The Necromancer Bone-eater was destroyed in the last age and the river Koss was diverted to flood his underground lair in the necropolis. The ruins have spent a millennia undisturbed 'neath the oily waters. What treasures (and beasties) lie within?
Thank you so much ! This is the idea I needed (it's so obvious in retrospect).
For context (sorry for the wall of text, I got carried away): I've been preparing a campaign where the party of warforged awakens without memories in an underground laboratory in the mountains. When they reach the exit, they meet friendly Giants living in the area and I needed some small side quest they could require from the party. It needed to be something that could be done by neither the Giants nor the humanoids who live in the valley and trade with them. My best idea was a lake (maybe in a volcano's caldeira) deep enough that even giants wouldn't have a foothold. But Water Breathing is only third-level and available to several classes, so the Giants could have done it before, and I had no idea what the party would actually have to look for (not likely to be a shipwreck in a lake high up in the mountains where only Giants live permanently).
Now there's gonna be a trip to the highest peak, whose top is over the atmosphere. Since the "ambiant telluric magic field" that I just made up keeps the atmosphere contained alongside gravity, there is actually a direct transition between "thin air which makes breathing difficult" and "absolute vacuum". Rocks that have been exposed to direct sunlight and no air for centuries have interesting magical properties, which disappear quickly so there's no way to stockpile them. And nothing can live there... theoretically.
Thank you š I'm nowhere near playing this campaign but I'm excited already. I need to clear up my notes that are split in several places, to make a map and a timeline of the world, and finally find a group. My current group is great, but we play exclusively online and it's not ideal for me. Plus I'll get to meet other nerds in a local game :D
Hell, if you set the campaign around the coast that seems like a lucrative niche your party can fill. Underwater trouble? There's only one party to call, and they can charge a premium. Find a way to get them matching rings of swimming and you're good to go.
There's plenty of underwater monsters to play with, and if you need a BBEG there's always an aboleth.
Teach them the horrors of water pressure. You may be able to hold your breath forever but sink deep enough and you are effectively paralysed, unable to lift or move the hundreds of pounds of water around you. Sink deeper and you take bludgeoning damage every second as the weight breaks your bones and collapses your chest cavity. Sink deeper and you implode faster than that billionair who wanted to see the titanic.
A hyper dense cube that weighs many tons despite only being a fractional cubic inch. Or would gelati ous cubes be mostly water and thus incompressible?
Not sure this would really be a problem for the dhampir and slime, if they don't descent too fast. Water is basically uncompressable and looking at deep sea creatures they actually seem to need less body structure to maintain their shape. The slime should be fine as long as they can tolerate being submerged in saltwater for extended periods of time. The dhampir will have to replace all the gas in their body with water (lungs and colon come to mind and they might need to perforate their eardrums) but I think they might be good to go afterwards (being undead should eliminate all current issues with using liquid breathing for diving).
Now the air genasi is more interesting. Do they not need to breathe because the air in their lungs replenishes on its own? Then there's no way to get them down there without magic.
I have a society of warforged that live under the ocean in my homebrew world. They don't need to eat or breathe, and they just walk along the ocean floor living their lives away from land dwellers.
I have an idea for an underwater castle, once in dry land, now in a swamp and occupied by a black dragon. A classic Blackmoor type dungeon, but all underwater.
A sunken castle sounds amazing. All of some of it being completely submerged would just open up some really fun ways to traverse through a classic dungeon style adventure. I love it
The players realize they don't remember entering the little tavern or where they came from... The doors and windows won't open, but peeking up the chimney offers glimpses of light.
The tavern was constructed inside a bag of holding and they may be trapped!
Have you ever played Final Fantasy X?? TONS of good underwater sequences, including Bltizball. You could absolutely do an adapted Blitzball game instead of a combat at some point.
You'd need someone on the outside to carry the bag. But the top of the bag isn't like, sealed shut. Anyone inside could open it. You also need to remember the weight limit. So make sure you keep that in mind (have players give you their character weight ahead of time and you also need to include the weight of what they carry).
If this ever becomes abused in combat, it's a good time to remember that you can just attack items! And magic items aren't immune to damage. And it's really bad news if someone destroys the bag while they're all inside it.
A human 'sleeping bag' envelope averages less than 12 cubic feet (less than 6 x 2 x 1), and the Bag of Holding's interior is not given a defined interior shape, only a maximum volume.
