Do you put lairs inside of Dragons? Look what happened!

[demiurge1138]

Let's see... cool adventure locales, you say?

One of my favorites was an abandoned salt mine overrun by demons. The first big battle was on the mine-cart tracks, and the players used the cart to run over the scalamagdrion they were fighting. The final battle in that dungeon was in a processing plant that the demons had converted into a makeshift foundry, complete with conveyor belts with chopping blades, vats of molten metal, etc.

My favorite geographical feature from one of my games was the Sea of Bones. Basically, it had started as a normal, albeit large, graveyard, but soon became the battlefield in the struggle between the city-state of Termanna and hordes of gnolls. The ferocity of the battle, and gnoll sorcery, opened up portals to the Abyss and Hades, and about a hundred mile radius became no-man's land, filled with packs of ghouls and scavenging gnolls, as well as many, many other undead. Fun thing was, a semi-normal ecology had sprung up around goats, carrion birds, giant insects and other hardy scavengers. It felt wierd when Eberron came out a few months later and I read about the Mournland.

Demiurge out.

 

[Keeper of Secrets]

I once had a huge ice palace on an enormous frozen lake. The power of the ice and cold was tied to the wizard that owned the place. Once the wizard was slain, the whole thing quickly began to melt with the characters desperate to get out of the way of falling chunks of ice as the remaining cold based creatures that were still inside.

 

[rushlight]

Well, this isn't an adventure locale - but it is a moment like the one Crothian had.

So, PCs are looking for the Special Item of Doom. They track it back to a wizard who's been trapped in a cave for years. They enter the cave, only to find that the wizard is still alive - as a lich! So, they kill him and take his stuff. Among said stuff: Book of How to Become A Lich.

PC discussion follows. Cleric: "Burn it!" Wizard: "Keep it!"

Wizard wins. They take the book back to their keep, in the grand city - and forget about it. Eventually they make a serious enemy within the city and he's far beyond their ability to kill. But with some help, they Imprison him. Years pass (literally) and eventually they too are effectively Imprisoned (which was the final scene from the campaign!)

When they are finally extracted, 1500 years have passed and the world is in seriously bad shape. Now, you're probably way ahead of me, but the PCs didn't see it coming. Needless to say, once they figured out who caused such destruction (including the downfall of the kingdom which they had defended previously) the Wizard was quite upset. It seems the baddie got un-Imprisoned and went looking for the PCs at their keep. No one was home, since they themselves were Imprisoned. So he helped himself to some loot - including a Book of How to Become A Lich. So he did.

That second campaign ended last year, and a third was begun. The players are *still* dealing with that lich. I don't think the Wizard will ever live that down.

 

[Sarellion]

You are a bad bad RBDM