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RandomNPC
2007-04-04, 08:42 PM
so we're playing dragon mountain, still, this second edition game i've made to 3.5 with some tweaks. and when a dragon comes to take over a dwarven mountain with dwarven defences, the dragon saves time by placing all her things in the dwarves vaults, and putting her protections on top of what the dwarves already built for her.

my party, running into the only hallway that leads to the vault, housing both dragon and treasure, now has a funny tale of "tactical withdrawl" from battle. no monster has turned them away, just a series of six traps. six beautifuly crafted, make you cry and run home to mommy traps. and nobody wanted to be a skill monkey. (rogue)

each trap is marked by a gate with a keyhole, if the key is turned the trap is deactivated and the hallway is normal down to the next gate. there are no keys, or even lockpicking skills, known to any characters.

rubble - the party had no key, so the wall of force that was holding up part of the cieling was disspelled and they got themselves a few hours of clearing rubble to be able to continue. the monk went a lil crazy and got himself fatigued.

gravity - again with no key. so the party finds a pit trap, wide open, thirty feet deep. the pit is 20 feet across and has no edge along the sides to walk on. the fighter in light armor and the fatigued monk decide to leap it and do something with a rope. so they both leap across and up, right into the reverse gravity spell. well from there they shoot up (they leapt kinda that way to begin with) break through the false ceiling, and fall up 50 feet to the top of a spiked pit. how did they get down? the wizard disspelled the gravity thing, and the monk slowfalled, i allowed him to get out on the other side because of the slow fall. at this point the fighter remembers he stole the wizards boots of spider climb and walks down himself. go him. they throw the boots back and forth and walk along the wall to get by.

fire - no key. so a kobold they managed to recruit from the armies of kobolds they fought / paid / snuck thier way past walks out into the aparently empty hallway, and triggers an oily fire trap for 4d10 damage to everyone in the hallway. the funny part? nobody waited in the previous section.

so at this point they retreat a bit, the cleric does his healy thing, and the rest so the cleric has more healy for later, and the wizard has more disspell and detect spells.

crawl - they bypass everything they retreated around, and again, no key. so they come to a hallway that has a section of wall coming down, so you need to crawl under a two foot gap, on the other side of this hole they crawl through, is another pit trap. it has a two foot wide bridge going across it, and on the other side is another two foot hole at the bottom of the wall otherwise blocking the passage. if you stand up on the bridge (raise your head more than two feet above the bridge, into the space between the walls you have to crawl under there is a colorless odorless gas that makes you dizzy, and you may just fall in the pit trap. they re-steal the boots of spider climb from the wizard, and go past sideways. negating the gas and the bridge, inventively using a 30 on a use rope check to not worry about dropping the boots into the pit when trying to toss them back.

spring - you guessed it, no key. so the hallway is clear, kinda like the fire trap hallway. the wizard detects magic, so he disspells, and makes some decent CL checks, thus saving the day. they all use the boots of spider climb anyway, and that saves them from the mechanical part of the trap. what would have happened is any living thing in the trap section would have triggered the cieling to push them down (flyers) through the light weight trap door. they would then be reduced, as per the spell, and fall down a small tube, twenty feet down this tube is an anti-magic field that wipes out the reduce, thus making you take crushing damage untill your party can grease you and pull a medium (or small halfling / gnome) character up a two foot wide tube with any rope they might just happen to have with them. even with the disspell the fall to the tube would have done 1d something fall damage.

false - key? no. this hallway is just a magic aura as per the spell. anyone casting detect magic on the area will, according to the campain books, become really paranoid. needless to say the campain book did not lie.

so for half of the traps, the boots of spider climb saved the day. for having the idea of buying them im giving the wizard a few extra experience, just because thats the kind of thing i do. i mean anyone can load up on blaster wands and prepare nothing but detect magic and dispell. but buying an item like that in my games, the players seriously take thier good old time.

they just got past the false, and there's supposedly a kobold ambush (according to the books) but i was thinking another trap after the false one gives them back a sense of security. thoughts?, comments?, ideas?

anyone reading this entire post gets a few bits of respect for putting up with my rant length description of what happened last game. i felt the need to share.

Kel_Arath
2007-04-06, 08:58 PM
pit traps with gelatenous cubes are always fun. but maybe one where the party has to jump from rune to rune spelling out the dragons name (knowledge history or summat to figure it out, or if the traps were from the dwarves spelling out the name of their king or a diety of theirs)

Matthew
2007-04-08, 10:37 PM
Interesting stuff. Glad to hear this campaign is still going. whatever happened about that Fighter's (Barbarian's?) Sword and the 'building by building' exploration technique? Oh well, looks like they made it this far. Maybe the Kobold Ambush should involve a Trap?