Disembodied Voice
Where’s a sahuagin with military experience when you need one? It’s been a few years since we posted our “It’s a Trap!” comic, but the old ones have a way of coming up fresh again. I say that because a certain paladin in my group recently came face-to-face with an extremely obvious trap. Is it time for another tale from the table? Does a green dragon gargle extra spicy Listerine?
So no shit there they were, down in the depths of the local megadungeon with naught but their wits and their weapons betwixt the party and death. And yet, despite these perfectly-normal working conditions, everyone was on edge. That’s because this particular section of dungeon was the one-time lair of an infamous conjuration mage. According to the history books, this dude had a penchant for collecting exotic specimens, meaning that literally anything in the bestiary could leap out of the shadows. The group had already fought a pair of escaped pyrohydras, as well as a bizarre sentient magnificent mansion. Just last room there’d been a bunch of pits with chaos beasts hanging out at the bottom, complete with hurricane-force winds bull rushing PCs all higgledy-piggledy. (Fail that save, and your adventuring career ends as an amorphous blob with Wisdom 1.)
So long story short, when they came upon the following, the party instantly scented danger:
The echoing sound of dripping water gives this room a vast and ethereal feel. What light you’ve brought with you flickers and reflects from the four pools around its coarse, cave-like walls.
“Hello?” calls a voice from the gloom. “Is someone there? Won’t you please free me?”
Unlike the hapless catgirl in today’s comic, pala-bro and company could actually see the source of the voice. There was a beautiful half-elven woman trapped in one of the pools. Some sort of invisible barrier prevented her escape, though it didn’t seem to register as magical. She introduced herself as Callie, and explained that the legendary wizard who ran the joint had been her lover. Apparently he’d imprisoned her in a fit of jealousy.
“Detect evil,” said pala-bro. There were no signs of Evil. That was because of the antimagic field around the prison.
“She seems to be telling the truth,” said the party’s investigator. That was because of Callie’s +28 to Bluff.
“How do we free you?” asked the party’s mage. And Callie explained that someone had to stand on a nearby dais, make an offering to the local sea god, and so whisk her to safety.
“I’ve been trapped here for so long,” she declared. “Centuries even. I think these pools prevent aging.”
“Alrighty then,” said the paladin, stepping onto the dais. “But just to be clear: This definitely isn’t going to make us exchange places, freeing you by forcing me into your prison?”
Callie responded with big blue eyes. Shock and hurt. Also the aforementioned +28 to Bluff.
“Fair enough. As long as you don’t turn out to be some kind of creature that forces me to look on helplessly while you attack my friends, I guess I’ll do it. Because I’m a paladin. And I believe in helping people. In fact, I can even imagine a scenario where I would still want to help someone even if they’d been less than honest with me up to that point.”
“Are you doing the sacrifice thing or not?” asked the buxom prisoner.
“Heavy sigh,” said pala-bro.
As a GM, I couldn’t have been more proud of the guy. Of course, that pride didn’t prevent me from running the subsequent dragon encounter with the bitter and somewhat insane Calleosis, but ya know… kudos to the paladin. I feel confident that his heckling and guilt-tripping from the confines of his new prison really got through to “Callie.”
Question of the day then! Have you ever decided to spring a trap by walking into it? Did you have a clever plan, or was it a purely RP thing like my pal the paladin? Let’s hear your tales of very-obvious-traps and the adventures who trigger them down in the comments!
