Trials of ...


Advice


If you're one of my players, don't read this thread.

I need some help with some ideas for an upcoming session. The players are in an ancient temple looking for some divine artifacts. I plan on them having to get through three trials to get to those, but I'm stuck on what those trials should be. These trials were designed and built a long time ago to grant access to only worthy individuals.

I was thinking of a trial of power, a trial of cunning and a trial of intelligence. Unfortunately, that's about as far as I've been able to get. There's plenty of combat without putting more into these trials, so I'd want to add something more if the was the main point of a trial of power. Riddles and the like sound like obvious candidates for a trial of intelligence, but those are notoriously unfun in practice. (I don't think my group would enjoy a straight-up riddle.)

I also don't want the trials to devolve into just, for example, a few skills rolls like a stealth trial probably would.

Any help, ideas or links would be appreciated.


It might help to have context--what is the nature of this ancient temple? What sort of people built it and what might they care about that could make someone "worthy?"


mplindustries wrote:
It might help to have context--what is the nature of this ancient temple? What sort of people built it and what might they care about that could make someone "worthy?"

Indeed. If the temple builders were generally "good" then worthiness might include wisdom, faith, compassion, etc. If on the other hand the builders were evil cultists of a dark god, "worthiness" would instead encompass "power," "ruthlessness," and "cunning" etc.

I do think that "cunning" and "intelligence" are too similar in general to both appear in the same set of trials.


Lord Pendragon wrote:
If the temple builders were generally "good" then worthiness might include wisdom, faith, compassion, etc. If on the other hand the builders were evil cultists of a dark god, "worthiness" would instead encompass "power," "ruthlessness," and "cunning" etc.

To expand, they also might be good, but value different "good" traits. For example, most ancient cultures highly valued knowing your proper place in society and doing your duty, whereas more modern cultures might consider that complacency and weakness and put more emphasis on individualism and personal freedom. It's such a nuanced issue, you would really do best by developing this ancient culture before developing their trials.

Lord Pendragon wrote:
I do think that "cunning" and "intelligence" are too similar in general to both appear in the same set of trials.

I bet he meant "stuff fighters are good at," "stuff rogues are good at," and "stuff wizards are good at."

I don't think that's a great way to structure the test, though--it feels a little "convenient." If your group is just into a light-hearted dungeon crawl, drinking beers and joking about magic missiling the darkness, this works. For people interested in something a little deeper, it might disappoint.


A trial of power might have the activating character duel a shadow version of them self. A true warrior must know himself before he can defeat his enemy.

I played in a WARHAMMER RPG game once, where our DM created a series of puzzles, skill rolls would allow you to get hints, and the intelligence of a character dictated how many moves they got (Like the mansions of madness puzzles). There could also be some sort of gauntlet, which doesn't necessarily have to contain monsters, but it could be loaded with traps and nasty curses.


mplindustries wrote:
Lord Pendragon wrote:
If the temple builders were generally "good" then worthiness might include wisdom, faith, compassion, etc. If on the other hand the builders were evil cultists of a dark god, "worthiness" would instead encompass "power," "ruthlessness," and "cunning" etc.

To expand, they also might be good, but value different "good" traits. For example, most ancient cultures highly valued knowing your proper place in society and doing your duty, whereas more modern cultures might consider that complacency and weakness and put more emphasis on individualism and personal freedom. It's such a nuanced issue, you would really do best by developing this ancient culture before developing their trials.

Lord Pendragon wrote:
I do think that "cunning" and "intelligence" are too similar in general to both appear in the same set of trials.

I bet he meant "stuff fighters are good at," "stuff rogues are good at," and "stuff wizards are good at."

I don't think that's a great way to structure the test, though--it feels a little "convenient." If your group is just into a light-hearted dungeon crawl, drinking beers and joking about magic missiling the darkness, this works. For people interested in something a little deeper, it might disappoint.

Adding to this, is it the temple of a deity? If so, is the deity still alive, or is it dead? What alignment is/was said being?


