I want to make a gauntlet - and not the glove kind.

[Camelot]

I've been thinking of this recently, too, and I have an idea for the start of the campaign. If you plan to use this, players beware of spoiler alert.

[sblock]Have the characters be normal adventurers from a normal town. Make them think they're doing an "above ground" campaign. Have them get hired by a duke to track a clan of goblins into the woods. The heroes follow the tracks, find an old abandoned stone building, and enter, expecting to see dozens of goblins...to find one.

This goblin doesn't attack them. They find him quivering in a corner, nearly having lost his mind. They interrogate him, but the only information they can get out of him was that the rest of his clan was sucked into the floor. If they try to investigate...a pit opens up and they're dropped 30 feet into the ground.

The adventurers are brought into your dungeon maze of doom. It seems like just a normal dungeon; the only way out is down. They meet the other goblins (whether they fight them or reason with them is up to you) and other creatures who've gotten stuck in here but made a living. They also meet a lot of other adventurers. Some tell them that they weren't brought here by coincedence, but before he can tell them any more, the goblin from above ground returns and kills him! He apparently tricked his clan into falling into the dungeon, and did the same to you. But why?

Well, it turns out (after much crawling and dramatic revelation) that the duke who first sent them here hired the goblin to lure his team there so he could get rid of the adventurers. The duke is actually some evil, scheming creature (maybe a doppelganer, lich, or mind flayer, depending on your style) who has spend decades eliminating adventurers using this dungeon so he can gain power without having anyone to stop him.

Of course, then the adventure becomes getting out, past the guards the "duke" hired to live here (but how were they to get out? I dunno...) and the beasts that have infiltrated and made the dungeon their home, so they can return to the city and confront the evil creature and save countless adventuerer lives.[/sblock]Whoo. That was longer than I anticipated. But that's my idea currently, for the story part of the creepy dungeon. Feel free to steal!

 

[knightofround]

My favorite fictional representation of a gauntlet can be found in Dune: House Harkonnen, pg 532 in the softcover. It details a gauntlet of death that all students must survive in order to become a Blademaster. It is a scifi setting, but it can be easily adapted to a fantasy setting.

 

[Pseudonym]

They should preferably be solvable, difficult, dangerous, and not completely arbitrary.

The one I remember most from an old 1E game was a pit trap, which while triggered by the first one over the pressure plate opened on a delay so the guy in the middle got it. The trap doors opened dumping the unfortunate fellow (read: me) down a polished marble slide in to a pool of Oil of Etherealness. The rest of the PCs hear a scream, a sploosh and then nothing as they think their poor friend must have fallen in to an acid pit and been instantly dissolved. Meanwhile the victim (read:me) is looking up at his friends and shouting for a rope since 1E magic users can't climb a ladder let alone polished marble with no hand holds.

Not lethal, but annoying to be sure. Now for 17th level 4E folks, it might be a minor one round inconvenience, but I'm sure it can be spiced up.

 

[Ariosto]

_________________________________
FLOOR GAMES (For the Flight-Impaired)
*********************************

1) Bare-Footin'

The floor is coated with a substance that eats dead organic material -- such as the leather or fiber in the soles of shoes (enchanted footwear getting a saving throw).

The floor in the next room offers some nastiness for the unshod.


1A) Bare-Footin' II: The Sole of Wit

More subtly, the substance (regardless of what it coats) combines with a substance in the next room to form an instantly bonding cement. Your choice as to what might dissolve it.

Inflict whatever seems appropriate upon immobilized adventurers.

Those who end up barefoot may be subjected to the same sequel as for (1) above.


2) The Cook, The Thief, The Knives, Take Cover

Here is a standard-issue pit (piranhas optional). Concealed, it may catch a delver while revealing itself. The walls and ceiling in the corridor above are hostile to climbing -- I suggest that they be heated like a cook's griddle, made of stuff too tough for pounding in any but magical pitons (if even those) in any reasonable time.

Yes, time should be off the essence. A wall advancing from the rear while hurling magical knives should ensure that. It has an arbitrarily large number of eyeballs (hey, if the walls can have ears ...) to help it aim.

