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Yeah, I wrote these notes when I should have been being professional. It’s rough, ephemeral, unimpressive content and non-exhaustive but I was surprised by how little content for Special rooms is out there when I (blind, clueless) went looking for it. For me, SPECIAL means the room is/contains neither a trap, monster, treasure, nor is it ‘empty’ (though empty never truly means empty and there can be a grey zone between Empty and Special). Therefore there’s a huge range of possibilities of what a Special room can be. This spectacular range of potentialities is merely touched upon, as my (perhaps limited) imagination has rendered some rather basic ideas from such a fertile concept and there are some duplicates. Working to a concept would render more specific or nuanced special rooms. My sole purpose in writing these notes is trying to prime my brain (small, calcified) for designing more dungeons and quicker. These are the sort of notes that I could keep adding to indefinitely but I've been a little more inactive than usual so I'm sharing them. Hopefully, as a rough and ready resource it’ll be of some use to peo(ns)ple like yourself and drive some thought.
"Special" Rooms on 3d6 (Or Maybe 4) by Clerics Wear Ringmail
The 10 types of special rooms by Traipse
Combine these two resources together and you’ll be unstoppable.
Special Rooms:
- Illusory
room
- Drowning
woman/Imperiled NPC ‘trap’ (it’s not a trap if it’s just a waste of time!
It’s called a TRICK)
- Dangerous
terrain/creature/trap
- Treasure
(combine with something else fun to make not disappointing)
- The
room conforms to a scene from a PC’s past, the DM asking the player a
question ‘Tell me about a time your character…(almost drowned/was scared
as a child/first killed someone, etc)’ and then the room appears as the
event in question.
- A
room that talks;
- A
head that tells you rumours from around the world/dungeon if you feed it
treasure/bodies
- Mocks,
jokes with or curses (non-magical curses but the party don’t need to know
that.)
- Asks
a riddle, correct answers may open hidden doors or reveal important
information.
- A
room where magic always fails/is twice as powerful (but possibly at a
cost)
- Similar
room with violence - heightened damage, attack-rolls, critical hit
chance.
- Anything
really, terrible saves, everyone has 20 in a given stat.
- No
violent act can be committed/no magic can be cast.
- A
dungeon control room with levers and pulleys and buttons {in another
language?}
- Blows
up another room, floods it with gas/fire/snakes/spiders/water - freezes
it.
- Changes
the configuration of the map - moves a corridor, swaps two rooms.
- Moves
the entire dungeon somewhere else on the worldmap/multiverse.
- A
scrying room that allows remote viewing of a different
section/room/character in the dungeon or elsewhere in the world (a deep
dungeon NPC that is obsessed with a familiar character in the town, like
the barkeep, and has a room dedicated to magically spying on them.)
- A
room that reveals the location of every vampire/troll/giant shrew in the
dungeon.
- A
summoning room
- Magical
- like a portal that spits out a creature based on a sigil you press.
- Chemical
- press a button to birth a vat-thing or combine two elements to make an
alchemical golem or a player cloning machine
- Or
via some vector that attracts a specific monster (bell, food stuff,
mineral (like those elephants that go in the cave to lick salty rocks),
anything pavlovian)
- A
divination room that allows for viewing of, or information about, future
events or the answering of lore questions - answers often cryptic
- cloud
watching room
- A
haruspicy room full of pigs or similar beasts
- Huge
candle on a pivot to be poured into a pool of water or crucible of molten
metal for divinatory purposes.
- Room
secretes entheogenic slime that when licked grants and immediate and long
lasting sleep filled with cryptic visions of future events. Or
maybe the room is filled with slick toads that die when licked like
bees deprived of their stings.
- A
magic altar, a classic, so many directions. But for substance, you can
have any other SPECIAL room type of this list projected or encapsulated
in/via the altar, it can essentially have any property.
- I feel altars are just things that can go in any type of room, treasure, trap, empty, whatever.
- Statues, like altars have many uses and functions. Totem poles too.
- A
flashback room (play as NPC's, stats and all, recreating a short event
from the past)
- Room
affected by some substance - mundane, alchemical or magical. Sticky,
frictionless, very hot/cold stuff or more unique or magical properties, reanimates the dead.
- Take
any trap and make it so obvious that it ceases to be a trap. If too subtle the room may qualify as Empty. 'traps' like this may be:
- A
bridge over a bottomless pit, large powerful fans make the crossing
precarious
- A
room where the floor is literally ‘thin ice’
- A
big blade that spins round the room.
- Obvious and constant blade pendulums.
- Room
slants precipitously, the floor greased, towards a wall of spikes
- A
room full of in-built bear traps
- The
ceiling is held up by something very fragile, if disturbed the room
collapses.
