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Doorhandle
2014-03-10, 04:51 AM
I'm planning to run a game soon using the Old-school hack system, and I had the brainwave to make a dungeon based on the deck of many things.

I've had a few ideas so far: could anyone give me more?

Moon: Players end up on, well, the moon, and end up facing an absurdly-oversized werewolf that uses the gravity and various craters to it's advantage.

...Yes, you can breathe is space, why do you ask?

Skull: End up in an ashen neverworld arena: face their wraithlike doppelgangers in battle.

Vizer: A break from the other rooms: the undead form of a vizier who was drowned by his king in a barrel of wine for his treachery. as the order of the rooms is randomly determined, he the only opportunity the players get to know in advance what the next room is. he also offers potions/various alcohols to any players that will take them.

Fates: A room filled with unusually mummified corpses, wrapped in threads and nailed to the ground with oversized needles. Each corpse is dressed thematically as one of the other signs: touching/picking the thread of the one for the fates is the only way out.

Any other ideas?

arcane_asp
2014-03-10, 05:43 AM
Here's an idea:

The Fool: A playful jester-type in bright colours, who ridicules the more serious party members in the form of silly rhymes. The way forward is a multiple choice door, all but one of which are trapped. The party has to befriend the fool and play along to learn which is the right door to proceed.
Any hostility to the fool reveals his true form - a mischevious supernatural-type monster that lives to mess with adventurers!:smallamused:

Friv
2014-03-10, 01:32 PM
Donjon: A smooth, glass-walled room, filled with dozens of bobbing crystal balls, each of which glows with a soft light.

Each ball is actually a soul prison, holding the souls of adventurers who have braved this dungeon and failed. Touching an orb allows you to briefly wake and converse with the adventurers, who are largely insane from solitude but may be willing to offer help in exchange for help in return. Some sufficiently powerful effect might allow the orbs to be broken, releasing the trapped souls, but each soul released in this way ruins some aspect of the dungeon in a really obvious way, or else drains the magic out of some helpful feature that they players are using (or out of some magic item they have found).


Key: This room appears to be an armory, filled with weapons. It is in fact filled with animated objects, who are deeply hostile and may wield each other against the players. If they are slain, most will be destroyed, but one or two magic weapons might be left behind.

The Oni
2014-03-10, 01:50 PM
Sun: You find yourself in a beautifully constructed palace hall where the light is blinding and the heat is unbearable. Enemies are, of course, fire-aligned or perhaps constructs immune to fire damage. However, proper use of items producing magical darkness or otherwise blocking the light reveal that the walls are inscribed with useful spells that the party wizard can scribe to his spellbook, clues regarding other rooms, and possibly vague hints about the origin of the dungeon in the first place.

Leviting
2014-03-10, 08:25 PM
I'm planning to run a game soon using the Old-school hack system, and I had the brainwave to make a dungeon based on the deck of many things.

I've had a few ideas so far: could anyone give me more?

Moon: Players end up on, well, the moon, and end up facing an absurdly-oversized werewolf that uses the gravity and various craters to it's advantage.

...Yes, you can breathe is space, why do you ask?

Any other ideas?

You do realize there are rules for fighting in the vacuum of space? Hint: it involves a lot of holding your breath. It's somewhere in the Elder Evils book, when fighting Atropus.

NichG
2014-03-10, 08:55 PM
Star: The door out of this room always appears to be the same distance from each party member, no matter where they stand. Ideas to get past it: throw ropes covered with glue/etc to bridge the gap with an inanimate object - even if it fails, maybe you can turn 10ft of rope into 20ft of rope. An incidental property of this room is that there is an increasing Will save the longer you spend in it to avoid having hallucinations of the things you most desire lead you away from the party (and given the properties of the room, there is effectively an infinite space to get separated in if you aren't careful).

