Things a DM can put in a dungeon to totally mess with players

[Orthos]

Liranys wrote:

williamoak wrote:

Usual Suspect wrote:

Chyrone wrote:

Could you PM it please?

Liranys wrote:

PM'd you two links. :) Enjoy.

Me as well please.

ME THREE! I'm working on a list of silly magic items for a "comedic" pathfinder campaign.

I'll send you the two Modules I just wrote (one at level 5 and one at level 10) once I'm done with them this weekend if you want. They are both rather silly. :)

One is called the Arena of Seven Deadly Sins and the other is called the Circus of Fate, which is based off a modified version of the Deck of Many Things.

Awesome, would love to see =D

[Liranys]

Orthos wrote:

Liranys wrote:

williamoak wrote:

Usual Suspect wrote:

Chyrone wrote:

Could you PM it please?

Liranys wrote:

PM'd you two links. :) Enjoy.

Me as well please.

ME THREE! I'm working on a list of silly magic items for a "comedic" pathfinder campaign.

I'll send you the two Modules I just wrote (one at level 5 and one at level 10) once I'm done with them this weekend if you want. They are both rather silly. :)

One is called the Arena of Seven Deadly Sins and the other is called the Circus of Fate, which is based off a modified version of the Deck of Many Things.

Awesome, would love to see =D

PM me your email and I'll be sure to send them. :)

I'd send them now, but the second one isn't quite done yet and the first has not yet been playtested.

[Liranys]

The first one will get play tested tonight at 7pm PST, though.

[williamoak]

Liranys wrote:

williamoak wrote:

Usual Suspect wrote:

Chyrone wrote:

Could you PM it please?

Liranys wrote:

PM'd you two links. :) Enjoy.

Me as well please.

ME THREE! I'm working on a list of silly magic items for a "comedic" pathfinder campaign.

I'll send you the two Modules I just wrote (one at level 5 and one at level 10) once I'm done with them this weekend if you want. They are both rather silly. :)

One is called the Arena of Seven Deadly Sins and the other is called the Circus of Fate, which is based off a modified version of the Deck of Many Things.

I'll admit mine is rather non-traditional (it's called "Adventures in Bureaucracy") I would love some lighter-hearted pathfinder modules.

[Liranys]

williamoak wrote:

I'll admit mine is rather non-traditional (it's called "Adventures in Bureaucracy") I would love some lighter-hearted pathfinder modules.

The Arena of Seven Deadly sins has such delights as Musical Chairs, an all out Brawl between the PCs (due to greed over an object all subdual damage and there's a will save involved) and a Kobold Emperor...

The Circus of Fate has things like : A strong man drinking contest, A gambling tent, a murder mystery and a duck in a dungeon.

[ElterAgo]

williamoak wrote:

...

I'll admit mine is rather non-traditional (it's called "Adventures in Bureaucracy") I would love some lighter-hearted pathfinder modules.

I kinda like those sometimes. Wouldn't want it all the time. Occasionally as a break is a lot of fun though. But I know quite a few people get very offended by those.

I remember one back in I think 2nd Ed. Everyone in it was crazy and the different sections were based on different fairy tales. At least that's the way I remember it. A lot of players back then got very angry about wasting their time on it if the GM hadn't almost ruined the whole thing by telling them it was a light hearted fairy tale adventure.

[Liranys]

ElterAgo wrote:

williamoak wrote:

...

I'll admit mine is rather non-traditional (it's called "Adventures in Bureaucracy") I would love some lighter-hearted pathfinder modules.

I kinda like those sometimes. Wouldn't want it all the time. Occasionally as a break is a lot of fun though. But I know quite a few people get very offended by those.

I remember one back in I think 2nd Ed. Everyone in it was crazy and the different sections were based on different fairy tales. At least that's the way I remember it. A lot of players back then got very angry about wasting their time on it if the GM hadn't almost ruined the whole thing by telling them it was a light hearted fairy tale adventure.