- Likewise,
any type of trap that isn't functioning properly but remains dangerous
could count as SPECIAl, eg a room with two walls smashing into each other
over and over again, a room constantly flooding with poisonous gas, an
adventurers corpse being charred by a flame spout trap. Rooms like this
can telegraph similar traps elsewhere in the dungeon - (surely, this is
SPECIAL and not a trap as the trap does not function as a trap should?)
- Dangerous
terrain - slime all over the floor, lava flow, a chasm that keeps yawning
open and closed, geysers that erupt periodically with whatever substance
you please, a miniature volcano.
- Machinery
- Factory
floor with conveyor belts.
- A
machine that is/can mass produce something (that isn’t treasure).
- Room
of gears - could possibly be the gears that work some other thing in the
dungeon - jamming the gears could disable a trap, open an inaccessible
pathway or weaken an automaton boss monster.
- The room is a carousel or contains bumper cars.
- Anomalies,
this list could go on forever, it’s inexplicable and magic and it does
something interesting.
- Death as a biological function does not exist in this room.
- Iron
(or any other material) becomes red hot, freezing cold, frictionless, vibrates, shrinks, expands, turns to slime/bugs/rose petals
- A
part or item in the room is strongly magnetic/repellent to a particular
material.
- Room filled with invisible webs, walls, tentacles.
- Room has affect on character's emotions - this needs to have a real mechanical effect or it is essentially worthless.
- Room
with specialist nature;
- Trash
compactor
- Incinerator
- Alchemical
machine that turns one substance into another
- A
sleeping room that is both magically silent and magically
soundproof.
- An
observatory (though the lens might be worth some money)
- A
Dagobah style vision-cave
- Sweat lodge
- A
Sauna, Spa, Mudbath
- The
room is an oven with a temperature control just outside, like an oven or
freezer room.
- Built
in torture chamber
- Brainwashing
room
- Cinema
- Photography
booth
- A
refinery like in Dwimmermount with Azoth, a laboratory would probably
count as treasure.
- A
special projection room that plays ‘holocron’ things, like vinyls, that
can be collected in the dungeon
- Perhaps
controversial, NPC's who are not ‘monsters’ or monsters with no ability to
act/agency.
- A
wounded NPC adventuring party
- Ghostly
presence or scene
- Helpless
NPC/Monster(s) captive in some kind of confinement, a peasant in a pit or
a demon in a summoning circle, a mammoth frozen deep in ice.
- A
puppy (players will not trust)
- Creatures
to catch or not, a pool of large but harmless crayfish, koi
(non-valuable), rookery, a large (harmless) bat roost, a large colony of
birds, a regular sized termite nest.
- Room
that produces something, item or substance
- Room
that produces art but it’s not very good + worthless (AI, haha 😐)
- Factory
production line that produces broken items
- A
goo room that produces goo
- A
room that manufactures the local weather and has a control panel.
- A
weird way of ascending or descending dungeon floors (self-immolation to
travel to any level of the dungeon, a lift that must be hand operated by a
left behind character, a slide, false quicksand, )
- Room
that changes the player(s) - positive changes must be the result of clever
play or sacrifice. Can combine with any other special room type for
something interesting.
- Alignment
and stat changes are common, (why not religion?)
- Change
characters backstory.
- Mutations.
Players don't like being mutated. Telegraph your mutations and give them
some predictability if you want more engagement.
- Grants
a spell to be cast once per day as a magical ability.
- ‘Device’
that shaves your head, stains you blue, turns you into an
elf/goblin/vampire, replaces a limb with a cyborg part, makes you
taller/younger/blind/not blind, cures your diseases, inoculates you
against future diseases.
- Exchange
stats, wowie
- A
portal or equivalent that leads to another part of the
dungeon/world/multiverse/timestream.
- Chessboard
style map of the campaign world with pieces representing the different
factions at play. Any moves the players make influence the moves the
factions will make. Perhaps limit these moves to one per player.
- As
above but with a blue painted canvas and natural-coloured paints (greens,
tans, greys and browns). Whatever the party paint appears as an island
off the coast.
- Similar
things can be done with books and are much freer. Books can be about
anything.
- An
architect's lectern with a map of part of the dungeon. Players can make a
single change (per in-game week/month?) to the layout that will instantly
be reflected in reality.
- Something, something Clay. Reshape a type of monster or the dungeon boss. Something Promethean to this.
- Room
that steals a spell from a party member and grants the ability to cast it
to some other thing or things in the dungeon - this could be via another
special room like spell transference chambers.
