OSSR: Grimtooth's Traps

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Ancient History
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OSSR: Grimtooth's Traps

Post by Ancient History »

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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...
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.

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:
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.
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).

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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.)

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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:
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.
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...

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.
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My inner English teacher is not happy with that paragraph. Gary Gygax probably though it could use another go at the thesaurus. Let us move on - Chapter 1: Room Traps.
Last edited by Ancient History on Fri Aug 23, 2013 4:33 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Koumei »

Oh dear. This promises to be hilarious and awful in equal measures. Actually, probably unequal in favour of hilarious.
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Post by OgreBattle »

Actually, reading the adventures of Scrooge + Donald's nephews is already a proper guide to traps in games
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Post by Maxus »

Incidentally, this is OSSR #50 in the thread's category, discounting my own playthrough of Chronicles of Mystara.
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.

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Post by fectin »

Pretty sure the pyramids had honest-to-god death traps in them; which is likely the source of traps in dungeons.
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Post by erik »

I have 3 or 4 of the Grimtooth trap series from grade school. I remember rubbing my hands with glee as a DM at the traps and then realizing that I was going to have to do all the crunch-work myself and got less gleeful.
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Post by hogarth »

Koumei wrote:Oh dear. This promises to be hilarious and awful in equal measures. Actually, probably unequal in favour of hilarious.
The books aren't serious, so laughing at them is what the authors expected. In that case, wouldn't "awful" equate to "non-hilarious"?
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Post by Chamomile »

fectin wrote:Pretty sure the pyramids had honest-to-god death traps in them; which is likely the source of traps in dungeons.
Pyramids really are the closest thing to a real-live dungeon the world has ever seen. Vast constructions filled with spectacular riches and, because no one is ever expected to enter them for any legitimate purpose, filled to the brim with traps designed to murder anyone who enters.
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Post by Ancient History »

Room Traps
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The room trap is probably the most feared type of dungeon doom device. It is the main event, the central attraction, the carefully-planned and patterned engine of destruction geared solely towards the destruction of those who venture within. No mere hallway nuisance or dangerous treasure are there - room traps are thoroughbred delivery systems of dismay, designed only to kill.
And so on and so forth, in that vein. I was going to argue with this definition, but it turns out that Wikipedia doesn't have a really good article on dungeon-style traps, which just seems unacceptable. I think it's just that in the Real World, physical traps of this type just weren't common enough to really attract engineers. Anyway, moving on, not going to cover every trap, just the highlights.

Infamous Wheel Trap (4 skulz)
The adventurers open the door. To their left and right the passageways are blocked by immobile, unopenable barrels. Directly in front of them is a shaft at a 30-degree incline with a door at the top. For some reason this shaft has a 5' deep trench down the middle of it. If the adventurers try to go up the ramp, a steel curtain slides down to cover the door and a ginormous wheel rolls down and crushes them all.
The wheel reeks of anti-magic, and is indestructible.
I've about lost count of all the impossibilities here, but now is as good a time as any to point out a common failing of traps: players are generally good at thinking of ways around them, and the gamemaster is outnumbered. So trap-designers set about severely limiting the PCs options to try and force them to pick the "correct" way out (in this case, scurrying over the barrels to safety). I disapprove of this in general, since I think if PCs are clever enough to figure out how to avoid/unfuck a trap they should be rewarded. Not necessarily with XP, but at least with staying alive.

Of course, some PCs seeing the wheel coming might dive into the trench...
The large wheel will pass over the characters in the trench (unless they're giants, or something equally absurd) - but those characters will be horrified to see that there's a second wheel, ever bit as deadly as the first, rolling down the trench just a few feet behind the first wheel. The only way to escape the wheel is to leap back out of the trench - something that should prove considerably tougher than simply jumping in.
This is an appropriately dickish move - it's basically a video-game Nintendo-hard mindset, where the PCs are supposed to Mario their way through things. It isn't terrible practical of course - why have a trench and a second wheel when without the trench, the first wheel will almost assuredly kill the interlopers? Maybe your dungeon is just an engine that runs on pain and fear, I dunno.

