Liquid Loot

Just another trap in the 4th level.  It's an example of my favorite style, the kind the players willingly set off.

8. Liquid Loot
Floating in the center of this room are three rings of blue superconducting metal.  They are nested within each other, and rotate slowly in three dimensions around a 1’ wide sphere of gold. Anyone approaching will feel the heat coming off the rings and the sphere – and in fact the sphere is molten, although that will not be obvious.

Jamming a sword, 10’ pole, or other object into the rings will merely cause them to stop spinning – they will resume once the obstruction is removed. Note that they are powerful magnets, and a successful “force doors” check is required to remove any metal stuck to them.  Further, the heat from the rings will soften most metal and burn wood – each round an item is jammed into the rings, there is a 40% chance it will be ruined.

Approaching the rings with a magnet will cause them to fly apart, doing 1d6 damage to everyone in the room as they ricochet about.

In either case, once the rings stop rotating, the molten gold within will fall to the floor, splashing all within a 10’ radius for 4d6 points of damage (save vs. paralyzation for half damage).

Once outside the rings, the gold will solidify in 1 round, and be cool enough to handle in 2 turns. It will take an additional 2 turns to pry the gold from the floor, if it has splashed all over the room. The total value of the gold present is 6,000 gp.

When nested together, the rings will resist being moved, and will heat any metal in the center to 2000° F.  Apart, they are simply strong magnets. The rings are worth 10 gp apiece if sold separately, and 100 gp if sold together.

Lying Wires

It will be interesting to see how this trap plays out.  If some poor chump (probably a henchman, knowing my players) gets caught in the wires, the rest of the party are likely to get the victim killed while they run off on some fool's errand.
 
90. Lying Wires
Dangling from the ceiling between the two doors on the eastern wall is a thick cluster of wires, 2’ in diameter.  The wires hang to within a few inches of the surface of the water in this room.

If the doors are approached, the wires will stab into the nearest character unless a save vs. magic is made, causing 1d4 points of damage and taking control of the character’s body.  The victim’s body will stand rigidly straight as it intones in a hollow voice, “If you attempt to remove the wires, this fleshy creature will perish.  Perform a task for me, and I shall release the organism.”

Roll on the table below for the task to be performed. The tasks are pointless busy-work, and the entity communicating through the wires will not release the body under any circumstances.  It will instead demand that yet another task be completed.

The wires may be pulled from a victim without causing any harm. The true danger is in leaving a victim behind – wandering monsters and/or dehydration will likely kill the character, as the wires will not defend a controlled body in any way, or otherwise try to keep it healthy.

Pointless Tasks
Roll 1d8 to determine the pointless task the wire-controlled body demands.
1.    Fetch me the mind of a hinge-headed. They shall know me, and I shall know them!
2.    Eliminate the goblins who infest this level. They have annoyed me for the last time!
3.    Retrieve one ounce of unprocessed nuclear fuel. You know this as “sick rock.”
4.    Return with an artifact from the Gray Void. I must know the nature of this dimension.
5.    Deliver this message to Trimexis of the Deep Tower: “Eight times eight is the number you shall aspire to.”
6.    Carve my likeness in the Hall of the Underlords. All who gaze upon me shall know despair!
7.    Fashion a suit of armor from the scales of the water serpent, and present it to me here.
8.    The gill-men have offended me one time too many.  Bring me a dozen of their heads, and your companion shall be returned unto you.

Golden Pendulum

Another trap of the "you're going to trigger this purposely to get the loot" variety.  Treasure-hungry adventurers should figure out a way to get this down.  It's not very dangerous, unless the players do something insane - and they usually do. As I've mentioned in other posts, I like this style of trap - make it obvious, but make the bait compelling.

114. Golden Pendulum
In the center of this room is a 3’ square wooden platform, six inches high, supported by a series of dowels. The wood is incredibly old and fragile, and it will break easily if disturbed. Carved into the top of the platform are the words “Warning: Pressure plate beneath. Do not disturb.”

There is indeed a pressure plate beneath the platform, easily spotted now that players know to look for it. Moving the platform will cause it to start snapping – players will need to take care to prevent it from triggering the trap.

