What would GLaDOS build in your D&D world?

[The Kool]

So as the title hints, some time back one of my players invested in bestowing intelligence upon a Lyre of Building. By setting-established magickery, they placed the soul of a Bard into the item. A Bard with plenty of Perform: Lyre, as well as several appropriate Craft and Knowledge skills. So, presented with a Lyre of Building that can play itself indefinitely, which the players then proceed to lose... What would it build?

Sidenote: I already have established what it built in my world, and the players are slowly discovering the resultant megadungeon. I'm just curious to see what different minds come up with.

[liquidformat]

Can you give more information on said bard who's soul possesses the lyre? That would have a pretty big impact on what it would be building. For example a lecherous womanizing bard might build bathhouses for women, narcissistic bard might spend its time building statues of itself all over the world...

[BowStreetRunner]

My first reaction to this is that it's the fantasy version of V'Ger.

[Drakevarg]

So as the title hints, some time back one of my players invested in bestowing intelligence upon a Lyre of Building. By setting-established magickery, they placed the soul of a Bard into the item. A Bard with plenty of Perform: Lyre, as well as several appropriate Craft and Knowledge skills. So, presented with a Lyre of Building that can play itself indefinitely, which the players then proceed to lose... What would it build?

Sidenote: I already have established what it built in my world, and the players are slowly discovering the resultant megadungeon. I'm just curious to see what different minds come up with.

An ever-expanding glass citadel with impeccable acoustics, heavily themed around kaleidoscopes and windchimes. Pipes run through it in such a way that the wind approximates the playing of an organ. Music fills the endless halls and a constant shimmering rainbow cascade of light streams through it, even starlight is multiplied enough to effectively light the structure. An immortal musical instrument with the capacity to manifest its will as architecture?

Yeah, music made manifest.

[Malphegor]

The biggest concert hall in all the world. Seats that stretch to the sky, an economy just for the audience yo never stop listening, even as whilst they
sit in their chairs their bindings grow tighter and they can never leave

[unseenmage]

If the Lyre has True Creation at will as well the answers differ. Ladder to the moon, a planet, Dyson sphere.

But just with a stock LoB? Roads. Roads everywhere. All buildings are repaired and upgraded. All Underdark access points start getting air locked guard forts.

Good fences make good neighbors so border walls and fortifications spring up.

Underdark roads and aquifers and aqueducts.

Domed cities. Colosseums. The Thunderdome.

Mundane Rube Goldberg machines spanning vast areas the end result of which is inane but also epic, like the bard's signature carved into a rock face.

Extra layers of defenses blocking passage to dangerous entities. Dragon lairs and liche's tombs get extra traps and locks and beefed up doors.


As madness starts setting in or when the item is possessed or corrupted things could start getting real weird real fast.
Mundane structures that are really deathtraps, the movie The Cube, a hole to the center of the world. Disneyworld.

[liquidformat]

An ever-expanding glass citadel with impeccable acoustics, heavily themed around kaleidoscopes and windchimes. Pipes run through it in such a way that the wind approximates the playing of an organ. Music fills the endless halls and a constant shimmering rainbow cascade of light streams through it, even starlight is multiplied enough to effectively light the structure. An immortal musical instrument with the capacity to manifest its will as architecture?

Yeah, music made manifest.

I feel like anyone who enters would automatically be dazed...

[Troacctid]

Honestly, if I were inspired by Portal for something like this, I would just make the dungeon a massive Portal reference and make the players run through a series of insane test chambers full of experimental magic.

[Psyren]

I don't know your bard's personality, but GLaDOS is a sadist, or at the very least does not have much regard for human life while also having a compulsive need to run tests due to her core programming. So if you're going for something/someone like her, it would basically entail a boatload of traps of steadily increasing complexity.

[Endarire]

Apature Science or Apature MagiTek. For science. We do what we must. Because we can.

[The Kool]

An ever-expanding glass citadel with impeccable acoustics, heavily themed around kaleidoscopes and windchimes. Pipes run through it in such a way that the wind approximates the playing of an organ. Music fills the endless halls and a constant shimmering rainbow cascade of light streams through it, even starlight is multiplied enough to effectively light the structure. An immortal musical instrument with the capacity to manifest its will as architecture?

Yeah, music made manifest.

Oh. My god. Her canonical origins are repairing a city named Glassrock for a blue dragon with a god complex (well, it used to be Redrock before a wizard with a bigger complex dominated her for a few weeks, flying her around and paving all surrounding desert in glass for a mile in every direction). This fits so perfectly I'm stealing it. Not ever-expanding, but still her home citadel.

So, the megadungeon so far has been a massive city-like structure, a lot of bare rooms. But they're only just getting started. Last night, after about two years of poking at this dungeon, they finally opened the door to the next section. Each sector is themed around a plane, so I'm going to have a lot of fun with that. However, as they get deeper, they are in fact going to find at least one sector that is basically Portal (Mechanus, anyone?).