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View Full Version : DM Help Tower of Trials: Designing an adventure that tests the PC's in a variety of ways



Pax_Chi
2015-07-26, 09:23 PM
This idea was somewhat inspired by the first and fourth Final Fantasy games. In both games, the heroes had to undertake a quest in a specific dungeon/castle/mountain area, doing the usual adventuring thing, but had to prove themselves worthy, not just via combat, but character wise as well. Achieving this meant the god/dragon/force of the place would acknowledge the worthiness of the heroes and grant them some type of bonus, both cases giving the heroes a class change to something either more powerful or which better suited their personality.

My own adventure idea is as follows:

The players were recently tricked into freeing a long slumbering entity known as the King of Stone from his imprisonment, releasing a very angry godlike entity upon the world who is basically a Mountain That Walks Like A Man, who can also animate earth and stone into monsters to act as an advanced army for him. Having set him free and barely help hold off his army long enough to evacuate a city that was directly in the KoS' path, the PCs now have to figure out what do do about the very being they set free.

The solution will be that the heroes will have to journey to a tower, atop of which sits a council who act as direct agents for a god or pantheon of gods. If you reach the top of the tower and found worthy, you are given godlike power. If you reach the top and are found unworthy, you are freed with no memory of what happened in the tower. And if you die trying to get to the top, well, you die.

Now, while there should be some combat, I want this to be akin to what you'd see in a movie, TV series or book series where the trials aren't all physical. There are things that test the heroes moral fiber, their intelligence, and other less physical attributes to see if they're worthy to wield godlike to power to right the wrong they unintentionally caused.

One idea that was suggested to me was to have another group of adventurers at the bottom, waiting to enter the tower as well, and both them and the PCs must travel up at the same time. How the PCs treat this other group will be part of the test, such as whether or not they help the other team, save them if they're in trouble, that kind of thing. At the end of the adventure, assuming the PCs make it, the other group will be revealed to be members of the council who were doing their own test of the heroes.

I'm open to ideas, but I don't want the right answer to be too obvious. I'm thinking of things like making the characters admit that they did something wrong, even if they were tricked, so they accept the responsibility for their actions and not just blame the person that tricked them.

Thoughts?