Morgrim's Traps and encounters - Part 5 #

The final chapter of Morgrim's Traps and Encounters. If by this point in your dungeons these, divers and trespassers on your unholy land haven't met a grim fate, this is where you deploy the big guns.

A dragon to protector your lair #

Pretty self explanatory, you make sure your lair is above a lake of fire with a single collapsing bridge. This way the dragon can set up and breathe fire down that bridge. Finally you want to take full advantage of legendary actions and lair actions to give your players a hard time, and when the dragon is injured it should stay well away from the range of any melee-focused players. A dragon's priority targets should always be ranged enemies. When a dragon is grounded, you can safely assume it is arrogant and "playing" with its food, but once it is keeping a good distance away it will be extremely difficult to kill a dragon considering their flight speed is just under 3x most player's movement speeds. Naturally, this dragon is employed by you, so it will receive a fair majority of the wealth while you receive the majority of magical trinkets and doodads. A mutually agreeable contract.

If you cannot find a dragon, you can supplement this by making a Dracolich, and forcing it to play to your demands by possessing its phylactery.

Morgrim #

Naturally, you need to make sure you, yourself are geared to the teeth. Ensure you have some flavour of adamantine armour, whether it is adamantine woven into the fabric of your robes, or adamantine plate armour, or whatever. This neutralises any critical hits which are frequent occurences of the death of fellow Liches. Secondly, you want a powerful magical focus. I would recommend either a Staff of Power or a Staff of the Magi, I would personally recommend a Staff of Power as it makes your spells ever so much more deadly. Next I would ensure you have a magical floating sword... I possessed "Naegling, The Sword not Held", which can be invoked to break the armour, shields or weapons of an enemy(a -2 modifier applied to it on a hit with 3 charges), with a +9 to hit and 4D12 damage. Why must this sword not be held? You need a hand free for any Somatic spells you cast. Finally for equipment, you prepare Draupnir, the Ring Dripper. Naturally while someone is in your dungeon, you spy on them and give them gifts and be helpful to them... Drip for them Rings of Action Surge that are apparently uncursed... and when the time comes, dominate them and use that action in your favour.

Regarding spell strategy, your 4 most important spells in my opinion are dimension door, counterspell, power word kill and finger of death. Your objective will be to whittle down your enemy, and then ideally use finger of death so you have a thrall to do your bidding. You can then cleanly obliterate another with Power Word Kill, and then should they counter spell or throw something unexpected to attempt to neutralise it... how cute... counterspell and be done with their nonsense.

Of course, Dimension door is your get out of jail free card. As this dungeon is yours, you will set it up, just so, that you can teleport with it wherever you wish. This is ideally used in combination with forms of healing.

For opening strategy, you should be invisible. It is unlikely they have truesight or something to detect you quite so easily.

Now for Phylactery strategy. Firstly, your phylactery should have several glyphs of warding, one which is a wish to teleport it to your own private little plane if its destruction, and another which is a wish to undo its destruction. This private little plane should be a demiplane, set up with alternating glyphs of warding of your own special selection of explosively deadly little glyphs. Naturally to confuse people, plastic imitation phylacteries and phylacteries of rival liches should be in here too.

Finally, if they do manage to try and escape with it and have slain your employee... give them a generous retirement package from the Dragon's hoard in exchange for your phylactery.

The Final trap #

Naturally the final trap is that this tome of traps is a trap itself. A wish spell is glyphed to this final page... A wish for your total and complete obliteration from all planes of existence and non-existence including and not limited to any manner of revival.

Published on 2026/03/09