- Weird
time/space room
- Anti-gravity
- Hyper-gravity
- Reversed
gravity
- Time
does not move outside the room/moves twice as fast
- Accelerated
aging - 10 minute equals 1 month - hair and fingernails grow
- A
gambling room, slot machine, wheel of fortune, magical dice, pachinko,
pinball machine, goblin poker, blink dog greyhound racing - bonus for real
minigames or meta twist.
- Gladiatorial
arena, magical and mundane, NPC vs NPC. Does this count as a ‘monster’
type room?
- Sacrificial
room, give something up to receive a blessing (or a curse!)
- Wishing
well, pond, pool or fountain
- Altar
[see altar entry above]
- Prayer
space, give up time for a blessing
- A
statue you have to tell a joke to in exchange for a blessing/info. Make
the actual DM laugh.
- Big
hungry beast, god-mouth, demon hiding in a hole - give it food for secret
lore, a blessing, a clue, hint or curse on your enemies.
- Some
sort of personality test wherein whatever you give up renders a different
‘reward’ and possibly a quote, ie giving the personality test room a
sword would give a character a +4 to-hit bonus but reduces their HD to
d4’s/d2’s and says the quote ‘live by the sword, die by the sword’.
- Sacrifice
time in a meditation zone for some benefit.
- A
food resource - replenishing feast table, tree with strange but otherwise
ok fruit (should have some effect, perhaps it makes you feel sad to eat or
jittery), a termite nest, an overgrown garden, a mouldy cornucopia, an
meal-in-a-pill machine, a mushroom patch where as soon as one mushroom is
picked another instantly grows up in its place, a fruiting topiary hydra
that grows two fruit heads whenever one is loped off.
- Novelty
and Games Rooms, this can be closely related to the gambling rooms.
- Game
room with chessboard flooring
- Novelty
can mean a lot of things - everyone in this room turns into a random
animal for a certain period of time or is reduced in size, in this room
players can only communicate in in-character dialogue and
stage-directions.
- The
room’s flooring functions like a seesaw, perhaps with dangerous things at
either end - shark tank, acid vat, spikes etc.
- A
really comfy room, bonus to resting here if you can keep the monsters
out.
- A
room that rotates, goes up and down or swaps with another room in the
dungeon/world somehow.
- Consider
Tricks and pranks, not traps, just a little irritating jokes such as:
- Infinitely
long corridor, reverse escalator stairs
- Pull
my finger statue
- Sphere
of annihilation mouth (haha, so funny)
- False
doors
- Corridor
with false perspective that quickly shrinks to a small door at the end.
- ‘Choose
your door’ rooms
- In
a more humorous than creepy fashion, statues or suits of armour that
follow you about the room but won’t attack.
- Baby
monsters, the infamous goblin babies. I don’t think this counts as a real
capital M, Monster, room unless there is an adult in the room - watch out
- eggs and some young creatures may count as treasure such as in the case
of dragon eggs, like infant giant
beavers, weird.
- Room
that swaps character’s minds (ie pass character sheet’s clockwise round
the table).
- Examination
room - physical, academic, guilt/sin, psychological, etc. Pronouncement
renders different boons/maluses. Could make the players do a real test.
Intelligence modifier could give a % bonus to the final score, +1 =10%
bonus and so on.
- Fun
but otherwise mechanically and monetarily unimportant (and not dangerous)
(do these count as ‘empty’ rooms? I think they might):
- An
automated orchestra playing a single song on repeat.
- An
enchanted puppet or stage show.
- Room
contains the aura borealis
- A
big boulder rolls slowly about the room.
- Room
wherein everyone appears as their true-selves.
- A
large collection of effectively worthless objects, WOW, (empty?) (Kind of
similar to the room filled with a flock of nesting birds, bats,
etc.)
- 10,000
sacks of flour
- A
thousand barrels of Mind-Flayer vomit
- A
million baby teeth
- Room
is waist deep in oil
- Ruined
books (a real library would count as treasure)
- Stuffed
(to the point it is difficult to move) with rotting mannequins. That will freak players out.
- A
vast space, stretching the definitions of a room, such as an ocean to sail
over with islands that function as other dungeon rooms, that could function as a
Special room.
- Perfectly
safe room, free from wandering monsters, the room has features to indicate
as such - may only be perfectly safe with some kind of cost.
- PUZZLE
ROOMS (that don’t (or maybe do) give up treasure upon being solved (but
could bestow some other blessing) - I’M NOT SMART ENOUGH TO COME UP WITH
D100 PUZZLE ROOMS FOR NO REASON.
- Use rooms that best support Theme. Horror dungeons should have gruesome special rooms, just be wary that they don't act like traps. P
