As promised in my previous, and rather downbeat post, I'll now counterpoint my failure with a success. The reward for the unfortunate dungeon, The Paper Maze, was the location of the next leg of the quest. The "Treasure" room contained little of the sort, but it did contain a large table with a detailed map of the island in which were placed two pins. One pin marked the party's current location, the other sat a few days' journey away and was labelled "Argent". Now, the title of the dungeon was a hint (argent is the Latin word for silver) and easily deciphered by one of my players who happens to be a chemist. A degree in chemistry is not required to complete this puzzle. Once they arrived at the location, they were met with a small stone building with an open entryway leading to stairs down and two more lines of those strange runes I previously mentioned. It is at this point that I feel I should mention that the runes I've been talking about are not simply some cut-and-paste from Tolkien, nor an extant written language. I personally developed a system of (mostly) consistent logographs, complete with their own grammatical structure. I did it for fun. That's how I spend my free time. Well, that and actually writing the game. *cough* (I will include details on these runes in a later post)
Anyway, on to the dungeon proper. Descending the stairs brought the party to an ornate metal door. The rogue searched for traps and found a trigger for one. Unable to discern its purpose, he disabled it. Had they simply opened the door, they might have found that it merely unfurled a welcome banner. (These dungeons are clearly designed by a wizard with a sense of humor.) Once past the door, the party enters a very large and very empty room. The only object in the room is a dome-shaped pedestal with six buttons on it. Each button contains two runes. These runes, as the players correctly determined after some experimentation, are an adjective and a creature or weapon. Pressing one button causes it to light up and an illusion of the thing described by the runes to appear in one corner of the room. Pressing a second button causes a second illusion to appear in the adjacent corner. Once two illusions have appeared, they become solid and "real" until they are dealt with. I use scare quotes because the things summoned are not entirely real. The creatures summoned only have partial hitpoints for a creature of their type, and damage that they deal is partially healed after the encounter. The one weapon that can be summoned, a copper sword, simply flies at the other illusion (or the activating player if summoned twice) and deals this same illusory damage. Not all of the summoned things are hostile (as it turns out, three of the four my players encountered were, but that was mostly bad luck). The correct response ended up being to summon two silver dragon illusions who then opened the door forward. All of my players found this puzzle to be particularly fun (even the one who died to unfortunate critical hits, more on that in later posts).
So now that I have a successful dungeon and a failed dungeon, I need to compare and contrast to determine what I did right and what to avoid in the future. So what were the major differences in the planning stage? Well, to start with the obvious, I spent a lot more time planning Argent than I did on the Paper Maze. But I sincerely doubt that planning time necessarily equates to a better dungeon. They both had an interesting theme, and the descriptions of the dungeons were cool, so that also can't be the problem. So, in my mind, the problem comes down simply to the fact that I handled the Paper Maze so poorly as to make an otherwise interesting encounter into an unengaging snorefest. I believe that if I had simply handled it a bit better it could have been very fun. To that end, I plan to try it again with another group whenever I get the chance.
Long story short, don't be dumb. It can only hamper the fun of other players at the table.
-Daniel
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