Complex Trap : Hypercube

[SolkaTruesilver]

This is an elaborate trap I once concieved to make my players rage and sweat. It was a great success, if I remember it, and my players were lost in it for a whole gaming session.

If you have seen the movie Cube 2: Hypercube, you'll be somewhat familiar with it.

The party, while exploring the abandonned ruins of [random] climb a ladder into a strange cubic room, which is 15 feet x 15 x 15. The trapdoor trough which they enter the room is at the center of the floor. The floor is painted black with golden scripts 5 feet around the trapdoor, while the rest of the floor is white. All of the sides of the cube seem to be painted the exact same way, and each of the other side seems to have the same trapdoor.

When the last party member has entered, the door closes behind him, and the Cube closed on them.

The Cube is a semi-plane, which is finite (27 cubes), but there aren't any edge. (if you keep going forward, you will simply go back to the room your started in at your 3rd room-transition.

Gravity is subjective, so the characers can always walk on the floor/walls (much like a perfect Spider Walk spell). It can be very, very, very disorienting, so, Sadic GMs, non-intellectual PCs should get maluses over time. I would also say that PCs may get tired (intellectually) quickly during the first days of travel.

The golden writing is the scripts upon which the whole HyperCube demi-plane exists. A wizard can try to decipher them, and if not, use another prisonner of the plane to inform them of the riddle. To free itself, someone has "To walk his own steps three time".

Which means, the party has to get into a room, and go back into the door it just got in. Then, when in the room, go back trough the same door. And then one more time

You may invent whatever good riddle to get out of the HyperCube, but make it hard.

One more thing.. there is a reason why it's "Hypercube", and not merely "cube". The scripts reveal that every time a door is open, it leads to the other room. But if the spatial movement is determinate, there is a random temporal movement. Technically, HyperCube always existed, and will always exist. You can mess your player's mind by making them meet NPCs that have encountered them in their past, them make them (later) encounter them again. Or make them find their own piece of equipment (hey! that's my family's sword! But.. it.. looks 5000 years old...)

The "temporal randomness" can help them encounter ennemies, other poor souls trapped into HyperCube for centuries.. even if mere days happened outside. Or, on the other side, they could have entered centuries in the past, but spent a mere hour in the HyperCube..

You can make them encounter wizards who are there to study this.. magical marvel, or other prisonners who have fell to cannibalism to feed and drink.

Sometime, it's possible to make your players see furniture that have been created/summoned by a wizard long dead/eaten. It's possible for them to encounter themselves..

My favorite encounter should be a somewhat early one. It's a dusty skeleton of a man who had his throath cut cleanly. He is dressed in [your choice], but hold a piece of paper.. upon which is writter (I hand-wroted in a hurry this piece. It's supposed to give a desperate feeling to the PCs):


I'm gonna die. I know it. I had hope to get out of this wretched labyrinth, forsaken by the gods.. but now, I know I'm gonna die. As I wrote it, my hands are covered in blood... mine.

I learned to prey upon other prisonners.. to get their food. Sometimes, it's a wandering beast, and I can eat it's flesh. So, when I saw a sleeping man on the floor of a room, I just went ahead, and cut his troath. When I saw his face, I recognised him. I've always knew him.. because he was me. He was an older me.. but he was me.

I will kill myself. I know it.

I cannot even leave this wretched place.. Because what will happen if I change what will be..?

PEACH and propose random encounters..

[Icewalker]

That...is...freaking awesome.

I can see a lot of kickass stuff happening in there.

To extend your sword example:
"Hey, that's my family sword, next to that weird skeleton! Looks like the strap is broken."
"But it looks like 50 years old..."
"I suppose I should take it anyway."

Later

"AAaaah monster too powerful for us to take, it's too big to fit through the trapdoors, run!"
While pushing through the trapdoor quickly, character's (current) sword gets caught on the door and as he is pushed through, the strap breaks and the sword falls back into the room.

:smalleek:


:smallbiggrin:

I like that dead guy one, really scary. Sounds like a good place to spend a bit of time. I don't really like the escape puzzle, kind of weird and simple, and worst, it could happen by accident.

Ooooh, the players could be with an NPC who gets split up from them and they meet him again but he is really old and half crazy and maybe tries to kill them. They beat him. Then later, they encounter him again, but younger.

I'm using this.

[Krimm_Blackleaf]

Crying demons are always unnerving, or creatures that might already be insane(or immune to insanity) are sitting in a corner seeming to have been driven even more crazy, to the point where it really shows. Maybe for about 3 solid days they hear constant screaming from an undetermined source, and they never figure out where it comes from.

I too, am using this.

[Xuincherguixe]

I've got some ideas on how to make it even nastier. Leave false trails and make it LOOK like they've escaped. Then they turn a corner and suddenly they're back in the Hybercube.

^_^

My thought is that escape should be really hard. Such as one of the PCs has to die, get resurrected, and create a door way out for them. But of course, then false gateways designed to look like the one the guy who escaped created will appear.

[Luean]

Once, i tried to design a "normal" Cube (for those who have seen the first cube movie :smallwink: ) but after some time i got bored...

I might give it another try, but until then, i'll use this idea ^^

Edit:
For the encounters, i think i'll rewatch the film.
One thing i remember, is a guy who went crazy and killed a girl who had a name tag on a chain around her neck.
Later, you see that guy again and he has a few dozens of those nametags around HIS neck and is covered in blood.

[Jack_Simth]

I once set up a hypercube, but not with the time issue - it was a space issue.

Basically, eight doors in each nexus, each one representing moving in a particular direction (Up, Down, North, South, East, West, Ana, Kata) to the next room on the grid. Each one had a portal to a random plane (I was actually rolling on the spot when they poked their head through).

The edges were flat - the door simply didn't exist once you finally hit the edge.

The group from the portal in the center (it was a manner of locking out a plane) had finally figured the place out, got it labeled (a herculean task, what with it being length 15) and was using it to invade the other realms. Oh yeah - and they had some nice tech.

[cha0s4a11]

A possible issue with the hypercube is working out which model of time travel you are using:

1) Self-consistent plane where if you do accidentally kill a later version of yourself that means you will inevitably die at the hands of a younger version of yourself, for example.

2) Quantum/Anything that could happen will happen somewhere where there are multiple versions of you running around each of which may have different events occur to them (like the movie, for example)

3) Something else.

The model you pick may affect what encounters you could have and what actions you can take in those encounters. Other than that looks pretty good.

A suggested riddle for escaping the hypercube:

"The only way to leave this cursed place is to never enter."

Solution:

To exit you must find the room that you originally started in, and enter the room at a time before you originally entered the hypercube. Once you have done this, then you must block the door that you originally entered the hypercube from, such that your original entrance into the hypercube would be prevented, thus preventing you from being in the hypercube now, and thus freeing you from the hypercube.

GM's discretion of course about whether or not characters retain injuries/items/experience/etc that they gained while in the hypercube, but consistency would say probably not, effectively turning the place into one big mind screw. :smallbiggrin:

[Pronounceable]

To exit you must find the room that you originally started in, and enter the room at a time before you originally entered the hypercube. Once you have done this, then you must block the door that you originally entered the hypercube from, such that your original entrance into the hypercube would be prevented, thus preventing you from being in the hypercube now, and thus freeing you from the hypercube.

GM's discretion of course about whether or not characters retain injuries/items/experience/etc that they gained while in the hypercube, but consistency would say probably not, effectively turning the place into one big mind screw. :smallbiggrin:


That is a smart idea if I've ever seen one. Sure, it wrecks havoc with causality, but causality is overrated anyway. When they block the door, they suddenly find themselves at the moment of their entry into the cube, but this time door won't budge. Or perhaps something else.

A better thing would be an NPC who's one of the PCs that has somehow escaped after many years. He's gone mad and is a pathetic wretch. Perhaps he had to kill and eat his companions? Or he's angry for he had sacrificed himself to save himself, which turned out not to be exactly him. So he attacks. When the two versions touch, something interesting happens. Or maybe not...

Anyway, this is great stuff.

[SolkaTruesilver]

To extend your sword example:
"Hey, that's my family sword, next to that weird skeleton! Looks like the strap is broken."
"But it looks like 50 years old..."
"I suppose I should take it anyway."

