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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jkusters" data-source="post: 4682655" data-attributes="member: 16895">(Hey, if you're playing in my "Forbidden Valley" game, scram. Open spoilers below...)Help! I've been terribly blocked in my adventure design for my regular game. I made the choice to postpone running the game (it would have been tonight) in the hopes of getting my act together and providing my players something better than a randomly generated dungeon with random encounters. My players are used to more involved storylines and dungeons that make sense and have a sense of story. After beating my head against the wall for a couple of days, I was reminded that there are communities of DMs out on them intarwebs, and thought perhaps some of you might have some feedback that could jump-start my creativity again.(For what it's worth, the system is True20, but I'm not looking for rules-specific advice.)I've been setting up the campaign to a tipping point, which is now upon the characters. The village they've used as a base is under threat from an approaching monstrous (to them) army, there's no way to retreat to safety, and the only place that is defensible within reasonable marching distance is an ancient keep that is said to be protected by (high level) monsters. The party's job currently is to explore and make that keep safe for the villagers to take refuge in. Thousands of years ago, the keep was a castle of a human kingdom in the forbidden valley, then after the kingdom fell, became a keep that protected a small human outpost from the encroaching hordes. About a two hundred years before my campaign began, the last member of the organization that kept the keep running left to deal with a reported incursion only to fall prey to an ambush. The keep has since been taken over by a variety of non-humanoid creatures.I'm designing the keep as five levels, each level roughly corresponding to one of the five "rooms" of the "five room dungeon" paradigm. The first level was easy to put together, and ran well. Featuring a battleground between a tribe of "ratlings" and some giant beetles, it gave the players a sense of the age of the keep, the state of it's repair, and introduced both some challenges and the fact that there is something intelligent around which may be controlling things. And they're right. There is a disembodied intelligence magically housed within the keep that has kept watch and tried to keep the place safe for the "return" of its rightful owners. (Which will be my players' party once they complete the story.)I'm stuck at the second level. I have some limited design constraints regarding the floor plan, and I want to make this level one of intellectual challenge rather than combat challenge (which was a large component of the first level). I know this level will feature the soldier's barracks, the main kitchens, the "common room" where people from the nearby settlement could gather in times of danger, and quarters for the domestic staff. (Higher levels will include the royal quarters and presentation rooms, the armory, and the "nerve center" of the keep.) I had thought of making the level a "gauntlet" that channeled the players' characters through a single path (with some side rooms) where they would face various traps and puzzles, invented by the guardian intelligence and constructed by non-intelligent creatures under his subtle control, but this "story" need didn't sit well with my "background" need of making the level realistic to its construction purpose. Besides, my players' characters would gleefully spend time concentrating on the roadblocks and totally ignoring the obvious path.So, I'm asking, what would you create for your players in this kind of a situation? How have you populated a dungeon level with traps and tricks and done so without "railroading" the characters down a single path? I want to reveal some of the nature of the guardian intelligence (that it definitely *is* intelligent, that it can exert influence on the minds of simple creatures, and seems to be intent on keeping the players' characters out of the higher levels it inhabits) but do so in a more subtle way than having low-level monsters jerking around the floor in a possessed-zombie like manner. I'm not looking to have my problem solved, but more to have the creative block dissolved and my usual creative juices start flowing again...My inability to provide a quality experience for my players is just so infuriating!!!</blockquote>

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