Quote Originally Posted by Pex View Post
I've run a dungeon that is a tesseract. How the players get into it, out of it, and what's in it is up to you. To map it takes preparation. What I did was build the 3D version using 8 d6s. I had all the numbers facing the same way and each die was a different color. This is necessary to label floors and rooms on 8 minimaps of the each room on two dimensional paper. Aside from doors at each wall there also were spiralizing stair cases because it's possible to go up through the ceiling trap doos and the floor trap door. Likewise the walls had their own staircases for when they become the new floor and ceiling combo. Two rules to use: 1) Down is always in the direction of your feet. When a wall becomes the new floor later down is still down. 2) You may only interact with objects that have the same down direction as you. You're in a multidimensional space. You can see the others, but that's it.

Mapping the dice is tricky. For each room there is one room you can never directly reach. You need to go to another room first. The hard part is when you cross the 4th dimension. Sometimes when going through a door the adjacent room is not directly connected in your 3d model. It's another die two dice levels away. When that happens your sense of direction can change. For example, by arbitrarily declaring a direction north, if you leave the room through the south door for the room you enter it's as if you came from the east door. I don't have the words to explain this better. You should be able to see it upon creating the 3d model and carefully follow what's the true adjacent room.
I once built a dungeon like this. To be honest, it was a failure. My players spent longer trying to work out what connected to what and to make sense out of it than they did actually playing the fun bits of the game - I think it ended up just being a bit gimmicky. In terms of the value added for the time taken to both prepare it and the time taken for the players to get their heads round it, it just wasn't worth it. I don't know if it would be better or worse if I extended it and made it a theme of the campaign. It might just extend the frustration, or it might actually give them time to get to grips with it and for it to be a bit more intuitive.

In the end, they didn't even engage with the geometry of the thing, they just mapped it as a graph and focussed on what they needed to do to go through doors and it wasn't that different from other dungeons only mapping it was harder work, needed more attention and was a bit more tedious. I think this could work as a concept, I just never managed to pull it off well myself.