RangerWickett
Legend
My campaign is coming to an end in a few weeks, and one of the players has been itching for a while to have a good dungeon crawl, with maps and traps and puzzles and monsters. The campaign has had a fair bit of role-playing in the form of scheming and politicking, and the climax will probably involve a lot of that too. But I've got a Macguffin the party needs in order for their schemes to succeed, and that Macguffin is in
The Consequence
A key premise of the campaign has been interacting with Kelma, a magic system involving stone tablets engraved with the words of a god of truth and eternity. These tablets create miracles, ranging from 'this granary will be free of vermin' to 'people can become priests of god X by doing thing Y, after which they will be granted the ability to cast spells A, B, and C." The civilization is built upon the rules these tablets establish, and the villain is a queen who is able to create these, and is trying to remove some of the few constraints left that are keeping her from becoming a tyrant.
Importantly, this god's words cannot be false. And over the years, more than few attempts to create these kelma stones have resulted in contradictory powers. Like if you made a tablet granting priests of the god of misfortune the ability to curse those who offend them with lice they cannot get rid of for a week, and then that person entered the granary above that cannot have vermin in it, there would be some hard to predict consequence to try to prevent the conflict. What typically ends up happening is that someone or something ends up glitching into an extradimensional dungeon, originally devised by the goddess of laws as a hell for those who egregiously broke rules.
The party already visited the Consequence once early in the campaign (they'd heisted a kelma stone by putting it in a bag of holding, which led to another kelma stone having some of the parameters of its powers not being properly defined, so the whole party got shunted).
The vibe there was akin to going 'off map' in a video game, and finding things that broke the physics engine. A lake floated in the air, waterfalls cascading into a bottomless void. Pieces of temples whose priests committed heresy hung like platforming puzzles. Insects grew immense, and in turn tiny birds had the strength of giants. Swarms of vermin banished from granaries would spawn and respawn in the same spot every five minutes. Some monsters had their precise location undefined and so would always glitch to a new spot if you targeted them directly, but could be hurt if you attacked them blind or used area effect damage. Damage to terrain would reset after a minute.
They managed to figure out a way to shunt themselves back home, but now they need to return on purpose.
Gods and Mortals
A decade ago a heretical sect of the god of mercy was banished to the Consequence (because they started to believe that the best way to spare people from death was to turn eveyrone into ghouls). The party has dealt with elements of this sect twice already, but they know the undead high priest survives somewhere in the Consequence. And the previous king's champion who was sent to defeat him vanished in the Consequence with a singular badge of office - the Mortal Lance. If the party can retrieve it, and destroy the lich, one of them will be able to claim the lance and become immune to kelma, which they need if they're going to outmaneuver the queen.
And so with that preamble, what sorts of weird stuff should be in this dungeon? The party is 6th level:
An ancestral guardian barbarian who is the queen's former lover.
A cat person conman copper merchant turned paladin of the god of fire and forges.
An alchemist who cobbles together fragments of kelma to create unintended effects.
A face-shifting ranger whose whole village was turned into formless horrors when a bit of kelma went awry.
A desert nomad psychic who is learning how to meddle with the plain meaning of words, convincing reality around him to redefine things in order to subvert the laws of kelma.
I'm thinking obviously a fair number of undead, led by a lich priest. Some perilous pathways that are easily navigable by things that don't need to breathe, but which living interlopers will have to be clever to bypass.
There's been some pseudo-Egyptian vibes with giant scarab beetles and sandstorms. But the party previously befriended one of the 'tiny birds with giant strength,' who might help them fight bugs that are bigger than they're supposed to be. Maybe I could have a crushing ceiling trap akin to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. In EN Publishing's Monstrous Menagerie II, I wrote the entries for giant ants and for a gargantuan undead spider called a vaknid, so I could use those.
I could scatter bits of broken kelma as, like, scrolls for the alchemist to wield some magic more powerful than is normally available. But likewise they'd find damaged tablets that create dangerous energy blasts or whatever, creating environmental threats for other battles.
