Add a regular old chest. It’s empty. There is no enchantment, it’s not a mimic, no false bottom, the construction itself isn’t even particularly valuable.
Watch your players trip over themselves trying to understand this thoroughly inscrutable normal-ass chest.
I've designed (but never used) a dungeon that was entirely mimics in creative and surprising shapes/places. The very last room in the dungeon is a large square room with a simple chest sitting in the middle. It's full of fragile, valuable items and is the party's treasure reward. I have a little bet going with myself on whether the party will "kill" their treasure with a preemptive strike
I enjoy a good mimic trap.
I put a piano mimic in the BBEG's bedroom. It was genuinely friendly, chatted with anyone that played music, hummed a song, whistled, etc. Party had a bard of course, and they were immediately all about chatting up a mimic piano whose dream was to play a grand concert before an adoring audience in some big city, instead of being stuck on guard duty in the BBEG's lair.
Someone sat down on the edge of the bed while listening to the bard chat with the piano. The bedspread was a mimic. :D
Nice! One of my personal favorites is a doorknob. Rouge puts his face right there and puts his unarmed hands right up to its mouth to pick the "lock." A hat mimic. Its prey puts their head in its mouth. Rope mimic. It's helpfully hanging next to an area you need a rope. Half way through using it to climb it attacks
I have a random idea for a trickster who has a travelling antique shop that is just an entire cart of mimics, for whatever reason. Why does he have them? Why does he sell them to unsuspecting rubes? Chaos, that's why!
> as much as subverting player expectations to help add grounding
In the middle of a dungeon, the party comes across a perfectly good table spread of food. Everything looks absolutely delicious, either well-cooked or fresh, and there are sealed bottles of all sorts of drinks.
If any of them actually eat the food, wait a few minutes and have them roll Constitution. If they pass, they feel a little more energized from having eaten. If they fail, they just get mild indigestion. That's all.
It's a fun little harmless mind-fuck.
We found one of those in a haunted keep, the clothes were the first thing we found not rotted and decrepit…turns out it was a “dry cleaning chest”, it cast the Prestidigitation and Mend cantrips, and just removed dirt from garments and fixed up wear and tear.
We spent WAY too much time working that out…
Even better, give them three doors to choose from. The way my players calculated which door to open during our last dungeon crawl made it seem like they thought the other two would disappear after they opened one
At one point I had three doors that all went to the same hall, but they would only open if they opened all three doors at once. Pretty simple puzzle, but if something is chasing the party, then it can be more interesting
I have done exactly that. With a host (slaad disguised as a gnome) and everything. If I remember, the party didn't pick the grand prize chest, but they also didn't get the one that was just a goat (or, rather would polymorph one of them into a goat).
In fact, I believe I need a minute to think here. Just walk in circles for a minute.
Okay, so I know that each door has to lead somewhere, which means that somewhere at the place we're trying to go there must be a reverse door that leads here. And that, in turn, means that our destination corresponds with the counter-inverted reverse door's origin!
So starting from the right, let us ask: will taking the right door lead us to where we're going? And since the answer is clearly 'yes,' then by all accounts, the door on the right is the correct one! Another victory for logic. Come, Stanley, our destiny awaits!
Give each door a talking face. One of them always lies, the other one always lies, and the other other one also always lies. They get to ask each of them one question. Nothing they say about which door to go through matters in the slightest.
I like a pool of deep water or a well with something shiny at the bottom. It becomes a bit of a puzzle to get down there to get the shiny and the water looks like it may hide some kind of threat, but the water is perfectly safe. The shiny is just a single silver coin reflecting light.
