Heavy Metal/psychedelic/point crawl/Oregon Trail. Journey through bizarre lands, meet cats with people hands who run the joint, be weird freaks, try not to die. Featuring one of the best carousing tables ever written.
"The mansion looks a bit like a miniature version of the Science Center, huge featureless white cubes and rectangles agglomerated together, with walkways, pools, and decorative arches scattered among them. But some of the cubes and rectangles are higher up, and barely attached... they look like they could break off and fall to the ground at any moment. And one prominent cube seems skewed, tilted at about a 15-degree angle from the others, along all three axes."
"OK, where's the front door?"
"You search every inch of the structure for signs of a door, there doesn't seem to be one."
"I cast See Hidden."
"Walking around with See Hidden up, you find a cache of whiskey bottles in a hole under a small boulder, but no doors."
"I cast Knock."
"You're pretty sure you just unlocked an interior door somewhere nearby."
"Screw this. I tie my rope to my grappling hook, fit it into my crossbow, launch it to the top of the building, and climb up to the roof."
"You get a good hold with the crossbow. But once you climb 30 feet to the top, you realize there is no roof. That's a 13 Agility test, to avoid falling 30 feet to the kitchen floor."
Factual history is filled with accounts of how the buildings designed by award-winning, world-famous architects turn out to be impractical or otherwise problematic. The Sydney Opera House had terrible acoustics as built, some of Frank Lloyd Wright's private house designs weren't quite weathertight, that sort of thing.
I was reading a recent account of another world-famous architect, and the shortcomings of a private home they designed, and it reminded me of "Glass House of a Dead Prince," the dungeon described on page 30 of Ultraviolet Grasslands and the Dead City, by Luka Rejec. This procedurally-generated mansion is described as being "built in the ancient Brutalist style of the Second Para-Dadaism."
An earlier, and more purely American, homebuilding folly is the Winchester Mystery House, which was endlessly, mindlessly added to by a rich widow, who was possibly either mentally ill or manipulated by an unscrupulous contractor. A heavily-advertised tourist attraction, its cancerous additions and dead-end or unfinished projects sprawl over what is even today an impressive square footage for a private mansion.
Finally, of course, there is "The Flowering Of An Art," the short satirical piece written by Argentinians Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy-Casares, in which an ostentatious para-critic lauds "Chaotic" architecture that is so artistic, it cannot be used by humans, or even entered.
There's more room for satire here... an entire dungeon's worth. The locals insist the house is cursed, that it eats folk who venture inside, or drives them mad. Or perhaps it's brand new, and a furious owner wants adventurers, people versed in trap detection and unafraid of physical danger, to make the surreal house livable.
Perhaps a rich hero in your group has bought themselves a new house, and you want to make it part of the campaign in an interesting way... or a powerful businessperson/criminal uses such a house to intimidate both equals and supplicants.
1d20, or several, can be fun, but don't be afraid to pick and choose what fits for your story.
20 Design Flaws for a House Designed By a World-Class Architect
No doors on the ground floor. No, there are no exterior stairs. One or more of the ground floor windows, if any, might be used as an entrance, or a ladder might reach a door on the second, or third, floor (over the architect's objections, of course). Or the only way in is a hatch on the roof. Maybe the house has no purpose-built doors or other entrances, at all. If so, the heroes should learn somehow that it was built this way, and that there is no hidden entrance to find.
Rooms are all separated by exterior walkways. You have to go back outside to get anywhere, and every structure looks exactly the same on the outside. Security would be provided by a perimeter wall, I guess.
The roof leaks pervasively and insidiously: water damage and mold are constant companions. There could be mushrooms growing in the carpet, and everything rotting, or full of standing water.
The house is excessively hot in the summer and incredibly cold in the winter. Or, it's one or the other, all year round.
Built with inadequate materials: creatures and objects crash right through walls, roofs, and floors at the slightest mishap or misstep. The entire house may be collapsing in on itself bit by bit.
