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View Full Version : Help me design a trap that'll last the entire session



Frosty
2008-08-11, 02:27 PM
Right now I've got this idea about a trap my players will fall into that will take them the entire session to get out of. I need help refining it and getting the details down.

The trap starts with something like they somehow all fall down this hole , land on somesort of teleportation pad, and end up in magically encased...structure that blocks teleportation magic out. They can't fly back out or climb back out due to the way the trap works, and the walls and ceilings and ground are imprevious to damage and spells (even Disintegrate).

One idea is, the players somehow move through time as well as space as they explore this structure with many rooms, and they'll catch gimpses of themselves in the future and sometimes see themselves from 20 minutes ago for example (but always in a situation where they can't talk to or reach the other "themselves"). They need to use the items they find to creatively get past the obstacles in the structure, and sometimes they'll even get hints in the form of notes seemingly written by themselves from the past. And as they glimpse possible dangers in the future they have to write notes to leave the their future selves andmaybe even leave tools. There will be fights. Sometimes they even have to fight the same things twice except in different times. They can bypass some fights, and when they see the creatures again in the future they are already skeletons. Eventually they figure out a way to blow up the structure with a self-destruct, but they have to find the right device to transport them back to the time before they dropped into this trap before the blow this place to kingdom come. They'll die, but when the othee "themselves" drop into the pit, the trap is no longer there and they won't have been in this trap in the firsy place.

The other idea is similar except the party is split into 3 groups of 2 (one in the present. One in the future, and one in the past. they're in the same structure but at different time periods, and they have to somehow communicate and aid each other past obstacles in order to get the parts that'll combine into the control for the self-destruct device. and then they'll all have to meet up in the past after fighting some golems or something, and again blow the place up so they'll have never entered in the first place. The characters will know nothing of what happened, and the players will hopefully want to congratulate and strangle me at the same time.

What do you guys think?

Deepblue706
2008-08-11, 03:14 PM
I have a simpler alternative. Have them fall down a pit. At the bottom is a teleportation circle. It teleports them back to just below the top of the pit.

Between where the fall begins and ends (and begins again), there is an antimagic field.

Oh, and the walls of the pit are spiked. And the spikes are greasy.

If they find a way to climb back up, a fat guy at the top pushes them back in.

There you go.

batsofchaos
2008-08-11, 03:35 PM
Have you heard of/played the Lucasarts adventure game Day of the Tentacle? If you go the second option, you could set up a mechanic similar to the way that game was structured to have them cooperatively construct a 'bomb' in the past using objects scattered in different times.

Erm. I should explain Day of the Tentacle for those who are unaware of the game. Skip the next paragraph if you've played the game and know what I'm talking about.

The start of the game splits the three protagonists up in different time periods; one 200 years in the past, one in the present, and one 200 years in the future. They all have devices that can transmit small inanimate objects to each-other through time (the depowered time machines, but that could be changed in-game to an inclosed part of a room where there's a temporal field or some-such). To play through the game, the three characters send objects that allow the others to accomplish their necessary goals. For example, the past character needs vinegar (as an ingredient for a battery), but there is no vinegar available. However, the character in the present can get ahold of some wine, which can then be sent to the past, where the character in the past can convince a group of people to place it in a time capsule. Flash-forward to the future, and the time-capsule has been dug up and the wine has spoiled to vinegar. Then the future character sends it back to the past where it is used for the battery.

The game, being a Lucasarts adventure game, railroads the players into specific ojects being necessary, as well as specific things needing to be done in order to "win," which of course won't work in DnD. However, this mechanic along with some defined requirements could lead to some interesting game-play. The self-destruct could be a puzzle that needs specific pieces from different times to be assembled in the past, but that won't stop the players from sending each-other messages across time and cooperatively changing the dynamics of the dungeon for eachother. Imagine a group in the future finding a poticullis rusted beyond use sending a message to the past for them to open the porticullis and disable it from being closed. Now they can explore an area previously beyond their means.

Eighth_Seraph
2008-08-11, 03:42 PM
Try this (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=79135). Great way to pull of some Star Trek-y goodness. Or introduce characters that would otherwise be impossible.

insecure
2008-08-11, 03:42 PM
This (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=79135) thread could be of help.

Ninja'd in under a minute.:smallbiggrin:

Eighth_Seraph
2008-08-11, 03:43 PM
...dude. That's, like, ninja to the second power. Like, zombie samurai ninja from space.

AND you managed to edit-ninja this post. Huzzah.

Totally Guy
2008-08-11, 03:56 PM
There was a film called the Cube which sort of did this. It did turn into more of a dungeon crawl though just with lots of small traps as the inter-party conflicts flared up.

