Lair of a Thief

[MrStabby]

What are good things to put into the lair of a thief for an adventure. So far I have two things:

1) Traps
2) The thief

This feels a bit hollow. I am not sure it is enough content for a session.

[Toadkiller]

Stolen things? Perhaps dangerous stolen things? Statues that come to life, perilous magic items, apparent prisoners that are really allies of the thief. Henchmen, the cops who think the party are henchmen.

Lots of options.

[Trum4n1208]

Puzzles and riddles maybe? I agree, it's a bit tough to fill the lair of a single Thief. Granted, I'm creatively bankrupt :smalltongue:

[MrStabby]

Stolen things? Perhaps dangerous stolen things? Statues that come to life, perilous magic items, apparent prisoners that are really allies of the thief. Henchmen, the cops who think the party are henchmen.

Lots of options.

So there are a couple of villains. One a Wizard, one a Ranger and one a thief.

I want to reserve magic stuff for the wizard and animals for the ranger.

Henchmen could work...

[CursedRhubarb]

A lair for a thief is a great opportunity to tell the thief's story, for if they have a place big enough to be called a lair, they've been very productive.
You can include display cases (all locked and trapped of course) to show off past items they took for themselves. Some artwork. A rare mask, rare armors or weapons, items from the royal suite perhaps.
Secret doors, hidden rooms are also good.
Perhaps a training room with an automaton for combat practice.
Defenses can be as simple as locks and traps, but if the their has a habit of taking from wizards and the like perhaps they have some animated armor or weapons as guards that are disguised as display items. A golem or two, where the thief stole control rods and gained some guards could be fun.
And a flameskull is never a bad idea for a Treasury guard.

[MrStabby]

A lair for a thief is a great opportunity to tell the thief's story, for if they have a place big enough to be called a lair, they've been very productive.
You can include display cases (all locked and trapped of course) to show off past items they took for themselves. Some artwork. A rare mask, rare armors or weapons, items from the royal suite perhaps.
Secret doors, hidden rooms are also good.
Perhaps a training room with an automaton for combat practice.
Defenses can be as simple as locks and traps, but if the their has a habit of taking from wizards and the like perhaps they have some animated armor or weapons as guards that are disguised as display items. A golem or two, where the thief stole control rods and gained some guards could be fun.
And a flameskull is never a bad idea for a Treasury guard.

Yeah, no constructs, undead or animated objects as i want those to be the challenges for the wizard. They are not bad ideas in a vacuum, I just want to keep the encounters differentiated.


So I am thinking: traps, meta-traps and a meta-meta trap.

Doors have needle traps on them, there are pit traps in the hallway, collapsing stairs and some nifty blade traps.

Level 2 traps deal more damage, some are obvious some are more subtle. Some are explosive. Keeping a safe distance whilst someone disarms the trap puts the PCs likely location in a perfect zone for an ambush/having a wall collapsed on them.

Level 3 raises the stakes (possibly into the PCs feet through an old rug?). At the end they get to corner the thief who holds some kind of dead mans switch (and possible a getaway plan) and the PCs find he has rigged the whole building to collapse and the whole encounter is one massive trap.

[Fable Wright]

My question is, why all the traps? He's a rogue, and a good one too. He knows how fallible traps are, and he'd hardly want everything to explode when he comes home from work.

Honestly, I'd give the rogue some display cases, comfy furniture, and a decently stocked kitchen with a chef who knows his way around the boltholes. All of the display cases have meticulously crafted forgeries, of course; the apartment should have nothing of actual value. All of that is stored in a single portable hole that never leaves the thief's possession. The only way to avoid getting robbed? Have your possessions somewhere the other thieves aren't.

[CursedRhubarb]

Hmm. Sticking more to traps and puzzles then.
Perhaps a patterned rug in one room then in another the floor tiles fall out if they don't follow the pattern.
Tripwires for darts with poisons that do various things, from basic poison, effects similar to color spray, sleep, or really nasty ones that make them suffer madness effects for a short time. (some of those can be fun)
Doors that don't make sense. (Fold down or up instead of left to right even though the handle is in he normal condition. Try to open like a normal door and nothing happens)
Gas and acid traps are also nasty.
Items on display could be on pressure plates so when taken and not swapped for an item of the right weight they trigger a trap ala Indiana Jones style.
Classic spiked ceiling that lowers in a room with locked doors.
Room with floor covered in caltrops or ball-bearings. Or both to be evil.
Room with no floor, just a pit and a 3in ledge that goes around the side.
Fake door on a wall, opening it only reveals a 6in deep closet and triggers a trap that sprays fire at them (alchemical fire vials in a prayer contraption, disarm and get the vials yay!)