Later

"AAaaah monster too powerful for us to take, it's too big to fit through the trapdoors, run!"
While pushing through the trapdoor quickly, character's (current) sword gets caught on the door and as he is pushed through, the strap breaks and the sword falls back into the room.


In the original HyperCube run I made, the PCs found the sword of the party's rogue, a powerful and clearly distinctable. They then knew they were in trouble. The sword was stucked into the skull of a monster, among skeletons..

When they were about to leave, in their first-backup room (you know, 3 time their own steps..), they encountered 3 Ogres, and had a nasty time (15x15x15 gives a total-reach for all ogres). But while the wizard and the cleric were down to negative, the Rogue managed a tumble to get near the ogre, and scored a nasty critical hit with his sword, killing the monster. He then turned on me, saying "I leave the sword into the monster", knowing that he shouldn't mess with causality. They then fled.

He was just waiting for the proper moment to leave his sword, and was afraid to **** up things.. I loved it.

It is your choice about how causality is. Personnally, I had a hard-enforcement of causality in my HyperCube, and the PCs were aware of that. They knew that is they tried to mess up causality, the magical property of the HyperCube will get back at them.

But you can allow the PCs to kill themselves. I don't much care.

I allowed the PC to gain experience and stuff in the HyperCube. They encountered a Lich that became a Lich within the Cube, in order to spend millenias studying it. It was a freaking experience, specially when they encountered the young wizard that was fascinated by the whole thing, and asked the PCs how to become a Lich...

[Fri]

Really cool. Personally, I wouldn't care about causality and such, because it'd be much cooler if time and space inside the hyper cube are really chaotic, and anything could happen inside it. And it'd be easier running the hypercube :D

[Icewalker]

My opinion on causality: if you are a good enough DM, like crazy good, you can make them do exactly what you want so that they will choose, most likely against their own knowledge, to keep causality correct. A DM I know can do this...

(In one adventure, one character had some strange stuff happen to him. One week later, this DM played through the same scene with another person, who was playing his character who was invisible and manipulating the scene to cause things to happen, and made it play out exactly as it did for the guy a week ago. This was complex enough to involve the decision to crouch and untie the guy's shoe to distract him...all planned beforehand unbeknownst to the player.)



Two other ideas for the very confusing cube:

They fight the BBEG, but an old version of him. Epic battle, they finally slay him. Upon finally escaping, at the end of the adventure, as they battle the BBEG, right before they win he escapes by fleeing into the cube. :smallwink:


Second one, is that there is a guy who was born inside the plane. His mother died during childbirth. He was separated from his father when he was quite young, but was found by a much older man and raised by him. When the older man died, he left the kid his sword, which the kid has carried his whole life and used to defend himself (a pretty powerful item). He ends up falling in love with a woman who is stuck in the cube, and they have a child. She dies during childbirth.

Realizing what has happened after he loses his son, he wanders aimlessly for a long time and one day finds his son again as a child, and raises him, eventually leaving him the sword when he finally passes away.




By the way, that first one with the BBEG will make up for any amount of screwing with them when they are inside.

[lord of kobolds]

if the addventurer are uberepic use this (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=78681&highlight=faceless)

[Waspinator]

This is an incredibly creepy and disturbing concept. I like it!

[CTG]

Seems to me you wouldn't need a cube design either.

A cabal of wizards could have the first floor of their tower of study/library/chantry set up like this, keeping those that would raid it for the mystical items within within the trap until they die from it or are captured by the wizards or their guards.

[Burley]

~Yoink!~
I've been wanting this kind of thing for so long! I'm running a campaign setting that is based at when the world is very young (only a couple generations after elves and gnomes (and other fey) were dropped from Etherea into the Material Plane. There are many elves and gnomes who remember what life in Etherea was like, i.e. "In Old Country.")
I've been wanting to stress that the world is still so young that there are gaps all over the place. The last session consisted of them being flung to another continent. The HyperCube could be a fantastic way for them to figure out the holes in the world, and give me time to prepare a few sessions ahead until they get out.

P.S.- I'm totally stealing a lot of stuff from a lot of the posters on this thread. I'm gonna gank the kid being his own father, as well as them meeting and befriending a young sorcerer and fighting his lich form at the very end. It's gonna be so epic.

[SolkaTruesilver]

P.S.- I'm totally stealing a lot of stuff from a lot of the posters on this thread. I'm gonna gank the kid being his own father, as well as them meeting and befriending a young sorcerer and fighting his lich form at the very end. It's gonna be so epic.

Why not making them meet the sorcerer as a powerful, but aged individual, then the Lich as an end-boss. And right before they leave, they meet the young man, and have to rail him into becoming a lich?

[Da King]

I'm having trouble understanding this because I don't know what exactly a hypercube is. Could someone explain?

[ZeroNumerous]

I'm having trouble understanding this because I don't know what exactly a hypercube is. Could someone explain?

Some people just plain forget that we're connected to the internet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercube).

[Icewalker]

Except...real hypercubes actually have more or less nothing to do with this thing.

This is just a plane of infinite cubes with crazy temporal distortion! At least, that's what mine'll be, it's a simpler solution with the exact same result. You said involves a 3x3x3 set of cubes with REALLY crazy temporal distortion?



By the way, another fun thing, and a simple one, good for starting. As soon as they move between rooms and realize they are all identical, one of the party's first actions will be to mark a room. Perhaps scratch an X into the floor. As they enter the next room, they find their X. But it is extremely worn and almost gone.

[Waspinator]

And that's about the exact moment that they realize how screwed they are.

[Da King]

Yes, I checked wikipedia before posting that, I was asking because I don't understand.

[Collyer-san]

Search for the Movie 'Cube 2: Hypercube'. That's the basis of this trap.

[cthulutastesgoo]

What happens if the party destroys a wall? Or all 4 at once?

[JackTR69]

I'd assume that the walls are indestructible.

[Icewalker]

If the walls aren't indestructible, there is still a solution here: they bust a hole in the wall, see another room through it like a trapdoor, move through, they are in another room, at a different time, which doesn't have a hole in the wall. :smalltongue:

[SolkaTruesilver]

My lab rats party members did tried to use markers, and they did found their maker, 2000 years old. It was a lotta fun.

the easy way would be to make the walls indestructible. But the other way around is making the walls regenerating. About 1 foot/year of lifetime. And when they destroy a wall, it simply open into nothingness. If they try to jump into nothingness.. well, they are screwed. I don't even want to know what will happen.

[Coplantor]

I'm gathering ideas for the crasiest dungeon ever and this one is a keeper. I'll let you know when the mad dungeon is done.

[martyboy74]

Would this merely be a tesseract, or would it go beyond to 5/6/7/etc. dimensions?

[MorkaisChosen]

I've got some ideas on how to make it even nastier. Leave false trails and make it LOOK like they've escaped. Then they turn a corner and suddenly they're back in the Hybercube.

^_^

My thought is that escape should be really hard. Such as one of the PCs has to die, get resurrected, and create a door way out for them. But of course, then false gateways designed to look like the one the guy who escaped created will appear.

Reminds me of an episode of Farscape- the one with the doors and craziness...

[Kenori]

God I have so many ideas for this. Thanks a lot for posting this.

*saved*

[lord of kobolds]

Beautiful.
plenty of evil potential.
Great way to really knock your characters out of a knock-down-the-door mindset.

[mikeejimbo]

I once set up a hypercube, but not with the time issue - it was a space issue.

Basically, eight doors in each nexus, each one representing moving in a particular direction (Up, Down, North, South, East, West, Ana, Kata) to the next room on the grid.

So it was an actual hypercube?

[Nathan W]

this isent a hypercube. its a 3-torus embded in 4 space

[Jack_Simth]

So it was an actual hypercube?
Near enough, yes. Doors were labeled (it was being systemically used for an invasion; each nexus ended up on a random but fixed plane) but they still needed some serious hinting to figure it out.

[Chokuto]

Love the idea, although didn't enjoy the movie too much.

Although haveing 27 cubes with no edge that are all in a strange time paradox spinning in a slight vortex of chaos would really amount the same as having an infinite number of cubes, yes?