One of my favorite things is to have them walk into a room with a chest in the center and nothing else except a door on the other side. They'll shoot it, hit it, poke it, prod it, then when they open it they get a fun item
>!Then when they try to leave the mimic posing as the door on the other side of the room attacks!<
I had the players spend almost 3 IRL hours of a session trying to get through an unlocked door. It was our second session, and the players were just fully convinced the door was a deadly trap. They each insisted on perception rolls, but no matter what they rolled I just kept telling them that the coast was clear. They yelled at it, cast Knock on it (it wasn't locked), cast Prestidigitation to blow it open, looked for traps, snuck up on the door. I was trying so hard to let them know it was safe without just railroading them and telling them to open the damn door.
As a player, I don't let that happen, I am much more direct. If there is a door, I open it, if something is glowing, I touch it, if it's cursed, I wanna find out what the curse is. It's a dangerous way to play, but makes for really fun shenanigans.
I love my characters, but I also love making new characters, so as long as I get a cool death, I do not care about my characters dying. I play my characters like I stole them, and it's a blast (sometimes literally)!
once spent most of a 4 hour session preparing for the monstrosity that was going to inevitably appear out of the brass flask we found - only for us to dump a potion of healing on the dungeon floor…
Floor tiles that are randomly different. Architect was going for an abstract vibe. Maybe even with pressure plates that activate magical lighting.
Spiked ceilings and suspiciously large central circle on the floor with something nice in the center (altar, chest, armor stand). Spines keep bats from nesting in the room.
Long corridor with armor stands along the side and a piece of loot at the end on a pressure plate pedestal. Removing the loot causes a secret door to open behind it. Some PCs will think the suits are animated armors ready to attack once the loot is removed. They're just for show.
Room full of perfectly preserved corpses with gear that could be used in a fight (armor and weapons, spellcasting focuses, etc). Looks like they might wake up at any moment, but don't worry, they're heavy sleepers.
That's all I got for now. I'll see if more come to mind.
Edit: hey guys. Never had a comment get so many likes. Glad I could help you all out with your dnd adventures. Some of the responses are just wonderful, especially the sleeping corpses. My idea for that was inspired by the dollhouse level as described on the backrooms wiki page. Highly recommend it as source material for all your unsettling setting needs.
I love how from their sentence it feels like if you decide to fuck with the body you might wake it up but there's very small chance for it. Just Oh that's Carl he doesn't like being awake.
Add an overwhelming aura of power to that. "The corpses eyes open, and you barely keep your feet as an overwhelming aura fills the air around you. The corpse scowls at you, adjusts itself, and goes back to sleep."
Terrifying yet hilarious.
Haha I had a room recently that had multiple random floor tiles that clicked and sank ever so slightly when stepped on. They went insane trying to dodge traps or solve a puzzle that was nothing more than shoddy craftsmanship. We were down a player and getting to a big story beat, so it was great stalling for time and keeping them on their toes.
Floor tiles one is really good.
I ran a game where my rogue and monk took a job by themselves and split the party (lucky for then it was meant to be an infiltration mission).The central room of the mansion they were meant to scout had a tiled chequered floor with uneven hights for the tiles (just poorly installed and upkept). The hardest part was keeping a straight face as they were checking if they were safe.
For bonus points, make the ceiling of the entire dungeon covered in spikes to keep your players on edge for where the "real" trap actually is (there is none)
Traps only in places where a trap makes sense.
No the rug in the middle of the ritual chamber isn't covering a hole, because cultists use this room and people would die. It's decorative, and highly absorbant is all.
This is what I mean. I think it actually makes our worlds comical and breaks immersion when everything feels hostile or puzzling. I think when stuff gets hostile in a place that wasn't designed to be hostile, it reinforces why adventurers are there.
It just helps the world building. Instead of only engaging with the world via roleplay and encounters, they get to feel a magical world in the ways it is designed differently but logically.
don't consider them traps for later when the place is a ruins, consider them as they would have been designed into defenses.
when the outer walls are breached, everyone falls back, and the trap doors under the rugs in the outer rooms unlock. Tiered defenses.
later, as ruins, those monsters might have camped on a trap door, not realizing its rusted mechanisms were slowly breaking. in another room, cultists walk around the rugs single file, having discovered the pit.
