All That Glitters
Our pal the mimic is the poster boy for this kind of thing. He looks like a treasure chest, activates the greed receptors in your adventurer brain, and then makes you pay the price for rushing ahead. However, the mimic isn’t the only way to achieve this effect.
I’m an especial fan of the old Gygax anecdote about the sinking treasure chamber. This one comes courtesy of old-school DM Mike Mornard via the Blog of Holding:
Mike told us the story of one of Gary’s lesser players who decided to go adventuring alone. He encountered a room filled with gems. Apparently, he didn’t suspect that Gary was trying anything devious: he ran into the room and started reveling in his treasure. “It’s great!” said Gary… “You’re in gems up to your ankles!”
The player showered himself with gems like Daffy Duck. “I’m independently wealthy!” (As a one-time recipient of a cache of random gems, I can relate to the player’s joy.) “It’s great!” said Gary. “You’re in gems up to your knees!” The player shoveled gems into his pack. “It’s great!” said Gary. “You’re in gems up to your waist!” I’m sure you can see where this story is going. When the player tried to leave, he found out that he was sinking in quicksand covered with three inches of gems.
Monte Cook pulled a similar trick in my current Pathfinder megadungeon campaign, turning a treasure chest and a couple of magic spears into dangerous animated objects with zero monetary value. Several rooms later, he presented the exact same setup with the exact same treasure description, but this time the loot was actually loot. Watching the players agonize over whether or not to grab the gold warmed the cockles of my frozen GM heart.
In my opinion, you do this kind of thing because 1) it’s hilarious, but also 2) players like feeling smart. Sure they’ll blunder into your golden guillotine some of the time, but when they manage to side-step the trap (thanks 10′ pole!) they’ll feel like tactical geniuses. You want to give your players that feeling every once in a while. It’s a pretty nice boost to the ol’ gamer ego.
Question of the day then: Have you ever rushed ahead in a dangerous situation, only to be hurt be your greed and/or impatience? What happened? How dead were you?
ADD SOME NSFW TO YOUR FANTASY! If you’ve ever been curious about that Handbook of Erotic Fantasy banner down at the bottom of the page, then you should check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. Twice a month you’ll get to see what the Handbook cast get up to when the lights go out. Adults only, 18+ years of age, etc. etc.
I’m not sure it exactly qualifies for the question, but we’ve definitely paid for our greed. Here’s the story.
At the charming level of 6, fresh from defeating a vampire in his own home with the help of a friendly but cowardly lich, we attended a party in our honor held by the nearby small town. During this event, our dwarven fighter gets drunk and falls down a historic well, landing with a thud at the bottom. It was covered, but he was heavy enough to smash through it.
Looking down into the well, it is lined with sharp spikes angled downward. The mayor informs us that this well actually lead into some ancient dwarven ruins, so they had installed the spikes to make sure nothing nasty come up at them. If we were going in after the fighter, we would have to find another way back up. We did, of course.
Fast forward a wee bit, and we’ve found the fighter and are exploring the ruins further. After travelling a few miles, we end up in the Underdark, and found an active black market run by a Drow named Mizzri Dyrr. Everyone we ask for directions tells us to go see Mizzri, so we have little choice.
Mizzri will gives us directions back to the surface, but she has a job for us. There is a treasure vault in the building she uses as her office, sealed by a complicated mechanism that apparently uses water pressure to operate. However, the water is shut off, so she can’t open it. She promises us that if we can open the vault, not only will she give us directions, but we can also keep 10% of the treasure.
We set off on our task, and soon come to three water tanks with three levers in another old section of dwarven ruins. One of them is banging around violently. We pull the two non-banging levers and go check out the vault lock, but it is only partially working. Reluctantly, we pull the third lever. A monstrous Purple Worm bursts out of the tank, boring away from us at high speed. Oops.
The vault lock is open, though. We head in and defeat some little critters who had gotten in through cracks in the walls, then get to the treasure chamber. It is demolished, gigantic holes in the floor and ceiling, and there is barely 300 gold in there. We collect it and then follow the hole down, following distant noises.
The hole is occasionally lined with a bit of purple scale, so we reason we are following our worm friend. For miles down it bores, and we slowly catch up to it. Finally, we approach the giant ass of the worm, including its surprisingly small stinger. We cut the stinger off and use it as a melee weapon, injecting the thing full of its own venom and taking it down with surprising ease.
When it died, we examined it further. It is oddly bulging. We cut it open and inside is something on the order of 50 tons of gold, presumably the true contents of the treasure chamber. Although we were several miles underground, we were quite rich! We had the idea to start our own town, and now we have enough for our own city. How to transport it all, though…
Taking off my helmet and shining it up, I look at my reflection and call the name of the lich. “Trughen…. Trughen… Trughen!” Nothing happens for a moment. I smile at the DM. He smiles back. “…. Yeah?” “Hey buddy, how would you like to make a LOT of gold?” “Go on?” “We’re waaaay underground right now, but we’ve got a king’s ransom in gold down here. Teleport us back to the town you met us in, and you can keep HALF of it.” “Deal!”