Hope these look a lil better

[Sigreid]

A treasure chest that makes it clear this is not his real lair, in the form of an empty chest/vault.

[MrStabby]

Hmm. Sticking more to traps and puzzles then.
Perhaps a patterned rug in one room then in another the floor tiles fall out if they don't follow the pattern.
Tripwires for darts with poisons that do various things, from basic poison, effects similar to color spray, sleep, or really nasty ones that make them suffer madness effects for a short time. (some of those can be fun)
Doors that don't make sense. (Fold down or up instead of left to right even though the handle is in he normal condition. Try to open like a normal door and nothing happens)
Gas and acid traps are also nasty.
Items on display could be on pressure plates so when taken and not swapped for an item of the right weight they trigger a trap ala Indiana Jones style.
Classic spiked ceiling that lowers in a room with locked doors.
Room with floor covered in caltrops or ball-bearings. Or both to be evil.
Room with no floor, just a pit and a 3in ledge that goes around the side.
Fake door on a wall, opening it only reveals a 6in deep closet and triggers a trap that sprays fire at them (alchemical fire vials in a prayer contraption, disarm and get the vials yay!)

Hope these look a lil better

Yeah, the more puzzle based ones work quite well to break up the encounter. Maybe get a lot of chances to use skills and knowledge. I may have to telegraph to the players that there is a puzzle element to it - else they will have some trouble. They are bright players, but can get set in a certain way of thinking.

[BW022]

What are good things to put into the lair of a thief for an adventure. So far I have two things:

1) Traps
2) The thief

This feels a bit hollow. I am not sure it is enough content for a session.

Why does the thief have a "lair"? Why not a regular house? Something obvious such as a mill, smithy, cobbler shop, etc. Or you could have all sorts of fun with it.

Say, the thief comes from an higher class family and lives at home -- full of family members, guards, etc. -- none of which know what he does at night. This makes it a social or investigative series of encounters unless they want to raid the tax collectors home and grab his son.

Or...

Say the thief has some type of cover business... say a barrel making shop. Stolen goods are hidden among hundreds of barrels and most of the guild has a day job making an delivering barrels.

Or...

Say the thief is an information broker type... he deals in stolen items and information which have lots of secrets or various people. As such, he has the protection of lots of nobles, the guard, some powerful family, etc. who don't want their secrets revealed.

[N810]

You could have a false bottom in an empty treasure chest,
actually be hatch to a secret basement.
Oh and of course it's trapped and locked and both of those are hidden.

[clem]

A master thief is one with no central base of operations. Treasures are distributed and sleeps in a different bed each night. Why not give the thief a means of Shadow Walk that lets him or her move to prearranged places to do business with clients or fences? Then the puzzle becomes a social one of tracking down where the thief will turn up next. It'll also like require a number of physical skill checks to get to a inaccessible/inhospitable locale.

[JellyPooga]

IMO the lair of a thief should have no defences. Trap? Any Thief can get past them. Monsters/guardians? How's a Thief to control them? Arcane wards? They rely on someone else to install them. A Thief should be paranoid. The best and only only defence they should have is any potential intruders simply not being able to find your "lair" in the first place.

It could make for a great scenario; after all the trials and tribulations of actually finding the lair (and you need to make the place hard to find), once the players get there, when nothing gets in their way...let their own paranoia do your job for you. Ham up the atmosphere to the Nth degree. Keep reminding them that it's the lair of a master thief. Leave them feeling like it was all "too easy". For the entire next campaign, give them the impression that they've been targeted or are followed. Play on their fears of some kind of reprimand but never follow through. They'll both hate you and love you for it, especially if you let the Thief get away.

The Sword of Damoclese is a powerful tool and this is a perfect opportunity to install one.

[smcmike]

This is a tough question without context. What do you mean when you say "thief?" What does he steal? How? Why? Does he do it alone, or is he part of a criminal organization? Does he live in a town, or a city, or the wilderness? What is his cover story? Who are his enemies? What is the goal of his "lair?" Does he have a family? Is he a she? What does she do in her spare time? How wealthy is she? How old is she?

