A Mad Man's Dungeon

[Jutnut]

Right, well basically what it says on the tin, what would you expect for a mad man's dungeon crawl?

So far I have had trippy traps, drugs, illusions and constructs, thinking about abberations and would like some inspiration to make this dungeon crawl interesting :smallsmile:

- party level is 4
- madness definite theme
- considering sanity rules

Gimme some inspiration :P

[lycantrope]

Incorporate cursed items that, when used in the dungeon (or certain sections) end up being a boon, possibly lifesaver.

[Telonius]

Depends on what sort of crazy the guy is. Axe murderer, sadistic trickster, non-Euclidean horror?

The walls are lined with torches being held by gloved hands. Every once in a while, the players make a spot check to notice the hands moving slightly. This can be terrific in a maze, too; statues move, so that when the players loop back around, the suit of armor is facing a different direction. (Players either get lost, or start getting paranoid about inanimate objects getting ready to attack them).

A door has a picture of a torture device on it. The doorknob is at the point where the torturer would turn the crank. To open the door, you have to turn the knob three or four turns clockwise. There is a magical effect that when you turn the knob, the victim painted on the door starts wailing, and the illusion of blood starts "dripping" down the door.

[Arbane]

If you're going 'Lovecraftian madman' style instead of 'Saw', how about Alien Geometry? Like one place where three right-angle turns puts you back where you started.... Or a section where the corridors twist,. but 'down' is always beneath you, so you can find yourself on the ceiling of a room you'd been in previously. (Make sure 'down' for you matches 'down' for the world before leaving, or you'll fall into the sky.)

[Deathra13]

For level 4s, add in a few spots where jumping into an apparently bottomless pit is the solution. Have a gnoll sweatshop doing basketweaving that just ignores the party. Have Cthulhu offer someone a kitten. Search for various mental illnesses have rooms themed after them. Like a room illusioned to look like a forest with some agoraphobics running around. Or just have rooms with illusions to make them look like other rooms, the same room over and over, or something equally maddening. Toss in a few targeted shots at your pcs if you know them well enough aim for real life fears. Have elements become reversed in various ways. A room where you can only breathe in the water, or where fire is the only safe thing to stand in. Add in a few journals of previous adventurers some with nonsense some with theories on how to beat this place. A feast room where all the food is fake and all the furniture is made of food. A willy wonka style corridor getting ever smaller till you come to a tiny door. Last idea for tonight, a room in which there is a miniature version of the dungeon with miniatures of themselves placed in this exact room that when moved teleport them to the room the mini is placed in.

Good luck with your dungeon, when Im more concious I will return with more madness Im sure.

[Gildedragon]

An corridor blocked every 5' with an adamantine door slathered with phantom traps. the nth door is actually trapped.

[Feytalist]

I don't have any specific advice, but you should be able to get some inspiration from games like American McGee's Alice, or that Grout's Mansion level from Vampire: Bloodlines.

Also, Forgotten Realms' Undermountain is essentially a madman's dungeon. You'll be able to get some nice inspiration from the published adventure Expedition to Undermountain, if you can get your hands on it. Things I remember (from its description) is roving portals, simulacra that cast spells at you then disappear, hidden teleportation circle traps and stuff like that.

[Arbane]

An corridor blocked every 5' with an adamantine door slathered with phantom traps. the nth door is actually trapped.

If you're going to be doing stuff like that, read up on the Winchester Mystery House (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winchester_Mystery_House). Then use the Standard Fantasy Adaptation of real-world structures: make it ten times as large and fill it with ninjas.

[Jutnut]

Thanks everyone for the ideas :) keep em coming!

Also @Arbane yes I've heard of that place, wasn't there an awful horror movie based there

The crazy guy is a wizard who hates adventurers and accumulated nasty horrors which drove him insane, came to me last night, though was playing with the idea of a psion of the same mental instability.

[OttoVonBigby]

For level 4s, add in a few spots where jumping into an apparently bottomless pit is the solution.Came to say something like this. If I was building a real dungeon--and, um, if I was insane--I'd go all-in on the bottomless pits. And the narrow, OSHA-noncompliant bridges crossing them.

I've been to the Winchester Mystery House and the thing that makes it creepy--namely Sarah Winchester's certainty that spirits wandered the house, which led to the aberrant architectural choices--doesn't seem like it would transfer well, directly, to a setting where spirits will be assumed to exist by characters.