Of course, then you have option number three:
The characters that escaped the wheel(s) by rushing into the side rooms aren't out of the woods yet, either. The barrels of liquid mentioned before are intended as crash-cushions to prevent the wheel from doing horrible, tell-tale damage to the back wall of the room. These barrels will collapse scientifically, slowing the wheel just enough so it will still crush any character caught behind it, but won't do any major structural damage. The barrels, however, aren't filled with water or foam - they've been filled with burning, corrosive acid!
Because of course acid doesn't leave a mark either. I can just imagine the goblin crew that has to reset this trap coming in first in full lab suits, spraying baking soda on the acid to neutralize it first. Thirty seconds of fun and 60 goblin-hours of clean-up.
Armor will provide a certain amount of protection, but only at the expense of its future effectiveness - this acid is corrosive!
The grognard is strong in this one. I often recall the twisted convolutions of logic that Mister Cavern would go through so that our PCs ended up running through the dungeon virtually naked.
Getting the characters back into the flow of the dungeon after the destruction has ceased might prove a bit of a problem. You could design the room so that the splashing acid burned away the top layer of plaster within the the small rooms, revealing a number of secret doors. Or, you might place a door at the top of the incline, beyond where the wheels were originally located. Suit yourself.
Yes, because massive dead-end deathtraps do put a bit of a downer on the dungeon-delving experience. If the PCs did survive being crushed and splashed with acid, then their only hope is to claw through the steel plate over the door that led to this mad trap.

Illusions (3 skulz) is a favorite trap of mine just from a nonsensical point of view. The room is covered in two illusions: the first on the floor shows an open pit full of spikes, which seems to show a pair of walkways on either side as the only safe way around it. The second illusion disguises sets of spikes placed on the ceiling, right above the walkways. Naturally, walking on the walkways around the "pit" activates powerful springs that launch the PCs into the ceiling spikes.

It's a great trap...until it isn't. Wouldn't it be weird to walk into this trap after it's been sprung, and see, I dunno, a perfectly normal corpse hanging from the ceiling, suspended on nothing? I mean, just pull an Indiana Jones and leave something "floating" on the pit illusion should twig everyone who comes after that right away something is not right here. It's really the fundamental problem with static illusion traps

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The Lobster Trap (4 skulz) is just silly. It takes as its basis that somewhere in the dungeon, the PCs have already been captured and/or knocked unconscious. They wake up unarmed in a cage surrounded by giant lobsters, who are being kept away by an invisible wall. And of course, there is a lever.
Levers lead to doom for dungeon delvers. Pulling the lever immediately, irrevocably, cancels the invisible-wall spell projected b y the cage. The lobsters, being sensitive to such things, will rush in greedily for the kill.
The Deluxe Centerpost (2 skulz) is deceptively simple and elegant.
In the center of a simple square room, a single, indestructible deluxe magic staff is wedged betwixt floor and ceiling. The staff, a coveted prize, supports the ceiling: a free-standing 10,000-lb. block of granite. Aside from this handicap, the staff is free for the taking.
That is one hell of a balancing act. They must have gotten wombats to do the construction.

Some traps just show a basic failure to understand how simple physical phenomena works. Like, say, lava.

The Dastardly Lava Trap (3 skullz)
...they enter a standard dungeon room that contains several mounds of glowing (and imperceptibly growing) lava.
Wait, what? Mounds?
A medium-sized tunnel leads from the room; at the end of this tunnel the delvers can clearly see a sign. [...] A character who journeys down the tunnel to see what the sign says will be greeted with the inscription, "You Blew It". When the character turns around, he'll see the lava mounds have moved behind him to block the tunnel entrance, leaving him hopelessly trapped.

