304 – “The poisoned spikes are a nice touch, though.”

I went looking around the net for trap ideas for this strip and boy howdy, are there a LOT of ideas for RPG traps out there! It was kind of awe-inspiring, in its own way. They gave me some good ideas for when I start back up GMing in two weeks. I had been playing a half-elf battlemind named Kevon d’Medani, which looks like a cool name when you write it down. Then someone else says it out loud.

“Who’s your guy, Rob?”

“Kevon d”Medani, a Medani Trueseer and half-elf battlemind.” (NOTE: Kevon was pronounced by me as Kev-ONN)

“You mean… Kevin? Your guy is named ‘Kevin’?”

“No… he’s Kev-ONN… he’s… but… *grumble*. Fine. He’s named Kevin.”

Next time I get to play (which won’t be for quite a while) I will do two things:

Come up with a better name. This goes without saying. I may go all Welsh and make it nothing but consonants and the letter “y”.
NOT run a Psionic character. I’ve tried running a psionic character in three different campaigns, and have never enjoyed it as much as I thought I would. So, sad to say, but never again will I run a master of the mind. I’m thinking of running an Avenger, if for nothing else than the chance to utter this battlecry: “AVENGER ASSEMBLE!”

OK, I’m done rambling. See you all later!

~Rob

16 Comments

If the victim can say it’s “overkill” the trap clearly needs more “kill”.

My favorite trap to this day was something a buddy of mine came up with in first edition. When you step on the trigger, a low level golem is released from a nearby trap door. The golem is fairly easy to kill, and presents no issue. Three turns after being released, however, the golem (or it’s damaged remains) explodes dealing a ridiculous amount of damage. The trap can be disabled at the trigger panel, the door, or the golem. The trouble was, the DM loved to place these in corners of dungeons, where the trigger was just before the corner and the trap door holding the golem is just after, ensuring you walk directly into the explosion.

Rob if you want inspiration for traps, be it for Meat Shield or your D&D campaign. Look up an old book called “Grimtooth’s Traps”, I’ve had tons of fun springing some of the traps from it on players *grins evily*

@Old n grumpy: Ah Yes, Grimtooth’s Traps. Never owned a copy of it myself, but a good friend of mine’s eyes mist over when she thinks of it.

Oh my god! They killed Kevin!

Grimtooth’s Traps is truly the best, hands down, for killing, maiming, or annoying your players, depending on the book you grab. My favorite trap comes from his annoyance book(don’t remember the name), where most of the traps are rated 1 to 5 in door-to-door salesmen (annoyance)rather than skulls (deadliness). That is, until Grimtooth gets sick of it and puts out several 6 skull traps in the last section.

The best one, in my opinion, starts with a trap door and greased slide, dropping your players into a room. At the far end is a ladder, and a door at the top. The ladder is spring loaded so that when the first player reaches the top, it kicks off the wall, slamming them to the floor, and releasing a boulder that rolls across the floor (and the players still under the ladder), up the slide, back down again and across the floor (and players) and crashes into the wall, opening a sealed chamber filled with pressurized poisonous gas. once the pressure equalizes in the chamber, a final switch is released, dropping the stalactite covered ceiling. and if your players can fly/levitate/climb without a ladder/etc., then there is a spell on the door that causes the door to open, releasing the lava chamber behind it.

Oh, and don’t try to go back up the slide. Trust me.

Funniest trap ever made, summon low level pixes. Everytime you killed one, two kore would show up. Now, they didn’t attack, they were loud and cast wierd stuff every now and then, it was fun.

I had Grimtooth’s Trap book as well,..I loved the “whipped cream trap”. Imagine walking down the corridor with a dirt floor,..you have the thief with a 6ft pole checking the floor,..you get to a certain point and the floor falls away and you fall into a trapizoidal hole [wider at bottom than the top] with glass sides filled with whipped cream,… you cant swim in it,..and you cant use “breath underwater” type spell because its not water,… you cannot climb out as the walls are glass and lean inward. We had one player complain that the pole would have sunk in when you tapped the area but imagine years of dust and dirt sitting on a semi viscous liquid,..it become fairly solid and able to bear a fair amount of weight [almost the equivalent of thin ice,…10-20 lbs is safe,… 100lbs breaks through]. My character was the only one to survive the trap because as a wizard I was able to cast a fireball upwards and burn all the whipped cream,…lol

I have used many traps on my group. In one dungeon I used a combination trap. The party climbs an incline, 50 feet into the corridor there seems to be a type of ledge in roof. After 100 feet, the party triggers the trap, and it starts a boulder rolling down to them from 300 feet away. They cannot se but but might be able hear it. It also triggers a release of a ultimate glue on the floor 30 feet from the ledge. Once they see the boulder they try and run but will get caught in the glue and will have to take the crushing damage. The best part was that the party was so heavily dependent on it’s items that they were at a loss for what to do when they lost approx 50% of them due to the boulder.