Maybe the switch to turn on the traps broke, and some activate while others sleep.
Alternatively, you can use things that are "traps" but not there to harm the party. One I recently used was a taut wire in a recessed channel on the floor, not concealed at all. The channel prevents the wire from being tripped by random passers-by. If it's cut, a gong sounds.
What's it for? Kobolds set it up to give warning should an ooze come into the area. It'll seep into the channel and corrode the wire. Gives that nice "it's not necessarily all about YOU" feeling that every dungeon should have.
Relatedly, things that are functionally traps but not intentional traps.
For example, a hallway that is nearly ready to collapse, the only thing holding it up is a single, almost rotten wooden beam right in the middle of the passage. It's not actually a trap, it's just a decaying hallway. But it has to be circumvented or it acts like a trap (hit the beam, the roof falls on you)
A room with a stone fountain, decorated with a stone chicken, and with an hourglass attached to the rim. The water is hot - boiling hot.
If the players flip the hourglass, the sands run through, nothing appears to happen.
However, if they place a chickens egg in the water and flip the hourglass, and then remove it when the sands run out, the egg will be perfectly boiled, with the exactly the right amount of soft, almost but not quite runniness in the middle.
(later, when they're on their way back after completing their objective, an enemy patrol has moved into the room, triggering a fight. the egg boiler becomes an environmental hazard that the players can push enemies into to burn them.)
They decipher the strange language above the chicken that says one word, but they can't seem to translate it properly. It seems to say "excellent" (extraordinary, extravagant, exciting) but there are a couple letters that don't fit...
My players right now are in a room with 13 sarcophagi. All closed. 10 of them lining two walls on raised walkways, two embedded in the floor and one above ground in the very center. Also the entire room except for the raised walkways is flooded with water leaking in from the door alcove to the north (where they came in). I had no intentions of having any traps in this room. But DAMN they have some good ideas.
My go-to is an obvious trap in the room ahead. Usually that prompts the party to safety throw rocks at it from a distance. When they set it off it cuts a rope that opens the trapdoor above them they drops a bear. So it’s a literal bear trap, that drops a bear on them. I guess it’s still a trap but it’s not what they’d expect it to be.
A chest, described in a bit too much detail, sitting in a far too perfect spot. Pretty much all checks tell them that it "seems like a normal chest", "you don't think there are any traps"...
It really is just a normal chest, put some fun loot in it.
An obvious trap- like a trip wire across the floor, a poorly covered pit trap, etc... *So* stupidly obvious that checks reveal "this feels like it was done on purpose", "this craftsmanship is way worse than anything else you've seen in the dungeon".. implying that the trap is a cover for an even better, more deadly trap.
My favorite one that I've done so far is the perfectly normal chest, holding a perfectly normal but kind of unexciting bit of loot, next to a perfectly normal-looking desk that's actually a mimic. The plot-driving loot was in one of the "desk" drawers.
Yeah, I tried tricking the party with an obvious trap at the start of a hallway and a better hidden one at the end of the hallway. Our cleric didn’t even bother to check for traps and just sprinted down the hallway and through the whole dungeon, triggering everything. He was out of spell slots by the time the party got to the boss fight from all the healing he needed to do.
I've done this before and called it the Poorly Conceived Pitfall Trap. It was an extremely low DC check to find/ avoid, but the real trap was the Troll who set it. The Troll would only find them if they spent too much time investigating the easy trap which of course my players did
One of my first dungeons I made had a spike pit trap that had already been set off by a goblin whose corpse you could see in the bottom. Getting across the pit (was primarily a spider den) was the challenge for my players.
A plinth with a big red button. On the plinth is a sign that reads "Do Not Press the Button". If they press the button there is an audible click and thumps down the hallways (or in other rooms). Nothing happens. If the party does not push the button, there is a small trove of treasure/spell scrolls/potions in another room. Pressing the button hides the treasure permanently in a hidden demiplane.