Tower: This room is filled wth Large animated statues (10ft reach) that move and behave in very prescribed ways. Each round, the statues rotate 90 degrees clockwise. During the round, if any creature or valuable item passes in front of them the statue makes a overpowered sunder attempt against said thing. If a statue has attacked something during the last round, it moves up to 30ft (as far as it can) after it changes direction at the end of the round. The trick is to get the statues to attack eachother or at least to move in such a way as to open a path through. Obviously the statues need to be densely positioned enough that there isn't just a safe path through. Not very interesting if the party has Dimension Door though (everyone gets naked, sends their gear with the caster...)

TuggyNE
2014-03-10, 09:34 PM
You do realize there are rules for fighting in the vacuum of space? Hint: it involves a lot of holding your breath.

Eesh. D20 Modern's rules are far better for this kind of thing, since IRL holding your breath is the worst thing you can do in a vacuum; instead of having a sharply limited oxygen supply, you have severe internal trauma and a sharply limited oxygen supply, since lungs are not built to hold air in.

Leviting
2014-03-10, 09:38 PM
Eesh. D20 Modern's rules are far better for this kind of thing, since IRL holding your breath is the worst thing you can do in a vacuum; instead of having a sharply limited oxygen supply, you have severe internal trauma and a sharply limited oxygen supply, since lungs are not built to hold air in.

I honestly did not know that.

hydroplatypus
2014-03-10, 10:10 PM
I honestly did not know that.

It gets worse. Due to the pressure difference between what you usually breath and space (aka. P = 0) your lungs will expand if you hold your breath. This expands their volume significantly, and drops the pressure in your lungs. Not all the way to 0, but certainly lower than what you usually breathe. The end result being that if you hold your breath Oxygen will get sucked out of your blood due to the pressure difference. You will actually suffocate faster if you hold your breath than if you breath out.

Leviting
2014-03-10, 10:50 PM
Wow. I knew there was swelling involved, but I can only imagine the effects of having oxygen pulled out of your bloodstream. Ow.

Doorhandle
2014-03-11, 06:40 AM
Which is one of the many reasons I'm just glossing over the entire space thing.

Stoneback
2014-03-11, 06:59 AM
Why not have normal air on the moon? It's freakin' magic.

Storm_Of_Snow
2014-03-11, 08:12 AM
Wow. I knew there was swelling involved, but I can only imagine the effects of having oxygen pulled out of your bloodstream. Ow.
Not oxygen, but any dissolved gases, which is basically what the lungs are designed to do anyway. You'd eventually get the bends (gas bubbles forming), but you'd have run out of oxygen in your blood and asphyxiated long before they're a problem. :smallamused:

But the main reason you shouldn't try to hold your breath is that you can't, aside from not being able to get a completely air tight seal on your nose, mouth and down your throat, the pressure differential will burst your eardrums and let it all out via the eustachian tubes between your throat and ears.

And then you'd have the effects on the other end of your body - remember that your digestive tract both contains gases as well, and links up to your lungs in your throat. :smalleek:

Even if you could, you'd have the external pressure on your ribs and the muscles around them, which would be at best painful, and probably fatal if any injury caused damage to them.

Solve those issues (or be able to reinflate the lungs when the alveoli have collapsed), and skin is actually a pretty good pressure suit for a short while, although you'll get a lot of surface capillaries bursting, high levels of radiation will eventually cause cancer and micro-meteroids would hit hard. Oh, and you'd rapidly overheat due to not being able to convect body heat away from yourself.

A personal air bubble surrounding the characters would be my way of going about it though. :smallsmile:

Anyway, back to the rooms - how about :
Comet: The party opens the door onto the viewing galleries of an fighting arena - when all members of the party have entered, the lowest level party member is transported into the arena, and an enemy (or enemies) of sufficient power to allow that person to exactly reach the next experience level if they defeat them, appears before them. Magical barriers prevent the rest of the party from aiding them.

After the encounter is over, the enemy/enemies disappears (including any equipment) and the party member (or their body) is returned to the rest of the party.

Leaving and re-entering the area had no effect.