So in my home game, my players have found a hidden, sealed dungeon in the upper city-ledge of Tumen in Osirion, specifically the one once owned by the Pharaoh of Numbers. They have already played through Entombed with the Pharaohs, and are working on discovering the location of The Pact Stone Pyramid, so I have plenty of material to work with.
I want this small dungeon in Tumen (which is almost a megadungeon in its own right) to be a hidden stronghold of the Pharaoh of Numbers, a place where he recorded lore on the Dominion of the Black and what their inevitable return to Golarion might mean. I also want them to find one of the doomsday clocks, since that was their entire goal in this expedition and they've done a darn good job with info gathering, smart exploration, and so on.
But for the life of me, I can't figure out what to put in this mini-dungeon/stronghold. The relation to the Pharaoh of Numbers makes stuff relating to Aucturn the 11th planet and the numbers 11 and 56 a no brainer, but beyond that, I feel like there should be something truly unusual, like a chunk of the dungeon being a permanent demiplane with objective gravity for some sort of MC Escher madness.
I'm just drawing a blank, so I figured I'd ask for a few ideas here to get the engine warmed up.
Any thoughts?
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If only Moingos had been updated to 3.x. You could have an aberrant one that had managed to work pi down to a flat 3, along with all the cosmic wrongness that would bring. (or maybe the Pharaoh of Numbers could have really done a number on it and forced it to compute pi as 11)
One notion that popped up unwillingly was some sort of Ancient Egyptian analogue of Aperture Science. This guy was a Pharaoh, a god-king, so he had to have a number of loyal followers embracing whatever ideology he espoused and ran with it. Some might be the usual expected themed undead guardians, but some of the greatest scientists, mathematicians, and priests(which may have been synonymous during his rule) have been reduced to mummified heads or some other sort of sentient artifacts which can be used as guides, adversaries, or necessary components to get ancient devices to work properly. Some of them may have gone a bit batty with time, some might have been a bit loopy while they were still living.
Maybe it's a bit of a collection game. You gotta catch 'em all. Some of them might want to be found, some of them have been misplaced, some have information to share about the others and the dungeon itself, some might be controlling large construct guardians that have to be defeated, some might be controlling a room's traps(like gravity issues in an Escher room).
Hourglass-ish sand traps should probably make a token appearance at least.
Perhaps some bit of forboding is that the party could find the remains of 10 wiped out parties that came before them, making them the 11th, which could put them a bit on edge. Especially if on of the corpses they find starts saying things like "Complete us. Complete the equation..."
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Brainless mummified ogres constantly pushing a turbine to power machines. They're non-hostile, but they're so ancient that the party needs to use Inflict spells to power them up for 1hr/per spellcaster level. Of course, dead Osirioni taskmasters would have a wand of inflict to keep these undead motors running.
You could have a pit filled with sand, but the party needs to get the sand level at exactly the right measure (11) This would involve a puzzle for the party to decide how many CL 3 Inflict Light Wounds spells they'd need to charge the mummy ogre with to make sure there's just the right amount of sand pumped into the chamber-pit.
You could have an enormous clock with a mirror surface. When the clock reaches 11, the mechanism activates and the mirror becomes an enormous portal linked to another portal at the top of the pyramid. This allows an enormous amount of morning sun into the chamber, and could scare off a huge amount of light-sensitive beasties. It also provides the only exit route.
And of course, you need a cursed pair of gloves with 5 fingers on one hand, but six on the right. The hand with six fingers becomes supernaturally quick and strong, but the 5 finger hand begins to wither, become numb, and rot.
I would also recommend a magical abacus. Litter the dungeon with iron and clay golems, who have numbers written in ancient Osiriani on their chest plates.
If the hero adds up to the listed number seen on the golem upon their abacus, the magic item provides a 60ft sanctuary effect to the party against the golems.
Great idea for a dungeon! I'd love to see this become a smart tomb session for PFS!