My players are somewhere in between the beer and magic missiles and the hardcore roleplay group. They seem to like some of everything but nothing specific. :P

Anyway, the temple was built around this collection of artifacts. First someone went around and gathered these up and put them in one spot. Later someone built the trials to control access to the artifacts. Then someone built a temple around those trials. Much later, after the temple had been abandonded, various traps and safeguards were added. Then a small village grew up outside to protect the now-sealed entrance and keep records. Back to modern times and that village is abandoned and the whole thing is lost knowledge.

The temple is built for all 14 deities in my pantheon as it was built around this collection of artifacts. Most of the deities are neutral, but there's more good than evil. There are likely multiple trials because deities/priests couldn't agree on one. For the same reason, the trials probably are somewhat generic. (Edit: Oh yeah. These are the same deities then and now. They've let this temple become lost, but have now sent the players on a quest to find it.)

Now, it'd probably make sense to have 14 trials that you only need to complete 3 of instead of having 3 generic trials, but I don't think I'd be able to handle that.


MagiMaster wrote:
Anyway, the temple was built around this collection of artifacts. First someone went around and gathered these up and put them in one spot. Later someone built the trials to control access to the artifacts. Then someone built a temple around those trials.

Ok, so the trials would not be connected to the religion because they predated the temple, right? What was this guy like that made the trials?


We recently went through a sorta-similar thing, and i think (not sure) there was one trial for each plane of existence / god / alignment. I'm probably messing this up but it was something like:

0. possibly, the first trial might have been to climb up the walls of the tower thing to get at the entrance, which was on the top.
1. a room whose floor consisted of tiles which explode when stepped upon (reflex saves, there was some pattern to the placement that i'm sure if you were cleverer than our party you could have figured out to avoid the damage)
2. a room which filled with a poisonous vapor as we traversed it (fort saves, just run across fast as far as i could tell, there was probably more to it that i missed)
3. a hallway with appealing treasures ripe for the taking, which turn out to be cursed (will saves) (god of avarice/lust maybe? the items caused you to be encumbered if you failed your save and picked one up, you also couldn't drop them w/o a remove curse or dispel magic or something, limiting you to one hand.)
4. a room containing some kind of mechanical construct which alternated between attacking with blade and electricity (this room was a clusterf**!, we just ran away and one of our NPCs died) (probably like a lawful neutral god of artifice or something, my character doesn't have knowledge-religion and i don't even really know what the gods are)
5. a room wherein a large fey/angelic creature of some kind demanded that we sacrifice one of our own in order to pass (we refused to sacrifice someone, which was probably the "right solution") (i think it was the lawful-good god/plane)
6. a staircase trapped with an accursed rune that instils blindness and confusion (this also was a clusterf#%*) (maybe a god of darkness and chaos)
7. a room guarded by three warring champions of different mortal races, have to pick sides but it also became a freeforall clusterf$#@ (god of champions/mortals kind of thing)
8. a room guarded by an enormous, cannibalistic bugbear with like a blood drain attack (this was where i lost most of my hit points) (god of blood/rage type thing)
9. a room guarded by some kind of fleshy, featureless, nightmarish changeling, who rapidly alternated form and tactics (god of nightmares type thing)

By the way, 9-10 encounters in a row in pathfinder is fairly brutal.

Then when we got through that we found the guy we were chasing, but I had one hitpoint left and just hid, the guy teleported away. It was also a long session, the end was sort of late at night and one of the players was asleep when we entered the last room, etc. Hazards of gettin' old.


One I remember from Unforgotten Realms is:

The PCs step into the room, there are two NPC's chained up in the middle of the room. The PC's move over to free them and then everything drops away and they're standing on a platform surrounded by water (or lava) as far as the eye can see. The NPC's tell them the only way to escape is to make the platform 2 people lighter.

The smart answer: Two people jump
The evil/easy answer: Throw the two NPC's off

If they don't kill the NPC's, they give them some advice on the next challenge then vanish into thin air.


The idea of 14 different trials might actually work if I could come up with 3 or 4 general trials that I could tweak to fit the different deities. Unfortunately, that just leaves me back in my original predicament, although with better justification for having such generic trials.

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