That's sad. I tend to play in mostly serious games, but I run the goofy ones, because I just do them better. I have a whole Adventure Path planned around Classical novels like Through the Looking Glass, Wizard of Oz, Dante's Inferno, The Island of Dr. Moreau, etc.

[williamoak]

ElterAgo wrote:

williamoak wrote:

...

I'll admit mine is rather non-traditional (it's called "Adventures in Bureaucracy") I would love some lighter-hearted pathfinder modules.

I kinda like those sometimes. Wouldn't want it all the time. Occasionally as a break is a lot of fun though. But I know quite a few people get very offended by those.

I remember one back in I think 2nd Ed. Everyone in it was crazy and the different sections were based on different fairy tales. At least that's the way I remember it. A lot of players back then got very angry about wasting their time on it if the GM hadn't almost ruined the whole thing by telling them it was a light hearted fairy tale adventure.

I'm not too worried personally; it's a campaign that I could only really run through play by post, since part of the play would be PCs "citing" (inventing) ridiculous laws & regulations from bureaucratic handbooks. Doing PbP on the site makes it much easier to find legitimately interested players.

Still, they are going to have some cooky characters to deal with. I hope I'm able to make something interesting.

[Liranys]

Did you know it's illegal to tie a camel to a light post in Georgia? ;)

[Liranys]

Ahh, Another thing to put in a dungeon to mess with players! A Law book full of ridiculous laws and the consequences of disobeying them.

[Orthos]

Liranys wrote:

Did you know it's illegal to tie a camel to a light post in Georgia? ;)

I did not and I just moved to Georgia a couple months ago. Good to know!

[williamoak]

Liranys wrote:

Did you know it's illegal to tie a camel to a light post in Georgia? ;)

I heard something along those lines... Now that I think of it, I'll try to do a proper write-up of the campaign. The setting would be limited (one city & countryside), a few main features (office, home, town square, etc.) with module-like "case files" ranging from easy to impossible... this could be interesting.

[Wyntr]

Liranys wrote:

Ahh, Another thing to put in a dungeon to mess with players! A Law book full of ridiculous laws and the consequences of disobeying them.

Then have a plane of inevitables devoted to upholding those laws come after the party (bonus points if the penalty is very minor but the party freaks out and tries to kill the enforcers).

[Dreaming Psion]

The Indescribable wrote:

A little girl with empty eye sockets crying blood who doesn't say a word.

For that matter, I've found waifish pale girls with Anime-proportioned, soul-piercing eyes to be enough to disturb players fairly well.

[Christopher Dudley]

Dreaming Psion wrote:

The Indescribable wrote:

A little girl with empty eye sockets crying blood who doesn't say a word.

For that matter, I've found waifish pale girls with Anime-proportioned, soul-piercing eyes to be enough to disturb players fairly well.

Worst nightmare I ever had:

You know how when you dream, your house in the dream isn't really what your house looks like? This dream wasn't like that. Every board and tile was as perfectly placed as memory could make it. I look out the window to see a waifish red-haired girl in a yellow dress riding a tricycle past my bedroom window... as I leaned out to say good morning and ask what she was doing there, her head lolled back and she looked up at me with enormously oversized blank white dead eyes.

I woke up with no breath to scream, and my heart wouldn't slow down for 10 minutes.

[Liranys]

Only dream I ever had that did that had spiders in it.

[GM_Solspiral]

Liranys wrote:

That's sad. I tend to play in mostly serious games, but I run the goofy ones, because I just do them better. I have a whole Adventure Path planned around Classical novels like Through the Looking Glass, Wizard of Oz, Dante's Inferno, The Island of Dr. Moreau, etc.

You were the target audience for my blog The Flying Pincushion once upon a time we have posts to help with all of the books you've mentioned and a few you haven't (Arabian Nights, Moby Dick) check it out sometime you'd like the backlog.

