Keys to Ethereal Portal

[Prince Atom]

Hi all,

I am currently designing an adventure in which the party discovers it must make contact with some elfs who are on the Ethereal Plane. I figure there is a portal to the Ethereal nearby, but I want to make it hard to get open.

My basic idea was to write a riddle describing the portal key which the heroes could find and decipher. The only problem is, I'm a n00b when it comes to portal keys. I always draw a complete blank when I try to think of one.

Does anybody have any advice or suggestions about coming up with these things? Any help at all would be appreciated.

Thanks!

TWK

 

[der_kluge]

I don't know if this will help, but here's something I ran a while back:


The party was on a demi-plane (but didn't realize it). To get from any one spot to another, all you had to do was basically envision it, walk a bit, and you'd get there. To the locals, the concept of "direction" meant absolutely nothing.

Anyway, there was a single way out - a portal that was keyed with a chill touch spell, IIRC. Anyway, only the "natives" to the place knew what that key was, but the "natives" were kept apart from these lizardmen who mistakenly made their way to the place eons ago. The "natives" were snakes that had a hivemind, like cranium rats. Individually, each was just a common snake; poisonous, but mundane. But when you got more and more of them together, they developed a collective conscious. The lizardmen knew from oral tradition that they should never keep more than a few snakes together in the same pot, or else bad things could happen. They just took it for granted at this point, and that's the way things where. None of them even questioned it anymore.

To get out, the PCs had to convince all the lizardmen to collect as many snakes as possible and then put them in a single place. Only once they had done that, the "snake" was able to speak to the PCs and tell them how to leave the place.

It took my players a couple of hours to figure that one out.

Don't know if it helps you or not.

 

[Oryan77]

I've used this site to get ideas for portal keys:

http://portalseeker.com/index.php

Remember that the key can be anything basically. Possessing items as keys to open a portal is the easiest, but emotions can be keys, gestures can be keys, spoken words can be keys, ect. I usually make mine up, but I use Portalseeker to get ideas and then tweak them to fit my taste.

Your riddle could be the key to open that portal.