Trap thread

What if the adventurers crawl through the pipe back to safety?

The pipe is considerably narrower than the circumference of an average person. If they can fit through the pipe their problems are bigger than getting out of a pit.

My favourite kinda trap that doesn't involve feminine dicks is any kind of explosive trap involving a vulnerable position

Toilet paper bomb, condom bomb, electric toothbrush bomb, sofa bomb, corpse bomb, chest bomb, soda can bomb, cologne bomb, trash bomb, etc

Read too many cold war stories and I've seen too many Vietnamese traps

>condom bomb

Lil bomb planted in the tip of the condom
Activated by pressure

even bomb is bomb

Healing spiders.

Fine Vermin

HP 1
AC 22(+8 size, +4 Dex)

STR 1 DEX 18 CON 2 INT - WIS 3 CHA 2

They're small, innocent looking spiders, quite like the normal vermin you encounter in any dungeon or heck, normal floor. Roughly the size of a dime, smaller without the legs.

However, if given a chance, they'll fall on/climb on to a player, use their venom to numb an area, and then burrow inside a humanoid/monstrous humanoids skin(they often do this to those asleep). From that point forward, they absorb any positive energy cast on the person, growing under his skin. At first, it's only a small amount, one point off a spell. However, when exposed to negative energy, the spiders instead multiply. They reduce the negative energy damage by one, and the single spider becomes a colony of two.

From that point on, things double. Two spiders absorb two points of healing, and subtract two points of negative energy to multiply into four. From four, they become eight, and so on and so forth. When the spiders reach a certain population(eight in a tiny creature, 16 in a small creature, 32 in a medium creature, and so on and so forth) they will wait until night to burrow out of the body, each spider dealing a single point of damage as they carve their way out of the flesh, dispersing to find fresh prey. If the unfortunate victim survives the ordeal, he's now quite capable of being healed.

It's a DC20 check to spot a spider as it burrows in, a DC10 to spot one when they're hit with positive energy, and automatic when hit with negative.

Other players can make a DC25 search check to locate the spider, and a DC20 Heal check to identify them. They are, however, extremely difficult to remove, requiring a DC25 Heal check. A failure of 10 or more indicates that the spiders have begun to dig deeper in order to avoid being removed, increase the Heal DC to remove them by 5 for every failed check.

Did that once
Deactivated bomb shell with a smaller bomb inside it that would be set off if they tried to move it

Everything is bomb

This post is bomb

I was always more fond of living traps instead of the traditional stuff.

I also thought traps should be something that stick with the players, rather than just another random way to kill them.

I used to use this on groups who didn't really value the heal skill, or if someone was fucking terrified of spiders.

>walk on the wrong stone
>spikes pop from the ceiling at the player's location
A classic. Spikes are on the GM layer btw, I'm the only one who can see them.

this thread needs more hot traps

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That was some good readings.
Is this from something or did some user just write this up at some point?

My players plan to design a dungeon when they get higher-leveled and I'd love to see them make a Planetary Teleport trap that takes unsuspecting thieves to ayylmao lands for them to live out the rest of their lives.

Yes, I know the flaws with this trap. Don't break my heart.

Besides that, the gelatinous cube will be being pumped up at the same time, so they'd need to swim through it and get through the pump unharmed.

>spider
>that much Ac

Nigga you what?

size bonuses nigga. None of that is from any sort of armour

May as well just use regular acid at that point honestly.

I know man. I don't have that much BaB but I am fairly good at squashing spiders, despite them being tiny, you know?

Reminds me of pycnogonids: sea spiders.
They're harmless to humans, but they're basically what you described to anemones and sea squirts. Some tinier species are known to burrow into the flesh of anemones and live out most of their lives there, according to some zoology book I skimmed in high school.

Imagine being an anemone in that situation. Imagine having a constant sensation of "spider under your skin" but you have no arms to pull the little fucker out with.

Sea is hell.

>Party encounters the villain over and over
>They thwart his plans several times in a row
>He notices one of their biggest weaknesses is getting distracted with greed
>When the party attacks his castle to stop his evil plans once and for all they find a bunch of fake graffiti written by 'runaways' who claim they hid an immense treasure they stole from his private collection under the villain's own nose
>Players get sidetracked following the messages and carrying out really long time-consuming rules written in the messages to avoid traps and alarms that don't actually exist
>By the time they realize they've been tricked the villain has already finished the ritual and reached his final form

Greed is the ultimate trap, OP.

But where's the fun in that?

Consider this idea stolen

Depends in the spider. Weavers are fairly immobile, but hunting spiders can be suprisingly mobile

I wrote it as my weekly contribution to
So to answer your question it's just a one-off that I wrote because I liked the picture. Now that I think about it, I never did find out where the picture came from.

