GM Help Please! Ideas for a 3-Phase Door

[agnesfulton]

Hi friends!

I'm running a Doctor Who one shot (really like a 3-4 shot) based very loosely on one of the adventure seeds in the 10-era GM manual. It involves the Dream Lord.


My party has arrived at the door to the Dream Lord's lair (a hidden annex in a library), and they need to get through the door to meet with the Dream Lord face to face.  My goal is to require 3 "successes" to get through the door - it cannot just be sonic-ed open.  I am hoping for ideas on what challenges to face/how to guide my party to think creatively with their skills and inherent abilities.

The party consists of:
1) 11
2) Jack Harkness
3) Madame Vastra
4) A catkin medic
5) An Ood that has memories of being a random, homebody kind of guy from 1980's Kent - no idea how he became an Ood, but has powerful psychic abilities
6) A skinflap a la Lady Cassandra that has improved on her technique for near-immortality. He's rolled up like a tube and in a hovering jar filled with fluid (so no need to moisturize, haha)

Any thoughts?  I know it's a bizarre group, but I'd like to let their weirdness shine in the challenges. 

[Stormcrow]

Bizarre groups are the most fun in Doctor Who.

Maybe the door brings an opener back to some traumatic event in their life that they must confront and resolve in a better way. The effect is an illusion, but one that is indistinguishable from actually being there. The entire group appears in the dream and can help the opener try to overcome whatever the challenge is. The characters in the illusion will treat the other PCs as if they belong there, even if they weren't there when the real version of the event occurred. If the event is successfully resolved, instead of failed as in the real version, that counts as one "success" to open the door. Now two more PCs must confront and overcome challenges from their pasts.

To pull this off, you'll need to work out details of a traumatic event from each of the characters' pasts. Be prepared to use only three of them. Each challenge should be no longer than a single encounter. The resolution must be more complicated than a simple binary choice like "I should have turned left instead of right." There should be some moral dilemma involved, or else a physical challenge that remains difficult even with all the extra PCs there to help you.

[agnesfulton]

Oh, wow - this is excellent, thank you so much! I think my players would really enjoy this, and I know them well enough to make it worthwhile and challenging.