Hit Me With Your Set Pieces!

Inspired by this thread, let's have some exciting adventure locales. Leave off the sewer scenario and the swamp stomp, the kobold caves, and the dragon's lair, just 'cause they've been done -- unless you have a really different twist to put on them. Instead, try for something exotic that will grab the group's attention. I'm not referring to overall settings, here, but a specific location that would make a good place to put an adventure or the climactic scene of one. It can be a single room, or a building, or even a situation (e.g., "riding on the back of a quarter-mile long flying turtle").

I'll start with a locale that I must admit, I stole directly from a Robert E. Howard story, but which was so dang cool that I couldn't not use it.

The Macabre Garden
This setting works best at 3rd - 5th level.

In a remote valley stands a gleaming white tower, with no door, only a parapet at the top. In Howard's original story, it was inhabited by a winged humanoid of unearthly beauty, the last survivor of a prehuman alien race, who scooped off a caveman's mate and flew away with her. In my game, the tower was inhabited by a dragonkin sorcerer who kidnapped the party's wizard with the intention of draining her magical energies to fuel his crazed arcane experiments. The key is that the tower's inhabitant comes and goes via flight -- the only access to the tower is at the top level.

In a 15' ring around the tower is a garden of ghostly pale white roses with long, needle-like thorns; the roses exude a sickeningly sweet odor and seem to quiver and sway without a breeze. If anyone enters this macabre garden, the roses suddenly thrash into a horrific animated state, wrapping themselves around any living thing, grappling them, and attacking them with a touch-attack Con drain -- the roses feed on blood! When the target's Con is reduced to zero, they die, drained completely by the roses, which stain a vivid red as they become engorged. (In my game, I used the "vampire rose" writeup from Tome of Horrors, which I suspect had its original inspiration from this same story. The party rogue met his end this way, due to Attacks of Opportunity from the roses as he charged past them to attempt to scale the tower wall. If only he'd put ranks into Tumble! In the Howard story, if I remember correctly, the caveman stampeded a herd of mastadons across the garden, crushing the vampire roses by sheer volume.)

Obviously, this is considerably more interesting for a party that only has ground mobility, and therefore has to get past the roses and scale the tower wall. If you can bypass all that with a dimension door or a flying carpet, it's still a hazard to overcome but only a minor one.

So ... your turn!

-The Gneech

This thread might help :

http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=51956

This garden really remember me Zodiac Warrior ( i'm not sure if the name is right because i know the name only in portuguese). When Saint Seiya is going to meet Ares (Saga)

der_kluge said:

This thread might help :

Click to expand...

Or this one:

http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=42357

Yup, those threads are cool indeed! Nevertheless, I was hoping for some new stuff -- I'm greedy!

Lessee, how's this: a goblin/kobold warren in the side of a sheer cliff face, with narrow ledges connected by ladders -- either to assault or defend, it's a problem!

-The Gneech

Hmmm... a couple I can recall off the top of my head...

Imagine a typical "big main throne room". Now add a river of vile black goo running down the middle. It can be whatever icky substance you like; in my case it was a river of pure, liquid evil. The room's main schtick is it has a distance distortion effect on it -- every round, the DM randomly generates how much each square on the battle map is worth. Some rounds, they're 5' squares. Some rounds, they're 20' squares. Some rounds they are 50' squares. Sometimes they're 100' or 500'. One minute you're standing right next to an opponent. Then without warning, you're 500' away from him. Suddenly, those "long" range fireballs have some use! BBEG is a spellcaster, probably a lich, with a bunch of summoned help (flying critters, elementals, etc.).

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In an alien or hellish landscape, imagine a fortress that also serves as a bridge over a wide chasm. Four bridge-like spans hold up the central building over the chasm itself. The fortress is guarded by "hellborn sorcerers" or other spellcasters with a lot of firepower (wands, staves, etc.) and able to fly. Helping out on the ground are a bunch of kytons as well as chain golems and, oh, let's say advanced fiendish hook horrors. Add a nest of fiendish giant wasps clinging to the underside of the fortress and you've got yourself some fun!

