[PF/3.5/Homebrew] Will this artifact cause me problems?

[Epsilon Rose]

As one might expect, if you are a player in my escaping reality campaign, please leave this thread. I will be most cross with any players who know about what I'm doing before hand.

With that done, I'm thinking of giving my players a custom artifact, but I want to make sure it won't be too disruptive. Before I describe the artifact, let me give a brief description of my campaign.

The campaign is, mainly, set in two worlds. The first is ours: specifically, the campaign started in present day New York. The second world is the world of faerie. They don't really know much about the Faerie yet and have only been there briefly, but I intend to have 'mundane' paths connecting the two worlds. Currently, the players are level 3 and, while they'll eventual be gestalt, they currently only have one of their classes active. I expect they'll be level 4 or 5, with both classes active, before any of this becomes relevant.

Currently, the party is exploring a 'maze' of sorts that was created by an area of unstable space. This maze is actually just a giant blank grid that I've dropped the players in. They each get three cards that they can lay down to create paths, but until those paths get laid down there's just mist.

One of the player's won't be able to attend the next session, so he's going to get shoulder checked off one of the paths. This will result in him getting dropped into a teseract dungeon. I expect a few other characters will be following him there for various reasons (mainly so I can avoid killing them).

Since a teseract doesn't naturally have any exits, and none of the players have plane shift, I need to come up with a way to get them out. That said, I don't want to rely on a deus ex machina or a one-off mcguffin.

The solution I've come up with is to have the teseract ruled by a crazy beguiler who has a key. But this isn't any key. It's The Key.

My idea for the Key is for it to connect the tesseract to the outside world. Each face of the tesseract will be connected to another by an unlocked door. The Key can fit any lock, both in and out of the tesseract. If the key is used on a door in the outside world, it causes the door to open to the tesseract, instead of whatever is in the other side. The first time The Key is used on a door, it permanently links that door to one of the tesseract's doors, so every time that door is opened with The Key it opens to that face of the tesseract. This also means they can only link one door per face of the tesseract. Conversely, if they use the key on a linked door within the tesseract, it leads to it's outer world counterpart, rather than another face. (I've yet to decide what happens if they use it on an unlinked door in the tesseract.

By combining these two functions, they can move quickly and stealthily between places they have been, assuming there are doors with locks available. Though I am planning to spawn some random monsters on each face the first time they link it.

I'm just worried if this will unbalance things or break certain types of adventures. For example, I'm currently planning on making them track bullets while they're in Faerie, but not earth, to add in some survival aspects. I think I can justify a lack of usable doors in the middle of the wylds or some random cave, but I don't know how much having every town just a few faces away from their HQ will eliminate that kind of pressure. I also don't know if this type of artifact carries any consequences that I'm missing.


On a slightly different note, I'm kinda hesitant to have The Key on the dungeon boss's body, but I don't know how else to get it to them with out it screaming "EXIT!" the moment I describe it. Especially because I don't give much in the way of loot. (We're using a modified wealth system, because I don't want them striping everything of value and conversion rates between USD and whatever the Fae use sound like they'd be a headache.)

Oh, one last semi related note: does anybody know how to calculate the cr of an enemy with class levels, possibly gestalt and possibly a pc race?

Thank you.

[Mr. Whatever]

Does this mean that only 6 doors can be linked to it ever? Or is there a way to add more, replace doors, or am I missing something?

[Epsilon Rose]

Does this mean that only 6 doors can be linked to it ever? Or is there a way to add more, replace doors, or am I missing something?

Three-dimensional tesseracts have significantly more than 6 faces (http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?78915-Piratecat-s-dungeon-design-fun-with-tesseracts!), especially if you count each side of a face separately. In that link, each red dot in the 3d diagram, in the complex post, would be a possible door.

Edit:If I did my math right, that should come out to 42 possible doors.

[papr_weezl8472]

If the links are permanent, then the restriction of only 24 48 linked doors ever might be enough to keep things in hand. But it seems like this artifact might not be friendly to the sort of survival-wilderness adventures you're thinking of.