[Icewalker]

Yeah, I think if I use it nobody will be fully sure what it is, but it is more or less an infinite plane of cubes which keep going into each other with temporal screwiness.

[Flickerdart]

The concept is explained fully and I still don't have any idea how it works. How will the poor players handle it?

I mean, it doesn't even have to be a hypercube if we stick with the time thingy. All you do is roll randomly where they go after they enter a door, including time rolls. Putting in a device that lets them control where and when they go would be a lot of fun, especially if that's the only way they can defeat the lich (go back in time and shank the newbie wizard).

[Fiery Diamond]

As others have said, this isn't really a hypercube.

I've never seen the movie, so I don't really get the references, but this seems like an awesome trap.

Having the time warp thingie is the only reason it's possible to have so many people wandering for so long in the place, though, as it is actually fairly small.

-Fiery Diamond

[Kenori]

My personal favorite versions of this is have only one cube, from which the doors keep opening on themselves in different times. Such as they may open one door of the cube to find that they are 100 years in the future or 100 years in the past, as long the cube still exists in working order.


Also make it even screwier if gravity is subjective to each cube. So say your party puts a big X over the door that they come in through, then go out the door directly in front of them. Not only is the X that appears over the door they came in to worn and faded, but it is on the door in the ceiling instead of on the wall. >:D

[Bluelantern]

A play with gravity and potential solving of the cube:

have a "gravity center" cube, who defines the gravity of the cubes around it. The center cube can either pull or push the gravity towards it.

It also changes under some circustances, this can be time, when the same trapdoor is open a number of times, or any other factor.

The gravity center cube can be the way out, of course the problem is get there before it changes, also there might be something there... waiting.

[curtis]

This, THIS is why i love these boards.

One word: Reapers.

For all those people who aren't fans of Doctor who (Read: idiots:biggrin:), a reaper is a powerful, dragon/batlike creature whoch appears when a paradox is created (eg. you kill your older self in the hypercube, and then leave) and "sterilize" the wound - by killing everyone inside.

[The Rose Dragon]

...who aren't fans of Doctor who (Read: idiots:biggrin:)...

Or those who can't watch the series because it doesn't air in their country?

[Reinboom]

Hm
I need to know -how- the thing works, exactly. Not just that it works.
I dislike puzzles without a why or how behind it. Even if that why or how is unrealistic and fantastic, I hate "just because".

That said, I think I shall use this idea - but expand it by trying to describe exactly how each room is formed when you enter it. Then let the players try to solve that.

[Kami2awa]

My lab rats party members did tried to use markers, and they did found their maker, 2000 years old. It was a lotta fun.

the easy way would be to make the walls indestructible. But the other way around is making the walls regenerating. About 1 foot/year of lifetime. And when they destroy a wall, it simply open into nothingness. If they try to jump into nothingness.. well, they are screwed. I don't even want to know what will happen.

They step into the void, and fall. Then a few seconds later, they fall past the hole again. And again, looping round the edges of the demiplane. They'll reach terminal velocity fairly soon but the strength test to grab the hole again, and the corresponding 20d6 damage from having fallen 200+ feet, will be hard. Of course, Feather Fall, Levitate or Fly can get them out of this. There were articles in a very old Dragon magazine on using tessaracts, and they suggested that good ways to escape would be Teleport, Wish... and Knock. On an unlocked door, causing it to open to the outside of the Cube.

[Kami2awa]

A play with gravity and potential solving of the cube:

have a "gravity center" cube, who defines the gravity of the cubes around it. The center cube can either pull or push the gravity towards it.

It also changes under some circustances, this can be time, when the same trapdoor is open a number of times, or any other factor.

The gravity center cube can be the way out, of course the problem is get there before it changes, also there might be something there... waiting.

An Umbral Blot (ELH)... it created the Hypercube by warping the dimensions around it.

[Jack_Simth]

Hm
I need to know -how- the thing works, exactly. Not just that it works.
I dislike puzzles without a why or how behind it. Even if that why or how is unrealistic and fantastic, I hate "just because".

That said, I think I shall use this idea - but expand it by trying to describe exactly how each room is formed when you enter it. Then let the players try to solve that.

Well, in the case of when I ran a hypercube, I was doing a "nexus" type. Each room connected to it's eight immediate neighbors by way of doors, arranged in a circle, around a central portal in the floor (which went to a random plane).

The thing was originally built as a wall around a plane that was invading the rest by way of a lot of casters using Astral Projection. It sealed up the plane (hence it needing to be 4 dimensional - to encompass the plane). It also consumed most of the magic of that plane (any spell cast needed a DC 30 caster level check, or the spell just fizzled). However, as it prevented the travel of souls off the plane (to stop the Astral Projection), the portion of the ethereal attached to that plane got rather crowded (souls couldn't go to their appropriate alignment planes). Likewise, the inhabitants eventually developed technology (to replace magic - took a long, long, long time....), found the portal from their world to the hypercube, and figured out the hypercube enough to use it to invade other planes again... this time, using technology, rather than magic. These invaders also went through and labeled the doors after some experimentation, so that they could direct solders - U, D, N, S, E, W, A, K (Up, Down, North, South, East, West, Ana, Kata). The letters were not part of the original construction; all doors were unlabeled and identical (as were all rooms). Before the labeling, it was trivial to get utterly, utterly lost.

Edit:
The nexus-type hypercube is actually one of the easier ones to track - you just stop trying to picture it, and run with a set of mathematical coordinates. A time-based hypercube would also be relatively simple - you've just got three spacial dimensions and one temporal dimension to worry about. If you really want to injure your brain, look up instructions for going from one volume to another on a hypercube the same way you'd go from one surface to another on a normal cube....

[Reinboom]

Ok, here's the method that I just wrote up:

The cube is a series of 27 (or 64, or 125...) series of rooms, in a cube like state. Each a subdimension in of itself. The cube itself is set up so that projecting, or shifting outside each separate dimension themselves is impossible1. Teleporting within a room itself is possible. The rooms lap in a folding of time in of itself, with only the core room being stable, for the purposes of entering and exiting.

Moving from a stable room (the core) to an unstable room causes time to lapse over itself upon you. This figment of time lapse stays with you, a number unseen.
Moving North, South, or Up causes this number to increase by the instability factor of the room you are entering (usually 1 for most rooms, and 0 for the core2). Moving East, West, or Down causes the number to decrease by the instability factor.

Further, the cube folds on itself. That is, going from coordinates 2-2-2 to 2-2-3, and then again in the same direction would place you at 2-2-1, not 2-2-4. This is a simple fold from one end to the next.3

A door in the cube opens up to the outside world when a character leaves from a stable room (usually the core) towards an unstable room, and the time change would cause the instability factor to become 0 for that character. For example, if a character with an instability factor of -1 who is inside a core room, moves North towards a room with an instability of 1, would normally become at a factor of 0, so instead, the door moves to the outside world for them.

A character always perceives through a door how it would affect them. This can cause very strange visual effects.

Finally, ultimately, the instability factor a character possesses directly effects what point in time they are present, using a sequence of folding amounts, accounted in days4. That is, the Fibonacci sequence.

First 27 numbers, with the number of years it would represent
{table=head]Instability|Days|Years
0 |0 |0
1 |1 |0
2 |1 |0
3 |2 |0
4 |3 |0
5 |5 |0
6 |8 |0
7 |13 |0
8 |21 |0
9 |34 |0
10|55 |0
11|89 |0
12|144 |0
13|233 |0
14|377 |1
15|610 |1
16|987 |2
17|1597 |4
18|2584 |7
19|4181 |11
20|6765 |18
21|10946 |29 (4 days shy of 30)
22|17711 |48
23|28657 |78
24|46368 |127
25|75025 |205
26|121393 |332
27|196418 |538[/table]

Alternatives:
1
A room can be studied in enough detail to allow a spellcaster to specifically teleport or gate to that room. However, they are still affected by the instability factor - this time, however, randomly whether it is positive or negative. In order to make this 'nicer' to your players, make the negative or positive apply the same to all players. For example, have the gate be determined negative or positive at the time of its creation, not for each passer.

