Café de Nuit

A gazebo.

If you don't know what I mean, you're just not hardcore, sorry.

How about a dolls house.

For added creepiness, have it look like a child has been playing with it and has just got up and left the room.

Along with the doll house, a small garden with exotic flowers and fruits... and a jar of your grandmother's jam.

Along with the doll house, a small garden with exotic flowers and fruits... and a jar of your grandmother's jam.

With a rocking chair still creeking back and forth when they enter...

Fido wrote:A gazebo.

If you don't know what I mean, you're just not hardcore, sorry.

But then the party will have to lug a gazebo pelt. That's no good.

-A working bathroom/privy, perhaps with working indoor plumbing.

-Stairs that lead nowhere. Doors that open to walls

-Giant chessboards, with a number of pawns missing corresponding to the number of party members.

-A normal village of the region, typical in every way, save that everyone is undead or otherwise monstrous. When the PCs enter, have all of the ghouls and ghosts run for the hills and say, "Help. there's PEOPLE here!"

-A chamber containing fossils or other remains that have some sort of weird phosphorescent fungi on them.

Way back when, I played Ultima IV for the PC and the final section of that epic quest required you to travel through the Stygian abyss.

Corridors took you into perilous bridge fights, cramped battles in doorways, and even caverns of fire and lava.

On the lowest level, there was one room that freaked me out when I saw it. It was a bright forest glade, fresh as a summer's eve (poetry) with a running water fountain and peaceful trees.

If you stepped into the middle of the glade, a wall of poison fields popped up and your party got poisoned.

Another room had the entire party enter as NPCs and attack the PCs. You got experience points for killing yourselves.

Then I played Thief: The Dark Project. One mission has you infiltrating a manor house to get a valuable sword. The house's lower levels are pretty normal, but as you get higher and higher, the layout changes disturbingly. Corridors twist and change shape and even curve back on themselves like the branches of a tree, and moss covers the walls. One room has floortiles floating over an open star-filled void, and if you slip you end up falling endlessly. One room has a wonderful perspective trick that makes it look like four corridors head off from it, ending in doors. If you actually walk up to any, it is clear that one corridor shrinks and ends in a miniature doorway, while another one grows alarmingly ending in a giant doorway.

The adventure Roots of Evil has a mediocre dungeon crawl where Azalin's lair is filled with implausible illusions. One minute, the PCs are in a mausoleum, the next they're out under the desert sun, and the next they're in a corridor that serves as the drainage for a large reservoir (and woe betide them if they open that damp, dripping trapdoor in the ceiling!). Many of the illusions are crude and unworthy of a spellcaster of Azalin's stature.

HuManBing wrote: Then I played Thief: The Dark Project. One mission has you infiltrating a manor house to get a valuable sword. The house's lower levels are pretty normal, but as you get higher and higher, the layout changes disturbingly. Corridors twist and change shape and even curve back on themselves like the branches of a tree, and moss covers the walls. One room has floortiles floating over an open star-filled void, and if you slip you end up falling endlessly. One room has a wonderful perspective trick that makes it look like four corridors head off from it, ending in doors. If you actually walk up to any, it is clear that one corridor shrinks and ends in a miniature doorway, while another one grows alarmingly ending in a giant doorway.

Man, that was a great level. There was another section in there that consisted of perfectly normal rooms that were all sideways, or upside down - so that the furniture appeared stuck to the ceiling or wall, and lamps hung upwards from the floor, etc. I think an awesome thing to do with that would be to combine it with some of the other suggested ideas involving making it seem like someone just got up and left. For instance, a lovely sitting room, with a fire crackling in the hearth, and the rocking chair still rocking, as though someone just got up out of it - except that the whole thing is upside down, and appears to all be on the ceiling. Or maybe you're the one who's upside down....

Somewhere around here I think I have an old 2nd edition adventure that took place in a giant cube where the direction of the gravity periodically shifted. Similar idea.

Also, I think the best use of illusions is not to have them be grand and overwhelming, like suddenly finding yourself in a desert, but small and (apparently) pointless. Like a chair or a plant or a tapestry that's not real. Then follow it up with a statue, or maybe even something like an illusionary housecat. Pretty soon your players won't believe anything they see, no matter what it is.

All of a sudden, the PC's are backstage!

A man in a blue overall walks by with a giant lamp in his hands. A woman walks around with a platter of bagles, cookies and danishs. She also has coffee with her. A make-up artist stands leaning against a wall with a cigarette in her mouth.

Assets and props are stacked in a corner, there's a rack with clothing on it the PC's might recognise as the clothes of several NPC's they met. They also meet someone they probably know. He's talking to a group of four teenage girls, handing out autographs. Wasn't he the Mayor in that town the other day? Or was he that beggar that was asking for alms in that other town? Or maybe that elven lumberjack they met in a forest?
In fact, the man's all those three things.


Blah blah, imagination!

I like the idea of gas - it's like in old mines when they would bring canaries down into the shafts with them: when the birdie croaked, it was time to leave.

* how about having the pcs run into vitims of the dungeon's traps (like arrows, and pitfalls, etc) which are in various states of decomposition. Yet, all of them appear to be smiling, as though the moment of their death was the happiest moment of their lives...

Boccaccio Barbarossa wrote:I like the idea of gas - it's like in old mines when they would bring canaries down into the shafts with them: when the birdie croaked, it was time to leave.

Wasn't that "when the birdie died"?


Ooh! There could be a birdcage with a dead bird in it!

-The Pcs enter the balcony running around the outer edge of a large dark room. The only light visable is a single lantern casting its light down upon a large obsidion table. This table is covered with various small figurines of various monsters and assorted creatures as well as what looks to be a scale model of the very dungeon the Pc have allready traversed. Sitting at each end of the table are black cloaked figures, thier hands the only thing visable. Every so often they seem to take turns moving pieces on and off of the table. If the pc look closely at the figures they find that a few look much like the pcs....

MatthiasStormcrow wrote: Also, I think the best use of illusions is not to have them be grand and overwhelming, like suddenly finding yourself in a desert, but small and (apparently) pointless. Like a chair or a plant or a tapestry that's not real. Then follow it up with a statue, or maybe even something like an illusionary housecat. Pretty soon your players won't believe anything they see, no matter what it is.

Hmm. what about a illusionary house cat that was illusionary not just to the party, but to itself. For all intents and purposes, the cat is alive, but an illusion, even it thinks its alive.

Or how about an illusionary party of adventurers? How do you convince someone that they are just figments of the imagination?

Then again, just an ordinary housecat put in a dungeon might freak arouse some kind of suspicion.

The Lesser Evil wrote:

MatthiasStormcrow wrote: Also, I think the best use of illusions is not to have them be grand and overwhelming, like suddenly finding yourself in a desert, but small and (apparently) pointless. Like a chair or a plant or a tapestry that's not real. Then follow it up with a statue, or maybe even something like an illusionary housecat. Pretty soon your players won't believe anything they see, no matter what it is.

Hmm. what about a illusionary house cat that was illusionary not just to the party, but to itself. For all intents and purposes, the cat is alive, but an illusion, even it thinks its alive.

What about the Cheshire Cat?

One fairly freaky encounter in the Deck of Encounters (2nd ed) was a rush-hour crush of pedestrians.

The PCs walk into a room and they see an implausible sight: an endless crowd of people walk from a door at one end of the room, bustling and pushing to get into a door at the other end. The PCs have to push and hustle their way through, but woe betide anybody who gets pushed into the door at the end - they're not coming back if they do!