On the other hand, you can use some of the Mystery House's features as inspiration for weirder variants, e.g.:
- Instead of a door three feet high, a door six inches high.
- Instead of a stairway that ends at a ceiling, a stairway that appears to do so but is actually the only exit--through a glamered portal to who-knows-where.
- Instead of a gift shop staffed by bored adolescents, a gift shop staffed by obsequious dretches.

[hobbitkniver]

Thanks everyone for the ideas :) keep em coming!

Also @Arbane yes I've heard of that place, wasn't there an awful horror movie based there

The crazy guy is a wizard who hates adventurers and accumulated nasty horrors which drove him insane, came to me last night, though was playing with the idea of a psion of the same mental instability.

A wizard could be fun since they could have basically anything in the game. Get a good variety of monsters. You could essentially have all your monsters be different kinds as a wizard could have paid guards (humanoids), animal-like monsters (spiders maybe?) and also constructs or undead.

[Telonius]

Inscriptions that start out in rhyming, metered verse, but end one syllable before they ought to.

Example:

Before you lies your certain doom,
No exit comes within the room.
My bones beneath the coffin lie,
Too soon to live, too late to die.
Beware my words, seek not the sight
Of things best left to death's realm.

[Arc_knight25]

Halaster is the mad wizard from Forgotten Realm. Pretty much do whatever you want and can get away with it because he is a Epic Wizard.

He created his dungeon to do experiments and what not for whatever his reasons were. He has created ever kind of enviroment you can think of in this dungeon and has brought powerful creatures in as well.

One of my favorite things he has done is had like 2 or 3 secert doors ina row and after the last one there is a chest. Adventures open chest only to see a note in it saying, "I owe you 1 chest full of loot" and signs off with a H.

Have to say a Halaster dungeon is on of the funnest 1-20 campagins, so long as you have a creative DM.

[Deathkeeper]

- Instead of a gift shop staffed by bored adolescents, a gift shop staffed by obsequious dretches.

Or, for a little bit of crazy horror for a non-evil party, make the whole dungeon manned by them (or similar creature) and manage to get the PCs to strike first. After murdering the many critters that try to stop them and going through all the traps and puzzles (bonus points if they're all frustrating but not very dangerous), they get to the obligatory gift shop, and the monster behind the counter cheerfully asks if they had fun and if they saw any of his buddies inside.
Yep, they just murdered the staff of a monster amusement park and most of its other guests. And THAT's how a crazy guy screws with adventurers- by pointing out that they're single-minded murder-hobos.

[Feytalist]

Have to say a Halaster dungeon is on of the funnest 1-20 campagins, so long as you have a creative DM.

This is Undermountain, which was mentioned upthread. By me.

Expedition to Undermountain has a lot more of these sorts of situations to shamelessly steal and adjust for your own uses.

[falloutimperial]

You could include, after a really dangerous bit, a small room with an ornate door. Above the door's pearl handle is an eye which opens and peers at the players. Mouth-less, it speaks:

"For a thousand years, I rise and fall,
With jewels of blue and red!
The birds and ants who hear the call
wear hearts of fear and lead!"

There is no solution to this riddle but the door is unlocked.

[SethoMarkus]

If you want just crazy and not horror, how about adding things that have no function or no sane person would replicate?

Such as, have a heavily guarded and trapped room or vault- for all purposes, treat it like a treasure room holding a great wealth. When the adventurers finally get to the inner chamber where the treasure is supposed to be, instead have a single piece of moldy bread on a pedestal. For added effect, have the insane wizard show up and blame the adventuring party for ruining his "greatest and most prized possession".

Have a river and waterfall that flows up rather than down. No point or reason to it, its just there.

An invisible bridge that turns people invisible as they walk over it. Or, play with gravity again, and replicate the Harpell family's bridge and make it so that walking over in one direction is normal, but to walk back across the bridge you need to walk under it (upside down).

Add in the elements from the Winchester Mystery House like others have stated, but don't even give a reason for them. Leave it a mystery; all the players need to know is that the hallways and doors are not as they are supposed to be.

Give the wizard strange paranoia, to which he sets up specific traps to combat against. For example, make an obvious high-level and deadly magical ward trap, but have it be harmless for the adventurers to pass through- it only targets squirrels.

In short, the wizard, if insane, should have strange and unexplainable behaviors that he puts his entire power into fulfilling. Even if you want to go with more of a horror feel, I think you can still implement some of these ideas to show that the wizard isn't just evil or a little out-there, but completely off his knocker. You can't reason with this wizard, you either play along or you stop him.

