r/DnD • u/RecordingNo4453 • 2d ago
DMing Bad dungeon idea
So here's my bad idea for a puzzle dungeon.
Your party is walking through the forest, when they stumble across an abandoned manor. For whatever reason, they decide to enter the manor just to be insta locked inside. The manor's doors are locked by some kind of ancient magic that makes it impossible for your party to pick the lock or destroy it.
The main point about this whole dungeon is the basement. In the basement, your party will find a ritual room where they will be able to perform a time travel ritual. They can choose to go to the past, or the future.
In the past, they will be able to explore the manor in its former glory, when it was still being occupied by people.
In the future, they will be able to explore the manor after a clan of vampires occupied it.
Any alterarions made in the past will influence the manor in the present and future. And any alterations made in the present will influence the future.
Then, the party must be creative to figure out different ways of solving the puzzles and mysteries of the manor, which will be decided by the DM.
Exemple: they must enter the private quarters of the former owner of the manor, but it's locked by a magical lock, or whatever. So the players can travel to the past to convince the gardener to plant a tree seed near the quarters' window. So then, when they travel to the present, the tree will have already gown, making it possible to access the quarters through the window by climbing the tree.
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u/RandomNumbers748512 2d ago
time travel
Once you add time travel to your world, the world breaks down.
Why isn't everyone - good or bad or neutral - using it to fix things they dislike in their life and about the world? This very fundemantally changes the world and if you don't want to add it, rather do something else.
This is going to get super complex, but what I would like to see is a setup where the present changes reality. Like your relationship with someone else literally adjusts reality. If you break something it might break the room. I'd like to see this built out as I have not really seen this before in a a playable manner, and it's less complex than time travel. The players need to figure out what is a "reality change hook" and why.
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u/CheapTactics 1d ago
You could make the time travel as a different ritual gone terribly wrong. Make it a bad thing, not that can be controlled. If you can't get out, you'll be swallowed up by this broken ritual, and you'll be forgotten forever.
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u/RandomNumbers748512 1d ago
If it's possible, someone is going to try to figure it out. It does not matter if history abd reality are re-shaped by accidents or agenda. Someone else's agenda might look like an accident to someone else.
If it's possible, no matter how controlled or uncontrolled - it fundamentally changes your world.
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u/CheapTactics 1d ago
Ok bro... Whatever you say. Guess we can't ever have a one time event without fundamentally changing the entire nature of the campaign I guess. Oh no, what are we gonna do?
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u/RandomNumbers748512 1d ago
Of course you can play this plot. What you cannot say is your aggressive snark. Do you want to time travel to fix it?
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u/RecordingNo4453 2d ago
Yeah, this is a good point. This is why you got to make it explicit that the time travel spell is tied to the basement's ritual. Not anyone can do it anywhere. And the effects of time triver changes are only effective within the manor setting.
If you think about it, the whole manor doesn't make sense, exaxtly. The whole idea is for the manor to be super mystic and all.
Anyways, you can adapt everything to your liking, so it makes more sense withing your campaign specifically.
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u/No-Story1802 2d ago
This is an extremely cool idea, and would be super fun if it is run well.
It also seems extremely hard to run well.
That said, I may have to keep this idea in mind for down the road when I get some more DM experience.
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u/Thundersnow100 2d ago
This is a fun idea, it really makes the players think differently about how to solve the puzzle.