Post/Author/DateTime	Post
shadowmimiiru 03-10-06, 12:57 AM	I just found out my players are gonna try to take all 50 stories of a tower during this weekend's game. I've only developed 10 of the 50 levels so far, and techinically speaking I've only really did 3 since one is 1 level is a 5 level library and the other is a cathedral like first level ... The game is saturday, but I can't for the live of me figure out a way to make 50 stories that are interesting as a whole and not just a "Meh this floor looks the same as the previous 45." Any help would be great. Oh! A little background: The tower is of a green crystal like material, and is about the size of a city block. It was created by a race of elves that died out when high elves where still young. The tower serves as a prison for an ancient Lich, and all who enter can't get out (there is a rqandom portal pool (like stargate ish) at the top that the Lich has just fincihed constructing {took 1000 years to do it because of the spell barriers surrounding the place}). And finally the reason the PC's want to go into the tower is because and I quote from the party "leader:" "Its really tall and pretty." later shadow
PharaunZarfien 03-10-06, 01:09 AM	WOW! You have ambitious players. I wouldn’t worry too much because unless you plan on playing strait through until Monday morning I doubt they will get through even twenty floors. Battle and puzzles take time. If you’re still worried you could check out some of the puzzle threads (sorry I don’t have a link). My other suggestion is to check out the Book of Challenges. It is a great resource for someone in your position. Could you let us know what level your players are and what level you would like them to be when they come out of this tower? The other suggestion I have is to have either the lich or another party go through and clear out some of the levels already. Hope this helps.
Faithless the Wonder Boy 03-10-06, 01:29 AM	Sounds like fun. Here are the random thoughts that come to me after 48 hours of no sleep. -A floor where the crystal is all cut in such a way that even the slightest breath becomes a roar, and anything louder can be painful and deafening. A move silently check DC 15 must be made (to be really nasty, make it that it must be made at each five foot square) to pass through the floor without experiencing negative side effects, though the sounds are still almost deafening. Failure by less than five means that the characters must make fortitude saves or be deafened for X rounds. Failure by 5-10 means Fort saves to avoid being deafened and they take sonic damage. Failure by 10+ means Fort saves to avoid deafness, sonic damage, and the whole floor shakes so much that it requires Reflex saves to avoid falling prone and balance checks to move. After any failure, it takes 2d4 rounds to quiet down again, after which point a new check must be made. -A floor that appears to serve as a storehouse for odd items, where about half of the items are Animated. Being mobbed by animated books, ropes, stools, mugs, etcetera is always interesting. -A floor consisting of many small rooms that once served as servant's quarters, but is now a breeding ground for magic-imbued spiders, centipedes, and similar vermin. -A number of floors that are labs and the such, with odd experiments. Half-finished golems, powerful protection spells, weird magic items that never made it past the drawing board. Perhaps one of these labs has a "room" that is actually an attempt at a magic item to transfigure individuals, and if the PCs step into it they receive a bodily change rolled off a random table. Nothing that changes game mechanics, or so serious that your players hate you for it (unless it's easily remedied, preferably with something else in the lab), but enough to make it interesting. -Floors that teleport you to lower floors, just to be annoying. -Floors that are filled with magical sunlight and serve as magical gardens and greenhouses. For encounters, plant creatures in the MM work, or look at the latest MDMC for lots of neat new plant creature ideas (my Inkvine Seedling/Horror was massively outdone by the Fire Guardian and others - a Fire Guardian or even some carniverous corn could be interesting). -Perhaps a floor that is populated with Awakened animals of some sort, that have set up some kind of society. Maybe the lich was using awakened animals in his experiments, but after abandoning them for a millenia to work on his later projects, they interbred...
Dag 03-10-06, 03:50 AM	Don't prepare all 50 levels if you don't want to run them...If you have ten, then play ten and who cares what your players are planning to do...All players have ambitions and greed that lead them to trying to bite off more than they can chew... I recently ran a tower shrouded in mystery as yours is...No one knew what was in it and no one knew how large it was (Since it bored into the earth) There were no stairs (Or minimal stairways anyways) the party got from level to level through small teleportation circles, of course they never knew if they were teleporting to the next level up or down, to another tower etc...So it was nearly impossible to 'map' out the tower in ascending or descending order. They can't say with any accuracy if they have just explored the top ten floors or floors 2,6,16,8,11...The teleportation circles foiled such organized mapping, though they did get some clues to up/down movement from their dwarf when they went below ground. Anyhoo, to limit where they could go, and to add a deeper mystery that their glimpse into this tower would only scratch at, the teleportation circles required rune stones to activate them. The party had to purchase their rune stones to get into the tower - just finding them (one per character) allowed for some adventures. Of course with their topaz stones they suddenly discovered that there were some teleportation circles that did not work, essentially barring them from certain areas. They discovered later that different rune stones (Emerald, ruby, sapphire, diamond...) would be used to trigger different portation circles, giving them an idea that they weren't going to be able to ransack the entire tower despite their eagerness to do so like your players....Maybe later they'll discover a sapphire rune stone in some treasure horde and decide to seek a return to ye olde tower. I got around things like teleport by finding spells that prevented such things...In the Book of Eldrith Might there's a spell called teleport redirect that zaps the poor teleporting people to a location chosen by the caster of the redirect spell...I had the party teleport some 400 feet in the air at one time and into a dragon's lair another time...Gosh I'm long-winded - just thought I'd throw some of this silly tower at you in case you decide you don't want to do all 50 levels right now. Let me know if you have any other questions...
