D&D General Your Best Traps +

[James Gasik]

Speaking of Grimtooth's traps, one of my favorites had the players on a narrow walkway, above a pit of molten wax. Then along comes a golem that is advancing on them, and there's nowhere to go but back.

Should they attack, they discover the true horror- it's a flint golem!

 

[James Gasik]

I've long had ideas on how to somehow use highly-localized gravity wells to mess up mapping and-or spatial orientation, but I've never been able to figure out how the result would work; and as one of my players is a high-degree physicist I gotta get it right!

Best I can think of is having what seems like a level passage actually lead to a different level.

As for more conventional traps, my favourites aren't so much pit traps as chute traps - a pit-like trap leading to a chute or slide that harmlessly spits the victim(s) out in a different area (a jail cell works best!) on a lower level with different hazards while completely cutting them off from the rest of the party.

What you need is a tesseract dungeon! Some older issues of Dragon talked about these, I want to say it was #17 and #38. One of the features I recall was a room where the floor and the ceiling were both "down" to people who entered it from doors on those levels. Thus the party enters the room, and there are enemies on the "ceiling" shooting arrows down at them!

 

[Shiroiken]

I've had a couple, but they might have been stolen from somewhere and I'd forgotten about it. Both are from AD&D dungeon crawls.

Party sees an open pit 20 ft deep with (poisoned) spikes at the bottom. It's easy to jump across with a running start... except for the permanent Wall of Force halfway across. Character takes 1d6 damage jumping into the wall, 2d6 for the fall, then hits 1d6 spikes that do 1d6 damage each (plus save vs. Poison or die). The barbarian was pissed.

Party is in volcano, walking above a lava flow. Under the dirt they're walking on is a glass floor that's been affected by the Glasssteel spell, which makes it as strong as steel until dispelled. The passageway is then blocked by a Blade Barrier. The obvious solution is to cast Dispel Magic, which not only dispels the blade barrier, but the glasssteel spell, causing the glass to break under the weight of the party, who's then dropped into a lake of lava. Fortunately for the party, they'd wisely selected fire resistance spells (going into to a volcano after all), so no one actually died from it.

 

[James Gasik]

That's some Keraptis-level evil genius at work, Shiroiken! I approve.

One I remember a friend of mine using was one of the "almost real" illusion spells to create an illusory bridge over a very deep chasm. If the party walked on the bridge, they were fine. If they disbelieved the bridge, however...

 

[Stormonu]

Lone skeleton in a hall, holding a rope that goes into the ceiling. Rope is connected to a falling block. If the skeleton lets go or is killed, the stone falls and blocks the hallway.

 

[James Gasik]

Sometimes it's the little things, lol. I have players who, rather than actually roll dice to disarm traps, will ask me for excruciating detail how a trap works in order to "MacGyver" their way around it. Feeling the need to teach them a lesson, I had them come across a large room 15' wide and 50' long. There was an idol in the center of the room with a big open mouth.

One of the players is like "aha, I bet something is fired out of the idol if we get close! Fighter, hug the wall and hold your shield up, and we'll see if it can turn to face us!"

The Fighter does so, and sure enough, the idol turns and fires darts at him, which his shield blocks.

"Great, you stay there, and I'll go past you!"

He moves ahead, past the Fighter, who is continuing to block a barrage of darts...and promptly falls into a trapdoor ahead of him.

 

[Richards]

I had a trap I was pretty proud of: a nosferatu (undead vampire who casts no reflections in mirrors) had a mirror of opposition in his bedroom and a permanent darkness spell centered on an unlit chandelier hanging from the middle of the ceiling. The party is trying to find him, enter his completely dark bedroom, can tell it's magical darkness because they can hear the crackling flames in the fireplace, and dispel the darkness. Now they can see what's in the room...meaning they trigger the mirror of opposition and the first four PCs closest to the mirror have their own duplicates exit the mirror and try to kill them. (And naturally, that's when the nosferatu makes his appearance as his hidden coffin room is behind a secret door in his bedroom's closet and he's been waiting for them to trigger the mirror....)

Johnathan

 

[Joshy]

The Room:
Players enter a room with an hourglass on the wall across and a number of pedestals equal to the number of players minus 1.
Each pedestal has a game or puzzle half completed. You can only move a single piece of any puzzle. When someone does this for the first time a ghastly wail sounds and the doors slam shut, they can't be opened. A little girl, barely visible, and lightly glowing appears pointing at the wall with the hourglass. The sand in said hourglass is now lightly glowing blue and an obvious button below it. The players have about 3 rounds before the sand empties.

