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This week — A City Location, and a Deadly Room
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In this issue...
Happy Friday! I wanted to created a location this week, so let me know what you think of the floating, deadly funhouse below. Its the start of a good idea, maybe, and something I’d like to explore more over the coming weeks.
And that’s by design. I Cast…Brainstorm! is my way of, well…brainstorming ideas, and I consider everything I create here a sketch — just a fun idea that might be the seed of something amazing, or not! And that’s ok. Ideally, dear reader, you take these sketches and flesh them out into amazing challenges, treasures and stories for your table.
Thanks for reading!
A City Location Full of Danger
I designed this estate and the story of Lord Worram Lanryllin as a modular location for a city — you can drop it into your world, and fill it with your favorite horrors and challenges that will be perfect for your game and players!
You can also decide Worram’s fate. Does he still haunt the mansion in some form? I can’t wait to find out!
The Floating Manse
“In that grand and famous city on the coast there are many wonders, not least of which is the stately mansion in the Manorborne District that floats a full five fathoms off the ground, according to the old salt I met who saw it for himself.
Oh, those Manorborne folk have been petitioning the city for a year now, begging them to tear the place down, but it floats there still, ‘putting a pall on our neighborhood’ says the swells, and attracting a fair amount of gawkers. It was the home of a disreputable noble from a high house, Worram Lanryllin, known to be an avid collector of artifacts and curiosities from ancient times. He funded trips to the most gods-forsaken places, and would return months later with crates and bundles of all sizes that he’d pack into that house. Lanryllin had odd visitors at odd hours, so mayhaps he was selling off his finds, but no one knows. It was rare that anyone from the city could get inside the place to see for themselves.
For years ol’ Worram pored over esoteric books in faraway libraries, and delved into dark places, and brought home his treasures. And then, about a year ago, a lamplighter working along the wide tree-lined avenue where the Lanryllin Estate stood was shocked to find the massive house floating 30 feet in the air! And there on the ground below the house was the now exposed basement, filled with debris and scorch marks, as if an explosion of great power occurred there.
City officials had construction crews build a scaffold so they could investigate, and a contingent of city guard entered the manse to search for its owner. They entered through the front door, and a gaggle of city officials, neighbors and other folk waited for them to return. And waited. Suddenly they heard screams — gods-awful, blood curdling screams from the guard, from deep inside the house. They heard other sounds as well. Metal scraping on metal, explosions, breaking glass, all mixed in and around the frightened screams of the guard.
Of the six men who entered, only one returned, stumbling out of the front door and down the scaffold as fast as he could. The city officials stopped him as he tried to break through the crowd and escape, and demanded to know what happened inside! Did they find Lord Lanryllin? Where are the rest of the guard?
The poor man could only babble incoherently. ‘That house…’, he said again and again. ‘That house is a gate to the hells!’”
A Deadly Room for the Floating Manse
The Lanryllin Estate is filled with hundreds of ancient artifacts and arcane items -- some valuable, and some quite deadly, like the brass umbrella stand below that creates a room the foolish may never escape.
The Gallery With the Sky for a Ceiling
The door to this room is constructed of gray stone polished to a high sheen, with oiled brass hinges that allow you to easily push the door open despite its obvious weight. Carved into the door in common are the words “Portrait Gallery. Compliments Welcome”.
If the PCs open the door, you can read or paraphrase the following:
You step through the door and find yourself in the corner of a wide brightly lit room, 50’ square. The walls are constructed from large blocks of the same shiny gray stone the door is made of, and dozens of large framed portraits of smug looking nobles are arranged on all four walls.
Across the room, in the opposite corner, you see another door of gray stone. The floor is made of 10’ square blocks of different kinds of marble in varied hues, and the 5’x5’ section of floor in front of each door is gray stone. Resting on the floor next to the door you just entered is a large vessel of hammered brass with six curved handles sticking out of it.
There are no windows or lamps in the room, and you can immediately see where the bright light is coming from. The walls end 20’ up, and there is nothing above them but a clear blue sky and a shining midday sun. As you look up, you shade your eyes from the painfully bright sun, and notice some faint wispy clouds moving across the sky.
The walls are smooth with only the tiniest seams between blocks. They can be scaled by a talented climber with a DC 22 Strength (Athletics) check. Should a character climb the walls to the top, or use magic to get there, they will find the “sky” is an image somehow projected onto an ordinary stone ceiling.
The brass vessel holds six umbrellas, large enough when opened for two small or medium-sized creatures to use. All the umbrella handles are black, but the outside of each umbrella is a different color — purple, blue, green, yellow, orange and red. A DC 14 Wisdom (Perception) check while examining the floor will reveal that the 10’ square tiles can also be sorted into the same six colors, arranged as seen in the map.
To cross the room safely, a creature must hold an umbrella open over its head as they cross each 10’ block of marble, and the color of the umbrella must be the compliment of the color of the stone they’re crossing. The yellow umbrella must be used to cross purple blocks, the red umbrella must be used to cross green blocks, and the orange umbrella must be used to cross blue blocks, (and vice versa).
Should a creature step on, or fly over, a floor square without the complimentary colored umbrella held overhead, a flaming meteor will streak out of the sky and land on that square. The creature must succeed on a DC 16 Dexterity save to leap to a different square of the creatures choice, or take 3d6 fire and 3d6 bludgeoning damage, (they take half damage on a successful save).
The gray squares in front of each door are safe, and will not trigger the trap, however walls are not safe— a creature on a wall is considered to be over the adjacent floor tile. Invisible creatures will trigger a meteor, but incorporeal creatures or creatures in the border ethereal will not.
Once a creature steps on the gray tile in front of the exit across the room, any umbrellas they are holding immediately teleport to the brass vessel near the entrance. They brass vessel is an ancient magical artifact that controls the room’s magic. A detect magic spell will reveal that the vessel is magic, but the umbrellas are not. Dispel magic has no affect on the vessel, but if an anti magic field is created around it, the ceiling and floor tiles return to gray stone for the spell’s duration, and are safe to cross.
The paintings are real, and whatever happens to the vessel, the nobles in the portraits remain as smug as ever.
Brainstorming Links
You probably already know about the folks below, who are real inspirations to me, but if not, do yourself a favor and check them out.
The Arcane Library — masterpiece adventures, and Shadowdark, too!
https://www.thearcanelibrary.com
The Angry DM — so angry….so many great ideas….
https://theangrygm.com/
DMDave — on point analysis of D&D rules, and a ton of fun ideas
https://bsky.app/profile/dmdave.bsky.social
RPGBot — whip smart critique and explanations of 5e rules
https://rpgbot.net/
Sly Flourish — a DM’s best friend who is also a better DM
https://www.slyflourish.com/
Treantmonk — years of helpful advice and clever ideas
https://www.youtube.com/@TreantmonksTemple
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The original ideas in this issue of I Cast….Brainstorm! are covered under the Creative Commons BY-SA license — all content is free to use (including commercially) and change, with proper attribution.
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