TerraDave
5ever, or until 2024
From his blog...dynamic traps in all there glory, and nifty rogue manuever. All during an adventure under Castle Greyhawk with Stephen Radney-Macfarland's cool set up.
On Sunday I went up to Stephen Radney-Macfarland's apartment for some 4th Edition D&D. Stephen runs a regular game on Sundays, and I crashed the party so that we could playtest some rules that are in an upcoming sourcebook that both Stephen and I are developing right now. I have to say, I was extremely impressed with his setup. He used a combination of Dwarven Forge setting pieces, Wizards' own Dungeon Tiles, and dozens of hand-painted miniatures and terrain pieces to set up a dungeon diorama that was out of this world. It was a dungeon crawl under Castle Greyhawk and felt very old school (not surprising, since Stephen is very old school in his game philosophies). The game also provided one of my favorite 4E moments so far. The party's rogue was disarming a trap that basically consisted of pressure plates on the floor that, if triggered would drop a giant 2-by-2-square slab of stone down on top of whoever triggered it. These slabs block the hallways as well, and she accidentally triggered the trap and got herself cut off from the rest of the party. She then proceeded to trigger another trap, this one different in that it summoned a Large bar-lgura (I think that's how it's spelled) into the small room where she was trapped. In a sweet move, the rogue managed to use an attack that did a small amount of damage, but more importantly it let her knock the creature off-balance and send it stumbling onto the pressure-plate triggers of one of the giant falling slabs. The slab crashed down on top of the creature, pinning it, and giving us enough time to get to her and help. The image of this elf rogue tripping up the big creature and pushing it into the trap was just so very...D&Desque to me.