Any pressure on the plate will cause a blade at the end of a long bronze chain to swing down from the ceiling, causing 3d6 points of damage (save vs. petrification for half damage) to anyone standing in its path (running from southeast to northwest through the center of the room). The blade has a second chain connected to it, running from the southeast end of the slot, that will immediately start pulling the chain and blade back into the slot after the trap has swung once.

The blade is cast from solid gold, and is worth 400 gp. Close inspection will reveal the blade’s edge is a thin length of razor-sharp carbide steel embedded into the gold body.

The slot that the chain and pendulum rest in (and just a tiny glint of gold) can be seen should players think to examine the ceiling, 10’ above.

Lightning in a Bottle

As I've written before, I like my traps to be dead obvious, and completely irresistible.  It's there, it's in your face, it's going to kill you - and you can't help but monkey around with it.

96. Lightning in a Bottle
In the center of this room is a lattice frame constructed of thin silver rods, running from floor to ceiling, and supporting a glass jar in the middle.  Five of the silver rods terminate inside the bottle itself, while others wind around it.

The bottle holds an electrical charge, and will shock anyone touching the frame for 3d6 points of damage.  Small amounts of insulation (such as touching with leather gloves, or a leather-wrapped metal pole) will reduce this to 1d6 points of damage.  Thicker insulation (more than a half inch thick) will allow the rods and jar to be safely handled.

As long as the bottle remains intact, it will continue to shock those who touch it or any metal that contacts it.  Breaking the bottle will fully discharge it, causing 6d6 points of electrical damage to everyone within 30’ feet.  If properly insulated, the jar could be removed and used as a weapon this way.

The silver rods are worth 500 gp if recovered and sold.

Another Pit Trap

As I create monsters and encounters, I have to watch myself, because I unconsciously latch onto certain ideas and reuse them.  You've seen that in previous posts, with the similarities between the giant earwigs and the polychaete worms, between the greater automaton abomination and gorillapede (both splitting into multiple creatures), and now with pit traps that drop players into cages.  By the time they get here, it will have been quite a long time since the last one, so I'm not worrying too much about it.  Plus, I like this refined version much better, as the pit closes itself shut, trapping whoever fell in.  Then wandering monsters get to come by and get fresh adventurer meat from the vending machine above.

191. Pit Trap, with Viewing and Taunting
The two corridors here do NOT intersect.  The north-south corridor runs underneath the east-west corridor.  At this point, in the east-west corridor, there is a pit trap.  This trap is triggered when a character places their weight in the center of the trap.  Then, the trap will drop them into a 10’ deep pit, with an iron grate for a floor, and they will take 1d6 points of damage from the fall.  After the characters fall in, the pit’s lid will swing shut again.

The iron grate is pressure-sensitive, and while there is weight on it, the trap door to the pit, above, will no longer open.

The iron grate that is the floor of the pit, is also the ceiling of the north-south corridor.  There is a lever in western wall of the corridor beneath the pit, in the “up” position, that can be pushed down to cause the grate to open and spill its contents onto the corridor floor (causing another 1d6 points of damage unless the characters somehow prevent themselves from falling).

The commotion of falling into the pit has a 50% chance of attracting 1d6 tunnel caterpillars from room 199, who will squirm about on the floor beneath the pit trap, hoping for a meal should the characters successfully open the grate.

Baiting the Trap

In my last post, I complained a bit how the Tower of the Stargazer's traps punished inquisitiveness.  It stands to reason that I should present an alternative rather than just grumble bitterly and shake my fist.

For "normal" trapped areas, I like to leave clues that something out of the ordinary is going on, so players are on their guard.  Then, their inquisitiveness will lead to figuring out the trap, or triggering it in such a way that they think it was their fault, not mine, that the trap went off.  I showed one of these in this post:  First Trap of the First Level

My favorite trap, however, is when it is combined with a treasure.  When that happens, I almost invariably use the treasure as bait, or as an integral part of the trap.  I make it absolutely obvious that something is up - it's not a bunch of gold carefully hidden, and, haha! it's coated with poison!  Rather, it's right out in the open, exactly where it shouldn't be, daring the adventurers to figure out what the catch is.  Because there's always a catch.  And thus, I present...