>tfw people actually repost your work

>a trap that teleports thieves to ayylmao lands
>thieves arrive on a planet filled with sexy alien girls
>thieves actually want to stay in ayylmao land
>thieves never return to finish the job

it's a 10/10 flawless trap

>not detecting the trap while scouting the area
>not using the trap as your exit after you've loaded yourself up with so much that you can't realistically carry it out of the house

Fuck yes, I approve

In my experience, the magic number is 3. If you show a player something 3 times (i.e. the left door is always safe, red chests always have treasure in them, etc.) then by the 4th time they will hold it as evident and they will fall for every trap there is.

Of course, you shouldn't try this on the same group of players too often, or they'll be overly suspicious. But if used sparsely it can be very effective.

Do mimics count as traps?
Because my players don't trust anything in any dungeon anymore because of my mimics. Including but not limited to:
>Bricks
>Mortar
>Light Fixtures
>Chests
>Locks
>Doors
>Door handles
>Door frames
>Skeletons
>Traps (Trap a trap)
>Gauntlets
>Armor in general
>Weapons in general
>Money
>Wells
>Monster's armor
>The entire room
>Kitchen gear
>Brooms
>Tables
>Machinery
>Magic staves
>Rings
>Prisoners
>Chains
>Sleeping goblins
>Spear racks
>Barrels
>Ioun stones
>Shells
>Mounds of sand
>Jars and bottles
>And more

Basically if something existed theres a 80% chance its a mimic.

They should just buy a magical device to scan for mimics.

Well they found one but it was a mimic.

Like pottery!

Hermit mimics, if the players leave their gear unattended in a dungeon they'll crawl into their bags and assume the shape of hats, boots, spare gloves, sleeping bags, you see where im going with this.

I used that once. They got knocked out by a normal has trap, and everything that wasn't their armor and secondary weapon became mimics. The gnome actually kept the corpses and made a suit of magic mimic gear.
He is now an honorary mimic.

>you're supposed to squeeze the top of the condom as you put it on

I love mimics as well, in my setting, mimics grew more intelligent as they grew older. Eventually they mimic monarchs and eat smaller kingdoms.

I might steal this. So far my most creative mimics were one that was a set of robes and a staff which knew magic, and a swarm that pretended to be water.
Whole mimic kingdoms though, the thought makes me wet.

Did it work on itself?

Well it did bite there hands, so they did know it was a mimic. So sort of.

She should have kept it then.
Better to have a detector that bites you than no detector at all.

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My most well received trap from the last campaign:

Setting: Ice / Water themed dungeon.
Long hallway with a giant "fan" at the end (in this instance, it looked like pic related but made of stone and generated a strong gust, enough for a normal person to struggle a bit moving through the hall). On either side were two levers. The floor was slick / iced over.

At the opposite end of the hallway, adjacent to where the adventurers enter, was essentially a prison cell with bars but no actual way in. Inside the cell were a couple of skeletons (just dead ones). Pulling both levers turns whoever is touching a lever into a gaseous form (use whatever appropriate spell for your game), which is then pushed down the hallway into the cell. Destroying or pulling the levers again reverts them back to normal. Destroying the fan also ends the spell.

This is probably my favorite trap that i came up with

Group opens door A to find a small room with nothing really interesting in it besides a closed door (door B) on the other side, they enter it and find it unlocked, unless they closed door A (and heard it lock, upon which door B unlocks) when they open door B so do they see a larger room with a pool of water with a constant fairly heavy stream of water coming from a hole in the ceiling and a stream of water leading out of the room via a grid under door C. When they lock door A so will door C lock AND the grid will close, preventing water from rushing out. To unlock door C so will they have to solve a puzzle or get a key or whatever, all while the room is quickly being flooded with water. (When i used it so had i a passive water-weird that tried to drown them while they needed to pour water into a sprout in the door at head levels (and if they wouldn't have been able to solve it, it would automatically have unlocked at a certain point anyway, but you can do anything you feel like).

The real fun part starts when they open the door and find that the water simply went straight down, since all the water in the room is going to rush with incredible force out and down. With little in the way of things to hold on to so will it be quite hard, especially for the weaker people that didn't take measures against it beforehand, to not get swept away.

When i used it so was it part of a dungeon that used the same continuous stream of water in sort of an automated purification process, to turn it into faux holywater, to at the end of the dungeon shower it over a very powerful cursed item (in that case, the finger of a corrupted god) to be kept in a stasis, only that it started to fail due to age and the influence of the finger, and needed to be relocated.

