I’m very fond of stories in a universe where some advanced, but long vanished, race of enigmatic aliens has left behind strange artifacts: like puzzle boxes or dungeons for our heroes to explore and nearly get killed in. If not aliens let it be a lost human civilization.
I also like to think about those ancient people who built the ‘Temple of Doom’— for all of those traps to work so well after thousands of years they must have been very clever. What was it like to set them up?
@futurebird You know how at the end of Raiders where you see the huge secure warehouse full of mystic artefacts? What if that's exactly what the hidden temples were, and there was some Biblical Indiana Jones who stole the Ark from an even older secure site. And some day, a 45th century Indiana Jones will rob the US warehouse and defy its security.
Reminds me of a #ttrpg I ran, part inspired by Red Dwarf (an abandoned ship as big as a city) crossed with Jack Chalkers "Well of Souls" books.
Earth demons were real, an advanced alien species, and imprisoned on their ship. Ship AI wanted to free them.
Demons were large, so their hand control was huge. Party referred to it as the "command banana" as they carried this black basalt 4 foot rock about, not understanding how it worked.
@futurebird Leetle bit different but T. Kingfisher has one book in her romantic fantasy series, Paladin’s Hope, that is about a very gnarly deadly dungeon that does in fact turn out to have a reason other than “kill people”, and that was pretty cool. I love when people justify weird fantasy tropes with world building!
@futurebird saw this and immediately wanted to come up with the opposite: a dungeon that's old ruins of an ancient civilization but all the traps are unintentional consequences of corruption, corner-cutting and poor design - stuff falling apart, former walls now floors with huge buttons designed in a "minimalist" aesthetic that now look like a path of tiles and it's really hard to tell which tiles are buttons and which are decorative, oozing rivers of gear-destroying toxic sludge that used to be part of the building envelope but the plastics have slowly reacted over the years to form this instead, AI smart electronics that interpret every noise the party makes in the worst possible way causing all sorts of automated stuff to happen at the worst possible time and place,...
@llewelly@futurebird the software has been tested in the field many times over (to the misery of very many people in that now-lost civilization) and everything's placed more or less sensibly, but the way the screen registers a touch is now reacting to one party member's breathing and it's not clear whose
A Cube filled with boobytraps marked by prime factorization only came into being as a never ending public works blunder lost in the bureaucratic shuffle https://youtu.be/boDgkH7Yw-0
@futurebird
when I played a lot of D&D, I noticed several D&D dungeons had been designed as built by ancient, powerful, mysteriously long gone civilizations (and sometimes whole cities). And there were dungeons built by wizards who used magic to alert them and replay the events that set off the trap for them.
But if the builders were long gone, there wasn't anybody to watch what happened when the traps went off.
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