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Trap an Egyptian-Style Pyramid

Morrow

First Post
I'm running a swashbuckling game set in and around Freeport. The party is made up of five 15th level characters. They are currently traveling to a distant land that has a fantasy Egypt flavor. They will likely end up exploring a pyramid temple/ tomb. I'm trying to come up with some traps that are appropriate to the setting and will challenge a party of this level. Any suggestions?

Morrow
 

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Blackrat

He Who Lurks Beyond The Veil
Well. I'd think some traps that cut their ways. Falling stone-slabs to form walls behind them. Rooms that fill with sand. The boulder rolling down a sloping corridor is classic, I just don't remember where I saw rules to really implement this in D&D. Maybe a corridor with holes in the walls all the way, shooting little darts.
 

Pbartender

First Post
Morrow said:
I'm running a swashbuckling game set in and around Freeport. The party is made up of five 15th level characters. They are currently traveling to a distant land that has a fantasy Egypt flavor. They will likely end up exploring a pyramid temple/ tomb. I'm trying to come up with some traps that are appropriate to the setting and will challenge a party of this level. Any suggestions?

One they reach the bottom, all the entrances way back at the beginning seal shut with immense stone blocks, and the entire tomb starts filling with water from the bottom up. A few secret ways out would make it a little more "fair", and give the characters a chance to escape. Perhaps the exits are closing very slowly... The character can escape, but it's a race against time.

For something a little less deadly, highly contagious diseases sealed in side sarcophagi or liberally spread by contact with the ancient treasures would work.
 

Set

First Post
With 15th level characters, most of the old standbys (crushing room, stone slabs, filling with water, rolling boulders, etc.) are going to be non-events.

"Ooh, another stone slab has fallen! We're trapped! Trapped like ratchets!"

"Put a sock in it, drama queen. One Disintegrate coming up."

The pyramid's creators might have trapped the outer areas with these sorts of traps, which the party will likely blow through, building up a false sense of confidence, as they make it into the inner areas that are trapped with Symbols of whatever and Glyphs of nasty spell X, as well as bound extraplanar creatures or constructs (stone golems in the shape of the guardian of the dead, Anubis, with some sort of cool template to make them a credible threat).

The 'traps' will be more imaginative and potent as they proceed past the 'wimpy' outer traps. Fighting Constructs in a room filled with toxic dust, making the air unbreathable (oh, and poisonous), would be one un-fun example. Why does the toxic dust / 'dead air' not travel? Perhaps the party has to go underwater to get to this room, surfacing into the 'dead air' space from the central pool, creating a natural barrier between the 'good' (dusty, dry, kinda spicey smelling) air in the rest of the pyramid, and this particular room, where the air was purged of oxygen by torch bearing zombies centuries ago. Or maybe there is a spell keeping the air 'bad' in this room. Maybe both. And once the golems are beaten, the keys to the next section can be pried from their head-gear, assembled and used to exit this room and / or get into the sealed inner sanctum, where the stakes only go up.

At some point, swarms of beetles must boil up out of the sand, and fly towards the group in flesh-shredding swarms. Not just beetles, not just flying flesh-stripping beetles, but Fiendish Undead flying flesh-stripping beetles! Yes, this swarm has Spell Resistance, and is pretty resistant to Fire, Cold, etc!

And the big kahuna curse? Anyone who dies in the pyramid rises as a mummy guardian. A half-dozen tomb robber mummies, with varying Rogue levels, wander the pyramid, tasked to make sure that nobody succeeds where they failed!

Finally, the party makes it past the poison and disease, the mummies, the golems, the crushing traps and bewildering passageways, to the great treasures buried with the pharoah, only to discover that he rests lightly. If his treasures are disturbed, he rises to defend them with Outsider-like powers from his 'passed on' status added to his own class abilities, like some sort of Fiendish (or Celestial) Lich.


Random nasty thought. Canopic jars. If one is opened, it attempts to Slay Living / Harm the opener, and if they die from this, their heart is ripped out and occupies the jar. Something extremely big and nasty draws power from this (paragon golem?), and it can be destroyed one of two ways. 1) Beat it to death, while down a party member. 2) Break the jar, which causes it to shut down immediately.

