
Errant Mercenary |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |

No. This is Pathfinder. You are not allowed puzzles or interesting encounters that cant be solved by a single spell.
Terrain? No, flying.
Travel? No, teleport.
Curses? Lycanthropy? Meaningful adaptation needing to adjust to new condition? No, cure s!$~.
Horror through fear? No, spells.
Horror through mindthings? No, cure s%, see above.
Face an army? No, scaling stats.
Someone sneaks behind them and puts a dagger to their throat? 10582 hp they can survive that.
----------
I just read the last volume of Carrion Crown and that contains one dungeon and one outdoors "dungeon" that are very, very cool with good touches of horror. There are haunts left and right and a great ambiance.

roguerouge |

Try the Cage of Delirium, from 3rd edition Goodman Games. It's a narrative mystery with horror elements (it came with its own horror soundtrack). It's set in an abandoned asylum.

![]() |

Ashes at Dawn is book 5 of the Carrion Crown adventure path. I don't remember many puzzles...but lots of vampires.

Childeric, The Shatterer |

From Paizo...the pickings are slim, but The Harrowing can be pretty horrific if ran right.
If your conversion-fu is strong Labyrinth of Madness - an old TSR adventure, and House of Cards from an old issue of Dungeon magazine are both phenominal high level adventures that are chock-full of traps and puzzles.

JDLPF |

As a homebrew GM, I know the pain of creating meaningful puzzles at higher levels when players have a variety of powerful ways to break the rules at their disposal.
If you're creating your own puzzles, keep in mind the typical tropes of video games.
Quests usually revolve around kill quests, combo quests, delivery quests, gather quests, or escort quests.
Puzzles common to video games include block puzzles, control room puzzles, frictionless room puzzles, light and mirror puzzles, lock and key puzzles, magic portal puzzles, weighted switch puzzles, and so forth.
Use these tropes to your advantage in creating puzzles. It saves time for the players when they can intuitively understand the type of solution needed to the puzzle based on their knowledge of the trope.
As for breaking the puzzle solutions with higher level abilities, design your puzzles with hard limits on the way they can be solved, but always have a backup plan if the players fail, typically by making future combats more difficult or missing out on extra loot.
Example 1: An ancient temple of Sarenrae is rumored to contain a blade forged of pure light, able to cut through any armor or shield without resistance. It can be summoned only on the day when the sun reaches its zenith. The temple has a light and mirror puzzle that requires the players to solve at high noon on the summer solstice as the light of the sun shines through an opening in the apex of the pyramid. They've got ten rounds before the sun moves on to solve the puzzle, or they've missed their chance for another year. Success summons the +1 brilliant energy scimitar which the local clergy of Sarenrae will trade for a significant reward, failure dooms them to a fight against the temple guardians with no reward.
Example 2: A sage has recently unearthed the location of the Nexus of the Gatekeepers of Eternity, an ancient, lost order of interplanar explorers. The sage possesses four (or five, or however many party members there are) magical amulets that let the wearer access the portals of the Nexus. His research has given him a rudimentary idea of where the first few portals lead, and he thinks there are more clues to find out where the rest might take them, but he's sure there's also lots of danger, so he needs an escort of hardy bodyguards to protect him as he explores.
Example 3: Within the Maelstrom there is a fragment of land created by a dead god's dream made manifest. It's said that within this stronghold can be found treasures to rival the greatest of dragon's hordes. Some rooms contain complex gravity patterns within an antimagic field, some have icky organic matching puzzles based on taste, some doors only open by sacrificing a secret you've never told a living soul. The Maelstrom is a plane of chaos made manifest, so expect stuff to work differently!