So i'm trying to design a dungeon for my pRP party to explore and was coming up short on a few rooms. then i got to thinking. Why not crowd sourse them. then i got to thinking. Why crowdsorse when just listing them could be interesting.

So here goes on the shared experiance of interesting traps i have designed for Dungeoneers.

Please comment and share

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The room of Spinning.

Tall room with a large circular disk magically suspended in the air. the way out is a shut door connected to the disk via a bridge. Ladders lead up to the disk. A lever Is in the centre of the disk. The lever Opens the door, However it also starts the disk spinning and releases swarms of bats onto the party. They can either try to run out the room or fight the bats. either way thay have to avoid nasua and falling over as they do so. and fighting bats on a spinning disk with a fear of falling isn't attractive.

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The fake teleporter

Room with an illusionary floor seperating the two enterances. First player to step ont he illusionary floor falls into a 15ft pit and has to fight off an appropriate creature with some sort of non visionary sight, in an area of complete silence and darkness. The illusionary floor makes the other characcters think it teleoprts somewhere making them hesitant to go in. and the combat is run in PM's (or secret notes) so the other players do not know they are in trouble.

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Finally one thats very DnD specific.

The Elven Gold Trap

Since Elves are Immune to sleep. In their burail tomb they decide to put all their gold under a curse that means any one picking it up falls to sleep. (there is a ton of gold in the room and it has to be moved onto a preassure plate to escape the room. Watch the party try and solve (gloves do not work, Shovels might). Only really works in non elven parties. very good with greedy parties who will try and keep the gold afterwards.

Pepsi Machine of Doom.

   The PC's come across a six foot tall by three foot wide metallic box set into an alcove.  The box seems to radiate magic, and will if checked by a magic user.  The box is blue with a stylized circle of red, blue and white set into the box in the front towards the top of the box.  The box has some type of runes, code, or language untranslatable by any PC means.

  There is a thin slot on the right front of the box about half-way up.  There six red buttons vertically centered on the front of the box.  Two of the buttons have blue runes next to them.  Two of the buttons have green runes next to them.  The remaining two buttons have red runes next to them.

   When a PC puts at least five silvers into the slot, lights behind the six buttons light up.  (Sorry, the box doesn't give change.)  When a PC presses a red button, a hidden door opens below the buttons towards the bottom of the box.  Behind the door is a paper goblet without the stem.  The door will remain open until the goblet is removed.

   The paper goblet holds about six ounces of liquid.  The liquid is brown if the blue button was pushed.  Green button gives green liquid.  Red button gives red liquid.  All the liquids are cold, sweet, bubbly, and delicious.

   If the PC's share the contents of the goblets, nothing happens.  If one PC drinks the entire goblet, the fun starts.

Brown liquid - Pepsi - +1 Strength stat - duration one hour in game
Green liquid - Mountain Dew - +1 Endurance stat - duration one hour in game
Red liquid - Code Red MD - +1 Constitution stat - duration one hour in game

At the end of the hour, the magic expires.
At the end of two hours, the PC starts to get really thirsty.  No water, wine, ale, or anything seems to slake the thirst.  The PC really wants another goblet of 'potion'.
At the end of three hours, PC starts losing the affected stats.

When PC gets another goblet of potion, both magic and stats come back.
The bad effects detox in twelve hours.
Drinking multiple goblets of the same potion do not extend the length of the duration.
Drinking a goblet of each different potion, gives all three magics and addictions.
Drinking one kind of goblet only affects the addiction of that goblet.
The paper goblets dissolve after fifteen minutes of holding the liquid.
The potions go flat (powerless) in fifteen minutes, or when pored into a different container.

Enjoy!!

My favorite trap personally is a 10 foot ledge with a pit of acid and another ledge on the other side with some sort of reward, and a chain suspending from the middle of the ceiling.

If someone jumps and grabs the chain in hopes of swinging across it becomes detached from the ceiling once more then 40lbs are put on it. The actual chunk of ceiling can be dodged but the acid is rather mean as its deep enough down to where the jumper would need assistance climbing out.

In reply to Andrew Wilson (msg # 3):

And if you're really unlucky, there is the prospect of acid splash damage.

Nothing slows down an adventuring party like a giant non-magical chess board.

Simple stupid exploding corpses spreading disease as you near them. Or sudden zombies in one room where every other room had normal corpses.

In reply to Arlowat (msg # 5):

That idea sounds fantastic.

I have this great idea for a trap room now that involves bringing a real life chess board to the session.

