Mansion of the king of time

Ok, so I'm going to throw my player's into a big old trapped mansion that is owned by a keeper. Now usually wod isn't very specific about layouts of buildings or traps there in, It kind of makes the whole thing feel like a dungeon crawl. I need some help with creating a mad mansion with some bizzard hedge traps. Could anyone help?

How about a room that has decoration that evolves and changes before your very eyes?  When you walk in, it's early renaissance furnished.. but as you watch, layers and revisions are made, slowly becoming renaissance, then victorian, then early 20th century, etc.  Not amazingly fast, but perhaps just fast enough to notice.

And, of course, a room entirely suspended in time.  Fish frozen in their still waters, a large one frozen in the moments before he snapped up his meal.  A decorative fountain whose sprays and streams seem to have been paused in mid motion.  The room is eerily still and silent, so that every motion you make echoes and resounds on everything.

The room of eternity.  You step through the door into an entirely endless black nothingness.  If you walk away from the door, you can find it easily as it doesn't vanish.. but you notice that the infinity goes on all around it, and that you could gou around the door and into infinity in the other direction.  Oddly, something tells everyone that walks away from the door that this infinite expanse can be walked, and that something does indeed lie on the other edge of infinity.  Anyone with the patience, willpower, or curiosity to walk off into eternity is not seen again (In this time-era, anyway).

A beautiful decorative fountain of opalescent blue crystal, swirling from the ground upwards to contain a glass glove that is surrounded by gold and diamond filigreed "planets" and their ring-like orbits.  In the center of the unbreakable "glass" sphere is a black hole.  Tt is just strong enough to suck any like that passes through the sphere into itself (Thus causing a spot of phenomenal blackness at the heart of the sculpture).  It is also just strong enough to cause a shadow distortion on the whole room, similar to light reflecting off the bottom of a pool and onto a wall.. except, of course, made of darkness and not light.

In the exact opposite room (On the other side of the hall, on the other side of the house, on the other side of the Trod, etc), there is the same sculpture, except made with sculpted rubies, obsidian spheres, and silver filigree.  In this one's globe is a miniature sun.

Clever always has good ideas...

Perhaps the characters enter a room in the center of which stands a small pedestal holding an antique telephone.  If one of the characters dials it, it will be picked up, though no voice will be heard.  Whatever the character says, the line will go dead after a few moments.  Later on, the characters enter a room where a phone is ringing.  If one of them answers it, they will hear the first character's voice from earlier -- but unfortunately the mouthpiece of the phone has been smashed, and they can't pass any messages to their earlier selves.

In another room, they see ghostly images of themselves, frozen in time.  It seems that their images are in the middle of a fierce combat.  Later, the characters find themselves in a similar room, and are attacked.  Perhaps something they noticed from their earlier vision of this future will help them overcome the foe.

In a lavishly-appointed sitting room, a golden hourglass sits on a mantle above a fireplace.  The sand sits in the bottom of the hourglass, and the fire in the fireplace is frozen.  On the wall farthest from the fireplace, tapestries are faded from age and a vase on a shelf is filled with flowers dried and long dead.  The only other exit from the room is to one side of the fireplace.  If any of the characters walks toward it, the others see him moving ever more slowly, while he sees the others moving progressively faster (assuming they don't follow him).  If the hourglass is turned, time will resume to pass normally in the room, but who knows how much time will have passed outside its area of influence by the time anyone can get to it?  Will one of the characters walk to it, leaving the others behind, and if so how long will his friends wait for him, since the closer he gets to the hourglass, the slower he moves, until as he reaches for it he seems to stop entirely?  Or if they walk to it together, once they manage to escape this mansion, will years have passed for the mortal world?

And then the characters find themselves in a giant clock, and must negotiate the massive cogs and gears.  At one point, their path is blocked by a massive pendulum -- which is appropriately a massive blade.  If they time it right, they could run past.  Of course, if they thought to keep the hourglass from the earlier room, perhaps they could use it to stop the clock and make their passage through it much easier.  But perhaps the clock serves a purpose of its own...  What may the consequences be for stopping it?

After walking into one room, the first character enters to find that his friends are frozen in place, stuck in time.  If that one touches one of his frozen friends, he becomes frozen in time -- but the friend is unfrozen.  The solution to getting the entire group through the room is fairly simple, but since the characters are unable to communicate it to each other, each will have to realize it one his own.  (Note that this problem relies heavily on the players not metagaming.  If your players have a problem keeping character and player knowledge separate, you might want to ask all of them except the active character to take a break and leave the room.)

That is some trippy stuff!  I love it!

As for more literal trap type things..

You can have the place patrolled by invisible "Temporal Anomalies" that serve as random battles, so to speak.  Create them like a Ghost or Spirit, trait wise.  Time magic from Mage should make for an appropriate type power spread, with higher or lower levels depending on how powerful you need them to be.  If you'd rather not use Mage, default spirit rules plus the contract of Hours should suffice.

Like the previous example, there might be certain rooms, doors, places, or other objects that cause a character that ouches them, or gets near them, begins to age rapidly until a solution is found.  It could be moving in reverse, or it might be something more esoteric or related to an old object or item that characters found in the past.  Or will find in the future.  Cuz this house can do that.

