One Monster in a Huge Dungeon

[TheGogmagog]

Hmm, I like this idea. It could be a haunted mansion with trap door slides into the basement, (silence spell and obscuring mist so other partymembers don't know where the other group went). You could also have a long hall full of doors that have portals to other doors, so you have a zany sceene with characters running in and out of the doors.... Scooby Doobie Doo!

Actually we did have something like this in our last campaign. The opponent was a dread wraith, so it had good maneuverability advantages. The problem was the DM designed the mansion with 5' hallways, and the dread wraith was 10x10. It had about three hit and run attacks until it overestimated it's movement and had to stop within range for one round too long. A medium or small ghost (of scrappy doo!) with 5' walls would have been even worse.

 

[EvilGM]

This could work, but you'd have to use a fair amount of traps and puzzles or other interesting pseudo-encounters.

You could use varied, highly-detailed rooms/tunnels, perhaps with frequent secret doors, to make up for the lack of encounters as well. PCs can spend alot of time in huge rooms, especially libraries or any other place that contains writing or carvings.

Get some suitable background music going with appropriate sound effects sprinkled in to establish the atmosphere you're looking for.

You could have encounters with normal bats, rats, spiders, etc. You could play these as swarms or non-combat distractions.

You can definitely make this work, but it would take good execution to pull it off.

 

[DrNilesCrane]

The Keep was originally a novel by F. Paul Wilson. I haven't seen the film, but it doesn't seem that great. The book, however, was most excellent.

Definitely agree on the book (haven't seen the movie). It would make an interesting one-shot with more than one opponent (i.e. two factions of German soldiers in addition to the supernatural adversary).

I'd worry only one opponent would get dull unless the adversary has flunkies or traps (or the real adversary is the environment itself rather than a monster or person). If the adversary escaped frequently, it could get very frustrating for the PCs (at least it was for me, having played in that kind of senario before).

 

[Thomas Percy]

Such a solitary bad guy can have a way to respawn everytime the PCs killed him, eg. accelerated phylactery, vamiric regeneration, rejuvenetion etc. He can attack the PCs many times, every time employing different tactic in the different dungeon rooms containing combat spicing dungeon features.