Difficulty? The person killed by the canopic jar can't be raised or resurrected without the jar, and if you break it to kill the Golem, say goodbye to your little friend...


Scrolls of papyrus sealed in ivory tubes that are sealed with molten gold. They have to be pried open, which unseals a guardian curse, genie, poison dust, whatever. Reading the scrolls is not much better, as they are pages from the Book of the Dead, enacting rituals intended to transform the reader into undead guardians of the pyramid!


An admonishment from a Permanant Image to leave this place, or be rewarded with many times your weight in gold! Strange sort of threat... Moving past this image triggers a Polymorph Any Object that turns the triggerer into a statue of gold, but the effect doesn't wear off (and must be removed by Remove Curse from a 19th level caster, or Wish/Miracle type magics). This 'gold' is cursed, and if the statue is carted out by the greedy party, they discover that any part removed from it reverts to it's original form. A sword will become steel again. An arm torn free will become flesh and bone... If enough parts are pulled free that the statue is only half it's original mass, the spell ends and the remainder also becomes flesh and blood (and appears freshly dead from massive trauma and blood loss, since it's had half of it's body ripped away by this point).
 
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Slife

First Post
You know, the lotus is an archetypically Egyptian flower.

Black lotus extract is contact poison that damages con.

So have some mummy/anubis statue guardians coated in it. Use grappling.
 

Pbartender

First Post
Set said:
With 15th level characters, most of the old standbys (crushing room, stone slabs, filling with water, rolling boulders, etc.) are going to be non-events.

"Ooh, another stone slab has fallen! We're trapped! Trapped like ratchets!"

"Put a sock in it, drama queen. One Disintegrate coming up."

*ZAP!*

"Ooh, there's another stone slab behind the first! We're still trapped! Still trapped like ratchets!"

"Put a sock in it, drama queen. I'll have more Disintegrates in the morning, after we rest for eight hours."

"Ooh, the room is filling with water! We don't have eight hours to rest! We'll die like ratchets!"

;)

It all depends on players' resource management... If you spring a doorway-sealing stone slab on them on the way out, after they've already spent all their big guns fighting the lich-mummy at the bottom of the pyramid, and they can't spend 8 hours resting to get the right spells back, because the whole place is filling with water, then it starts looking like trouble even for high-level characters.

In addition, if, for example, the stone is thick enough that it takes three disintegrates to get through it, and Wizard only has two left, then they're still stuck and they have to start looking for other alternatives.
 

Oryan77

Adventurer
Set said:
With 15th level characters, most of the old standbys (crushing room, stone slabs, filling with water, rolling boulders, etc.) are going to be non-events.
Trust what he says....the Egyptian god Set should know all about pyramids :p
 

Hand of Evil

Hero
Epic
Area effect, gas, water, sand, swarms.

An interesting one I have used was three rooms, each smaller that the one above, players start at the highest. Trigger in all three rooms, the first room starts to fill with water. The players have to open the door leading to the next room or stop the water. Opening the door to the next room flooded the passage way and opening the next door would empty the passage way but flood the next room. Becuase the passage ways were different lenghts and rooms different sizes the players had to be under water different amounts of time.

They also took a pounding from being flushed. ;)
 

Thanael

Explorer
Energy drain wards. Cleric-y necromancy stuff. (Greater) Glyphs of Warding with the Spell Glyph option and loaded with death spells or reversed healing spells. Zone of Harm.

And of course Contagion for that Curse of the Pharaoh stuff.

2E's Complete Necromancer Handbook has some nice Necromantic spells: Death Ward for example.
 

Kid Charlemagne

I am the Very Model of a Modern Moderator
Pbartender said:
One they reach the bottom, all the entrances way back at the beginning seal shut with immense stone blocks, and the entire tomb starts filling with water from the bottom up.

Even better - it starts filling up with sand. More sensible and easy to acquire, and the PC's are much less likely to have potions of sand-breathing.
 

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