2
This can be expanded and changed easily, though I don't recommend having it be higher than 3.
You could even change the whole center is stable, and make them move in time even the moment they enter.
For example, a 5x5x3 'cube' (to really mess with your players):

Top floor
{table]2|3|2|3|2
3|2|1|2|3
2|3|2|3|2[/table]

Mid Floor (center 2 is core)
{table]1|2|1|2|1
2|1|2|1|2
1|2|1|2|1[/table]

Bottom Floor
{table]0|1|2|1|0
1|2|3|2|1
0|1|2|1|0[/table]

3
This can be changed, depending on how sadistic you want to be. Obviously.

4
This can also be changed, of course. Hours would work, and make a lot more 'personal' interactions. Or be creative (8 hour sequences would work as well, I believe).


Further, this allows for more interesting 'studying wizard lichs' types. You could even make someone who has reached a level of understanding as to be able to see the amount of time has lapsed on someone. Or someone who understands how much a room adds or removes, but not the amount on both the rooms and on players... or a lich for each. Etc.

Further, you could have the instability factor on each person loop as well, from the point the cube was created until the point it was destroyed in the unknown future in relation to that person.

[TheGeek]

*Yoink!*
I'm totally using this in my campaign. I just have to figure out why Strahd would have one.. (Doing Expd. to Castle Ravenloft).

[Soup of Kings]

I totally wanna use this.
Maybe.
The temporal distortion thing is cool, but I was also considering just dropping them into a tesseract. Of course, it would only be 8 rooms in that case, so a bit of temporal distortion might be called for. The idea is that each room is cubical and has six doors, one on each inner face of the cube. These six doors correspond to the six cubes that the room shares a face with (Which means that from any given room, there is one room you can't reach without going through another). It would be hard to explain the particulars, but I based it off my very limited knowledge of geometry and the Wikipedia article on the tesseract, with some helpful moving images. I REALLY like the idea of using a knock spell to escape, but I don't think my players would ever figure that out. Also, I have a few ideas rooted in the chaotic temporal dimension idea thing. Here's one.

The PC's enter a room to find an NPC (Class doesn't matter) fighting a group of Wights. By the time they save him (He's not doing well, though he's managed to bring down a few) he's lost a few levels. He joins the party in hopes of escaping, and explains how he got there, and that when he first arrived he was afraid and attacked everything that moved. Something happens, I haven't figured out what, to drastically alter the NPC's appearance. Later, a crazed man attacks the party, kills the NPC, and flees. That man, after he's calmed down, later encounters a group of Wights and is only saved by the timely intervention of an adventuring party...

By the by, my knowledge of 4-dimensional hypercubes is a bit...nonexistent. Could someone tell me if my concept is right?

[batsofchaos]

This is a great idea, that I want to use but don't know how feasible it would be in the campaign I'm starting out. It's a solo campaign, and this seems like a situation that needs a full party. Ah well, one of my future games, then.

If I were to run it, I would have to add this little bit of fun, expanded on the group that claims they met previously:

The party encounters a group that recognises them. Aside from some benign chatter, have one of the NPC group hand a party member an item, preferably something nice but mostly useless, like a handkerchief. The NPC says that they accidentally took it from the PC last time they spoke, and he wants to return it. The PCs have never seen this handkerchief before. Flash-forward a bit to where they encounter the NPCs again, only for their first time. Have one of them be sneezing and sniffly and ask to borrow a handkerchief.

It's especially awesome in my opinion for two reasons: The handkerchief does not in actuality exist since the PCs get it from the NPCs who got it from the PCs. Who had it first? :smallbiggrin: The other thought is that although the time of ownership is static between the two parties, the handkerchief experiences the passage of time between the two locations on a continual loop. The handkerchief should thus experience a matter of days, years, centuries, and millenia without any recognition from either party. Reasonably speaking, it should crumble to dust. But then again, if it crumbled there'd be an even worse paradox.

[Soup of Kings]

Handkerchief.

Same idea as the guy who was his own father and mentor and gave himself the sword, but I kinda like this one better as it directly involves the PC's. If I wind up using temporal distortion, I'm going to yoink this idea :smallbiggrin: Also, why would it be a greater paradox if it crumbled to dust? It just means that eventually, at some point either the NPC would say "I have your handkerchief, but it's so old and decrepit I don't think you wanna use it anymore..." or else the PC would say "I have a handkerchief, but it's so old and decrepit I don't think you wanna use it..."

[EDIT] Never mind, I see now. If the PC's didn't give it to the NPC, he wouldn't be able to give it to them to give to him to give to them to...oh, dear, I've gone cross-eyed. DAMN YOU, PARADOXICAL INFINITE TEMPORAL RECURSION LOOP...thing...

[batsofchaos]

It's a slight variation of one of my favorite time-paradox musings. This is the original musing:

A man wakes up one day and finds a revolver in his boot. He's never seen the gun before, but he takes it as his own, purchases bullets, and uses it to assassinate the president. Then, to hide the evidence, he travels back in time to the night before and hides it in his boot.

The musings are the same: The gun was never originally manufactured, purchased, or serviced by anyone, and although the situation with the man is static, the gun infinitely ages. At some point, it will be so old it will be unable to fire. Additionally, what if the gun CAME with ammunition first? Perhaps the gun is originally loaded full, so he just uses the first round, and then next time uses the second, etc. until the chambers are empty, and then his future-self purchases new ammunition each time it empties (and since he'd buy the same set each time, it would simply be reloading the same set of bullets). The president is assassinated with a variation of 6 bullets (or more depending on the model of gun), all at the same time.

Another fun thought is something more abstract, like an idea or a skill. Think about the song Johnny B. Goode in the Back to the Future movies. Marty learned how to play the song from Chuck Barry when it was popular, while Chuck learned (or at least was inspired for) the song by Marty playing it.

Perhaps the PC's meet another party that's grizzled and powerful which claims they look "vaguely familiar" and one of them offers to teach someone in the party a sword technique (read: trained in a feat or somesuch). Later they come across the same party several years before, when they are young and wet-behind-the-ears. The same who trained the PC asks said PC if they have any advice in sword-fighting. Thus the technique itself has no original perfection, it sprung whole-cloth into existence between the two.

[BrainFreeze]

Just a few ideas. You could have teleport/planeshift work as a way to enter the cube at a random location, but not work as an exit. By using this the players would be able to summon beings into the "trap" while they are fighting other residents though the beings they summoned would not be able to get back out once they are there. After awhile you may end up with a small army of creatures in the cube that hate the players since they condemned them to this prison.

Also I was thinking about any spells casted withen the cube running based on the actual timeframe of the plane instead of the player's subjective time. In this case you may have instant spells seem to take years to go off since the players have been slowed down a drastic amount, or 24 hour spells that expire right after being casted due to the players being accelerated in the time stream.

[Soup of Kings]

Various related time paradoxes.

All variants of the ontological paradox. All equally viable examples, too. Often, the ontological paradox deals with information as opposed to physical matter, avoiding the decay problem.

If you REALLY wanna mess your PC's up, read Robert A. Heinlein's "All You Zombies-" (http://ieng9.ucsd.edu/~mfedder/zombies.html) and try to pull off something like that. You might need a Girdle of Femininity/Masculinity...

[Jack_Simth]

There's a handful of basic methods of temporal paradox resolution in fiction.

1) Fate. What did happen, will happen, because that's the way it went. You can't kill your grandfather - you'll change your mind, something will intervene, the guy you shoot survives, you find out the hard way that you don't actually know who your grandfather was, et cetera. Even when it's absurd. Those nifty chicken/egg paradoxes fall under this.
2) Multiverse forking. You don't change your history, you spawn an alternate timeline. If you go back and kill your grandfather, you come home and nothing's changed - your grandfather is alive and well. He's dead in an alternate timeline, but that doesn't affect you, personally, at all. Optionally, when you "go home" you get shuffled into that alternate timeline... which is usually not distinguishable from...
3) Insulation. You go back and kill your grandfather. Your grandfather dies. You might fade out, or you might return to your own time and find no trace that you ever walked the earth. But either way, the incident happened, and your grandfather is dead.