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I have two cases of this, one was sort of a clever plan, and the other was for rp. For the RP one, we were playing the tomb of annihilation, and I had just gotten a brand new character after my old one died after tanking around 10 beholder rays from the invisible beholder. This new character then immediately got possessed by a dead animal god due to a practical joke from another player, and unfortunately for this character who was built to be a stealthy character with a good ability to plan ahead for different encounters, this possession changed him to make him hyperactive and the kind of chaotic stupid do the first dumb thing to pop into his head character you usually see in middle school or high school games. This immediately led him to split from the party while the others were resting, with none of them noticing, accidentally clearing some puzzles through sheer and very very dumb luck as it turns out the first dumb thing that popped into his head was exactly what was required, soloing a difficult encounter in a pitch black dark room that he was trapped in, as it turned out that his build was basically absolutely perfect for that situation, find a talking lizard which he promptly chased for 10 min, triggering a bunch of laser traps which he dodged and finding a secret room in the process, until finally the rest of the party caught up to him, and tied him up. He then promptly got out of those binds when they stopped looking, and things kinda continued in that looney toons fashion for him until finally, at long last, his luck ran out. He had just found a secret hallway after running in circles in a room with a bunch of tied up skeletons for a bit, and in that room was a pretty necklace covered in rubys. Now the smart thing to do would have been to id that necklace in case it was a trap, as he had the ritual caster feat and could cast identify. However he could no longer really be patient anymore, so he instead just took the necklace, and immediately put it on, setting off every fireball in the cursed necklace of fireballs immediately with no reflex save, killing him, and ending his insane cycle of luck. The sort of clever plan, was that it was a pretty high level campaign, and I had built my magus in such a way that he could tank pretty much anything for short durations with minimal risk, so one time I had him just plow through a bunch of traps quickly to trigger them so the rest of the party could either see where they were and avoid them, or just not get hit since they were already triggered. It worked out pretty well. I did similar with a later character in d20 future, in which my character effectively purposely ran into traps that would stick him with groups of enemies, because in doing so it would let the rest of the party act a lot more freely for a while with me acting as a diversion, and my guy was both incredibly tanky and the most mobile character, so he could just survive most anything thrown at him without much worry.
Too bad about that necklack of fireballs. Was there never a chance to get rid of the curse/possession?
As for the second character, there’s a reason that I consider Barbarian to be Thief’s opposite number on The Anti-Party:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/barbarian-vs-thief
People often underestimate the utility that comes with being tanky as hell. The god possesion can only be ended when another god try to possess you, with you getting the chance to either get the new god, or break free of both, unfortunately my guy survived only a session and a half, and i dont think i found a god in that time. It was a real shame too because the possession i had was the second worst personality wise besides the mindless destruction and amger one, which luckily no one got possesed with, and just the straight up weakest one by a fair margin for giving a power boost. My previous one got lucky and found and accepted possesion by the kindly and patient snake god, which effectively just made him a bit more patient and unable to lie, and he already was a pretty honest guy, with its power being pretty useful in and out of combat.
It’s situations like the above comic where I like to apply a concept from Erfworld: “Signamancy”. Unicorns don’t hang out in spoopy swamps, they hang out in pretty enchanted forests and glades. That magical bleeding tree? It’s evil. The guy in black spiky armor? Evil.
Is there a war between an empire with a red/black color scheme vs. a kingdom with a blue color scheme, and there’s an alliance of small dukedoms with a yellow color scheme who are trying to avoid the conflict? You already know who the baddie is, who the supporting player is, and who the heroes are. That’s signamancy.
The Evil Overlord List is more than 25 years old, but the villains just don’t learn… they decorate everything in black, they dress their minions in faceless uniformity, and build lairs in the most sinister places they can find.
It’s a good rule of thumb, but you run into danger when GMs catch wise:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/altered-bestiary
It wasn’t a trap, but my very first experience as a player was going well-enough until the party stalled-out outside our first dungeon, a wizard’s tower.
We’d checked the shed, looked up at the high window, then spent an hour debating how to get inside. Battering ram? Burn down the door? Go back to town to buy a tall ladder to reach that window? We didn’t have a rogue to unlock that door.
…Except that nobody had actually tried the door. The party, gripped by paranoia, had shot down every idea that involved actually touching it.
Eventually I couldn’t take it, and neither could my barbarian. She stormed past the others, grabbed the knob, and wrenched the door open while her companions shouted for her to stop, tried to grab and restrain her, or dove for cover.
It was an unlocked, untapped door with no encounters on the other side. It took us more than an hour to get through it.
A friend of mine ran a game, where the party encountered an open door. She did emphasize it’s open. They’ve spent a good then minutes trying to guess how to open it, while she repeatedly stated it’s open.