The room has a giant chess set that they can move around and every move gains a response from a magical source. this is acted out on the real life chess set. A plaque on the wall reads only the wise will continue.

the trick is the door on the far side of the room isn;t locked and nothing is actually impeding prgress. I LOVE IT!!!!!

Room / corridor set up: The walls are lined with orbs along the top edge of the wall near the ceiling. About half way down the corridor is a 5ft wide hidden pressure plate.
When stepped on the orbs extend wands and start firing goop balls that will encase and immobilize anything they hit. They stop firing after 10 minutes.
Goop can only be removed via special mixture (found elsewhere and deeper inside the complex).
The way to avoid this is simple, don't step on that corridor wide pressure plate (jumping over it works fine).

If this is an active strong hold, guards will eventually show up and gather up those captured.
If this is an abandoned strong hold, hope some of the party did not get gooped, so they can find the antidote to the goop, cause your dead otherwise. (unable to move do to being effectively glued in place)

A Sweet Deal
Room Size: 30x30x15
Exits: 2 (Any directions)
Level: Can be varied

Upon entering this room, you see before you a wooden box, near the door you entered, thirty feet across another door sealed shut by a large iron door with no handles. To your left, a pool of water that seems to be swirling about, the nearby stone eroded heavily.

The wooden box is about three feet cubed with iron accents on the corners and edges, and features an odd humming sound that seems to be getting louder and then quieter in odd successions. It has a lever inside of it, bolting it and the box to the floor.

Knowledge Nature: The buzzing is the sound of yellow jacket bees.
Knowledge Nature: The water laced with pheromones.
Spot: The water seems to be thick, like a soup rather than plain water.
Spot: You see occasional bees floating about the water's surface.
Listen: The humming is not coming from the box, but rather it seems like it's coming from under the box.

When the player reaches into the box to pull the lever, his arm is sprayed with a strong bee pheromone inciting the bees to attack. When this occurs, damage can be altered to fit the level, a handful of bees to do 1 damage per round or a large swarm to do more. Jumping into the water increases the damage, as it is bee pheromone laced water, meaning when the player comes out to take a breath he is now covered head to toe. This can double the damage if appropriate, or add additional dice at the DM's discretion. The lever opens the trapdoor that releases the bees, where as the door on the opposite side of the room can simply be pried open if the party brings a bladed weapon. If the party has no bladed weapons, feel free to include a skeleton corpse equipped with a decaying dagger in the corner of the room. The party will attempt to push on the door since it has no handle, but only a clever mind would initially think the door could be pried open by sliding a blade between the door and the wall. Note that if someone wearing armor over their entire body touches the water or the lever, they would be immune to the bees, maybe getting the occasional sting from a lucky bee who climbed into the armor, but nothing to deal real damage.

Not a whole room, just a feature, but very annoying.

Hinges in crack in the wall that are fairly easy to notice (DC 10 or 12 perception, in Pathfinder, or same DC with Spot Hidden in DnD 3.5). It's much more difficult to notice (DC 25 or 30) that it's literally just some hinges in a crack in the wall.

The Map Trap

Sometimes your players need to learn not to blindly trust everything they're handed. This trap is designed for just such occasions. This is not a 'room' or static trap, but a psychological trap. The setup is that the characters are raiding the enemy stronghold. The nature of the stronghold depends on the game, naturally. It could be the evil villain's secret lair, or the skyscraper your shadowrunners are supposed to infiltrate, or the lich's necropolis. Regardless, getting from A to B is not a straight line, and without any idea where to go, the players are going to get taken down eventually. They need a map.

How they go about getting the map depends partly on your players, and partly on the genre. In a cyberpunk/sci-fi setting, the hacker can try and access the building schematics. In a fantasy setting, they can try and take out one of the guards to get information from him. Or perhaps there is a helpful map on the wall, like in the mall. Regardless, they find a map, and start looking for their destination. All's good, right?

Not exactly. See, the opposition leader in this case is just a bit paranoid and probably more than a little sadistic. You see, the map the players find is wrong. Oh, all the structural details are correct, but some of the rooms have been intentionally mislabeled. For instance, the room marked 'Main Control Room' will actually be the 'Basilisk feeding room', and 'Lunch Room C' will actually be a biological research lab. Meanwhile, the 'Auxiliary Trash Compactor' will be the Main Control Room.

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Hilarious Template Room

Sometimes, you want to throw an extra encounter at the party, but aren't quite sure what to do. In these situations, I like to take 'normal' monsters, and throw templates on them that will screw with players' heads. This is a tactic that can scale to any level, depending on the monsters used. For instance, say you have a tomb (or a necromantic research lab). You're going to expect undead, right? But few players expect to be attacked by a swarm of skeletal pixies. Scaling up a bit, a Half-Fiend Trumpet Archon or Half-Celestial Balor can make for one helluva story. And there's going to be one heckuva story behind that Half-fey Red Dragon. Again, this is less a 'room', and more a storytelling point.

