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Old 01-17-2018, 08:59 PM   #1
Mordantus
 
Join Date: Aug 2016
Default Mindbending deamscape/psychic danger room encounters

Hi all,

I am planning a campaign based around Magic: The Gathering (don't worry if you don't play that, it's only peripherally relevant). Characters would be Planeswalkers and the new Gatewatch (think X-Men) under the leadership of an older Jace (think Professor X). I wanted the first session to basically be Jace running the characters through a sort of psychic/hallucinated Danger Room, but I wanted to make it really cool and interesting. Kind of a combination of the Danger Room and Inception. I don't want to just have regular stuff happen... but in your mind. In fact, the PCs won't know it was all in their minds until after.

Does anyone have any experience running an encounter kind of like this? Do any of you have any ideas about what exactly could happen? Are there GURPS supplements that address this kind of stuff?

I was imagining things like terrain abruptly changing, enemies appearing and/or changing into other creatures (e.g., a skeleton transforming into a sphinx). I had an idea where the PCs appear in a space filled with apparent clones of themselves and must figure out who is an ally, and who is not, but wasn't sure what I would do with that, exactly (e.g., do the clones start attacking PCs? a clone will attack a PC if the PC tries to interact with it?).

So anyway, I am looking for ideas on what challenges this encounter could have (it would be a great opportunity for weird puzzles!). Can anyone help?

I wanted to link the encounters to lessons that Jace would be trying to teach the PCs. However... I haven't decided yet, but Jace might be mind controlled by the big bad (I was thinking Bolas), so the lessons might be a bit shallow or even aimed at subtly sowing discord and distrust among the party. Some lessons I had thought of are:
*Always be aware of and use your surroundings
*Don't assume... learn. Investigate and reason.
*Be prepared for sudden betrayal at any time (I was thinking of adding one or two additional Planeswalkers who might turn traitor in the end and turn out to be extremely convincing illusions)

Here are some encounters I've thought about including:
1) A room with two doors. PCs enter through one, the other seems to be the only exit. There is some sort of elaborate, but fake, puzzle in the center of the room. Maybe interacting with it even makes bad things happen. The exit door is actually just an open door, PCs can waltz right through it if they don't make assumptions.

2) PCs are in a room/cavern with narrow tunnels on opposite sides. Enormous boulders are near the mouth to one tunnel. Monsters start coming through the tunnel without the boulders. If the PCs are smart, they will take advantage of the bottlenecking tunnel that forces the monsters into single file. I plan to basically spawn more monsters until the PCs are almost tapped out on magic and HP. As the battle seems to end, more monsters start coming down the other tunnel (with the rubble next to it) toward them. If the PCs are smart, they will use the boulders to block the tunnel.

If you ARE familiar with MTG lore, I was thinking of using some of the trials from the Amonkhet storyline: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWcP...bKHIeH&index=1
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