*ten minutes, not then minutes, of course. Wish I could edit my comments. 😛
Not so long ago my Starfinder crew searched an enemy base for any clues to an evil cult’s computer password.
“Is there anything on that recording we found?”
“Nothing but that weird cult song with its idiosyncratic and very specific title.”
“OK. We keep searching.”
Face, palm, etc.
Okay, but that was a clue. You have to introduce at least three clues for a solution if you want your players to have a chance to catch it. Meanwhile the DM practically spelled out the door was open…
Reminds me of the most famous Oglaf comic (SFW, though the rest of the site is very NSFW):
https://www.oglaf.com/trapmaster/
The shame of a DM knowing no trap will ever get them or cause the party more havoc than this unlocked foor, though.
I remember this one time our party found a maiden chained to a pillar in a dungeon, who was also claimed to be an ex-lover of the dungeon’s wizard. However, we did not even bother rolling Sense Motive checks. It was so obvious. I mean just thinking about it logically, if the woman had been trapped there for as long as she says she was, what was sustaining her? The room was bare, and on that note, there was no sign of fecal matter (no piss pot, or commode).
So yeah, everyone knew it was a trap, but because we were low-level and had no way of determining what the trap was, we decided to just go ahead and trigger it anyways.
So what happened? What was she?
I honestly don’t remember. I think she ended up being an illusion.
I did a reverse of a trap. The 3rd level party was running around in an enchanted maze (which practically changed itself each time they turned around a corner), when they come to a T section, with a simple looking chest in the middle. It didn’t even have a lock. It had 2d6x10 gold pieces inside.
It was obviously a mimic. Well, it was obvious for the party. It wasn’t a mimic, it was a simple chest.
They’ve spent about half an hour throwing pebbles at the chest from a distance, using mage hand to pick each coin one by one and check if they are genuine.
After the session I told the party: “Today’s lesson: a simple chest in a low level dungeon is most likely to be a simple chest. Mimics are rare.”
I can imagine no other response than a link to the Dread Gazebo:
https://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/98/Jul/gazebo.html
I played Death House with some friends once after having already read the module on my own a couple years earlier. I didn’t remember everything, but I did remember the two ghost children who possess you if you try to leave the room they’re in. I was trying not to spoil the game for everyone else, so when we came to the ghost children, I had to play the encounter like I didn’t know what was going to happen and ended up being one of the party members to get possessed.
Well done you. It’s always tough deciding whether metgaming is justified. The thought that, “Maybe my character would be suspicious,” is hard to ignore. But since it’s impossible to recover your own genuine reaction, I think that biting the bullet and springing the trap is the fairest solution. Besides, interesting things tend to happen when the trap is allowed to go off.
My main group generally has a bad track record with traps, so it’s only natural we’d walk right into a few. Here are some highlights:
– The party barbarian setting off a trap right after the rogue warned everyone about it, just to show he was tough enough to survive falling into a pit full of acid-spitting worms. In his defense, he was.
– When I was playing multiple characters, one of them got split off from the party and found and circumvented several traps, but I had to let the other one and his companions stumble into them when they came through. Got to keep player and character knowledge separate, after all.
– My sorcerer and another player’s barbarian walking into a kobold ambush because we didn’t have a better plan. Yes, the room with conveniently spear-sized holes all over the walls and floor was a tad suspicious, but what are a lightning-slinging blaster-caster and a berserking brute supposed to do about that?
Heh. I guess FaceTank the barbarian belong in my mountain climber’s club:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/falling-damage
When you say: “Have you ever decided to spring a trap by walking into it?”, does it count pushing someone else to spring the trap and see what happens? 🙂
Asking for… a friend… that is >_>
That’s more “stumbling into the trap slightly off balance.” 😛
Then i got nothing. Is more fun to tease tour DM with almost triggering the trap that actually trigger it. And i am not enough good or charitable to offer myself as a sacrifice 🙂
To quote one of my favorite cartoons. “When expecting booby traps… always send the boob in first”
A multiverse of edgy rogues reasents that sentiment, lol.
