Brutal Trap Ideas for Dungeon

[Brendanicus]

Hello, Playground,

It's been 10 session in to my dungeon-crawling campaign, and there hasn't been a single player death. Numerous close calls, but nobody has died except for two animal companions (One of whom was revived as a half-dragon) and the Bard whose "death" was part of a ritual of becoming a Warlock and resulted in his prompt resurrection.

Anyway, I've got enough nasty monsters in store for them, so I want to throw in some fun traps to kill one of them. The dungeon is an ancient prison for demons, but has been abandoned for millenia and is now occupied by Drow enslaved by Driders. Due to magical shenanigans caused by several high-level deceased Drow Sorcerers, the whole area is coated in gross sheets of flesh, with veins growing out of the walls and aberrations galore.

Basically, in terms of traps, there could be generic dungeon traps, poison-riffic Drow traps, Drider traps meant to catch errant Drow slaves, ancient Celestial traps designed for demons, demon traps/artifacts, and even gross biological traps.

Players are a six-person party at level 5.

The players walk into a corridor and find a Large lump of sinewy flesh along the way. Unbeknownst to them, it's a abomination spawned by the magic of the halls. The creature is stuck in place and would always stay dormant, were it not for the fact that its nervous system is growing nerves along some of the floor tiles. Players can make a Search check to find some of the hidden nerves. Any player who steps on a nerve awakens the beast and gets beaten to a pulp.

The beast itself is a hastily re-statted three-armed Shambling Mound with Improved Initiative that can't walk, with aberration traits instead of plant. It will relentlessly target whoever "set it off" until they die. Seeing as the party has a cocky Dwarven Cleric who likes to march first unless he expects a big fight, I suspect that he shall be in danger.

[Mr Adventurer]

Ah, the World's Largest Dungeon.

One trap could be a pit trap, with a secondary effect that drops the ceiling on you. So you take falling damage, crushing damage, and are buried alive at the bottom of the pit where it's hard to get help to you. The idea is the falling rubble sweeps Featherfalling or flying folk down too, so they aren't safe.

[Telonius]

Room-crusher trap, with an obviously heavy-duty, severely-locked door at the other side of the room. Several locks to open, so it takes a few rounds to get it open. When they finally do, they see that it leads directly to the cavern wall instead of another room. The real door is a hidden secret door off to the side, but the Rogue has wasted a round or two fiddling with the fake door. (If you're really cruel, the real hidden door has already been passed by the spikes that are rushing towards the PCs).

[endur]

Read Tomb of Horrors.

[daremetoidareyo]

If your PCs are galavanting in a dungeon sheathed in flesh and veins, it seems to me that a thematic trap along the lines of digestion would be good. A trap where the floor makes a touch attack to swallow the PC and shunts them into an acid filled stomach. Make the attack bonus, and HP for cutting your way out with a slashing or piercing hand held weapon. Also make make a high escape artist DC as a way out as an option also. Make the acid potent and add crushing damage (like 6d6 acid +4d8 crushing per round).

[jguy]

Have a room with jars of marbles hanging from the ceiling. All seems well until they realize that Wall of Sounds (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/w/wall-of-sound) cut through the room. When the jars drop for on reason or another they shatter, hitting the walls. People in the room will take 20d4+ with no safe

[Biffoniacus_Furiou]

Another Gaming Comic had a few episodes where they were in a room that was a vacuum, with a permanent illusion of breathable air inside. It was extremely difficult to open the door, once they went in the door was sucked shut, and the interior was completely silent because there was no air to carry the sound waves. Everyone was suffocating without even knowing it, probably while trying to solve some puzzle inside. Even if someone made the save to disbelieve the illusion, they couldn't communicate it to anyone else using speech, and the suction was too great for a single character to open the door.


I'm very fond of using a pit trap with a (advanced) Gelatinous Cube at the bottom, if anyone falls in they'll be automatically engulfed by the cube and the walls of the pit will be slick from it reaching out with a pseudopod in search of food. It's especially mean if they're chasing an opponent to prevent it from alerting its allies, and it's small/light enough to not trigger the trap when it runs across. You can also make it activate some kind of darkness or cloud effect, such as a Pyrotechnics Smoke Cloud, at the top of the pit when triggered so they won't even know what happened or that the pit is there.

[ExLibrisMortis]

There's a corridor that takes a little dip, stairs down, 500 feet, stairs up. When you're halfway along, digestive juices start to pool in, rising at a rate of a foot per round, until the corridor is completely full after six rounds. Each foot of stuff increases the cost of moving a square by 1 (so double cost in 1-foot sludge, triple in 2-foot), or you can swim when it's 3 feet deep or more. Of course, the stairs are blocked once the trap is triggered, though a careful application of force can open the stone 'lid'. Breaking the lid simply results in rocks falling.

The stuff deals acid damage and forces a fortitude save vs. nausea. Oh, and there are acidborn (Dungeonscape p. 111) piranha swarms* in the mix, arriving when the digestive juices reach 4 feet depth.

