Design Challenge: Utilizing Fantastic Terrain

[Rechan]

I love fantastic terrain. But I find I have a problem with it.

See, I'll create an encounter, with monsters and the layouts and everything. Then I say, "Hey self, you know what would be good? Fantastic terrain." But when I look, the stuff doesn't fit my encounter. I'd have to change the map, change the monsters, change the encounter's PLACE to really utilize this or that.

So it occurs to me that really, when designing an encounter, the Fantastic Terrain should be chosen first. That way you can design the layout of the map, and the monsters for that map, to compliment the fantastic terrain.

But I'm not as good at coming up with encounter layouts that facilitate the fantastic terrain, where the FT is the basis for the map. Mirror Crystal, for instance, are really cool, but I blank at building an encounter around them.

Thus, I suggest this challenge:

Design some encounters (at least COME UP WITH THE IDEA) utilizing various Fantastic Terrain (or really cool mundane terrain) elements. The encounter doesn't have to be ABOUT that element, but the element certainly does play a part in the "feel" of the encounter.

One doesn't need to draw out a map, or flesh out the monsters that go there. The single goal is to incorporate one (or more) terrain features (fantastic or mundane) in the encounter.

Where Is It (the encounter site).
What's the Terrain Element.
How is it laid out/how does it interact (and if need be, how does it WORK, if it's unique).

 

[FireLance]

Here's one that I used in a fairly recent game (late Nov or early Dec last year): a series of platforms (columns of rock, actually) 10 feet, 20 feet and 30 feet above the ground connected by ramps (I decided that moving up the ramps was like moving into difficult terrain because of the slope) and populated with flying monsters, artillery monsters and monsters with push/pull/slide powers.

Due to the placement of the ramps and the difficulty of moving up them, the (mostly landbound) party had to spend lots of movement to get from place to place, which prevented them from closing quickly with the artillery monsters. The flying monsters had a natural mobility advantage, and the push/pull/slide monsters threatened to maneuver PCs off the platforms and ramps, forcing them to both take falling damage and to start moving up the ramps from the bottom again.

A player in the campaign was nice enough to blog the session (with photos!) and if you would like to read it, here are the links: part one and part two. While you're there, check out the rest of his blog!

 

[Rechan]

That's really cool FireLance! Guess you didn't have a lot of Ranged Nuke PCs.

 

[FireLance]

That's really cool FireLance! Guess you didn't have a lot of Ranged Nuke PCs.

The PCs had some ranged support in the form of an invoker, a bow-wielding bard and a wild magic sorcerer. The other three PCs were more melee-oriented: a half-orc avenger, a barbarian and a sword-and-board fighter. The half-orc got good use out of his racial speed boost while running or charging, and the barbarian also had a pretty good charge attack, so those two PCs were fairly mobile. I also gave the PCs a way to boost their mobility during the adventure although they didn't use it much (see blog for details).

 

[Amaroq]

Moving locations are always fabulous:

One of our group's favorite encounters involved a downhill race on mine carts - complete with multiple paths of varying length, "switches" between different tracks that one might be able to Mage Hand into a different orientation, and the party sandwiched: Bad Guy With McGuffin in the lead, party chasing him, BBEG's minions and defense chasing the party.

Another memorable scene took place on a pirate airship, kept aloft by captive air elementals, with pirates acrobatically using the rigging above us. The DM broke it down into several encounters depending on what our short-term goals were (e.g., the battle to get to the helm), and allowed encounter powers to reset but no healing surges during the "brief rest" between encounters.

Another great series of battles took place in, essentially, a Howl's Moving Castle knock-off - eloquently described and made fresh by our DM, and populated with an "owner" who was clearly wayyyy too buff for us to take on. Battles tended to involve us vs constructs and animated inanimate objects, with the added difficulty of trying to keep the battles quiet so as not to alert the owner ... or to slip out of the rooms, find hiding places, etc, if he came to investigate.

I think the "trick" is to let go of the inner critic that says "this has been done" or "this is cliche", and instead embrace the done-before, cliche thing, and make it your own. Put your own signature touches to it, and know that your players will put their signature touches into it, too.

 

[Dr_Ruminahui]

I've done a few, with varying degrees of success.

First was an abondoned grain silo full of rats with a slide going from the top to the bottom. Didn't play much of a roll - the dwarf was the only one who tried to walk down it, the others simply used ropes.

