If any of my 'Aul for One' players are reading this... don't?
Tl:dr Hey all, I'm trying to design a series of traps/puzzles/encounters that one might come across in the sprawling labyrinth of a scientist who specializes in planar studies. Any advice/ideas/etc... on how to do weird physics bendy/planar encounters would be fully appreciated.
More Context: The party will be searching for a missing person (a professor of planar studies), only to track them to a lone door in a warehouse. The door will inexplicably open up into a sprawling maze-like demi-plane that shifts and reorients itself from time to time. The scientist has been hiding out here, while on the run, and has been using this demi-plane to conduct experiments of the planar variety. The players will need to navigate these experiments (which just so happen to have a trap/puzzle/combat encounter in them), and make their way to the heart of the maze and battle their room-sized guard mimic to find and retrieve the professor.
The demi plane could feature rooms and corridors with reverse gravity trap, thermal rooms, phlogiston matter, sea of silt, acid mist, time-affeced space where it's slower, faster or stop, romms with planar monsters, planar travel taking them elsewhere, border ethereal crossovers, astral plane highways, a multiplanar- room or area simultaneously accessible from multiple planes where all sorts of creatures from across the plans can be found, like a Dimensional Inn on the Rock of Braal for exemple, some areas of dead magic, wild-magic or magic empowered in some fashion.
I like the time warping ideas, I'll see how I can introduce them in a mechanically fun way. I may err away from having rooms fully allow access to other planes (only because full planar travel is a plot point I've saved for later), but having elements coming through would be really cool. A wild magic room is VERY interesting. Maybe the ability to scry into different planes in different rooms could be cool as well. Thank you for the ideas!
I once created a bizarro world trap room for my players that might work for you. Upon entering a room with a malfunctioning demiplane spell, they found themselves trapped in a mirror dimension where all magic was reversed: healing spells did damage, illusion turned into conjuration, debuffs turned into buffs, etc. They had to reverse-engineer the demiplane spell (whose equations were hidden behind giant mirrors and whose ingredients required feeding magic into the hidden nodes) to get out. It was basically Opposite Day: The Trap. Required them to get creative, to think backwards, and it gave them some laughs as they fooled around with altered magic.
If any of my 'Aul for One' players are reading this... don't?
Tl:dr Hey all, I'm trying to design a series of traps/puzzles/encounters that one might come across in the sprawling labyrinth of a scientist who specializes in planar studies. Any advice/ideas/etc... on how to do weird physics bendy/planar encounters would be fully appreciated.
More Context: The party will be searching for a missing person (a professor of planar studies), only to track them to a lone door in a warehouse. The door will inexplicably open up into a sprawling maze-like demi-plane that shifts and reorients itself from time to time. The scientist has been hiding out here, while on the run, and has been using this demi-plane to conduct experiments of the planar variety. The players will need to navigate these experiments (which just so happen to have a trap/puzzle/combat encounter in them), and make their way to the heart of the maze and battle their room-sized guard mimic to find and retrieve the professor.
The demi plane could feature rooms and corridors with reverse gravity trap, thermal rooms, phlogiston matter, sea of silt, acid mist, time-affeced space where it's slower, faster or stop, romms with planar monsters, planar travel taking them elsewhere, border ethereal crossovers, astral plane highways, a multiplanar- room or area simultaneously accessible from multiple planes where all sorts of creatures from across the plans can be found, like a Dimensional Inn on the Rock of Braal for exemple, some areas of dead magic, wild-magic or magic empowered in some fashion.
I like the time warping ideas, I'll see how I can introduce them in a mechanically fun way. I may err away from having rooms fully allow access to other planes (only because full planar travel is a plot point I've saved for later), but having elements coming through would be really cool. A wild magic room is VERY interesting. Maybe the ability to scry into different planes in different rooms could be cool as well. Thank you for the ideas!
I once created a bizarro world trap room for my players that might work for you. Upon entering a room with a malfunctioning demiplane spell, they found themselves trapped in a mirror dimension where all magic was reversed: healing spells did damage, illusion turned into conjuration, debuffs turned into buffs, etc. They had to reverse-engineer the demiplane spell (whose equations were hidden behind giant mirrors and whose ingredients required feeding magic into the hidden nodes) to get out. It was basically Opposite Day: The Trap. Required them to get creative, to think backwards, and it gave them some laughs as they fooled around with altered magic.
Oh this is great, definitely the brand of wacky, physics-bending planar nonsense I could play with here.