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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The_Gneech" data-source="post: 2347113" data-attributes="member: 6779">Inspired by <a href="http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=136878" target="_blank">this thread</a>, let's have some exciting adventure locales. Leave off the sewer scenario and the swamp stomp, the kobold caves, and the dragon's lair, just 'cause they've been done -- unless you have a really different twist to put on them. Instead, try for something exotic that will grab the group's attention. I'm not referring to overall settings, here, but a specific location that would make a good place to put an adventure or the climactic scene of one. It can be a single room, or a building, or even a situation (e.g., "riding on the back of a quarter-mile long flying turtle").I'll start with a locale that I must admit, I stole directly from a Robert E. Howard story, but which was so dang cool that I couldn't not use it.The Macabre GardenThis setting works best at 3rd - 5th level.In a remote valley stands a gleaming white tower, with no door, only a parapet at the top. In Howard's original story, it was inhabited by a winged humanoid of unearthly beauty, the last survivor of a prehuman alien race, who scooped off a caveman's mate and flew away with her. In my game, the tower was inhabited by a dragonkin sorcerer who kidnapped the party's wizard with the intention of draining her magical energies to fuel his crazed arcane experiments. The key is that the tower's inhabitant comes and goes via flight -- the only access to the tower is at the top level.In a 15' ring around the tower is a garden of ghostly pale white roses with long, needle-like thorns; the roses exude a sickeningly sweet odor and seem to quiver and sway without a breeze. If anyone enters this macabre garden, the roses suddenly thrash into a horrific animated state, wrapping themselves around any living thing, grappling them, and attacking them with a touch-attack Con drain -- the roses feed on blood! When the target's Con is reduced to zero, they die, drained completely by the roses, which stain a vivid red as they become engorged. (In my game, I used the "vampire rose" writeup from Tome of Horrors, which I suspect had its original inspiration from this same story. The party rogue met his end this way, due to Attacks of Opportunity from the roses as he charged past them to attempt to scale the tower wall. If only he'd put ranks into Tumble! In the Howard story, if I remember correctly, the caveman stampeded a herd of mastadons across the garden, crushing the vampire roses by sheer volume.)Obviously, this is considerably more interesting for a party that only has ground mobility, and therefore has to get past the roses and scale the tower wall. If you can bypass all that with a dimension door or a flying carpet, it's still a hazard to overcome but only a minor one.So ... your turn!   -The Gneech <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" /></blockquote>

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