Does anyone have this picture of modern mimics? Like the one that disguised itself as a phone but it was actually some kind of horrifying spider?

Personally, I'd rather blow off someone's dominant hand than their dick.

the sierra madre special
>huge well stocked treasure room
>drops giant stone door way if anyone gets in
>traps anyone without ethrealness inside
>enjoy your gold
modifications
>adamantine lining
>anti-magic gold
>no light sources
>astral/ethereal barriers
>prominently displayed emergency exit it leads to the perfume department

Wouldn't be easier to just use the C4 + some nails?

I like this.

it's a trap by the Petroleum Warfare Department, what did you expect?

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>using something as non aerodynamic as nails
>not chromium steel balls coated in anticoagulant/poison

top tier

...

And now your idea is mine

I like this one, but how would you communicate that pressing the button resets the timer?

By resetting the physical timer?

If you mean in game another user suggested a large hourglass the players can turn over to reset.

Thanks! The DC to break / bend the bars is pretty high, and it's obviously much more effective at lower level before teleporting becomes commonplace.

My players ended up finding a way to freeze the bars and break through.

...

I think he meant pressure as in bottoming out in that pussy.

Something that you clearly haven't experienced.

Gimmicks like this are so retarded.

Kek

So here's something I did to my party once:

>Party is looking for a treasure in a cursed swamp
>the curse, as they quickly learned, caused dementia in anyone to touch it. Each round you spend in it, you must roll for another flaw until eventually you can't think straight enough to swim.
>that swamp? Yeah, it wasn't the trap. The players quickly learned to steer clear after the first person stepped in and got some minor effect.
>Fortunately, a kindly old peasant lived near the swamp and offered them a ride. It was very fortuitous. This ragged peasant even just so happened to own a magic item that could summon a short span of track to rise from the swamp along with a cart large enough to fit the whole party.
>No detect magic
>No detect evil
>No asking the guy why he's offering to do this
>No nothing
>They all happily hop on this literal railroad.
>I tell them: the minutes go by and your cart slowly moves away from the shore. Do you do anything?
>Nope, shrug.
>It's been about an hour and you're just about to the point where getting back to the shore without the cart would be unfeasible. Do you do anything?
>I eat a ration
>It has been a few hours now. You're hopelessly in tge middle of the swamp on this slow moving cart. The cloaked peasant sits motionless in front of you
>Hey, uh, you think you can make this thing go any faster?
>No
>Oh, okay...
>More and more hours go by. The party sleeos on the cart, not much closer to the destination in the morning.
>Finally they decide to try getting off the cart. Swimming in liquid insanity has to be better than this, right?
>With a wave of his magic staff, the cartman summons steel bars to keep the passengers in place.
>He turns around, revealing a skeletal face, "No one gets off of the cart!"
>At this point the party finally realized their mistake...

>The ride never ends.

found the Arseplomancer

Say that there's a button, and if they say they press the button, reset the timer.

Duh.

what manual is this from?

It had a happy ending, though. They muscled out of the constraints, at which point the ride transformed into a bone coaster. They stole the coaster staff, but since it couldn't go any faster than the current speed, they just jumped to a nearby island, getting a few more defects in the process. They built a boat or something and went on their way. Oh, and one mental defect made the paladin regard the wizard as their master. The wizard, being the only one that knew Remove Curse, didn't see it necessary to remove it... they had a loyal subordinate for the next few sessions (they finally delt bad & removed it).

I recall a few of them from the old army handbook fm 5-31 booby traps, not sure if it has all of them though, you can find it on the Internet archive in pdf fornat, I'd post it but I'm on my phone and don't want to eat into my data.

>found
safer just to assume everyone is at this point

A vietnam era boobytrap guide

Im pretty certain that the pic is from that art exhibit "Body Worlds" where the use a special embalming fluid with plastic or something to preserve veins, muscles and organs to put on display to showcase the wonder that is our anatomy.

Also fantastic story I'm saving that for next time I run a campaign.

Explosive runes paper airplane. That poor guard was so traumatized after that incident

This one was another one that i enjoyed employing.

In a dungeon that at first seemed to simply be ruins and overgrowth, once they manage to get a good bit in so does the party "activate it" which includes lighting up of small torches in the corners of every room, some fire based traps, some fire magic and fire elemental creatures. A thing in some of these rooms is that there is an emergency "break glass in case of being-burned-to-a-crisp" tanks of water in some of the rooms, some broken, some still remains functional.
Now, the party is nearing the end of the dungeon and stumbles upon this room, after they crouch under the narrow space that is actually an airlock so do they enter the main hall, it got four "corner torches" that's lighting up everything fairly well, a small platform a few inches above the floor, a threshold a single inch above the floor and one of there water tanks.... But this one got a fair bit of gold inside of it. The parties greed causes them to break the tank, out spills a very highly flammable liquid, possibly some sort of strong alcohol or very clear oil. The alcohol coats the one that did the smashing, very quickly reaches a torch and is ignited, the room is set ablaze. The small not-big-enough-for-everyone-unless-people-stand-on-top-of-each other platform is the only place where the liquid doesn't reach. The threshold gets flooded quickly which collects in burning pools in the airlocks while at the same time leaving an inch of the burning liquid all over the floor.

