DMs: Most evil encounter you've ever made.

[Brendanicus]

The most famous dungeon of them all, the Tomb of Horrors, was remembered for one reason. What vile traps and monsters have you unleashed to make Gygax himself smile?

In my upcoming game, I was planning on the party getting ambushed by a Medusa Assassin. With Greater Invisibility. When they realize that they are fighting an invisible foe, they will scramble for a way to dispel the cloaking, only for that proving to be a horrible idea. :smalltongue:

[JAL_1138]

Nothing I've made quite comes close to the Tomb. I'm just not that imaginative. Most of mine are somewhat stolen from old modules or evil things my old DM did to me.

The Death Minnow is always a fun one to pull out, though. And yes, it was a real monster. Showed up in Dragon first, but got added to a Compendium later. It's a little fish a couple inches long that can alter its size, eat a Medium creature whole (same way a Giant Frog eats a Small character, IIRC, rather than instant death), and shrink back down in the same turn.

I've made some traps that are Tomb-ish, though. One dropped open a floor section with a 10' long x 10' wide x 30' deep pit below. The bottom 10' of the pit is filled entirely with a Gelatinous Cube. At the same time the floor drops away, so does the ceiling, dropping another Gelatinous Cube directly onto whoever fell into the pit, sandwiching the poor schmuck between two Cubes.

[Eisenheim]

I made but never ran an encounter in 4e that had 3 potentially overlapping monster-generated auto-damage zones. Could have trimmed 40hp a turn without any real way to avoid it if I positioned well, against a mid paragon party.

[Naanomi]

I've done the dungeon full of pit traps and gelatinous cubes before... Jump over the pit; into the cube. Fall down a pit, ooh there was a cube in it.

Also did a dungeon in tidal caves that the tide made the water level rise and fall over time. More puzzle-y when they learned the trick but boy was that first rest a rude surprise.

[VoxRationis]

For 3.5, kobold snipers with heavy crossbows sniping from an elevated ledge 200 feet away, coupled with a kobold patrol harassing with slings shortly down the path, which was built on the edge of a canyon and collapsed if 2 or more Medium-sized creatures walked in a particular place. It DESTROYED the party it was set up against.

[PrinceOfMadness]

This was actually fairly recent....

Two baddies: a mind flayer and a beholder. They're in a 60 ft room, where the only way in or out is a 70 ft narrow corridor with no cover. The corridor counted as difficult terrain due to some...unusual circumstances (the city they were in was falling from the sky). The beholder is keeping his anti-magic cone on the corridor - and I houseruled that his eye beams worked through the anti-magic cone. Psionics, of course, worked through the cone.

Party consisted of a barbarian, fighter, monk, paladin, and two wizards. And the barbarian started the fight dominated by the mind flayer.

The party had seven rounds to either kill the beholder, or at least get him to look away from the giant glowy crystal in the middle of the room before it became to late to save the city.

The party was level 5. :smallamused:

They actually managed to pull through with only one fatality (the barbarian) and killed the mind flayer. They were smart and brought their own cover with them, but didn't coordinate fire. Unfortunately they didn't manage to save the city.

[ZenBear]

Also did a dungeon in tidal caves that the tide made the water level rise and fall over time. More puzzle-y when they learned the trick but boy was that first rest a rude surprise.

I really like this idea! It doesn't have to be brutal, this is just a solid idea all around for making a dungeon delve more dynamic.

[Mrmox42]

Also did a dungeon in tidal caves that the tide made the water level rise and fall over time

I did something like it, but with vulcanic lava rising instead. I hadn't thought it through, just thought it was awesome.
It was.
The party failed ALL (like thirty of them, I never saw so many 1's rolled) their ability checks and saves.
They all got roasted, one by one. In the end, everybody died. They had not even met any monsters yet.

The players were nice, as they saw that I really tried to save them with giving them extra save rolls, but to no avail.

Alas. :smallredface:

[charcoalninja]

The most famous dungeon of them all, the Tomb of Horrors, was remembered for one reason. What vile traps and monsters have you unleashed to make Gygax himself smile?