Virtually any method of interesting temporal paradox resolution in fiction will be a variation on one of those. There are a handful of others - universe collapses, or effective reverse-time-travel not actually possible, for instance - but those aren't particularly interesting for a game, and generally either end up in a TPK, or acting much like the "fate" version (as the party has to follow the script to not die).

Interestingly, there's really only a few basic purposes for reverse time-travel that don't necessitate paradox if successful:
1) Information gathering. If you're just going back to find out who really killed Kennedy, or to actually listen to one of the prophets of old, there's no necessity that you actually interfere with events - no changes, no paradox. Going back to "have fun" tends to qualify under this one, too.
2) Stuff where the changes won't enter the perceptions of your personal timeline until after you return and know exactly where to look. If I get a gold bar, go back fifty years, hawk the gold bar, buy some fifty year bearer bonds, come back to the present, and cash in the bearer bonds, I've made a huge chunk of change - but unless the dm decides to pull a Butterfly Effect on you, there's no necessity of paradox - as you haven't changed anything that effects your personal previous timeline. No changes, no paradox.
3) Permanent escape. If the reason I'm going into the past is to hide, I don't particularly want to change anything. No changes, no paradox.
4) Resource gathering. If I'm just skipping back to 1912 to pick up a penny, so I can sell it when I come home, there's no particular need for there to be a paradox. (unless I am trying to pick up a specific penny).

For just about any other reason to travel into the past, you're doing it specifically to change something... which necessitates a non-Fate version of Paradox Resolution if you're to be successful at your task (Fate can have you be unsuccessful, no problem).

[Reinboom]

-snip-

The Song of Storms - The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time ?

Even though the song exists elsewhere (Majora's Mask), it does not effect that particular time line.


Also, why can't the trap be producing every type of time travel? Depending on the room.

[batsofchaos]

The Song of Storms is an excellent example.

It certainly could be any type of time travel, however I personally find the ontological paradox variety to be the most interesting, as well as the easiest to illustrate. What's perhaps more interesting is illustrating what happens when the PCs screw up an ontological paradox. I mean, in my above example what if they DON'T give the kid a hanky?

[1condor12]

dude this is the awsomest idea ever. i am not the dm of my game but i told him about it. he emediatly thought out a lot of exit riddles. one was "to get out of the maze you must kill you greates ally". you had to go to where you entered and kill yourself as you entered. but what i love is he gave us a chance to come to a workshop a wizard had set up. it gave me a spell to control the hypercube. i used it to travel through time along with my group. we turned out to be the heros of all time in that world. i might sould mention that my dm is one of those people that are master manipulaters. he made all sorts of paradoxes we had to solve. i started to get old. though we beat the final boss at level 3 when our level 20 selves came back in time to help us.:smallsmile:
all in all this is the greates idea iv heard
p.s. sorry i dont do gramar or spelling or punctuation or capitalization or etc...

[Jack_Simth]

It certainly could be any type of time travel, however I personally find the ontological paradox variety to be the most interesting, as well as the easiest to illustrate. What's perhaps more interesting is illustrating what happens when the PCs screw up an ontological paradox. I mean, in my above example what if they DON'T give the kid a hanky?Then you use one of the three basic methods of paradox resolution. Or send inevitables after them...

[SolkaTruesilver]

Well, I am glad that this idea is used a lot. I've put it there to be oinked, and it did.

Even better, it spawned baby-ideas!!!

[curtis]

WIZARD

A wizard (good) is travelling with a fighter. One day, they are attacked by ... trolls? ... and separated. Another time, he is attacked by an insane man, and is saved by a slightly older, evil wizard who tried to turn him evil. Nonetheless, they ended up travelling together and summoned up a great monster.

They came across an even older wizard who was standing in front of a sleeping wizard and in the distance a man with a baby, running. The evil wizard launches a bolt of lightening at the old wizard. As it hits the wizard, she casts fireball, and kills the beast.

The two wizards split up, and she, the young one, meets her old friend, the fighter. the two end up having a child. One day, though, she wakes up and he is gone, and so is the baby. It rots her soul, and she becomes evil.

Eventually, she comes across her younger self, being attacked by a madman. She kills the madman, and the two begin to travel together. They eventually summon up a great monster.

They came across an even older wizard who was standing in front of a sleeping wizard and in the distance a man with a baby, running. Remembering what happened last time, she launches a bolt of lightening at the old wizard. As it hits the wizard though, she casts fireball, and kills the beast.

She recognises the man as the fighter and runs after him. She eventually meets her son, but older. She hypnotises him to find the fighter when he was younger, and kill him. But afterwards, overcome with grief, she becomes good again.

A few days later, she sees the beast in the distance, and in front of her is the fighter, trying to get the younger her and their son away from the beast, and she understands. She tells the fighter "Take the baby, I'll look after her."

As the beast and the wizards approach, the evil her casts a bolt of lightening at her. But in dying, she launches a fireball at the beast.

She dies smiling.

It doesn't quite make sense yet, but I'll soon post the story of the fighter and the son.

[Soup of Kings]

An epic tale.

Lots of ideas floating around in here. It's getting hard to breathe...oh, Gods!

Ooh, also, watch this (http://www.animationarcade.com/animation/timefight.html). Fun, and relevant, especially if you plan to have the PC's fight alongside themselves (as I do).

[D&DCapone]

THIS IS AMAZING

I was gonna use a simple labyrynth to start but this IS SO MUCH MORE FUN.

[curtis]

FIGHTER

A fighter is adventuring with a wizard. One night, the fighter is attacked by a man who looks just like him. He flees and goes insane.

One day, he comes across the wizard, and attacks him. He didn't see the person who killed him.

The plot thickens... if he was killed, who had the child with the wizard?

[Soup of Kings]

Crazy idea. The players starts in the cube, complete with all the ideas contained in this forum. They wake up, have no idea how they got there and no knowledge of their past. They know only their training (Class levels) and their names. After they escape, they start adventuring. Throughout the adventures, though, they see all these recurring themes that remind them of stuff from the cube, and at the end of the campaign after some big climactic battle they save the world, and the ancient MacGuffin the villain was trying to use to bring about the apocalypse explose in a flash of brilliant white light. Then they wake up, back in the cube...give them an evil look and close your notes slowly. Start a new campaign next week. :smallbiggrin:

[Pie Guy]

Having your younger PCs attack older versions of themselves (no recognition, tattered clothes, wrinkels, whatever). Have one of the older kill a younger (preferably himself).

1. Make a giant flash, having all of the younger PCs wake up with a huge headache, and have them see the clothes and posessions of the killed PC on the floor, with the PC nowhere in sight.
Or
2. Have the killed PC vanish and reappear in a constant state of flux. (i. e. here,now gone, now here, now gone)

If you chose the latter, at the end make the PC be waiting outside of the trap, with a healthy boost to xp, as you've erased his character from the game for a while.

[Jastermereel]

It sounds like this thread is shifting from Cube/Hypercube to Heinlein's By His Bootstraps (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/By_His_Bootstraps) and : All You Zombies— (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_You_Zombies%E2%80%94)

Even just the wikipedia summaries could prove interesting for this thread. As for how to involve them in the game without creating a rail-roading nightmare, that I do not know.

[Prometheus]

I like this idea of playing around with time. In my Hypercube, you'd be able to enter but not be able to escape - Once the players are all inside, they are able to discover this fact. What they can do, however, is use the doors to change the time that they are in the cube, or possibly the rate of time. In their travels they must figure out the pattern, also learn a little bit about past and future travelers. However, they realize they are doomed to die, and must return to (seconds before) their original time to shout warnings to themselves and to give them any information they discover. Of course, if they fail, than the second generation of players might encounter the first generation of players and fair better, and are able to warn the third generation and prevent their mistake.