[Liranys]

GM_Solspiral wrote:

Liranys wrote:

That's sad. I tend to play in mostly serious games, but I run the goofy ones, because I just do them better. I have a whole Adventure Path planned around Classical novels like Through the Looking Glass, Wizard of Oz, Dante's Inferno, The Island of Dr. Moreau, etc.

You were the target audience for my blog The Flying Pincushion once upon a time we have posts to help with all of the books you've mentioned and a few you haven't (Arabian Nights, Moby Dick) check it out sometime you'd like the backlog.

Link?

[GM_Solspiral]

This one is a good intro Not a crunchy article but the links on the side work

[Liranys]

Yay! Flying Monkeys!

[Chyrone]

A clownish puppet in tuxido, riding a tricyle at the end of the hallway.
They eventually end up in a room, the floor's covered in caltrops (or beartraps, if you're feeling sadistic). It is across: I wanna play a game

[Sgtdrill]

Two big tricks I use:

1) When they go to do something - open a door, identify an item, eat a sandwich - just ask in a neutral tone, "So.... that means you touch it, right?"

Even if there's nothing bad about it, its fun watching the light of panic in the players' eyes.

2) A deck of many things. No player can resist it.

[Chyrone]

A trap that sets off a modified version of Baleful Polymorph, every time if you don't say the magic word.

Good luck opening locks being a bunny or a kitten for the next 10 minutes.

[The Indescribable]

Liranys wrote:

Ahh, Another thing to put in a dungeon to mess with players! A Law book full of ridiculous laws and the consequences of disobeying them.

And as long as it's in the party it tries to enforce said laws. it is illegal to draw your weapons when being attacked. Lose two turns. two turns grease spell!

Note it says illegal to draw weapons during a fight, not before a fight, not initiating a fight just during. heheh. Hope it's not an ambush.

[I'm Hiding In Your Closet]

An ornate shrine at the bottom of a dungeon, the centerpiece of which is a large stretched-out sheet of fine paper, to the side of which is a black quill pen. If anyone steps up to it, the pen floats up as though wielded by a phantom scribe and begins writing on it, the first sentence it writes being:

Hello. Would you like to play a game?

The pen then hovers in front of whoever's standing in front of the shrine, as though prompting them to take it and write a response. If the PC tries to ask the shrine what games it can play, the list it replies with includes something like the following:

Chess
Draughts
Tic-Tac-Toe
Hangman
Three Dragon Ante
ArcoMage

and at the very bottom of the list:

Global Armageddon.

And so may very well begin the party's "race against time to save the world" adventure.

[captain yesterday]

Liranys wrote:

Did you know it's illegal to tie a camel to a light post in Georgia? ;)

did you know Whale hunting is illegal in Nebraska:)

[Chyrone]

IHIYC wrote:

Chess

Draughts
Tic-Tac-Toe
Hangman
Three Dragon Ante
ArcoMage

YES!! If only that could be done properly.

[Chyrone]

They're visiting a neutral zone, they all get these (irremovable except by staff) leather bracelets as "visitor ID", but those give a 75% fail chance on any magic other than non-combat cantrips. Can't have temperful mages go wild on unarmed staff now can you?

[Trigger Loaded]

Sgtdrill wrote:

2) A deck of many things. No player can resist it.

I have personally resolved that, unless it's a one-shot game, if I ever encounter a Deck of Many Things, I will destroy it or otherwise remove it from the group, no matter my character's motivations or knowledge.

[UnArcaneElection]

How about a trap (or better yet, series of traps) whose payload is a draw from a Deck of Many Things? Actually, this might be fitting for Starstone Cathedral . . . .

[UnArcaneElection]

(Too late to edit the above.)

Just had another thought: The Evil Boss is a Cleric with the Televangelist Archetype . . . .

[Sissyl]

That's not something to mess with players. That's a sodding reward.

