In the spirit of gazebos and the Head of Vecna

[unixronin]

Rather than adding pointers to every comment to the post about the Head of Vecna, I figured I'd just post this separately.  It's another D&D story, from about 1985 or 1986.

Background:  We'd just completed the Lich Lords campaign, the final battle of which had reached a point where the three party members still standing faced the single lich left standing (the most powerful of the four), safely ensconced behind a Prismatic Sphere after having just taken down one of the two paladins in the party.  My paladin picked up the fallen paladin's Crystal Sword and, dual-wielding it with his own Holy Avenger, charged the lich.  He made it through (and took down) four of the seven levels of the Prismatic Sphere before simultaneously failing both magic-resist rolls and his save vs. magic, whence the remaining three levels magically poisoned him, turned him to stone, and simultaneously banished him to the ninth plane of Hell.  With the lich's defenses thus weakened, the mage in the party burned the last of his mana to take down the rest of the sphere; the lich, with nothing left, performed a Retributive Strike that left both surviving party members unconscious.  They eventually came around, and the healer was able to revive all party members except for, of course, the missing paladin.

So, for our next campaign, run by one Art Larson (aka the Mad DM), after having employed various forms of divination to determine the missing paladin's fate, we mounted a rescue mission to the ninth plane of Hell.  The party was very oddly assorted, including a lawful-good paladin (maybe two, I don't recall), an antipaladin of some flavor of evil (my memory says neutral-evil), my chaotic-neutral mage, and three or four others.  We had reached the sixth plane of Hell, and determined that the portal down to the seventh plane lay within the undercellars of Dispater's palace, whereupon we sought entry to said palace.

That's where the fun started.

Since marching in through the front door of one of the Barons of Hell didn't seem to be such a good plan, we looked for a smaller side door, and found one.  Relatively speaking.  It was only about twelve feet tall and eight or so wide, of some dense black stone, heavily studded and banded with iron.  In the center of the door, at about head height, was a large, protruding red button.  The thief-assassin of the party set about checking the door to see if it was locked or trapped, but before he could do anything, the antipaladin walked straight up to the door and pushed the button.  It sunk in with a loud CLICK, and would not come back out.  At length, the thief determined that the door was not mechanically trapped, but was now locked.  He repeatedly tried and failed to unlock it.

My mage stepped up and cast a Knock spell.  CLICK!  The button popped out.  Up walked the antipaladin.  CLICK!  he pushed the button back in.

"Please don't do that," I said.  "You just relocked the door."

Again, my mage cast Knock.  CLICK!  The button popped out.  CLICK!  The antipaladin pushed it back in.

The remaining party members physically restrained the antipaladin while my mage cast Knock a third time, the button popped out, and we safely opened the now-unlocked door.  We entered the palace undetected, made our way down to the sub-cellars without incident, and began searching for the portal.

On the way to the portal, we passed a side-passage that seemed relatively unexceptional, except that about twenty feet within it was another twelve-foot-tall, iron-banded black stone door with a protruding red button in the middle.  The antipaladin's face (well, the player's) lit up, and he marched straight up to the door, happy as a sandboy, and pushed the button.

WHAM!

The moment he pushed the button, the door pivoted forward from its base and slammed down hard against the corridor floor, smashing the antipaladin flat, then slowly rose back to the vertical again.  We dragged his mangled remains out of the side-corridor before raising him, but most of his gear was smashed beyond repair, and somehow he never seemed like he was all there in the head for the rest of the campaign.  (Then again, some would argue that wasn't much of a difference.)

Comments

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

I ran a party up against an illusionist lich at one point when they were feeling a bit cocky about how good they were. That fixed it.