[Soup of Kings]

Can someone help explain to me movement in the fourth dimension? Preferably without driving me insane? Because everybody keeps mentioning four dimensional hypercubes and the directions ana and kata as fourth dimensional analogues to up, down, left, right, forward and back. And I have no idea how those work. Hell, I barely understand three spatial dimensions. :smallsmile:

[D&DCapone]

Can someone help explain to me movement in the fourth dimension? Preferably without driving me insane? Because everybody keeps mentioning four dimensional hypercubes and the directions ana and kata as fourth dimensional analogues to up, down, left, right, forward and back. And I have no idea how those work. Hell, I barely understand three spatial dimensions. :smallsmile:

if im correct its that gravity is where your feet are pointed (at least thats how im gonna use the hypercube)

[Jack_Simth]

Can someone help explain to me movement in the fourth dimension? Preferably without driving me insane? Because everybody keeps mentioning four dimensional hypercubes and the directions ana and kata as fourth dimensional analogues to up, down, left, right, forward and back. And I have no idea how those work. Hell, I barely understand three spatial dimensions. :smallsmile:
You can track them using what amounts to Cartesian Coordinates (instead of being at location X, Y, you're at location A, B, C, D) but if you attempt to picture it, you're liable to get a headache due to the lack of an example in your experience. But that's okay - I've yet to meet anyone with actual experience with an actual hypercube. It can be described mathematically... but whenever you're moving in that direction, you need a cludge of some kind - an extra door that doesn't go in quite the direction that's expected, a mystic item that moves you in that direction, or whatever - as experience and game-rules don't really support a proper fourth physical dimension.

... at least, using traditional characters. If you've got a group that's really good with abstract thinking, you can fairly readily expand to a 4 dimensional world....

But wait, you didn't want to go insane, so I'll stop now.

[Waspinator]

I am somehow really reminded of "Flatland".

[Soup of Kings]

You can track them using what amounts to Cartesian Coordinates (instead of being at location X, Y, you're at location A, B, C, D) but if you attempt to picture it, you're liable to get a headache due to the lack of an example in your experience. But that's okay - I've yet to meet anyone with actual experience with an actual hypercube. It can be described mathematically... but whenever you're moving in that direction, you need a cludge of some kind - an extra door that doesn't go in quite the direction that's expected, a mystic item that moves you in that direction, or whatever - as experience and game-rules don't really support a proper fourth physical dimension.

... at least, using traditional characters. If you've got a group that's really good with abstract thinking, you can fairly readily expand to a 4 dimensional world....

But wait, you didn't want to go insane, so I'll stop now.

Nah, you explained it pretty well. See, what I was picturing as people described it was six doors, one on each face, each leading to another cube of the tesseract, and then a portal or something leading to the other cube, since I find it difficult, if not impossible, to VISUALIZE a higher dimension. But if my understanding of tesseracts is correct (doubtful) then the cubes can appear in three dimensions to the characters inside them, and they travel through them in three dimensions, but it would appear to have weird spatial anomalies; for instance, all the rooms are perfect cubes, but by traveling through only three doors they can come back to the room they started in due to the way the cubes are connected.

I based most of my thought processes on this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract) article, and mostly this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:8-cell-simple.gif) 3-dimensional model of a 4-cube.

The idea I was coming up with was really a 5-dimensional adventure; four spatial, one temporal, wherein time randomly skips about whenever the PC's move from one cube to another. I think I might roll a random encounter table for such an adventure and post it. Throw 'em up against one of those Faceless Ones (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=78681&highlight=faceless) on a d% of a hundred. :smalleek:

Also, in regard to explaining how the hell a fourth dimension slipped into my perfectly logical airshippy dragonny magicky campaign world, I say the cube is some sort of ancient artifact of immense power and the PC's are tasked with following someone who went to retrieve it. Imagine their surprise when the artifact isn't the MacGuffin at the end of the adventure, but the adventure itself.

[Saohc]

Mind Screw:

The PCs learn of the "only source of good" in the hyper-cube. Said good is really the party's caster, advanced 5-6 levels using the fighters weapon in honor of his old friend!:smalleek:

[FlyMolo]

A 4-dimensional cube would have 81 rooms. Think of it as a stack of 3 27 cube cubes. 3cubes by 3cubes by 3cubes. And then three of those.

A real Mind Screw: A guy becomes a lich by sacrificing older self and younger self. Only possibly if time is screwy anyway. Which it will be.

I think my players are going to love this. Also fits with my McGuffin idea. Or rather unGuffin, the opposite of the Guffin I have for the players.

[Daracaex]

This is brilliant! I'm gonna steal this too.

Most everyone had been focusing on the time-travel aspect of this, but I'm also interested in one of the original ideas: Down is where your feet are pointing. In any one room, you can walk from wall to wall without any discernable change in gravity for yourself. This opens up VERY interesting combat options by having archers target foes on the relative ceiling or fighters fighting at upward angles with someone on another wall. Combat would get immensely twisted.

[Voidhawk]

:smallbiggrin:*Yoinked faster than Roadrunner*

Evil and Awesome, the classic DM combination!

A couple of ideas of my own:

Have one room completely filled with water, and when the PCs open the door to it the water starts to pour into their room till it fills it (a bit odd with subjective gravity, but what the hell). If they try to flee to another room, just have the flood follow them. The way to escape would be to wait till the room was full, then climb into the room the water came from first. As explantion you could have a decanter of endless water broken on the bottom...
Even better put a couple of Dire Sharks in it :smallbiggrin:

Have one room completly filled by a Gelatinous Cube. 'Nuff said.
This works well with the 'finding your own sword' one. Have the PCs find the old sword with a skeleton inside the G. Cube when they kill it. Then when they're fighting the BBEG, once he's wounded have him grab the sword run through a door blindly to get away... straight into the cube :smallamused:

[DigoDragon]

As for how to involve them in the game without creating a rail-roading nightmare, that I do not know.

I'm actually running a modern day conspiracy RPG that successfully involves this concept. The basic premise of the story is that the world is run by a handful of powerful "Movers & Shakers", similar to concepts like the Illuminati. This group has taken a special interest in the players and have affected their lives in some rather uncomfortable ways (For example, one person lost his lucrative career in the WWE). Suddenly, the Illuminati group vanishes and the players are curious to know why. The players are now traveling around following clues to locate the whereabouts of these mysterious people and why they were messing with the players' lives at all.

What the players didn't know is that they WERE (Or would be?) the Illuminati and the dissappearance occured when they tried traveling back in time to assume normal identities and escape a would-be assasin. :smallbiggrin:

I find that a great way to keep the players fulfilling the paradox is to give them bits of info at a time so their curiosity guides them without resorting to a railroad. I also kept a few aspects of the paradox undefined until the players had made certain choices so that I have some flexibility to keep the causality consistant and it lets the players feel like they are still in control of their own destiny (at least until the big revealat the end).


As for this Hypercube trap... I like the style! Reminds me of the ocean cube puzzle from Final Fantasy Unlimited, only even more bizzare (if that's even possible). I'm assuming that simply inverting your Bag of holding and stuffing it over your head while you walk into a wall isn't going to help. :smallwink:

[Soup of Kings]

Reminds me of the ocean cube puzzle from Final Fantasy Unlimited, only even more bizzare (if that's even possible).

I'm intrigued. Now I wanna watch Final Fantasy Unlimited...
I just got FFXII today. Fun times. ^_^

[Zolem]

Another idea for the hypercube trap is actually a way out without the paradoxa; "I prevent us from entering" thing. When you go throught he rooms in a predetermined patern (something they learn from a note left by their older selves that they eventualy find) they will be able to leave, noting that they wrote this note for the sake of their younger selves. A few rooms later, when they're almost finished with the sequence the note is droped and falls through a partialy opened door. A player decides to look through the door, and before they can go through it, they see their younger selves leaving with the note in hand. They compleat the sequence and exit from the center cube, finding that less than an hour has passed since they left. A torch that they dropped which is still burning is a good visual cue to use. (Note: Mindscrew on where the note origionated from).

They then proceed to finish their initial quest. Something with a time consteint so that they feel a need to hurry in the cube is a good idea, and once enough time passes they feel taht tthey failed, and wonder what the consequences of failing will be is a good option here. Some of the players may hate you for railroading the failure, but figure that the adventures were cool enough to make up for it a bit. Mindscrew#2: They still have time to compleate the mission, despite leveling up a lot over the course of the cube, preferably leveling up a bit as well.

