System Agnostic Puzzles and Traps

[Sorcerer Blob]

Hey Playground,

I'm looking at building a puzzle-heavy dungeon delve ala Tomb of Horrors for a 4e game I'm hoping to run. I've delved into the deviousness that is Fourthcore for inspiration but wanted to appeal to y'all for ideas.

So, what I'm looking for mainly is system agnostic puzzles and traps. What were your favorite puzzles or traps accross any systems/editions? Please keep in mind I'm looking for, for lack of a better word, "old school" feel/inspiration.

Thanks!

[Sorcerer Blob]

Bump? Come on Playground, I know you've got this in ya!

[TheThan]

I've got a bit of a list, i've spoilered it for length. A lot of these are pretty classic.

Spoiler

Show

Rolling bolder trap
Borrowed from Indiana Jones, this trap drops a massive bolder on them and chases them through the dungeon. Its classic and probably something they will remember. Kudos of they have to run through other traps they have already bypassed.

Collapsing ceiling trap
Another one borrowed from Indiana Jones, this one is a good-sized room (say 20x20), when triggered, the doors seal and the ceiling starts to slowly lower, threatening to crush them. For added effect make spikes pop out of the floor and ceiling.

Drowning trap
The pcs falls onto a chute that promptly deposits them into an empty room. A moment later the room starts to slowly fill with water, sand, poisonous or explosive gas or anything else you can think of that can “drown” the pcs.

The jumping puzzle
More of a puzzle than a trap, the pcs come to a seemingly impassible precipice. However there are several floating disks, rocky columns protruding form the bottom etc. The pcs must try to leap across the spaces to get to the other side. Please note that fly, dimension door and other such movement spells ruin this one.


The big red button
Another puzzle, this one consists of four things; a mostly empty room, A big red button on a pedestal, an ordinary unlocked door and the player’s own paranoia. Hitting the button does nothing at all, but the pcs won’t know that. They will assume that hitting the button does something, and they may stay there and puzzle over what to do about it. Eventually someone will try the door, and find out that the button does nothing. The trick to this one is to simply stall them and waste their time. It should prove an annoyance.

Walk on the left side
This is borrowed from an old fantasy film called “lady Hawk”. It’s a simple wooden bridge crossing a chasm/fast moving water/something the pcs won’t want to fall into. They should get some sort of information telling them which side they should walk on (a short riddle works good here). One section of the bridge has been weakened, and any appreciable amount of weight will make the bridge collapse. The pcs will have to figure out which side of the bridge to walk on to safely cross the hazard. If they walk on the wrong side, they fall into the hazard.

The stepping stones trap
Another one I borrowed from a movie. This one entails a pit of nasty acid or lava, and a series of stepping stones that allow the heroes to skip across safely. One of the stones should be marked (but not too obviously). When that stone is stepped on, the whole section of stones collapses into the lava/acid etc. You can amp this up a notch by having the marked stone a “bate” stone, and set the trap trigger on one of the stones surrounding it. So if they try to avoid the marked stone, they may very well fall into it anyway.


The inferno trap
This is similar to the drowning trap above. The pcs are dropped into an empty room. Soon after fire shoots from holes in the walls, burning anything they touch. The fire should be hot enough to hurt them even if they are not in the flames.

The seesaw floor trap
The floor of a room is set on a large pivot point. A huge bar crosses the whole room, underneath the floor. The floor itself is attached to it, in such a manner that it will spin freely when weight is put on it. When the pcs enter the room, the whole floor gives under their weight exposing a bottomless pit. The trick is to figure out how to keep equal weight on the floor so it doesn’t dump everyone into the bottomless pit.

The sphere of annihilation trap
One game I ran, the pcs were cleaning out an overrun dwarf mine. They came upon the dwarf’s kitchen and in there they found a chute in the wall. At the ‘bottom” of the chute sat a sphere of annihilation. The thing, is that it’s not really a trap, it’s the dungeon’s garbage disposal. I nearly got one of the PCs to go into it and check it out (would have killed them), but he wound out enough rope so that it went into the sphere and they found out what it was. Although they did have a blast tossing dead goblins into it.

