Dungeon Master Forum

I notice that I can have a timed dungeon (as per the labyrinth example) and a scroll which says how long there is left to complete the game.

What I would like to do more (it seems much more useful) is have the timer inactive until a certain point. For example, the player can take months to get through my dungeon to level 15 billion and then come across a reactor which he has to blow up. The game should then say "Right, you have an hour to escape from the dungeon before the reactor blows" and the levels suddenly fill with monsters trying to stop you escaping as a final challenge before the end of the game.

Can I do this, or does the timer have to start at the beginning?

You can do this, just not with that built in timer mechanism.

Just activate a relay with a long delay, and kill the party at the end of that delay...

True, would be nice to have it available properly though. After all, there's no way of giving the party a scroll telling them how long they have left using your method

No, not an exact number (though there may be soon!)

You could always have a few items with increasing levels of warning attached to their description fields (or an orb that starts as green, goes to yellow, orange, red, etc...) and opportune SWAP_GLOBALS also triggered by your relays.