And Mindscrew#3: The rest of the mission plays out to their current level. The villain makes a dieing speach about how the heroes were chosen by the court wizard because they would defeat him acording to a prediction spell, but the evil guy (now called Baron VonBad) had checked them out when they entered, and they were obviously not powerful enough to defeat him. He doesn't understand how they became so powerful in so short an amount of time. As such, the wizard foresaw VonBad's defeat, but not the events that would lead to it. VonBad checked how the party was when they entered, not how they would be when they faced him. As such every single thing in the Hypercube had to happen.

Mindscrew#4: A young lad, VonBad's son, swears revenge and runs off, proclaming himself the Lord of Revenge and runnign off. The PCs will most likly follow, and find the young lad enter the hypercube. Teh rouge notices that he had grabed the Liutenants distinct sword on the way. It was the same sword wielded by the earlier villain called Lord Raven, whom the players now realise is the Barron's son. This magic sowrd wha what they used to kill a Hydra in order to get a more powerful weapon which is what they used to kill the Baron. So the son's attempt at revenge leads to his fathers death.

[vicente408]

Saw this and had to reitierate how awesome it is.

Idea: PCs repeatedly encounter a room with the same prisoner in it. The prisoner is huddled in the corner, staring blankly across the room. Doesn't speak or react to the PCs in any way, except for that each time they enter his room he says a number. If the PCs can figure it out: each time they enter the room, he is saying the number of times the party has entered the room. Naturally, the numbers will be out of order, and some of them will be very large. :smallbiggrin:

[Frosty]

But how to make it so the players will have a hell of a time getting back to prevent their own entrance?

[Shadow_Elf]

Ok, I'm not a DM, but reading this is enough to make me consider spending the money on the extra books. Love all the time paradoxes. Hard to keep track of it on a game board though, and also hard to plan out on a sheet of graph paper ahead of time. Any ideas on keeping track of where everything is and playing 4 dimensional battles? I play 4e, which I've noticed hasn't garnered much popularity yet, so its possible that someone posted an explanation in here that I just didn't get.
Also, I think you broke my mind. :smallannoyed:

[vicente408]

Time paradoxes and such can get very messy very fast. I think the best, and most enjoyable solution is basically to just do whatever seems coolest/most fun with regards to how time travel paradoxes occur, even if they're inconsistant. Unless the players are the type to meticulously keep track of every nuance, you can just 'do whatever' to keep the fun and suspense as long as possible.

Idea: As party enters a room, they see themselves exiting through the door across from them. If they look behind them, they see themselves entering the room they just left. The two adjacent rooms happen to share the same space-time. Trippy!

[Randel]

A few ideas:

1) The campaign starts off in the outside world when suddenly slain creatures rise as zombies or other undead instead of being killed. They track down the cause of this to a temple somewhere and see a big gate. Upon entering the gate they find themselves in the hypercube. Inside the hypercube, the time shifting occurs in addtion to other phenominon. Slain creatures sometimes rise as undead but those undead may suddenly turn dead for some unseen reason.

Eventually, the players discover that the Grim Reaper is trapped inside the hypercube with them and is unable to navigate himself out. They must help him escape the maze despite the confusing geometry, paradoxes, and some nasty traps and powerful monsters and constructs sent in there to KILL DEATH HIMSELF! Once they help death get out of the maze then he can tend to the restless dead in the world.

2) In the maze, they find a used-up helm of opposite allignment. They later find an older version of the party wizard who is clearly evil... possibly performing experiments on the other prisoners in the maze in an attempt to map it properly. He provides clues to the party to help them get past some obsticles, but only cares about helping his past self... and not to let him get out of the maze. They then find the helm of opposite allignent when its new. They later run into a Lich of the party wizard who is surrounded by monserous experiments and magic items. He attempts to capture his past self and forcibly make him wear the helm of opposite allignement... and then capture the rest of the party to use as raw material for his projects.

Once they defeat the Lich, they find that he has ammasesed a truly massive army of monsters and is close to finding a way to escape the maze with his hordes in tow. He didn't enact this plan yet because he has to be there to ensure his past existence. Once the party leave the laboratory, the party wizard runs into a mirror of opposition which creates an evil duplicate of the party wizard! This duplicate is in fact the one who will later become the old wizard and the lich... the help of opposite alignment can be used up for anything and will make its way to where they found the used one. They could even shove it on the head of the Lich as he reforms near his phylactory, turning him good and having him deal with his monsters before he finally leaves the maze after the party leaves... if he ever has to leave at all.


3). Someone brings a decanter of endless water into cube in the theory that if the flood the place they can then wait for it to drain and see where the water goes to escape. Unfortunatly, its possible that he wouldn't know when it fills up and everyone else in the cube wonders where all the water came from.

Replace with a commoner with the Chicken Infested flaw or someone with endless rations leaving a trail of bread crumbs.

4). They run into an older version of one of the players who looks forlornly at them, and just says "If you run into a door labeled 539... don't enter it."

They notice that he's got equipment from all the other team members.

[Tobi_goodboy]

Time paradoxes and such can get very messy very fast. I think the best, and most enjoyable solution is basically to just do whatever seems coolest/most fun with regards to how time travel paradoxes occur, even if they're inconsistant. Unless the players are the type to meticulously keep track of every nuance, you can just 'do whatever' to keep the fun and suspense as long as possible.

Idea: As party enters a room, they see themselves exiting through the door across from them. If they look behind them, they see themselves entering the room they just left. The two adjacent rooms happen to share the same space-time. Trippy!

...a party member then shouts to alert the party entering the room behind them, only to here a shout from the party ahead of them trying to alert them only to turn...


I. AM. SO. USING. THIS!
this is just as twisted and diabolical as ive been looking for!
kudos to everyone in this topic!

[chiasaur11]

A few ideas:

1) The campaign starts off in the outside world when suddenly slain creatures rise as zombies or other undead instead of being killed. They track down the cause of this to a temple somewhere and see a big gate. Upon entering the gate they find themselves in the hypercube. Inside the hypercube, the time shifting occurs in addtion to other phenominon. Slain creatures sometimes rise as undead but those undead may suddenly turn dead for some unseen reason.

Eventually, the players discover that the Grim Reaper is trapped inside the hypercube with them and is unable to navigate himself out. They must help him escape the maze despite the confusing geometry, paradoxes, and some nasty traps and powerful monsters and constructs sent in there to KILL DEATH HIMSELF! Once they help death get out of the maze then he can tend to the restless dead in the world.

2) In the maze, they find a used-up helm of opposite allignment. They later find an older version of the party wizard who is clearly evil... possibly performing experiments on the other prisoners in the maze in an attempt to map it properly. He provides clues to the party to help them get past some obsticles, but only cares about helping his past self... and not to let him get out of the maze. They then find the helm of opposite allignent when its new. They later run into a Lich of the party wizard who is surrounded by monserous experiments and magic items. He attempts to capture his past self and forcibly make him wear the helm of opposite allignement... and then capture the rest of the party to use as raw material for his projects.

Once they defeat the Lich, they find that he has ammasesed a truly massive army of monsters and is close to finding a way to escape the maze with his hordes in tow. He didn't enact this plan yet because he has to be there to ensure his past existence. Once the party leave the laboratory, the party wizard runs into a mirror of opposition which creates an evil duplicate of the party wizard! This duplicate is in fact the one who will later become the old wizard and the lich... the help of opposite alignment can be used up for anything and will make its way to where they found the used one. They could even shove it on the head of the Lich as he reforms near his phylactory, turning him good and having him deal with his monsters before he finally leaves the maze after the party leaves... if he ever has to leave at all.


3). Someone brings a decanter of endless water into cube in the theory that if the flood the place they can then wait for it to drain and see where the water goes to escape. Unfortunatly, its possible that he wouldn't know when it fills up and everyone else in the cube wonders where all the water came from.

Replace with a commoner with the Chicken Infested flaw or someone with endless rations leaving a trail of bread crumbs.

4). They run into an older version of one of the players who looks forlornly at them, and just says "If you run into a door labeled 539... don't enter it."

They notice that he's got equipment from all the other team members.


So, would Death be kinda like Discworld Death?

Also, the proper approach to the last guy is agree and take him with you. that way, you can force him to give you double loot.

All these sound fun.

