Tailor-Made Prisons in Tabletop Games.
- Anima: Beyond Fantasy has, among others, the Tower of the End where the poor fellow who killed Abel was incarcerated by Imperium, after becoming inadvertently something much worse. It's described as a pocket dimension where time repeats again and again, and he's bound with thousands of chains able to retain a god
- The Champions setting includes Stronghold, a prison specifically designed to hold supervillains. And unless your GM changes things around, it does a pretty good job of holding them.
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- In Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition Tharizdun, The Chained God. Ironically, Torog, the patron of slavers, torturers and prison guards as well.
- The Ravenloft campaign setting. Yes, the setting is composed of prisons tailored to hold and torment a very special guest.
- A large chunk of the Meta Plot of the setting (back when it had one) was woven around the Lich Azalin's elaborate plans to get out of his particular custom prison regardless of the fallout. He almost succeeded once, with another notable failure. In an unusual take on this trope, so far the prison is still holding.
- Although there is a tendency for significant figures of other campaign settings to make their escape one way or another.
- There's Lord Soth of Dragonlance, who was released for just completely giving up on either escape or furthering any of his goals. This either made him too boring to keep around, or made him the first to make the personal change required to be released. Ravenloft punishes the Dread Lords by forever denying them their evil obsessions. Giving up that obsession (briefly) could be considered redemptive. Or a Dragonlance author was annoyed that Ravenloft had usurped a character she wanted to use and let him out.
- And, of course, the demi-god/lich Vecna, whose complicated escape was engineered well before he was ever imprisoned and allowed to him to obtain true godhood and invade Sigil simultaneously, nearly toppling the D&D cosmology entirely. The particulars of his escape are sometimes considered the canon reason for the changes in 3rd Edition.
- Several editions of D&D (not to mention 3.5's spiritual successor Pathfinder) have had the imprisonment spell, which puts the target in stasis and traps them underground until such time as the proper counterspell is cast.
- Pathfinder ups the ante with the high-level spell binding, which throws in a number of relevant tropes: the caster can make the binding ritual more reliable by having additional casters as assistants, and the effect comes in six different flavors, including physically binding the target to one location, sending it into a decades-long sleep, permanently banishing it to a separate plane of existence, or sealing it inside some small object.
- The 3.5 Edition supplement Fiendish Codex 1: Hordes of the Abyss has Layer 73: the Wells of Darkness, which is an entire demiplane containing nothing but these. Doubles as a combination of a 24-pack of sealed evils and, since most prisoners can't communicate from within their cells, And I Must Scream.
- 5th Edition goes even further with the Maze spell. Powerful, boss level monsters are capable of ignoring most powerful disabling spells with their "Legendary Resistances", which lets them automatically succeed saving throws when they fail. The Maze spell seems to be custom designed to get around that limitation, as Maze does not give the enemy a saving throw and it requires an intelligence check, rather than a saving throw, to escape.
- The Pathfinder adventure path Legacy of Fire introduces a construct called the tophet that's essentially an ambulatory Tailor-Made Prison. They're often commanded to convey prisoners out into the desert at noon... or underwater. (And that's just the ones that don't have nasty enchantments built right in.)
- The god Rovagug was trapped in one of these by an alliance of all other gods to stop him from devouring reality. He's sealed in a prison plane known as the Dead Vault located at the center of the planet Golarion (which is itself referred to as The Cage by interstellar observers), forged by the gods. One component of his prison, the Star Towers which prevent him from hearing the prayers of his worshippers, has been crumbling since their benevolent creator become the malevolent Zon-Kuthon, and on occasion his spawn escape.
- Exalted: While not for a single individual, the prison-realm of the Yozis fits this trope perfectly. It was made from the mutilated body of Malfeas, the King of Primordials, and reinforced with the "surrender oaths," a ritual combination of physical and spiritual torture intended to permanently bind the creators of the world to the body of their King, such that they could never escape.
- As appropriate to this trope, the Yozis have struggled for Ages to free themselves from their prison. Their most recent attempt was the creation of the Infernal Exalted, though it remains to be seen whether this plan will work any better than their previous ones.
- While this trope applies to all the Yozi to some extent, Oramus, the Dragon Beyond the World has an even more extreme example. With nigh-omnipotent control over the concept of Boundaries (physical and abstract), the gods and Exalted feared that any binding, no matter how clever, wouldn't be enough to lock him away permanently. Thus, in addition to the surrender oaths and being placed in Malfeas, they also fashioned him into his own prison, breaking his seven wings into restraints that he couldn't simply ignore or command.
- Legend of the Five Rings has the Tomb of Iuchiban, built when the Bloodspeaker was captured and turned out to be unkillable. The tomb encircles him with multiple levels of mundane and magical wards, and surrounds those with a Death Course of traps — not to keep him in, but to kill any of his followers trying to free him.
- Mage: The Awakening has a spell called "Oubliette", which forces someone into a nightmarish pocket dimension, where all sense of space and time breaks down, they see and feel future images of themselves at different points of their imprisonment, and are physically and mentally tortured. Using this spell will ding your Karma Meter unless you're at such a low Wisdom that trapping someone in a prison of inescapable eternal torment doesn't bother you.
- In Planescape, if the Lady of Pain decides, for whatever reason, that simply passing over you and letting her shadow reduce you to shredded meat isn't the right punishment, she seals you away in a personalised planar labyrinth, a "Maze" as the locals call it. There's always a portal out, though the trick is finding it before you go utterly mad or die of old age.
- And of course there's the persistent rumor that Sigil itself is a tailor made prison. For the Lady of Pain. Yup, the absolute supernatural ruler of the City of Doors is unable to leave.
- Scion has a Justice Boon called "Personal Prison" where the subject is tossed into an inescapable prison for years to face the true horror of their crimes... and then the effect ends, and they realize that their experience lasted a few minutes in real time.
- Warhammer 40,000: The C'Tan, being ancient evil gods that have only recently woken up, tended to get hit with this trope. Strictly past tense at this point.
- The Nightbringer was trapped in a two-part dimensional prison with his star-eating ship of the same name. Uriel Ventris prevented the ship from being freed, but not the entity itself.
- The Martian Dragon is believed to remain trapped in a prison the God-Emperor himself fashioned for it. Which means it was on Terra at some point.
- The Outsider was supposedly trapped in an extra-galactic prison by it's kin, who feared it. But the Tyranids are giving that part of space a very wide berth, so...
- This has been downplayed after the 5th edition retcon, as Necrons revolted and enslaved the C'tan. They now keep the C'tan in Tesseract Labyrinths, which are basically Pokéballs made by Doctor Who. However, said labyrinths are not totally reliable, and there is also the problem of what happens if multiple shards of the same C'tan merge together. Namely, a pissed off star god who is very upset with its former slaves...
