Hello!
I'm getting ready to run my very first D&D 4.0 game. It will start the characters at level 1 and hopefully they will reach level 4-5 by the end of the campign.
The whole game is set inside a haunted mansion, with walls moving themselves , trap doors, puzzles, and the leader of it all - A Kobold Vampire! (Gasp!)
But I want to kick it up one more notch, just when the players think it's over, and they walk out of the mansion I want it to come alive. So they have to fight the building it's self.
In my mind, I vision the house standing up the different wings of the mansion forming it's arms and legs.
I kind of want the fight to go like a video game fight, where the different arms and legs have different sets of Hit-points.
How would you go about creating this?
I can see this working as an encounter, but I have a hard time seeing it working for 4th-5th level characters, at least as you've laid it out.
If the entire mansion, which was big enough to keep the players going for at least four levels-worth of experience, animates, it's going to be so massive that there will be little the players can do to hurt it, even if hit points are calculated separately for each section. Furthermore, being hit by a room moving at considerable speed is probably enough to take out the PCs in two or three hits.
Have you considered having the mansion begin to crumble when the players reach the top/inner-most section? There could be a fun skill challenge involved with escaping before it falls apart around the them, and when the PCs are out they notice that what remains of the house when all of the unnecessary pieces are gone is actually a construct. Now what you have is smaller, more managable, but still along the lines of your basic idea. You could reflavor a macetail behemoth, or somesuch, so that the tail is actually the remnants of a chimney or a piece of furniture or something.
That sounds like a great idea! I like the idea of having an indian jones style 'run away run away!' and just when you think your safe - BOOM! The remains of the building come after you.
Thank you very much 