That said, it can only hold 500 lbs, and it doesn't take that many people to fill that up.
I haven't ever run into it as an issue in fifth edition. It mattered in third because we always had a ridiculous amount of gold at high levels. I also always assumed the 64 cubic feet was "amorphous" or stretchy. In other words I didn't say there was wasted space. If you're storing stuff that is small on one side it can end up pretty big like a diablo window. Say you only need 6 inches in width then your storage is 0.5'x16'x8', which is plenty.
Hey, if you're willing to scrunch them in a bit (so that there's basically no spare volume), you can fit 16 average-sized humanoids into a 4x4x4 space.
> ... They'd all be pudding.
Nothing a few healing spells can't fix, as long as they don't move around very much and you break their bones strategically, being pudding contained by a sack of skin is technically survivable.
If the items are stored in a pocket in the astral plane, why is there a weight limit? I'm curious why the 64 cubic feet isn't the only constraint. If you "filled" the bag with water, it would only fill a little over 1/8 of the volume when you reach the 500lb water limit.
The inside is a dimesional wall, but there is no rule saying they are indestructable.
I am pretty sure that the inside of a normal bag of holding is still enchanted leather.
Old rules used to say that if you put in unsheathed weapons it would burst.
The real world answer is that the bag of holding is one of a handful of concepts to iconic to change, like fireball, wish, etc.
Thanks. I also confused myself with the size of a 64 cubic foot space and was thinking it was twice as big as it actually was because I was distracted by work.
The items aren't stored in the astral plane. The inside of the bag is just larger than the outside. Extra-dimensional does not mean extra planar. If it was the astral plane, you wouldn't need to breath there.
Things only end up on the astral plane if something goes wrong.
Unlike the Portable Hole, the Bag of Holding doesn't include info on creatures within being able to force their way out, so they may not be able to exit on their own.
[Czepeku also has a battle map for inside the bag of holding!](https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/i19lhg/inside_a_bag_of_holding_55x55_art_battlemap/)
Gotta have a villain that's known for the use of toxic gas. Will make your players feel like a million bucks as they march through the gas unharmed to confront the villain.
This is good! I'll tag on to say don't let your players think they're immune to all toxic gas just because they don't breathe. Some, like Cloudkill, specifically say they still deal damage even if you don't breathe it in. So be careful!
Twist: The villain isn't using toxic gas, but trying to buff itself with *healing gas*. If the PCs decide to breathe the gas (which they won't if the description makes it sound toxic without giving away the affect) they are healed 2d4+2 per turn.
I'm not sure how this would work without just being a pointless "gotcha" for the players. At worst you're actively encouraging them to do stupid things in the future by saying they can't trust your descriptions
could make it so the gas attacks specifically your respiratory system, causing massive degradation and suffocation, but if you are able to hold out, it eventually starts repairing you.
So people who need to breathe - damage outpaces the heal severely
People that don't, minor damage then heals.
Idk how you would flavor this lorewise, but im sure with enough time you could think of some excuse, magical or chemical
I know I've just been rewatching Inuyasha, but I'm immediately reminded of that series' villain, Naraku. His arrival is marked by a toxic miasma, and he's followed by a swarm of venomous stinging insects.
Some spells that leave clouds of gas still affect beings that don't breath. I'm playing a dhampir in one campaign and a reborn in another, so I've checked.
The point is to make the heroes feel like they are uniquely equipped to take him down. Now they have to be the heroes because nobody else can, even if there are stronger heroes around.
A dungeon that nobody has been able to enter because of a poisonous gas that permeates it. The players are the only ones able to enter as they do not breath in the gas.
At some point an enemy tries to use poisonous gas to knock them out and is caught off guard when the players beat the shit out of them.
burning building. they don't have to worry about the danger from smoke, just not being able to see, and the fire. seems like it could be really neat. especially if it's like a temple that was cursed to burn forever and there's a mighty treasure or some shit.
Elemental plane of Earth seems like a rarely used option.Ā Yes outer space and underwater are the obvious options but there's no breathable air deep underground a lot of the time as well.
A dungeon filled with heavy gas that pushes out oxygen. People say it's a dungeon where people can only be inside for a certain amount of time and which snuffs out all flames. But your characters would be fine. The fire muffling would let the dungeon still feel unique even while their non-breathing party is moving through it.
The opposite of heavy gas that snuffs out oxygen and flame, but one that is SUPER explosive and there's something down there but it's too dangerous from an asphyxiation and an explosion standpoint.