LAVA DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY.

I mean, there is still the basis of a trap here: false bait, get the PC to go down a dead-end hallway, with something deadly moving in behind them. Classic. Still. Lava mounds.

Later noted fantasy/science fiction author Michael Stackpole contributed material to this book, including the Bigger They Are (3 skulz) trap. The PCs are in a cavern rapidly filling up with water (a dungeon classic), and:
Somewhere near the ceiling, overhanging a ledge, is a large rock doing a credible imitation of a piton. Some smart delver will probably try to loop a rope around this rock so as to climb to safety - especially if you introduce sharks or similar nasties into the water. The rock, however, is delicately balanced in place. Any sort of tugging upon it will cause the rock to drop - usually onto the heads of the party trying to rope it In any event, the rock will fall - and the bigger it is, the hard the fall.
Water-based traps are a classic because they take time to fill a room, giving PCs plenty of opportunity to panic - it's a scene in and of itself.
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The last trap of this chapter is The Bridge at Rue Vincent (4 skulz).
The trap is a room filled to a depth of ten feet with boiling wax.
Okay. So far so good.
A narrow bridge lacking guardrails and the usual safety items crosses the wax.
...okay, I guess that's to let the maintenance-goblins through?
The air is laden with vapors from the boiling wax below; the wax has splashed up upon the bridge, making it quite slippery.
I wonder who keeps the boiling-wax room filled with wax and the fires stoked? If I was a dungeon designer, I'd have a shoot leading to the giant bee hive above, and the fire elemental storage right below.
Guarding the bridge is a magical statue of living flint.
Well of course.
The characters should be able to smell the wax in the air, and feel it on the bridge and on their armor. A fall into the wax below is quite likely to be fatal - if the fall doesn't kill the character outright, being suffocated in boiling wax probably will. The flint statue is the crux of this trap. If the statue is attacked with steel weapons, the flint should send up a shower of sparks. With a bit of luck, the wax vapor will ignite, setting fire to the bridge - and probably to a number of the characters as well.
Wax vapor. Huh. That's a new one. I'm not saying it's wrong, but honestly I think the boiling wax is just a bit of overkill. All you need is a bit of mine gas and a flint golem and you're in business for this trap. No need to go messing with giant bees or anything.

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Last edited by Ancient History on Mon Aug 26, 2013 12:46 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Ancient History »

Corridor Traps
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One of the main reasons traps work so well in corridors is the fact that, due to the tunnel's dimensions, you have a fairly good idea where the party will be walking, and can thus plan your horrible devices with a high degree of directional accuracy. Where else can you expect your victims to line up in a neat little row like a sequence of pop-up targets?
I do love corridor traps. Declare your marching order, little adventurers. The fun's about to start.

Hop, Skip, and a Jump (4 skullz). The PCs are presented with your bog-standard open pit filled with something disagreeable and probably fatal - but it's only 4-5 feet across, so they can easily jump it. Attempting to do so, however, will cause them to run into the invisible wall on the opposite side of the pit.

<run up> <jump> <smack> <slide> <sploosh!>
If you think this trap is a bit too deadly, there are a number of variations which can be applied. For instance, you can put up a sheet of heavy glass in place of the invisible wall. This removes all magic from the trap, thus eliminating the chance of a magic-user sensing that there's something on the other side of the pit. Also, if the character who jumps the pit is extremely lucky, he might travel through the glass instead of simply bouncing off it. The delver would take a significant amount of damage from plunging through the glass, but he'd still be in better shape than if he'd fallen into the lava.
Unless, of course, you have only 4 hp.

As before, Science!-based traps are some of the silliest. The Gas Passage (2 skulz) is a lowered section of hallway filled with carbon dioxide (presumably there's an elemental for that), designed to put out torches and maybe kill the PCs if they stick around too long looking for secret doors. At which point you have to wonder why the dungeon designer didn't invest in a proper poison gas (I have yet to see a D&D book with stats for CO2 poisoning) and be done with it.