A couple things. First: if I got an artifact like this, the first thing I'd do would be to try to link it to a mobile door, like a car door. Have you got some way to deal with this if your PCs try it?

Second, you should figure out what happens if the Key is used on an unlinked face of the tesseract. If the PCs are going to be picking it up in the middle of the tesseract with no faces linked, or without knowing how it works, it seems likely they'll try this pretty soon.

[Epsilon Rose]

If the links are permanent, then the restriction of only 24 48 linked doors ever might be enough to keep things in hand. But it seems like this artifact might not be friendly to the sort of survival-wilderness adventures you're thinking of.
Is it 48 or 42? I thought that there were 7 cubes with 6 faces each.


A couple things. First: if I got an artifact like this, the first thing I'd do would be to try to link it to a mobile door, like a car door. Have you got some way to deal with this if your PCs try it?

Proper doors only. This means car doors and portable door/doorframe combos don't work.


Second, you should figure out what happens if the Key is used on an unlinked face of the tesseract. If the PCs are going to be picking it up in the middle of the tesseract with no faces linked, or without knowing how it works, it seems likely they'll try this pretty soon.

Agreed. Part of the problem is that I don't want them to be able to just stick it into the nearest door and leave, but they'll also need to eventually do just that. If it wasn't there only way out, I'd be tempted to have it not fit in doors that aren't linked.

Any suggestions on how to handle it would be greatly appreciated.

[papr_weezl8472]

Is it 48 or 42? I thought that there were 7 cubes with 6 faces each. There's kinda a center cube, cubes on all six sides of it, and an outer cube formed by the exterior faces of the six cubes on the sides. And since each face lies on two cubes, there are 24 faces all told, or 48 if they open to different places in different directions. Wikipedia probably does a better job explaining it than I can.

Proper doors only. This means car doors and portable door/doorframe combos don't work. If doors without fixed positions don't work, that could be interesting. If they needed to go somewhere by sea. for example, they couldn't restock on the way.

Agreed. Part of the problem is that I don't want them to be able to just stick it into the nearest door and leave, but they'll also need to eventually do just that. If it wasn't there only way out, I'd be tempted to have it not fit in doors that aren't linked.

Any suggestions on how to handle it would be greatly appreciated.
How'd the Beguiler get there? One or more faces might already be linked. For bonus fun, the one linked exitway could be somewhere out in the middle of nowhere, so getting back to civilization could be an adventure in itself.

[Epsilon Rose]

There's kinda a center cube, cubes on all six sides of it, and an outer cube formed by the exterior faces of the six cubes on the sides. And since each face lies on two cubes, there are 24 faces all told, or 48 if they open to different places in different directions. Wikipedia probably does a better job explaining it than I can.
Ah. For some reason I thought the six outer faces connected to each other. That makes more sense now. I'm also tempted to use the external cube to provide a twist in the flow of paths...


How'd the Beguiler get there? One or more faces might already be linked. For bonus fun, the one linked exitway could be somewhere out in the middle of nowhere, so getting back to civilization could be an adventure in itself.

I haven't entirely decided how the Beguiler got there, but I was planning on some variant of "All the doors are disconnected and you're starting from scratch." That could be because the real-world analogs got destroyed after he entered, trapping him, or he had some ritual that disconnects the doors, allowing him to hide from the world (I did say he was crazy). I had also considered that the key might only work for one set of owners at a time and killing all of the previous owners resets the tesseract.

The idea of dropping them into an old, forgotten, keep, somewhere in the Fay Wylds does sound interesting, but there's a potential problem. They're entering the tesseract as a sort-of dungeon-within-a-dungeon. I don't know if they'll be able to defeat the outer dungeon before entering the new one, and I kinda want to have them finish it (though there are some interesting possibilities for leaving things the way they are). They also have a pair of CIA agents with them, one of who might be getting dropped into the tesseract shortly, and I'm not sure I want them dragging the agents around as they romp through faerie (both because I want the agents doing background stuff back on earth and because I don't want to turn them into permanent party NPCs).

Also, it would be impossible to have the Beguiler's door be in the outer dungeon (he'll need to be from Faerie and the outer dungeon is in the new york stock exchange...