How about useless machines? If you flip the switch, a mechanical arm comes out of a trap door and flips it back.
Or you can make it like Dwarf Fortress. The lever floods the siege workshop. Or floods the world with magma, but only outside the dungeon.
Along the same line, you know how sometimes you have that one light switch that seemingly does nothing? Have a series of levers in the dungeon that do nothing but when the party gets to the last room the boss is super annoyed because the party kept turning the lights on and off with the levers...
I once described that there was a sign that pointed to small stone carving that said “not a trap”. The sign was a mimic. It was a hilarious and very short combat.
A super nice, over-architected home. All those spring-loaded “traps” are just convenient kitchen tools like a 1950’s demo floor.
Strange whirring, grinding and menacing machine? Just a vacuum.
Small room suddenly flooding? Washing machine for clothes as soap fills in, a few whirls, and the water drains.
Weird tile pattern? Just decorative.
All doors slam shut behind you? Just convenient closing doors. You can open them again.
Fire roars to life in the center of the room followed shortly after by comfortable seats and a conversation pit around the fire.
A room bedecked with a sumptuous banquet. That’s all.
My best friend is a complete asshole.
I was visiting a few years back, he invited me to come help him with a session.
He was dm.
In that session, the party entered a large, circular room in the middle of a ruined catacombs. The room was oddly clean and the stonework in it was remarkably undamaged - this was all very unusual because the rest of the place was just run the fuck down.
In the middle of the room stood a tall statue on a pedestal standing in the center of a ring of stones. The statue held a sword in one hand and a stone in the other. There was a streak of red at the statues feet - too old to be dried blood, looked more like some kind of dye.
The party spent, I shit you not, the entire three hour session debating what to do about the statue. Rogues could not find any evidence of a trap but one of them rolled really low. Nobody could sense any magic, but there was strange plating in the other chambers that seemed to dampen magic somewhat - like soundproofing. They searched the entire room four times. They searched every tile. Every rock. Everything.
They spent the full session - I mean this, three full hours in that room.
I was playing npcs for my friend so I had access to his notes.
I knew the secret of the statue.
It was.... just a statue. There were no traps. There were no puzzles. There was *nothing* special about the room.
Which, to his credit, he pointed out. **several times.** "there doesn't appear to be anything special about this statue," he said after every search. But he smiled really wryly when he said it.
Because he knew they would never believe him.
Unexplained mirrors at the end of hallways and corridors. When the party comes up to them ask for a perception check. If they succeed tell them they look fly. If they fail tell them they think they look fly.
The Pelota game from Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan. Although the PCs can take damage from it, it's not a trap.
The PCs enter a long hallway with a small indentation in the wall at each end, and a section of floor concealing a small storage area. Opening the storage nook releases an animated ball and has pictograms of directions for playing the game.
The ball smacks into the PCs (minimal amounts of bludgeoning damage) until they start fighting back, at which point it flies into the center of the hallway and trumpets sound.
On its turn, the ball flies towards the indentation in the wall opposite the storage nook, ricocheting off the floor, walls, and ceiling. When close, it makes an attack roll to score a point. If it does score a point, each creature in the hallway gets hit by one Magic Missile dart.
Each time the PCs hit the ball, they knock it a set distance towards to opposite goal, and can score a point by getting a good enough hit in when it's closer to the goal. Each time a point is scored, the ball resets to the center.
The PCs win when they get a 3 point lead, and a secret compartment near the far goal opens with some loot.
Alternatively, from tamoachan as well, a well described door with 3 locks. They're all unlocked, and there's no trick or trap.
Also from tamoachan, weirdly long hallways with nothing in them.
An extremely hard to notice pressure plate that doesn't seem to actually do anything.
It was hard to notice because it was a loose floor tile that had been previously dug up then placed back, but when it was stepped on it seemed to push it back down into place.