There are nine drains spaced 50' apart along the corridor, but they are down pit traps and initially closed. The pit traps are pretty obvious, with no cover and visible spikes 15 feet down at the bottom. The pit traps fill completely on the first round that digestive juices start pouring in.

Each open drain reduces the depth of the piranha soup by 1 foot every two rounds.

The drains are big enough to crawl through, and lead - via a 20-foot drop - to an underground stomach-like lake, with lots of acidborn marine life and the lair of a hivenest (Dungeonscape p. 115) acidborn kraken. Hivenest turns the creature into a zombie inhabited by a swarm, so use an acidborn piranha swarm for that. There is no way out of the stomach room - the kraken grew up, died and zombified there - but you can climb or fly back into the drains.

Note: I didn't take CR into account much, krakens may be a little too tough, especially with all the acid, nausea and swarms in the mix.


*I don't know whether they exist in official books, but here's a GITP link (http://www.giantitp.com/articles/LikdZboAmZOKxrp5uD0.html).

[Vinyl Scratch]

The room is featureless, except for two doorways, a lever or button, and some form of timepiece. The timepiece could be an hourglass, numeric countdown, analog clock, whatever. Size of the room shouldn't matter.

Upon entering the room, the doorways are sealed off, either by heavy portcullis or some other apparent method. Make it difficult for the party to force open. The countdown activates, and lasts for one minute (or longer, your choice), or ten rounds. Activating the button/lever resets the timer, buying them more time.

When the countdown reaches zero, the doors open.

[Seharvepernfan]

Traps work best in combination with other things.

A portcullis trap to trap the party in the same room as a dangerous monster, or better yet, to separate the party down the middle with one half stuck with the monster and the other half unable to come over to help, maybe with one unlucky bastard pinned under the thing.

A hallway that is a dead end, but it's around a corner so you dont know until you get there. At some point near the corner is a trap trigger that opens a section of the wall near the hallways mouth, letting a gelatinous cube the same size as the hallway come out. Now the PC's are stuck. They have to kill it, or otherwise have the ability to go through walls.

A drider waiting somewhere above to use a web spell on a party right as they trigger a trap that sends a big stone boulder tumbling their way.

Sleep/paralysis poison in combination with a crushing walls trap or something similar (or just some monster).

A pit that drops into a room, like so: http://i62.tinypic.com/96i92o.png
Good luck climbing out of that without spider climb. Bonus points for 10ft of water at the bottom, with skeletons armed with longspears.

A chest with a ray of enfeeblement trap (or any debilitating/immobilizing effect) on a chest full of crawling claws whose claws are poisoned. Bonus points if the magic trap is on the inside of the chest and is triggered by opening it.

A pit trap covered by a permanent silent image, with a sloping edge covered in grease (no way to catch yourself once your foot goes through the image). Gelatinous cube at the bottom. Best used after an earlier trap in the same hallway gives them a good reason to be running.

Can't find the entrance to the next level? That's because it's through a secret door at the bottom of a pit trap.

[goto124]

When the countdown reaches zero, the doors open.

-laughs and groans-

[Telonius]

I had something like that in an underwater dungeon once: a trap that drained all the water out of the room, replacing it with air.

[Tarvus]

I was always fond of rooms filling with sand. Lots of ways to breathe water, not that many to breathe sand. Classically you think of small rooms, but big caverns where they have to complete objectives (get to a button, grab certain items or even just get to the door on the other side) work especially well.

Sandstorm(pg.18) has rules on how it slowly gets harder and harder to move in depths of sand. Eventually tumbling becomes impossible and small creatures have a much harder time of it and need to be helped by the bigger party members, slowing them down even more. Great for clever players.

Add in some wind effects via Control Winds and turn the entire area into a sandstorm, making flight impossible, doing nonlethal or lethal damage at your discretion, and imposing heavy penalties on Listen and Spot.

Good fun.

[DrKerosene]

I originally came here to say "Gelatinous Cube chasing party towards a big pit trap" because someone can fail the Jump check, but I see that's been mentioned. Just make sure they're being chased into new areas and not backwards.

Some thread suggested giving potions to Oozes (Jump, Spiderclimb, Haste, Fly, etc) and I thought "How about a trap that's lethal, except for anyone who can find the potion/spell-trap in it?"

Like the room pit trap suggested above (suggested to use with water and spear-wielding skeletons), but it's waist-high with acid and has potions/a trap of (enough) Resistance/Immunity to Acid. So the Drow will be hurt and scarred, but salvageable, and monsters will just die? Maybe it's just a message above a secret door(cabinet) in the Drow language. Maybe there is magical darkness and some vision shenanigans.

Maybe there is a super well hidden room with it's walls covered in gems, a spell-trap of Sanctify the Wicked, and an Inevitable? If the party has some questionable morality, and they can't figure out some way to fix it, they might have a long wait. Also, any stolen gems will probably have screaming Drow inside them. Who doesn't want bling like that?

