This was another 'rapid encounter table generation' exercise. Original prompt was a post the r/DnDAcademy prompt for 'Living Locks'. This time I tried bulking it out through gygaxian democracy on the OSR discord then fed that to the Bellard tool to bulk it out.
My original ideas for the “lock” were:
1. a critter strong enough to lift the multi-ton stone door.
2. a wall-squid that can bend apart the bars in the doorway long enough for something to pass.
3. a whole bunch of hermit crab like things that have shells that fit together, faced outwardly with adamantium or whatever - at rest it is a wall, but entice them to move and the wall just scurries off.
4. something enormous just lying in the doorway, needs to be knocked out and climbed over.
Plus ideas from gygaxian democracy:
5. a violently alcoholic door that hacks and coughs and demands she be given hard liquor or else she wont open. careful testing will reveal she can neither taste nor smell, so an alcoholess party will be able to use most any liquid
6. The tough that bars the way to the master-thief's otherwise-open chambers. They're nicknamed "The Door".
7. A sentient colony of extremely venomous ants that lives inside a hollow wooden door. Their hive-mind has simple desires; acquire more food, avoid destruction, get that one orc who keeps slamming the door really roughly to stop, etc.
8. The Philosopher's Door, a construction of brass and plant fiber that only opens if you give your honest opinion on something philosophically important, like the gods, the cosmos, your relationships or halflings. "I don't care" is, apparently, a valid opinion.
9. A gargantuan, slobbering maw crowned by an enormous nose; will only open for the most sumptuous and aromatic of foods.
10. The door is a former adventurer who got polymorphed into a door and installed in the dungeon as an ironic punishment. They have just enough self awareness left to be an asshole to everyone who even remotely looks like a wizard... which these days is “bipedal, radial symmetry, hat.”
11. Sir Cullis, Baron of Alveron Harbor. When he realized his name and existence were only there to fulfill an awful pun (port cullis), he fled into a dungeon in despair. He can typically be found in an archway at the midpoint between a goblin tribe and a bandit gang's territory; both groups supply him with food in return for keeping the other out. Sir Cullis's family misses him terribly.
12. A former dragon or whale who got polymorphed into a small hallway door. The door reads as a magical trap to all abilities that can detect such things. The use of dispel magic or disarm trap automatically succeeds, much to the dismay of the wizard or thief standing right in front of a rapidly depolymorphing behemoth in a narrow tunnel. The only clue to its nature is its immense weight when opening, and resistance to smashing.
13. A revolving door which is taken by nausea each time someone passes through.
Plus outputs from the Bellard tool:
14. A bunch of rocks with legs and all their parts arranged and aligned in a specific and specific kind of order.
15. a bunch of fish in the doorway, the first ones with two shells.
16. a dead crab just standing around and being eaten by any kind of thing, or an insect who wants to eat him and want it to come in contact with its own body.
17. anything that can knock out an entire wall or climb it.
18. some kind of invisible shield (it probably has to be some kind of wall as it is very hard to see), with metal parts on each end
19. A strange humanoid creature that's been turned into a stone statue by two elves and then a statue by a blacksmith working on a large stone wall with a door. The door is a door of light and the statue is a stone statue and everything except the statue is black and has a weird light that can be either positive or negative (but always negative).
20. A giant spider monster that has a nasty habit of eating anything with two legs, and uses sharp claws, and if your people see this, it will eat everyone who is close to it, but will not hurt you; once hit it will attack you at range.
21. Some sort of a giant spider on a stick and has a web that can only fit its right arm. It can use its
22. a monster with no idea how its eyes work. It doesn't see what's behind it, for some reason. It also isn't interested in anything but itself, except as food.
23. a large stone statue which seems to have been magically carved to look like a dragon. There are no wings, or other body parts.
24. the corpse of the old dragon, which seems to have given up trying to do anything that isn't to devour its life support system
Below are the nonsense outputs scrubbed from the Bellard outputs ~ 38% fraction of junk.
A. a building on the roof that needs to be patched up, or torn down, or torn from under
B. A thing that is only very slightly larger than itself.
C. It just has to be moved, as long as one thing is in position and then another.
D. Two sets of locked doors with a hidden lockbox beneath. If the player finds the box, the player is transported to another world or to an inaccessible island where no humans live. You do not know where you went and what happened. The only way to gain freedom is to make a full-dive around the world, but, like the rest of the puzzle, the time frame to do that is never more than a few seconds.
E. When opening an area with a special door that has an ability to reveal secrets which cannot be guessed unless the party is very high in level, and when the doors are opened before the hidden box. This ability seems not to be very useful.
F. Three doors to an ancient doorhole
G. a large building that's been abandoned for generations and needs to be cleaned up. The building is usually about a foot taller than a person and has a door that's one foot wide but its hinges are a long steel beam and the sides are carved into a huge hole that's roughly 1 foot wide. They can climb this door, but only on their own.
Many thanks to Travelling Mailsman, Kava’s H, Locheil, Ava, hey its hoop, Dyledion, Gio_il_Mago and A Blasted, Cratered Lexi for their contributions.
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