Traps!

[Brainznolmz]

I'm in need of some new trap ideas. What I'm looking for are witty traps which require thinking and not just a roll to get around. I have come up with a few already which I'll post here. Note that not all of these are completely my design!

1. Room with thin glass floor, just enough to hold one person. At the end is a closed door. Beyond the door is a Gorgon. When player opens door and fails roll, s/he turns to stone, becoming heavier and falling through the floor into spikes/water/lava/?.

2. Plain room with nothing but a pedestal and a locked door within it. On the pedestal is a glass box filled with a strange blue smoke and a small golden key in the middle. The box has one hole in it just big enough for some ones hand to squeeze through. The blue smoke is Enlargement Smoke, effectively doubling the size of anything engulfed by it.

3. Mouse hole with sign above 'Key Within!' Potion of reduce size outside. Drink potion and go through mouse hole. The room beyond the mouse hole holds the key and another potion. The curious player who goes through the hole will drink the potion, not knowing it is a potion of enlargement.

4. Stone statue blocking the doorway forward. Will not move until it is greeted.

5. Octogonal room with mirror walls. Missed spells have a 100% chance to hit a random player/monster within the room.

6. (Variation on 4) Stone hounds blocking door. Loose kobold with a bib labeled squeaky on in the room. Catch and squeeze 'squeaky'(str roll) to get the hounds to move.

7. Room with obviously visible tripwire. The door forward will not open until the tripwire is sprung.

8. The players enter a room completely made of glass. Surrounding the glass in an aquarium, filled with dangerous and aggressive sea creatures. In the middle of the room is a bell. When the bell is used it creates a pitch so high it shatters the glass room, letting the creatures loose on the players. Randomly placed in the water is the key to advance to the next room.

9. My personal favorite so far, this trap plays on reverse psychology. The players enter a large dimly lit room. The only light source is the faintly glowing bones that seem to cover the entire floor. Now, chances are the players wont want to touch the bones, afraid that they'll set off a trap. The only floor space is a path on the left side of the room and a strip of ground at the entrance and opposite side of the room. The players will most likely skirt their way through the boneless areas of the room, until they reach the far side where they will find chimes made of bone. When the chimes are struck the bones arrange themselves into aggressive skeletons. If the bones were moved by walking though them, the skeletons would rearrange themselves wrongly (foot for head, three legs, no arms etc.), posing no threat at all.

 

[Calzone]

<double post deleted...my bad>

 

[Calzone]

Here's a few that might help you. I might sit down and come up with some more later.


...and not a drop to drink.

A small round room holds what appears to be an old well, filled to the brim with sand. On a hook by the well is a bucket, half full with clear water. Pouring some water onto the sand turns all of the sand to water. Shortly thereafter, the mummified remains of an unfortunate adventurer float to the surface. Looking down the well reveals a glint of gold deep at the bottom. At the bottom of the well are a few gold pieces strewn from a small niche in the side of the well. The niche contains a small pocket of air, within which are vast treasures loosely embedded in sand. If any of the sand from the niche touches the well water (say, tiny grains of sand on an adventurer's greedy wet hands), all of the well water immediately turns into sand, entombing any within it.


Virtue

A small stream of water burbles from a hole in the wall. Above it is a small plate with the word "Virtue" engraved in it. Drinking from this water has amazing restorative properties (gain a healing surge, stat pluses, or some such). Later on, there is a treasure room, above whose door is a small plate with "Greed is the corruption of Virtue, Giving the height" written above it. Leaving loot in the treasure room increases the duration/effectiveness/etc. of the properties of the stream, while taking from the treasure house causes the amazing restorative properties of the stream to become amazing destructive properties (lose a healing surge, stat penalties, disease track, what have you).


Through the Looking Glass

The party encounters a large mirror with a gilt frame carved in the monstrous image of a mouth wide open. Examining the mirror, they notice the figure of an adventurer, sitting forlornly behind them in the mirror image. The figure is not behind them in the real world, but only appears to be sitting behind their reflections in the mirror. If they tap on the mirror or linger, he soon notices and moves excitedly next to their images in the mirror, as if he were only on the other side of a pane of glass, gesturing wildly for them to wait.

