Dungeon Vignette articles will describe a room or small area within a dungeon that can be easily dropped into another dungeon or used to spark adventure ideas.
The Dancing Tide
This is a 30 x 30 room with a single standard wooden door.
Along one side is a sluice for what was once a natural spring to flow through, providing clean drinking water for inhabitants. Due to a breach from the city sewers, the sluice now carries muck and filth. When it rains, this sluice overflows covering the rest of the room with an inch or two of murky water and depositing smelly sediment across various patches of the floor.
In the center of the room, covering a 10' area, is inscribed a mystical circle. When clean and not submerged it enables the imbued magic to function.
Those entering the circle experience a compulsion to perform a specific dance. The saving throw is a DC17 Charisma roll. Subjects willing to perform the dance do not need to save against the compulsion. Failure of the roll or acceptance of the urging, causes the affected creature to dance around in the circle for up to one minute making additional saves each turn to break free of the dance.
While one or more subjects are dancing within the circle a secret door opens in the far left corner of the room, across from the entry door. Anyone not compelled to dance may proceed through the opening into the next room. The secret door cannot be opened by any means short of destruction or submitting to the dance.
Once there is no dancer performing in the circle the secret door begins to close, taking a full round to do so.
For the return trip back through the door there is a musical piece written on a wall of the next room. The piece contains lyrics in a language of the DMs choice, that characters must perform to open the secret door. The door remains open for 1 minute after the tune is completed and taking a single round to close
.A clue about how all of this works should be either given to the party by someone, or discovered by them prior to encountering this room.
Solving this problem should require some thought.
There's the matter of how to stop the flow, and how to get the existing water out. As long as it keeps raining the sluice will overflow enough to keep the room under one to two inches of water and muck.
A Wall of Stone spell would be overkill for blocking the flow in a small room. Hauling in a bunch of sandbags might be a good option if a bit labor intensive.
For clearing the water you have options like Control Water or Create/Destroy Water spells, or mops and buckets.
For clearing the muck there's always a good old shovel and the Prestidigitation cantrip. It's not deep and you really only need to clean the 10' magic circle.
The Bones plastic version of this Reaper Mini is available on their website. SKU 77668. I did not paint this. You can tell because it looks great.
