Pre-emptive TL;DR: Need suggestions for hazards and atmospheric touches for an ancient underground highway populated by savage creatures who would very much like to have the party for dinner. Also want help coming up with thematically relevant and mechanically useful rewards, whether (first) magic items, new SLAs, or other special acquired Su abilities.
Spoiler alert: I don't think any of my players are regulars here. If you are, go read about puppies instead or something.
First of all, a little background. The campaign can be briefly disguised as the 18th century three-way lovechild of Dr. Strangelove, 24, and the X-Files. The party are a group of plausibly deniable contractors for the Western nation's intelligence services who discovered on their first official mission that we are not the first batch of races on this planet, that a great war was fought in time unrecorded, and that magic is a thing that exists. They decided to keep the specifics close to the chest and not report them to their superiors.
In a more recent outing, they accidentally-on-purposed the Eastern nation's ambassador to the Dwarves and all but turned the cold war hot. Rather than undertake their assigned punitive all-but-suicide guerilla/sabotage mission behind enemy lines to buy the Western forces time to prepare, they decided to GTFO and go revisit the place they discovered magic. There, they had discovered a great underground road, and while they could not perfectly make out the language on the signs, they suspected them to be mile markers with distances to other locations not known to modern historians. They didn't dare to delve further before, what with the threat of dying of cave-in or starvation or thirst, but in light of the current alternative, they've opted for the relative safety of the dark.
I want help making the Deep Road more horrifying than any mortal army can be. Up to now, I've been easing them in mechanically. They were super bad-butt special operatives and played that role well. But, apart from the ruin and the monsters it housed, everything they faced was familiar - Urban environments and humanoid enemies, susceptible to manipulation or ambush. They're gearing up to spend the next two weeks several hundred feet below ground to see where the Road goes. Backstory-wise, none of them are spelunkers. Only one of them has Darkvision. None has higher than +5 in Know(Dung). In the coming adventure, I want them to feel less like action heroes and more like the cast of a horror film.
I'm want the characters anxious and claustrophobic. I want them to see the Road as an entity itself, wielding suffocation, cave-ins, and deadfalls as the party wields bow, blade, and tongue. I want them to want most desparately to flee when it is least feasible. I want them to feel some relief when they face their threats because, hey, at least I can see it now. The trickiest part is I want all this, but I want more that through guile and a modicum of luck they prevail, unbroken if not unharmed.
There is a line of critters that will be the main antagonists. Heavily inspired by a combination of the Descent's Crawlers and the Metro Series' Nosalises, I've drawn up some homebrews I'll be cross-linking from the Homebrew forum soonish. If you've had the superhuman patience to read through this much bloviating. I'd love your help both with designing actual challenges/encounters and with flavoring the journey.
Mechanical deets: L3 Gestalt. E6. No magic classes (yet), but each party member has one SLA of each of levels 0 and 1. Most thematically appropriate options here are create water and swift expeditious retreat. Sunrods in this campaign have been nerfed to burn brighter but shorter by far - they're basically battlefield illumination. One Dwarf, one Half-Elf, three humans. Respectively a rifleman, Swashbuckler, Unarmed fighter, archer, and Face/Disarm Fighter. Recent cameo by past member playing a role not dissimilar to Q in Bond films has left the party with some nifty homebrewed toys, like short-duration breather masks.
Current Ideas: Atmosphere
- Shattered Lantern
- Blood stains of varying freshness.
- Droppings containing remains identifiable as humanoid (Finger bones, etc.)
- Echoing growls in the far distance. Low pitched, drawn-out, and thunderous.
- Shriller growls, shorter, quieter, much closer. Just out of LoS or lamplight, really.
- Abandoned equipment packs (with rations, climbing gear, lamp oil, etc)
Current Ideas: Challenges/Hazards
- Areas of dead (i.e. no O2), live (breathable, duh), or explosive/suffocating air, distinguished by the types of mold/lichen growing in each area.
- Cave-in's a standard, but I'd need a mechanism for spotting, avoiding, and bypassing. It's just one road so far. Maybe side routes through natural caves? Maybe the cave in cuts them off from going /back/?
- Water infiltration. The road is ancient. It's very possible whatever seals existed have eroded and certain sections are now buckled and submerged.
- Breaks in the road from seismic activity. Yay! They need to scale X0 ft. up or sideways to continue onwards. Also an effective way to block off hasty retreat.
