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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5271712" data-attributes="member: 4937">I think you have to be very careful with that.   Even a truly 'alien intelligence' must have some logic to it be considered intelligent, since intelligence only means 'having an appropriate response to the situation'.  It might not prioritize or think like us, but it must have some goal which is meaningful from the perspective of the intelligence.  As the DM, you are I think under some obligation to imagine how the alien intelligence thinks.   And a mad artificer that makes malevolent machines is itself potentially a logical explanation for dungeons of the 'lethal fun house' sort.  It's some attempt to explain the dungeon and, if it is a real explanation, creates certain contraints and narratives about the dungeon that would fulfill my requirements of good dungeon design.What I think you should avoid doing is making these things a trivial explanation that fronts for you true reasoning, namely, to create things that will challenge or kill the PC's.  Players are typically quite intelligent people, and if you make a dungeon where the real reason behind everything is some metagame consideration, don't expect them to buy into some explanation of 'alien intelligence' and 'mad artificers'.  They will know that the real dungeon designer is you, and they will see the dungeon in that light as a product of your desires and having no reality outside the metagame. That is not to say that metagame considerations shouldn't inform your design.  You still have to think to yourself, "How will the players use their powers when they encounter this situation?  Will the player character's abilities render this situation trivial or impossible, and am I ok with that, or do I need to rethink the design to decrease or increase the challenge?  What do my players enjoy in an encounter, and what is there skill level?"   But those questions ideally aren't the only ones that inform not only what appears in your dungeon but how it and in what context it appears.</blockquote>

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