1981. From Flying Buffalo Games, the producers of Tunnels & Trolls. The first in an ongoing set of generic roleplaying supplements, which in the default understanding of the day were pretty much assumed to be used for your generic medieval fantasy world. Traps made by old-school gamemasters who thought the start of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) wasn't deadly or clever enough.a compendium of catastrophic traps,
sinister snares, engines of evil, and deadly devices
with passing comments made on a folio of fearful fates
in all, one hundred and one ways to influence
adventurers, delvers, tunnellers, and all player characters...
Traps are a venerable part of roleplaying, but usually fade out of the game relatively early - it's difficult to design a trap that cannot be overcome by magical abilities, and even harder to find an environment for a trap outside a dungeon (whose physical obstacles are, again, usually overcome by magic). So traps are generally the bane of low-level games, though maybe not realistic ones - because there is rather little though that goes into resetting traps, freshening up the poison, etc. - but all that is fodder for much grognard-talk.
They include a disclaimer:
That said, Rube Goldberg-style trap design is an intellectual exercise that has long thrilled mankind, from the board game mousetrap and Looney Toons to the escapades of various superheroes in comics. That said, it's a curious one - aside from the stuff set up by professional escape artists and the like, elaborate traps are pretty rare in real life and even in anthology they generally top out at throwing the hero in a maze or something. So while people all acknowledge the deadliness and reality of traps, I'm not sure when the idea of elaborate set traps as window dressing for ruins and dungeons actually started. Certainly it pre-dated Indiana Jones (and it's inspirations).Attention wrote:The traps in this booklet are designed for game purposes only. Actual construction of these traps might prove harmful, and such construction is strongly discouraged.
Maybe it was a feature in early adventure serials, and inspired Gygax & co. from their youths. I dunno. What I do know is that Grimtooth's Traps and its sequels are essentially pure intellectual exercises of designing traps, with all the muss of stats left to the gamemaster. This is good in a way, it encourages players to think through traps rather than Roll Disarm, collect XP, and continue on, but it puts a lot of work on Mister Cavern, especially in systems with hitpoints.
"A giant rock rolls over you."
"So, how many points of damage is that?"
There are two introductions, and then the book divides the 101 traps into five chapters based on type - again, you see the dungeon dressing really coming through since these types are "Room Traps," "Corridor Traps," "Door Traps," etc.
A Word from Grimtooth
This is a one-page in-character introduction from vaguely demon-esque entity Grimtooth, presenting this as a collection of traps he's brought together for would-be dungeonmasters.
(What the fuck is a dungeonmaster exactly? I mean, in a historical standpoint, that would sort of be like the head jailer of the donjon, right? The guy the Lord of the keep/castle/palace sets in charge of the care and feeding and guarding of prisoners and stuff.)
This is the only picture of Grimtooth I could find wearing something resembling real clothes. Mostly he's drawn in just a loincloth.
Grimtooth explains that the "Deadliness Rating" of these statless traps are gauged by the number of skulls next to the entry, with the more skulls the better. The Big G also assures us:
That is an incredibly torturous metaphor, as much as I now want to see an animated door-trap try to leap through a burning hoop and activate itself against a passel of scared, unarmed adventurers in a giant circus before an audience of goblinoids now...Also not that you can increase or decrease the "punch" of a given trap by simply altering its consequences. This will, of course, depend entirely upon your mood and circumstances. By filling a pit with an obnoxious-smelling green dye instead of boiling oil, you have essentially altered the entire trap - yet the delivery system remains the same. With a modicum of monkeying around, you should be able to make any of these traps in this book leap through hoops for the edification and bemusement of delvers who journey through your dungeons.
And Now, A Word From the Editor
I hate these things. I really do. There are two general purposes of an editorial introduction, and both are retarded. The first is to tell you what a great book this is, and how everyone worked hard on it, and it came out great, and it'll really be a benefit to your game. That is all fucking pointless. If you're trying to sell me on the fucking book on page vi, you have either already made or lost the sale. The second purpose, of course, is to explain what the fuck the book actually is or how to use it...and again, that's something you ideally want to get out of the way earlier, like the back cover copy. If you have to waste words on explaining that this is a Manual that contains Monsters for you to you in your game, you assume your audience is a bunch of mouth-breathing morons and are wasting ink and wordcount and page space.
I'm sure there is a good, valuable introduction out there somewhere. Event books, for example, might need a word from the editor about where the campaign falls relative to the timeline of the game. I think the Encyclopedia Magica had some good introductory notes just on how the book was laid out which were good to know. But in general, editorial introductions are terribad.
In this case, editor Paul Ryan O'Connor (represented by his own terrible cartoon as a skinny kid chained to an honest-to-ghost typewriter with a t-shirt that reads "Asst. Troll" on it) keeps in character, pretending he actually edited the work Grimtooth put together. This was very popular during the 80s, and lost fashion back around the time people stopped pretending that game books were actual manuscripts from some other world. Still, it leaves us with a good summary of what's to come:
Editing Grimtooth has been an experience in the pleasure of pain. Before seeing Grimtooth's manuscript, I would never have believed that there are so many ways to ensnare, humiliate, redirect or otherwise destroy your average dungeon-delving slob. But ways there are indeed, and their number is uncountable.