[Shiroi]

I once ran a group through a place I called the Forest of Illusions. Giant worms, Snake People, and a dozen other nasty real denizens aside, they honestly hit as many "dead ends" as they did real openings through the forest (if they all failed will saves to disbelieve that river, or crevasse, or massive tree in the way, they'd have to go back around and try a different route), they also saw about 3 times more fake encounters than real ones, spent 30 minutes taming an illusion of a Giant Scorpion for the Cavalier to use as a mount, and then got to the boss, a Hydra. He was real. They didn't believe it until someone took acid to the face. When they nearly killed him, a custom unstatted caster brought him back, even stronger, but gave him WAY more heads (as mirror image).

When all was said and done, the exhausted but intact party killed the Hydra, which dissolved into sand. The mage stepped out of the rubble, and smiled, and went on a nice long rant about how awesome he was, using various spells to basically make anyone who moved helpless. Tied up with plants, flesh to stone with the head left flesh, and various other methods of "roll a will save and good luck". When he finished he told them...
"The best part of all these illusions is that I'm honestly more focused on my Evocation. Have you ever seen a fireball the size of a Great Wyrm?"
He proceeds to produce a massive kamehameha blast above his head, and I brutally describe the characters dying from exposure to the heat in slow motion, while marking the passage of time on my sheet. One of the party members finally disbelieved, just in time to realize the illusionist was drawing a knife to slit his throat as he lay there, perfectly healthy (aside from the Hydra damage) and free to move.

A group with a heavy rules focus may not like this, but it was probably one of the most memorable moments of any campaign I've run.

I've also let them have a chat with a god, and while in the holy temple they passed doors to other times and places and existences. Which included a few doors of their own past, a few doors of their future (not that they knew that) and a door where they saw a group of scraggly looking humans in odd clothing sitting around a large rectangular table with a number of parchments and writing utensils nearby, drinking from strange green metal cups and consuming small puffs of orange foam.

That same party had thought the keys they were collecting (based on information from ages old prophecies and such) were the answer to preventing a demon from getting free. Turns out, they were split up because the demon would be let go if they were all destroyed. So he planted prophecies through his minions to get them all collected from the holy temples his allies couldn't enter. Naturally, the party gets most of these and makes a huge mistake... They leave them in a mage's magnificent mansion, and when the mansion disappears the sealing enchantments cease to function.

[Maid Sinister]

There's been a lot of talk of Weird Butlers recently, but what about SINISTER MAIDS? UUWEEEEHEEHEE! *runs off to go Cook People*

[The Indescribable]

Maid Sinister wrote:

There's been a lot of talk of Weird Butlers recently, but what about SINISTER MAIDS? UUWEEEEHEEHEE! *runs off to go Cook People*

*Watches her run off* She seemed like a nice lady. *ignores the screams*

[UnArcaneElection]

Sissyl wrote:

That's not something to mess with players. That's a sodding reward.

Which one, the Deck of Many Things (that thing is dangerous to the user, although my judgment may be skewed by the 1st Edition version), or the Televangelist (actually, those things are dangerous too)?

[I'm Hiding In Your Closet]

Maid Sinister wrote:

There's been a lot of talk of Weird Butlers recently, but what about SINISTER MAIDS? UUWEEEEHEEHEE! *runs off to go Cook People*

What about singing telegram girls that deliver a wail of the banshee when the door is opened for them?

Thank the gods SOMEBODY took Improved Initiative....

[Shiroi]

Wailogram, is a Mr. Ed Screw available?

[Liranys]

captain yesterday wrote:

Liranys wrote:

Did you know it's illegal to tie a camel to a light post in Georgia? ;)

did you know Whale hunting is illegal in Nebraska:)

Yes, because there are SO MANY Whales in Nebraska...

[Liranys]

Trigger Loaded wrote:

Sgtdrill wrote:

2) A deck of many things. No player can resist it.

I have personally resolved that, unless it's a one-shot game, if I ever encounter a Deck of Many Things, I will destroy it or otherwise remove it from the group, no matter my character's motivations or knowledge.

You might not want to do that with my Modified Deck. :) Most of the things are good and the ones that are bad are amusing and not very serious. No auto-death-kill-murder cards.