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Dispel Magic Trap

A variant of the classic 'the door is trapped with a magic spell, and the rogue better have been searching for traps' ploy. While the normal use of a spell trap on a door is to blast the foolish person who wasn't checking for traps (or who failed to disarm the trap), this variant targets the floor. Specifically, the wall of force that was painted to look like the rest of the floor, and is hanging over a pit trap.

Infinite teleporter loop

I used this one for fun effect.  There were 3 levels of a nearly identical room. Bottom of lowest room and top of highest room were 15 foot wide teleporters (of a 25 foot diameter room), with a platform to walk around each room of about 5 feet wide.  The lower teleporter teleported back to the highest room teleporter, creating an infinite loop.

Just add monsters, and voila, it's suddenly become more interesting.  Add a roper, a creature (like a mummy or carrion crawler) whose touch alone will harm.  A falling dragon can breathe fire on three levels at once as it falls.  Ropes become interesting as players dangle and climb.  Also, keep in mind the arc of falling, in that you are unlikely to fall straight up and down, but will slowly approach the far edge as you start reaching terminal velocity.

And characters on different levels may have obscured visibility or get attacked while on different levels.

For more fun, add a reverse gravity effect halfway through, or traps like arrows shooting across as you fall.

Giant Whirlpool

Very similar to the room above, the characters fell down into a large round cavern filled with water on the inside of a dormant volcano--I think it was in the neighborhood of 100 feet in diameter or more.  Due to the melting ice of the mountain, the water was a giant whirlpool with sheer sides except for one exit point created by an ancient lava tube.

Again, add enemies, and voila.  Here, they had derro or duergar in the water trying to kill them and drown them while they were trying to fight back and keep going to the outside of the whirlpool to escape getting sucked under.  It ended up being one of my favorite rooms in execution, with all sorts of rules being used that are typically not.

I'm Watching You

This one trap is not necessarily in a dungeon at all. As the party begins investigating some great wizard (or hacker or whatever), they come to find out they're the topic of interest. Deciding it best to know who's after them, the person takes to the street, posing as an ex-employee of the person they're after. When questioned how to enter their magically locked castle/stronghold/base of operation, the person hands them a key/keycard/etc... "You can get in with this", he tells them, but what they don't know, is that item is a form of scrying (or technological equivalent). Every day the party has the item, the person knows more about them, and can modify the defenses more and more. Guess you can't just trust anyone huh?

Oooo Shiny!

This one actually was used against my party, but it was so brilliant I had to include it. When walking down the road one day, the rogue caught a glimpse of something shiny from the river. She picked it up to find it was a metal gauntlet with gems encrusted in the wrist. Every time she would wear it, she would feel immense power coming from it, but a looming sensation that and I quote "It's coming". She got too afraid to use it anymore, and decided to sell the glove to a wizard. The wizard had expressed interest in the gauntlet before, saying he'd like to use it to destroy a nearby castle which had been known for years to contain vampires. He paid a hefty sum for it, and immediately took off to complete his task. As we went off in another direction, we would occasionally hear reports of vampires growing in numbers. Heading back to the town after a long while, we found it was razed to the ground. All accounts were of a wild mage with a magic gauntlet being present. Since the castle with the vampires was also destroyed, we'd assumed the vampires fled to the town and he blew it up Paladin style to kill the vampires.

Later, we found out that while we were doing other things, he'd made a deal with the vampires, and was growing their numbers in exchange for their loyalty, and wrecking towns in his wake. Nothing hurt more than that point when we all looked at each other and went, "Christ... that guy with the gauntlet IS the blackberry blowing everything up". I died that day, and fell into the mud face down. So... lesson of the story... don't pick up shiny things without making sure that the rock they're pushed under isn't a magic seal to prevent wizards from detecting the gauntlet...
This message was last edited by a moderator, as it was against the forum rules, at 05:46, Sun 31 Aug 2014.

Look for any of the Grimtooth books. His Dungeon of Doom in particular has some nasty traps. The flour silo is worth the money if nothing else.

   One of my most successful traps wasn't a single trap...

Step one place an obvious and very nasty trap in a main corridor... make it something vile...like rot grubs in vials rigged to drop if one of MANY triggers are tripped.

then put a poorly concealed secret entrance to one side which is easy to notice... If they are the average group they will use the "Secret passage" to avoid the trapped passage.

