Nefarious Illusionist ideas

[Arkusus]

So, when running late on making some more encounters for my D&D group (I try, but it's easy to procrastinate when games get put off for more than a month). I made a few rooms with just some orcs, in typical "Group with that one tougher guy" setup. Being unsatisfied, knowing my party would breeze through them, I created The Great Illusion Brothers, one Illusionist Wizard, and one Shaper Psion. Their goal, find ways without dealing any direct damage, to make the Orc encounters as much trouble as possible.

So basic ideas are, use a mixture of hollow illusions of orcs and other things, actual shaping/creating from the shaper, and actual blunt threats from the orcs to make the party second guess everything, and turn a simple encounter into an interesting one.

Existing ideas include the brothers being invisible, creating a fake balcony outside a window with a bad guy on it(so anyone going outside will fall down two stories and have to climb/walk back), creating real and fake walls, or holes in the ground, and astral constructs or summons on.occasion as needed.

What other tricks, or specific tricks could be fun to use?

The party will be on the second/third/fourth floor of a tower

[mostlyharmful]

I love the idea of a room of walls myself... illusionists that don't mind the set up time can give their minions a detailed account of how to move in it and there's enough different ways to monkey with perception that the players may just give up. If you arrange them right you can have trueseeing and see invisibility being real handicaps, trap finding irrelivant and summoned minions. Play around with line of effect, line of sight, illusionary orcs running through real walls, real orcs running through real walls, illusionary traps, etc... takes some planning time but it can be worth it.

1. Standerd walls
2. Invisible walls
3. walls of force
4. Illusionary walls
5. Standerd walls with Phase Doorl spells on them.
6. Invisible walls with symbols or Explosive runes on them after the first invisible walls
7. spell trap walls of X spells
8. Teleporting walls that time in and out
9. walls with Glasstone spells on them
10. Wall of Stone/Dissintergrate traps that time in and out
11. walls of force sandwhiched inside other walls, or walls of dispel magic just above pits or what have you
12. etc....

Most of this stuff is doable at surprisingly low level and without homebrew, it's dependant on ingenuity rather than class-power and takes little maintainance. if the illusionist wants to be really mean then the best/only real way through is to close your eyes and count out the steps if you know the code.

[Telonius]

There's always the classic "illusory floor over the pit trap, illusory pit traps surrounding the illusory floor" trick.

[Emperor Tippy]

A fun one is to keep the dungeon having consistent 10 ft. wide hallways or the like. Then you make one that is 30 ft. wide and use two Permanent Image fake walls to make it look just like any other hallway. Immediately behind said walls are nice 5 ft. wide chasm's filled with acid and behind that moat are goblins on a ledge that is 5 ft. higher than the normal floor. Said ledge is covered in a permanent silence effect. For real fun you have an auto reset persistent true seeing trap buried somewhere around that the dungeons residences activate every day to that they can ignore the illusions.

If you feel like being nasty and the party doesn't have True Seeing then an illusionist can make a dungeon a total death trap.

Do things like a Permanent Prismatic Wall in the middle of a hallway and immediately infront of it is a Permanent Image of the hallway exactly as it should be.