[I'm Hiding In Your Closet]

Liranys wrote:

Yes, because there are SO MANY Whales in Nebraska...

What, you never saw that episode of The Tick with the cross-country-running whale?

[The Indescribable]

I'm Hiding In Your Closet wrote:

Liranys wrote:

Yes, because there are SO MANY Whales in Nebraska...

What, you never saw that episode of The Tick with the cross-country-running whale?

You know, I don't think I have.

[Usual Suspect]

As a fairly large guy living in the Midwest, I have to admit to being a little relieved that whale hunting is not legal in several Midwest states.

[I'm Hiding In Your Closet]

The Indescribable wrote:

I'm Hiding In Your Closet wrote:

Liranys wrote:

Yes, because there are SO MANY Whales in Nebraska...

What, you never saw that episode of The Tick with the cross-country-running whale?

You know, I don't think I have.

I believe it's called "Trapped In The Belly Of Love," and I think it's actually an important episode for reasons I will not spoil.

[Aaron Bitman]

I know nothing about The Tick, but I'll never forget this. You never know where or when a whale might drop in.

[Shiroi]

Speaking of which, if you've ever had a party do something totally bizarre to an NPC, feel free to have a cameo appearance.
Last year's NPC troller of the year award went to the Mage, falling out of the sky. This year's PC troll of the year award goes to... The Mage, falling out of the sky. Because congratulations, you've just trolled yourself.

[The Indescribable]

Aaron Bitman wrote:

I know nothing about The Tick, but I'll never forget this. You never know where or when a whale might drop in.

I expected a link to Hitchiker's guide.

Shiroi wrote:

Speaking of which, if you've ever had a party do something totally bizarre to an NPC, feel free to have a cameo appearance.

Last year's NPC troller of the year award went to the Mage, falling out of the sky. This year's PC troll of the year award goes to... The Mage, falling out of the sky. Because congratulations, you've just trolled yourself.

I'm going to need further explanation of this one.

[Shiroi]

The Indescribable wrote:

Aaron Bitman wrote:

I know nothing about The Tick, but I'll never forget this. You never know where or when a whale might drop in.

I expected a link to Hitchiker's guide.

Shiroi wrote:

Speaking of which, if you've ever had a party do something totally bizarre to an NPC, feel free to have a cameo appearance.

Last year's NPC troller of the year award went to the Mage, falling out of the sky. This year's PC troll of the year award goes to... The Mage, falling out of the sky. Because congratulations, you've just trolled yourself.

I'm going to need further explanation of this one.

Have you ever had a party do something (intentionally or not) that an NPC witnessed, which would be decidedly classified as WAY UNUSUAL? For instance, random NPC notices the stealth/slight of hand check of a PC rogue stealing a pastry from his plate and running away with it in his mouth?

Bring it back. Unless you've been timeline specific, have one of your characters in a separate campaign get his pastry stolen, the exact same way, by the exact same character. In other words, have them literally troll themselves.

[The Indescribable]

I like that, but could you give me the situtation with the mage?

[Shiroi]

Ah, nonspecific. It was a generic concept for a ludicrous event which could have occurred, and would be memorable enough that the cameo would be recognised.

I could happily tell you of the Alchemist who used spider silk to make a hot air balloon, and the travelling monkey (not Kender, just a monkey) who hung around with the party as they floated from dungeon to dungeon. Someone nearly did fall out, though I can't recall who. 5/1 says it was the fighter... His dice were so bad he was notorious for rolling a 1 on the first combat roll of every campaign for a solid 2 years.

You could always have a random NPC fall out of a zepplin or hot air balloon just like that, or a mage with a botched teleport spell ending up some 40 feet higher and a hundred miles to the left of where he was supposed to be going. (cue subquest to take him to his destination, cue plot cross to find out the place he's so flippantly describing as home is actually the demonic portal he's trying to open that you've been trying to prevent for the last 3 sessions)