Whereas a lot of the room traps take at least some small pains to disguise the fact that they are simply trapped room, most of the corridor traps are obviously traps to begin with - but what the PCs see is usually only half of what's really there, with the rest being covered up by weird line-of-sight, mirrors, invisible walls, and other tricky business.

Case in point is Mike Stackpole's next trap, Trip Wire That Isn't (2 skulz). A highly visible tripwire is strung across the dungeon corridor at ankle height, beyond it is a not-so-visible section of rotating floor that will give the second you put any weight on it, dumping the PCs down to whatever dark fate you have in store for them. If you hop or step over the tripwire, you fail; if you spring the tripwire, a pair of spring-loaded steel spikes shoot out and secure the floor ahead of you, letting you pass safely.

Stackpole apparently either had a thing for corridor traps or they just turned to him when they needed to fill out this section of the book, because the next four are by him too.

The Greystoke Memorial (3 skulz) is brilliant, and the illustration sums it up perfectly:
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As the writer likes to put it:
What's a chasm doing in the Death Star anyway?
That little lever-and-wheel thingy in the lower left hand corner is an automated crossbow that starts firing in the projected line of flight of the would-be Tarzan, activated by the pull on the rope.

There is a special section on Detours:
...the detour device, which forces the party off their line of advance and so on to some alternate pathway against their will. These traps can be especially useful in dungeons where the floorplan allows the characters to wander around aimlessly while avoiding the provided encounters. Traps such as these insure that the party will "get involved" - whether they want to or not.
Yes, these are railroad traps. Choo choo!

Most of these involve some form of sliding wall or floor. My favorite is probably the Chute and Hammer (3 skulz) designed by some mad dwarf: the PCs walk onto a pivot trap, the floor gives way (dumping them down the chute) and some mad bastard has put a hammer on the ceiling of the chute so you can maybe get your eggs scrambled as you fall down it.

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The Mapper Maddener (1 skulz) is another favorite. It's a four-way junction with sliding walls that reset when (insert MC dicking with players here), so that when they come back to it they'll find a straight corridor, a T-junction, or a dead end. Fun.

While some of the traps above are likely lethal, the next section is about traps known specifically as Murderers. I was expecting something like a murder hole, but I was wrong. The Pilum Pacifier (3 skulz) for example is set into a flight of a stairs; hitting a pressure plate on a lower stair releases spring-loaded pilums (short spears) to be released from the back walls of the stairs at varying heights.

Then there's this:
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Really, you have to wonder at what point the players get tired of getting killed by traps and start begging to encounter some monsters.

A lot of the rest of the traps in this section involve some combination of partial vacuums, elaborate mechanical devices, and CO2, so let's move on to the next sub-section: Step-and-Die.
Traps of this type are uniformly activated when someone treads upon the trigger mechanism
Technically we've already had quite a few of those so far, but whatever floats your little boats, guys and girls. Now, the basics of these are pretty simple:
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But let's see what Grimtooth & Co. came up with...

Smashing Floor Trap (4 skulz), step on trap, spring slams you into the ceiling.

Whirling Blade Boot Bloodier (3 skulz), step on trap, and a whirling blade shoots up just behind their leading foot, aiming to cut the Achilles' tendon and other bits vital to walking.

First Step Trap (3 skulz), step on trap, mechanical arm with razor blades pops out of the floor striking at back of the leg and heel.

Most of these traps are super-effective because the adventurers are only wearing greaves.
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Should have armored the backs of your legs, Bob.
And so on, and so forth. The actual Apache foot trap was adopted into a dungeon setting with the Stair Snare (2 skulz) - as you might expect, it replaced one of the stairs. Step on stair, break through, get a bunch of spikes in your leg and probably unable to pull it out again.

My adventurers in Crypts of Chaos probably would have cut off the offending leg and left it there. But they were hardcore.