My guess, based upon the thread, is we are talking about an urban building where a solitary master burglar lives and keeps his loot. He is paranoid because he's ripped off powerful people, so he keeps his house trapped, and never leaves except in disguise.

1. The presence of the thief's lair should be hidden by some sort of a front - the entire lair should be behind a hidden door, and there should either be a domestic dwelling or some business that faces the public.

2. The traps should be easily disarmed or avoided by the thief, such as with a key. No point in having a lair that tries to kill you.

3. It should have a secret back door of some sort, perhaps into the sewers or through a tunnel.

[Temperjoke]

I like the dual entrance sort of thing. One entrance is more obvious, but littered with traps.... basically the thieves guild challenge from Dungeons & Dragons (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0190374/). Very lethal unless you are incredibly skilled. The second entrance is very secret, with a high DC to discover, that takes you directly to the living quarters of the lair. This way the thief doesn't have to deal with anyone not worth his time, and he doesn't waste a ton of time getting home every night.

[Biggstick]

Unless your party is full of people who are capable of disarming traps, I would try and steer you away from primarily using traps in the lair of a Thief. The only person who really gets to do anything in a session with traps is the person who can disarm them; I've played both as the trapfinder/disarmer and the other party members, and I can tell you from personal experience that it's great fun as the trapfinder while the other party members don't really do much of anything.

I'll echo what others before me have said and bring up that a Thief probably wouldn't have tons of traps in his lair, as he knows they're fallible. The hardest part of a Thief's lair would be actually finding it. It should be somewhere you wouldn't expect.

[JellyPooga]

I like the dual entrance sort of thing. One entrance is more obvious, but littered with traps.... basically the thieves guild challenge from Dungeons & Dragons (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0190374/). Very lethal unless you are incredibly skilled. The second entrance is very secret, with a high DC to discover, that takes you directly to the living quarters of the lair. This way the thief doesn't have to deal with anyone not worth his time, and he doesn't waste a ton of time getting home every night.

Put yourself in this Thiefs place. One entrance festooned with traps with a second entrance that isn't, is a waste of time, effort and money. Anyone that knows about your lair and is liable to loot it will probably find out about the second, easier entrance too, making the "obvious" entrance pointless.

You either have one trap infested entrance OR rely on no-one finding your lair in the first place. The first instance is a pain in the backside; every time you want to get in yourself, you have to bypass all those traps. If there's an easy bypass, any other thief worth the name will find that bypass too, which therefore renders all those traps worthless. As such, trapping ones lair at all is both pointless as a defence and a pain in the butt for you to boot.

So you obfuscate your lair as best you can, expending all the resources you would have spent on traps to hide your lair better, make sure no-one follows you when you go there and have done. Unless this thief is an idiot who doesn't have the smarts or paranoia to realise the above, the lair itself should be a cakewalk. In order to make any kind of encounter out of it, from a GMs point of view, you need to play mind games (see my previous post).

So the question is; is this thief a moron? I'm assuming not.

The only other option is if this thief is a sadist who enjoys watching "newbs" succumb to his death-trap "obvious" entrance OR he's an idiot who doesn't assume that at least someone doesn't know about his so-called "secret" entrance/bolt-hole or that it won't be found.

This does, of course, ignore the value of trapping any valuables within the lair itself. Setting up some trapped foils that appear valuable, might fit the more sadistic style of thief, but if he's just an opportunistic rogue, I don't see him spending the resources on bothering.

[clem]

Another idea is to play on a Master Thief's sense on unfair play and create challenges outside of a typical dungeon crawl. Make the playing field asymmetrical without it feeling like a Monty Hall death trap.

For instance, make the thief also a local magistrate or one who has enough political clout to have the local guard patrolling his place. Now the heroes can't upfront assault him without getting on the wrong side of the law. The alternative is that they need to build a case against the thief and/or the corrupted officials who are protecting him.

[Temperjoke]

Put yourself in this Thiefs place. One entrance festooned with traps with a second entrance that isn't, is a waste of time, effort and money. Anyone that knows about your lair and is liable to loot it will probably find out about the second, easier entrance too, making the "obvious" entrance pointless.

You either have one trap infested entrance OR rely on no-one finding your lair in the first place. The first instance is a pain in the backside; every time you want to get in yourself, you have to bypass all those traps. If there's an easy bypass, any other thief worth the name will find that bypass too, which therefore renders all those traps worthless. As such, trapping ones lair at all is both pointless as a defence and a pain in the butt for you to boot.