Poor ventilation: Carbon dioxide builds up, and the house becomes dangerously stuffy with all doors and windows closed. The house might even be intentionally airtight. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
That important room or structural element of any house, that you were specifically looking for? This house doesn't have one, because art. Could be a kitchen, bathroom, roof… maybe there are no floors to the rooms, and furniture is suspended by wires from the ceiling.
The house constantly moans and wails as wind and/or air temperature shifts inside and out, and gaps left by shoddy workmanship create natural whistles. There is a constant draft.
Sinking: the house was built on an inadequate foundation or on an incredibly stupid site, and is sinking into the ground. The floor may be tilted at an uncomfortable angle, and there might be gaps and faults where different parts of the house have sunk at different speeds. Alternately, a different failure to adequately address the house's site.
Outsize: the house is custom-built to utterly non-standard dimensions. Doorknobs, shelves, furniture, and other things may be far bigger or smaller than necessary, maybe a mixture of both. You might not be able to reach them, or have to get on hands and knees to do so. Despite this, the house was designed for members of your species.
Randomly-generated layout. List the house's rooms, and roll dice or pick arbitrarily, possibly while the heroes are exploring. Bonus points if access between rooms makes no sense, or you wind up with non-Euclidean geometry. Because architecture is an art, and should not be subject to the demands of mere physics.
Dead-end or pointless loop corridors, staircases to nowhere in particular, superfluous doors between the same rooms, maybe even the classic door opening into empty space. It may not obviously look like the Winchester Mystery House, but that's the end result.
Dated, tasteless, or just plain ugly decor. At its extreme, this could cause psychological distress. Physical injury is also not impossible. For three years I went to a real junior high school that had decorative interior pillars faced with crushed quartz, that could rip clothing and draw blood. They loomed diagonally out over the corridors, reaching for scalps and shoulders. The rest of the walls were made of cinder block that would easily give you something like road rash.
Unorthodox and impractical transportation media, such as slides, rope ladders, rope swings, teleportation devices or magic, catwalks, steep ramps, pointless but unavoidable elevators or levitation devices, escalators that only go the wrong way, etc. Bonus points if one has to backtrack all the way to a central hub to get to the room on the other side of the wall.
Inscrutable fixtures and objects. Is it a light switch? Or does it open the door on the other side of the room? Maybe it's purely decorative, or once turned on the entertainment system. You can't tell, because you've never seen anything like it. You might not even recognize it as a fixture if it's sitting in the middle of the coffee table. Perhaps everything in the house was keyed to a now-defunct smart speaker, or an unidentifiably disguised remote.
Obviously hazardous "features." Why is there a 10-foot long, 10-foot deep trench bisecting the living room? Why does the touch of a lever bring the 1-ton chandelier crashing to the floor? Why is the kitchen a walk-in food processor only operable from the inside? A subterranean panic room may be flooded, inaccessible, or contain some great horror, living, dead, or otherwise.
Unsettling geometries. No, not like in H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King. More like Richard Serra. Off-plumb walls that tilt toward you more and more until you have to duck to get through the corridor. Ceilings that swoop too low for no apparent reason. Intentionally uneven floors, because level floors are aesthetically boring and static. Whole rooms designed to be off-plumb.
Things are not where they should be. The architect tried to deconstruct the antiquated, socio-imperialist concept of the "chair" by nailing all of the house's chairs to the wall, sideways. Or, the central fireplace is in the hallway and the bathtub in the living room.
Things do not fulfill their purpose. Walls might not keep out the weather. Chairs may be shapes that are impossible to sit in. Lamps are masked by opaque shades so that they don't light anything up. Probably just come up with one or two elements, and stick with them.
Proliferation. The house is infested with too many of the same type of room, or possibly another element, like staircases. They might be identical, they might be unique. Every time you turn a corner or open a door, there's another one. Or maybe the house is just catified beyond all reason, or has a hand-washing sink in every room.
ADD TO THESE PROBLEMS whatever depraved idiocies might have been demanded by the house's original owner. This could include security features that wouldn't make sense for a place someone lives, the kind dungeon designers are told not to do… because the people who designed this house and live(d) in it are or were enslaved by an artistic vision… One that philistines like your heroes will never understand.