[Segev]

Madness is generally about obsession of one sort or another. Whether paranoia fueled by an inescapable sense of danger or persecution, compulsive disorders focused on certain actions, or a desperate need to deny something true about reality, the insane who build "mad dungeons" and the like have something in specific that they're irrationally fixated upon.

But at the same time, if you can accept their premise, there is a certain logic to much of it. Conspiracy theorists, for example, who are mad enough to deny the reality they see because it doesn't fit their preconceptions, have a quite logical constructed "hidden world" that they have "discovered." They're inventing things that must be so in order to make their delusion make sense. The part where they usually falter most is in motive, and there's always the fallback of "they're evil and want power/wealth/control and I'm in the way."

If you construct something like the Winchester House proposed above, one thing that struck me as I was reading the wikipedia article was how many things "have no purpose," including a supposedly-magnificent window that would create a room full of rainbows...but which is placed indoors with no direct lighting. What if the madness were also a sort of prophecy, and the whole dungeon was constructed according to a very precise set of purposes?

Two ways to approach that: one is to have exactly one or two things in it that are otherwise inexplicable be precisely what is needed to achieve some obscure one-off goal. On return visits, if any, the party finds one more thing that, this time, makes perfect sense in that it serves their purpose perfectly, despite being weird and random last time they came through.

The more "doomsday prophecy" type approach would be to have this planned for two run-throughs: once in its "mad" state that all the other adventurers met it in. Vague hints in the riddles should point to some feared future the mad creator seemed to dread, but should seem paranoid and sometimes contradictory. But drop hints that could be related to one or more of the riddles, poems, and "random" images throughout, as the campaign progresses.

Eventually, creeped out, the party should come to a point where the mad dungeon seems like it might hold an answer or two. As the prophesied doom begins to unfold, destruction and chaos shake the dungeon, causing pieces to fall into place. The window in the Winchester House might suddenly be placed just right, after a collapse of the rooms nearby, to create the rainbows in a way that reveals a desperately-needed escape path. Stairways to nowhere become stairways to parts of the dungeon that have collapsed onto them and which would otherwise now be cut off.



Finally, if you don't want to go that "method to the madness" in this... Perhaps the whole thing is constructed like a shopping mall or some equivalent that could fit your setting. Maybe a gnomish or dwarven underground bazaar. And it's populated by zombies, controlled such that they act out mundane activities. Pushing zombie babies in strollers, picking up items and putting them in carry-bags, gesturing slowly in a mockery of emphatic barter over tables with actual un-animated corpses sitting on the other side.

Or, you said the madman hates adventurers. A psion might have great fun with over-use of Quintessence, preserving odd things and making harvesting them a touch dangerous. An illusionist could deliberately set things up so that there are no or very few monsters in the dungeon, but that it attracts multiple adventuring groups at a time. And then uses Illusions to make them look like monsters to other adventuring groups. Perhaps a Suggestion that is cast by the room. When the party makes its will save, those who fail are Suggested that the "enemy" has Charmed them. Those who succeed merely know that somebody - presumably those monsters over there - just did something that made them have to make a Will save. Maybe this Suggestion only goes off if one side tries to open up negotiations rather than just engaging in hostilities.

Dream spells or tasked monsters (Succubi or Erinyes make good messengers) make sure that the names and faces of adventurers who escape the dungeon are known...for ambushing and murdering other adventurers to steal their gear.

Meanwhile, all the traps should be insulting, trollish things. There should be cursed magic items with uses that are just attractive enough to make the curse tolerable, and demons or devils or the like Tasked to pose as clerics to remove curses "for a price" and to buy back cursed treasures for far less than they're worth (if possible) so the dungeon remains well-stocked.

Little "alarm" traps should be everywhere, causing rackets and clangors as tripwires pull bells, clacking doors are slammed shut by a pressure plate, and anything else you can think of. Not only does this make stealthing harder, but it can allow you to warn players of approaching "enemies." And even set them off every 15 to 25 minutes...while they're trying to sleep.

Speaking of trying to sleep, the dungeon floors should slope just so, making setting up bedding really uncomfortable and awkward. Doors in should also be unlocked and easy to find. On their other sides, they should be hidden, like secret doors, and without means of opening them. They should automatically close behind people.

[Talderas]

Right, well basically what it says on the tin, what would you expect for a mad man's dungeon crawl?

Any and everything present in Undermountain. After all, Halaster Blackcloak is basically the poster child for wizard madman.

[Norin]

Halaster is the mad wizard from Forgotten Realm. Pretty much do whatever you want and can get away with it because he is a Epic Wizard.