The next thing we know, we are back above ground, sitting right at the gates of the town with 25 tons of gold. We did it! We’re rich! Except… wait, did we just screw the Drow in a business deal? House Agrach Dyrr, no less, the house known for having the strongest Lich in all the lands? I think we did. Shoot. We send back 90% of the 300 gold from the treasure chamber. That’ll satisfy her, right?
Wrong. The Drow take a bit of time figuring out who we are (most of us didn’t give our names) but find out they do. They attack our city as a diversion while they kidnap two of our party members (who’s players had to drop out) and turned them into undead in the service of the Lichdrow. Now it is personal.
The resulting war with the Drow would be the focus of the rest of the campaign. This was a consequence for our characters, even though it was a perfectly good and fun campaign for us players. =)
Oops, got a bit carried away there…
Ha! Your bard levels are showing.
Was it a premeditated “let’s screw the drow,” or had you simply seen all that gold and acted without thinking?
Depends on who you ask. My character reasoned that the gold was ours because it wasn’t in the vault, it was several miles below it in the belly of a purple worm. Others were more clear about the fact that we were screwing over the Drow.
Fantasy racism may have also played into it. We expected her to betray us the whole time, so we struck first. Turns out, she was so desperate to get the vault open that she wasn’t even going to betray us. Oops…
You mean your character is, quite literally, more devious than the drow? Remind me never to look at him funny.
Reminds me when someone like you did a blog about tomb of horror and described as “A collection of trap that triggers for seemingly no reason, transforming the game into a long trudge of poking everything with a 10-foot pole”
XD
What do you mean “someone like me?” Do you mean to say that there are other websites out there blogging about tabletop RPGs? Inconceivable!
But naw, my thoughts on “fair traps” live way back over here:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/the-handbook-of-heroes-06
I already told the story about my wizard trying to scrape Runesprawl off of the walls for weaponization and profit and how a month of convalescing and insanity was the reward for myself and the gunslinger, but it super fits here too.
The -actual- traps, on the other hand, we’ve navigated with aplomb. Thus starts the metagame with our DM…he gives us ‘real’ traps and we successfully gain unexpected benefits from them, and then he gives us simple scenery and we give ourselves grievous injury by throwing ourselves atop the spikey bits.
So the trap was overthinking it? Nice. What was the “simple scenery” that beat you up so bad?
After the fungus? Then it was windows. We tried Tactical Entry into an abandoned manse and boogered it up nicely, resulting in lacerations from glass and critters. We had the key to the place, too.
Then we tried an underwater entry and I spent three quarters of my available ‘let’s not drown myself’ supply to determine that it wasn’t really viable as an entryway. And nearly drowned myself anyway.
Oh man… Water is so tough. If you can’t take 10 your way through that silliness, it’s a one-way ticked to drown town.
I had my lil black kobold, Skraa (still one of my favorite characters) and we were raiding a necromacer’s place. He went a bit farther in the living quarters than everyone else, and when he found the necromacer on his bed reading a book, he spied a wand not far from him. “If I can get that he will be easier to kill…” It should have occurred to me that the others were making WAY to much noise for him not to have heard…
So he sneaks up just close enough and and the caster grabs the wand and scorching ray to the face.
The party just hears “SKRAAAAAAAAAA!” From the next room over and has to come save me from bleading out.
He got his revenge though.
Rolled a nat 20 on a musket.
Nothing like a good old fashioned magic ray / gun fight.
Laurel is playing a musket master in one of our games, and you should see the mad joy that comes to her face when that ridiculous gun crits. It’s a cannon, man.
The party had finished making it’s way though the maze (a literal maze, don’t ask) and had arrived at a pair of suitably impressive-looking double doors. My monk, without consulting the rest of the party, decided that this would be the perfect opportunity for some “kick in the door” style play. I rolled for attack. I kicked. The lock burst. The doors loudly crashed open. The entire party could now not possibly fail to see the white dragon sleeping in the middle of the room…
“Ha! I have given you the greatest gift of all: A surprise round! All glory to the monk!”
Two things:
1.) I’d be remiss if I didn’t post this Family Guy clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viDL2W0HcJw#t=00m10s
2.) The secret to doing this is to use colloidal gold
1.) I’d have thought Peter had more hp than that.
2.) The secret is to acquire dwarven pool boys.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1xG8haCtvg&t=1m36s
Interestingly enough, in the rebooted Ducktales, Scrooge McDuck actually says that this is what would happen to anybody who wasn’t very very good at swimming. Probably an epic level usage of the skill (and definitely over DC 18 as he says this to Dewey who, being a duck, probably has a +8 racial bonus and skill mastery)
Once again I’m reminded of Ducktales. Maybe he should give swimming lessons.
Now see, I don’t see a relationship to Ducktales in this one. Not sure where you’re getting that from. >_>
Scrooge McDuck has a money bin just like the one in the picture. He regularly goes swimming in it. It acts like water for him.
https://www.bing.com/th?id=OIP.49BdXbeo0MEFjdj_6DSc5wHaF5&pid=Api&rs=1&p=0
What? Scrooge McWho? Never heard of him. *smoke grenade*
lol Is the smoke purple? Because that’s more Darkwing Duck.
“It’s not a liquid! It’s a great many pieces of solid matter that form a hard, floor-like surface!”
~Peter Griffin~