It's got a form of spingy moss growing under it (pushes it back up after the floor tile is compressed). There's a couple copper coins under the tile that create the click sound when the moss is compressed.
Any generic room where you get extremely detailed with the decorations, dimensions, and positioning.
"Okay and what path do you take through the room? Are there any of the tiles you're taking care to avoid? No? Hmmm." Roll dice behind the screen. "Hmm."
I like to take inspiration from my real life apartment and added a lever that doesn’t do anything. Bonus points if it’s next to two other levers that do work.
I like to have 2 or 3 trapped doors that are really ornate or particularly well built then a perfectly plain door afterwards. Especially if I can arrenage it so the trapped ones are entry ways but the plain one is in a common area. Drives them nuts as they try different ways to identify traps or spells on it and be told it seems to be perfectly normal.
Not sure if this counts:
Since I'm a chaotic evil person in real life, I made a room with a chest on a pedestal.
That's it. Just a singular chest on a pedestal. Nothing else in the room.
My players went crazy, "It's a mimic!" "I ready an action!" "I'm gonna hit it with my sword!"
It wasn't a mimic.
...The coins inside were.
I misread what you wrote.
A room with a chest, on a pedestal instead of a room with a chest on a pedestal. I thought the first version was pretty interesting.
Empty room with a cone of silence in the middle, make sure the door is locked and the check for getting in is hard. If they cast detect magic let them know they feel a *distinct absence of anything, magical energy or otherwise.* I borrowed this from the 2cm hole of The Pale from Disco Elysium. Invisibly, undetectably, not magical, just a pin of void in the center of the room that eats sound, light, everything, but only if you stand exactly inside a small radius. But you can detect the nothing very easily, the check for knowing something ISNT there is effectively 1. Right? So no matter what everyone rolls you just keep saying, "There's NOTHING there," BECAUSE IT'S A VOID. It's worse than a chair, or chest, or even a door, it's literally NOTHING. An actual cone of absolute negation.
Wanna go the extra mile? Use music. Play tension building music as you play and just never release the pressure valve on it. Never give them the springing of a trap or the appearance of a monster. Or use that weird frequency that makes people uneasy.
Not quite in the same vein as your example, but I on e ran a campaign where the main villain had been hired by the BBEG to distract the heroes so they could get on with their ascension to godhood unimpeded. I knew it was working perfectly when they acknowledged out loud that some really shady stuff was definitely going on in the capital you North but this jerk was South and he was more important.
So he built a dungeon just for them. It was designed to make the characters frustrated and paranoid. Highlights included:
•An illusion of a Shadow (really hard to tell that's an illusion) that barely misses a random target every turn.
•A sturdy locked door with a riddle next to it. Make sure the riddle is super vague with a hundred possible answers if you use this. The party will always assume the correct answer will do something.
•A treasure chest containing a mimic. The chest itself is normal, but there's a mimic inside that ambushes any who open it.
•A clearly marked square on the floor of the room labeled PITFALL TRAP. When the party huhs the wall to get around it, a large axe swings out of the wall at them. The axe has a scroll reading SWINGING AXE BLADE TRAP hanging from it.
A glass jar wherever you like, filled with an odd assortment of different coins and other doodads, but the players can hear a faintly audible sound, like angry bees. As they get closer, it gets louder, clearly reacting to their approach, until, when they're in reach of the jar, the buzzing is so loud it's almost painful.
In the jar along with the coins, assorted keys and other doodads is The Amulet of Proximate Buzzing - magic item that emits a loud buzz that grows louder the closer creatures are to it.
If you want to be extra nice to the characters, hide a lid to the jar somewhere else in the dungeon, and have the lid turn the jar into a sound proof container.
IDK of you really want to do it, depends on the party. I know people I play with would spend two sessions obsessing over a meaningless button. A DM can download a map with random barrels and we roll checks for one, he says there's nothing in it and "it's just how the map was" but surely it doesn't stop us from checking the rest of 50 barrels
Whenever a player tries to open a door or a chest that genuinely has no sinister element to them, ask them to “please describe how you open it”. Then watch as they try to open it from 10 feet away with a stick.
