White Plume Mountain -- the slippery room solution?

[Henry]

Levitate was my simplest answer - levitate, and someone either pushes you across with a long pole or similar, or possibly even telekinesis (if a 9th level wizard is present).

 

[Umbran]

Okay, so have the strongest party member grab the halfling and wind up. . .

You know, if that halfling doesn't have adamantium adamantine bones, he's gonna have a hard day...

And nobody tosses a dwarf!

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

Another solution: ever skip a flat rock across the water?

Okay, so have the strongest party member grab the halfling and wind up. . .

Actually, in several 1st edition campaigns, that was our preferred method of trap-finding.

 

[Henry]

A thought just occurred to me: If Rob Kuntz (as Robilar) has ever explored the Plume, he probably just hauled the giant crab's body into the room, shoved him in, and used that as a bridge or cover for the pit of super-tetanus.

Alternately, just diverted the flow and filled the pit with water, and swam over.

 

[Eridanis]

We played through White Plume (updated to 3.5) last year. I don't remember the exact process, but it did involve two immovable rods, some rope, and our halfling rogue making her way on the walls with her slippers of spider climbing. I also recall the rogue (who is played with the verve and world outlook of a kender) sliding across the room like a hockey puck, just for fun, once we'd safely figured out the way across.

 

[MerricB]

Get a rope and a 12' long plank. Tie yourself to the rope. Get the rest of your friends to hold the other end of the rope. Jump over the first pit while holding the plank and use it to surf across... until you reach the other pit at which point the rope stops you. Put the plank over the pit and walk across.

Well, actually, my group's solution involved a rope and surfing on charred ghoul bodies, and getting supertetanus from the second pit. But they might have used my idea if they thought of it.

Cheers!

 

[Quasqueton]

Interesting. Some of the solutions shouldn’t have actually worked, according to the module.

The Frictionless Room. The strips labeled A are five-foot-wide open pits. They are ten feet deep and the bottoms are lined with rusty razor-like blades. Anyone falling in will take 1-12 hit points of damage and will contract instant super-tetanus and die in 2-5 rounds unless they save vs. poison (cure disease will destroy the infection).

The walls, ceiling and floor of area B are covered with a substance that is totally 100% frictionless. This substance extends to cover the ceiling and walls around the razor pits. Anything that alights on this silvery surface will move in the direction of its last horizontal impetus, bouncing off the walls (if it strikes them) like a billiard ball, until it slides into a razor pit. It is impossible to stand on the surface, for even a heartbeat would unbalance the stander enough to send his feet out from under him. The slipstuff will be totally unaffected by any force, magical or otherwise. It is completely inert.

Magic-users will find that fly, levitate, jump, dimension door, blink and teleport spells will not work in this room. The dotted line at C is the illusion of a west wall: the actual west wall is ten feet farther. Objects hitting the false wall will pass through and apparently disappear. This tends to foil schemes for attaching ropes to the west wall from afar.

The trick here is to get a rope strung through this room and fastened securely at both ends. Once this is done, a party can pull themselves across, regardless of the surface. A clever party may even be able to come up with other methods. Ingenuity is required.

So:

One group had an archer with arrows designed to pentrate a wall of stone or wood, grappling hook arrows and the like with rope. He shot one long way down the room and then secured the rope on his side and they climbed.

With such specialty arrows, this would probably work to secure the rope, but would an arrow support the weight of an adventurer? And I don’t see how the illusionary wall on the other side of the room would have foiled a “scheme for attaching ropes to the west wall from afar” after maybe the first attempt (if then – an extra 10’ wouldn’t keep an arrow from hitting the wall.

Another group pryed off the copper trap in the hallway before the slippery room and used that to cover up the pits and createa walk way.

According to the copper trap text, the copper plates “cannot be damaged or removed.” So this shouldn’t work.

My last group did it the hard way (balance check, jump check, balance check...) I think 3 of the 5 were close to death by the end of it and they only lived becasue the room was a lot less lethal as written in the new update.

How does one balance on a surface that “is impossible to stand on”? Most DMs with the AD&D1 rules would say such is impossible (as the text says). With the D&D3 rules, shouldn’t the Balance DC be in the epic range?

Ours involved heavy rope, a potion of levitate, and the classic 10ft pole.

Levitate does not work in this room.

Our eventual solution involved a large number of iron spikes hammered into the floor, creating a hand-over-hand system to cross the floor, and two doors (stolen from elsewhere into the dungeon), used to bridge the pits (the doors were secured in place with more spikes).

This might work. Would take a long time, but I can see it working.

I seem to recall that we somehow secured planks or doors or something over the pits and crossed that way.

Similar to how my group got across.

First time through it with one group, one of the spellcasters had a spell (I think it was called rainburst) that made it rain. He used the spell to wash the slippery areas off and the party jumped the pits.