The secret passage has a series of taps, dead falls, spikes, poisoned darts etc... each one harder to by pass than the last.... throw in a few Glyphs and trap spells just to give the mages something to do.. at some point the group will probably give up as the complexity of the traps exceeds their ability to disarm...or they will just get tired and want to turn back...at which point they discover the traps have rearmed.

now if they keep going have the tunnel end in a dead end.....then when they work their way back to the entrance... and begin to work their way past the original trap they can discover after the first trap on the main passage the tunnel has only fake traps with easy paths to avoid the swinging blades, flaming walls that they could see from were they first spotted the "death traps" and took the "secret" bypass tunnel

Something my GM did to us once:

A long hallway (in his game it was essentially a spiral) filled with traps.  But all of the traps had been tripped, bypassed or disarmed.  The party made its way through the hallway of tripped traps and at the end of the hallway was a large chest with a skeleton hugging it.  I believe he described it "As if the person's dying action was to grasp the chest that they prizes."  So then as the party rogue gets to checking the chest for traps he moves the skeleton only to find that the skeleton was holding a trigger that activated all of the traps in the hallway.

The chest was empty by the way.

The whole thing was an elaborate ruse to catch and kill thieves.

When doing a dungeon crawl one of my favorite treats is to take a perfectly symmetrical room, 10' x 10' x 10', for example and turn it into a tesseract.  For those who do not know what a tesseract is, imagine a single room becoming many rooms within one.  If you have ever seen Labrynth with David Bowie and Jennifer Connolley, you have seen a type of tesseracts in play, the stair tesseract.

In my experience, with dungeon crawls, you always get a player that wants to map it.  This one room will make that person want to pull out all their hair.  This room is harmless by itself, but in the hands of a devious GM, try to imagine battling a dungeon denzien while they are standing on the ceiling.  Or is it you who stands on the ceiling?

years ago there was a series of books put out with tricks and traps.
'Grimtooths'? I think.

Yeppers, good old' Grimtooth.  A wonderful series of books dedicated to nothing but traps and pitfalls.  He even rated them for deadliness which is also helpful if you do not want to kill, but instead maim a PC or two.

They were excellent.
For me though best traps came from other members of my own party.  Had an Arrogant guy playing a ninja but didn't want to get his hands dirty just 'rush in and get the treasure type'.  Our illusionist got him good though.  We knew that this room had a Trapper in it.  2 doors where we could see each other (both doors led to the same hallway.  Well half at one door and half at another we looked in.  Across the way was a fireplace.  As I walked with the ninja and another charrie the illusionist passed the GM a note (we had a table top rule that any spell had to be written and handed in, complete with distance and height and any pertinent info).  we open the other door and look in and the GM read the note ver batum 'Across the room over the mantle you see 3 glowing +5 ninja-tos'.  Rest of us looked a bit quizzically.  Ninja ran straight across and into the trapper.  We then rushed in beat the Trapper to death (and well...beat the snot out of the Ninja too).  getting out he walks to the swords and the illusion vanished.  he was ticked, illusionist laughed. rest of us chuckled.  Rest of us pointed out the flaws he should have caught...but it was still funny!

If you really want to try something nasty, do a 'Build Your Own Dungeon' game.

The set up is this: A rich noble contacts the party. He is dying and wants to devolp an impenetrable tomb to house the treasures he wants to be buried with. Who better to build such a tomb than delvers experienced with delving such places? He offers them a substantial amount of money if they design hm a crypt. Have each player come up with one trap, encounter, etc. and pitch it to the noble. The noble, who of course has some djiin or a few wish rings or whatever, will have the tomb built in a day. He then will test it by capturing the PCs and making them run the gauntlet.

Now of course your Players will see this coming a mile away. Which is of course half the fun. The other half is the fact that you will be changing their ideas slightly. Example: when I ran this, one of the players submitted a magic item design. A ring that would transform the wearer's body heat into a small fireball. I think the design was cursed. The ring did cold damsge to the wearer each time it was used as their body heat was drawn away. But that's beside the point. Here's how I used the design against them: the players entered a bare stone room. Slabs slammed shut blocking the entrance as soon as they were all inside. Then thousands of these rings blinked into the air around them, filing up the room to waist deep. And of course they didn't have to be worn to be activated. They just had to be close to a heat source. Like a player's leg or hand. Or another ring which was warming up.

You can imagine what happened. So many saving throws... The player whose character was holding the torch was particularly irked. It was glorious.

In any event, have the players do most of the work for you. I have found that players will often come up with the most devestating ideas themselves.
This message was last edited by the user at 04:56, Wed 03 Sept 2014.