The Gaming Den

I'm trying to write out a joking parody of "old school" dungeon crawls, complete with instadeath traps, encounter tables, and designated mapmakers.

What dungeon encounters should I include? Iconic or wacky, it'll all go in.

"It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue."

The Book of Oafish Might has some stuff you can add.

http://www.rpgnow.com/product/28881/The ... Might?it=1

Also the Dread Gazebo, you can find the stats in the pdf "Bride of the Portable Hole".

Random encounter with a gazebo.

Game On,
fbmf

"You all meet in an inn."
Bandits in the woods on the way to the dungeon.
10' by 10' room with an orc guarding a chest.

Classical spiked pit trap.

Or even cheesier, a simple 10-foot wide gaping pit in a corridor.

"Herp derp roll Jump check."

As far as Dick Moves go, in addition to traps and monsters you can include these elements in your adventure design:

[*] Mary Sues
[*] As any Morton's Forks as possible. You know the classic ones: Baby orcs, orphans begging you for money right outside the magic shop, so on.
[*] If the heroes finagle their way out of the first one, then have Chrono Cross-style plot twists. You know, stuff like 'you retrieved the antidote reagents from the hydra, but since it was enchanted to be the guardian of the swamp the swamp immediately becomes all poisonous and the dwarves living there declare war on the fairies and everyone blames you'.
[*] Any companions that the heroes have to pick up are secretly traitors and/or criminally stupid. Nothing like rescuing the princess only to find out that she's an idiot who goes around flipping levers.
[*] Sierra Screws, but in Tabletop RPG form. The button that you push to open an unassuming door also releases deadly poison gas. 10 minutes later in another room.
[*] Secretly charming and dominating people. Have a trap or a potion that charms someone to follow the lich but don't have it go off until a really inopportune moments. This works well with the Sierra Screw.

Fake druid with pet mountain lion.

The Tomb of Horrors screw-you portal that changed you sex and alignment. I'll have to see if I can dredge up any of the Rube-Goldberg machines I designed when I loved the idea of instadeath traps as well.

My favourite trap ever has to be a simple pit trap of arbitrary depth with a polymorph any object trap set to gelatinous cube at the bottom. My players had a lot of fun fishing paralyzed characters out of the guy that failed the save.

EDIT: Also, something crazy with a chessboard. It doesn't really matter what. There's a reason one of the tome prestige classes has "No. If the floor looks like a chessboard, don't walk on it" as the flavour text. Even an untrapped chessboard like floor could defend a secure location because nobody wants to find out it's trapped the hard way.

I have no idea if it's still on the net, but there was a file called The Trap Collection that had (mostly stupid) user-submitted traps. There's a few gems in there, like a water-filled pit with invisible water and an illusion of water on top to fool people that try to disbelieve everything all the time. Half of this school of trap design is anticipating the actions of adventurers and specifically targeting the common anti-trap countermeasures they employ.

A giant chessboard where every tile is a pressure plate that has a 50% chance of disintegrating you, rolled each time you step on it?

(Unless you use the exact pattern you followed last time, in which case it disintegrates you exactly when it did last time, or the moment you deviate if you followed at least three tiles of that path)

Also, there are chess pieces on it, and each side makes a random legal move each time you step on a plate (white, then black; random piece that could legally move, random legal space to move to)

The chessboard of lethal pieces sounds cool, but the 50% disintegration per tile is bland. It's got to be something like 50% gigantic firestorms flesh to stone for the black tiles and 50% flesh to ice on white. That makes use of the actual pattern on the board instead of just being an arbitrary death floor. And obviously the way to bypass it is to take the place of one of the knights and make legal knight moves across the whole board. That or performing an entire Knight's Walk shuts it down for a few minutes so you can cross.

EDIT: I assumed spinning the lethal random chess game off into a different trap.
Double Edit: Did someone say Random Encounters? (Good luck getting anything remotely usable out of it, but that's not the point.)

No, see, you make them think the chessboard has a pattern, but there very nearly isn't one.

Throw one person at it per month, with an audience, and you'll get a religion.

EDIT: The correct answer is not to trigger the pressure plates.

EDIT 2: The chess pieces are red herrings too.

...or maybe you can climb on them safely, so you just need to find one that you think will make it to the other side? or maybe you just hop from one to the next?

A pool of acid* with an acid-shark in it. At the bottom there's a magic ring. Watch as people go "Oh, we're supposed to jump in there and fight it like suckers? HA! We're smarter than that!", kill it from the surface, then dive in.

The ring is obviously of Acid Resistance, so it would have been really handy five minutes prior.

Indeed, any kind of "a lot of effort to open a door to get to a room that has the key to the door you just opened" is good for screwing with people.

*As in, the kind that looks like water except it's not fun to drink or to swim in. Unless you're an acid shark.

You had me at acid-shark.

Now that it's pointed out to me, I like your thinking.

EDIT: This was in response RadiantPhoenix. Those other two posts definitely weren't there when I hit reply.

A room with...






and if they survive all of that to get the treasure:



A cavern with...

Don't forget the overpowered, overshadowing, GMPC!

Put in a sold block of iron painted and molded to look exactly like a treasure chest, locked, of course.

OgreBattle wrote:A room with...






and if they survive all of that to get the treasure:

You forgot to fill the room with gelatinous cubes.

how about a dungeon carved out of a TEXA$ sized cube

Every sexy lady you meet in chains is really a vampire/evil sorceress/doppelganger/illusion/ogremage that will betray you to the dungeon boss.

OgreBattle wrote:how about a dungeon carved out of a TEXA$ sized cube

Every sexy lady you meet in chains is really a vampire/evil sorceress/doppelganger/illusion/ogremage that will betray you to the dungeon boss.

But if you kill them more than a scene before they betray you, you can't get through the door they really were going to let you through.

OgreBattle wrote:how about a dungeon carved out of a TEXA$ sized cube

Every sexy lady you meet in chains is really a vampire/evil sorceress/doppelganger/illusion/ogremage that will betray you to the dungeon boss.

If players wise up and start killing them, it turns out that at least some of the ones killed were innocent. Then they come back as ghosts looking for revenge.

Also, the munchkin d20 books could be useful if you can find them.

Gnoll/Troll under a bridge

What. No Mention of the Monster for whom the Labyrinth was made?
The Minotaur?

Use a Wandering Damage Table. Found here (scroll down).

Edit: You should probably tone it down. Unless you're giving your players unlimited characters or something.

Also, if you're okay with a lot of silliness, you could look through The April Fools Articles in dndwiki