If they press the button the sand magically pulls itself back up and the hourglass restarts, all the game and puzzle pieces return to their original state. Every time the button is pressed the room feels a bit less vibrant, a bit colder, a little darker, and the little girl seems to be a bit more faded. There seems to be less sand and the sand seems to have just a bit more glow. But at the same time none of these changes seem to be true, almost dream like really. After the reset the little girl is now standing in front of one of the pedestals pointing at part of the game/puzzle and mouthing something that can neither be heard, nor understood. If the part she is pointing to is moved. then the next time the button is pressed she appears at a different game/puzzle. But even then all the games and puzzles reset.

Sooner or later they the sand will fall. When it does the girl will look towards the group and for the first time her face is truly visible and all that can be seen is sadness. All the light slowly drains from the room until nothing can be seem except the lightly glowing sand and then even that fades away. When nothing can be seen the lights return and the doors are open. The players are fine but they feel like they forgot something important, like waking from a dream, a slight yearning to return.

DM notes: Every time the button is pushed roll some hidden dice and take some notes.



Sorry this is less of a trap. I realized in the middle of writing but I kind of wanted to finish it. I have used this as a main hook in a few campaigns. Players usually want to know more about it and it is easy to tie other things to it.

Low Int DC ability check finds that the little girl has the same face as someone related to a party member or is some random npc child from so and so.

For some reason the big bad is interested in the place and it cause the players to come to all kinds of assumptions but in reality the big bad went through the same thing and is also interested. But found out that the party has been sniffing around and is now sure that there must be powerful secrets to the room.

 

[Joshy]

Sorry about the last one, here's another and I'll even make it short:

The Offering:
While traveling through a forest far from civilization the party notices that it has been getting a bit foggy with a chill to the air. The further they travel the less animal life there seems to be, it's quieter for sure. As there traveling they smell an extremely appetizing smell. At first it is faint but then it quickly gets stronger.

If the party follows the smell they will come a cross a perfectly circular clearing. There is no fog and the place just feels right. In the center of the clearing is a table large enough to fit the whole party with a magnificent feast. The food is extremely fresh, the smell is so good it eels like it is almost pulling the players in, the warmth can be seen radiating from the cooked food and the drinks still have ice in them.


The truth is that this is not a trap but an offering. A creature or group of creatures (Usually pixies or fairies) have laid out this Heroes Feast as a bribe to get some help with the local situation.

 

[Blue]

Three I've used in the past year.

One was a simple pressure plate trap filling a 5'x5' section of a 5' wide hallway. They got tipped off to it. The problem was the hidden pit trap with a reason to get more characters down there quickly. If the party tried to jump over the known trap they would fall in the hidden one, and if they were to help someone out of the pit and it's hazard they would either need to deal with the pressure plate, or jump over both and hope there was no trap on the other side. This was for 3rd level characters in a West Marches style game several of DMs were running together.

Another pit trap (for a different, higher level group) was in the Imperial Catacombs, which were lit every 30' by these everburning sconces that gave dim light for 20'. The pit trap was 40 feet down, so it was dark at the far side, and there was a Black Pudding at the bottom. Oh, and the party knew about the pit trap from the original dwarven blueprints but were trying to get to a secret door that was hidden in the wall of the pit part way down but were getting rushed by foes (with ranged attacks) from behind.

Last was for a third party. They had come across a whole fey-built "dungeon" that they knew had brass dragon wyrmlings at the end. Due to player actions the magic that had sustained it was taken away, and without that the wyrmlings would starve. Anyway they went through this entire tricks and puzzles dungeon, to come back out with the wyrmlings, only to realize that all of the traps were designed not to hurt the wyrmlings and to usher them back to the main chamber in case they did get out. So the party could have avoided a bunch of fire traps and animated armor and all of that sort of thing on the way down if they just let the second trap, a long spiral stairwell that turned into a chute, take them. They would have ended up in the central chamber with the wyrmlings and then just worked through it all once.

They found this out by working through it twice - once down and then once up - and then right near the end the puppy-enthusiastic brass dragons accidentally triggered the chute and them and several party members ended up back in the central chamber to do it all again.

EDIT: Added some details to the first, and fixed scones to sconces. Yummy.