Help with Salamander encounters!

[Nebulous]

The PCs are newly 11th level and descending into the bowels of a castle where they will meet various salamanders, fire elementals, lava brutes and firebats flowing from a breach to the Plane of Fire.

I don't need help with the stats or monsters, the MB does all of that pretty much instantly. I have quite a few maps already made up, and the final battle is on one of the old WotC fold out maps against a fire giant Forgepriest.

What i'm looking for are interesting terrain hooks, traps, dead ends, puzzles, monster personalities and other ways to spice up what would otherwise be straightforward combat. Think of the castle as the lower holds of a regular castle that have been melted and warped by prolonged contact (100 years +) to the Plane of Fire from a breached artifact.

Keep in mind that through at least two of these encounters the PCs will probably have DR 10 against fire, which will make the threats trivial.

Lava itself i'm thinking inflicts 10 +1d10 damage when touched or at the start of your turn, or a flat 20 damage.

Oh, and one last thing, the PCs need the willing kiss of a salamander to power up one of their magic weapons. So i have a good bit going on, i just wanted to expand on it before this weekend. It never hurts to drum up ideas around here

 

[Salamandyr]

Well, if they want me to kiss them, they better bring flowers and do some sweet talking.

 

[Celebrim]

I can't really tell the edition from the description, but I'm assuming 4th which is going to prevent you from giving you much crunch advice.

Ok, so this area has been in prolong contact with the plain of fire. The result is that its basically eat most of the rock out of some areas, with the result that some floors and walls are basically pretty thin brittle sheets of blackened and cracked glass. A character without alot of knowledge or rock or with poor perception can break through the floor in places and find themselves landing on top hot lava crusts or even plunging directly onto pools of hot lava (not in to, lava is to dense). This is dangerous in itself, but it will also cause rapid influxes of superheated air into the cooler upper chambers pushing things back (as per a gust of wind) from the hole and doing heat damage to those left in the upper chamber.

Also some walls are seriously unstable and easily shattered, releasing flows of hot rock (think peanut butter rather than water) into rooms, slowly filling up and burying squares next to the disturbance.

Prior hot flows have tunneled through the rock and then emptied, leaving large tubes and ramps cutting across the area at random. Some are basically horizontal, but others are nearly vertical (and everything in between). Dungeon inhabitants that can fly use these passages to make odd connections between rooms. This is an especially nasty trick if you have regenerating creatures (or a centrally placed fire priest) such that you can do hit and runs on the players and room to room running battles where the foes have a manueverability advantage.

If the dungeon inhabitants are magically capable, they may have created permenent walls of fire within the dungeon (or shooting jets/sheets of flame may be the natural result of contact with the elemental plane of fire). These can be used to give the inhabitants additional manueverability advantages, which can be enhanced if you rule (hee hee, being DM is fun) that such sheets of flame are opaque to non-elementals, but partially translucent to elemental creatures (who afterall live in a world of flame, not air, and hense must see through fire to have distance vision).

For a more dramatic, dynamic environment, you have have these sheets and jets activate randomly. A little more tactical though is to have them 'faithful' geysers of flame that go off at predictable intervals, but that's harder to run.

Straight forward traps like glyphs of warding (depending on the system, dispel magic traps in hostile enviroments are often interesting) and fire traps on makeshift doorways/iron gates are also possibilities. While we are talking classics here, moving heated iron grills/walls to crush the party or heard them toward some hotter hazard could be nice.

Intersections of this environment with the outside can be interesting. For example, a lower section of the dungeon enviroment might intersect the local water table, resuting in geysers of steam and a network of rooms permentally filled with steam and mist at various temperatures. These chambers while possessing dangers of their own, might be impentrable to or at least very dangerous to flame inhabitants so the intelligent party can use them as a stronghold to retreat to - particularly if the can elimenate or reach a diplomatic agreement with the steam loving creatures (steam mephit? steam loving marid(?); a CG/CN marid or djinn with a fire template could be interesteing.) that dwell their.

Likewise, at other points of intersection there might be coal seam, whose slow burning fire fills an air with choking smoke and sulpherous fumes (somewhere you might have a pool of hot sulpheric acid, which is always fun).

More when I have more time to think.

 

[Nebulous]

Great ideas Celebrim. Yeah, it's 4e.

I especially like:

1) Stone floor glassified with a river of lava beneath. That's gonna hurt!
2) Opaque/Transparent flames (especially devastating for the salamander archers)
3) Mixed noxious fumes with interaction from other elemental sources.
4) Firebats attacking and retreating en masse through vertical lava tubes.

 

[Theo R Cwithin]

Lots of areas will be glassified, and therefore sharp and pointy: slows down movement and/or deals damage when moving through.

Wildlife from the Plane of Fire come through the planar portal: not necessarily dangerous, but maybe the occasional swarm of wasps, tangle of thoqqua larvae, "fire moose" with young, or whatnot slips into the complex. Such do fire damage (or fire-related poison damage?) in addition to normal damage, but may or may not be interested in a fight.

Powerful fire planars might use molten iron/metal for doors: say the command word, and the thing flows out of the way, then seals up again behind.

A pyroclastic flow of fiery, glassy, gritty, toxic ash is a great way to clear out a tunnel. Even more so if it's controlled in some fashion.

Power/healing/arcane energy sources: captive water elementals are tortured/slowly vaporized to provide steam power to the area. Alternatively, this might be some horrible source of healing or arcane energy for the fire elementals.