Describe your favorite traps

[shilsen]

Couple of examples from a goblin warren:

At the end of the tunnel leading into the warren, the goblins had placed a wire at human neck-height. The PCs sent in the dwarf invisibly to check out the place, so he walked under the wire, saw the rough barricade with a couple of goblins on the far side, and came back and reported on it. The PCs crept up close and then charged out, hoping to surprise the goblins. The human fighter in the lead almost decapitated himself.

The barricade consisted of piled up rocks, and there was a three foot wide gap in the barricade to let goblins go in and out. What the PCs didn't know was that the goblins had dug pits in front of the barricade (leaving the 3 ft wide area in the middle, like a gangplank) and put a light cover over them. So as soon as someone stepped on it, he fell right through. The spikes at the bottom were bad, but what was worse was that a few of the goblins pushed in half the barricade on top of them

 

[Gregor]

Although I would probably re-work this trap, I have always been fond of it ... because I am an evil, evil DM.

http://www.dndadventure.com/html/places_and_traps/pt_coffin_of_acid.html

 

[diaglo]

my favorite traps are in Grimtooth's....

try Necromancer's site for the update to the newer editions.

 

[DMH]

My favorite from Blue Troll:

THE FOOLISH PC SMASHER
Party is going through a dungeon, and a barrier wall falls down on either side of a player (in my game, it happened to be the thief). A board slides out from the wall, crossing the corridor, and a magic mouth says "Can you break this board?". Buddy breaks board, and barriers retract. A little while later, same deal, except it's a stone beam, (and their fighter was the trapped one). Buddy breaks said beam, and the barriers retract. A bit later, the same thing, except it's a wooden pole, (and the mage is trapped). Buddy breaks the staff, and the DM looks up Retributive Strike... See Staff of Magi & Power, page 154, DM's Guide 2nd Ed.

I remember that from 10 years ago and it still make me laugh.

 

[Dark Dragon]

Ouch! Quite expensive, though.

 

[Keepiru]

I ran a short campaign where my players were scouting an enemy's army camp. They snuck into the generals tent, surrounded by 8 guards, and which was divided into two sections by a curtain. On the otherside of the curtain in the bedroom area was a thin wire running a stack of metal objects. They didn't bother searching the tent for traps and the next thing they know, *crash* *clang* *ping*. All the metal comes crashing down. The guards outside activated magical lights and lit the whole area up like it was Noon.

When I run my next campaign I plan on having a section take place in the sewers. At some point if they trigger a trap they'll get splashed with a jug of stinky rancid meat & blood. Until they can wash it off it'll attract dire rats and other beasties looking for dinner every minute.

 

[derelictjay]

Here's one I had in a recent campaign, that had my player's scratching their heads on how to get around. First the players come to a corner of two hallways, they notice that the walls been smashed in here, and a relativly easy to find pressure plate on the floor, and easy to disable. But turn the corner and every 5 foot step is a pressure plate for and 80 ft stretch of hallway, oh and the corner just sealed itself. By a block of stone, so no way back (or at least easy way back), and the hallway is filled with the sounds of hundreds of buzzsaws as they flit back in forth between the walls. But if that was the trap, then what was the pressure plate for, a giant Indiana Jones-esque rolling ball of stone. You see when you trip that pressure plate you don't have to worry about the buzzsaws, and the PCs can sprint down the hallway before the big rock smashes into them. Magic of course brings the big rock back to its starting point when it smashes into the end of the hallway.

My players took about an hour to figure out how to get around this trap. The disable the pressure plate and found themselves in the hallways with buzzsaws, so they lifted the block (strongish characters) and escaped, after awhile it resets, and then the light bulbs came on, it was fun just to watch.

BTW I stole both of these traps from the Traps & Treachery just combined them.

 

[AuraSeer]

I like puzzle-ish traps that have simple, obvious, wrong solutions.

Example:
The party opens a door at a corridor's end and finds themselves peering out the middle of a wall. The floor of this large room is much lower than the rest of the dungeon, about 50' below the corridor. There are doors in the other walls too, also very high off the ground, and a bunch of 5-foot-wide pillars of the same height are placed in lines from door to door.

The players immediately recognize this as a platform puzzle. Obviously, they are supposed to make their way to the other doors by means of Jump checks, hopping from pillar to pillar. This turns out to be the wrong answer, because jumping to the pillars is not safe. One of them is weak, and crumbles when a PC lands on it. Another has been greased. A third is actually a hollow metal cylinder, with a false top made of paper; when a PC falls in and tries to grab the edge, he'll find it to be razor sharp. There are lots of unique traps, and every path between doors includes at least three of them, making it impossible to use the pillars to cross the room.

The real solution for this puzzle is to find the invisible ledge that leads around the room's edge. It's heavily used, and will be revealed by any DC 10 Search check-- but only if the players actually search the room before jumping to conclusions.

 

[Thanee]

Buddy breaks the staff, and the DM looks up Retributive Strike... See Staff of Magi & Power, page 154, DM's Guide 2nd Ed.

So what is worse then... taking the blast and die or getting transported to another plane and live in the knowledge that you just had the staff of the magi in your hands and broke it...

Bye
Thanee

 

[DaveStebbins]

I have two personal favorites.

The first was from a module called Grakt's Crag published around 1980 in White Dwarf (when they still did D&D stuff). It was a large, thick, door set flush with the stone surrounding it. It had a ceramic pull-handle. When the PCs tried to open it, it fell out on them. It was not attached to anything and was just standing in a recess, waiting to fall. The give-away, if they had checked, would be the lack of hinges on the pull side of the door.

The second is a modification of something that I think was originally in Grimtooth's. Essentially, it is a hole in the wall, about an inch in diameter, about two-and-a-half to three feet off the floor. It's not far from a strong-looking door, and light spills out from the crack under the door and through the hole. When someone leans in to peek through the hole, they set off the glyph which casts a blindness spell upon them. I don't know why, but this one has always appealed to me. The Grimtooth version was mechanical and had a spike which would lever down and through the hole to blind the peeker in the eye they were using.