What's the creepiest "normal" thing to find in a d

[Gonzoron of the FoS]

EDIT: Oops, subject should be:"What's the creepiest "normal" thing to find in a dungeon" (can't figure out how to fix it.)

Still working on that Gears adventure for this weekend. Started running out of room ideas and wanted something really bizarre and creepy and random.

Imagine exploring this massive machine full of tunnels and rooms and traps and gears. And then you open a door and see... A bustling tavern full of patrons. Oblivious to the fact that they "live" inside a clockwork monstrosity of a dungeon.

I like it, but it could be weirder... Any thoughts? What's the most incongrous think you could open a dungeon door and see? Children playing a forest glade? a room made of pulsing flesh? Lets see what we can come up with, not just for me, but for anyone looking to drop a bit of the bizarre into an otherwise normal dungeon crawl.

Explanations for how it got there are nice, but not necessary, we can always blame the mists.

[Fido]

A passage you go through and you end up in someone's head!
Like in that movie...





Orr.... You go through a closet and end up in a different world!
Like in that other movie..



Which leads me to think about a door you go through, and on the other side there's a completely different season. A snowy glade when walking through a door in a burning mansion can be pretty damn weird.

[ScS of the Fraternity]

A couple of things off the top of my head:

A massive room comprized of stairways leading up, down and in every direction, each of which orientated in a different direction of gravity. As a person decends one staircase, they emerge heading up a different set at a different angle. Only way out is to climb down a wall into a hole in the floor.

An empty circular chamber connecting various rooms. In the center of the room is a wounded bird, which continously tries to fly straight into the floor.

A hallway adorned with large paintings, which appear amazingly realistic and lifelike. They are, in fact, other rooms - sealed off by glass windows. Inside these rooms are a variety of people and/or horrors trapped in stasis or just standing still.

A large antechamber which appears empty. However as soon as someone nears the entrance, they notice that a school of fish are swimming in midair.

A dungeon made completely of glass. The maze is entirly invisible. As well, the maze is inhabbited with naturally blind creatures, which the players can see as they zig zag their way ever closer. Have a few times the creatures appear right on the party - but seperated by a wall that the players can't see.

[Gonzoron of the FoS]

Someone's been looking at Escher drawings. Cool ideas, though... keep 'em coming!

[Glim]

After the characters exit a room, there's exactly the same room again (maybe even with the players looking into the doorway across the room), and so on. Then the walls come closing in :O

[Isabella]

It depends on the type of GM you are normally. Sometimes the creepiest things for players to see in a dungeon is... nothing.

Because if the GM is the kind of person who leaves devious traps about like no one's buisness, the players will fill in the blanks. There can't actually be nothing in the dungeon, in the player's mind, so they'll spend hours poking and prodding every square inch to mke sure there isn't some sort of spikey pit that the GM hs set up for them.
You don't even have to do any work.

Another variation is a single, out of place object in a room, like a chess board or a qumquat tree. PCs of a certain type will try everything they can think of on the poor thing, until even the GM is considering screaming, "There's nothing special about it!"

But that's based heavily on the players and game in question.

[tec-goblin]

A swimming pool!

Or just a nice, comfortable sofa. Which one of the PCs has seen in horrible nightmare last night he spent on the dungeon (a semi-real nightmare which almost killed him).

[BlackBoxGamer]

An old, obviously antiquated painting that shows a distinguished figure that the characters easily recognize... one of the party members. Beneath the painting is a comemorative plaque that says something like "<Character's name>. Their death shall have a purpose." Or simply "The end has come."

Sorta freaks the player out with the <hopefully> false threat of inevitable demise for their character.

BBG

[Ail]

An old, obviously antiquated painting that shows a distinguished figure that the characters easily recognize... one of the party members. Beneath the painting is a comemorative plaque that says something like "<Character's name>. Their death shall have a purpose." Or simply "The end has come."

Sorta freaks the player out with the <hopefully> false threat of inevitable demise for their character.

BBG

A small variant to that, having a birth and a death date at least a century before real time. Then... could it be they had gone back to the past?

[Ail]

1) entering a room and finging yourself the size of a toy in the middle of other toys. The playing child is somewhere around and is accordingly big.

2) be in the void suddenly. All is black, there are no walls or any boundaries around you. You can even move up and down at will. And you walk, walk, walk without finding a reference point.

2b) a variant of the last one: the same void, but you are steadily falling and gaining speed as you do. You still can't see a reference point.

3) a classic one: fall in the middle (and inescapably) of a vermin swarm so big it is more like a vermin pool.

4) be suddenly in a room 5ft x 5ft x 5ft in size.

I'm losing quality as I go down, so I'm stopping here, ok?

See you around.

Ail

[AdamGarou]

Couple of thoughts:

*A doorway that actually leads into the stomach or intestines of someone in the party. If anyone's read "The Dancing Hut of Baba Yaga", you know where I got this. The PC whose body the doorway leads into can't pass the doorway, of course, but everyone else can--and the walls are dark, moist, even slimy. Caustic liquid (digestive juices) wash over the PCs feet when they move, and the floor shifts alarmingly every so often. If they attack anything in the passageway, they inflict damage on their friend.

