I need to come up with an aquatic/ water themed dungeon but all my ideas are horribly cliched

I need to come up with an aquatic/ water themed dungeon but all my ideas are horribly cliched.
Can anyone help with some brainstorming?

Yeah, I got time to kill. What have you come up with so far?

The usual shit. Sewers, cisterns, swampy temples full of lizards.
All of them done to death, I feel.

So you don't really have a location or theme yet beyond "water"? What role does it play in the campaign? Does it have any counterparts?

Think of an interesting non-aquatic/water themed dungeon.

Now flood it with water.

Right, so I had a few ideas for a dungeon that stuck with me.

The first was a trap where the PCs fall through a floor into a pit that would fill up with water. Of course, the PCs could just wait till the water level rises to the top, but 2 giant squids would come out of the water pipes and start attacking. The PCs would have 3 rounds to act before it would turn into underwater combat.

Make them float on corpses to get across something.

Why would you need to though? The water level would get high enough soon.

...

Water is poison. Water is acid. Nasty animals in the water. Etc.

Nah, that sounds too hard.

This would take considerable planning, but:

>multi-level dungeon (a la Ocarina of Time water temple)
>On a platform in the middle of the entry level are three stones
>one resembles a sun
>one resembles a raindrop
>one resembles a snowflake
>entry level is the topmost of three, and there is a ladder visible that goes all the way down
>in snowflake mode, the water freezes and the entry level becomes a solid floor of ice
>in raindrop mode, the bottom level is filled with water (the water level reaches the middle level), and the middle level rooms are accessible by swimming
>in sun mode, there is no water

Obviously needs more in terms of content, probably puzzles, but that's what my sleep-deprived mind has to offer.

The next idea I had was to approach water in all 3 of it's forms; solid, liquid and gas. The PCs had to complete the solid and gas rooms before they could move on to the liquid room.

The solid room was a hockey arena where the PCs would have to challenge an equal sized group of ice mephits. First to 2 goals wins and gets to keep the puck (A diamond).

The gas room I forget about, but it would involve steam and glass. There would also be steam mephits that would become invisible in the steam.

Liquid room would have the PCs sail across some magical in-door lake while dealing with rocks, rough weather and water elementals that would board and try to stop them from reaching a lighthouse at the end of the lake.

I still think that a flooded "regular" dungeon can be great. Maybe an ancient steam-powered factory used by giant, partially flooded as big pipes broke down. There is people in there who use the remaining working stuff to live and do things (hot pressured water trap, but also for heating, huge giant press which are not working used as the roof of several houses, furnace used as a prison...). There may also be wandering treasure hunters, looking for old usable technologies. And you add a lot of water to all of this

Doesn't have to be the entire dungeon. Or even deadly amounts of damage, just enough to make it a preferable alternative.

I like this idea.

How about an ancient water temple located in what is now a dried lake bed.

The party must figure out how to traverse the temple and solve it's puzzles now that the water that everything was based on is all gone.

You have a big aerial structure (like planets gravitating around several axis ) and each of the "rock" gravitating is surrounded by a big globe of water, attracted by the rock. Sometimes the "gravity" that pull the water around a rock stop, and it fell in a big splash, but is catched by another rock (surrounded by water or not), sometimes two rocks blend,or are sufficiently near to stick the two globs of water together. You may add rooms accessible like that (or rooms inside the rock), streams of water that go in whichever direction... You can also add levers that alter the cycle and so on.

>(a la Ocarina of Time water temple)
Stopped reading right there.

I'm not sure how you plan on adventurers going underwater etc, but here's my idea
Sent to find town that's now lost to a dense fog, no one makes it out. As they get deeper and deeper it's wetter and colder, like if a humid day was also cold. Visibility is super poor and is worse as they get deeper into this valley filled with massive trees. Eventually everyone's having breathing issues as they are aspirating water. Some caster has broken ranks from bbeg and gives breathing wards to team.
proceed on but now you can have random swimming monsters overhead

I mean I was just trying to create a visual, but alright.

in fact, it could even be something else than water, like some kind of thick darkness (the kind of atmosphere in the upside-down from stranger things)

A tidal reef where different levels are above and under water at different times. This changes each encounter.

They walk into a room, look up, and see pic related. Visibility is low. They are beset by sharks and other aquatic nasties which can "fly" through this room. But the party is bound to the ocean floor as if it were dry land and the water's edge were the sky.

Have a dungeon that fills with water as the party progresses. About halfway through, the party will be in waist high water and be trudging through, their mobility hindered, which will be an issue due to aquatic monsters that are unhindered by the water.

The final room, the characters must stay afloat and swim for the final fight/puzzle/whatever.

Then as they make their way out, it slowly drains again.

I like this.

well, maybe you can still let the dungeon fills, but now they can access new parts of it (like some kind of bonus/treasure rooms they might have saw earlier but which were unatainable)

Im just gonna say that you actually stick the cliches, they may seem uninteresting but they do make for a great campaign. If you fill the thing with cliches then the parts that arent, or are slightly different can really shine by comparison. Also, the cliches often make great stories, they are cliches for a reason

post cool water enemies

How about a shipwreck?

Go play Aquaria. It's on Steam for $10, and it'll get you in an inspired mood.

>but all my ideas are horribly cliched
cliche isn't always bad

exploring a giant wrecked ship is cliche, but it also means you can have undead privateers and a whole lot of treasure