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I need some ideas of things to furnish an air themed dungeon. It should be around 8th level. The point of the dungeon is that the eye of a god is supposed to be there which is a large orb that is controlling the weather in the local region. So I also need to figure out how to disable such an orb. The bad guys of the campaign are the ones who activated it, but they just need it to cause a diversion whilst they do a more devious thing.
Where is the dungeon located? On a mountain or is it like a floating island? I would suggest traps that use wind to knock your pcs out of the dungeon and into... Precarious locations. Is the dungeon in a good condition (meaning people visit it to worship, etc.) or is it abandoned?
You could have the orb activated by hitting certain stones in a specific order. It could be deactivated by hitting them in reverse order. While activating it is easy, deactivating it is less so, given the high winds and everything else.
Have you considered having an antigravity field around the area as well? What sort of weather is it giving off?
Pneumatics: air pressure used to move things. Have travel between rooms be in tubes; doors that open with a rush of air; forced air cleaning/heating systems.
First off, the party needs a way in. The entire place is surrounded by the vortex of a tornado, so maybe they need to burn some resources just entering. Secondly inside there might be lightning traps, gust of wind and windwall spells, or weather-related effects like sleet storms. Finally some monsters attracted to such a place might be air mephits, air elementals, sylphs, cloud giants, and of course a blue dragon.
As for shutting down the eye, how does one stop a hurricane? You could either make it a puzzle as Indy suggested, or perhaps key it to the weather itself requiring the party to balance heat and humidity and such. You could also just have the eye "open" like the eye of the TARDIS and someone needs to take massive damage pulling it "closed" with a manual override.
First off, some question: What/who is the god in question? Does he/she/it still live? Did he/she/it leave the eye there, or was it stolen/moved?
These questions might help a lot in making a dungeon that makes sense.
As for a generel air themed dungeon, I think the having different gravitational effects would be great. Take a look at the rules for different gravitation for planes. A lot of flying (through magic, and/or through subjective gravitation) should be necessary.
To make an air theme with a capital A, you should consider the air as the major component and limiting boundary, rather than the walls of the dungeon. Of course this depends on who build the place, but I think wind tunnels and the like should have an important place.
I might be a bit off my rockers right now, and it might not fit with what is already in place in your game world: But what about having the air/weather inside the dungeon be the actual orb, or in other words the dungeon itself?
Instead of finding a way to manipulate a physical orb, they will need to adjust different parts of the dungeon (openening/closing air vents - connecting lightning sources - calming air elementals (diplomatically, or by killing earth elementals enraging them).
The dungeon is located on top of a mountain in the Edge of the World Mountains in Taldor.
It is supposed to be in Aroden's Eye, which doesn't have any more detail that I found than the name. So it's supposed to be Aroden's Eye, but doesn't literally have to be so. The idea came because I need a distraction that puts a fog over the city while the bad guys do other things and the fact that the Eye of Abednego was the fault of Aroden. So I decided it could be similarly related. After his death, followers built the place in his honor or something.
I like the ideas of gravity, flying necessary(or climb checks), using air as barriers, having earth elementals/other creatures that are disturbing the balance, having certain air themed creatures attracted to it, quite a few puzzle like things involved with getting through the dungeon and stopping the orb, lightning traps, etc.
Keep the ideas coming please this is good stuff, especially if anyone can help connect Aroden with the weather effects(I know he isn't really the god of weather or air, but he is of innovations, which is like technology, right?)
*Edit* - I just thought about the orb actually being an egg for a Thunderbird which is just about to hatch, which explains why the weather is going weird because that's what thunderbirds do.
Have hallways in ceilings and spiked covered floors everywhere so that a lot of the dungeon seems practically inaccessible at first. If the wizard wanders off using means of levatation, great him with a room that is too full of air elementals for him to fight alone. Then have a series of orbs that essentially lets characters and monsters all fly while in the dungeon.
Make them have two annoying fights with flying enemies early on and then have them fight those enemies again while they are airborne themselves. The fight should be easier. One fight could just be against kobolds or some other kind of mook enemy, but the room is covered in spikes and the kobolds keep turning off the fly effects at inconvenient times.
More or less a fun little Zelda dungeon.
Here's an old Help me design an Air-Element "Dungeon"! thread on ENWorld...
What about an enormous cavern, like super ginormous. Inside it would have several platforms some connected some not which would each perform their various functions. The "walls" would be the gaps between some of them, the fog that obscures vision to 30~60ft, and some walls of air that prevents movement between certain areas. To be able to traverse the gaps there would be stones that give the PCs flying for a while until they get to the next part. In theory they could choose which ever platforms to go to next but they would have to do all of them to deactivate the orb.
I imagine something like this: Air Dungeon with each of the pathways being the platforms and the center being the boss area. The skulls being the stones to deactivate the barrier around the middle. And the rest being a bottomless pit.
Thoughts?