Dungeon plot twist ideas

[TheDude]

Hello guys,
first of all sorry for my English! I'd need an advice for a dungeon crawl that i would make a little different:

my players are going to reach a mysterious dungeon (Durlag's tower) to take a McGuffin. Near the Dungeon i see there is the village of Gullikyn, a small hamlet of halflings (in my campaign).
The dungeon have a bad reputation, someone told the players no one ever returned from there, and i'd like the reason of that to be not only the difficoult dungeon encounters and various traps, but the fact that the halflings in the village kill/poison/capture the survivors when they rest in the city tavern.


What do you think could be a reason for that? Collecting souls/bodies for a fiend that lives in the dungeon? What monster do you think can inhabit such a place?
Why the halflings help the fiend? Are they evil, or disguised svirneblin/monsters/fiends? Are they dominated?

I was thinking about the story of Durlag, and I thought about the rage/madness of the dwarf still living in the dungeon and creating a sort of "mini-Abyss" fed by the souls of creatures that die in the tower (maybe only creatures with a particular alignment like CE? and maybe legal creatures become caotic when entering the tower? saving throws for madness if you stay too long?)

Those are just ideas and i'd like to know what you think about it and how i can improve it!

Thanks in advance

[maxion]

A have a tiny bit less typical proposition for those reasons. You could make a little moral dilemma out of this. Dungeon is hosted by some alien refugee (Illithid? some extraplanar powerfull creature which is chased by their race). So creature is hidden there, and is so afraid of its exposure, that manipulated whole city to protect him. They could kinda praise him as a semi god because of disguise/ manipulation. And creature might be just a little evil, but his oppressors could be even more evil, which situation could lead to decision whether to help him or kill him.

[ayvango]

There were was a party that traveled to the dungeon. They have a kings order to do so and they could not refuse it. The party returned successfully. But in the night after resting in the tavern party enraged and massacred bunch of village people. Village survived, elders managed to kill party with heritage limited use magic items. But the party was kings champions, so elders could not admit they killed party. This way the tale of dungeons of no escapes were born.

One year on kings sent another party to defeat the evil. The story repeated itself. Halflings draw a conclusion that incomprehensible evil plagues whoever enters the dungeons. So to prevent further massacre of fellow villagers, barman poisons returning adventures to help locals kill them without large scale fight.

[Zaq]

What you’ve described is a fair bit of work on the part of the townsfolk. So what’s in it for them? If they don’t have a semi-believable rationale, the story will likely fall flat. A few brainstorming ideas:

The townies can’t go in the dungeon (because it’s legitimately dangerous, because of a cultlike taboo, etc.), but they like something that happens to be in the dungeon and that happens to tend to come out when adventurers come out. Something shiny that adventurers tend to gather because of typical looting mentality, some kind of organic thing that tends to stick to them (like, I dunno, magical fungus spores that tend to accumulate on their armor and that can be gathered after the fact by townsfolk who are trained in such matters), maybe even some kind of metaphysical thing (a blessing or whatever) that can somehow be harvested from a freshly slain corpse. So they send adventurers in on the pretense of getting the Macguffin, but they’re really after whatever this other element happens to be. I like the “magical spores” idea because it basically feels like a twisted form of how plants attract pollinators.
Maybe the townsfolk are effectively just bandits who want to let the dungeon soften up their targets for them. Adventurers carry lots of valuable stuff, you know? But freshly rested adventurers are damned hard to take on in a fair fight. Much easier to take them on when they’re low on spell slots and HP and other depletable resources, like after a dungeon.
Maybe the adventurers are doing the dirty work for the townsfolk, but no one can know about it. Adventurers in dungeons tend to murder whatever they see, right? So let’s say that the dungeon is where the townsfolk send the people they don’t like. Their own people they don’t like. Criminals, heretics, unwanted children, members of disgraced families, people who are politically inconvenient, folks who know too much, whatever. They force ‘em into the dungeon. Maybe there’s some kind of magical effect that makes folks in the dungeon look different the longer they stay there, so it’s not so obvious that these are just former citizens of the town. Why bother with this? Because the town authorities want these victims dead, but they have some kind of rule against actually explicitly executing them. Maybe it’s a religious prohibition against explicitly killing their own kind, maybe it’s a twisted legal compromise, maybe it’s just a personal quirk of one person in charge, whatever. But they want the victims dead and they want to do it without killing them. So they round up the victims, force them into this dungeon that twists their appearance to look like goblins or whatever, and then the townsfolk send murderous adventurers into this dungeon on some kind of pretense, knowing full well that the adventurers will happen to kill at least a good handful of victims before they catch wise to what’s really going on. However, by the time the adventurers get out of the dungeon, they’ve usually figured it out, and that’s why the adventurers must be killed.

[Particle_Man]

The extinction burst of the dungeon’s bbeg/removing the McGuffin released a plague of mirrors of opposition in a large radius outside the dungeon, and the village got showered in them. These evil killer halfling duplicates murdered their good counterparts but need to keep killing in order to maintain their quasi existence.

One clue might be lots of suddenly evil wild life?

[Jay R]

People keep coming into their tavern low on hit points and high on loot.

Does this really need a more complicated explanation?

[TheDude]

Thanks to everyone for your amazing ideas!!
I have still a doubt: why high level adventurers never discovered the village lies? They are not intrested in Durlag's Tower because of the reputation it have?