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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jack7" data-source="post: 4564850" data-attributes="member: 54707">I designed a dungeon crawl one time (I'll put up a description of it elsewhere, in my Adventure's Thread) that included a moving or sweeping artifact that had been created by a seemingly long dead Wizard. The Wizard had an ancient reputation in history for being extremely ingenious, and powerful, but also for being cruel and evil.As the artifact moved through the dungeon anyone caught in it's path was transported either forwards or backwards in time (it operated on an oscillating, but patterned basis). Sometimes they were transported backwards to a time when the dungeon design was primitive, or unfinished, sometimes forwards to where it was far more complex in design. (It could not as a matter of it's normal operation transport anyone or anything back to a time before it was created.) In different eras the players would encounter different areas of the dungeon (because of what time period they encountered it), different creatures, treasures, furnishings, traps, puzzles, etc.Because of the nature of the artifact it existed in the dungeon at any and every era simultaneously, so that the players always were being moved around in time, and sometimes in space. The mission was to recover a rumored device that would allow the recovery of a True piece of the Cross which according to prophecy would allow Samarkand to stave off a coming invasion. The trouble was that the piece of the Cross, was according to the same prophecy, on another world and could not be recovered for another 600 years in any case. Nevertheless the prophecy also spoke of where to look for the piece of the Cross (the relic) and when the party was sent to that locale on an expedition they dug underground and into a set of catacombs that led into the "Tesseract" (or dungeon) of the time device. By the time they began to encounter the device and figured out it was sweeping them through time they began to realize how they could actually recover the artifact they were searching for.The real trick of course was to try and maneuver the device (or gain limited control of it) to try to take them to the time period of the Wizard to see what he was really like, and if he could help them locate the piece of the Cross and then return it to their own era to assist with the invasion against Samarkand. What they didn't know is that they kept re-encountering the Wizard over and over again in different guises at different times and places and forms in the dungeon because like the device he had created he was now in constant flux and existing simultaneously in every era of the dungeon as well. (The Elturgic magics he had used to create the device had inadvertently transformed him as well.) The dungeon itself had become his "time trap and time capsule." So in order to help the party get the piece of the Cross, he wanted them to help him regain control of the time device, so he could shut it down and finally die.Anyways, in that case, time travel was the way I got around the whole problem of the "crawl design" and how players were able to explore and re-explore the same place over and over again and have the dungeon itself in a constant state of change as well.</blockquote>

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