Leaping over the apparent trap is not too difficult. However, the far side is not the safe landing it seems. Any impact leads to perforation of the floor by, and impalement upon, poisoned spikes (with their own spring-loaded impetus). The second such impact (or third, or as you please) simultaneously unleashes a catapult beneath the near side, sending anyone in that area (nearer or further from the pit as you see fit) hurtling on a trajectory calculated to intercept the poisoned-spike patch.

The catapult cannot fire if the moving wall is on top of it. If the wall has passed it, then the trajectory is into the wall's poison-spiked other side. (How characters have got there, and what otherwise becomes of them, is not the concern of the Frobozz Magic Trap Company.)

When the wall reaches the edge of the pit, it collapses as a lid (and continues throwing knives for a while).

The pit offers convenient (temporary) cover from the flying blades. However, it is filled to the rim with a vapor that after sufficient exposure produces unconsciousness, death, or murderous psychosis (other formulations available).

There is a door, not obvious to casual observation but easily spotted upon careful examination, partway down the far side of the pit. A thief can climb around to it, inside the pit (as can someone else with appropriate assistance). The latch is easy to find and operate.

However, each time the door opens (swinging into the pit) it unleashes a barrage of magical missiles from the end of the corridor -- which may be a dead end, or lead on after a turn -- on the far side of the pit. (Ask your FMTC agent about optional substitutions.) It also swings shut after only time enough for one person to pass, unless a Hold Portal spell is applied immediately. (Other magic, superhuman strength, etc., may defeat this feature as well.)

It can be stopped with a body, as in the case of trying to slip a second person past. That leads to crushing damage until the trapped one is (with some difficulty) pulled free. The door must close fully before it can be opened again.

The doorway opens onto a passage that rejoins the dungeon (via the same corridor or otherwise) some distance onward.


3) Take the Long Way Home

Here's an oldie but baddie:

There's a big chamber with a narrow ledge around it, just out of reach of a big monster. The ledge is crumbling, plainly rickety, but adventurers who take care should get around safely to the other side and up the stairs there. (It may be more interesting for the monster to have cunning and belligerence enough to pelt passers-by with missiles -- possibly causing one to fall into its clutches.)

If subjected to attack from above, the monster can retreat behind the great columns of a corridor that runs around the bottom of the chamber further back than the ledge.

At the top of the stairs are a landing with a pressure plate, and a door, contacting either of which causes the stairs to turn into a well oiled slide, and swinging blades to sever ropes, so dumping hapless victims (possibly alight from the meeting of torch and oil) into the pit.

The chute is harder to get back up, and there might be no way forward there anyhow.

The monster (and the dungeon environs) should be terrible enough to make fighting it a sucker's bet. However, there is at least one crevice, in the wall of that encircling corridor, that will admit a man but is too narrow for the monster to pass. By this way, our subjects proceed to the next station of their ordeal.

 

[Herobizkit]

Two fun traps/tricks involving gravity:

a) Reverse Gravity flings PC's UP into spikes/slime/gelatinous cubes, only to be canceled on impact, dropping PC and said extra goodies into a new pit "below" them, also full of spikes/slime/gelatinous cubes. Once they fall the full distance, the Reverse Gravity kicks in again...

b) A circular pit opens up below the PC. At the bottom of a 10-100 foot drop, a portal opens up which teleports the PC exactly 10-100 feet above the original portal. Rinse and repeat as the PC helplessly "falls" forever at terminal velocity. Add whatever mean things you want to the mix.

b2) Optionally, you can mess with the 3-D component and have them fall sideways through harmful substances/slimes/gelatinous cubes/Flaan and teleport them all around the dungeon like a crazy Scooby-Doo hallway-with-doors montage.

 

[FireLance]

What's so special about DC 16?

It's just what I consider to be a challenging skill check for a 1st-level character. The DC should, of course, scale with level.

 

[mgbeach]

Pits. So many pits.

Pits with things at the bottom, (spikes, monsters, poison mushrooms) pits with pits inside those pits. Pits with pits at the bottom with spikes and monsters at the bottom of those pits. Illusory pits. An illusory pit with a real pit right after. Room full of pits. Open a door? Spiked pit trap.

Lionel Richie pit trap!

Oh, what a feeling.. when you're dying on the ceiling...