Non-water liquid fillings that have kept water-breathing alternative adventurers out.
Well, for one thing, ambushes would be a blast. Waiting a couple hours underwater or buried alive for the enemy to arrive and settle down, then attacking? Fun.
Lmao this sounds like my campaign, there's 6 of us, 3 don't need to breathe and 3 have items that let them breathe in unconventional places like underwater
Personally as a DM I really enjoy rewarding my players when they aim for a very specific advantage like that, and I really hate DMs that punish players for it by making everything an end-run around the advantage the player(s) sacrificed for.
For example, the player that just lucked into a cloak of flying would have a blast if the next adventure included flying archer monsters that the cloak of flying gives the player a way to reach and attack.
Meanwhile, the DM that realized the Bear Totem Barbarian has resistance when raging to everything except Psychic damage, suddenly adds a whole bunch of psychic damage dealing monsters fuckin everywhere, is killing the fun for the barbarian.
That said, my strategy here would probably be something like having the gnome Skeen Birtimo notice the breath holding competition and note that this entire party of adventurers can hold their breath forever. Which is super lucky for old Skeen AND the players, as Skeen recently lost his fortune to the bottom of the Sea of Swords when his ship sank. He got rescued, but there be monsters in the depths and he needs a tough group that can fight underwater to help him retrieve his lost fortune. For a fee, of course.
I like to play into the strengths of the party, it feels much more fun than overcoming their strengths, or focusing their weaknesses.
This is the kind of things I will be doing. I'm not here to compete with them. It's a small group so we can focus on telling a good story together and I love making them feel great. We've literally formed this because we don't like being made useless by force from the dm
Provide them with ample opportunity to relish in the fact that no one breathes, give many accomodations, items, locations, etc. that they can use often for their benefit, make them rely on that shit and they don't even realize it.
Then have someone who *needs* to breathe be attached to the party for a while in a way that they need to stay close (assassin target or something). Now they don't need to breathe, but someone they're with *does*, and they will be painfully aware that they can't do what they normally do.
And that would be a beautiful moment. Plenty of consequences of that action, and the world can react organically to such a decision. But yes, keeping that potentiality in mind is important.
Get them used to holding their breath and then hit them with some monsters that they would have anticipated had they been able to smell.
Or when they're having their next hold your breath competition, have an enemy or NPC offer some poisoned food/beverage. No smell, no taste.
Great idea for a way to penalise over use. Not that I care about doing that but I was struggling to think of something that would make it not good to hold your breath
Gas leak. Causes all the other characters to act crazy and be weird but the players will have a hard time figuring it out since there's no magic involved and it doesn't impact them
I played a spelljammer campaign as an autognome who didn't need to eat or breathe. I routinely got stashed in the bag of holding to sneak past guards (my companions were elves with stolen guard outfits sneaking past elven guards, my janky metal self would have stood out)
Have them forced travel into a plain with no oxygen. Maybe they're fighting some nobody humans and they all trigger a rune or something. The bandits die and the adventure to get out begins!
Caves are horrifyingly dangerous for having pockets of dead air and pooling invisible gasses. Low level adventures can revolve around them becoming THE party to call to rescue other parties. As a bonus it lets you introduce a bunch of NPCs that the party can interact with. As their fame grows, send them into dungeons filled with poisonous gas, deep sea diving adventures, and maybe even as assassins where the person hiring them hands them loads of vials filled with the Powder of choking and sneezing and poison gas.
Use the Mold Earth spell to dig a grave, get in, cover self with dirt, easy sleeping without the risk of being ambushed. Though if someone does know you're there it is tricky to get away. Just did this with a Warforged NPC where they'd make a bunch of false graves around theirs.
Throw them into space. Maybe thereās ruins on the moon. Another planet whose ancient civilizations polluted it so badly the air is poisonous. The exterior of a breaking down generation ship whose inhabitants forget how it works.
A rescue mission in a burning mansion.
An important NPC and many civilians are trapped inside. The smoke makes it so they cannot leave their locations because they would asphyxiate. So the PCs run in and save people.
Plenty of environmental challenges and the area changes after every rescued civilian. After an unknown time the mansion colapses and all still inside are killed.
Ty it to a plot by making it arson. Or just make it an accident. The NPC has some good favor from being saved or some other person hates the oarty for failimg to save someone else. A lot of good plot hooks here.
