Down the Rabbit Hole Campaign Ideas?

[Albinobear]

I am running a campaign that has the PC's going through a roller coaster of tropes and cliches. The next step in their adventure is supposed to be inspired by things like Alice in Wonderland. By inspired I don't mean mirrored or ripped off from, so I don't really want Mad Hatters or March Hares or Red Queens. To be clearer, I want a world inspired by it, not a story.

The group is five fourth level characters, a rogue, a cleric, a wizard, a barbarian, and a logger (like a lumberjack, its based off a fighter. He's the strange one in the group)

I'm relatively new as a GM so any help is nice.

What I'm looking for:

Monsters
Items
Traps/encounters

The more unique*, silly, strange, crazy, interesting, etc it is, the better. It can be from any source book, as our group has pretty much all of them.

* I know something can't be "more unique" but just roll with it.

*EDIT* I know Dungeonland exists. It isn't 3.5, is meant for levels 9-12, and its based off the story.

[Rogue Shadows]

Chess is your friend. Learn chess. Get good at chess, or at least passable. Most PCs these days have it as a default game.

Solitaire, Freecell, and Poker, too, for that matter...

As for monsters - ethereal filchers spring to mind as very "Wonderland-esque" monsters from the MM.

As for magic items - Nolzur's marvelous pigments, robe of useful items, and, of course, Deck of Many Things.

Eh, who cares if the party is too low a level? Just adjust the results of the Deck to make them work.

[begooler]

A puzzle involving getting through a series of rooms using potions of enlarge person and reduce person.

The infinite staircase (http://www.amazon.com/Tales-Infinite-Staircase-Planescape-Adventure/dp/0786912049) is the rabbit hole. The PC's go down it to reach a demi-plane.

Obviously an incidence of this is required:
One, two! One, two! and through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

[Divide by Zero]

If you're able to visualize four-dimensional objects, try putting them in a tesseract-shaped dungeon.

[Darrin]

Are you aware that Gygax's original Dungeonland (www.wizards.com/dnd/dnd_ex.asp) is available as a free download?

I have no idea if anyone ever updated it for 3rd edition.

[Albinobear]

Are you aware that Gygax's original Dungeonland (www.wizards.com/dnd/dnd_ex.asp) is available as a free download?

I have no idea if anyone ever updated it for 3rd edition.

I saw that, and forgot to mention it in the OP. It hasn't been updated, its for levels 9-12, AND its based off the story.

[Feytalist]

I'm somehow reminded of the Alice video game by American Mcgee.

Lots of nonsensical riddles and puzzles should feature. A mysterious helper that leads the characters through the adventure, appearing and disappearing all the time, taking in riddles would be fun.

Oh and lots of non-combat games, like the aforementioned chess or some sort of croquet analogue.

As for monsters, the only ones I can think of are anthropomorphic animals, really.

[Talya]

The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! Ack...infinite inspiration loop!

[Xtomjames]

Down the Rabbit hole stories are great. I don't know what setting you're in but a literal fall down into the Underdark would work wonders. You could reverse it have it be an up the rabbit hole experience. Maybe they discover they're not actually on the surface of their world. You could introduce aliens to your game as well (great rules in the Pathfinder GM guide).

Monsters; displacer beasts, assassin devils, blink dogs, hatchling lost dragons, ogres, and so on are all good.

Traps: a great trap is being plunged into the heart of a jelly or ooze or gelatinous cube. Classic snakes on a (wait for it) plane....(tipsy floor that has snakes that attack the PCs as they try to cross). Be creative there are so many possibilities and if you can't think of anything there is a traps compendium called "Book of Challenges" to look through.

Items: Intelligent items that have their own will are hilarious at low levels. Especially if they have higher will saves than the players that are wielding them. Mundane items that seem innocuous that can be used later are also good. Like marbles, bouncy balls, twine, sticks, etc.

[kestrel404]

Any story that takes PCs from a sensible reality that follows logic that they can understand and transports them to a place that does not (while still have some semblance of internal logic) is a down-the-rabbit-hole style story.

Putting greyhawk/forgotten-realms-esque characters into a modern day setting is a good example of this.

So if you want something inspired by Alice in Wonderland, what you really need is a world that makes internal sense (not necessarily logical sense - a world based entirely around puns like the Xanth series works just fine) that will be totally alien to the PCs.

If you want some concrete suggestions (aside from the examples above), I'd recommend choosing a game (say, Candy Land), thinking about how someone who lived in the world of that game, following the rules as intrinsically as normal people follow the laws of physics, would live and act and think. Then populate that world with gods and monsters and interesting scenery.

Alice in wonderland does this for a number of different English parlor games, including chess and cards, as well as touching on a number of common english hobbies like gardenning. It took the mundane and made it fantastical. That's why it's an absolute classic. If you can do that for just one common game, then your campaign will be a smash hit.