5 ms·
My best horror dungeon so far was a 3-level abandoned dwarven mine. 2 first levels are infested with kobolds and pseudodragons, players kill some kobolds, block
by ajuc 7y ago
My best horror dungeon so far was a 3-level abandoned dwarven mine. 2 first levels are infested with kobolds and pseudodragons, players kill some kobolds, block off some others with explosions, solve puzzles to get through blocked lift to the last level and see that it was blocked from inside on purpose, there are dwarven runes on the walls written with blood warning not to speak to each other and not to read anything or you'll get infected by HIM.
I borrowed it from SCP series - it's a "memetic hazard" - nonmagically infects brains when it's thought of or spoken of. Mechanically players roll a Wisdom save whenever there's infection opportunity, on a fail they start shouting the meme (then others have to roll :)), on a bad fail they become possesed and run somewhere. You of course don't explain it to the players, just ask them to roll when needed :)
As they explore searching for the artifact they were hired to recover they find the whole mine is full of dead bodies calmly sitting in circles, pools of dried blood, all the books are burned and there are bodies of dwarves who were fighting each other before they died. Then there's the last room with a huge portal that starts to activate when players who got possesed run into it.
The climax is a big pvp fight between the players that try to teleport to their new god and the rest of the party trying to knock them unconscious and drag them away before the portal activates :)
- RhysU 7y agoWhat is "SCP"?
- ajuc 7y agoA genre of web fiction with scary x-files like stories. Great source of ideas for scary monsters/dungeons/villans/legends after reskinning from modern times to whatever setting you need. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCP_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCP_Foundation
- carapace 7y agoThat sounds great! The guys I was DM'ing for wouldn't have fallen for it though: they had a knack for confounding your best laid plans. E.g. they would have just read the warnings and bugged out. Or forced captured kobolds to go in first or something. Later on in the wrecked flying castle there was a room with a clockwork horror in it that I was sure would give them a hard time. They trapped it in a chest right off and ran away before it broke out. Another time I had a classic dungeon set up for them complete with a lich. They woke up the lich... and ran away. Like all the way out of the dungeon and then halfway across the freaking continent. They just left it for someone else to deal with. Unrelated story time... In another campaign one player had this dwarf fighter and he had rules-lawyered and finagled to get him specialized with two axes and multiple attacks per round. Three with the right and two with the left, five attacks per round. We nicknamed him "the Blender" because he could just chop the shit out of anything. He was stupid and reckless, a follower of the great god of war VTRE (Victory Through Reckless Endangerment!) and he was awesome. This was a Spelljammer campaign (am I the only one who loved/loves Spelljammer!? It was so much fun) and one battle in particular they were fighting a ship of mindflayers. Scary right? The Blender jumps on a loaded ballista and tells the crew to launch him at the Illithid ship. He crashes into the deck, bounces up, grabs his axes from his belt, and proceeds to straight butcher the mindflayers. I forget the details but it was one of those times that the whole table is howling, the dice are hot, and it's just unbelievable but so fun no one cares.