[Infernalbargain]

A nice trap is the vacuum room. Just through in some physics and you instant mundane deadliness.

[GM.Casper]

A nice trap is the vacuum room. Just through in some physics and you instant mundane deadliness.

Throw in illusory air so that the PC's don’t notice they are suffocating. Warning: may lead to players constantly disbelieving everything.

[Howler Dagger]

In a similar vein to the red button one, have two glasses, and an inscription saying that one is poisoned and one is not. The players will labor over which one to drink while they could just go through the unlocked door behind it.

[Pronounceable]

Steal Portal's more devious chambers. Call all the funky stuff magic and you're set.

Death Bridge: Too narrow bridge over a pit with ghouls/ghasts/golems climbing from bottom between players.

Maze of Mirrors: Maze with all mirror walls inhabited by dopplegangers.

Statue Room: Big room full of satues mixed with golems. Add spike floor traps, ceiling crushers, time limits and whatnot for extra fun.

Wrong Way: A long series of locked and heavily trapped doors that are all nailed to a wall, preferably with some time limit. Add illusion walls behind a few with empty/trapped/monster infested rooms behind for extra fun.

Fake Boulder: The classic Indiana Jones boulder trap with the boulder replaced with boulder shaped golem/earth elemental that'll round corners and roll up inclines to chase players.

Invisible Maze: Maze with invisible walls. Populated with invisible stalkers/ethereal enemies for bonus hillarity.

Endless Fall: Doorway opening to a deep hole with a portal covering its bottom that leads to the ceiling atop it. Completely filled magical darkness for bonus hillarity. Inhabited by flying enemies for extra fun.

[Terraoblivion]

You mean traps and puzzles that believe that the existence of systems cannot be proven or disproven? That might be a bit tricky, especially since I'm fairly certain that traps and puzzles only rarely hold beliefs about anything.

[Sorcerer Blob]

You mean traps and puzzles that believe that the existence of systems cannot be proven or disproven? That might be a bit tricky, especially since I'm fairly certain that traps and puzzles only rarely hold beliefs about anything.

Yes, I want traps and puzzles and tricks that are questing the meaning of life and/or the existence of God(s). These are very philosophical traps.

But on a more OT note, these trap/puzzle ideas are great! Keep 'em coming if you've got 'em!

[EccentricCircle]

not quite agnostic, but you could have the Dualist's sword. it looks like a Duelist's sword, but if a player tries to use it their soul becomes seperated from their body and trapped within an astral prison.

[NichG]

This one requires a bit of setup to work, and some things must be possible in the system. It also requires the party be under some sort of time constraint, so that utterly exhaustive methods aren't feasible.

Have a mage's lair that is filled with some sort of very obscuring fog. Chambers that must be crossed to get to higher security areas have deep pits into awful things with narrow walkways hanging over them. Preferably going by air along the wrong route is also dangerous, or there are enough of these rooms separated by long time intervals so that flight across isn't the obvious answer in systems where it can be done (or don't run this for a party with trivial flight).

There is always a cylinder about waist-high at the entrance to these rooms with two crystals (red and blue) and three to four slots. By moving the crystals around, the walkways move through space so that a path is formed. The 'key' that the PCs should have found prior to this is goggles that allow the walkways to be seen via an illusion that overlays the real world, displaying the locations. So the lair basically looks like pathways traced along the edges with yellow light. If you disbelieve the illusion or refuse the goggles, you're on your own for finding the paths of course. You could do so by throwing salt or using a stick or whatever, which is a valid answer but wastes time.

The trick is in the last room, where the pathways don't move, only the illusion does (and there is an illusory grinding sound to go with). The real fixed path has a gap in it that one could trivially step over knowing where it is. However, there is an illusion of an intact path that is mostly correct but fails to zag at a few places, leading people to want to complete the path the same way they've done the others.