Sadly, traps, and being with an evil dm fond of living traps. I stopped playing a rogue because of these kind traps, the fall in and die. Instead i would be the fighter with the hp and strength to hack, climb, leap, and dismantle any trap with adamatine short swords, swords, spears, and axes. And it saved me having to roll up a new guy each time the floor went to lava, or a pit with something, even weaponized traps that combo hit you. You can jam mechanics easily with a long spear of adamantite, or two the rare strong full metal means it cant break without herculean effort. The instant deaths are avoidable because your strength, especially if you go pure con/str with feats, mean that even if your dropped, you can grab and hold yourself with the swords, and hack/climb your way out of the trap long before falling in while the rest of the party dies because of it. The con ensures you never fail any mental attack via feats (And lets you give your dm a massive middle finger for trying to kill you), and enough fort, means the only way to kill you, is raw damage. When you can piss off a trap heavy dm enough, that he will throw back to back hp damage traps, and fail, you’ve done right in discouraging him. People really think fighters are basically screwed when it comes to traps, but really, the only things they need they have, good fort/will and the hp to just up and take damage from falls, traps, snares and nothing kills them, you just dont need reflex saves, especially from a 3.5 standpoint, especially when you start adding in spell resistance and elemental resistance.

Y’all can have a PDF of the original Grimtooth’s Traps (from 1981) for a mere $4.95:

http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=94938

The whipped cream pit? (grin) If you’re a magic user, summon a dust devil to whip the cream some more; if you’re a strong fighter, start thrashing around. In less than five minutes, you will have greatly reduced the volume of the whipped cream because you would have made butter and buttermilk. Try making your own whipped cream and you’ll see what I mean; it doesn’t take very long to go past “whipped cream” to “oh crap, now I need to run out to the store for another pint of heavy cream.” Now you have something to eat and something to drink as you figure out how to escape.

My favorite trap would be the big red “Do Not Push” button. Those things can be hard to resist out of sheer curiosity. After the pressing of the button any number of things can happen from deady to ammusing. I like the random shape change feature some of these buttons come with.

Favorite trap I ever set before my players wasn’t even in any D&D system, it was Vampire:Masquerade (DON’T HIT ME!!!) The players, all vampires, chased the badguy’s clues down to a cellar, and made it to the final room, where the only contents were a table, a cardboard box upon the table, and a handwritten note on the box that said “Open Me.”

After about a half hour of deliberations, they picked the “shiny red button” option and opened the box. Inside? UV lightbulb connected to a battery that did grenade damage to undead. >:-]

Man, they were pissed.

This didn’t happen to me, but it was the funniest trap I’ve ever heard of (outside of Grimtooth).

Adventurers find a dungeon room with a bookcase in it, with only one fancy looking book in it. Careful to search around first, they discover a curtained off area that has an unmoving flesh golem in it. “Okay,” they think. “Touch the book and the golem comes after us.” So they come up with a plan: everyone waits outside the room except for one person who will grab the book and run out the room as quick as they can.

So one character stands next to the bookcase, looking at the curtained area, sure that as soon as he grabs the book, the golem will animate. Keeping his eyes in that direction, he grabs the book.

*SMACK*

The bookcase slams down on him and pops back up to its original position.

@Paul Enns: Nice. I like it. 🙂

The Kobald King’s trap:
High level adventurers learn of a treasure held by the great kobald king. It lies at the bottom of a long corridor.
As the party descends, they come to an area where the corridor goes back up. At that point they are attacked from in front and the rear by kobalds. They easily slaughter hundreds of the tiny foes, soon they are fighting in blood and slime up to their knees, then their waists, then their armpits. At some point, they realize that the press of kobalds won’t let them leave the area. If they try to use magic to leave, they discover a planar anchor has been cast.
Soon they drown in kobald blood or die of crushing damage from the hordes of kobalds pressing inward. The kobald king gets the magic items of the high level party in exchange for a few thousand easily replaceable kobalds -the mothers of his kingdom hatch that many eggs in a year…

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MeatShield by Rob Chambers

Bi-Weekly D&D-style Fantasy Hijinks!

304 – “The poisoned spikes are a nice touch, though.”