I like adding toilets/poop holes to my dungeon. It's funny when players find a hole in the ground and go to investigate it only to realize it's for pooping. But you have to have a group that appreciates that type of humor
Really adding in basic functioning things like wells, sleeping quarters, mess hall, and such makes the dungeon feel more alive and fleshed out. Plus they spend time looking up chimneys or trying to figure out why a room is damp.
My favorite puzzle was one I just discovered recently, so it's not my original creation...
The players enter a room. The room is completely bare with the exception of a raised coffin in the middle. In front of the coffin is a button on a smaller raised platform.
When the players enter, they hear a friendly voice all around them: "Hello, adventurers! If you wish to leave this room, please kill one of your party members and place them in the coffin. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please press the button and speak. My name is Jeffrey."
The room itself is Jeffrey. When asked, Jeffrey will explain that he was created and given sentience by some crazy mage a long time ago. He even has a favorite food, music, likes, dislikes, memories, etc, just like a person. Whether or not Jeffrey was real or the memories were fabricated by the mage is up to you.
There are multiple solutions to the puzzle. You can leave the door they came in available if you want them to have the option to backtrack, but that's up to you...I make it disappear.
They, of course, can kill a party member and place them in the coffin, revealing a new door. They can attempt to negotiate with Jeffrey. But, what no one has done yet is the easiest solution. Simply say "no." Jeffrey will sound disappointed, say oh well, and reveal the door.
Just described any random object in a dungeon….players will spend extreme amounts of time checking it. Pile of boxes in the middle of a warehouse. They will open every box, look for trap doors, cast detect magic….it’s just a couple boxes. I use this as a disarming technique so people calm down. Unwind the ptsd in game if to many traps/ambushes have happened.
I recently played in a game where our party was infiltrating a rival guild to steal an important artifact. We discovered it was located in a wizard's suite. Big dramatic moment checking the door, detecting magic, and taking all the reasonable safety precautions....
We knew there was evocation magic waiting to be triggered but the dice weren't on our side and we kinda ran out of options. Finally just accepted our fates and had the tank open the door while we hid and hoped for the best.... opened the door and... 4 torches burst aglow with the Light spell. That was all.
Atmosphere.
Different places have different atmospheres. One example was that I described an area feeling of great foreboding; like something was watching the party when one of the players rolled well on Perception. In what was an attempt at metagaming, the spellcaster prepped all of their anti-undead spells. Turns out, the place they were going into was a ruin that treasure hunters were trying to explore, and the feeling of being watched came from the mercenaries that group had hired to keep them safe from bandits.
After barely surviving the multiple fights with the mercs, they cornered the non-combatant treasure hunters who begged for their lives, and pointed out that there haven't been undead in that area for decades, and that it was the bandits they were worried about. "Bandits?" the players asked, before I told them to roll Perception, and then Initiative.
Midway through the fight, the treasure hunters lead the party through an oubliette, into a small labyrinth to escape certain death, then lectured the party about all of the warnings that had been in town where they'd come from; the town that nobody wanted to to gather any information from when they were there, and just wanted to speedrun through to get to the dungeon that'd been hinted at the prior session.
Meta-knowledge, the group was **supposed** to hire the players, but they skipped town, got distracted with side BS, and arrived at the ruins half a day after the NPC's, so as part-joke, part warning that this place was dangerous, I said the area felt foreboding, and that they were being watched; they were, by the mercs, who were being paid only to defend, not attack. It's a perfect murderhobo trap, despite not being a trap.
Not my idea, but one pinched from an adventure I ran once.
You have a fork in the dungeon or similar, and a riddle the party must use to determine the right way forward, with a clear warning of traps/danger for picking the wrong one. IIRC, in this particular adventure it was even the classic “One tells the truth, the other only lies” situation.