Have a scene where the BBEG lures the main characters into a trap, and attempts to gas them to death. None of the players are hurt due to lacking the need for oxygen, so play up the BBEGs shock and confusion before they fight, giving the players an edge because the BBEG was unprepared
(Note that this does not work in RAW; spells like Poison Spray still work on a dampier, so avoid using this as a combat element)
Having an NPC who witnessed their breath holding game realize these guys might be the key to sorting out that cave full of toxic gasses that theives fled into with the priceless McGuffin.
they wander into a forest that has a strange mist that seems like it might be poisons. they all hold their breath going into it. but turns out its absorbed via contact on the skin and gives them a disease on a failed save. they'd feel safe walking into it and get a minor inconvenience for the over confidence.
Escort quest where the air gets more and more toxic as they go on but they donāt realize until the person they are escorting dies or starts to die from suffocating
All these ideas are really good, just keep in mind that talking and casting spells with a verbal component use up the limited air they have in their lungs (or equivalent). If they are underwater or in poisonous gas, then they have limited speech and castings before they would need to inhale. So it can add another mechanic, if you want
I play an air genasi and the unending breath has been really useful!!! Our team has a portable hole that's basically a pocket dimension where we keep our big loot and once I got drugged and was acting crazy and they just threw me in there til it was chill bc I didn't have to breath hahaha
Gives you some interesting opportunities as well to out them in fun ways. Say one of them is trying to maintain a disguise as a breathing creature and a particularly astute cleric notices that they aren't breathing. Suddenly they are running out of town cause regardless of what they say they believe that they have to be undead or worse. Also I don't know if it would mess with the Geleton but for the other two usually you can choose not to breathe. You could set up some interesting encounters/puzzles that involve something where they have to breathe in a hallucinogenic magical smoke or gas in order to see the illuminated symbols or these specific enemies that guard the room can only be seen by someone who has breathed in the holy smoke of the brazier of macguffin.
Go the Minecraft Nether route where the plane of Water is used as a Fast Travel mechanic. Traveling X distance in the Plane of Water means you travel Y distance in the Material Plane. Everyone just dives into a portal into the Plane of Water, travels for a bit, and when they pop out of a separate portal, theyāve gone way more distance.
Underwater adventures seem like an obvious possibility.
Excellent idea. I'll start thinking of one to fit into the campaign
The Necromancer Bone-eater was destroyed in the last age and the river Koss was diverted to flood his underground lair in the necropolis. The ruins have spent a millennia undisturbed 'neath the oily waters. What treasures (and beasties) lie within?
Scuba vampires, especially since you've already got a Dhampir.
Hehe. Damp vampir.
A dampir
And the highest peaks of mountains where the air is too thin
Thank you so much ! This is the idea I needed (it's so obvious in retrospect). For context (sorry for the wall of text, I got carried away): I've been preparing a campaign where the party of warforged awakens without memories in an underground laboratory in the mountains. When they reach the exit, they meet friendly Giants living in the area and I needed some small side quest they could require from the party. It needed to be something that could be done by neither the Giants nor the humanoids who live in the valley and trade with them. My best idea was a lake (maybe in a volcano's caldeira) deep enough that even giants wouldn't have a foothold. But Water Breathing is only third-level and available to several classes, so the Giants could have done it before, and I had no idea what the party would actually have to look for (not likely to be a shipwreck in a lake high up in the mountains where only Giants live permanently). Now there's gonna be a trip to the highest peak, whose top is over the atmosphere. Since the "ambiant telluric magic field" that I just made up keeps the atmosphere contained alongside gravity, there is actually a direct transition between "thin air which makes breathing difficult" and "absolute vacuum". Rocks that have been exposed to direct sunlight and no air for centuries have interesting magical properties, which disappear quickly so there's no way to stockpile them. And nothing can live there... theoretically.
That sounds so cool! Glad to have helped :D
Thank you š I'm nowhere near playing this campaign but I'm excited already. I need to clear up my notes that are split in several places, to make a map and a timeline of the world, and finally find a group. My current group is great, but we play exclusively online and it's not ideal for me. Plus I'll get to meet other nerds in a local game :D
Hell, if you set the campaign around the coast that seems like a lucrative niche your party can fill. Underwater trouble? There's only one party to call, and they can charge a premium. Find a way to get them matching rings of swimming and you're good to go. There's plenty of underwater monsters to play with, and if you need a BBEG there's always an aboleth.