”The slipstuff will be totally unaffected by any force, magical or otherwise.”

On another occasion, the mage cast wall of stone and we used it as a impromptu bridge across the entire room.

This could work.

On another occasion, the cleric used stone shape to make bridges and the party used rope relays to keep from slipping.

This could work.

Our group used variations of the methods P-cat mentions [slide across with a 10' pole; jam it down into the pit itself and use the momentum to polevault up and over].

The pits are 10’ deep, so jamming a 10’ pole into the pit wouldn’t really let someone “pole vault over” it. My Players discussed and dismissed this method for this very reason.

Levitate was my simplest answer - levitate, and someone either pushes you across with a long pole or similar, or possibly even telekinesis

Levitate does not work in this room.

I don't remember the exact process, but it did involve two immovable rods, some rope, and our halfling rogue making her way on the walls with her slippers of spider climbing.

I think this would probably work, but it requires a set of unusual magic items (immovable rods).

Well, actually, my group's solution involved a rope and surfing on charred ghoul bodies, and getting supertetanus from the second pit.

Sort of what my group did (minus the ghoul bodies).

So, of 13 solutions used, 4 should not have worked (according to the explicit text), 3 would only work with a very charitable DM, and 6 would work by the text and most DMs.

The group I recently ran through this took a long time (well over an hour) to figure something out. They took down the door (8’x8’) to the room and laid it across the first pit, making a bridge. This got them across the first obstacle. Not coming up with anything for the next pit (they had no other doors), the fighter, ranger, and cleric just slid across the floor and fell into the far pit. They each made their poison saves (they had no idea how deadly those blades were, and that they were coated with disease, not poison). The halfling sorcerer used two unseen servants and his pseudo dragon familiar to slowly move across the floor, to the other pit, where the fighter and ranger lifted him from one side to the other without falling in.

To get back across, they used all the flotsam of the dungeon – kayaks, dead monsters, another door – to fill in the pits.

******

Now, a follow-up question: Was this a fun room to experience? Was it fun spending a lot of time figuring out how to get across a room as gimmicked and restricted as this was? If you experienced this many years ago, when you were younger, do you think it would be fun now?

Quasqueton

 

[Squire James]

Door surfing. I ruled that the razor blades were not powerful enough to cut through those thick dungeon doors, since the doors required a roll to even open. If I remember correctly, one of the PC's threw a grappling hook into the far door as they were riding across the room on the other door, and they jerked the rope taut to cause the door they were on the "jump" the inch or so needed not to fall into a pit. They weren't being terribly precise, but their idea was crazy enough that I decided the trapmakers never accounted for it and thus it would probably work.

My players normally explore 100% of a every dungeon they come across, probably because they've missed a lot of treasure not doing so in the past. They explored White Plume Mountain until they found the one weapon they were tasked to look for, and left promptly. I guess they were more annoyed by the traps than challenged by them (though I note one player liked the fact that his physical skills were actually useful for a change).

 

[Crothian]

So:
With such specialty arrows, this would probably work to secure the rope, but would an arrow support the weight of an adventurer? And I don’t see how the illusionary wall on the other side of the room would have foiled a “scheme for attaching ropes to the west wall from afar” after maybe the first attempt (if then – an extra 10’ wouldn’t keep an arrow from hitting the wall.

They are specially made arrows designed for just this type of thing, so yes they would support the character.

According to the copper trap text, the copper plates “cannot be damaged or removed.” So this shouldn’t work.

Which is just silly, but in that event they just would have carved up the walls and gotten blocks of stone. Same effect.

How does one balance on a surface that “is impossible to stand on”? Most DMs with the AD&D1 rules would say such is impossible (as the text says). With the D&D3 rules, shouldn’t the Balance DC be in the epic range?

Standing on and balancing on are two different things. And with items that allow one to get +10 to balance it is not that hard and I have no idea what epic range means. The DC according to WotC is 20.

 

[kenobi65]

Now, a follow-up question: Was this a fun room to experience? Was it fun spending a lot of time figuring out how to get across a room as gimmicked and restricted as this was? If you experienced this many years ago, when you were younger, do you think it would be fun now?

I think it was fun at the time. I'd only been playing D&D for a couple of months, and this was actually the very first time I'd ever played with a "real" group (I'd been playing mostly with my next-door neighbor, doing solo stuff), and the first time I'd ever seen a situation that you had to really think and plan your way through, rather than just applying brute force.

I think we spent at least an hour figuring out how to get past the room (maybe even more), but the whole planning and brainstorming was fun.

And, yeah, it was when I was younger (24 years ago, when I was 17). I think it'd still be fun today. I DMed one of my groups through a 3E update of it a couple of years ago (downloaded the update from EN World, in fact), and they had a lot of fun. Though, I think they had a lot easier time of it in that room, thanks to the rogue and his slippers of spider climbing.