“ It is traditional for two warlike countries to each give their first-born royal prince as a hostage to each other to prevent war. One of the princes has been murdered, and the PCs have a few days to rescue the prince in the other country to save him from being executed and a bloodthirsty war from breaking out.”
“ A corpse lays at the side of the road, or path. The man has been robbed of everything but a few tattered pieces of clothing. It looks like the scavengers have been working on him for a few days. The smell is ghastly. What dangers lay ahead?”
“ Here at Dragonsfoot http://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=65381 The post discuses the use of the classic arcade game " Dragon's Lair" as a playable dungeon but it approaches it like a normal D&D game. You cannot represent DL with " Ok Bob, it's your turn what are you doing?" So I've got a germ of an idea.
The castle itself is a dream construct of the way-too-powerful-to fight Dragon. From a distance the castle is changing, growing towers, walls falling , getting bigger and smaller in rapid succession. The castle "eats" interesting things that the players will need to extract. It is also Multidimensional and planer and moves around.
The way I am planning on running it is that individual rounds are broken into 3 parts and only one player gets an action to interact with the "trap". a second player will be able to aid the "phasing" player in what ever action he takes. casting spells will be broken up over the 3 partial rounds(depending on L of spell).The phasing player will in essence be the party leader for the 3 partial rounds. The phasing player "job " will be rotated in some fashion(havent got this worked out yet). This is all run w/ the idea that you are trying to recreate the frantic pace of DL The growing and shrinking nature of the castle forces constant movement on the players A brief description of the situation will be provided with the idea of "looking around" will be an action that takes up a whole "partial" round. A few normal combats to be sprinkled in.
Since a lot of work will go into an encounter that should only take IRL 2 maybe 3 min., the rooms and traps are reusable (justified by the "dream logic")
This will obviously not work for a large group of players. Prob want to keep it to 3 or 4.
This will require MASSIVE prep time for what will prob amount to a 1 hour crawl at best (depending on how many standard fights you work in) That's why REUSABILITY is key. To make the prep worth it , you can rerun it w/ the "dream logic"
Not sure if I'm going to pull the trigger on this. But I really like the idea.Not promising a part two if I don't.”