I warned you about stairs.

[S] Adventures: Descend

I played a scenario similar to this a looooooooooooooooong time ago.

It was a gigantic tower, and all of the characters had become sealed inside of it, and besieged by a horde of zombies and other undead. The only way out was up.

It was a large spiral staircase that clung to a central pillar in the tower, so we could only see a certain distance in front of or behind ourselves before our view was blocked by the curvature of the staircase and central pillar. At various points, there were either doorways and chambers inside of the large central pillar, or narrow catwalks that branched off into the dark void between the central staircase and the outer structure of the tower.

There were rooms and chambers in the outer structure; once you got off the ground floor; but the danger was that if we took time to explore these outer rooms, then we might become cut-off from the central stair by the ever-pressing zombie horde that was slowly but surely following us up.

I remember having a scenario where my PCs had cast sleep on a target and decided to push him down a SPIRAL staircase. The rules for just falling didn't seem quite relevant enough for the situation, so I wound up multiplying the fall damage by 1.5 to account for horizontal movement as well.

For a moment I considered trying to use that. Then I realized that on the game I wanted to use it on, half of them will have fly and just carry the other half. Crisis averted.

I'm reminded of watching a video for first edition D&D. You and your group get to the door and kick it down (and if you fail, well you get to kick it again) and if there was a monster in it, it was like a Jack-in-the-box and you had to fight it in the hallway.

But yeah, accidentally fainting or getting sleep cast on you or anything while on stairs could be very bad business. Probably add -1 to all skills for every 1d6 damage you took in falling damage due to stairs (You are going to be sore as hell, too sore to want to do anything but go home)/

Hmmm...