He cannot be heard as he excitedly speaks, but attempts to pantomime that he was trapped and needs help. If he can convince the party, he holds out a hand to one of the party members, beckoning them to grab him and pull him through. If the party member attempts to grab his hand, they succeed, but find that they have switched places with him, and he is now outside the mirror and they are trapped within. Apparently, the only way to escape the mirror is to have someone outside willingly reach out to you, swapping places when your hand touches theirs.



And, a variation on an oldie...

An ancient stone door stands before you, eldritch runes carved prominently on the arch above it. After painstaking translation, you interpret them as "Speak fiend, and enter." Speaking in Abyssal or some other demonic tongue will grant entry.

 

[Unwise]

Have enjoyed the discussions, please keep them coming. I have moved to D&D from other systems and am not yet use to the suspension of disbelief it generally entails. For instance, the amount of effort that goes into making traps, the impracticalities of having traps in your base during day to day life and the overly elaborate nature of most traps. The link below was my very dalliance with overr the top silly traps. The players loved it, so I will definitely try to introduce more of them.

Here is a really good trap room from Save vs Death. Be warned it is a Fourthcore encounter, so very deadly:
The Riddle of White and Black | Save Versus Death

 

[Calzone]

One thing I keep in mind when placing traps is that your average evil overlord isn't going to want to spend several hours disarming them to get to his inner sanctum after an impromptu trip to the grocery store.

I recently ran an adventure where my players ventured into a kobold warren to stop a sinister ritual from occurring. The warren was an old mine that had been taken over, and as such the original design was fairly linear. The kobolds laced this entire linear section with traps, murder holes, sally ports, and other such nastiness. The kobolds then excavated a set of interconnected passages parallel to the old mine shafts and hid them behind secret doors. These passages provided safe access to the common rooms, ritual chamber, and living quarters, as well as staging areas for mopping up adventurers working through traps. The adventure went great, with the players discovering an entrance to the side tunnels immediately, partially exploring and clearing out a good part of the warrens, and then backtracking and stumbling their way through the trapped section while the remaining kobolds ambushed them. We had a blast.

For very cumbersome or lethal traps, consider using them to guard ancient tombs, hidden treasures rooms that were never meant to be disturbed, etc. These traps can provide challenges to players in places devoid of monsters and help reinforce the bleakness of the setting. Alternatively, scatter them liberally in an old-school megadungeon - the dungeon is a quasi-conscious malevolent entity that actively opposes the players during exploration, so it's quite possible that the jammed door two hallways back opens easily for dungeon denizens, allowing them to bypass the hall-of-whirling-blades-poison-darts-and-bad-poetry-recitation.

 

[Brainznolmz]

Thanks everyone! These are great, keep 'em coming!

 

[MarkB]

One I came up with awhile ago is the "invisible bar pit trap". It's designed to guard the outer corridors of something like a kobolds' lair, delaying intruders long enough to allow a sentry to retreat back to the nearest guard-room.

Generally set just after a twist in the passage, it consists of an easily-visible pit set across the entire width of the corridor, about 10-15 feet broad, enough to be difficult to jump reliably for untrained characters.

Set across the pit, at what will be roughly chest height for a character trying to clear the pit in one jump, is a sturdy iron bar, which has been ensorcelled to be invisible.

A retreating sentry can tell where the bar is by the holes where it's fixed to the wall, and can grab and swing from it mid-leap, halving the DC required to jump the pit.

Pursuers who didn't see him jump due to being just round the corner, however, will attempt to jump across the pit, and slam chest-first into the invisible bar, dumping them down into the centre of the pit.

 

[wlmartin]

I know this is a quick-and-simple fix, I'd love to list them all here but my suggestion is to love at the PC Computer Game EVIL GENIUS for ideas and possibly Dungeon Keeper (I, II).

There are bound to be wikis and fan pages devoted to these games and will include all sorts of images and graphics.

Such things include (Evil Genius) the Wind Turbine (the PCs would get thrown to the other side of the room), Gas Trap (fairly obvious) and many more

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Oh yeah, there are MANY musty old tomes of trap designs floating around. Grimtooth's Traps is the most famous (there are a wide variety of editions of this thing, some of which I gather are now available as PDFs in some form or other. Actual print copies of the original ones are apparently serious collector's items now. Well worth getting hold of as practically any nasty low down vicious cunning device ever to cross the mind of a GM is probably in there somewhere...