The last obstacles before the big fat treasure

[Allegro]

I’m building out a sandbox game and I’m looking for interesting vault concepts for players to crack. I’m trying to limit the number of big monsters or safes at the end of the mini-dungeons. For example, a broken flying carpet takes the PCs to the hidden location of the treasure. The carpet is damaged and is malfunctioning and will barrel roll on its way to the target. If riderless the carpet returns to the take off spot. The PCs can overcome it by passing an insane ride checks, tying themselves to the carpet with a rope can help the ride checks, using sovereign glue is auto success. I’m sure the PCs can come up with a few other solutions. Any other ideas for last obstacles?

 

[Amaroq]

Hmm. Our DM had an NPC steal something of extreme value from us, and lock it in a vault recently.

He made it much scarier by making the location of the vault an un-scryable zone. We have a planeshifter, our plan was for her to teleport in, grab the item, and teleport out, but not being able to scry made us wonder if she'd be able to teleport, and what if she could teleport in but not out ..

I kid you not, we came up with better ideas for the protections on that vault than he did!

Magical defenses:
No scry.
No teleport-in.
No teleport-out.
Anti-magic-field.
Time distortion field.
- Time passes slower inside than out.

Triggers:
Entering vault triggers alarms to notify the owner.
Entering vault triggers some form of in-vault trap:
- Poison gas (lethal or KO)
- Fire
Entering vault triggers some form of in-vault defense:
- Constructs which come to life and attack
- Undead guardians

Physical protections:
Too heavy to move
Too thick to drill through
No way to unlock door from inside.
No air inside.
Nothing inside: the vault we knew about was a decoy.
- But still trapped up the wazoo, of course

As we'd wound up planning for pretty much all of those cases, the defenses he had for it had all of us sitting on edge, thinking

"This is easy .. too easy .."

It was the best DM reverse psychology, as we did all of the work and all of the tension building while he just laughed.

All the way until we made it back to our home base - which we discovered had been invaded by evil while we'd been invading evil's home base, turnabout being fair play! At least we caught 'em in the act and got a satisfactory battle out of it!