Someone actually adapted this trap for 3e:
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The last trap in this section is the Flesh Pot (2 skulz), which I think is a very poor rating. It's your basic foot trap, except instead of spikes there's a pot of superglue down there. And you can pull the pot out, so really it's just a trap that ensures the PC is hobbling around with one foot in a pot for the entire fucking adventure. I'd do this once, and then have them come across a skeleton with a pot on each food, each hand, and another one on their head. Just to make them feel paranoid.
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Post by Blicero »

I wonder how many of these traps ever got used in actual games.
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Post by Red_Rob »

I always found it hard to come up with a good rationale for having traps, particularly the complex mechanical types that require building into the dungeon as it was designed. If the designer of the dungeon didn't want an area to be accessible, they could just not build a corridor there! For me Grimtooth's Traps needed more discussion on how to integrate traps into a game without setting your players eyes rolling like a slot machine on Saturday night.
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Post by Whipstitch »

Yeah, the most practical traps are generally just warning systems rather than Rube Goldberg devices--if Bob the Kobold Janitor accidentally sets off the bells-and-string alarm you can just choose not to murder him when you go check what is going on in the foyer, whereas having an elaborate deadfall where you live is just a bad idea on so many levels.
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Post by Corsair114 »

Most of these traps seem the kinds of things a bunch of overly imaginative, thoroughly introverted librarians that can turn incorporeal and fly might lay down to keep people away from their books.
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Post by hyzmarca »

Traps make more sense when you don't use the facility very often but still want access every now and then. Tombs for the rich and paranoid are a good example. You bury your loved-one once, and then aren't going to go back all that often. And you bury him with all his swag. Because.

And also you've got a family unlife insurance plan from Necromancers Mutual and you're all totally going to be raised as vampires in a hundred years.

Guards are expensive and they steal shit. You don't want any shit stolen and no one is going in their after your corpses are deposited, except for the insurance adjuster who has a map of the tomb already because that's a part of getting the policy.

So you put in traps. Preferably, you put in traps that don't hinder the undead, just in case you or the insurance agent accidentally sets one off.
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Post by Koumei »

I used traps when I ran Sigil Prep: the first class is always an introductory dungeoncrawl "in a safe, controlled environment*". The walls are actually made of cast plastic, like a giant playset for children. The traps are basically there to alert students to the dangers of traps in dungeons. The first is typically your good old "step on pressure plate, trapdoor drops X on you", where X in this case is a 5x5x5' cube of honey. This makes them easy to track by smell or by footprints and provides a dexterity penalty if they fail to leap out of the way.

The next is a series of tripwires for the dexterity-impaired, which triggers a series of spring-loaded mechanisms or shanghais or whatever, launching acorns and such at them. Minor nonlethal damage for those in the area who fail a Ref save. Those covered in honey are now looking like some kind of delicious treat.

The next encounter is a swarm of squirrels or a bear cub or something. Target priority is pretty easy at this stage.

That said, you can of course set up great mechanisms that appear to be some kind of trap, just to waste player time. Much like the oglaff comic in the first post.

*Safety and control not actually guaranteed.
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Post by wotmaniac »

Blicero wrote:I wonder how many of these traps ever got used in actual games.
Back in the "good ol' days", I got plenty of mileage out of the entire series. However, as my tastes in game elements have refined, the less I even bother with even having dungeon traps at all.
Red_Rob wrote:I always found it hard to come up with a good rationale for having traps, particularly the complex mechanical types that require building into the dungeon as it was designed. If the designer of the dungeon didn't want an area to be accessible, they could just not build a corridor there! For me Grimtooth's Traps needed more discussion on how to integrate traps into a game without setting your players eyes rolling like a slot machine on Saturday night.
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Post by icyshadowlord »

Does this book have any relation to the Tomb of Horrors, by chance?

