How to Run a "Living Room"

[DRD1812]

I've always been enamored of the idea of a "living room" encounter as illustrated here. I have a couple of worries though.

--How do you justify all those monsters working together?

--How do you foreshadow it properly? You don't want the encounter to become one big "gotcha" before everything gets a surprise attack on players. The players need a fair chance to spot their enemies, you know?

--Beyond the usual suspects of mimics and lurkers above and similar, are there any lesser-known monsters that fit the trope?

[Val'bryn2]

Animated objects. And it can be a form of symbiosis, the mimic takes the form of a mound of gold, attracting the heroes, cloakers that appeared to be carpet or tapestries attack,I'm guessing cloakers rely more on blood than meat, so they drain the blood, and the mimic eats the flesh.

[LordKailas]

DRD1812 wrote:

I've always been enamored of the idea of a "living room" encounter as illustrated here. I have a couple of worries though.

--How do you justify all those monsters working together?

There could be an intelligence working behind them. Perhaps a powerful undead creature (eg. Vampire, Lich, etc.) has a "waiting room" like this to deal with unwanted visitors that it needs to "disappear". Since the "master" is undead it's "Pets" will generally leave it alone.

Then again, maybe this relationship developed naturally. That only makes sense if the area is for some reason still regularly visited by creatures. Maybe the room is "cursed" in a hotel/inn that frequently changes hands. It's in a house in a rundown district that is purported to be "haunted" since there have been disappearances that no one can explain. For the most part subsisting on vagrants and/or refugees in a city that regularly gets influxes of those.

DRD1812 wrote:

--How do you foreshadow it properly? You don't want the encounter to become one big "gotcha" before everything gets a surprise attack on players. The players need a fair chance to spot their enemies, you know?

There should be plenty of rumors and/or half-truths about the place for characters to discover prior to encountering the room. If it's a situation where rumors don't make sense (like a vampire's lair), then there are other things you can do. Maybe the chair is chained to the floor and the rug is attached to a wall via a cord. The real reason these things are there are so that the "pets" don't wander off. Maybe the room is unusually clean compared to the rest of the rooms in the complex.

DRD1812 wrote:

--Beyond the usual suspects of mimics and lurkers above and similar, are there any lesser-known monsters that fit the trope?

2nd Edition had the House Hunter, which was just a colossal mimic meaning the entire room/building was a single monster. Others that come to mind.

Piercers
Cloakers
Oozes (if they are in a substance and/or container that makes it not seem out of place)
Wolf-in-Sheep's Clothing
Rope Dragon

A quick search of monsters that include the phrase "bonus to disguise" shows me a bunch of creatures that might fit what you're looking for.

[Tim Emrick]

The classic 1st edition AD&D adventure "Expedition to the Barrier Peaks" has a host of different monsters with various forms of camouflage, but they're scattered over a huge dungeon (6 levels, each about 600 ft. diameter).

Spoiler:

There are lurkers above, trappers, doppelgangers, piercers, ropers, and various slimes and molds. This is also the module that introduced the wolf-in-sheep's-clothing.

[blahpers]

DRD1812 wrote:

I've always been enamored of the idea of a "living room" encounter as illustrated here. I have a couple of worries though.

--How do you justify all those monsters working together?

As above: symbiosis, or they're all servants/allies of the same bigger nasty thing.

Quote:

--How do you foreshadow it properly? You don't want the encounter to become one big "gotcha" before everything gets a surprise attack on players. The players need a fair chance to spot their enemies, you know?

Depends on the reason for its existence in the first place. For example, An evil playing god by splicing living beings with inanimate objects or perverting creatures with magical energy could be telegraphed by any number of means, including the very rumors or other plot hooks that led the players to that dungeon to begin with. Maybe one of the previous rooms was a laboratory with notes or samples suggesting such experiments.

A room full of self-sufficient mimicking symbiotes in the Darklands, on the other hand, might not be telegraphed much at all, other than the nearest vegepygmy tribe's warnings that those who go that way never return.

Quote:

--Beyond the usual suspects of mimics and lurkers above and similar, are there any lesser-known monsters that fit the trope?

Probably. I don't spend too long looking for monsters like these, though; if I need something not covered by the standard stuff, I'll just brew up a variant mimic and call it a day.

[DRD1812]

LordKailas wrote:

A quick search of monsters that include the phrase "bonus to disguise" shows me a bunch of creatures that might fit what you're looking for.

That's a really clever strategy. Cheers!

[Scott Wilhelm]

So, I guess the monster that lurks above would be a Lurker Above. The carpet says "Trapper" to me. The wall looks like Green Slime. There was a Green Slime on the wall in one of the rooms in the Tomb of Horrors. The 'Slime was disguised as a tapestry, and if you tried to kill it with fire, the Green Slime would turn into a Brown Mold.

The Trapper and the Lurker Above are both ambush predators, and they would be competitors. Trappers are actually intelligent, though, so maybe it would be the pack leader? Green Slime is more like a detrivore, and might eat the remains, but the Slime would attack the other 2. I'm a little dubious of the ecology of this room.

You could re-imagine the concept of the Living Room.

The entire contents of the room might be all appendages of 1 gigantic Mimic.

The 'Room could be a Construct, or just filled with Animated Objects.

There could be an ecology to the room: Maybe there is a monster lurking on the ceiling that is careful not to touch the floor, because the floor is somehow-hard-to-notice Green Slime. Maybe there are beautiful silk tapestries draped from the ceiling that were woven by the intelligent spiders that live there. The spiders attack by shooting their webs down at the players then bringing them up, sucking them dry, then dropping their dried husks to the slime below.

I guess it doesn't have to be a Green Slime. Okay, I think this is the money shot. I'm really liking the idea of my super-smart, tapestry-weaving spiders. The carpet is the Trapper. The spiders and Trapper work together: spiders subsist on an almost entirely liquid diet, sucking the ichor out of bugs that fly into their webs. When they aren't preying on passers-bye, they are constantly engaged in lively, witty banter, you know living room conversation. The party hears the conversation as they approach. Then they walk in, seeing an Elf and an Orc seated on plush chairs engaged in a chess game. If the party fails their Perception Checks, they won't realize that the game, the chairs, and the orc and elf are all a single Wolf in Sheep's Clothing! It is putting on a puppet show, with the Spiders and Trapper doing the voices.

[the David]

Stunjellies are similar to gelatinous cubes except that they look like walls.

Ofcourse, you mustn't forget to include a mimic disguised as a latrine. It's the latest style in dungeon design.

[Slim Jim]

Do not sit on the Couch of Doom.

[Temperans]

For animated objects, there is the living wall which is kind of meh but also oh so very creepy. Combine them with some type of cover like the spider silk drapes discussed above. Or maybe even a large group of mimic boards (that make the room look wooden and totally not a bunch of corpses.

There are also sheet fungus, which fits nice with the vegepygmy. Since apparently there is a 5% chance of whatever a sheet fungus kills gets returns to life as a vegepygmy.