RangerWickett
Legend
Because my year and a half-long campaign came to an end recently, and it is too close to the end of my college career to make starting a new campaign feasible, I ran a one-shot tonight. It's final exams time, but I don't have any, so I went to a lot of effort to set up a fun, easy game for my gamer friends to come. I provided characters, provided food, and provided myself with a chance to test out some flavorful rules I'm considering using in my next campaign.
I haven't run a true dungeon crawl, with traps and monsters, for a long time, so I decided to have a little fun, build a tomb, and have a nice dungeon romp. I learned afew lessons from this, and I'd like to share them.
1. It's still possible to scare 7th level characters with pit traps. When that pit trap involves a rotating floor that seals you off from your friends, and plunges you forty feet down a razor-edged narrow pit, down to a bed of spikes. Thankfully the minotaur in the party was the one who fell prey to this, so I got to roll my 6d6+2d8+8 without guilt.
The pit trap was made even more fun because the dungeon above the trap was mostly looted, but the real treasure could only be reached by going down this pit, which apparently all previous adventurers had been smart enough not to fall prey to.
2. The Elements of Magic made a new tactic available to the PCs. I was having the PCs test run some of the rules for the new revised EOM (due out this weekend!), and when they ran afoul of a golem, they shaped a pit into the stone in front of it, then sealed it in before it was able to climb out.
3. The Expanded Psionics Handbook has some broken stuff. Namely, sonic attacks and burrowing power. I wanted to try out my brand new XPH which I got yesterday, so I let one player have a psion - a kineticist. With burrowing powers and sonic energy cones, the psion was able to wreak havoc in a narrow dungeon. Did you know that, in the XPH, sonic damage apparently ignores hardness. Nothing's quite as cool as standing behind a wall of force and manifesting a 5d6-5 cone of thunder into a charging swarm of ghouls, not only destroying all the ghouls, but shattering a cone-shaped section of the dungeon.
4. Bestow Curse as a contingent spell on a villain (You touched me? Okay, take -6 Wisdom) is very cool, especially when the villain is a ghoulish Orc in an Egypt-like tomb, and the cursed PC already only had an 8 Wisdom.
5. Want to hear about a cool trap? Imagine the diagram below represents a hallway. Each character equals 5 ft.
======*RW==|
| represents a door at the end of the hallway
R is a row of red tiles on the floor. When you touch the door, a wall of fire appears here, aimed inward so everyone between the wall of fire and the door takes heat damage.
W is a row of white tiles on the floor. When you touch the door, a specialized antimagic field appears here, filling just this area. No spells can target the wall of fire to dispel it, and it negates the fire resistance of anyone who steps through it.
* represents a wall of force, which goes up at the same time as the wall of fire and the antimagic wall.
You can't dispel the wall of fire, but the heat of the fire reaches you even through the antimagic field. And if you get heroic and try to jump through the wall of fire, you hit a wall. If you go through the door, you hit a really nasty room trap that ought to kill you.
A square room, 60 ft. across, twenty feet high, lined with gold and silver on the walls and ceiling. In the middle of the room, 30 ft. from the entrance, is a gold coffin covered with gems (this is the tomb of an ancient witch who specialized in antimagic, and they were coming to loot her stuff). The floor is sandy, and if anyone takes the effort to dig down a few inches, they find that there's no floor, just a wall of force over a huge pit. The only thing that's solid is a stone pedestal in the middle of the room, on which the coffin sits.
When you get within 10 ft. of the coffin, an antimagic field hits the room, and the door slams shut. Most parties will be relying on light spells at this level, so lights out, and without knowing why, you fall. The real floor is actually 30 ft. down, lined with spikes. A round after the antimagic field hits, the spikes mechanically retract into the floor, and a huge mechanism of whirling, scything blades emerges from the walls in the 'basement.' It's basically a mechanical version of blade barrier, chopping you to pieces. A minute later, the blades stop and retract, the antimagic field ends, and new sand is sprayed onto the floor.
Again, the Minotaur led the way, heading bravely into the room while everyone else tried to find a way around the heat from the wall of fire. He managed a Reflex save to jump just as the antimagic field hit, so he was able to leap the last few feet and hit the stone pedestal. While the blades whirred, he climbed onto the coffin and just began stabbing into it. There wasn't actually anyone in the coffin, of course (if you're trying to keep an immortal evil hidden, you brick them into a wall, not put them in a dungeon with a door), but the Minotaur hacked the thing to pieces nicely.
Meanwhile, the rest of the group was locked out with the wall of fire, and were only able to survive thanks to the psionicist being able to manifest through the wall. A cone of sonic energy blasted the door down and ruined much of the mechanism (ignores hardness!), and another cone shattered the walls of the tunnel so they could walk around the wall of force.
