Door Traps
At this point I should mention that while the black-and-white artwork is uniformly blah and somewhat shoddy, this is a remarkably clean, clutter free book. Wide margins, no sidebars, no waterprint, no header and footer, no full-page illustrations, no Oh Gods My Eyes blocks of unreadably fonts, no white font on black...this is simplicity itself, and it is a joy to read after years and years of...Doors are probably the most overlooked items in a dungeon, and with good reason. By and large, doors are usually transition devices between areas where the real action takes place: a warm-up act for the main attraction. As such, doors become commonplace objects, tackled with little caution and quickly forgotten.
A few well placed door traps will put an end to this. Operating as they do - when a delver's guard is down -t raps such as these are likely to create a high number of casualties. They will also lead to widespread, unreasoning paranoia, for if your best buddy gets fried by the first dungeon door, you can bet you're in for a tough trip.
Knock knock...
Okay, back to the traps.
Doors are basically barriers, and barriers aren't typically trapped. Barb wire or spikes on top of a fence isn't a trap, it's just a further impediment; an unmarked electrified fence is a trap because the danger is not obvious. So it is with doors. The basic problem is, there's not a lot to a door. Doors themselves tend to be designed to open, so even really big and heavy doors or those with complicated locks offer relatively limited space for traps. Thus the trap is either small and in the door, or it is more accurately located in the proximity of the door.
So what I'm getting at is that rather inventive door traps tend to get rather silly. Case in point, The Circular Doorway (4 skulz). It's a perfectly circular doorway that has no obvious door, but the image on the other side of it is rather foggy. This is because the door is actually a gigantic, near-invisible, noiseless fan with razor sharp, barbed, jagged blades. In other words, the PCs are expected to walk into a blender, no save.
More traditional are the Guillotine Door (4 skulz) and Poison Door (3 skulz); these traps are triggered simply by opening a standard door (which, in addition, may be locked), and either a guillotine blade falls down from inside the door frame (I'm not sure how the timing on that is supposed to work, but I suppose it might lead to some one-footed salesmen) or a cloud of poisonous gas is sprayed on you. Classic, rather workmanlike traps.
A rather common tactic for dungeon window-dressing, this is a good way to avoid traps situated around the handle (i.e. the part of the door you are most likely to touch). This is such an effective technique that is was used in The Princess Bride.
So perhaps naturally, there is a trap specifically designed for adventurers that kick down doors. It is the Cure a Kicker trap (2 skulz), and it is a (relatively) simple mechanical trap that causes something very heavy to fall on you when the door is broken open from one side.The green speckled recluse doesn't destroy as quickly as the stonefish. And many think the mamba brings more suffering, what with the ulcerating and all. But gram for gram, nothing in the universe comes close to the green speckled recluse; among other spiders, compared with the green speckled recluse, the black widow was a rag doll. Prince Humperdinck's recluse lived behind the ornate green handle on the bottom door. She rarely moved, unless the handle turned. Then she struck like lightning.
[...]
He just yelled and jumped for the door and slammed it open with his body, never even bothering with the niceties of turning that pretty green handle, and as the door gave behind his strength he kept right on running until he came to the giant cage and there, inside and still, lay the man in black.
[...]
Inigo, for his part, was startled at Fezzik's strange behavior. He saw no reason for it whatsoever, and was about to call after Fezzik when he saw a tiny green speckled spider scurrying down from the door handle, so he stepped on it with his boot as he hurried to the cage.
Michael Stackpole was brought back in to design three more traps, these relatively tame affairs. The Dry Rot Door (3 skulz) is simply a very weak door; on the other side of it is a monster. If the adventurer attempts to kick open the door, it will go right through the rotten wood and the monster will cut the offending limb off. Presumably the monster has a union which prevented the dungeon designer from combining this with the guillotine door, because otherwise there would be ogres outside the dungeon complaining about how in their dad's day they didn't have to worry about automation taking their jobs.
MS's Dragging Doorway (2 skulz) is a similar principle: kick down the door, and a built-in snare latches on to the offending limb and drags the PC into the next room. Possibly to be the bait/centerpiece of a nice room trap.
MS's Double Door Trap (3 skulz) is actually what we would call a half door design.
Standard for witch's cottages, comes in oak, teak, and gingerbread.
If you open the top door and lean through, a spring-loaded blade shoots up and cuts you in half. Or I suppose it scalps you if you're a hobbit. For dwarves, I imagine it would just clang against your helmet. Half-ogres and half-giants may be circumcised. You get the drift.
AH now pictures the PCs stumbling into a Jewish ogre mohel.
The final trap of this (very) short chapter is the needlessly complicated Delvermatic Dicer and Malingerer Trap (4 skulz).
Noticeably missing from this chapter are magic door traps (which, for some reason, often involve mimics or animated door knockers or something), and the classic standby: the poison dart in the lock trap. Maybe those were just too obvious.
