The Flying Birdcage

My week 2 contribution to Dungeon23 is done.

Again, I'm focusing on producing something instead of perfecting something.

>>>HERE<<<

It's technically only 3 rooms but it's also 12 pages, so I'm going to count it as 7 rooms and be done for the week.

Anyway the flying birdcage is a magical elevator that flies around the dungeon after the party finds the correct birds (keys) to take you there.  Quicksilver Hall is a bit of a funnel, but I expect most players to bump into the birdcage around session 15-20.

The Therapeutist by Rene Magritte, 1937
entirely unrelated to anything else on this page

There's a lot of words, but most of it is for the DM.  The three rooms aren't that complex, on the player-facing side, and the bird=destination thing is dirt simple.

Vestiges

There's a cursed item in here that houses a semi-friendly ghost (a vestige).  You get bonuses when you wear the item, but you also invite a ghost into your head.  If you drop to 0 and roll sorta-bad on the Death and Dismemberment Table, you die (even though you might normally have lived) and the ghost takes over your body.

This is a mixed blessing--if you were about to die, you survive with an interesting new PC to play (still in your old PC's body).  If you would have lived, you lose your PC.

Either way, the player should be warned (so they don't take this risk unknowingly).

I like the vestige rules on a macro level, since they encourage the kind of lateral-growth // character sheet chaos // random mutation type of game that I like.  Your barbarian got hit on the head so hard that he died, and now he's a wizard who is back from the dead and wants to join your party.  Fun!