Soul Cave

Here is another installment of exTRAPaganza, our Thursday over-the-top trap series. 

Inside the cave are pictographs depicting some very dark and evil stuff from a very long time ago. The pictographs get darker and more disturbing the deeper you delve.

A hard Intelligence (Religion) check detects that some of the pictographs, while in the same style, depict more modern subjects than the rest.

At each chamber, the ancient evil that is present steals a bit of the targets’ souls. Each target must make a hard Wisdom saving throw. On a failure, the target loses 1d4 points of Wisdom. However, this point loss has no effect until the target’s Wisdom reaches 0. At this point, the target dies and the soul becomes a small pictograph in the chamber.

The Wisdom damage can be healed normally, but once reduced to zero, only a wish will bring back killed characters. Once the caverns are exited, the Wisdom loss turns to temporary Wisdom loss, and can be healed accordingly.