Friday Encounter: The Hall of Winds

This isn't just your regularly scheduled Friday Encounter - this is also an entry in the Late Summer Blog Competition over at Monsters and Manuals. In the RPG community, noisms might well be one of my biggest influences. I fondly remember following his thread on rpg.net, back when rpg.net was cool, going through the entire 2e Monstrous Manual and discussing the potential worldbuilding implications for every single entry, and when he started his blog, it was one of the first OSR blogs I ever discovered. I've been following his work ever since. Needless to say, I'm a big fan of his - his terrible opinions on cloakers aside - and when he announced the competition, I was just as intrigued as he was by an interesting mosaic he found on a vacation. The thoughts kept flowing from there, and they turned into the next Friday Encounter!

The Hall of Winds

Due to the spatial implications of this encounter, it is best suited for a dungeon. The dungeon can be as big or as complex as you like, but there should be a few features you want to make sure you include. There should be a room somewhere in the dungeon where a series of hallways lead off in each of the eight cardinal directions, and each of those hallways should terminate in a room where a large brazen lion's head with gaping jaws is mounted on the wall opposite the entrance. Additionally, there should be another room elsewhere in the dungeon where a large circular mosaic is set into the floor. The mosaic depicts a compass rose in the shape of a sun, with the image of a sailing ship in the center, and on the wall behind it is another lion's head.

The section of floor the mosaic is on rotates and can be pushed - doing so causes it to turn slowly with a loud sound of stone grinding against stone that can be heard from any adjacent room. When the mosaic is lined up so that one of the points of the compass rose points toward the lion head on the wall, a strong gust of wind billows from out of the mouth of the lion head at the end of the hallway corresponding to that direction. The gust of wind is daunting and unstoppable, and can be felt all the way to the nexus of the eight hallways. It cannot be walked against easily. Any ranged attack made perpendicular to the direction of the wind is made with Disadvantage, and any ranged attack made against the direction of the wind will be turned backward toward the creature that made the attack instead of its intended target. The wind only stops if the mosaic is turned again.

This is a feature with plenty of open-ended applications. The wind could put out torches or other fires. It could spread a fire into another room. It could be used to guide an arrow across a chasm to a target on the other end that would ordinarily be out of reach. It could be used to blow an enemy into a pit. It could uncover a secret passage placed behind a tapestry. I'm sure you can think of plenty of ways this effect could be exploited, and I encourage you to think about how you can incorporate it into how you design dungeons and puzzles. I'm sure your players can think of plenty of ways to exploit it, too; don't be afraid to reward thinking outside the box!