Oddly enough, the last session I DM’d had a disembodied voice. The players had earlier run into a nervous-sounding “Hello? Is someone there?”-type voice coming from the dark, which they treated cautiously. Unfortunately, it was a sea hag, a species so incredibly ugly that merely looking at them causes 1d6 STR damage (I still don’t understand how, but that’s what the book says), so their caution didn’t do them much good. But the next session, when they explored ANOTHER dark creepy tower that people think is haunted, they were on pretty high alert. The unexplained Will saving throw didn’t make things better, especially after the report of “you all feel fine.”
Then the disembodied voice started. It asks why the party was there and if they were “mages.” When asked if the voice had seen the missing mage they were looking for, it paused and then said yes, but that he was dead, having been killed by the island’s ghostly curse (a legend they had heard before). The party advances into the tower. The voice mentions another person they are looking for, who it says has also been killed by the curse. A Perception reveals that the voice is not actually sound, but being delivered telepathically. A Sense Motive notices a weird pause between when it was asked the name of the missing mage, and when it replied.
The party goes upstairs and finds a weird platform with magic runes on it. They poke it endlessly but can’t figure out what it does, while the voice keeps telling them that they need to leave before the ghost curse gets them. Eventually, the Kineticist goes back downstairs to see if they missed a clue in the destroyed furniture down there. This finally provides an opportunity for the voice to strike, revealing itself to be… a rhu-chalik! ( https://aonprd.com/MonsterDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Rhu-chalik ) It used its invisibility, Detect Thoughts (the unexplained Will save) and telepathy to learn what the PCs were up to and tried to spook them away. But, it turned out, the “ghost” was merely a floating psychic alien squid thing. Nothing to be afraid of at all!
The session was summarized here:
https://i.imgur.com/gCK4QgI.png
Damn. That rhu-chalik encounter sounds like a solid session idea. I might just have to steal that mess.
In Shattered Star AP, we had a Paladin Goblin in the party face-check a trap.
Spoilers below!
We entered a hallway with a bunch of doors, where we immediately noticed that one of the doors was unnaturally cold, enough that it was obvious that there was something cold and/or frozen on the other side, most likely a monster causing it, or magic. We considered avoiding that door, or but we were worried that something might burst out of it if we did, leading to us getting flanked, or a monster hearing us.
Our paladin decided to face the problem directly, bracing herself for combat and opening the door, trusting her faith, stats, and/or dice could handle it on her own, whilst the rest of us backed off.
There was no combat, and no monsters. Just a good old reflex save versus a LOT of cold damage, due to being caught point blank by an icy boom (the rest of us took less or none).
Enough damage, that our poor Paladin’s failed save brought her from full HP to being a corpse outright.
Lesson overall: ALWAYS assume a trap is instant-death deadly if you screw up.
Wait a minute… Isn’t there somebody else on this thread saying “a chest is just a chest sometimes?” What’s a paranoid gamer to do!?
Minimize the theoretical worst case scenario, then trigger it?
You’d think Magus would have gotten used to (explosively) cutting her way out of confined/constricting situations or swallow whole’s.
If you’re dating a drow, you get plenty of experience with Use Rope. Nod nod, wink wink, say no more.
Let’s hope she doesn’t gain any new and weird kinks then!
Ooh, a monster I don’t recognize! Is this a Laurel original or a classic beastie? And is the froggo invisible or ethereal? Being ethereal tends to make snacking on Magi a bit tricky.
I asked for an invisible frog monster with a freaky talking tongue. The inspiration kind of sort of came from the false hydra:
http://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2014/09/false-hydra.html?m=1
Laurel fricken nailed the art though. Kind of makes me want to develop the creature.
That’s… Quite the monster. One of those things that drive a whole campaign. Reminds me of the baddest of bad Fey, the Whisperer, who acts pretty much like Slenderman, turning a region into a mini-Barovia with itself at its center.
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/fey/whisperer/
Not technically a trap, but my DM gave a random magical device to the party’s ADHD Kobold without telling her or her player what it was.
