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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Whizbang Dustyboots" data-source="post: 5632776" data-attributes="member: 11760">I'm looking for some design help here, if you please.The player characters are currently exploring the megadungeon of my setting, Glangirn, the fallen dwarven fortress, and seeking a McGuffin. Shortly before reaching it, they're going to come across a long-presumed-NPC (as in, he's supposed to be dead and gone for decades now), magically trapped and (mostly) preserved.Now, the campaign has a very strong Tiamat theme and this dungeon is both a fallen dwarven fortress and, after that, the abode of a powerful green dragon for 500 years.My initial thought is that this NPC is trapped by a variant of the Sepia Snake Sigil, except that it's five different dragon heads (probably statuettes), each a different evil dragon color, spitting out their breath weapons, and that the combination of all five of them keeps the NPC trapped between them.(Well, almost: He gets to move one second per minute, but he's not able to physically move out of the spot he's in, and he's moving too slowly to cast any spells to free himself. Mostly this is just a bit of weirdness to make the player characters realize he's alive and so he'll be too weak to help them when freed -- he'll need to be fed and possibly have curative spells cast on him so that he recovers.)My initial thought is that the trap is disabled by using the other elements on each of the heads: the white head could be shut down by fire, for instance. But the group forked a long time ago, and this group in the dungeon doesn't have any wizards. (Those are several countries away.) So making it impossible to solve at level 5-6 isn't cool. (This group is a paladin/cleric, a barbarian/druid, a ranger and a fighter.)On the other hand, I don't want them to just smash the trap to free him. There either needs to be risk involved in them doing this (which isn't exciting, but it's a fallback) or it simply won't work. But what will, then?I don't need there to be a singular solution -- the fun is always in seeing clever ways players handle problems -- but I'd like some ideas on tweaks to this trap that would make it more workable with the group in the dungeon.Thanks in advance for your suggestions.</blockquote>

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