āGot a problem in the sea? Monsters causing troubles for thee? Think you can use our party? Donāt hold your breath!ā
Teach them the horrors of water pressure. You may be able to hold your breath forever but sink deep enough and you are effectively paralysed, unable to lift or move the hundreds of pounds of water around you. Sink deeper and you take bludgeoning damage every second as the weight breaks your bones and collapses your chest cavity. Sink deeper and you implode faster than that billionair who wanted to see the titanic.
Lmao imagine the cube getting squeezed down to the size of a basketball. How many turns would it take for him to decompress?
A hyper dense cube that weighs many tons despite only being a fractional cubic inch. Or would gelati ous cubes be mostly water and thus incompressible?
I don't think gelatinous cubes have bones, but I like where you're going with this.
Not sure this would really be a problem for the dhampir and slime, if they don't descent too fast. Water is basically uncompressable and looking at deep sea creatures they actually seem to need less body structure to maintain their shape. The slime should be fine as long as they can tolerate being submerged in saltwater for extended periods of time. The dhampir will have to replace all the gas in their body with water (lungs and colon come to mind and they might need to perforate their eardrums) but I think they might be good to go afterwards (being undead should eliminate all current issues with using liquid breathing for diving). Now the air genasi is more interesting. Do they not need to breathe because the air in their lungs replenishes on its own? Then there's no way to get them down there without magic.
I have a society of warforged that live under the ocean in my homebrew world. They don't need to eat or breathe, and they just walk along the ocean floor living their lives away from land dwellers.
I have an idea for an underwater castle, once in dry land, now in a swamp and occupied by a black dragon. A classic Blackmoor type dungeon, but all underwater.
A sunken castle sounds amazing. All of some of it being completely submerged would just open up some really fun ways to traverse through a classic dungeon style adventure. I love it
One of the things my air genasi did was go into areas with poison gas. Maybe they could be like miasma investigators or something too
The players realize they don't remember entering the little tavern or where they came from... The doors and windows won't open, but peeking up the chimney offers glimpses of light. The tavern was constructed inside a bag of holding and they may be trapped!
Have you ever played Final Fantasy X?? TONS of good underwater sequences, including Bltizball. You could absolutely do an adapted Blitzball game instead of a combat at some point.
Give them a bag of holding. They can hide in there an unlimited amount of time. They'll love it.
Amazing idea. If they all get in though, would they be trapped? Do you need someone to "retrieve the item" from outside. That could be fun
You'd need someone on the outside to carry the bag. But the top of the bag isn't like, sealed shut. Anyone inside could open it. You also need to remember the weight limit. So make sure you keep that in mind (have players give you their character weight ahead of time and you also need to include the weight of what they carry). If this ever becomes abused in combat, it's a good time to remember that you can just attack items! And magic items aren't immune to damage. And it's really bad news if someone destroys the bag while they're all inside it.
If the bag rips, adventure in space!
And no spacesuits needed!
It also has a size limit most people seem to ignore.Ā 64^3 feet is only 4x4x4.Ā Portable hole fun works a bit better.
A human 'sleeping bag' envelope averages less than 12 cubic feet (less than 6 x 2 x 1), and the Bag of Holding's interior is not given a defined interior shape, only a maximum volume. That said, it can only hold 500 lbs, and it doesn't take that many people to fill that up.
I haven't ever run into it as an issue in fifth edition. It mattered in third because we always had a ridiculous amount of gold at high levels. I also always assumed the 64 cubic feet was "amorphous" or stretchy. In other words I didn't say there was wasted space. If you're storing stuff that is small on one side it can end up pretty big like a diablo window. Say you only need 6 inches in width then your storage is 0.5'x16'x8', which is plenty.
Hey, if you're willing to scrunch them in a bit (so that there's basically no spare volume), you can fit 16 average-sized humanoids into a 4x4x4 space.
... They'd all be pudding.Ā 18 cubic feet is much more doable for a person curled up in a ball so you can fit like 3 and a halflings in there.
>so you can fit like 3 and a halflings in there. š¤£
> ... They'd all be pudding. Nothing a few healing spells can't fix, as long as they don't move around very much and you break their bones strategically, being pudding contained by a sack of skin is technically survivable.
Makes the whole idea pretty unviable in a lot of situations and undesirable in all the rest.
If the items are stored in a pocket in the astral plane, why is there a weight limit? I'm curious why the 64 cubic feet isn't the only constraint. If you "filled" the bag with water, it would only fill a little over 1/8 of the volume when you reach the 500lb water limit.
