Tomb Dungeon Ideas-what makes a good gloom?

[Kol Korran]

It could help if you tell us the game system, the relevant power level of characters, and possibly the play styles, experience of your players.

I rarely run dungeons, but here are a few things from a few dungeons that worked nicely:

1) Hall of shadows:

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This was in D&D, 4 characters around level 10-11. They enetered a massive room, with a trail leading between what seemed to be huge piles of frozen corpses, and the room entirely dark, bleak, the walls and ceiling sheer black. (The room had some connection to the negative energy plane, but just for feel- the light grows dimmer, the cold penetrating and such).

The party expected lots of zombies. They were... partially right. As they got near the middle of the room, suddenly a great wail came from everywhere (threatening to deafen) as the walls suddenly *leaked* hundreds of shadows! (The remains of the souls of the hundreds of slaves sacrificed to protect this passage) the shadows attacked from All sides, the party besieged.

I gave the party 2-3 rounds to prepare while the shadows came near (they spent 1-2 of them arguign whether to push forward or try and defend). then they fought the hordes for a few more rounds, before the slave masters- 4-5 bone claws (MM3) wielding great necromatic whips came qquite some distance behind the shadows, getting them into a sort of pseudo frenzy!

The party surmised rightly that they should get rid of the slave drivers, but there were quite a few shadows between the party and the shadows, and the bone claws have quite a lot of hit points... and they were spread all around.

They party was fairly low on resources at that point, and this encounters nearly ended them, and was nearly a TPK. Lets say... desperate tactics were used. By the end of the battle all but 1 characters were one touch attack from becoming shadows themselves.

The encounter is still mentioned today sometime, whenever things get really tough. "Hey, remember the hall of shadows?" sort of thing...

You could easily change the number of slave master, their types, or turn the shadows into zombies or such. Note that it's a hassle on the grid- waaaaaayyy to many miniatures to keep track of. I heard there are mob rules some where, maybe those could be used more easily?

2) *Click* goes the dungeon:

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The same dungeon, same group. When they reached the end room to get their goal, They only found a large room, with a decorated dessicated corpse. They were very suspicious, and expected a lich or some "boss fight". However, it didn't happen. once they got what they came for however, they heard a click, and the door they came through quickly closed. (two made their rolls to jump through, but decided not to split the party. wise move. )While they tried to get the door open again (resistant to knocks, and they didn't have teleportation by that point) they could hear all sort of grumbles and... stuff happening on the other side. When the Rogue finally unlocked it, some water rushed in.

The dungeon was flooding, and quickly! (I suggest you change it to sand though. Some character had left over water breathing or swimming potions from previous adventures). The clock was on.

Now, I should mention that I made the dungeon very... decorative before that- Sarcophagi, wall statues of gaping dragon mouths and more, but not trap or magic was found. All of these became active and into view now. Plus, some new enemies poured in, less hindered by the water, like cloud giant skeletons, some sort of solar contructs from BOED who can disintegrate (forgot their name) and so on. Some portions of the dungeon also slightly changed themselves. (An alchemical golem who they didn't engage exploded and made a mish mash sticky acidic web in a hall.) All of these were fairly simple and common place, but the time constraint, the rushing water (USE SAND! Hmmm... or crumbling dungeon? Bits of mortar falling off?) made this all the more problematic.

The problem though? This turns the dungeon into one long, round by round obstacle course. Make a fairly big and detialed dungeon map andhave tokens (pins?) to mark the location of your characters, as some may lag behind.

As a twist, the opening wasn't at the expected place. (Made players go "ohh sh*t!" ) but somewhere else, and I made an ocean dragon come through the portal to the plane of water. (It didn't excite so well ,since the party was really not in the place to fight, so they just bribed their passage with lots of treasure.)

3) Twisting tunnels:

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Now, before I suggest this, I must say this went well with some players, and frustrated the hell out of others. So some caution may be needed. In a much earlier dungeon, They came to place where for some reason they couldn't quite map easily. My explanation was that the tunnels were twisting, and there was a heavy influence of confusion (A former Daelkyr stronghold, masters of madness), and owrst of all- some of the passages were shifting. I think that with a large enough dungeon you could come to a similar result. There were a few key locations, and lots of minor/ insignificant locations, that the party mostly traveled around randomly if they didn't try to figure how things worked. (As a DM a few tables are needed, and a listing of several rooms).