Cube 2 did the "you see yourself in the next room 20 minutes from now" thing but mechanically it's not viable in roleplay as either you railroad them there, you control what future man does or you allow partial control of future man without them knowing the full story. Past man might work. Cube 2 was a bit pants compared to the first.

CASTLEMIKE
2008-08-11, 04:10 PM
Heroes of Horror Soul Locked Living "Trap" Spell using Unapproachable East Shadow Lord Shadow Discorporation if "Killed".

Using a Dimension Door type spell similar to Undermountain should get them lost in the dungeon unless they are high level.

Throw in a Mirror of Opposition could be interesting.

jcsw
2008-08-11, 08:14 PM
There was a film called the Cube which sort of did this. It did turn into more of a dungeon crawl though just with lots of small traps as the inter-party conflicts flared up.

Cube 2 did the "you see yourself in the next room 20 minutes from now" thing but mechanically it's not viable in roleplay as either you railroad them there, you control what future man does or you allow partial control of future man without them knowing the full story. Past man might work. Cube 2 was a bit pants compared to the first.

Link (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_2:_Hypercube), cause wiki gives a way better explanation.

Covered In Bees
2008-08-11, 08:18 PM
http://red.reveries.info/public/transvideogame/bridget.gif

There, done.

Frosty
2008-08-11, 08:43 PM
Ok, the hypercube seems cool, but even the wikipedia article was a bit confusion. I'd like a version of this that focuses mostly on time puzzles. I'm actually confused by the hypercube trap described in the linked thread.


Imagine a group in the future finding a poticullis rusted beyond use sending a message to the past for them to open the porticullis and disable it from being closed. Now they can explore an area previously beyond their means

Yes, that is something I had imagined,and I will probably do something like that, but I want the premise and mind-screw to be of scary/epic proportions. I want my players to be SCARED but not in a horror-movie way, but more like "I'm going to die here of old age" scare.

CASTLEMIKE
2008-08-11, 09:10 PM
Random Summon Monster Machine in your dungeon.

Jayngfet
2008-08-11, 09:14 PM
Pit. Teleportation circle.

From there you're in a 100x100x75 room with no doors and a 20x20 wide pit that's 70ft. deep in the centre. A 10x10x10 cube falls from the cieling as if with feather fall, if it hit's them they're teleported at the bottom of the pit from there via teleportation circle on the pice of the roof.

A. if they dodge it it smashes a panel and falls into another teleportation circle. It does the same thing ten times over before landing in pre determined spots. After which it hits the bottom of the pit in a corner and activates the trigger, proceed as B.

B. They hit a trigger, the roof lowers at 20ft. per round. Fifteen feet from the bottom of the pit and every five feet aftur until the top of the ceiling. A 4x4 hole opens near the top with a tunnel leading 70ft. westward to a 40x40ft. room 500ft. high with a rope ladder leading to a ledge with a door. Six stirges are halfway up led by a fiendish stirge. the doorknob is a trigger for a trap that fores 4 crossbow shots from the other side of the room, as if from +2 light crossbows. The doorknob also has greenblood oil(1 con initial damage, 1d2 secondary damage) smeared on it.

The hallway on the other side is 10x75 with a fifteen foot high roof and contains 2 wolf skeletons twenty feet from the door. twenty five feet from the door the halway is razor wired and the next ten feet after has the floor greased. The door at the end has three jewels(one red, one green, one blue). The door has a nonfunctional knob with an inflict light wounds(caster level 1st) trap. Pressing the blue jewel opens the door. Pressing either of the other two activates a scything blade trap.

More later.

Vexxation
2008-08-11, 09:27 PM
I want my players to be SCARED but not in a horror-movie way, but more like "I'm going to die here of old age" scare.

Then have them think they really *will* die of old age in there. Take the number of party members. Double it. Assign each person 2 of those slots.

For each person, flip a coin. If it's heads, there is a Venerable version of themselves wandering around. If tails, there are two corpses, old and decayed, bearing their equipment.

Take the Venerable versions (however many there are) and scatter them. Don't point out immediately that they are copies of the players, but describe them as you would the players, perhaps bearing equipment the PCs might recognize. Have the aged ones babble inanely, offering little help, but referring to the traps that killed their companions. Perhaps one corpse contains a hastily scrawled note commenting on the cause of its death.

Once the players catch on, they might get a little shaken. Lead them in circles, show them their own deaths ahead of time, and see if they take heed of your warnings.

Glyde
2008-08-11, 10:00 PM
http://red.reveries.info/public/transvideogame/bridget.gif

There, done.



I lawled.

I'm gonna have to second (third? Fourth?) the Hypercube idea.

PirateMonk
2008-08-11, 10:10 PM
The Hyper Cube is probably what you're after, though as presented it will take more than one session to escape from.