- Previous cave-ins. Put that Escape Artist skill to use!
- Some supernatural anomaly. My best idea is supernatural darkness with a critter attack, but anything that can't be Scully-ized works.
Current Ideas: Rewards
Regardless of what the party chose as its next mission, I was going to figure out a way to work the mytharc into it and give them some combination of more SLAs, some other non-EX added ability, and/or their first magic item or two. The way the campaign works, giving any sort of new special items implies implies "Get this to the right person and in a few in-game weeks you could buy anything within its family." Our local mercenary murderhobo opted not to kick the mithral shirt on which he called dibs over to R&D, so the rest of the party is stuck with the mundane variety much longer than otherwise.
Now, there are already locales whose backstories make them ideal spots for the discovery of certain classes of magic items, like stat boosters and magic arms. I'd prefer to leave that reveal for later, but can be flexible if you guys think it's best to get the bread and butter on the table now.
What would be mechanically useful and thematically appropriate for a road used to connect the old Dwarven strongholds and into which the Dwarves fled when their experimentations with the arcane made their homes too dangerous to inhabit? I'm thinking persistent illumination would be both useful and relevant, but loldwarveshavedarkvision. One thing I'm including regardless is a magic journal that basically keys and archives entries by password, i.e. a pen-and-paper interface to a dictionary data structure. The obvious benefit would be that it can contain important lore for the campaign which I can delay writing until they've figured out how to research important keying passphrases.
If you've read this far, I love you. If you have any suggestions, having read this far give you ample authority to all but demand I use them. Pre-emptive thanks.
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One important thing to work on as a GM is to make it scary, not annoying. Something that often happens in cramped dungeons is to have a lot of 5ft corridors. Then you get a fight, and only one PC can actually fight with enemies; the rest are in each others' way. This may make dramatic sense, but it's hugely annoying to players who spend several rounds just not being able to do anything because of the way the game board is set up. If you like your players, don't do this.
Instead, you can have a fight in a room with stalagmites/stalactites/pillars/rubble, so that although there's multiple routes through the room, there are also a lot of cover objects to hide behind or to provide cover against AoOs and such. Quite some opportunities for tactical combat, but it's less likely that the PCs will get all bottled up in an annoying way. When you place enemies in the room for the encounter, do so in a way that actually lets the PCs move into the room; don't choke them off at the entrance.
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The mechanics for Squeezing will be powerful here. If the PCs have to fight while stuck in a narrow tunnel, the significant Squeezing penalties will make the combat much harder. Then again, sometimes they'll be able to hide in tunnels too narrow for their enemies, so that the PCs can fight normally-too-hard-enemies who now have the -4 to AC and To Hit that Squeezing entails. This gives you the opportunity to use weaker (kobolds and tinier ones) and stronger enemies (trolls) than you'd normally feel comfortable using.
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Mine gases can be interesting; the risk of massive detonations if anyone uses open flame, can really change a combat. Sparks created by metal weaponry might also set things off.
This works better if the players anticipate the danger, so that they're trying to play around it, than if you spring it on them as a surprise. If the PCs smell gas, and then notice oncoming enemies, they might use unarmed strikes or wooden weapons instead of steel. That can make a combat interesting and different.
Also, if at some point they get Resist/Protection from Energy magic, they can also use it for devastating ambushes. (So can enemies.)
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Be careful with cave-ins. The Cave-In hazard found in the CRB is brutal against even high-level PCs. Make sure you know those rules before you accidentally TPK the party. (TPKs should never happen because the GM wasn't aware of the severity of a rule.)
I recently used Fey Mist. Basically mist/fog that caused confusion like the spell for one round unless they were a Fey. Pick a DC. You could have some fogs that hide foes and replicate one spell or the other.
Have them need to scale a cliff to continue on. And let a fight happen there.
Some ghosts, friendly or not. This could help guild them in thin/correct path.
And hordes. Massive low CR creatures.
Best of luck
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I picture a few things as I read your post:
- Go ahead and have the lights at irregular intervals. Find a way to let them realize at some point that the dwarves didn't need lights, and that the lights are a later addition. Who added them???
- A wide chasm cutting across the main passage. Some ancient mechanism that can be used to extend a bridge across the chasm.
- A side-passage large enough to hold a small village or way-station, apparently home in the distant past to up to a hundred dwarves. The bones of the inhabitants are still in the village, perhaps amidst scorch-marks and rubble, perhaps with no sign of what killed them (maybe a poison gas attack took them all in the middle of the day as they went about normal business).