TheLastOfTheFallen 03-10-06, 04:03 AM	As for layout, try making four different maps. If the tower is square, you just made sixteen levels, since you can rotate the maps around as you want. Those sixteen maps would be enough for the entire tower - the layout wouldn't vary too much more. If you just move a door around here or there, you have maps made for every single level that are entirely different, but you only had to make four. Hope that helps some. :)
Sulaco 03-10-06, 09:59 AM	To be quite honest, I think you are absolutely flipping nuts to try this. Sure it sounds impressive, but do you really want to design down to the 5ft square a tower to comprises between 3,484,800 to 13,939,200 sq ft (depending on which defintion of "city block" you choose to use).
shadowmimiiru 03-10-06, 10:06 AM	To be quite honest, I think you are absolutely flipping nuts to try this. Actually I believe I am since I've also designed a Metropolis that the players recently got done exploring (Over 5,000 buildings they could of went in, they only did about 100). Of course I was building this for monthes, and the tower was only seen in the horizion about 2 weeks ago ... Thanks everyone for the help. I don't think I'll wing it too much but a lot of the ideas here (teloportation circles, sound rooms, reusing some maps) are great, and may find their way into the tower. later shadow
MinusInnocence 03-10-06, 10:55 AM	What if almost all of the floors are completely empty and devoid of encounters? Then you only need like 10 or 15 interesting floors. Sure you can spend some time coming up with descriptions of other areas but the vast majority of an abandoned tower should be abandoned and, though archaeologically noteworthy, useless to adventurers.
Mitchell 03-10-06, 11:56 PM	Yeah, don't sweat it. Go rent a movie or two and after the party gets through the ten you have ready, it's movie night. :) Of course, depending on how populated the tower is, then ten floors may be more than enough to hold you for a session or two. I know that it would take my current group forever to get through ten floors, something I'm trying to work on, but that's neither here nor there. The only other thing I could add would be to wing it. If you have some sort of trap or puzzle book, you can keep on whipping stuff up on the fly and see how far they actually get. I doubt that they will cover the entire thing anyway, so you will still be able to prepare the rest, or more of it, later.
shadowmimiiru 03-12-06, 01:49 AM	Well managed to get up to 20 floors done (redid the first 10) before the game tonight. The tower is basicly trap infested, and each floor is vaguely themed to go along with a mix of two ideas I borrowed from people earlier in the thread. So here's how I changed it: The tower now has no stairs (except in the 5 story library section), instead it has teleportation circles that lead to one of 3 places (either the next floor up or one of two trap rooms). Each circle will onyl work correctly if the proper stone is place in the center, if the wrong stone is placed the Pc's will end up in one of two trap rooms where only the "death stone" or the "child stone" will release them back to the point of origin. All the rooms are either vaguely themed or plainly stated (examples: the first floor has a blood red carpet in the center leading to the circle and 30 stone statues of warriors flaking the carpet. The stone is the Warrior Stone. The 14th floor's stone is the birth stone, this room begins filling with water soon after the PC's enter it, and is only a hallway, much like the birthing canal.). The rooms also have a logic to them must of the time. The 14th floor's water trap is linked to the 15-19th floor's cascading waterfalls the vanish into the floor. Now on to the good part. The PC's made it into the tower today, barely as the didn't realise/notice that the forest surrounding the tower was an extremely large overgrown cemetary overrun with zombies, ghouls, and ghasts. Once they made to the tower they realized that the 9 statues the had blindly dashed by on the way to the tower had a purpose, each statue held one of the 9 stones needed to gain entrance into the tower (a little too Resident Evil personally, but I couldn't figure out how'd they get in, and just did that. ) Once they got all the 9 stones, and fought off a Zombie/Ghoul/Ghast hoard of over 200 hundred (the druid used his swarm spell, and was then carried {she's the only one that actually RP's}) they made it back to the tower and placed the 9 stones in randomly and promptly got zapped for 5d6 lighting strike DMG from the door. After doing this 2 more times the PC's decided to place all the stones in the same order that the statues rested in the cemetary, and the door opened. At this point the party Ranger rolled for a "Life Line" (If they rule over an 18 I'll give them a vague hint once per game), and succeeded, thus he figured out to take the stones with instead of leaving them behind. Now inside the tower the doors shut and would not open, even the Fighter's war hammer wouldn't brweak it, so the PC's moved forward, and soone hit every trap in the room (a total of 10 traps). 7 of these traps which they activated all at once by trying to sprint across the room brought every stone warrior statue in the room to life, and attack them. Barely (the druid actually died, but the Ranger had a Res scroll that he had a wizard make for him, and brought the druid back ... Unfortunatly I ruled bad and the human male druid is now a female Tiefling druid) they maanged to survive the 30 odd stone warriors, and deciding to not go up the center of the room took the right side and fell through an illusionary floor into a poisioned spiked pit trap. They lived and managed to get themselves out, and then got to the cicle and managed to get transported to both trap rooms before figuring out that I refered to their enemies as Stone Warriors and used the warrior stone to take them to the second floor where the collapsed and said "We're done." So thanks everyone for all your help, I feel it helped me make a more challenging area for the PC's to explore. I'm not trying to kill them by the way, I just don't feel that the people who built the tower would have left out traps just in case a party came along with out a Rogue. I also made the traps easy to find only DC's 15 through 25 on any and all traps in the whole of the tower. So yeah thanks guys, the players loved it, I loved it, and I think this was the best session yet. later shadow