1/2

At this point the party got to try to climb up on top of each other and wait for the fire to die down or try to get into the next room (Which, just to make things fun, should be an exact copy of this room, but with actual cool, cool water in the tank this time and a missing threshold from the room where they came from). If they stay they will most likely die due to suffocation, carbon monoxide poisoning or simply choking on the smoke, causing them to collapse into the burning floor and possibly bring a few teammates with them. If they on the other hand choose to plummet themselves into the pool to try to get to the next side so will they be completely coated with flames and take a very large amount of fire damage before reaching the tank. Once they break the tank the flames on them are exhausted and enough water pours down the stairs into the pool to both cool it and dilute it to such an level that it no longer burns (that intensely at least) allowing for a much less painful escape for the others still in the room.

We had a fun one in a campaign I was in.
I stepped on a pressure plate on accident, but nothing happened. Our party assumed it was a result of the crypt being old; the trap must have just broken
Had any of us had better hearing, we might have heard the strange sound of rushing water. In about... 5 minutes, we found ourselves waist-deep (over the poor gnome's head) in scalding water. It cooled down slowly, but we all mamaged to get up on sturdy tables (the gnome,on my shoulders).
We cooled the water off faster with some quick work from our caster, and we got off our perches (save the gnome). No one got seriously hurt, luckily.
What really nearly got us were the temperature-acclimated sharks released from the trap into the water shortly after the crypt was flooded

I'm personally a fan of simple traps that actually make a shit of sense to employ.

Setting up easily triggerable cave-ins in passages that make sense to walk through, but aren't regularly used by denizens.

I really liked the artificial pools that can be collapsed to create a one-off rush of water in Mines of Phandelver.

Goblins and other small folks have an especially easy time with traps, as they can create traps that are only triggered by tall or heavy creatures, allowing them to safely navigate their own trapped fortress.

That being said, it doesn't make sense to have intentionally placed traps in the inner sanctum/living areas of a dungeon. Why would someone put a trap in the hallway between the dining room and the bathroom? That being said, traps like falling chandeliers, damaged floorboards, upturned cauldrons, etc. are fun.

Never been a fan of magical traps specifically designed to be traps in dungeons where people still live. I only rarely use "meta" traps in dungeons that were designed from the ground up to test adventurers.

Bathroom graffiti.
"If you have trouble with constipation, say aloud this incantation. Explosive runes." Fucking wizards man.

>Never been a fan of magical traps specifically designed to be traps in dungeons where people still live.
Personally I've always been a fan of the old paranoid wizard excuse. Not an every day thing to be sure, but it happens.

I was humoured enough to cap it.

fucking assclass.

Also nice comedic timing m8.

What about toilets?

When you're trying to prevent people from coming over your sandbags, nothing I can think of is as much of a deterrent as a giant fireball. Sure nails might be painful and maybe even more deadly, but a soldier is more ready to get shot than he is to be lit on fire. It's psychology. Humans don't like being on fire.

Plus the fire will stick around a while completely fucking up any attempts to push through after the explosion. Nails might kill the first couple but fire is a gift that keeps giving.

Lots of decoys. Each decoy has a good chance of getting the party to waste a spell, retreat, or just get frustrated and sloppy when it comes to the real traps. Pressure plates that don't do anything. Vault doors with fancy-looking locks that only open to a stone wall Rugs. Just rugs. My players have a pathological fear of rugs. They think every rug is an animated object or a pit trap.

This trap is shit. Unless the PC's are walking shoulder to shoulder only one person is going to get caught. Everyone behind the point guy is gonna notice when he falls through the floor.

Think of it like this:
Each round is still six seconds. If the spider sees you it's gonna take a few rounds' worth of time to squish it.

Come on user, is it really THAT hard to imagine?

What will stop a person more, a single blast of nails through an area, or a wall of fire that stays in that area for a while?

Huh? HUH? HUH??

Give a man a fish and you have fed him for a day.
Set a man on fire and you've set him up for life.

>not just coating both sides of the condom with slow-acting poison

Kills two for the price of one. They might even die happy.

>small bombs in the condom