*A simple, refreshing water fountain that might actually have beneficial properties (like the equivalent of a cure disease or cure light wounds spell. Of course, the fountain could be either simple and nondescript-looking or could feature harpies and tanar'ri and whatnot frolicking together (and thus be really disturbing). Either way, suspicious players will probably give it a wide berth.

*A doorway into a computer room, full of flashing lights and blinking diodes and beeping alarms and a disembodied voice saying "Intruder... Alert... Intruder... Alert" over and over again. Of course, this has to be described to the players in the ways their characters would see it (having grown up in Barovia or Mordent or wherever, not as children of the 21st century).

*A vast burning desert (a la the From the Shadows adventure) that the PCs must find their way though to a door on the other side of the room or be forever lost.

Nothing else is really coming to mind--hope these help.

[CorvusCornix]

Wow, this thread is growing FAST! Let me add my two cents...

I like ScS's 'Stasis Gallery' idea, how about adding a little timer (Hour Glasses for each of the "paintings"), something that gets triggered when the characters enter the room, which shows when the stasis will end. Now, the players must find a way to get into the rooms behind the transparent walls in time, otherwise some BAD STUFF will happen - although not necessarily to the PCs, you know, the usual: some cute little baby happily playing within a circle of paralyzed wolves, puppies drowning and the like...

Your tavern-idea suggests that you are going for really weird, how about a small jump in time: in a room, the characters find one of the items they are carrying right now - an exact replica of it. Entering the area ABOVE this room will send the players back in time (through some unseen portals). Maybe just a few hours, maybe decades, in this case the item would have been corroded. Now you just have to make sure the player drops the item when in the past (because of illusionary floor, traps, or simply because some stones are missing). Maybe he sees the item aging rapidly as it falls down

Or maybe the illusion of some VERY bad memory the characters have? Slowly have the 'real' dungeon fade into some kind of deja vu. Have the PCs fought and lost against some particularly nasty creature? Recreate the scenario right before they met that creature, so they slowly realize something very bad is about to happen AGAIN, and they have no option but to continue in that direction. Or even a bit more obscure: put them back into school, their bodys turned into that of 12-year-olds, the walls of the Gears fading into the corridors of their school. Then they are intercepted by an old teacher of theirs, who leads them down the corridor, telling them all the time that the headmaster will rip their heads off for <insert crime here> again (forgetting their homework, talking in class, bullying their classmates,...)

I seriously hope you'll introduce us to your Gears-Artwork once it is finished!

[Ail]

I don't know if anyone said this already, but:

let them feel trapped inside of something, but fully aware of what is in front of them. In reality, they are now 2d drawings in pictures at an exhibition, and the people in front of them are simply in a museum, studying the pcitures in minute detail, talking about the characters and possibly making jokes about them.

In alternative, they could be statues or other kinds of sculptures, and if it were a modern museum with at least surrealist art, that could give way to compositions of their bodies deign of Markov and Mordenheim.

Hmmm.... don't ask me how to get out of there, though.

Another possibility, variant of a proposition above: instead of their being inside (phisically) of someone, let them be inside their mind and understand this. They are fully conscious they are battling with a host spirit for control of a body or haunting their dreams... but this understanding comes only after a while.

Also, if it's merely for the bizarre and not the outright frightening, a variant of my first suggestion: they are in a museum, as normal visitors, where they stumble in the middle of Goblins, Orcs, Trolls, Demons and the usual lot of evil dungeon-denizens with a scholarly, quite dedicated look. Have you wondered what do 20 children orc look like in school, with a troll Headmaster? That would also be a possibility, more on the fun side, perhaps... or not.

What if instead of a regular doll golem you have a doll golem that looks like the child of an evil creature ? Does it still have that flavour of innocence about it? Can a baby orc be cute and innocent?

I'm straying too much again, aren't I? Sorry, I'll be back if I have any good ideas....

Ail

[Isabella]

One of the rooms in Quest for Glory 4 was a room that instantly stripped the senses from the people who walked inside. You got them back, one by one, as you made your way through it, but in the meantime you had to stumble through the dark, relying on only touch or hearing to get you through safely; and you have no idea what else might be in there.

[Undead Cabbage]

Hey Gonzoron,

Just a few ideas. Hope it goes well this weekend!

- When underground there is one thing that is trully horrible: Gas. Poisonous gas gets frightening in cramped quarters. With a much smaller volume of area for the gas to fill, the players quickly run out of options. This gas can keep the players on the run, or even isolate them from each other. I wouldn't make it kill them instantly, however, since the players might take a few points of constitution damage to realize that they can't just tough it out (especially those cocky fighters).
- Water. For the same reasons as with gas, a flooding cave is NOT a happy thing. Cave diving is currently one of the most dangerous sports out there. If the players are trapped underground they will need to find a way to stop the water, or at least avoid it. If you REALLY want to be nasty, you could mix the gas with the water, keeping the water level about a foot away from the ceiling (thus having two layers).