Tell me about a cool room in your dungeon...

[fredramsey]

My Responses - please read

Cool, but I think something needs to happen in this room...

By the way, if I don't respond to someone, it's not that I don't like your idea, it's that I don't have anything to add.

Thanks for all the responses so far!

A silver octogon room with no features save a bass relief carving on each wall of a face. One per wall on seven walls the eighth wall is the door. Each face is expressing a different emotion; happy (smiling), sad (crying), thinking (frown) and so on. Searching the room no matter how high of a roll will reveal nothing. The walls, faces and floor are seamless.

 

[Pielorinho]

A couple from a long-dead game; these were traps designed by a dorky little traploving duergar.

1) A room with several faintly visible pressure-plates on the floor. They're actually not pressure plates: it's the area between them that's trapped. Step on the visible plates and there's no problem; step between them, and the trap triggers.

First, iron plates slam down over the entrances and exits to the room.

Second, magic mouths begin to speak. I handled this by passing out index cards to the players and having them read the cards in sequence as I pointed at the players. Each line is a new magic mouth spell being triggered by the previous spell:
You want to go home?
Then finish the poem
and maybe I'll open
the door.
Robin Hood's job
Was simply to rob
The rich, and give to the

At this point, of course, all the players shouted, "POOR!" Tragically, this completed the last stage of the trap.

See, the duergar had found a Decanter of Endless Water that could be activated by anyone saying the command word, even if they weren't holding it. So he'd put it in the ceiling of this room. The Decanter's three command words were Trickle, Dry, and Pour.

As soon as anyone finishes the poem, the room began to fill with water, and I started a stopwatch: they had half an hour to figure out how to disable the trap (easily, by saying "Dry!" or harder, by figuring out how to get to the well-protected Decanter and destroy it) before the room was completely flooded.

I had three other similar traps in this dungeon, in which acting in the obvious puzzle-solving fashion got you killed; I'll post them if anyone's interested.

Daniel

 

[Mystery Man]

Cool, but I think something needs to happen in this room...

What happens in this room is course entirely up to you. Unless that is what your point was if indeed it was then I do apologize.

For me it was a lich's philactery. It radiated an overwhelming abjuration and if tampered with incorectly teleported the hapless PC to some other part of the lair. Trapped heavily of course. IF the PC's figure out that the faces being eye level were looked into and matched expression like a mirror (with a PC in front of each face at the same time) the floor would open up and a gem would rise to the center. If only one PC matches expression then they (the faces) all frown and *bampf* the PC off to a trapped filled room again and reset themselves.

 

[fredramsey]

Sorry, I thought the wink would have let you know I was kidding! Cool idea, though, so thanks!

What happens in this room is course entirely up to you. Unless that is what your point was if indeed it was then I do apologize.

For me it was a lich's philactery. It radiated an overwhelming abjuration and if tampered with incorectly teleported the hapless PC to some other part of the lair. Trapped heavily of course. IF the PC's figure out that the faces being eye level were looked into and matched expression like a mirror (with a PC in front of each face at the same time) the floor would open up and a gem would rise to the center. If only one PC matches expression then they (the faces) all frown and *bampf* the PC off to a trapped filled room again and reset themselves.

 

[fredramsey]

...
I had three other similar traps in this dungeon, in which acting in the obvious puzzle-solving fashion got you killed; I'll post them if anyone's interested.

Daniel

Please do!

 

[the Jester]

Very High Level, Very Deadly

Here's a very high-level, very deadly trap.

The party is walking down a hallway, depicted below, heading from towards the side labeled A. As they approach, spells or some kind of ranged attacks start coming from down the hallway. Naturally, the pcs rush forward- into disaster!

The section of hallway between the two 'b's on the diagram is actually not attached to the rest of the hall on either side. Instead, a clever mechanism using weights and counterweights leaves it delicately balanced, with c as the pivot point. Below the floor of the first section of the hallway is another layer of floor, which doesn't move (e); so as soon as the weight past area C outweighs the weight on the section of the hall blocked by E, the hallway flips into a vertical position, smacking the pcs around violently and
-----------------------
b c b
-----------------------
----------e
subsequently dropping them into something nasty nasty, such as a pool of lava, acid or green slime. This works best if your bad guy is incorporeal, so he just goes right through the wall of the hallway as it flips the pcs into the lava or whatever. When I used it on a nigh-epic party, the hall dealt 6d6 hp of damage from the smackaround, then there was a 20d6 falling damage impact followed by 20d6 lava immersion, iirc.

 

[Wolv0rine]

Painfully simple, overwhelmingly deadly

This appears to be nothing more than a typical corridor, say 5' wide and 8' high. At some point in the corridor, however, there is a decidedly wicked and lethal problem (marked below as 'A' and 'B'). At this point there is a Teleport Trap that spans the width of the corridor. The location marked 'B' teleports everything from the floor up to 3'11" to location 'B2'. The location marked 'A' teleports everything from 4' to the ceiling to location 'A2'.

----------------------------------------
..........B2................A
.............................B..................A2
----------------------------------------

My own suggestion is to force the PCs down this corridor, chased by something fast and mean. In most cases, you'll end up with a pile of torsos on the floor at A2, and a pile of pelvises & legs at B2, and possibly a few halflings who are scarred for life.
(You'll have to ignore the periods, I couldn't get the location markers to position properly in the post, so used the periods to make them appear in the right places)

 

[Alhazred]

I'm currently designing a dungeon for a low-level party. Here are some of the ideas which I'm thinking of including.

I stole one idea from Return to the Tomb of Horror . The PCs enter an elevator. The doors seal and a small recess opens in the wall opposite the door. Inside the recess is a switch in the middle position. It's attached to a plague which says "Push Me". Characters you operate the switch set off the trap - in this case, knockout gas. To move the elevator, someone has to push in the plague.

Another idea involves a 40 ft-by-40 ft room. At one end of the room, chained to the wall, is a dire ape. Smart players will note that the chain is not long enough to allow the dire ape to reach the far side of the room (the last 5 ft.). Really smart players will wonder why. The last 5 feet of flooring is actually an illusion covering a 20ft spiked pit. Moreover, the dire ape has been trained to separate characters by tossing some into the pit.

BTW, I'll have to steal some of the ideas already posted

 

[Patman21967]

I did one that was really fun

It was a library/sitting room that once entered, everything animated. Brooms sweeping, fireplaces, books flying from shelves, tables and chairs attacking. The only way to stop it was to find the book that contained the magic phrase. It was the mages last try, he kept failing concentration rolls because of the flying objects, to cast detect magic and focus long enough to find the right book.

It was a laugh and a half

 

[Patman21967]

BTW...I forgot that the door locked behind them