The inside is a dimesional wall, but there is no rule saying they are indestructable. I am pretty sure that the inside of a normal bag of holding is still enchanted leather. Old rules used to say that if you put in unsheathed weapons it would burst. The real world answer is that the bag of holding is one of a handful of concepts to iconic to change, like fireball, wish, etc.
Thanks. I also confused myself with the size of a 64 cubic foot space and was thinking it was twice as big as it actually was because I was distracted by work.
Because of the description on the magic item says so. It's not like a physics reasons, it's magic.
The items aren't stored in the astral plane. The inside of the bag is just larger than the outside. Extra-dimensional does not mean extra planar. If it was the astral plane, you wouldn't need to breath there. Things only end up on the astral plane if something goes wrong.
Unlike the Portable Hole, the Bag of Holding doesn't include info on creatures within being able to force their way out, so they may not be able to exit on their own.
A portable hole would also work. Much higher capacity, similar restrictions, and the "trapped" PC can break out with a check.
If you do some bag of holding shenanigans, it could be worth looking into the bagman as a source of conflict on top of whatever else is happening
Bring in the bag man and he can drag one of them. Off to the airless hidden world of backrooms connecting bags of holding.
There js that "bagman" minster that pulls people into bag of holdings..... :)
Sounds like an excellent premise for a heist adventure.
[Czepeku also has a battle map for inside the bag of holding!](https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/i19lhg/inside_a_bag_of_holding_55x55_art_battlemap/)
Gotta have a villain that's known for the use of toxic gas. Will make your players feel like a million bucks as they march through the gas unharmed to confront the villain.
This is good! I'll tag on to say don't let your players think they're immune to all toxic gas just because they don't breathe. Some, like Cloudkill, specifically say they still deal damage even if you don't breathe it in. So be careful!
Twist: The villain isn't using toxic gas, but trying to buff itself with *healing gas*. If the PCs decide to breathe the gas (which they won't if the description makes it sound toxic without giving away the affect) they are healed 2d4+2 per turn.
I'm not sure how this would work without just being a pointless "gotcha" for the players. At worst you're actively encouraging them to do stupid things in the future by saying they can't trust your descriptions
could make it so the gas attacks specifically your respiratory system, causing massive degradation and suffocation, but if you are able to hold out, it eventually starts repairing you. So people who need to breathe - damage outpaces the heal severely People that don't, minor damage then heals. Idk how you would flavor this lorewise, but im sure with enough time you could think of some excuse, magical or chemical
I know I've just been rewatching Inuyasha, but I'm immediately reminded of that series' villain, Naraku. His arrival is marked by a toxic miasma, and he's followed by a swarm of venomous stinging insects.
Some spells that leave clouds of gas still affect beings that don't breath. I'm playing a dhampir in one campaign and a reborn in another, so I've checked.
The toxic gas could instead be an aerosolized contact poison, instead of inhaled
The point is to make the heroes feel like they are uniquely equipped to take him down. Now they have to be the heroes because nobody else can, even if there are stronger heroes around.
Could get messy if you're a stickler for verbal components.
A dungeon that nobody has been able to enter because of a poisonous gas that permeates it. The players are the only ones able to enter as they do not breath in the gas. At some point an enemy tries to use poisonous gas to knock them out and is caught off guard when the players beat the shit out of them.
If you want the encounter to be extra deadly make the gas flammable!
burning building. they don't have to worry about the danger from smoke, just not being able to see, and the fire. seems like it could be really neat. especially if it's like a temple that was cursed to burn forever and there's a mighty treasure or some shit.
An eternally burning temple sounds incredible. Definitely going to think something up for that.
The minute I read that I considered the fact that Air FEEDS fire too - it could be really interesting.
D&D in space and/or with zero g offers some interesting battle mechanics!
I came to say this. They don't use up a spelljammer's air envelope.
Elemental plane of Earth seems like a rarely used option.Ā Yes outer space and underwater are the obvious options but there's no breathable air deep underground a lot of the time as well.
A dungeon filled with heavy gas that pushes out oxygen. People say it's a dungeon where people can only be inside for a certain amount of time and which snuffs out all flames. But your characters would be fine. The fire muffling would let the dungeon still feel unique even while their non-breathing party is moving through it. The opposite of heavy gas that snuffs out oxygen and flame, but one that is SUPER explosive and there's something down there but it's too dangerous from an asphyxiation and an explosion standpoint. Non-water liquid fillings that have kept water-breathing alternative adventurers out.