[Jack_Simth]

Ok, I'm not a DM, but reading this is enough to make me consider spending the money on the extra books. Love all the time paradoxes. Hard to keep track of it on a game board though, and also hard to plan out on a sheet of graph paper ahead of time. Any ideas on keeping track of where everything is and playing 4 dimensional battles? I play 4e, which I've noticed hasn't garnered much popularity yet, so its possible that someone posted an explanation in here that I just didn't get.
Also, I think you broke my mind. :smallannoyed:
You don't want to run your battles in 4d. Don't get me wrong - you can, you just don't want to. You run room-to-room navigation in 4d, any individual room is treated as though it is 3d.


However, to do it, you use Cartesian coordinates. Get lots of d20's (or dwhatevers, based on your grid size). You need four of them for each creature. Each die is used to track one coordinate of the W, X, Y, and Z co-ordinates of that creature. Creatures are adjacent to each other if they are no more than one off on one coordinate die. Creatures are diagonal from each other if they are not adjacent, but no one die of their coordinates differ by more then 1.

[Person1123]

Awesome. Nearly exactly as awesome as my orb of randomly changing everything it the room.

If you don't understand what I mean, read the first book in the Bartimaeus Trilogy, the Amulet of Samarkand.

[Crossfiyah]

Crazy idea. The players starts in the cube, complete with all the ideas contained in this forum. They wake up, have no idea how they got there and no knowledge of their past. They know only their training (Class levels) and their names. After they escape, they start adventuring. Throughout the adventures, though, they see all these recurring themes that remind them of stuff from the cube, and at the end of the campaign after some big climactic battle they save the world, and the ancient MacGuffin the villain was trying to use to bring about the apocalypse explose in a flash of brilliant white light. Then they wake up, back in the cube...give them an evil look and close your notes slowly. Start a new campaign next week. :smallbiggrin:

Sounds more like The Dark Tower.

[MageSparrowhawk]

one of the (few) suggestions on ways to get out gave me an interesting idea...if you bar the (original) door, you appear outside, before anything has happened. so does -everyone else- trapped? or at least those that came through that specific door? >=D

Otherwise, I am going to use this in my next game...there was a mageocracy in the ancient past (100,000 yrs+ ago) that was crazy-powerful. (they could mess with gods and mostly get away with it) this is one of the few remaining relics from their time...after they, ya'know, blew themselves up...

[Wisp Wings]

Do you realise that due to the making of this thread:

5000 people have actually had a crack at this:smallsmile:
4972 PC's are stuck in a pocket in a pocket dimension:smallfurious:
584 peoples heads have exploded
230 people are going: the way out is s,w,s no, killing myself, no, stopping the past, no.. aha.. hahahahahahahha... llama
37 people have built one of these in real life:smallcool:
18 people have been pushed over the edge and completed the grandfather paradox... and then kill their father before they were born just of the heck of it:smallsigh:
4 people have understood and risen to a higher plane:smallbiggrin:
1 person has made a list like this:smallredface:

[-Baldur-]

A possible issue with the hypercube is working out which model of time travel you are using:

1) Self-consistent plane where if you do accidentally kill a later version of yourself that means you will inevitably die at the hands of a younger version of yourself, for example.

2) Quantum/Anything that could happen will happen somewhere where there are multiple versions of you running around each of which may have different events occur to them (like the movie, for example)

3) Something else.

The model you pick may affect what encounters you could have and what actions you can take in those encounters. Other than that looks pretty good.

A suggested riddle for escaping the hypercube:

"The only way to leave this cursed place is to never enter."

Solution:

To exit you must find the room that you originally started in, and enter the room at a time before you originally entered the hypercube. Once you have done this, then you must block the door that you originally entered the hypercube from, such that your original entrance into the hypercube would be prevented, thus preventing you from being in the hypercube now, and thus freeing you from the hypercube.

GM's discretion of course about whether or not characters retain injuries/items/experience/etc that they gained while in the hypercube, but consistency would say probably not, effectively turning the place into one big mind screw. :smallbiggrin:


"The only way to leave this cursed place is to never enter."

Too complex. Way too complex. If you changed just one thing and made it "The only way to leave this cursed place is to never enter, only return" THAT would clue a smart player in. Ohhh so we always have to exit the way we came. Etc etc. But exiting a room you started in BEFORE you ever entered? That would confuse the crap out of even a smart player without it being directly written with numerous hints on how.

[cha0s4a11]

Wow. Thread Necromancy in Progress. At any rate:


one of the (few) suggestions on ways to get out gave me an interesting idea...if you bar the (original) door, you appear outside, before anything has happened. so does -everyone else- trapped? or at least those that came through that specific door? >=D

Presumably the reason that you get outside is because when you tried to enter, the door was blocked. Given that, it shouldn't matter who blocked the door, whether it was you, your descendants, or some other guy who entered in through the same door who worked out how to "leave". So long as the door is blocked during the time you try to enter, you should be free of the cube. Whether the door barricades made by someone else who "left" the cube will still exist or not after the person/group that made them are gone depends on how paradoxes get resolved (since if they blocked the door, then they were never in the cube to block the door.... commence mind turning inside out).


"The only way to leave this cursed place is to never enter."

Too complex. Way too complex. If you changed just one thing and made it "The only way to leave this cursed place is to never enter, only return" THAT would clue a smart player in. Ohhh so we always have to exit the way we came. Etc etc. But exiting a room you started in BEFORE you ever entered? That would confuse the crap out of even a smart player without it being directly written with numerous hints on how.

I was under the impression that half the point of the trap was to turn the player's minds inside out. :smallbiggrin:

At first the clue should sound like a taunt along the lines of "Haha, you guys are SOOO screwed", but it should begin to make sense once the players work out that:

1) Time works differently here, the first time you enter a room is not necessarily the earliest.
2) Paradoxes can be made to happen with varying effects.

Also, to reiterate, how my solution works is that you don't leave the cube, you just arrange matters so that you couldn't have entered in the first place.... just like the hint says. :smallcool:

[The Rose Dragon]

I sense insane levels of Thread Necromancy in this thread.

[Haven]

4). They run into an older version of one of the players who looks forlornly at them, and just says "If you run into a door labeled 539... don't enter it."

They notice that he's got equipment from all the other team members.

I love a lot of ideas in this thread, but especially this one.

I've been tossing around ideas for a time travel campaign for a while, but I don't know if I'd be able to pull off running a game =| Still, it's fun to think about and this has been a good resource.

[Tobi_goodboy]

Hm
I need to know -how- the thing works, exactly. Not just that it works.
I dislike puzzles without a why or how behind it. Even if that why or how is unrealistic and fantastic, I hate "just because".

That said, I think I shall use this idea - but expand it by trying to describe exactly how each room is formed when you enter it. Then let the players try to solve that.

hmm... if you splice this with bluelantern's 'gravity center' idea then a possible explanation forms in my mind:

the hypercube could in fact only one room that loops infinitely between the trapdoors on the surface of the walls/surfaces--designed and created to confine an existence so powerful it's mere presence bends space and time (a faceless one, for example--or something bigger and scarier if you so choose)

[Dragon Elite]

Can I use this in my campaign setting?
It's a giant maze, and this would be a sweet trap.

[Tobi_goodboy]

Can I use this in my campaign setting?
It's a giant maze, and this would be a sweet trap.

joke: if they didnt want anyone to use it, would it have been posted on the internet in the first place? :smallbiggrin:

even if they said i couldnt i'd still use this--its that awesome.

[Asheram]

I sense insane levels of Thread Necromancy in this thread.

This is the hypercube we're talking about.
Time fluctuations are expected.

[n00b killa]

In my opinion, if this... "thing" really existed, it would be flocked by Inevitables the second it becomes created.

Of course, that could also be turned into an awesome campaign.

Kudos to everyone that contributed on this!

[Shpadoinkle]

The problem with the "PCs meet themselves from the past/future/alternate timeline" is that lots of groups are probably going to have at least one guy saying "You know, if we kill them we could take thier stuff and double our wealth."

He probably won't let the possibility of a paradox sway him, either.

[BtanH]

thread necroman! hoora! i love it, and will use i asap.

[Roland St. Jude]

[Color=red]Thread necromancy.[\color]