Colmarr
2008-08-11, 11:33 PM
There was a film called the Cube which sort of did this. It did turn into more of a dungeon crawl though just with lots of small traps as the inter-party conflicts flared up.

Cube 2 did the "you see yourself in the next room 20 minutes from now" thing but mechanically it's not viable in roleplay as either you railroad them there, you control what future man does or you allow partial control of future man without them knowing the full story. Past man might work. Cube 2 was a bit pants compared to the first.

I had never heard of these films before reading this thread. Now, after reading the wiki entries for all three, my head hurst.

Thanks a bunch :smallbiggrin:

OneFamiliarFace
2008-08-12, 02:24 AM
I like the OP's first idea quite a bit, but it would be very tricky to run. (The second idea would leave a good portion of the players sitting out most of the time.)

It would look crazy, but I would try to do a flowchart of actions for the three groups, or maybe just cut it down to two: future and past. Set it into a series of if/then statements, and try to be very accomadating to players' ideas that you didn't think of.

I would also let them get a glimpse of what happens when they fail. Perhaps they get a prophetic vision of themselves being slain as they are in the room they land in from the hole. But then they wake up in a slightly different room, the hole above them. By the time you have them arrive in the room where the saw themselves die (by falling through a similar hole), they will be both crapping their pants and praying to the gods that their past selves set everything up right that their current selves don't suffer the same fate they saw befall their future selves!

So...umm...yeah, I'm going to totally jack this idea and use it. Of course, I won't be able to for 2 years, so I'll have to try to remember to send you my completed dungeon :-p.

(As follow-up adventures, maybe they continue to receive prophetic visions, and the ultimate purpose is to find out why their times are all messed up.)

Frosty
2008-08-12, 02:34 AM
It is indeed very tricky to run, which is why I'm asking id anyone else has run anything like this before.

OneFamiliarFace
2008-08-12, 02:44 AM
It is indeed very tricky to run, which is why I'm asking id anyone else has run anything like this before.

I've run something like it: the aforementioned split the groups and have them need to do things to help each other. They key is that you have to more accurately map out the encounters (not geographically, but in your head), because they are not isolated events. They interact with each other. Because of the complexity, you might want the encounters to happen in a linear order, and I would do one of two things:

1. Always have the same temporal group go in the same order. So the present acts, then back to the past, then back to the present, etc.

2. Rotate evenly between encounters. So in one room, the players enter as the present people, but the next encounter, they enter as the past. This will keep them confused, and not knowing if they should pick up items or leave them behind.

Or, I guess there is a 3rd: Have them play the groups at the same time sometimes, with the past group looking down on the present, pulling levers (which the players have already encounted in the present) to help them do their tasks. Or, if the present group does this for the past, then it could lead to rooms that the present people were not yet able to access, at which point, they would just appear in the new room the past people have accessed.

Don't worry about paradoxes or the whole "Well, if they never made it to this room, then they couldn't have been here to help themselves make it to the next room." If done right, the players will be too busy solving puzzles to question the "reality" of the situation. To further mess with them on that scale, include a type of monster that is encountered in both past and present, and other types which are overcome by the present and then found dead by the past.

Back to my dungeon. In order to limit my rampant brain, I picked an arbitrary number of encounters, and planned those. If I couldn't fit everything I wanted into that number, or I felt some were repetitive, I would remove/add some. Then I would plan the encounters from each group's individual perspective, as though it were a separate encounter being faced only by that group. Does that make sense?

nargbop
2008-08-17, 11:27 AM
The Sandstorm book gives a delicious little spell. Vitrify. Have the players wander about on a deep field of sand in a large room, various other traps and things all through it. They'll waste their time on the little traps, then get to the center.
The doors at the ends close. There's a massive dispel, and anyone magically flying or with other buffs loses it.
VITRIFICATION. The whole floor is turned to molten glass. Floorbound guys sink in, on fire. They have nowhere to escape to.
There should be flying demons grappling anyone who gets out of the molten glass and throwing them back in, interfering with every attempt. Or lava mephits or something. Keep the party separated so the guys who try to teleport out can only take themselves.
SHATTER. Or Greater Shout. Or something. Point is, the floor is sand again. Give the guys one round to go NOOOOOOOOO.
Repeat as necessary.

Ossian
2008-08-17, 11:33 AM
I have a simpler alternative. Have them fall down a pit. At the bottom is a teleportation circle. It teleports them back to just below the top of the pit.

Between where the fall begins and ends (and begins again), there is an antimagic field.

Oh, and the walls of the pit are spiked. And the spikes are greasy.

If they find a way to climb back up, a fat guy at the top pushes them back in.

There you go.