I'd love to try something with a Mirror of Opposition and teleportation shenanigans, and/or spamming Baleful Polymorph.

[Lerondiel]

Make them feel like chumps with Evard's 'Fleshy' Black Tentacles...even without a high caster level it ought to chew up some of the PCs

[Deox]

There was a similar thread a while back over on the WotC boards.

Some of these are particularly ingenious. Link (http://community.wizards.com/forum/whats-dm-do/threads/1071681)

[atemu1234]

A pit filled with spikes dripping with Crystal Pestilence (advanced bestiary, p48-49). A PC falls in? Watch them decay over a couple days, eventually becoming a monster who will try to consume the party. Better yet, make it a magic-resistant strain (CL check of some sort to cast Remove Disease).

[BoutsofInsanity]

I am very disappointed in this thread.

Grimtooth

Grimtooth

Grimtooth

http://www.amazon.com/Grimtooths-Traps-Game-Masters-Role-Playing-Systems/dp/0940244756

This is the legit site. Finding the book in another format is up to you.

Highly reccomend this book and it's sequels. Fun writing, clever traps, diagrams and witty dialogue. Provides lots of inspiration and shenanigans.

[sideswipe]

a pit trap with an illusion over it to make it 5' further away :smallbiggrin:

[Xyzzt]

Not technically a trap, but... Facehuggers. Alien-style. Player investigates a pile of twitching muscles suspiciously in the shape of a human... and gets a faceful of demon eggs in their mouth. Watch in glee as your players panic and the host feels the demon trying to break free from inside him.

An old classic - mobile mazes. Except when these walls move, they eat you. You can't see your fellow adventurers, but their screaming faces are imprinted on the walls with the faces of other damned souls. Add a demon with a huge bloody axe slowly wandering the maze, every step sounding from all directions as he hunts the party, one by one.

Pit traps full of Rustmonsters. Nuff said.

[atemu1234]

I am very disappointed in this thread.

Grimtooth

Grimtooth

Grimtooth

http://www.amazon.com/Grimtooths-Traps-Game-Masters-Role-Playing-Systems/dp/0940244756

This is the legit site. Finding the book in another format is up to you.

Highly reccomend this book and it's sequels. Fun writing, clever traps, diagrams and witty dialogue. Provides lots of inspiration and shenanigans.

I actually bought this a while back. I'm surprised I forgot.

It might have been amnesia from the Dungeon Master's Guide to the face after the gotcha lava trap.

[jiriku]

I am very disappointed in this thread.

Grimtooth

Grimtooth

Grimtooth

http://www.amazon.com/Grimtooths-Traps-Game-Masters-Role-Playing-Systems/dp/0940244756

This is the legit site. Finding the book in another format is up to you.

Highly reccomend this book and it's sequels. Fun writing, clever traps, diagrams and witty dialogue. Provides lots of inspiration and shenanigans.

Agreed. Grimtooth is the gold standard. None finer in the business.


You want to kill PCs? Combine monsters and traps. There have been many suggestions in this vein already.
I also am fond of one-two traps where an easily detected or less lethal trap is used to trick players into letting their guard down as they walk into a much more deadly trap. Grimtooth has many, many examples of these. Let's go with a basic example: self-closing pit trap in room is nasty. Exit from room is 20' from pit trap, and trapped with explosive fireball that burns PC and shoves him back 20 feet, directly into the pit trap, which closes overtop of him. Ledges in pit lead up to about 3 ft below the self-closing lid (not quite high enough to climb out on your own, where a lever will open the lid. The lever is trapped with a heightened suggestion: "grab the first person who tries to help you out of this pit and drag him in." Oh, and the explosive fireball trap on the door is auto-resetting.
Rube Goldberg or perpetual motion traps are fun. For example, spiked pit trap is positioned below a spiked ceiling, in a long hall. Door at end of hall is trapped with some bigby's hand spell or other that bull rushes into the pit. The floor of the pit is a trap that triggers a reverse gravity spell. The ceiling spikes are a trap that triggers an antimagic field. Naturally, all spikes are poisoned. So, PC opens door, is blown back down hall, falls in pit and is impaled on spikes, is flung up into the air to be impaled on ceiling spikes, then falls back down into pit and is impaled on spikes again. Poisoned three times and falling damage galore. Good times. If that bores you, put oil in the pit and have the initial trigger be one that sets the PC on fire. Splattering burning oil might even get a little splash damage on other nearby fools adventurers.

[Eloel]

The room is featureless, except for two doorways, a lever or button, and some form of timepiece. The timepiece could be an hourglass, numeric countdown, analog clock, whatever. Size of the room shouldn't matter.

Upon entering the room, the doorways are sealed off, either by heavy portcullis or some other apparent method. Make it difficult for the party to force open. The countdown activates, and lasts for one minute (or longer, your choice), or ten rounds. Activating the button/lever resets the timer, buying them more time.

When the countdown reaches zero, the doors open.

Please do this. This reminds me of thebutton on reddit.