In my upcoming game, I was planning on the party getting ambushed by a Medusa Assassin. With Greater Invisibility. When they realize that they are fighting an invisible foe, they will scramble for a way to dispel the cloaking, only for that proving to be a horrible idea. :smalltongue:

Nice twist!

My most deadly encounter was a party of 20th level players were clearing out a cave complex when they stumbled on a trap that divided them, and revealed the complex to be a beholder den.
The archer fighter found himself in an antimagic eye beam from a beholder hovering overhead just as it disintegrated the cave cages that contained 2 10 headed hydras.

Now that was a basic encounter and for a 20th level fighter I figured tough but doable, he had a psion for backup after all. Nope. The archer fighter had all his ammo stored in a quiver of elhonna (an extradimensional space) so when the anti-magic zone popped up, he had nothing to shoot. After that 10 opportunity attacks a round plus full attacks from the hydras reduced him to mulch. The psion GTFO'd though and lived to fight another day.

[Millface]

A Nalfheshnee set up an unassuming inn in Waterdeep. Every so often he would murder some of the guests and serve them up as "specialty" meals to some of the higher-classed nobles. Using magic to compel people to enter, and to output a sincere, warm, fun environment he had it made. The party was searching for the Dwarven guards of an emissary from Adbar, the search split them up. Two of them ended up at this inn.

Some failed saves and checks later and they were happily eating and drinking, one of them even had seconds. Fast forward a little and they feel they've narrowed it down enough for the Cleric to Locate Creature. They narrow it down shortly to the dwarves being within 5 feet of their location before I describe one of their stomach's rumbling. The parties eyes go wide as they finally figure out what all of those saves were for.

They run back to that inn and demolish it, but not before they had to tell the emissary that they had eaten his trusted guards.

Difficult? Nah.
Vile? I think so.

[1Forge]

Homebrew world cast into eternal night. A drow archer patrol with longbowmen rained arrows and magic on the party, the few who lived had no darkvision or fire, and were wiped by drow warriors.

[Drackolus]

I'm planning on an npc fight against a 3 assassin/8 death cleric (or more) and a 3 eldritch knight/8 necromancer. The kicker is, they both have lots of animated undead already, and the fight starts with the necromancer already concentrating an improved invisibility on the cleric - meaning the party had better thing to detect magic. And I already know that they won't. The fight will likely start with somebody getting an auto-critical with a "darkbrand" (flamebrand but necrotic) rapier with her divine strikes and channeled divinity straight to the back. And I won't feel bad. Once they actually manage to get the spell off of her in order to fight her, the necromancer's gonna get the great idea to cast vampiric touch and start healing the crap out of himself on top of his 20 ac in his armor and shield, even action surging to do twice in a row if he's low enough. All the while, both will be using their bonus actions to command their horde of zombies, making the sneak attacks almost guaranteed.

This will essentially be two prepared level 14's against 7-9 (we've got a big group) level 7 characters. I may just tone this down or wait until they level up, but I dunno.

EDIT: I may even throw in their daughter, an extremely talented 6-year old Warlock serving Orcus (and crazy as hell).

[MOLOKH]

Most of the encounters I plan out don't go too well, usually getting curbstomped or being rather uneventful. One of the hardest encounters for my group was supposed to be just a road bump, but it nearly killed two PCs. It was a Roper stuck to the wall of a dried up well. The Barbarian of course looked down the well, got grappled, pulled in and chomped, with a crit no less, before he could even rage, then fell down the well, where he could at least find cover among some debris. The rogue jumped in to help, but stubmled somewhat on the rolls and ended up next to the Barb with almost no HP. It was a grueling fight, with the Roper trying to pull the two out of their hiding place while the Warlock was flying over the well, shooting a couple of times, then flying back. Finally, the Paladin jumped into the well and smote the beast as he fell with just enough damage to kill it, just as the Barbarian and Rogue, who were unconscious and dangling under the Roper at two failed death saves each, were about to get their heads bitten off. They were all a couple of levels above the Roper's CR.