He created his dungeon to do experiments and what not for whatever his reasons were. He has created ever kind of enviroment you can think of in this dungeon and has brought powerful creatures in as well.

One of my favorite things he has done is had like 2 or 3 secert doors ina row and after the last one there is a chest. Adventures open chest only to see a note in it saying, "I owe you 1 chest full of loot" and signs off with a H.

Have to say a Halaster dungeon is on of the funnest 1-20 campagins, so long as you have a creative DM.


This is exactly what i was supposed to suggest when i read the OP.

Too bad i never got to play through his mad dungeon though. Looks fun.

[RogueDM]

Gibbering Mouthers or other insanity lending monsters.

Rooms full of random useless junk, a la some sort of hoarder-esque collection. Mirrors, childrens' toys, thimbles, left shoes, hats, boxes that contain smaller boxes. Could even hide a needle in a haystack, figuratively by having one of the items be magical or valuable, or literally by having a room contain only a haystack in which a needle is hidden.

A normally simple maze, but illusions, darkness, mirrors and the like increase the difficulty.

A large room littered with bones and scraps of rusted equipment all staged around some out-of-place and harmless object. A rock with a face painted on it, or maybe a particularly vicious hobby horse.

Animate seemingly harmless objects with malevolent spirits. That collection of puppets is creepy by itself, but once animated... puppet strings as garrotte wire?

Rooms that are out of place in a dungeon; like a room that replicates a beautiful forest glade, or an empty (possibly trapped) tavern.

Walls that rearrange themselves without warning. The way forward may have opened up behind them, or they may find a new way back into a room (now unrecognizable) that they've already been through. I once used a trap utilizing trap doors, illusory walls, and a few sliding stone labs to force my party members down different corridors. Some of the squishier or less trap-findy members of the party were very unnerved by this.

A deep body of water (cistern, subterranean lake, etc) that may or may not have a horrible monster or twelve in it. Prey on uncertainty. I found a submerged skeletal ogre was a brutal challenge for my players.

Closets and other doors that lead nowhere or nowhere useful. But lock them just the same. Additionally conceal exits. I once had a door spring loaded so that once unlocked it would pinball the adventurer through the actual exit (hidden with an illusion), and others that just had a cartoonish boxing-glove-on-a-spring mechanism.

Juxtapose dark and light elements. Any combination that makes for unusual or standardly inappropriate bedfellow works well.

Objects that seem important but aren't, obvious bait that isn't and things like that, but also dummy doors on the ceiling. Out of the way obstacles that have no purpose, that can be ignored without harm, but should they, say, expend spells or other resources ascending to the ceiling-door it only leads to a broom closet which instantly dumps its contents out onto the floor.

That's all I have for right now.

[Jutnut]

Well that's levels one and two done! I love the puppet idea, isnt there a srd monster like that puppeteer or something? Also the wire is a nice touch :smallbiggrin:

So much idea, going to have like a 5 level dungeon + at this rate, hope they survive lol

[Gildedragon]

- Instead of a stairway that ends at a ceiling, a stairway that appears to do so but is actually the only exit--through a glamered portal to who-knows-where.
To the base of the stairs of course, giving the illusion of an endless staircase.

A shrine to zagyg

chests of gold coins, every coin polished and filed into perfectly regular hexagons and tesselated. Every coin is heads down and arranged identically (Spot 15 to notice)

sink is cursed to compel anyone who uses it to wash their hands 6d6 times.

[Alabenson]

Thanks everyone for the ideas :) keep em coming!

Also @Arbane yes I've heard of that place, wasn't there an awful horror movie based there

The crazy guy is a wizard who hates adventurers and accumulated nasty horrors which drove him insane, came to me last night, though was playing with the idea of a psion of the same mental instability.

If you want to really go all out "paranoid adventure-hating" (and don't mind the undying hatred of your players), then you could design the entire thing as essentially the Tomb of Horrors as run by Tucker's Kobolds;
-Cursed magic items and fake treasure scattered throughout the dungeon
-Traps which trigger different traps if disarmed
-Lift whole sections from Tomb of Horrors, but reverse the solutions, i.e. the only way to avoid death is to climb into the statue's mouth.
-Fill the entire thing with kobold ninjas and permanent illusions of kobold ninjas.

[Pokonic]

So, he hates adventurers, right?

One thing the PC's might find is a long, wide hallway flanked on each side with vast troughs of a brightly colored, goopy substance that comes in every color the the rainbow, and that the entire hallway is dark enough that the bright childlike pictures painted along the entire stretch of hallway. A closer look (a low-difficulty check to pick out individual pictures) at the wall might creep some players out, as they clearly depict some rather vile acts.