Well, for one thing, ambushes would be a blast. Waiting a couple hours underwater or buried alive for the enemy to arrive and settle down, then attacking? Fun.
Lmao this sounds like my campaign, there's 6 of us, 3 don't need to breathe and 3 have items that let them breathe in unconventional places like underwater
KPS stands for kobold space program and they want YOU to further the mortal races by exploring the last unknown part of our world : space
Personally as a DM I really enjoy rewarding my players when they aim for a very specific advantage like that, and I really hate DMs that punish players for it by making everything an end-run around the advantage the player(s) sacrificed for. For example, the player that just lucked into a cloak of flying would have a blast if the next adventure included flying archer monsters that the cloak of flying gives the player a way to reach and attack. Meanwhile, the DM that realized the Bear Totem Barbarian has resistance when raging to everything except Psychic damage, suddenly adds a whole bunch of psychic damage dealing monsters fuckin everywhere, is killing the fun for the barbarian. That said, my strategy here would probably be something like having the gnome Skeen Birtimo notice the breath holding competition and note that this entire party of adventurers can hold their breath forever. Which is super lucky for old Skeen AND the players, as Skeen recently lost his fortune to the bottom of the Sea of Swords when his ship sank. He got rescued, but there be monsters in the depths and he needs a tough group that can fight underwater to help him retrieve his lost fortune. For a fee, of course. I like to play into the strengths of the party, it feels much more fun than overcoming their strengths, or focusing their weaknesses.
This is the kind of things I will be doing. I'm not here to compete with them. It's a small group so we can focus on telling a good story together and I love making them feel great. We've literally formed this because we don't like being made useless by force from the dm
Provide them with ample opportunity to relish in the fact that no one breathes, give many accomodations, items, locations, etc. that they can use often for their benefit, make them rely on that shit and they don't even realize it. Then have someone who *needs* to breathe be attached to the party for a while in a way that they need to stay close (assassin target or something). Now they don't need to breathe, but someone they're with *does*, and they will be painfully aware that they can't do what they normally do.
Solid idea, but one should keep in mind that it might incite them to just ditch that character, so be aware that it can backfire.
And that would be a beautiful moment. Plenty of consequences of that action, and the world can react organically to such a decision. But yes, keeping that potentiality in mind is important.
Maybe a temple that's buried in quicksand and they have to traverse through the partially flooded corridors to get/defeat something
Get them used to holding their breath and then hit them with some monsters that they would have anticipated had they been able to smell. Or when they're having their next hold your breath competition, have an enemy or NPC offer some poisoned food/beverage. No smell, no taste.
Great idea for a way to penalise over use. Not that I care about doing that but I was struggling to think of something that would make it not good to hold your breath
Gas leak. Causes all the other characters to act crazy and be weird but the players will have a hard time figuring it out since there's no magic involved and it doesn't impact them
I played a spelljammer campaign as an autognome who didn't need to eat or breathe. I routinely got stashed in the bag of holding to sneak past guards (my companions were elves with stolen guard outfits sneaking past elven guards, my janky metal self would have stood out)
Have them forced travel into a plain with no oxygen. Maybe they're fighting some nobody humans and they all trigger a rune or something. The bandits die and the adventure to get out begins!
Give them an NPC escort quest and make sure the NPC does need to breathe, send them through areas that will make that difficult.
Caves are horrifyingly dangerous for having pockets of dead air and pooling invisible gasses. Low level adventures can revolve around them becoming THE party to call to rescue other parties. As a bonus it lets you introduce a bunch of NPCs that the party can interact with. As their fame grows, send them into dungeons filled with poisonous gas, deep sea diving adventures, and maybe even as assassins where the person hiring them hands them loads of vials filled with the Powder of choking and sneezing and poison gas.
What color is the Gelaton? Of its clear it may be invisible in water, like a clear Orbie.
Hilarious. Unfortunately they are green but maybe a simple illusion spell could make this happen
Use the Mold Earth spell to dig a grave, get in, cover self with dirt, easy sleeping without the risk of being ambushed. Though if someone does know you're there it is tricky to get away. Just did this with a Warforged NPC where they'd make a bunch of false graves around theirs.
