If you’re walking in on the middle of the Advanced Fantasy Dungeons series, there’s an index here.

Firstly, obviously Hazard is a better name for environmental challenges. Let’s change that. I realise that I’ve forgotten an important hazard: Traps. Now, there are a number of approaches I could take:

• Find and remove traps roll
• Trap clock as per other environmental challenges
• Descriptive traps

My inclination is to say that there could be an overlap between clocks and descriptive traps, but I feel like there’s a benefit to completely de-mechanising traps, at least from the PC end. At the GM end, there isn’t a procedure, there need to be trap principles:

• Easily identified or easily anticipated.
  • A pit covered in leaves. The safe of a master poisoner has a needle.
• Foreshadowed or gives the PCs a chance to react.
  • A collapsed pit with two skeletons in it.
  • “The poisoner is paranoid as known to trap her most treasured belongings”
  • You hear a click and the flagstone moves under you. What do you do?
• Goes either for a kill or a capture.
  • A pit trap either imprisons or has a spiked floor
  • A poison needle instantly kills or puts to sleep
• Balances the trapper’s protection and convenience
  • Never in the main access hallways unless there’s secret access; always in the chest in the high priest’s quarters.
• Simple actions can avoid or disarm them
  • “I stand on a box and pinch the wire so I can set the door slightly ajar. Glorax, you’re slim enough to to slide through the slightly open door. Once you’re on the other side, you can cut the wire, allowing us to enter without the bucket of acid tipping on us.”

It’s always better to have no rules than rules, in my opinion. A trap is simply a description of it, and either kills or imprisons if it’s not caught.

This has been a part of the Advanced Fantasy Dungeon Series! Let me know your thoughts on traps, if there are questions left unanswered, whether I’ve overlooked anything glaring, or anything of the sort!

Idle Cartulary

17th May 2022