Creative Dungeon Elements

[pukunui]

Whoa. Sounds tricky to wrap your around (but in a totally good way). I like the bit with the gardens and the basil vs cockatrices. Nice touch.

One that I quite like that was suggested to me elsewhere: an empty fountain with two buttons. Press the "up" button and water starts flowing (and a magical trinket appears under the water). Press the "down" button while the fountain is empty, and a wraith appears.


I was just watching Labyrinth with my daughter, and there are plenty of fun ideas in that movie (not the least of which is the Escher-esque bit near the end). There's also the tunnel with the "cleaner" which turns out to be a machine being driven by some goblins. That could be kind of fun.

Those little guys that pop out and rearrange the flagstones whenever Sarah puts a mark somewhere could infuriate the players. LOL.

The big metal gate with the big metal mech warrior thing in the goblin city could be fun too.

Also the talking statue heads that tell you you're going the wrong way, and the guards with the logic puzzle (one is always lying, the other always tells the truth).

 

[Savage Wombat]

I plan to have a castle with a secret Jacquaying variant - all the mirrors in the place connect to each other through a dungeon of mirrored rooms, providing the PCs with alternate routes once this is discovered.

 

[GMMichael]

I think the book Dungeonscape, one of the last books of 3e, had various suggestions of exotic dungeons. Like walls made of slime, etc etc.

+1. Dungeonscape was a great book. Rich Burlew, its co-author, is a great writer.

This isn't a creative element, but a recommendation on how to use creative elements:

They must make sense.

A little consistency goes a long way. For example: D&D Next's Mines of Madness adventure. There's a purple worm outside the beginning of the adventure. I played the adventure at 3rd level. 1) A purple worm doesn't make sense, ever. 2) Even if it did, somehow, make sense; wouldn't a purple worm eat a party of 3rd-level adventurers as a snack, and then eat the rest of the enemies, already in the dungeon, as well? A purple worm is cool and crazy. But not consistent, in the least.

So to add something creative to your dungeon, set it up first. Why is the dungeon there, and what was its designer thinking?

After that's settled, you can add your creative element. Let's say, the dungeon is an actual dungeon, quite extensive, and sitting under the ruins of a castle. Not creative. But the previous dungeon keeper make a grievous mistake: he imprisoned a geomancer in the deepest, darkest cell. And the he failed to grant that geomancer due process.

This is getting interesting.

The geomancer died in his cell, in the middle of a dark, evil ritual. After all, if you've been abandoned, that gives you plenty of time to perform blood rites. Now the dungeon is cursed by an earth-soul, meaning any wall can come alive at any time, to do anything.

A little more interesting.

But you still need to make sense. So maybe the supernatural wall-events occur more frequently near the site of the ritual. Above ground, characters think they see a ripple in the stonework. Further down, stones start to shift underfoot.

Add some consistency: no sane person is going to live in a place like this...unless he's a geomancer. So populate your dungeon accordingly. No giant vermin are allowed, unless proper amounts of food-chain are present. Maybe, just maybe, you have skeletons that aren't animated by evil; they're animated by elemental spirits, making them more like elementals than undead.

And finally, your creative final encounter. There's a skeleton in the deepest, darkest corner cell. IF the heroes can get to him, they'll see the panels of the cell slowly flowing around the skeleton in a sort of animated, stone armor. The soil flows out of the floor, and up through the skeleton as though it were blood. But getting to the end-boss isn't easy, you've got to fight your way through animated cell doors, chains and shackles, and really difficult traps (since they're built on magic, not mechanisms) just to get to the source of the curse.

By the way, destroying the geomancer doesn't end the curse. He can just re-form somewhere else. You must find a way to shed sunlight into the darkest cell, so he'll see the light of heaven, and be able to escape on his own.

Consistent. Reasonable. And hopefully, creative.

 

[pukunui]

I plan to have a castle with a secret Jacquaying variant - all the mirrors in the place connect to each other through a dungeon of mirrored rooms, providing the PCs with alternate routes once this is discovered.

That sounds like fun!

They must make sense.

Oh yes. Stuff that doesn't make sense within the context of the game world just drives me nuts. I probably spend too much time agonizing over little details that the players won't ever notice, though.

Oh and yes, that purple worm was just totally random and out of place.