Certainly some of the ranger's family should be here in monstrous form - and I could include clues around the dungeon that it's possible to cure them by combining different bits of kelma.
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I would love suggestions to design a dungeon with these ideas. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
The Consequence
A key premise of the campaign has been interacting with Kelma, a magic system involving stone tablets engraved with the words of a god of truth and eternity. These tablets create miracles, ranging from 'this granary will be free of vermin' to 'people can become priests of god X by doing thing Y, after which they will be granted the ability to cast spells A, B, and C." The civilization is built upon the rules these tablets establish, and the villain is a queen who is able to create these, and is trying to remove some of the few constraints left that are keeping her from becoming a tyrant.
Importantly, this god's words cannot be false. And over the years, more than few attempts to create these kelma stones have resulted in contradictory powers. Like if you made a tablet granting priests of the god of misfortune the ability to curse those who offend them with lice they cannot get rid of for a week, and then that person entered the granary above that cannot have vermin in it, there would be some hard to predict consequence to try to prevent the conflict. What typically ends up happening is that someone or something ends up glitching into an extradimensional dungeon, originally devised by the goddess of laws as a hell for those who egregiously broke rules.
The party already visited the Consequence once early in the campaign (they'd heisted a kelma stone by putting it in a bag of holding, which led to another kelma stone having some of the parameters of its powers not being properly defined, so the whole party got shunted).
The vibe there was akin to going 'off map' in a video game, and finding things that broke the physics engine. A lake floated in the air, waterfalls cascading into a bottomless void. Pieces of temples whose priests committed heresy hung like platforming puzzles. Insects grew immense, and in turn tiny birds had the strength of giants. Swarms of vermin banished from granaries would spawn and respawn in the same spot every five minutes. Some monsters had their precise location undefined and so would always glitch to a new spot if you targeted them directly, but could be hurt if you attacked them blind or used area effect damage. Damage to terrain would reset after a minute.
They managed to figure out a way to shunt themselves back home, but now they need to return on purpose.
Gods and Mortals
A decade ago a heretical sect of the god of mercy was banished to the Consequence (because they started to believe that the best way to spare people from death was to turn eveyrone into ghouls). The party has dealt with elements of this sect twice already, but they know the undead high priest survives somewhere in the Consequence. And the previous king's champion who was sent to defeat him vanished in the Consequence with a singular badge of office - the Mortal Lance. If the party can retrieve it, and destroy the lich, one of them will be able to claim the lance and become immune to kelma, which they need if they're going to outmaneuver the queen.
And so with that preamble, what sorts of weird stuff should be in this dungeon? The party is 6th level:
An ancestral guardian barbarian who is the queen's former lover.
A cat person conman copper merchant turned paladin of the god of fire and forges.
An alchemist who cobbles together fragments of kelma to create unintended effects.
A face-shifting ranger whose whole village was turned into formless horrors when a bit of kelma went awry.
A desert nomad psychic who is learning how to meddle with the plain meaning of words, convincing reality around him to redefine things in order to subvert the laws of kelma.
I'm thinking obviously a fair number of undead, led by a lich priest. Some perilous pathways that are easily navigable by things that don't need to breathe, but which living interlopers will have to be clever to bypass.
There's been some pseudo-Egyptian vibes with giant scarab beetles and sandstorms. But the party previously befriended one of the 'tiny birds with giant strength,' who might help them fight bugs that are bigger than they're supposed to be. Maybe I could have a crushing ceiling trap akin to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. In EN Publishing's Monstrous Menagerie II, I wrote the entries for giant ants and for a gargantuan undead spider called a vaknid, so I could use those.
I could scatter bits of broken kelma as, like, scrolls for the alchemist to wield some magic more powerful than is normally available. But likewise they'd find damaged tablets that create dangerous energy blasts or whatever, creating environmental threats for other battles.
Certainly some of the ranger's family should be here in monstrous form - and I could include clues around the dungeon that it's possible to cure them by combining different bits of kelma.
---
I would love suggestions to design a dungeon with these ideas. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
