Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mad_Jack" data-source="post: 9052762" data-attributes="member: 6750306">I've actually been getting back into working on it, or at least coming up with ideas - a lot faster than I can draw them. So... when the dwarven settlement that constitutes my "dungeon(s)" collapsed into the earth, it shattered into chunks, some more whole than others - it looks a lot like a partially-assembled 3D jigsaw puzzle of an M.C. Escher picture, with all the still-missing parts filled in with solid stone. There are parts that are fairly large and fully intact pieces of a single layer (or two or three), some that ended up settling on their side or even upside down, and there are others that look more like a geological core sample - small in area but many layers deep. Because the settlement inside the mountain had a river that flowed down the slope of the outside from the plateau at the top, the dwarves cleverly used small carved channels through the rock walls inside the place to provide running water to the entire complex. Now that it looks like your little cousin's big box of LEGOs, some random sections have become flooded because those "pipes" either shattered and released all the river water or allowed the seawater that flowed over the ruins (and that eventually became the swamp) to funnel in. Narratively, this means that although most of the 500-odd dwarves were crushed or otherwise died of injuries, a number of them also either drowned or were suffocated when they became trapped and their air ran out.One of those "core-sample" sections is going to contain some living quarters on the upper levels, and a mine level or possibly two on the bottom. The lowest level is going to be partially flooded. In the living quarters, the party may find the diary of a young girl, who's last entry tells of her excitement at the prospect of her father bringing her and her siblings down to the mine to bring their mother (the supervisor of that lowest mine level) her lunch at her office.When the party reaches that mostly-collapsed and partially flooded level, they'll discover that the 10-ft tall corridors are all flooded - the water in this section is almost 20-ft deep - but that the small section of the collapsed mine area they can reach (A on the map, with its 30-ft ceiling) has a limited amount of breathable air in it.(Hastily-sketched map)[ATTACH=full]288665[/ATTACH] Across the corridor from the mine entrance is Maeveena's office (B) - there's a long set of stairs carved out of the stone parallel to the corridor, rising up 20 feet to the open non-flooded area outside her office. When the party gets near Maeveena's office, they discover she's still there...Maeveena is a special kind of banshee - being immaterial, she can materialize anywhere within 60 feet of (M) as a move action, and attacks by pummeling a character for two attacks (dealing necrotic damage).She has a legendary action - at the start of her turn she lets loose a scream of rage and pain so hot that it actually causes the water around her to boil in a 30-ft radius, and which refreshes on a 3 or less on1D6... It also suppresses any waterbreathing magic the party may have until the end of the round. Characters in the water take damage and must make a DC 20 CON saving throw or suffer a level of exhaustion as they struggle to keep from drowning, and steam fills the entire area until the end of the next turn (the whole area becomes heavily obscured, and Maeveena is considered to be invisible). The party can give themselves a bit of respite by retreating into the collapsed mine section, as Maeveena and her powers can't quite reach them there, but there's only a limited amount of air there.Maeveena isn't so much a monster encounter as an environmental hazard - defeating her in combat is absolutely doing it "the hard way". The party is meant to eventually talk her down and convince her to pass on to the next world.Each time she screams, the wall of her office begins to crack a little bit more, and there's a cumulative 20% chance each time that the wall will suddenly crumble, revealing the reason for Maeveena's rage and despair - the well-preserved bones of her and her family, who became trapped in her office when the corridor outside it collapsed. When the wall to her office collapses, Maeveena will spend three rounds simply staring at their bodies, shrieking and crying in rage and frustration - clearly her current undead status is the result of a mother's desperate and ultimately futile determination to hold out and keep her family alive until help arrived.The party can try to use that time (and the information they hopefully uncovered while exploring her family's living quarters above) to try to convince her to stop attacking, making a DC 20 Persuasion check each round... (If they fail by more than 5, she starts attacking again, and the DC increases to 30, and by 5 each failed check afterward. If they continue to attack her, they're in for one hell of a fight...) Maeveena, in life, was a kind, caring person and a devoted mother, and once she's convinced to stop attacking she can be convinced (after an additional series of successful Persuasion checks) that it would be best for her family for her to let go of her inconsolable rage and grief and join them in the afterlife.Now I just need to map out all the rest of that particular chunk, probably eight or ten rooms on each of the six or seven housing/workspace/otherstuff levels and then the first mine level (and some other random bits of the bottom level reachable by other ways down...  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f644.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":rolleyes:" title="Roll eyes    :rolleyes:"  data-smilie="11"data-shortname=":rolleyes:" /> <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /></blockquote>

Verification