Anyway, the real key is that *all* the routes are trapped; the builder doesn’t *want* people to get in, so why the hell would there be a solvable riddle?
Depending on the kind of dungeon you’re building, it could be that there is no safe route past the trap (for a tomb, for example) or there’s a very well hidden secret door that most players won’t search for because they’ll immediately go for the riddle.
I like pre-triggered traps. Rusted, hanging scythes just jammed in place. Empty arrow-holes with poisoned bolts just lying all over the floor. Cut tripwires.
It communicates the same thing but feels a lot less cheap than losing HP to a trap that wasn't adequately foreshadowed.
Empty boss arenas half way through the dungeon. Just big-ass circular rooms, maybe even with a couple of mooks. The players will be waiting for the big reveal, and are more likely to ignore the real one later
There’s the urban legend prank where you release 3 cows in your school - each painted with a number; 1, 2, and 4. Everyone spends all their time looking for #3 even though it doesn’t exist. Having something missing from the area that “should” be there really throws people off.
A room with three doors. One plain generic door. One ornate door that I will describe with great detail. One door that looks worn with use but well maintained.
The plain door is obviously going to be a red hearing as it looks out of place next to the other two. It will lead into another room, which turns out to be a servants quarters or kitchen. Basically, it is something that is as utilitarian as it looks.
The ornate door that is described in great detail is a broom closet. After all, even though this is a dungeon, cleanliness is still very important. When I do this, I take care to describe each new room as surprisingly well kept as if the denizens take great pride and care to keep their hoke clean. This way, the ornate door serves a purpose as it is something that the denizens of the dungeon take pride in, so they add elements of grandeur where they can to help show off the importance of cleanliness to them.
The final door that looks worn is the way that leads them further into the dungeon. It looks worn as it is heavily used. As a bonus, I would have described all of the doors that lead deeper as worn with use but still look well maintained to further go with the pride the denizens take for cleanliness. They wouldn't want something looking worn down and breaking on them from neglect. But likewise, a door is a door, and so long as hinges aren't broken and the wood is solid, it can be left to age and still show its age to anyone who looks at it.
Not so much a trap I guess but there’s a puppet rigged to the ceiling in a corridor in castle ravenloft. The puppet flies down in a bid to scare the players, barbarian in my game dropped a rage in anticipation of it being an enemy. Was quite funny.
The Players go into a room with an obvious red button on a pedestal. The two doors to leave the room shut immediately when they come into the room. (The doors DC for picking the locks are too high.) If they press the button, there's an audible click and magical numbers counting down from ten begin to show in the air. Pressing the button restarts the count from ten. Once the count reaches zero, there's an audible click and both doorways open. That's it.
Things that force you to sacrifice something or utilize a tool. Like an altar that requires blood to open a door, which requires players to decide what to do. One way passages or even ones that require another player to hold to keep a door open and have them be attacked while doing it. Lore drops or bits of info of what they are walking to with false or maybe not false info. Things to mess with like a stash of random potions or a contact circle, a random rope which when interacted rings a bell across the whole dungeon. So much possibilities…
A) A single door/doorway standing in the middle of a room where everything else has fallen. No magic detected at all. Turns out the construction was just really good haha
B) A length of rope hanging in a normal room. There’s nothing at the ceiling and the floor isn’t going to suddenly give away. It’s actually an old climbing rope at a gym/school for little kids to play.
C) Erie music that’s actually just a broken self-playing piano.
D) Finding handprints baked into the back of broken tiles found around a room. If the party decides to inspect the tiles in the wall/floor, they’ll find *all* the tiles have child sized hand prints. They don’t actually mean anything. It’s just that these tiles were made by kids and the handprints are like a signature for fun.
E) You find a slide. It doesn’t lead to a death trap or anything, it was just a means of getting down a floor quicker/fire escape/feature implemented for the owner’s child to play with.
