Designing a Dungeon

[Lacum Dominum]

So I'm dming for my first time in around 2 months, since our current campaign is just about done wrapping up. In the meantime, I'm trying to work on the dungeon the players will deal with in my campaign. My initial idea was to have the party go through a fairly generic dungeon, meet up with the final boss, and have the final boss teleport them halfway across the world and also backwards in time. Whenever the group inevitably gets back to the dungeon they find that the amount of time they were traveling back is almost exactly equal to the amount of time backwards they were thrown.

So now, on a time limit, they have to travel through the exact same dungeon following the carnage that they themselves caused the first time they came through. So I'm trying to think of ways to make the party's actions the first time affect them the second time. Destructible environments, barred doors, enemies that the party would (hopefully) run away from the first time, etc. Do you have any ideas for cool tricks to make the same dungeon feel fresh a second time?

[EvulOne]

Resettable traps, traps with timers like sliding walls or bridges that force the players to wait. Monsters they thought were killed regenerated or perhaps a sub-boss or boss wizard raised the dead or necromancer animated them all as undead.

[Castilonium]

A Remixed Level (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RemixedLevel) sounds like it could be a lot of fun in a tabletop game. Take a peek at that link for lots of examples done in video games. (Standard TVTropes warnings apply.)


When done right, backtracking can make an area feel far more real than if you just followed a straight line through it. It can also show contrasts, such as a familiar area going through major changes (such as exploring the Doomed Hometown before and after its destruction), or having familiar scenery but completely different enemies and gameplay. Also, in games where the protagonists get more abilities over time, heading back through previous areas much faster due to newly accessible shortcuts (as well as new areas) and blowing everything away easily can contrast with how much trickier navigating and surviving a location was before (this can be one of the biggest strengths of the Metroid Vania genre).

[Tamorlin]

I'd make the whole dungeon to travel back in time. They can find different denizens (like golems that they found shattered into pieces in the first run), and find that some of the rooms they visited weren't built yet, but some previously collapsed passages are now transitable.

[Bucky]

You could have a trap that slowly floods the room with acid. The party probably clears it the first time with plenty of time to spare, but the second time they find the room already flooding.

You could have a monster that they could sneak by the first time, but which has been woken up by all the ruckus for the second round.

As a variation, you could have some enemies that try to pursue them up a planted ladder or rope; the party will probably cut or smash it to avoid pursuit. That leaves them stranded with a bunch of angry enemies on the second trip.

[EvulOne]

Also depending on the player level, dungeon cleaners like Carrion Crawlers and Gelatinous Cubes could be encountered having followed the players in the first run. Or there is always an adventuring party that was following them. In fact they could have been ones who were out to get the party from a previous story arc or something and the players are now right behind them.

[Bronk]

Perhaps a dungeon fought in reverse?

The first time through, the players fight weak monsters, reach a boss that exists across time, it hits them with an ability that locks them to the dungeon, and sends them back in time.

Not too far though! Just long enough to reach a time when the dungeon had more powerful monsters. As the players fight these monsters, the lesser monsters they fought last time run away, with enough remaining to repopulate, drag any forgotten loot into new/old positions, and ruin notes left to the players' past selves.

When they get to the boss this time, it's more powerful too, and is able to send them even further back, and so on, until you or the players come up with a good way to end it.

There can be more going on here, like side plots and hints about how to finally getting rid of that pesky boss, even though it keeps getting tougher.



Basically, I think that it would wreck things by allowing the players free reign to time travel around your world freely.

For a fun example of this sort of thing played for laughs, check out the Doctor Who parody, "The Curse of the Fatal Death"...