So you obfuscate your lair as best you can, expending all the resources you would have spent on traps to hide your lair better, make sure no-one follows you when you go there and have done. Unless this thief is an idiot who doesn't have the smarts or paranoia to realise the above, the lair itself should be a cakewalk. In order to make any kind of encounter out of it, from a GMs point of view, you need to play mind games (see my previous post).

So the question is; is this thief a moron? I'm assuming not.

The only other option is if this thief is a sadist who enjoys watching "newbs" succumb to his death-trap "obvious" entrance OR he's an idiot who doesn't assume that at least someone doesn't know about his so-called "secret" entrance/bolt-hole or that it won't be found.

This does, of course, ignore the value of trapping any valuables within the lair itself. Setting up some trapped foils that appear valuable, might fit the more sadistic style of thief, but if he's just an opportunistic rogue, I don't see him spending the resources on bothering.

First off, you aren't the authority on what an NPC in someone else's game might realistically do. Maybe the thief is amused by watching people attempt to sneak in? Maybe, like I said, he wants to test the skills of people trying to catch him offguard? That's not out of the question for someone with a large ego. Secondly, While I said "a high DC" I didn't spell out how I would describe it. There are many non-linear ways to hide a secret entrance that a player might not figure out without guidance to doing it that utilize magic that players ordinarily can't access. There was a recent example in SKT that unless a DM went out of the way to describe things, a player would never guess how to enter. Thirdly, people with a lot of resources and time have been known to be wasteful with those resources, so someone making an elaborate lair to entertain himself is hardly the worst way money has been blown.

And that's assuming he built a lair like that himself! Maybe it was an old dungeon or lair of someone/something else that he overcame before, and just decided to renovate it a little.

Stop throwing fits about other people's suggestions.

[CursedRhubarb]

I can see the reasoning behind the lair being devoid of traps, puzzles, or guards but It just doesn't sound as fun to me. Besides, there's always the chance that the thief gets discovered or some child or silly adventurer stumbles across the entrance my chance and they would want something to slow down intruders while they grab what they can and prepare to run or defend their home.

Not having any defenses, to me, would feel rather "meh" and would just take what I could without rushig since there wasn't anything to stop or deter it; and it is, after all, a thief's lair so finders keepers rules were established by the host

[smcmike]

It also depends on the function of the "lair." A lair need not be the thief's living quarters, right?

Let's say the thief keeps an apartment in town for living in. He might keep a few safeguards there, to warn him if someone breaks in, but he wouldn't want to keep anything too valuable or anything that could blow his cover. When the magistrates break down the door, he doesn't want them dead, he just wants to not be there and to have them find nothing.

What he needs is a secret place to stash his loot and his illegal gear. This is the sort of laur that he might guard with traps, or place in some particularly hazardous area, where it is unlikely to be disturbed.

Undead are good guardians, if he knows a way past them. His lair can be in a tomb.

[JellyPooga]

First off, you aren't the authority on what an NPC in someone else's game might realistically do. Maybe the thief is amused by watching people attempt to sneak in? Maybe, like I said, he wants to test the skills of people trying to catch him offguard? That's not out of the question for someone with a large ego.

So did you read the part in my post about the possibility of him being a sadist? Or if he's not paranoid enough? I'm assuming a thief that wants nothing except a lair that no-one can rob. He expends no resources on pointless death-traps and all the resources he can afford for his lair on hiding it. Note that I made no mention of how this thief would hide his lair either. Only that one entrance is better than two entrances. If you've got a budget of X, then spending all of X on one thing is better than splitting it between two.


that utilize magic that players ordinarily can't access.

In campaign design circles, this kind of thing is known as the definition of pointless. If the players can't access it, don't waste ink on it.


Stop throwing fits about other people's suggestions.

Who's the one throwing a fit? I'm posting what I consider the most logical method of protecting a lair from a master thiefs point of view (ignoring any personality traits that would make him less than logical, such as being a sadist or deciding to splurge excess money) and suggesting a way to subvert the usual promenade of the trap-monster-BBEG dungeon.

If the OP wants a "normal" dungeon, which rarely make much sense at the best of times, my suggestions are probably not for him. If the OP wants something a bit different from the norm that actually makes sense from the point of view of a highly paranoid (and hypothetical) thief, then something along the lines of my suggestion might suit.