Tricks and Empty Rooms

[valis]

I don't know where to put this, so I pick here. If it's in the wrong place feel free to move the thread.

I made a system neutral little document about Tricks, Traps, and Empty room design. It's geared towards old school style play. Here's the info.

Hi. I wrote a little document called:

Tricks, Empty Rooms, and Basic Trap Design

Inside you'll find:


* A way to randomly determine over 105 empty room types, each defined and given a basic list of what items they contain!
* The differences between a room and a chamber!
* Ways in which empty rooms may be interesting!
* A comprehensive listing of things that a room may contain!
* 17 different categories of tricks!
* A comprehensive listing of trick types!
* Almost 100 example tricks!
* Basic old school trap design, including triggers, special effects, duration, resets, and different categories!
* Randomly generate thousands of different doors and a listing of over 60 door tricks!
* Over 40 different surface tricks!
* Randomly generate hundreds of thousands of different magical fountain effects!
* 69 different interesting curses!
* 100 different things that can be found in pits!
* 100 strange and interesting things that can be found in corridors!
* Randomly generate a nearly infinite number of traps!
* 16 sample riddles and guidelines for creating your own riddles and puzzles!
* Free!

It has a companion piece called Treasure, focusing on interesting treasure generation.

Tricks can be found here.
Treasure, here.

 

[Aramax]

This is the kind of thread En World has been lacking since 4th came out

 

[valis]

Glad to be of service Aramax.

These kind of 'threads' are quite common in the OSR Blogosphere. If you're looking for them, they are out there.

 

[Aramax]

Could you provide some examples?

 

[valis]

You mean besides the long list of examples down the right hand side of my blog?

 

[Ed_Laprade]

* A way to randomly determine over 105 empty room types, each defined and given a basic list of what items they contain!

Um, if it has items in it, it ain't empty!

 

[valis]

Kellri (Kellri) has some excellent documents for old school play.
Ancient Valuts (Ancient Vaults & Eldritch Secrets-The Old School Revolution is weird) provides a new monster/spell/ or magic item daily? More often?
The Underdark Gazette (The Underdark Gazette) provides weekly summaries of the blogsphere.

The Alexandrian (The Alexandrian) Grognardia (GROGNARDIA) and Delta's D&D Hotspot (Delta's D&D Hotspot) provide excellent analysis of play.

I am not affiliated with any of the above blogs.

There's mine of course, for old school documents like I share in this post, and extensive analysis of RPG structures and DM resources.

 

[valis]

Um, if it has items in it, it ain't empty!

Cute.

From the appropriate section of the document:
The first and most important thing to remember is that empty rooms aren’t. “Empty” refers to the fact that they lack an antagonist, threat, reward, or something ‘unusual’. The purpose of an empty room is to insure the players never know which one of these options they are going to face - all rooms devoid of antagonists should appear empty, so that the players never know when a trap, trick or treasure is hidden in front of them. This also increases the tension as the players explore the dungeon, as well as their excitement when something is discovered. Much like gambling, erratic reinforcement with make encounters all that much more exciting.

 

[ExploderWizard]

A completely empty room can contain the best antagonist of all time:

The PCs vs themselves as they become convinced that they must have missed something.

 

[Stoat]

A completely empty room can contain the best antagonist of all time:

The PCs vs themselves as they become convinced that they must have missed something.

Yeah, the trick is to describe it this way:

"This dusty chamber seems empty."

That word seems get's em every time.