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Hit point damage obviously weakens the party, making them less able to handle combat encounters and more likely to deplete their potions, healing spells, and other resources. Encounters are more likely to kill or incapacitate characters. You can include other effects in hazards beyond ability score and hit point damage. Some hazards reduce a character’s speed, grant him saving throw penalties, reduce his AC, and duplicate spell effects. If you have a hazard you cannot simulate using damage or modifiers, look to the spell lists for effects that mimic its function. Level drain, petrification, and other effects all fall neatly into areas already charted out by spells. For inspiration, page through lists of spells and find effects that appeal to you or fit the mood of your game.

CHAPTER THREE: Worlds Beyond

cripples a party’s ability to use magic. that a caster needs a minimum ability score to use spells of a certain level. Reducing these scores strips away the party’s most powerful abilities and can leave them far more vulnerable.

After deciding how your hazard attacks the characters, you need to determine its saving throw DC, interval, and interval penalty. These three factors tie into how much damage the hazard deals. Ones that inflict a lot of damage should have long intervals or low save DCs unless you want them to quickly overwhelm the characters. For example, a mechanical world features sword blades falling from the sky in place of rain. If you want the characters to immediately sprint for cover when this rain hits, set the damage and save DC high, and the check interval short. If the characters take a lot of damage in a short period of time, they obviously cannot withstand a hazard for long. One of the key pitfalls in hazards lies in their saving throws. If a hazard’s effects reduce a character’s save bonus, either directly or indirectly through ability damage, be sure to keep the initial save DC low. Otherwise, the characters can hit a death spiral where a single, missed save can doom them to successive failures that kill them. In general, lower save DCs work best for hazards. Only the most dangerous obstacles should have DCs as high as 20 or 25, with 10 and 15 the most common ones. Since a hazard can affect every character in the party, a lower DC allows PCs with good saves

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