6. Psionics-Magic Transparency? A good thing.
I haven't run a true dungeon crawl, with traps and monsters, for a long time, so I decided to have a little fun, build a tomb, and have a nice dungeon romp. I learned afew lessons from this, and I'd like to share them.
1. It's still possible to scare 7th level characters with pit traps. When that pit trap involves a rotating floor that seals you off from your friends, and plunges you forty feet down a razor-edged narrow pit, down to a bed of spikes. Thankfully the minotaur in the party was the one who fell prey to this, so I got to roll my 6d6+2d8+8 without guilt.
The pit trap was made even more fun because the dungeon above the trap was mostly looted, but the real treasure could only be reached by going down this pit, which apparently all previous adventurers had been smart enough not to fall prey to.
2. The Elements of Magic made a new tactic available to the PCs. I was having the PCs test run some of the rules for the new revised EOM (due out this weekend!), and when they ran afoul of a golem, they shaped a pit into the stone in front of it, then sealed it in before it was able to climb out.
3. The Expanded Psionics Handbook has some broken stuff. Namely, sonic attacks and burrowing power. I wanted to try out my brand new XPH which I got yesterday, so I let one player have a psion - a kineticist. With burrowing powers and sonic energy cones, the psion was able to wreak havoc in a narrow dungeon. Did you know that, in the XPH, sonic damage apparently ignores hardness. Nothing's quite as cool as standing behind a wall of force and manifesting a 5d6-5 cone of thunder into a charging swarm of ghouls, not only destroying all the ghouls, but shattering a cone-shaped section of the dungeon.
4. Bestow Curse as a contingent spell on a villain (You touched me? Okay, take -6 Wisdom) is very cool, especially when the villain is a ghoulish Orc in an Egypt-like tomb, and the cursed PC already only had an 8 Wisdom.
5. Want to hear about a cool trap? Imagine the diagram below represents a hallway. Each character equals 5 ft.
======*RW==|
| represents a door at the end of the hallway
R is a row of red tiles on the floor. When you touch the door, a wall of fire appears here, aimed inward so everyone between the wall of fire and the door takes heat damage.
W is a row of white tiles on the floor. When you touch the door, a specialized antimagic field appears here, filling just this area. No spells can target the wall of fire to dispel it, and it negates the fire resistance of anyone who steps through it.
* represents a wall of force, which goes up at the same time as the wall of fire and the antimagic wall.
You can't dispel the wall of fire, but the heat of the fire reaches you even through the antimagic field. And if you get heroic and try to jump through the wall of fire, you hit a wall. If you go through the door, you hit a really nasty room trap that ought to kill you.
A square room, 60 ft. across, twenty feet high, lined with gold and silver on the walls and ceiling. In the middle of the room, 30 ft. from the entrance, is a gold coffin covered with gems (this is the tomb of an ancient witch who specialized in antimagic, and they were coming to loot her stuff). The floor is sandy, and if anyone takes the effort to dig down a few inches, they find that there's no floor, just a wall of force over a huge pit. The only thing that's solid is a stone pedestal in the middle of the room, on which the coffin sits.
When you get within 10 ft. of the coffin, an antimagic field hits the room, and the door slams shut. Most parties will be relying on light spells at this level, so lights out, and without knowing why, you fall. The real floor is actually 30 ft. down, lined with spikes. A round after the antimagic field hits, the spikes mechanically retract into the floor, and a huge mechanism of whirling, scything blades emerges from the walls in the 'basement.' It's basically a mechanical version of blade barrier, chopping you to pieces. A minute later, the blades stop and retract, the antimagic field ends, and new sand is sprayed onto the floor.
Again, the Minotaur led the way, heading bravely into the room while everyone else tried to find a way around the heat from the wall of fire. He managed a Reflex save to jump just as the antimagic field hit, so he was able to leap the last few feet and hit the stone pedestal. While the blades whirred, he climbed onto the coffin and just began stabbing into it. There wasn't actually anyone in the coffin, of course (if you're trying to keep an immortal evil hidden, you brick them into a wall, not put them in a dungeon with a door), but the Minotaur hacked the thing to pieces nicely.
Meanwhile, the rest of the group was locked out with the wall of fire, and were only able to survive thanks to the psionicist being able to manifest through the wall. A cone of sonic energy blasted the door down and ruined much of the mechanism (ignores hardness!), and another cone shattered the walls of the tunnel so they could walk around the wall of force.
6. Psionics-Magic Transparency? A good thing.
