I'm GMing Pathfinder 1e this weekend and my players will be delving through a cave that was once a silver dragon's lair. I want to have a bunch of encounters planned out so that I can stretch this crawl out to the end of session, since we have a guest player who we don't want in the story for too long or too short.
Stuff they will find so far:
-Group of Frost Giants in the entrance. They don't speak common, but are pretty chill guys if a player remembers to cast Tongues.
-SO MANY SPIDERS, while escaping down a spiraling cavern. I'll have them crawling out of the walls and stuff.
-A Black Pudding. Never used one of these, and I don't think my players would know what to do immediately.
-Long underwater cave with some aberrations in it, maybe gibbering mouthers. Also a gigas clam with a huge pearl to lure in the party ninja.
-Big ending surprise - it's not a silver dragon's lair, it's a black dragon's lair, and this whole plot was him luring you to get eaten. Why is this cave so long? Because the black dragon just uses his underwater secret entrance/exit for his schemes.
Party is level 10 and there will be 5 of them, 6 with animal companion. Does anybody know any good encounters for a group like this? Doesn't need to be system specific - I'd love ideas for cool cave traps and stuff.
I think, even if it’s not a silver dragons layer, have a fake version of the silver dragons larking corner.
Silver dragons LOVE heroes and will collect and make littl shrines to them. Maybe have the black dragon sort of try to imitate that but in a poor or thrown together way that gives the party a chance to realize something is up?
Like “oh hey we found this old sword but it’s thrown on the ground on a pile of coins that’s weird silver dragons would be more ornate about this”
on the same theme the deeper they go the more decayed and undead things should get. Like have rotting corpses of decaying animals that get up and attack them. or the pools of water under stalagmites becoming foul and gross.