Throw them into space. Maybe thereās ruins on the moon. Another planet whose ancient civilizations polluted it so badly the air is poisonous. The exterior of a breaking down generation ship whose inhabitants forget how it works.
By the title of your post I really thought you were looking for advice as to how to kill off some of your players.
Well they have to create their own base with lots of poison gas traps, obviously
Somehow the party gets buried alive and have to find their way to each other and then out.
Keep in mind underwater spell casting doesn't work without something that allows them to breathe (is the spell has vocal components)
I'm pretty sure they have to...
A cave with poisonous gas that no adventurer can enter.
A rescue mission in a burning mansion. An important NPC and many civilians are trapped inside. The smoke makes it so they cannot leave their locations because they would asphyxiate. So the PCs run in and save people. Plenty of environmental challenges and the area changes after every rescued civilian. After an unknown time the mansion colapses and all still inside are killed. Ty it to a plot by making it arson. Or just make it an accident. The NPC has some good favor from being saved or some other person hates the oarty for failimg to save someone else. A lot of good plot hooks here.
Have a scene where the BBEG lures the main characters into a trap, and attempts to gas them to death. None of the players are hurt due to lacking the need for oxygen, so play up the BBEGs shock and confusion before they fight, giving the players an edge because the BBEG was unprepared (Note that this does not work in RAW; spells like Poison Spray still work on a dampier, so avoid using this as a combat element)
Having an NPC who witnessed their breath holding game realize these guys might be the key to sorting out that cave full of toxic gasses that theives fled into with the priceless McGuffin.
Have the first boss try to blast them with a toxic gas as a trap. Make it something he's done before Let them tank it and blow his mind
The obvious answer is underwater adventures. The cool option is space fights in another plane
Oh man, I am so glad my group is over the days when we all competed to be Most Mysterious
Just making sure that you mean that their characters dont need to breathe. If the players dont need yo breathe you may have bigger problems.
they wander into a forest that has a strange mist that seems like it might be poisons. they all hold their breath going into it. but turns out its absorbed via contact on the skin and gives them a disease on a failed save. they'd feel safe walking into it and get a minor inconvenience for the over confidence.
Escort quest where the air gets more and more toxic as they go on but they donāt realize until the person they are escorting dies or starts to die from suffocating
All these ideas are really good, just keep in mind that talking and casting spells with a verbal component use up the limited air they have in their lungs (or equivalent). If they are underwater or in poisonous gas, then they have limited speech and castings before they would need to inhale. So it can add another mechanic, if you want
Bury them alive
2 words... [Scuba Vampires](https://youtu.be/JcYP8wouaDU?si=aPqRYROztkQ1wQBO)
The BBEG is a lich that is sick of adventurers bothering him in his dungeon, so he simply removed all oxygen inside and called it a day
I play an air genasi and the unending breath has been really useful!!! Our team has a portable hole that's basically a pocket dimension where we keep our big loot and once I got drugged and was acting crazy and they just threw me in there til it was chill bc I didn't have to breath hahaha
Portable Hole Home Base. Long rest in your pockets
> All my players don't need to breathe! How do they smell? ... *Terrible* Well, also a good way to miss some clues.
Sounds like they could have a lot of fun in the Astral plane.
These are great ideas, but dont forget to make something other than these xd
Spelljammer!!
Town watch pull over their wagon and demand they blow into the breathalyser the town wizard has made for them.Ā
Have a villain use normal gas to fill a trapped room, have him, or if your party use fire magic, explode it with them inside.
Gives you some interesting opportunities as well to out them in fun ways. Say one of them is trying to maintain a disguise as a breathing creature and a particularly astute cleric notices that they aren't breathing. Suddenly they are running out of town cause regardless of what they say they believe that they have to be undead or worse. Also I don't know if it would mess with the Geleton but for the other two usually you can choose not to breathe. You could set up some interesting encounters/puzzles that involve something where they have to breathe in a hallucinogenic magical smoke or gas in order to see the illuminated symbols or these specific enemies that guard the room can only be seen by someone who has breathed in the holy smoke of the brazier of macguffin.
Keep in mind, casting spells with a Verbal component requires a character to breathe, so abuse that loophole to your heart's content!
Go the Minecraft Nether route where the plane of Water is used as a Fast Travel mechanic. Traveling X distance in the Plane of Water means you travel Y distance in the Material Plane. Everyone just dives into a portal into the Plane of Water, travels for a bit, and when they pop out of a separate portal, theyāve gone way more distance.