Similarly, there might be some kind of age contagion there, one that begins to age anyone infected at an expontential rate.  It starts slow, and anyone that doesn't get a good roll at recognizing the symptoms (Intelligence or Wits with Occult or Medicine) may not notice until the aging becomes more rapid.  The only known cure for this disease is in the room of this same mansion in which time runs backwards.  Anyone that drinks enough of the waters there (Which, like everything, runs backward through time) is healed as the time distortions cancel.  Of course, there is a similar problem with drinking or eating anything in the backward moving room--If you aren't infected with Age, you will begin to grow younger and younger unless affected by any rapid aging effect in the Mansion.

May I suggest taking a look at the xxxHolic movie? Gives plenty of ideas for a situation where people are stuck in a mansion owned by a Fey like being.

spectacular! I'm lovin' these ideas! I was having such great difficulty trying to figure out how to setup the mansion I didn't even think of a good linking theme. Silly me I guess I'm not thinking changeling enough yet. I would appreciate even more ideas if you have the time.

Another thing you can do, which I've done in a chronicle including some minor time trickery...

Have the characters run up to see the end of a battle -- a battle between themselves and a terrible foe.  The characters arrive near the end of the battle, too late to help, and watch as their other selves are slaughtered.  But the foe is wounded, and perhaps the characters saw something during those final few moments that gave them hope that they can be victorious.  So they charge in...

...but find the foe still deadly.  They get in their licks, but in the end, he's too strong.  And as the last character standing braces himself for what shall surely be a killing blow, he sees his younger self and friends run up in time to witness his death...

At which point the point of view switches to the earlier version of the characters.  The players have now witness the deaths of their characters first hand, but now have better understanding of the foe.  Do they try to take it on yet again, even though the characters know that they (will) have already been defeated by it once (and the players have seen it twice), or will they choose a different path, a different strategy?  And if they should fail, if they should all die, they find themselves -- for the first time -- walking up on the aftermath of their future selves' failure.

Basically, design a scenario with a just barely beatable enemy -- you could use something bestial or monstrous , but a more intelligent and conversant foe is better, especially if, once the characters commit themselves to an action and are noticed, the foe politely points out that the last several times they will have tried this method, it ended badly for them.  Have the foe taunt them, saying they any course of action is futile, and can only ever end in one result.  Also, make the setting an interesting one, with lots of options how they might use it to sneak by or use it against the foe -- statues and crystal chandeliers with which they can attempt to crush or impale him, wooden beams, ledges, or trelliswork they might climb to pass unseen above him, or perhaps some obstacles and terrain they they might use as concealment (like topiaries and shrubberies) or as improvised weapons and cover (like a dining table and chairs).  But in all your preparations, make it so anything you can forsee that the characters might try has just the smallest chance of working -- you don't want to make any aspect of the encounter so difficult that it's simply impossible for the characters to overcome it.  They should have some small chance of succeeding with any particular plan of action.  But make it hard enough that they're slightly more likely to fail than succeed.  Make it seem like fate has conspired to end their tale here, no matter what they try.  So when they do finally succeed (after about the third or fourth attempt -- fudge the dice a bit if it starts to drag on), they can feel that they have succeeding in defying fate.

And, you know, maybe you've planted clues, however vague, throughout the rest of the house suggesting ways they might defeat him.  Perhaps they noticed chess and checker boards and playing cards in different rooms, deduce he's fond of games, and challenges him to a game for their freedom.  Or maybe some old floor plans show an ancient aquaduct flows right beneath the chamber or courtyard, and they realize that if they could collapse the floor underneath him and send him falling into the aqueduct, it might give them time to escape. 

There are endless options here, but in a nutshell it's a really hard boss-type encounter that, because of the nature of the place, the players (and to a lesser extent the characters) get to witness in a loop.  And the mood of futility should be omnipresent.  Do it right, and your players will think you're a genius.  (Do it wrong, of course, and they'll call you a sadistic bastard.)

mb_webguy:

Basically, design a scenario with a just barely beatable enemy -- you could use something bestial or monstrous , but a more intelligent and conversant foe is better, especially if, once the characters commit themselves to an action and are noticed, the foe politely points out that the last several times they will have tried this method, it ended badly for them.

I'm thinking a Telluric Fairest, with some rather nasty contracts.  Contract of Hours, that one Instant-death Goblin Contract (Of course, now that the King of Time is "mortal", he might think twice about using it), Maybe the Contract of th Forge, and some combat worthy contracts.  True Fae are scarier than Charlatans, due to their moldable Contracts and changeable Kith, but you can still make a pretty fucked up encounter just using changeling traits.  You can even come up with a few goblin contracts of time, if you want. (And better, let an interested character walk away having learned one of the contracts as "loot" if you want).  If you'd rather not use a Fairest for combat, you could do Wizened Telluric/Oracle, Elemental Telluric, or even Ogre Telluric Witchtooth.  Regardless, he should be cosmic and elegant, but unfeeling.

for the moment the players are just going to be chasing one of the king of the clocktower's loyalists. He will lead them into the mansion and try to sneak away will the players are distracted by all of the traps and such. although do like the idea of using the mansion as a staging area to fight the king in a later chapter. although I'm fairly certain the true fae are a bit too powerful for the players at this time.

Earthbound True Fae can be introduced much earlier than Arcadians.  They are designed like a Changeling, but with more creative liberty and less solid limits.  It isn't until you get a True Fae with varying Manifestations and power levels that you get into the danger zone.  Though, it may well still be early.