126. Bejeweled Bung
In the center of this room is an elongated dome, 4’ high, resembling a beehive.  Plunged into the top of the dome is a golden spike, with a ruby attached.

The beehive is hollow, and filled with poison gas.  If the spike is removed, the gas will be released into the room.  The person who released the gas must save vs. poison or die.  Others in the room have 1 round to immediately leave, or they too must save vs. poison or die.  If someone successfully saves, but remains in the gas, they will have to make another save every round they remain in the poison.

If the door is not shut after the gas is released, it will spread into room 125 as well.  It will take 1d6 days for the gas to dissipate, due to the lack of ventilation.  Leaving both the door between 125 and 126, and the door between 125 and 130, open will cause the gas to dissipate much more rapidly, in only 2d6 turns.

The ruby may be safely pried off the spike without causing the gas to be released, should the players try that.

The golden spike is worth 200 gp, and the ruby an additional 400 gp.

Morlock Surprise

I am keying the dungeon in two passes.  First pass,  I go through the map and mark each room as X (trap), M (monster), T (treasure), S (special), or a combination of those.  As I do that for each room, I write a one-liner describing what should go there.  Most of the rooms are pretty easy to populate, but after a while my brain goes numb, and I just write "special here, figure out later".

During the second pass, I'm going through each room and expanding the description to more clearly state what I was thinking (it's very easy for me to forget details in the middle of a session), and to come up with ideas for those "figure out later" areas.

This particular pair of rooms was a "T" and an "M".  The "T" got this one-liner:  "Net trap, rings bells when triggered, morlocks in room 137 attack."  I thought it was pretty lame while I was writing it down, but after fleshing it out a bit, this could easily be a TPK (total party kill, for those not familiar with the acronym).  Players beware...

136. Present from the Morlocks
The floor of this room is covered with debris (stone, wood, and bits of dried fungus). The far southern wall is covered with some kind of fungus, running from floor to ceiling.

Suspended from the ceiling is a large net of leather, dyed gray like the stone ceiling above.  It has several bits of rusty metal tied to it.

There is a tripwire buried under carefully placed bits of loose debris in the center of the room.  It runs down to the southern wall and up, under the fungus, to the net.  If tripped by a player crossing the room, or poking around in the debris with a pole, the net will drop, trapping all players in the northern 30’ by 30’ section of the room.  A save vs. paralyzation will allow players who are near the exits or southern end of the room to escape the net.  Other players are automatically caught.

The metal tied to the nets will make quite a racket as it falls, alerting the morlocks in room 137, who will come to see if they have captured the delicious goblin-flesh they have been hunting for.  They aren’t averse to a bit of human, of course.  It will take one round for the morlocks to arrive.

It will take 8 points of damage from an edged weapon to cut a player free from the net (no roll to hit needed).  Each player caught will need to be freed individually.  A player caught in the net may try to cut himself free, but cannot effectively attack or defend against the morlocks (and will thus have no Dexterity bonus to AC while trapped).

If players explicitly look at the ceiling, they will see the net.  Otherwise, they have only a 1 in 6 chance (roll once for the entire party).  The tripwire running up the southern wall has been deliberately buried under fungus placed here by the morlocks, and is not normally detectable.

137. Morlock Hunting Party
6 morlocks (AC 8, HD 1, hp 5 each, #AT 1, D 1-6, MV (40’), Save F1, ML 9) are here, waiting for the trap in room 136 to be triggered.

First Trap of the First Level

So I've got 16 traps to make in the first level.  I prefer to have memorable and interesting traps, but it's a pain to come up with so many.  No way to finish except by starting, so here's trap #1.

101. Eyeful of Jellies
The 10’ by 10’ square area in the center of this room has an intricate carving of a face with a gaping mouth and empty eye sockets on each side.  The floor around this central area is covered with a dozen skeletons.