I devised a few methods of traveling:
- Using some skills helped mitigate the randomality (Survial, knowledge dungeoneeing and such).
- getting the intelligent inhabitants of the caves to help. (The party ended up threatening a troll to become their guide. it ran off however and left them stranded... somewhere?)
- Druids had long ago navigated the caverns and made markings on some of the safer routes (the party knew this) leaving discreet signs as to the possible destination of a cave, making navigation a bit easier. The party didn't have a druid however, and so had to figure out the meanings of the signs. This didn't go well though, the puzzle was too hard. There were 16 signs total, and the party guessed but 2-3 true, and came with some outlandish explanations for others. Again- some loved this, some hated it.

I think that in your dungeon you can make an area with short range random teleports, perhaps with gems or signs that can lead places. You can place all kind of riddles in the rooms, either in ancient texts or the like.

3) Dream maze:

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A bit similar, but not quite. This idea can enhance the story behind the maze a lot (perhaps of the 11 priests?). It works best with a heavily roleplay focused group. If not, then you can use the idea, just not as a maze, and it could work fine.

My party was transported to a "dungeon" made of memories of people (some of which they... sort of met before, some not). They way it worked was this:
1 character (randomly, but I suggest to begin with the more roleplay focused player), comes to believe he is some sort of a character, in some situation. (This is not an illusion, this happens in their mind. it's the memory of that character). Give the player a slip of paper explaining what happened to him, and ask him to play in character (explain the character as well briefly).

The other characters coem to fill other roles in the scene, only they retain knowledge of who they are, while the first character is fully immersed (explain this to all!) give each of the characters some info about the character they play, and the situation.

Yes, the players will be roleplaying characters, roleplayign characters. a bit like "Who's line is it anyway".

Now, you can run it in different ways:
1) I suggest using these scene either showcasing important aspects of the plot, of the maze, of the priests, or even of the characters themselves! (Playing parts of their background perhaps, either by the same characters, or by others. I suggest the same character though)
2) In my game the players needed to find items that didn't belong in the scene, and "invoke" them to get to another scene/ room. I don't think that's a good method though, since it makes the scene something secondary. I suggest instead on the party needing to come to some sort of resolution to the conflict inherent within the scene. It can be a battle (but then you'll need a mess of using other character sheets and stuff), but I suggest to make it a roleplay scene, with the decisions however making far reaching consequences, or great secrets revealed. The progression between rooms may depend on the choices made. They may lead to different knowledge, perhaps different areas of the dungeon, or wrong choices may lead to thematically difficult battles, or some kind of other price or loss for the characters.

I suggest highly to include some scenes that can be humerus (If your players don't make them so already)

From time to time, between scenes I added dream monster fights (Quori monsters from Eberron books)

The players loved the roleplaying aspect, it was really really fun, but they were entirely confused by "navigating" the "dungeon". Again, I made it too obscure and difficult)

5) An idea- The sand medusa:

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I haven't tried this, but the idea just came to mind. A specially themed guardian, that harass the characters through out the dungeon... perhaps a sort of a mini boss? The medusa doesn't turn people into stone, but rather into sand (thus the players won't find stone statues, just... lots of spread out sand). What makes her more special though is that she can turn into sand ,that can move and siphon through tiny holes, through a network of them to nearly all parts of the pyramid, so She can come to many places, thus she can appear many places, activate traps, harass with her gaze and arrows and more. You might even have rooms in which a portion is blocked by a thick hardened glass the medusa can get behind, harass withh gaze and lever activated traps, and then retreat into her holes if the party breaks through the glass.

On a general note of medusa's gaze and "save or die" saves: In our game we have these replaced by ability damage. medusas' gaze for example cause 2d6 dex damage per gaze. You may prefer Con if the players are turning into sand (You can describe it as some of their skin and muscle turning into sand, or even them coughing up sand suddenly ) You'll just need a clever way of gettign the players to look at her, where the many holes come in.

Ok, that's all I got for now, I hope that's enough. I'd love to hear how it went!