13. Brave the Waters [15x19] Dungeon Trap
![13. Brave the Waters [15x19] Dungeon Trap](https://i.redd.it/s8k7jnwir9j91.jpg)
Posted Aug 22, 2022, 1:46 PM UTC
56720
This is FANTASTIC! Reading over the description, the puddle in the middle gave my Minnesota brain some inspiration. For a dangerous twist, make the illusion floor a one way drop into the water. Once PCs have fallen through, the only spot available for air is the puddle in the middle. For this to work, the puddle is no longer solid land, more of a hole in the solid underside of the floor illusion. The creatures in the water are octopuses or snakes, focused on restraining and keeping heroes away from the gap where they can get air. The Boat can float on top of the illusion still and acts as another surface for a submerged PC to get out if adjacent to the puddle. The underwater creatures do not attack the boat.
If you can take a little more mechanical homebrew, have the attacks from underwater creatures reduce their overall drowning time rather than damage. Since it takes minutes to drown RAW in 5e, shorting the timetable makes for a great way to make PCs try to break the restraint vs. out damaging their opponent.
Just a suggestion of a twist on this already amazing room. Falling through the "ice" and needing to find that hole to breathe makes me shiver just thinking about it, hopefully it can strike some terror into y'alls' PCs' hearts as well.
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If you'd like to support my work, high resolution versions are available on my Patreon. I also recently published Strixhaven Orientation Day, a Silver Best Selling supplement for the Strixhaven module that makes it easier to run and includes a few puzzling encounters too!
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This is fucking cool
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Wow, thank you so much for including context within the image itself! I have so many maps I've saved on my phone that I don't know what the intended design was, and it's a pretty big problem.
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Yeah I definitely second that
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I dont understand the challenge? You read the boat. You paddle across the land that's really water. You arrive on other side. If they ignore the boat they get an encounter. Am I missing something?
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I fully expect that if I threw this at my players they would spend 15 minutes checking the boat for traps, try to create a rope bridge out of 5ft of rope, eventually say "fuck it" and take the boat across, only to get curious at the end and walk across the red line to start the encounter.
Sometimes these traps aren't really traps... Unless you know what your players will do when they run into them
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Well, it's not a challenge. It's a trap
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Players over think things and ask questions that the DM can just shrug at and say 'You don't know' or 'Go ahead and try'. At least that's been the case with mine, they wouldn't read the seats on the boat and trust it at first glance.
It's a part of the dungeon that can kill time if there's an in-game rush, it can cost resources like spell slots as they try to identify what's going on, it can play on in-character fears, etc.
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Make it pressured. Add some sort of timer. They're being chased, they have to interrupt a ritual, the dungeon is collapsing, etc.
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This is a great room to add to a dungeon. I’d probably put a chest or something of note on the illusory puddle/dry land to entice the players to go there.
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You never know what players are going to do. I once set up an ambush in a room that consisted of a relatively small area of flat ground and a cliff that needed to be scaled. My players enter carefully and look around. They turn to each other and say, “This is the perfect place for a trap.” They then stroll into the room, at which time the ambush was sprung.
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What in the world does "undisbelievable" mean?
To be clear: I think this is a great little dungeon room and will definitely be using it. Thank you so much for sharing this. Just have no idea what that pretty-sure-its-not-really-a-word means.
It sounds like someone has cast Hallucinatory Terrain (or something very much like it) on the room.
So, I'd assume it just means to ignore the 2nd paragraph of that spell that talks about ways you can see through the illusion. So you're always swimming/sinking/fighting-water-creatures in what your brain keeps telling you is a solid stone floor.
It means that you can't disbelieve it. A normal illusion can be investigated to lose its effects, meaning your character still sees it but knows that is false and an illusion. Undisbelievable means that even if you investigate it, it looks real to you anyway.
A free willed being can disbelieve anything they want to, including things that are entirely real (just look at people who don't believe in climate change for example).
I think what is meant is that disbelieving it does not affect your perception of the illusion.
You're right, but here we're talking about RPG stuff and "by the rules" type of things. Primarily, I'm talking about how it is on the d&d5e rules.
In 5e "disbelieving" is a mechanical function. If you disbelieve an illusion you see a ghostly version of the illusion overlaid over reality. It requires some reason such as touching an illusory wall, and a save. If you fail the save, the magic makes you justify what you perceived to fit the illusion: "I must not have reached as far as I thought, my hand didn't hit the wall". 5e illusion magic is more like suggestion magic in function.
Maybe he meant un-dispellable?
Tbh I really don’t like that aspect of the concept. As someone familiar with Hallucinatory Terrain, I’d be really annoyed as a player if I took the steps necessary to identify an illusion, confirmed there wasn’t one, and still wound up falling prey to one because it was considered “Undisbelievable.”