The eye sockets are recessed, and have voids above them.  In each right eye socket is a small lever.  Should anything less than all four levers be pulled simultaneously, eight corpses jellies (AC 9, HD 1+2, hp 6, #AT 1, D 1-6, Save F 1, ML 12) will be released, one from each eye socket.  Every player with their hands on a lever when this occurs will be subject to an attack from a corpse jelly as it is released.  The players will be surprised on a 1-4 on a d6.  The jellies will use the first round of combat to engulf the skeletons, if they are within reach when the jellies are released.

If all four levers are pulled simultaneously, the stone behind each of the mouths will lift away, allowing the players to crawl through into room 102.

102. Tarnished Bones
This room contains a skeleton made of tarnished silver.  The skeleton is worth 900 gp.

A trap avoided...

The players avoided this trap, by just peeking into the room and deciding it was boring.  So no green slime showers, and no out-of-the-box ideas on fun things they could do with a shower that shoots green slime.  Not that it was ever really likely that they would decide to take a shower.  One design principle that I'm sticking to (probably foolishly) is to not re-use unencountered traps & other special features later on in the dungeon.  Once I've stuck it in a room, I'm leaving it there - if it is never seen, so be it.  I want to put some creative pressure on myself with this campaign.

4. Showers
This area contains showers and toilets.  There are cracked tiles on the floor (with the same white material as the walls underneath the tiles), but the porcelain toilet bowls and protonium-metal showerheads and faucets are still intact.  There are some holes in the wall where sinks and counters used to be, but those are gone.  If investigated, the toilet bowls will be found to contain a green slime (AC always hit, HD 2*, hp 13, #AT 1, D dissolve, MV (1’), Save F 1, ML 12).  The same slime is living in the protonium-metal pipes.  It cannot surge upwards from the toilet bowls, but if the showers are turned on, it will spray down on whoever has turned the faucet.

Who Built the Megadungeon

Some background on who built this megadungeon.  Well, I haven't decided yet.  But I do know who built the gatehouse, not that the players will likely ever piece the information together.  Megadungeons are mysterious places, that through their very nature attract dangerous monsters, devious traps, and untold riches.  They are more than just holes in the ground - should you somehow clear a megadungeon from top to bottom of all creatures, loot all its treasure, disarm all its traps, they would slowly reappear.  As nature abhors a vacuum, so it also abhors an empty megadungeon.

In the ancient, forgotten past, this megadungeon and its supernatural resources were discovered, and given the nature of the times, exploited by a megacorporation.  The gatehouse portion of the first level was excavated by the megacorporation, to provide a safe haven for the scientists and explorers that it was sending into the depths.  The men who ran that company had the insight to realize that what they found was more than just bits of treasure guarded by hideous monsters, but a place ruled by physical laws subtly different than those of the surface world.  In this special place, they explored, experimented, and died.  Sealed off for the passing millenia, it has now finally been reopened.

Parts of the gatehouse were used for training potential explorers.  These live training exercises were potentially lethal.  See below, an attempt to teach students of the perils of riddle-traps.


24. Subsurface Training Simulator
This room is unusual in the gatehouse, as the floor, walls, and ceiling are bare stone, uncoated with the white substance found in the other rooms and halls of the gatehouse.  The ceiling, being stone, does not emit any light, and the room is dark.

The north wall of this room has a large protonium-metal chest sitting on a raised dais.  To either side of the chest are two poles, with horizontal rings attached to the top.  The poles, if examined, can be tilted to face the SW and SE corners of the room.

In the alcoves to the southwest and southeast are two crystal living statues (AC 4, HD 3, hp 17, 9, MV (30’), #AT 2, D 1-6/1-6, Save F 3, ML 11), one in each alcove.  They resemble warriors in chainmail, holding swords.  They are standing on stone pedestals – the pedestal in the southeast alcove inscribed with “In Darkness”, and the one to the southwest inscribed with “We Dwell”.

If the players try to open the chest, the living statues will attack until the players leave the room.  The only way to prevent this is to place light sources on each of the two poles, and tilt them so they lean towards the statues.  If this is done, the players can safely open the chest without fear of attack.

In the chest is a gold ingot, inscribed with the words “Simulated Subsurface Treasure”, worth 600 gp.