Three Bears Medium Difficulty, 4-7 Players, Level 6-9

"If it's black, fight back, if it's brown, lie down, if it's white, say goodnight."

— A rule for bear encounters (don't apply to humans)

Setup

This encounter is designed to be played when one of the players is missing from the session. It involves rescuing their character, but the missing player doesn't have to be involved in combat.

To start, the players wake up from a long rest, and the character of the missing player is not around! It is unclear where they have gone, but a perception check of 10 will show you some bear tracks. The players will walk a short ways and find that the tracks lead to an entrance to a cave, a house, whatever makes sense in the terrain that they are in. After walking into a small hallway, they find a locked door. The door cannot be opened, and the lock seems rusted shut. The lock can be broken with a STR 10 check, and the door with a STR 18 (if they don't think of going for the lock itself).

Black Bear

The first room is very cluttered, with dust and old trinkets everywhere. Large wooden cabinets make it hard to move around—everybody's movement speed is halved. Large characters will be unable to squeeze into certain parts of the room. Some things to have lying around the room:

1. An umbrella stand filled with various umbrellas. Every few minutes, one umbrella opens up slightly and devours another umbrella. They are replenished by a nearby large potted tree that grows new umbrellas. The tree also grows the 300gp gilded flower that you can use in the Summon Fey spell. The flower can be identified with a perception check of 18.
2. A single bowling lane with bowling pins made of fire. The bowling ball is made of ice. Nothing particularly strange happens if the user tries to bowl, but an athletics check of 17 will get them a strike. The bowling pins extinguish if they are hit by the ball.
3. A cactus with well-made fedoras on the end of its arms. You need to pluck the spikes out before putting one on or you will take 5 HP of piercing damage.
4. Several large hourglasses filled with sparkly sand, flowing very slowly. They have the names of random NPCs that the players met a while back and likely will never see again on them, as well as many random names on them.
5. Paintings of people undergoing horrific transformations. A human with spider legs sprouting out of their torso, a dwarf with arms becoming tentacles. If the players look at the paintings for too long, the transformation completes.
6. A wooden cabinet with drawers containing:
   1. A large peacock feather
   2. Several golf balls made of solid gold
   3. A silk boxing glove, which gives the user 1d12 damage on an unarmed strike
   4. A letter written on thick hippo skin that reads "Help, I'm a hippo" in Sylvan
   5. A baked potato that is still warm and fresh and tastes delicious
   6. A large wheel of cheese, which appears to be somehow layered such that every few inches you cut in reveals a different type of cheese, including cheese like mozzarella, which isn't normally made in wheels.
   7. A foot-tall oak tree with very small acorns. If you try and touch the oak tree, a squirrel jumps out of another drawer and attacks you. The squirrel has the following stats:

      STR 2 (-4)

      DEX 11 (+0)

      CON 9 (-1)

      INT 2 (-4)

      WIS 10 (+0)

      CHA 4 (-3)

      Armor Class: 10 (natural armor)
      Hit Points: 1 (1d4 - 1)
      Speed: 30 ft
      Senses: Darkvision 30ft., Passive Perception 10
      Keen Smell: Advantages on Wisdom (Perception) checks that rely on smell
      Action: Bite. Melee Weapon Attack: +0 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 1 piercing damage.
      

7. A fish tank with an octopus that cannot speak but can gesticulate. It has an INT of 15 and will be helpful if you feed it a fish from another tank nearby.

The crux of this puzzle is a large door at the other end of the room. Bear tracks lead across the room to the new door. There is no door knob, but there are hinges on the right side. The door cannot be broken. In the center of the door is an ornate carving of a black bear's face. To open the door, the players have to scare the bear by stretching out their arms and looking as large as possible. This will cause the carving of the bear to run off the side of the door, across the walls, and eventually disappear into a crack in the floor. If the players are confused, the octopus can gesticulate advice if they feed them a fish.

Brown Bear

This next room is a very boring cube with not much in it, about 30 feet wide and 100 feet long, with a very tall ceiling. The ground is packed dirt, with a stone path going across it. Bear tracks are visible in the dirt going through the door you entered by, to the door on the other side. The door on the other side is also impossible to open, with a brown bear carved into the surface. There is no knob.

On one of the walls, there is a large painting of an elf playing dead (or perhaps actually dead) surrounded by large brown bears. On the other side, there are massive portraits of musical instruments on black backgrounds, illuminated by spotlights. A perception check of 17 can reveal that there are small bottles of clear liquid next the instruments.

If a player tries to touch the paintings, they are transported into them. The other players can see them painted in acrylic on the surface of the painting, and the player can only see inky blackness, except for a spotlight illuminating the instrument and a bottle. The bottle contains turpentine.

The player needs to pour the turpentine on the instrument to get it out of the painting and then on themselves to get out. The player undergoes no damage when being removed from the painting, but it is fun to get horrific with the descriptions and have only the parts of their body, such as arms, that have had the turpentine poured on them come out of the painting and just flop around on the floor.

Once the instruments have been taken out of the painting, a player has to play the notes D-E-A-D on the instrument to make the brown bear slowly vanish into the door, followed by the door itself vanishing. Fun fact: when I first ran this encounter, one player, who was a saxophone player, joined virtually. He was doodling on the saxophone during the game, and was the first to figure out that you had to play the notes D-E-A-D, and when he figured it out he actually played it on his saxophone!

Polar Bear

When the door is opened, a blast of cold air hits the players. Anybody not wearing a very heavy coat takes 10 HP of cold damage, and continues to take 5 HP of cold damage every minute (so every 10 turns in combat). On the other side of the door is what looks like a frozen lake. If they walk out onto the frozen lake, any large player makes an acrobatics saving throw of DC 13. On a fail, they fall into the water, take 10 HP cold damage, and have to swim out.

There is a snowstorm, which sets visibility to 15ft. They can hear a growling sound in the distance, as well as yelling from the character of whichever player is missing this session!

If they walk towards the noise, which they should because it has the missing character, they encounter a polar bear with a collar around its neck. The collar chained to a metal spike in the ground, giving it a radius of 15 feet to move around within. The bear has the following stats:

The bear does not attack the captive, and when the players kill it, they can free the captive player who is tied up on the ice. They can easily walk through the doors that they came in through, and out into whichever terrain they were last in.