Second was the group waterwalking over a bunch of zombies, then needing to dive down to unlock the door. It was pretty fun, though unfortunately I felt I railroaded the PCs a little, as they really wanted to figure a way around the door instead of diving into the murky water, and I didn't let them. Still, the fear of drowning (they were all used to 3rd ed. drowning, not the much less lethal 4th ed. system) and the reduced visibility made things quite tense.

Third was a rope bridge over a chasm (water at bottom, to keep falling damage level appropriate), but I suffered a moment of stupidity where I got the boss monster stuck on the bridge instead of having him try to cut the bridge. Still, it was essentially a 5ft wide corridor, which made things work differently than normal, and the fact that the parties light sources couldn't cover the whole bridge made things interesting.

Later, in the dwarven hold (captured by goblins) they freed a bunch of slaves from a rock crushing room, with conveyor belts and rollers and big cruching blocks. The party largely avoided the conveyor belts, so they didn't play too large of a role in the combat, though the wizard got dropped below zero HPs by being pushed into a set of rollers a few times.

Fleeing from the rock crushing room, the party fled down a huge set of gears, jumping from one gear to the next, and being chased by the goblins. I was hoping that the players would have fun pushing goblins off the gears, but our thunderwave wizard wasn't there that week, and the one other guy with a push power for some reason didn't use it until he was down on the ground. It was interesting, but not enough to justify the huge amount of prep work that went into it.

Most recently was a battle against a fire resistant solo where there were 5ft walkways with 5ft canals of burning oil in them - didn't do a lot of damage to the players, but enough to help the solo stay mobile and largely avoid flanking.

So, my experience with terrain has been mixed - I think I've had some good ideas, but for the most part they haven't had the effect that I felt they would. That said, I'm getting better at it - and part of it is that my group's playstyle is pretty conservative.

That said, I agree with the original poster's position that terrain is one of the first things one considers - each time I've chosen terrain, its for some thematic reason as much as a tactical one, and is most often the jumpin-off point for designing the encounter.

I should also note that I'm not a big fan of the more "fantastic" terrain, but prefer more mundane features. Its a matter of style - I tend to DM more of a "low fanatsy" game, and reserve the more overtly magical terrain for those specific circumstances which I find justify a more magical feel.

 

[Rechan]

I tend to DM more of a "low fanatsy" game, and reserve the more overtly magical terrain for those specific circumstances which I find justify a more magical feel.

I dunno. I would classify big clockwork/machinery to be fairly High Fantasy. Giant Gears/rock crushers/conveyer belts are not very Traditional Fantasy, but more towards Steampunk or "You got technology in my fantasy!"

 

[weem]

My last encounter found the PC's fighting inside a crater, up near the rim. The crater was 5 square blocks of city that vanished suddenly, a vacuum of force of which pulled them from the catacombs below and expelled them there.

Anyway, I had 4 levels of terrain connected by ramps (sloping debris). All around them buildings collapsed, falling into the crater (none close enough to hit them) which shook the ground. There were also small streams of sewage (step in and I rolled vs REF or fall prone) as well as fires (I used LED candles).

They fought members of an organization that had been hunting them with the help of a Wererat named "Xizitik" who I made 'large' and had a great jumping ability (so he moved between tiers pretty easily). He also had 2 powers that implemented forced movement (one I called "the Sparta Kick" for reasons I'm sure you can imagine).

Anyway, it was a blast - the players had a great time.

Here is a pic of my test setup (I didn't get a pic with their actual figs from the day we played, etc)...

 

[surfarcher]

Nice!

You know that soft, crumbly block foam florists use to set their flowers, etc in? Taht stuff is awesome for this kind of multi-level work. You can just cut it up to the dimensions desired with a knife and ruler. You can even go crazy and glue stuff to it (like textures from map tools, etc). You can join block with toothpicks... Really easy stuff to play with.

I've yet to find something easier and at's like $2 for a 3"x4"x8" block at the "Cheap as Chips" type stores.

 

[Dr_Ruminahui]

Yeah, my gear one likely would have been better if I had been able to construct something actually 3 dimentionaly... unfortunately, I'm not very mechanically inclined and I didn't think I could pull it off with a reasonable amount of effort.

As for gears being high or low fantasy... in my mind they seem low fantasy. 8) Plus, gears are very "dwarfy".

I guess what I meant is that I'm inclined to use "magic/technology as a tool" (portals to get places, huge gears to transmit power from a sluiceway to a rock crusher) but not really into "showy magic". But enough self-rationalising and this is dreadfully off topic.