Also, Koumei mentioning Sigil Prep reminded me; I need to find someone to DM that.
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Ancient History
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Post by Ancient History »

Well, I imagine all of the designers ran through the Tomb of Horrors at least once. So maybe "inspired by..." It doesn't share any designers, however.
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Judging__Eagle
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Post by Judging__Eagle »

Having read Tomb of Horrors, and a few of Grimtooth's Traps collections; I'd say that they're not very related.

Most of the Tomb of Horrors traps trigger upon entering a room you're supposed to enter to progress through the adventure. While the auto-death traps trigger when you enter areas you're not.

Most of Grimtooth's traps are designed to punish players who don't treat dungeon crawling as super-lethal mountaineering. Where your lack of pitons while crawling down a tunnel; or you unwillingness to solve stuff on your own with your own tools; or your over eagerness to fight monsters and break stuff; is supposed to be a metric for how badly your MC is supposed to 'punish' you today.

Some of Grimtooths is basically "arbitrary death traps", others of it is "solve this, or die!".

Koumei,

That... 5x5x5' cube of honey is... rather heavy. Possibly lethally so.

Honey is 36% denser than water. At 154.2 cm per 5'; cubed that's 353,9605.824 cm^3; or 3539.61 Kg (if water); and 4813.8696 Kg if honey.

At 1d6 damage per 200 libras, that supposedly "harmless" cube of honey is going to deal a pile of damage to any adventurer.

Convert to lbs (x2.2) nets 10590.51312 lbs; divide by 200 = 52d6 of damage.

Which will be capped at 20d6.

I'll have to assume that your players wouldn't/didn't point out the fact that your "totally not lethal" trap should have crushed them like bugs under a rock.

Even if it's... subdual damage, since it's a liquid. However, that's an ad hoc ruling. Remember, water is denser than cement; and that the engineering departments at various universities engage in "cement boat races".
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Ancient History
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Post by Ancient History »

I read that as the trapdoor drops them into a 5-foot cube of honey. Which is a sticky situation, but probably any able adventurer can tread honey long enough to get to the edge.
Last edited by Ancient History on Mon Aug 26, 2013 2:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Red_Rob »

I'm guessing that if you removed the floor below a 5' cube of honey its viscosity would actually cause it to... gloop downwards in a flow rather than drop like a stone.
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Post by hyzmarca »

The Great Molasses Flood was an actual thing that killed 21 people in Boston and destroyed a fuckton of property.

Do not expect viscosity to protect you from large amounts of etremely dense fluids propelled by gravity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Molasses_Disaster

Molasses can be surprisingly quick when a tank of it bursts, and Honey would be even faster.

Drowning is also a potential problem.
Molasses, waist deep, covered the street and swirled and bubbled about the wreckage. Here and there struggled a form — whether it was animal or human being was impossible to tell. Only an upheaval, a thrashing about in the sticky mass, showed where any life was... Horses died like so many flies on sticky fly-paper. The more they struggled, the deeper in the mess they were ensnared. Human beings — men and women — suffered likewise.
Last edited by hyzmarca on Mon Aug 26, 2013 2:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by hogarth »

wotmaniac wrote:
Blicero wrote:I wonder how many of these traps ever got used in actual games.
Back in the "good ol' days", I got plenty of mileage out of the entire series. However, as my tastes in game elements have refined, the less I even bother with even having dungeon traps at all.
When I read those books back in the day, I assumed that they were just supposed to be silly fun -- many of them are obviously humorous (e.g. the lobster trap) or intellectual exercises (e.g. a grappling hook made out of gallium that melts when you use it) and my D&D heritage never involved a "Tomb of Horrors" phase so we never developed a taste for ridiculous gauntlets of deadly traps. I can see some people getting some use out of the books, though.
Last edited by hogarth on Mon Aug 26, 2013 4:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Ancient History »

I used traps to great success in the Crypts of Chaos. Granted, the PCs didn't appreciate some of them...
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