Traps — a GameMaster’s friend and the bane of player characters. Whereas even the toughest monster can eventually be overcome with brawn and steel, traps are a different matter entirely. Depending on the intent of the designer (and his skill at constructing and placing the trap), a good trap can spell trouble for even the most powerful player character.
Have your players become too powerful and difficult to handle? Do they cut a swath through your well-planned dungeon with little fear or trepidation? Traps can detain an adventuring party (as they waste valuable time trying to disarm or avoid them), divert them off course (as is the case with flinging-traps, sliding chutes, teleporting pads, etc) or cause minor or major injury. They can even mean instant death. As such, traps are one of the most powerful tools in the GameMaster’s tool belt.
In Deadly Trappings, we give you the traps you need to put a little fear back into your players’ lives, with 75 specific examples, each with name, purpose of design, intended outcome, details on the mechanism(s) used, lethality and more.
Each of the traps is easily adaptable for any rules system though our dungeon engineers have provided general information (or even specific rules examples) to aid you in determining how much damage a trap should deal, which magic spells it uses (if any), and so forth. Now go forth: employ and destroy!