Now, with a moderate Arcane check by the local wizard, said wizard would learn that all of the liquid is under a effect much like a powerful Predignation.

If said wizard manages to dispels it, all the liquid turns out to be blood.

[Hamste]

Have an invisible maze with a ton of visible monsters that do not need to eat. A few with blindsight/no eyes wander around ignoring the characters. Others like zombies notice the players and constantly walk into walls staring right at the players as they moan in anger. Have a few constructs that appear to be patrolling the maze as if guarding hallways. Make it absolutely clear that the players are outmatched and out powered if they fought them all at the same time. The key though is that most of them are not actually a threat. The monsters are in the hollow walls of the maze and they are mostly there for decoration and to freak out adventurers. If the adventurers try and cheat using spells like passwall they suddenly have to deal with a much bigger threat than if they actually did the maze. Have a few minotaurs with rings of invisibility (who know the maze off by heart), invisible creatures and gelatinous cubes in the maze as the actual threat to the adventurers making them have to choose to either use blindsight to see the monsters and walls or not using it to allow them to see where the “threats” are and how close they are to the door.

[Gildedragon]

Have an invisible maze with a ton of visible monsters that do not need to eat. A few with blindsight/no eyes wander around ignoring the characters. Others like zombies notice the players and constantly walk into walls staring right at the players as they moan in anger. Have a few constructs that appear to be patrolling the maze as if guarding hallways. Make it absolutely clear that the players are outmatched and out powered if they fought them all at the same time. The key though is that most of them are not actually a threat. The monsters are in the hollow walls of the maze and they are mostly there for decoration and to freak out adventurers. If the adventurers try and cheat using spells like passwall they suddenly have to deal with a much bigger threat than if they actually did the maze. Have a few minotaurs with rings of invisibility (who know the maze off by heart), invisible creatures and gelatinous cubes in the maze as the actual threat to the adventurers making them have to choose to either use blindsight to see the monsters and walls or not using it to allow them to see where the “threats” are and how close they are to the door.

I love this one. Will so take the idea for my next dungeoncrawl

[Jutnut]

If you want to really go all out "paranoid adventure-hating" (and don't mind the undying hatred of your players), then you could design the entire thing as essentially the Tomb of Horrors as run by Tucker's Kobolds;


I dont really like being almost dm against player, like a few sadistic traps is all fine and good but anything more I like to clearly sign post in my games so the players dont get too attached to their characters :)


@Pokonic thats bloody brilliant (excuse the pun)
@Hamste and that is awesome!

[Deox]

Put traps on torches/candles/light sources.

...my players are still reticent about touching torches.

[RogueDM]

Put traps on torches/candles/light sources.

...my players are still reticent about touching torches.

I hid IIRC magnesium at the base of some conveniently available torches, so once they burnt down low enough they exploded. Small explosion, but made the party a bit suspicious of mundane objects.

[ElectricMadman]

Mimes. Abberation Mimes.


The things they mime are incomprehensible and maddening to the party.

You go mad from the miming.

[ElectricMadman]

- Instead of a gift shop staffed by bored adolescents, a gift shop staffed by obsequious dretches.

This. This made me giggle.

By the way, I have seen the horrors of the adolescents in the gift shop myself.

[Deophaun]

The entire point of the dungeon is to defend a vault where he makes his dill pickles.

That's also why he hates adventurers; they keep breaking in and spoiling his sandwiches. So, the dungeon gets more elaborate each year.

[JaronK]

I have a character something like this, but he's a high level Archivist//Expert architect who builds castles and such for wealthy kings. He makes test dungeons sometimes... they're just ways to test out his art or his theories. Then he hides them, but sometimes other people find them and start using them. The result is a pretty insane dungeon. Some options here:

1) Hallways made of alternating pit traps and illusions of pit traps (which he was practicing his ability to make illusionary traps), which lead to an illusionary treasure chest.

2) Giant statues with hinged joints animated via Haunt Shift. The creature haunting is an uncontrolled skeletal horse or similar random low level creature creature.

3) Piles of illusionary gold with an illusionary dragon on top, the entirety of which is simply floating in empty space (so jumping down to engage the dragon just results in falling into an underground water area or something).

4) Slickstone slides leading to other areas of the dungeon.

JaronK

[Jutnut]

Lol because of inanimate objects coming to life e.g. suits of armour (medium animated objects), chests (mimics) and clothing (cloakers) my party have gained the habit of stabbing everything in the room and refuse to loot wardrobes. XD