I am quite frightened. ou might have actually "divided by zero". I mean, what if the acceleration gathered at each fall stacks with the acceleration of the next?

What if they don't stop at cruise velocity (which is still a whopping 400 kmh, go cast spells at that speed) but actually...reach....the ...spee...of...light....

Uh, and what if the Teleporter is slower than the SOL...perhaps that would break the cycle, and have the PCs squish themselves on the floor past the teleporter (at 300k km sec...hurts). what if they slowly become aware of that?

O.

PS
This (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/55/Tesseract.gif) killed my brain...

Chronicled
2008-08-17, 07:28 PM
I am quite frightened. ou might have actually "divided by zero". I mean, what if the acceleration gathered at each fall stacks with the acceleration of the next?

What if they don't stop at cruise velocity (which is still a whopping 400 kmh, go cast spells at that speed) but actually...reach....the ...spee...of...light....

What if we check the laws of physics? Terminal Velocity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_velocity), gogo!

Now, if you wanted to do that in a vacuum, be my guest.

BigPapaSmurf
2008-08-18, 09:31 AM
Here's my 2 cents,

Have a room with an open exit, in the next room the players can see themselves in the future, say fighting a g cube or disarming a trap, Though after one minute they all reset to their starting positions, any preperations they did for the fight with the G cube will be reset.

At this point they realise they can only prepare for the next room for one minute before they start over,(including the vision of the next room) any attempt to backtrack a room will strat them at the beginning of the whole thing.(including mana/items used)

In the second room they have two minutes to both kill the monster and look into the next room to prepare for it, after two minutes back to page 1. It may take them a few tries to determine a fast enough method for completing the next room, make sure they can't skip rooms with a force field or something on the next doorway.

Only problem is, anyone who dies, stays dead where they were killed, unless carried to the next room. The only magic which should be nullified is transportation and scrying type spells.

CASTLEMIKE
2008-08-18, 11:49 AM
Dragon Magzine on Traps:
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/drfe/20080818a

Demonix
2008-08-18, 12:21 PM
I'm actually designing an adventure/trap around a similar concept, inspired by the movie Cube (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0123755/). I would recommend watching this movie (an dmaybe its sequels) for ideas. I'm only working with a 3x3 cube, but thats 27 rooms of potential doom, with each chamber possibly having a trap, undead, or nothing, depending on the sum of the room numbers coordinates in 3 dimensional space. The biggest challenge I have right now is mapping this thing 3 dimensionally with periodic room shifts. I might need a bunch of wooden blocks, lol.

playswithfire
2008-08-18, 01:45 PM
I'm only working with a 3x3 cube, but thats 27 rooms of potential doom, with each chamber possibly having a trap, undead, or nothing, depending on the sum of the room numbers coordinates in 3 dimensional space. The biggest challenge I have right now is mapping this thing 3 dimensionally with periodic room shifts. I might need a bunch of wooden blocks, lol.

Or grab a Rubik's Cube and have certain events trigger the rotation of the different block groupings. Gives you a convenient little model you can hold in your hands. You can also keep the PCs there until they solve the cube. Maybe let them find three wooden disks that self-attach when brought in to proximity (one per mini-boss/tier) and once they have all three, you can give them the Rubik's cube you've been using (behind the screen) to keep track of them and let them figure their way out that way.

Of course, blasting the model with a fireball or otherwise destroying it unleashes the <insert horrible monster> here that was trapped in the center of the cube.

busterswd
2008-08-18, 02:50 PM
Another Idea: Desperation Fueled by Attrition:

If you really want to make them desperate, begin limiting their resources as they progress. Instead of just having them slog through a long, long trap, begin to make them think they will become powerless if they are trapped for too much longer. It'll give them a strategic challenge on top of making them desperate.

Inexplicably, enchanted weapons may shatter after fights. The fighter discovers this to his dismay after a couple fights. Make a room have a limited supply of other replacement, enchanted weapons, that still suffer from the chance to break.

The arcane caster finds his favorite spell school is barred by the field. In addition, he gradually begins losing his spellcasting prowess (every time he casts a spell, ~20%-30% chance to fizzle and lose according spell slot permanently)

The divine caster starts having trouble channeling his god's power due to the field. His healing spells start losing potency (1 dice less per cure wounds every time you want this to happen).

Set up other situations for respective classes.

The situation that this sets up: the further they progress in this trap, the more and more their available magical resources become depleted. Near the end, the the room with weapons only has 1 replacement left, the cleric is using some of his highest ranked spells to heal for barely anything, the mage has lost his ability to cast most of spells save for a few, and if this goes on for much longer, they're going to have to resort to hand to hand combat.

At this point they find the trap was fueled by their own magical powers/equipment, and now that most of it has been drained, there's no longer enough to sustain the trap. They escape.