The other planets under Sol’s domination had been visited, or at least probed, and to some extent were being colonized and exploited–but on the whole they had proved disappointing. No life to speak of. No intelligent residuum.
-Emil Petaja: The Nets of Space (1969)

To take this phrase out of context, here’s an idea for 4e: INTELLIGENT RESIDUUM. When you melt down an intelligent weapon, you get this stuff. If it’s used to make a new magic item, that item gets the former weapon’s personality.

In powder form, the residuum still possesses intelligence. It can travel on its own, like a vampire in vapor form, and try to possess people for short periods (either to communicate telepathically or to dominate the possessed creature: it’s a Will attack to possess a creature, and a save ends the possession.) The vapor is immune to melee and ranged attacks, but bursts and blasts automatically kill it.

The residuum can, over time, exert enough force to pop the cork on an ordinary residuum vial, but any stronger form of containment will trap it.

What does intelligent residuum want? Well, it depends greatly on personality, but probably to be used in the creation of a powerful item.

The Frost Dungeon

They descended for a long while. The stair spiraled down with no terminus in sight. The light seemed to lead them. The walls grew damp, cold, colder, coming to be covered with a fine patina of frost figures.
Roger Zelazny – Dilvish, the Damned

I like the idea of sensory details, like temperature, informing a dungeon, and there are a lot of dungeon tricks that can be done with ice, especially if one of the PC is a fireball-toting wizard. Furthermore, if the PCs are defeated in an ice dungeon, they’re sure to wake up hanging upside down from the ceiling just as a Wampa beast shows up for dinner.

The Star Labyrinth

“As for myself, in my early years I beamed through the star-labyrinth many times. Why, once I accompanied Priestess Poogli all the way to–”
Emil Petaja – The Nets of Space

Just as the ocean is a dungeon, space can be a dungeon. Let’s say that each star leads only to 2-3 other stars (because of stargates, distance, spice, or some other such nonsense). The PC’s space ship, spelljammer, or astral kayak is essentially plying a space dungeon, with planetary systems as rooms and navigation routes as corridors.

“The Star Labyrinth” is also a cool name. As cool as Princess Poogli? Hard to say.

The Drowned City

Riding along the fringes of this wild place, Orisian could see, faint in its misty heart, the ruined towers of old Kan Avor. The broken turrets and spires of the drowned city rose above the waters like a ghostly ship on the sea’s horizon.
-Brian Ruckley – Godless World: Winterbirth

A half-submerged city is not a completely unique adventure locale: many platformer video games have a water dungeon where you have to pull levers to change the water level. It’s still a cool spot, and if the PCs have to do some dangerous diving to get to the entrance of a half-submerged tower, you can give them some interesting challenges on the way up the tower: a time limit based on holding your breath, for instance. Another fun aspect of amphibious adventuring is that swimming PCs can easily escape water-only enemies, like sharks, and air-only enemies, like birds. You can use this to introduce some difficult puzzle enemies: if the fight is impossible, the PCs can easily submerge, or emerge, to safety.

Here’s an example of cross-pollination between D&D and pulp fantasy:

Roger Zelazny began his series of “Dilvish the Damned” fantasy short stories in 1964. Zelazny was influential on D&D: Gygax says that Zelazny’s Shadow Jack inspired the thief class, and Dilvish’s Elf Boots inspired the Boots of Elvenkind.

In Zelazny’s 1981 Dilvish the Damned story “Tower of Ice”, the influence seems to be going the other way:

Black completed the spell. They remained motionless for a brief while after that. Then: “That’s it?” Dilvish asked.
“It is. You are now protected through the second level.”
“I don’t feel any different.”
“That’s how you should feel.”
“Is there anything special that I should do to invoke its defense, should the need arise?”
“No, it is entirely automatic. But do not let that dissuade you from exercising normal caution about things magical. Any system has its weak points. But that was the best I could do in the time that we had.”

Maybe Zelazny re-invented the concept of second-level spells, but there’s no reason to think he did. And there’s no reason to think he should. An environment where authors are free to borrow from each other is one where they can build on each others’ work. A lot of D&D-influenced fantasy and fantasy-influenced D&D from the 80’s is kind of like the Chthulu Mythos in this way: written by multiple authors, but sharing so many genre assumptions and pieces of lore that they’re practically set in the same universe.

Now here’s something that Zelazny’s “Tower of Ice” can give back to D&D:

He had escaped from Hell itself, after two centuries’ torment. Most of the humans he had known were long dead and the world somewhat changed. Yet the one who had banished him, damning him as he did, remained–the ancient sorcerer Jelerak. In the months since his return, he had sought that one, once the call of an ancient duty had been discharged before the walls of Portaroy. Now, he told himself, he lived but for vengeance. And this, this tower of ice, one of the seven strongholds of Jelerak, was the closest he had yet come to his enemy. From Hell he had brought a collection of Awful Sayings–spells of such deadly potency as to place the speaker in as great a jeopardy as the victim should their rendering be even slightly less than flawless. He had only used one since his return and had been successful in leveling an entire small city with it. His shudder was for the memory of that day on that hilltop, rather than for the icy blasts that now assailed him.

Use Awful Sayings as a form of treasure for wizards. More powerful than spells, they can have campaign-level impications. Once memorized, an Awful Saying stays memorized until you use it – then it is gone forever.

Casting an Awful Saying requires a saving throw. Failure results in some terrible, random, Deck of Many Things-style misfortune happening to the caster and his friends.

Because these spells can only be used once, and they might backfire, they might provide a tantalizing form of temptation/resource management for the wizard.

Example Awful Sayings:
Raze City A city, or an area the size of a city, is completely blasted and destroyed.
Damn A single being is killed and sent to be tortured at the bottom of the Abyss for all eternity.

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“You might call it a game,” said the youth. “When the bell completes its song, several strokes hence, the maze will be laid. You will then have an hour until it strikes again. If you have not found your way out of town and away from here by that time, you will be crushed by the buildings’ rearranging themselves once more.” “And why the game?” Dilvish asked, waiting out another tolling before he heard the reply. “That you will never know, Elfboot, whether you win or lose, for you are only an element of the game. I am also charged to warn you, however, that you may find yourself under attack at various points along whatever route you may choose.”
–Dilvish the Damned, Roger Zelazny

Wow, this sounds more like the setup of a D&D set-piece adventure than it does a piece of fiction! You don’t have to go very far to turn it into quite a usable episode.

This would work quite well in older versions of D&D, with their emphases on mapping and time management, but this adventure would also be a good excuse to bring such elements into a 4e game, as a sort of minigame.

The maze in the story features two guys who keep on popping up, and Dilvish isn’t sure which to trust. This is sort of a disguised liar-and-truthteller problem, with the addition of a time limit, which makes things less cut-and-dried.

There are also fun events like this one:

Immediately the flagstones about him were raised like trapdoors and figures rose up from out of the ground beneath them. There were perhaps two-score men there. Each bore a pikestaff.

Nothing like bad guys popping simultaneously out of 40 trapdoors to tell the PCs “Don’t go this way”.