Temple of Greed

[wdmartin]

Here's a map I made for a home game: a temple of greed. Made in Photoshop with textures from textures.com. I got the chests from the Dundjinni forums years ago. The standing stones in the entryway were made with assets from Gabriel Pickard's Cursed Forest map set. And statues I made using Hero Forge and then texturized in Photoshop.

I didn't put doors in the map because I wanted to add them in my VTT, but I'll indicate where they go. This map was inspired by Sugar Fuelled Gamer's podcast Lost and Forgotten.

Temple of Greed.jpg

Starting at the bottom right, we have:

The entry staircase. Usually this is full of water. Entry requires performing a short ritual outside to lower the water level.

The first room contains controls for the entryway. Once the players are done they can leave the way they came, performing the same short rirtual here: douse the four sentinel stones with water from the sea in a vessel of purest metal, and then speak the name of the God of Greed. (A helmet will do for the "vessel of purest metal", and the passageway is usually filled with seawater). There's a locked door a the north bearing the legend "LET YOUR GREED DRIVE YOU ONWARD".

In the hallway north of that first door, I put a trap consisting of a slab of stone that smashes people up against the opposite wall, driven by an enormous spring. When my players encountered it, this had already been set off by a previous group that they were pursuing.

After that, the first treasure room: four chests of loot, with another locked door to the north.

After disarming that, they come around the corner to the room with six chest in niches. Each of them has a tiny poppet sitting on top of it. I used Soulbound Dolls for this, with the added ability that they can suck your soul out of you by latching onto your face. In my game, they were currently full, having feasted on six dead people from the previous group currently lying on the floor. Once sated, they sit back and taunt people with tittering giggles, claims to be guarding fabulous treasure, and so on. Except that in this case the chests were already looted by the last group.

Around the corner, we have a room consisting of a narrow stone bridge over a pit full of acid, which glows a violent green. There's a door at the south end of the bridge that's locked; opening it requires jamming something into four holes at once, whereupon the door chops off whatever you stuck in there. Usually it's finger. My group smashed a chest from a previous room and stuck bits of wood instead.

Getting to that door is a problem, because the place is of course horribly trapped. The bridge is rigged so that setting foot on it triggers a pressure plate hidden in a niche in the north wall, under the bridge. Once it's triggered, a few seconds go past, and then two things happen. First, the four diagonal notches in the wall start squirting oil onto the bridge to make it slippery. And then giant double-sided axes start swinging back and forth from the horizontal slits on the sides. Woe to the unwary rogue who doesn't check this for traps. Oh, and the acid-immune Gibbering Mouther who periodically surfaces in the pool to scream at people is merely a courtesy detail.

Beyond the acid pit, we have another treasure room. EIGHT chests, this time. Of course, opening one of them causes a spear to shoot from the floor and impale the person standing in front of the chest. Better snip the trigger wires attached to the lids!

At the left edge of this room, we have a short passage with a locked door at either end and one more spear trap in the middle.

Beyond it, we have Golden Cathedral: a soaring, vaulted space holding four statues of the God of Greed, two armed with spears and two with swords. There's a fountain in the middle, and channels around the center area, all filled with molten gold. There are also four 2x2 square pit traps, 20 feet deep and positioned diagonally from the fountain. Once someone falls into one of those pit traps, two things start happening at the end of each round: first, the fountain starts to erupt withe more gold, and the trenches start to fill from below. Five rounds is enough to fill the pit trap and the trenches. Every round after that the gold fills another half square. Touching it obviously deals a whole bunch of damage. Getting submerged in it is a death sentence. The other thing that happens is that the statues spin in circles at the end of each round. They're designed to sweep people off the floor and into a channel full of gold with their huge stony spears and swords. Once triggered, gold pumps out for about three minutes -- enough to fill the room over the head of the statues -- and then it drains away again over the same period of time. The place isn't gilded, and all of the gold retreats, because magic. The pit traps reset themselves, too.

The north exit of the room is guarded by a door with a fantastically complex lock involving setting seven different dials to the correct position. You could make this a puzzle if you want, but I just reduced it to a difficult lock picking check. At the top it says "So close to the mother lode now!"

The last room is a deep pit. In fact, it's a snake pit. You can't see them down there in the darkness, but the floor is alive with venomous snakes. Also, there are spikes down there, because why not? High up above them a series of stones hover in the air. Some of them are solid, and will hold the weight of a leaping PC easily. Others flip on contact, dumping anyone who lands on them screaming into the pit below. Only one series of stones is the safe path. But if you can get across, why, here are stairs leading down to the next treasure room and all the traps to come. Down, down through the levels, room after room, each one with treasures more fabulous and traps more deadly than the last.

Because in the end, this temple's purpose is to tempt foolhardy adventurers to their death. Nurture the greed in their souls, all while pushing them to take just one more risk, just one more chance for an even bigger payout -- so that when they finally roll the dice and lose, the God of Greed can take their souls.

My PCs finished a boss fight in the gold room, took a long hard look at the floating stones and noped the heck out of there.