. This all depends on your dungeon layout, of course.

Above ground, however, that's still a pretty small creek. That's 0.6684 cubic feet per second (40 cf/min). With our previous 4' x 6" creek, that's still an average current speed of 4 inches per second.

But I'm a math geek. I like digging this far into stuff. Your game may vary.

No, I spent a lot of time figuring this out. I wasn't happy that my players made me do it mid-session, but meh; it was entertaining in the end.

Spoiler: Here's the full story

Show

So, there's this village under the shadow of a great mountain. Once it was a prosperous city, flourishing with trade goods under the watchful eye of a great leader, who had hired a group of dwarves to carve out a lavish home/fort for him in the mountain. For the better part of a century the village went on, growing richer and richer, until one day the leader died (he could've turned immortal any number of ways, but he felt he deserved rest in the afterlife.) Without the leader, the village slowly crumbled. Out of reverence, they left his great hall empty - over time this reverence turned to superstitions about the old castle in the mountain. These superstitions only grew stronger once a necromancer made his home there, unbeknownst to the townsfolk - though they could hear suspicious activity coming from it.

Cue the low-level party looking for loot. They head on in once hearing of the rumors, and have the options of going up or down. They choose down, toward the "well"; a decanter at the very bottom of the fort (so as to prevent water damage, and make for easy drainage in the event of an accident.) They find the decanter, read the instructions on the pedestal, and try it out. As mentioned earlier, the Wizard was knocked flat on his back, at which point I ask how he's holding it; whether it was pointed at anyone in particular. They then think this device can somehow kill them, and the (quite small) well is quite wet and filling fairly quickly. So, do they speak the command word? Do they pull the lever that activated the draining system? Nope; they drop it and run up the stairs, apparently not quite understanding the nature of the artifact since they thought it would eventually run out. So, they continue with the rest of the dungeon, kill the necromancer, and head back down to find that the first few floors had flooded (whenever we weren't in combat or something similar, I used actual time to estimate in-game time).

So they head to the top floor, and start making a plan. After quite some time, they blew a hole in the wall, and tried climbing down. Most of them botched their rolls and took rather nasty falling damage, so they still decided to ignore the problem and rest in the inn for a night. It was only the following morning, when they noticed the new waterfall at the very top of the mountain, that they decided to stop the problem before the mountain face weakened enough to crumble. After spending a lot of time digging a trench and walls around the village, they drove stakes into the mountain, tied themselves to the stakes, and opened the door to start lowering the water level. After a fair while, they trenches and walls held up, and the fort was drained enough for them to enter. They had the muscle swim down, grab the decanter, and take it back up to have it turned off.

They then buried it underground and never looked back.

[Lord Torath]

Ah, players. Never put anything past them!

Thanks for sharing!

[Strigon]

Ah, players. Never put anything past them!

Thanks for sharing!

No problem!

Anyway, back on track; the players enter what used to be a well-used structure, and find all of rooms have just a few too many torches in them - all burnt out, of course, but it looks like the inhabitants took incredible care in making sure there were no shadowed corners anywhere.
Of course, now it's all in utter darkness.

[Tohron]

Anyway, back on track; the players enter what used to be a well-used structure, and find all of rooms have just a few too many torches in them - all burnt out, of course, but it looks like the inhabitants took incredible care in making sure there were no shadowed corners anywhere.
Of course, now it's all in utter darkness.

Optional: Have the players face a number of zombies, giant spiders, and skeleton archers.

[MrStabby]

The hallways are empty and silent apart from one room.

On a throne in the middle of a huge mosaic is a single zombie quietly sobbing.

[BootStrapTommy]

Optional: Have the players face a number of zombies, giant spiders, and skeleton archers.

Bonus points if you add enemies that explode...

[goto124]

If the PCs toss fireballs and poison arrows at the sobbing zombie, do they take an alignment hit?

[MrStabby]

If the PCs toss fireballs and poison arrows at the sobbing zombie, do they take an alignment hit?

Just one more thing for them to be paranoid about.

[Keltest]

If the players stuff the sobbing zombie in a bag of holding for later use, will they take an alignment hit?

[BootStrapTommy]

This works from personal experience:

Put a powerful piece of ranged siege weaponry down a very long, very narrow, and very dark hallway.

[Strigon]

This works from personal experience:

Put a powerful piece of ranged siege weaponry down a very long, very narrow, and very dark hallway.

Add in health potions and consumable weapons to taste!

[goto124]

From a different thread:

Things I need to do: Have an NPC warn the party that one of them is a traitor. None of them is actually a traitor.

[dargman69]

Long, unremarkable hallways. Maybe lit by a few torches. Nothing else. No doors, no windows, no monsters, not even mold. Nothing. If that doesn't scare the living hell out of your players, you're doing something wrong.

[Elxir_Breauer]

For my group, the main thing that sets them on edge is being too polite, or anything described as your typical loot chest. At least one member of any given party has SOME means of lighting stuff on fire from range, specifically to fight Mimics. The sad part is, we've only ever encountered roughly 3 or 4 of them in the entire time we've been gaming together, 10+ years...

[Feddlefew]

Generate-as-they-go Dungeons, especially if you roll dice instead of using a dice roller.

BONUS: Encounters (including traps) appear on a 5-10 minute delay, and only when no on is observing the room.

[LnGrrrR]

In the first room with a trap, show ghosts of former adventurers being killed by a trap, replaying in a loop. Then in random rooms, put ghosts of other dead adventurers... which may or may not have been killed by traps in that room.

[Amaril]

My low-level group and I were exploring an ancient underground temple we unearthed. After a while, we found the entrance to the second sub-level, which was a fissure in the floor with a drop below. Climbing down, our torchlight immediately illuminated a big, scaly face with angry eyes and lots of teeth.

We all stood frozen like deer in the headlights, waiting for it all to end, but the face didn't move. It wasn't a dragon. It was a bronze statue of a dragon, painted in an extremely lifelike fashion.

[Feddlefew]

A room filled to 1/2 foot deep with humanoid teeth. Anyone who walks through them discovers bruises shaped like bite marks on their bodies (even in places the teeth didn't come in contact with) after the next time they sleep.

[EtuBrutus]

Traps that do something positive for the pc but they disabled it thinking it was harmful.