I got the totem to come out very nice and looking like real lava and all with the cool parts raised and the hot parts lower but when I apply the material to some other objects (just some primitives) the lava looks very flat. This seems to be an issue with the displacement. Do you know why it would work well on the totem but not some other things? I tried using a UV map as the vector input to the whole node set up, that helped a little. I also increased the strength of the displacement which also helped but it never quite got that sex lava rock look like I was able to get on the totem after following this lesson.
Displacement is dependent on object scale with respect to the world. So it sounds like the objects you're applying the shader to are significantly different scale than the totem.
Of course you can just adjust the displacement strength via the math node that I dialed way down. Just raise that value till it displaces the way you want.