Any ideas for a dungeon for an all wizard party? Looking for inspiration for a fun one-shot in between campaigns
Oneshot: Latenight Brainstorming
It’s time to hit the books!
Setup: The party are a group of incorrigible youths attending a magic school (no not that one, another one), who are facing down a big test that may or may not decide whether they’ll be forced to repeat a year. Sadly for the party, they’re not great at school, and their only hope not to be forced to endure the humiliation of being held back is an all-night cram session before the big test.
Cram session, as in “ cramming ourselves into a secret passage we found to the forbidden section of the library, then cramming as many high-magic tomes into our packs and hope that one of ‘em will have a spell we can use to cheat on this test.”
Challenges & Complications:
Step 1: The Heist. Plan out with your party the way in which they’ll circumvent the various defenses of the library, from the insomniac upper classmen ALSO cramming for their exams, to the demonic librarian that patrols the stacks endlessly, looking to castigate any who put a book back where it doesn’t belong. The challenges should seem relatively easy to overcome, so encourage your players to think outside the box and use what their characters would know from their various classes.
Step 2: The Secret Passage. Getting to the Forbidden section of the library is easier said that done, and requires going through a winding series of cramped and forgotten hallways crawling with spiders, alchemically mutated rats, and all manner of other minor threats.
Step 3: The screwup. Things are progressing well trough the heist, with the party having gotten to the forbidden stacks and managed to toss a few promising looking spellbooks into their “study pile”. Then things start to go wrong: the party stumbles across one of their classmates ( the one who may or may not be the chosen one) and her do-gooder friends, Who’ve ALSO decided they need a few books from the library ( likely for worldsaving nonsense) and protest at the party sniping their supply. A squabble between the two groups attracts the attention of a demonic librarian, and the party is forced to flee through the stacks and back through the passage.
Step 4: Study The Maelstrom Tome. Among their purloined parchments, the party discovers a magnificent book that claims to be an invaluable treatise on weather magic. Knowing that one of their proffessors was stressing the utility of such spells, the party begin perusing the book without any acknowledgement that it’s started to rain outside. Messing around too much with the tome ends up releasing a powerful storm elemental, which threatens to blow their tower-dorm down if they don’t manage to seal it back in its book. The party will have to skirmish across rainslick rooves, possibly climbing spires or hitching a ride on one of the castle gargoyles in order to reach their flying foe.
Step 5: The test has been rescheduled due to inclement weather. With most of the roof blown off of the grand hall and the carefully laid out tests nearly washed away by the rain that came sluicing in, the party have miraculously managed to obtain a reprieve from their encroaching deadline.
If you wanted to use this adventure as a springboard to a larger campaign, have the story pick up some years after the characters have graduated, having moved out of their awkward adolesence on to varying other carriers out in the wider world. Have it be a reunion for old time's sakes and work with each player to figure out the trajectory of their life in the interm period. Eqch of these characters has accued their own problems, but reunited, they might just be able to scheme their way out of trouble as they once did.