So, yeah, technically not a trap, but also definitely a trap.
She ended up un-anchoring time and braking the multiverse, of course.
Lol. That’s not a trap. That’s a plot device.
…
Actually, they may be same thing now that I think of it.
Big oof on that Chaos Beast trap. Our party faced one that we thankfully saw coming and avoided as much as we could, but our Brawler had the misfortune of getting smacked once and getting hit by its curse. Even with it dead within a turn, that one hit effectively killed her, very quickly being put on an express path to becoming a similar blob herself if not cured very quickly.
My Ratfolk wizard had to toss a hexbiter charm into her ooze-morphed mass to try help her on the subsequent remove curse spell, leaving her 1-2 rounds from having to reroll her character (or worse, attacking us and spreading it!) before she got cured.
She would still die in the same dungeon, alas – we made the mistake of trusting an NPC that betrayed us at the worst possible time, attacking her with a bomb whilst she was in melee with a nasty spidery monster, leaving her low enough on HP to let the monster finish her off with a full attack. The rest of us had to dimension door out of there, leaving the NPC to handle the monster themselves (they survived, but we quickly tracked them down and slaughtered them in revenge later).
My players were clever and tied themselves to their flying carpet to avoid the winds. It was a close thing though. Roll enough saves and eventually someone is going to screw up.
Hah, the day after this strip aired, I reached the Glass Cannon episode that featured Leucrotta. Similar disembodied voice, though those more charm you outright into being foolish, rather than rely on your own stupidity.
Met some of those guys back in my hex crawl days. I was not expected freaky deer weasels.
Hex crawl days?
Somewhere in the wilds of Lastwall.
I remember finding a drawing online of Admiral Ackbar sitting behind a DM’s Screen, with a word balloon coming in from off-panel saying ‘I roll to check for traps.’ Wish I could remember where it was…
Bingo!
https://twitter.com/thesgw/status/938835715135176704
Nice. Thank you for your service.
Your paladin pal should invest in Truecolor Dye, cover their armor/banner with it. It’s a wondrously cheap and clever way of discovering evil creatures, regardless of how good their bluff or disguise is.
https://aonprd.com/MagicWondrousDisplay.aspx?FinalName=Truecolor%20Dye
The dye has a different perceived color based on alignment (evil sees red, good sees gold, neutral sees its normal orange). Just convince or trick a suspected creature to say which color it sees and you instantly know if its good, evil, or neutral. It’s also unlikely to be discovered, as it’s identified by a skill few typical trickster creatures would heavily invest in.
Also, it’s really cool in general. Cheap golden shine for your allies, crimson red for your foes. Works for antipaladins trying to maintain a low profile, code messages, or other intrigue stuff!
Trying to decide if this would work while the viewer is in an antimagic zone while the dye is outside is giving me a headache.
I don’t know what’s more naive, Magus falling for the ‘land of enchantment’ bit, or the fact that a unicorn considers her pure enough to approach.
Is there a version of DND where the virgin thing is actually baked into the stat block?
I think the Monkey King’s answer to such a situation is best.
https://youtu.be/Jr5IU8g2SHA?list=PLDb22nlVXGgdg_NR_-GtTrMnbMVmtSSXa&t=118
Also, I’m usually too trusting to see traps coming, so I’ve just gotten really good at fighting my way out of them instead.
It’s more entertaining anyway.
“It’s a trap!”
“We’re surrounded.”
“It’s a core meltdown, sir. It can’t be stopped!”
“Surrender may be our only option…”
As Magus is, well, a Magus, I assume she must have a fairly robust Intelligence.
Wisdom, though? That seems to be her dump stat… ^^;
So. Many. Times. Well, at least two or three times. I (and my characters) tend to be very trusting so long as the NPC isn’t acting like an asshole. Even when the GM was doing what was his stereotypical Silly Evil Voice for one of the NPCs, I didn’t pick up on it because I’m so used to enemies being openly hostile from the get go. Fortunately the party finally figured that particular out before we could walk into a death trap and we slowly but surely fought our way through.