Remember that the most common goblin trap is just overthinking. A room with three off-color tiles that don't do anything. Levers that just make horrible creaking noises. Obviously hinged stairs that are supposed to turn into a slide, but are so rusted that they are fixed in place.
Also remember that they incorporate their feces into their traps whenever possible.
1. The Totem Pole
Made of beaten wood, and crude grotesqueries. It's central mouth has steel fangs clutching a small, metal chest, held in place only with a moderate amount of friction. With some investigation, steel hinges are discovered to the side of the totem pole's mouth. When the chest is removed, the jaw closes, and the entire upper half of the totem pole pitches forward, crushing whoever is in front of the totem pole. This part of the trap is obvious.
That's only the first half of the trap, though. In fact, the totem pole is hollow, and will spill a powerful acid all over the ground when it falls. This part of the trap is not obvious.
2. Dead Snake Pit
This stairway collapses and dumps you into a snake pit! Except the snakes are all dead; the goblins forgot to feed them.
The real danger is the low oxygen levels at the bottom of the shaft. You can't breath down there, and torches will burn out, too.
3. Shitty Pendulums
A room with slash grooves on the floor and a darkened ceiling obscured by cobwebs. When a lever is pulled, the far door unlocks and a half-dozen bladed pendulums swing from the ceiling. You can figure out the safe spots to stand by examining the slash grooves on the floor.
Except the construction is shit, and after a couple of swings, the pendulums will collide, tangle, and the whole mechanism will fall out of the ceiling. All 4000 lbs of it. This will collapse the floor, and send the party down a level onto a bunch of bladed pendulums and broken rock.
4. Dragon Statue
A dragon statue that holds a torch in front of it's face. When the party approaches, it speaks, "What number is green?" because goblins are pretty shit at riddles. The correct answer is "one", because goblins are number one, but this answer is bullshit and most goblins will get it wrong. This opens a door to a room full of goblin bombs.
If a wrong answer is given, the dragon will breathe lamp oil over the lit torch, bathing the room in flame. The easy solution to this is just to remove the torch, but then you have a dragon statue spewing oil over everything. If you plug its mouth with something (not hard) it'll make a series of creaking noises before its crotch bursts open and spills oil all over the ground.
Either way, the next room contains a bunch of goblins with torches who bust in one round after they hear the dragon go off.
5. OSHA-Violation Spiked Pit
A quartet of obviously discolored tiles marks a spiked pit. They aren't even the same color.
The real danger is attempting to jump across the pit--the far side is unsupported dirt, and will collapse if more than 100 lbs is put on top of it. Anyone attempting to jump over the pit will collapse 3' of the far ledge, sending them into the pit and pouring loose dirt on top of them after they land on the spikes.
6. The Ol' Footy-Stabby
This is just a hallway with grated floors. As you walk along it, goblins with shit-caked spears stab you from below. They're real dicks about it. There's probably even a tripwire halfway along the path that they can yank up, too. The holes they stab through aren't too big, so they get 90% cover from it.
This one actually isn't too hard to overcome (just pour burning oil down the holes and come back later when the smoke clears). For a more challenging trap, try the Ol' Facey-Stabby, where the goblins are hidden in the ceiling.
Just awesome.
ReplyDeleteAnd somewhere along the way the party of warriors and wizards acquired an out of time, out of place Technomancer named Tod. They found found him sitting on the side of the road hungry and downtrodden. They took pity on him and pretended to believe him when he said he was a great spell caster. He would recite incantations for EMP bursts and rituals to crash servers but struggled to find his place in the anachronistic world. That is, of course, until they entered the ruins of Dungton.
ReplyDelete"There are goblins about m'boy and that means shitty traps." The dwarf paladin told him, "we would do well to avoid them. They're like broken ladders, you don't know you're doomed until you're at the top."
Tod knew what he needed to do, he spent a moment to recall a rarely used cantrip. Smiling, his self worth was renewed, he wiggled his fingers towards the suspect hallway and whispered, "Detect OSHA Violation... ."
wait there wouldn't be a pit of starved snakes there would be a pit with one starved snake and a bunch of snakebone containing feces
ReplyDeleteGoblins are shitty at biology so they stuffed the trap with herbivorous snakes. An amazingly unlucky find.
DeleteI did this - then had the ranger roll a nature check and found out it was a slow worm (a legless lizard, completely harmless). Main visible difference is slow worms blink, and snakes don't - they don't have eyelids
DeleteLove the idea of traps where the real danger is the inept construction of the trap, not so much the trap itself. Food for thought.
ReplyDelete