- Another wide chasm, but this time the bridge mechanism is smashed and unrepairable. A pair of cables span the gap, such that a person could walk on one and hold the other for balance. (Who put the cables here???)
- The sound of a woman screaming, echoing down the tunnel from far, far away. (Eventually they might learn this is nothing more than a subterranean Cougar hunting.)
- Swarms of stinging insects infesting the rocks and lichen around a small stream of fresh water that runs down the wall of the main passage.
- The main passage slants up and down at different times. After setting this expectation, they reach a place where it slants down into a flooded section, the entire passage disappearing into black, stagnant water. To continue, they must grope blindly through the gap and hope to reach a rise on the other side where there is air before they run out of time holding their breath. Remember the water will be incredibly cold; they'll need to get warm again as soon as they emerge. (Perhaps the first time this happens, the water isn't opaque, and it's obvious light is shining through from some point up ahead, and reflecting off a surface up ahead. The second time, the water is black and they have no idea how far they need to go.)
One important thing to work on as a GM is to make it scary, not annoying. Something that often happens in cramped dungeons is to have a lot of 5ft corridors. Then you get a fight, and only one PC can actually fight with enemies; the rest are in each others' way. This may make dramatic sense, but it's hugely annoying to players who spend several rounds just not being able to do anything because of the way the game board is set up. If you like your players, don't do this.
If a fight should involve peculiarities in terrain, I'd try to ensure that it not be purely a one-sided benefit. A choke point may prevent flight or hamper party movement, but it also guards against surrounding and, once through, prevents massed pursuit. My players have been pretty dang good about using terrain wisely.
Instead, you can have a fight in a room with stalagmites/stalactites/pillars/rubble, so that although there's multiple routes through the room, there are also a lot of cover objects to hide behind or to provide cover against AoOs and such. Quite some opportunities for tactical combat, but it's less likely that the PCs will get all bottled up in an annoying way. When you place enemies in the room for the encounter, do so in a way that actually lets the PCs move into the room; don't choke them off at the entrance.
I hadn't reflected on the pitfalls of mechanically featureless rooms. While the bulk of the adventure is travelling a wide road, there might be, I dunno, some sort of rest stop analogue I can throw in both to provide a break from the monotony and shelter for camping. As for general encounter map design, including features for cover is important even if only for stealth. Anything subterranean will have darkvision or similar.
The mechanics for Squeezing will be powerful here. If the PCs have to fight while stuck in a narrow tunnel, the significant Squeezing penalties will make the combat much harder. Then again, sometimes they'll be able to hide in tunnels too narrow for their enemies, so that the PCs can fight normally-too-hard-enemies who now have the -4 to AC and To Hit that Squeezing entails. This gives you the opportunity to use weaker (kobolds and tinier ones) and stronger enemies (trolls) than you'd normally feel comfortable using.
I'd largely intended to use squeezing and EA checks less to spice up combat and more as en encounter of its own. There's a scene in the film the Descent where the protagonists have to move through a very narrow tunnel on a spelunking trip. The last one through becomes stuck, and all around her, the rock begins to shift. The terror she feels as tons of rock threaten to crush her transfers to the audience very well, and I think the scene is one of the scariest in the movie. Moreover, it set the stakes for the rest of the film - she makes it through, but has to leave behind her rope bag to do so, and the cave-in she barely escapes traps the protagonists in an unknown cavern with little hope of getting back out alive even before things start trying to eat them.
Analogous constraints apply in-game. In an emerging-magic campaign, haversacks aren't available, and everyone's eating a -3 ACP to carry everything they need, dropping the pack when combat is imminent. Do our players drop their packs to make it through the tunnel on time? Even if they don't need to, imagine the situation. If they face this challenge after their first encounter with the beasties, they must surely realize that in avoiding the crush, they are moving further into their predators' territory and must press on through it towards some hoped-for exit now that the original entrance is cut off.
Mine gases can be interesting; the risk of massive detonations if anyone uses open flame, can really change a combat. Sparks created by metal weaponry might also set things off.
This works better if the players anticipate the danger, so that they're trying to play around it, than if you spring it on them as a surprise. If the PCs smell gas, and then notice oncoming enemies, they might use unarmed strikes or wooden weapons instead of steel. That can make a combat interesting and different.