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A rolling fortress (ala the one from Hellbound, "Field of Nettles" Planescape adventure) with all sorts of towers manned by minor demons -- each tower has a device that hurls sonic-substituted fireballs, as well as ballistae. The other defenders are whatever you like; in my case it was a force of lawful (and evil) formains allied with a bunch of chaotic (and evil) slaad psychic warriors, led by some bone devils and a suped up babau demon. Yeah, it was ebony and ivory working together in perfect harmony...

More ideas

Atop an ice floe (or in a large iceberg).
Cold environment damage, balance checks (or the swimming rules), and lots of fun with fire spells...including the ultimate timed escape, as the wizard casts wall of flame and starts melting the floe in two, leaving the PC's the small half.
Large monsters can swim under the floe and tip it for added fun.

A Pueblo/Ansazi style cliff dwelling is perfect for desert-dwelling lizard men.

Army ants form themselves into hollow balls and float across rivers. Giant ants could do the same trick with oceans. Formians might try this stunt with the Astral plane. Try hunting the queen ant/formian in a dungeon made of her own subjects.

A ship's graveyard, like the Sargasso Sea. Maybe the crews turned to cannibalism and will murder the adventurers for their meat. Maybe the crews turned to cannibalism, died anyway, and are now very hungry ghouls.
Maybe something in the water eats the crew before they have time to get hungry...

A dire badger cete.
The tunnel of a purple worm.

The 3 best I've used in the recent past:

#1) An island. A simple, no frills tropical/temperate island. Oh, BTW, the party had been captured by Large Felinoid interdimensional raiders (from another prime-material plane) who wanted to HUNT them for sport, so they stripped them naked and scattered their equipment all over the island before releasing them with a 24 hour head start.

Think Predator + Naked Prey/Surviving the Game.

That party reached 3rd level before they got off the island, 5th before they had 1 magic item apiece.

#2) An abandoned keep in the desert. The party is chased into the keep by a large force intent on taking their NPC charges capive- its the only "safe" spot for miles around. The exterior of the keep was nothing special, but the interior design of the keep was based on those gigantic termite mounds of Africa...it decended deep into the earth for a variety of reasons. The party CANNOT escape the besieging force- they are surrounded- but they discover that there is a back way out...via a subterranean river. To get there, they must get past the various giant arthropods that have taken the keep's upper levels, some adventurers who have gone mad because they're lost in the lower levels, and the multitude of undead who guard the escape route beyond the keep's lowest level of construction. Oh, there's also an assassin in the midst of the NPCs, allied with the besieging force outside the keep.

3) While it was used in a superhero campaign set in 1900, my adaptation of Scaramanga's (Assassin from Man with the Golden Gun) Chinese Island stronghold was great fun for the players to traipse through.

BTW- there are LOTS of great strongholds/setups in James Bond movies.

One I played: A lich queens stronghold inside of a giant enchanted clocktower... fight took place in the midst of the workings of it. Plenty of nasty stuff to jump/push into or fall off. The nastier suprises were:

The chimes - switched some mechanism at the start of the fight. Random buffs/debuffs every couple of rounds...

The workings were still spinning around, meaning you got relocated fairly frequently. Possibly into the path of...

The pendulum - if it struck you, then you got hit by a targeted greater dispel, followed up with an electric orb. As well as the impact of the thing.

The White Plaza

The central square of Hydebarad City is a massive area, raised above ground level, and accessible by stairs at numerous points (think the structure of a Mesoamerican pyramid, only less steep, and very broad and flat). Designed to be accessible during the entire year, there is a large landing a quarter of the way up all the stairs, that becomes the effective ground level for the floating deckings that are affixed to the main streets during the monsoon, when the city floods. Although designed for excellent drainage, during some of the fiercest monsoons, the plaza can still be covered in water up to a foot deep, especially if debris and litter should clog the drainage pipes.

The square can be covered by an enormous canvas marquee, which is shielded from the winds by magical wards, partially protecting those beneath from the elements during the Monsoon Festival, the largest celebration on the Republic's calender.


So you have a city where the streets are replaced by canals with narrow wooden walkways, shackled to the ground beneath, all converging on a partially flooded central square, in a ferocious storm. During the biggest public party of the year.