iserith
Magic Wordsmith
As the protagonists make their way through the Ever-Changing Chaos of Limbo to find a remedy for the Curse of the Iron Shadow, a plane-spanning malady that robs the afflicted of creativity and drive, they find themselves swimming through the chaotic soup to the Temple of Change, home to the mysterious githzerai anarch known only as The Enlightened One.
An outer maze of shifting walls and maddening hallucinations eventually gives way to the inner maze, a strange series of corridors filled with spheres of chaotic essence haunted by angry yet colorful ghosts. Only by finding a way out of the inner maze can the protagonists enter the temple proper and meet The Enlightened One to seek his wisdom. If they cannot, they risk becoming angry ghosts themselves, forced to spend eternity in the maze.
(Map created by me on Roll20 using some assets designed by Gabriel Pickard. Each square is 2.5 ft., so a group of four squares is the typical 5-foot square for tactical measuring. This map is 36 x 42 squares in total.)
Look familiar? This will be a challenge my players (and their characters) will be soon facing in my Planescape campaign. Obviously I'm riffing on Pac-Man here as Limbo is weird and so am I. Because the dynamic lighting will be turned out, players will only be able to see to the limits their character can see given darkvision and/or light sources. So it's probably not obvious right away that this is a Pac-Man scenario. But I assume they'll figure it out pretty quickly.
The way I have it currently set up, the PCs appear as a group in the area between the two "T's" to the south where there are no spheres. The ghosts come out of the central tomb one at a time in initiative (so one comes out on Round 1, another on Round 2, etc.) and make their way toward the nearest PC. The PCs cannot harm the ghosts in any way unless they have a colored sphere in the their possession, so they better run if they don't have a colored sphere! These four spheres are more or less in the four corners of the map. Ghosts that are destroyed go into a time-out back in the tomb and reappear later.
The way out is to collect the four colored spheres, go to the tomb, and place them in the appropriate receptacles as shown south of the sarcophagi. PCs who do this are teleported into the Temple of Change.
Now, in addition to just giving you this silly idea for your own campaign, I'd like to brainstorm a particular portion of it with the community. The white spheres will disappear when a PC interacts with it - basically just moving through the square. I intend to have the players keep track of how many spheres they touch as a way of keeping score. The PC with the highest score when they escape the maze gets a prize of some kind. I think this will be fun for my players and will actually incentivize splitting up to get the highest score... which can only make ghost encounters that much more fun! So what do you think the prize should be? The PCs range from 6th to 8th level at this point in the game. Also, I'm toying with adding the floating fruit that moves around the map. Normally, those are just worth bonus points, but that seems kind of boring. What might the fruit do?
Which video games have provided inspiration for your own campaigns? How have the players interacted with them? How did it work out in play?
An outer maze of shifting walls and maddening hallucinations eventually gives way to the inner maze, a strange series of corridors filled with spheres of chaotic essence haunted by angry yet colorful ghosts. Only by finding a way out of the inner maze can the protagonists enter the temple proper and meet The Enlightened One to seek his wisdom. If they cannot, they risk becoming angry ghosts themselves, forced to spend eternity in the maze.
(Map created by me on Roll20 using some assets designed by Gabriel Pickard. Each square is 2.5 ft., so a group of four squares is the typical 5-foot square for tactical measuring. This map is 36 x 42 squares in total.)
Look familiar? This will be a challenge my players (and their characters) will be soon facing in my Planescape campaign. Obviously I'm riffing on Pac-Man here as Limbo is weird and so am I. Because the dynamic lighting will be turned out, players will only be able to see to the limits their character can see given darkvision and/or light sources. So it's probably not obvious right away that this is a Pac-Man scenario. But I assume they'll figure it out pretty quickly.
The way I have it currently set up, the PCs appear as a group in the area between the two "T's" to the south where there are no spheres. The ghosts come out of the central tomb one at a time in initiative (so one comes out on Round 1, another on Round 2, etc.) and make their way toward the nearest PC. The PCs cannot harm the ghosts in any way unless they have a colored sphere in the their possession, so they better run if they don't have a colored sphere! These four spheres are more or less in the four corners of the map. Ghosts that are destroyed go into a time-out back in the tomb and reappear later.
The way out is to collect the four colored spheres, go to the tomb, and place them in the appropriate receptacles as shown south of the sarcophagi. PCs who do this are teleported into the Temple of Change.
Now, in addition to just giving you this silly idea for your own campaign, I'd like to brainstorm a particular portion of it with the community. The white spheres will disappear when a PC interacts with it - basically just moving through the square. I intend to have the players keep track of how many spheres they touch as a way of keeping score. The PC with the highest score when they escape the maze gets a prize of some kind. I think this will be fun for my players and will actually incentivize splitting up to get the highest score... which can only make ghost encounters that much more fun! So what do you think the prize should be? The PCs range from 6th to 8th level at this point in the game. Also, I'm toying with adding the floating fruit that moves around the map. Normally, those are just worth bonus points, but that seems kind of boring. What might the fruit do?
Which video games have provided inspiration for your own campaigns? How have the players interacted with them? How did it work out in play?