I'm going to make sure they'll be identifiable, by experience if not by skill. Maybe include a toned down version before things go pear shaped so they recognize it later. I kinda see this one as more opportunity than threat in the grand scheme of things, frankly, particularly because the party has a means of setting off timed fires.
Be careful with cave-ins. The Cave-In hazard found in the CRB is brutal against even high-level PCs. Make sure you know those rules before you accidentally TPK the party. (TPKs should never happen because the GM wasn't aware of the severity of a rule.)
I know! Problem is it's so iconic. So I gotta figure out how to ride that razor's edge between believable threat and manageable one. I'd done a ceiling collapse before that I think someone spotted with KnowEng and handled by going prone along a very thick pillar that had already fallen. When the floor above them fell, it buckled on the pillar, leaving the party dusty and scraped but otherwise healthy enough to crawl out when the dust settled. I think a similarly effective idea might be to break the cave-in up into smaller segments, i.e. 4 rounds, 1d6 outer/2d6 inner per round with a progression of effects if you fail your save (standing to prone to entangled in place to buried). Then, one failed save won't doom you, and party members will be able to help each other out /before/ anyone is hopelessly buried.
I recently used Fey Mist. Basically mist/fog that caused confusion like the spell for one round unless they were a Fey. Pick a DC. You could have some fogs that hide foes and replicate one spell or the other.
The most magic they've been exposed to so far is a sort-of after-image of a ruin at its full glory and the general who made his last stand there. I'd prefer to reserve actually threatening them with magic until later. That said, I'll now be using an underground fog to conceal foes and to combine with...
Some ghosts, friendly or not. This could help guild them in thin/correct path.
... because I like the image of ghostly shapes forming from the fog as "imprints" of the people who fled or invaded via the tunnel long before.
And hordes. Massive low CR creatures.
Yuuuuup. I'll be posting two wip homebrew critters to the homebrew forum eventually for help in tuning to this purpose.
Thanks for the suggestions, guys.
I'll put some more here later. I did way more prep than I need to for a previous campaign, so I might have something for you.
There's also the fact that the adventurers may not be the first ones to explore the Underground Road. Say there were three, six, or eleven such parties across the ages that tried to explore with varying degrees of success. The adventurers may find clues of clothing with decipherable markings of ancient kingdoms, old weapons lost in previous battles with the denizens of the Underground Road, corpses left behind after ambushes, with journals in ancient lettering depicting their reason for journeying into the ancient Road.
The best part of an "Us vs. Them" plot is that the players eventually discover that the other parties were way, way more prepared and higher-level than they were, and yet they all died too. It's one thing to know you're out-EL'ed or CR'ed with your party against the dozens of types of monsters. It's another to realize that there's monsters in here that took out Level 15+ parties. So that means they've been fighting the "vermin" of the Underground Road, and eventually Something woke up and took out the ones that made it past the easy monsters...
With tattered journals and Last Will and Testaments (heh) left behind by other parties, you give yourself the GM an easy way of narrating the goals of the other parties, and what magic might be found at the end of the Underground Road. You can also increase the reward of making it back out alive, as some governments might pay to learn what happened to their previous teams. If the governments still exist in today's world, that is.
Yeah, i'm all for the remnants of the previous group turning up a little at the time.
Also, make it feel underground by doing the following:
Floors not level, which cause people to slide one way unless they can balance
Breaks in tunnels, where climbing is needed
Chasms to leap across
Areas where the air is bad, or flammable
A huge cave with a giant mushroom forest
Getting them lost
Non hostile animal life, like herds of giant lizards or frogs or bats.
Talk slowly and deliberately when describing things. Don't try to use a spooky voice, just look worried whenever you describe something, the players will soon pick up on your uneasiness.
Have terrified NPCs warn them about the road ahead.
Play creepy music or sound effects at very low volume so that the PCs can barely hear it so they lose conscious awareness but their subconscious awareness remains.
When you describe some things add a description about the impact it has on the PCs themselves. Feel free to use all the classic clichés. For instance: hair standing up on the back of the neck, biting of nails, shaking hands, a cold chill down the spine etc.
Enforce a rule that the PCs must whisper everything while their characters are using stealth. If the players fall completely silent let loose with a chilling scream sound effect then weave that into the story.
In the game have a strange fog roll in that cuts visibility to zero, then hand the players blindfolds...
If there is an underwater section make the players wear ear muffs and they must use hand signals to communicate with each other. But you can give them written messages.