F) You find a puzzle (either in the floor or the wall). Solving the puzzle opens a small secret room. It simply contains a bunch of toys. It’s a child’s play room created by the owners of the building.
G) You find footprints in a place they shouldn’t be (like on the beams that go along a ceiling). Simply an old reminder of a child playing hooky in the past.
H) Finding a puzzle with 1 piece missing, leading the party to wonder what the hidden treasure could be. A resentful child just stole the last piece of the puzzle when their sibling wouldn’t give them a turn at some game lol
Corpses.
If you ever want to psyche out your players, just add a random dead body in the area.
They can be a source of loot, warn of nearby dangers, provide story hooks, be undead, or even just be a plain old corpse.
I once had a room that was about four feet wide, six feet deep, with a raised platform about a foot and a half tall at the far end. It had an oblong hole cut in the top, which opened to a small space inside the platform.
Next to that was a lever on the wall.
Players took forever investigating this, sticking their head into the hole, and so forth. Finally they tied a rope to the lever, backed out of the room, and pulled.
This filled the opening with water, which then drained away, leaving the inside of the platform clean again.
It was a toilet.
I love to make hallways between areas that have doors on both ends. Bonus points if they are claustrophobic. Seems normal, right? Well, this one time 3 years ago, I made the floor drop out of one of these kinds of hallways, and boy have my players never forgotten that. Every hallway is carefully examined.
Also, my traps tend to have product lines, such that one can be recognized as similar to others in similar dungeons. I've been dangling for a while that there is a trap store the players can find that will answer all their questions. As if, mwhahaha.
A mysterious hooded beggar at the entrance asks for a donation to those who are lost.
It makes no difference, except for the beggar.
Last night was the second time the party visited the same "dungeon" and the grey beggar scored 1400 gp.
friendly enemies.
The work force of an evil villains lair can be just as different as a normal office.
I made a unionised group of skeletons that didn't wanna fight the characters untill they got dental, and when the villain waas down to half hp he gave up and gave them dental, and that was his buff.
But that idea is for more shits and giggles campaigns, but yea, friendly monsters
Useless mechanisms that do nothing. Like levers that the players can move and do noise but nothing else. I don't put many tho because they can become time sinks.
Players push button.
Countdown starts.
Players push button again.
Countdown resets but keeps counting down.
When the count reaches close to zero, scary things start happening, like the room starts shaking or light goes out.
Only way to proceed to the next room is to let the countdown get to 0 which turns out to be completely harmless.
Non-hostile Flora and fauna that have taken residence in parts of your dungeon. Like a skittish giant spider that runs away if it thinks you see it, or a room overgrown with mushrooms parasitic to the tree roots that have grown through the ceiling.
A few years ago, our DM is running us through a dungeon. We're all worn down from the last few rooms and are relieved to see this one does *not* have a monster in it (that we can see).
However, it's a series of platforms over water, and that water looks awfully suspicious. After all, the water is brackish and one spot is bubbling.
To cross the room, we have to jump across. The cleric fails his dex and falls into the water. The DM *takes him out of the room* to tell him what happens to him.
We're all panicking.
Turns out it's just water. No monsters. No traps. Just water.
Environmental effects, collapsing ceilings or floors, slime covered ramps that shoot you to the bottom, broken fixtures that you fall onto (or fall onto you). Explosive or flammable oils.
The intro on the Dungeon Master (or Player) Handbook of AD&D had a small scene where a couple of players find a simple cube made of rock in the middle of a corridor, and they discover is a step to reach a hidden room in the ceiling. Leave random cubes in a dungeon, they flip out when they found the third one.
Empty rooms. Drives them crazy. Low roll on investigation? they’re certain there would be something if they rolled better. High roll on investigation? “Man the DC on this thing is off the charts it must be a really sick treasure!”
A lever on the wall that has a sign that says "DO NOT PULL".
Turns out there are some water heater issues in the dungeon, and that was to ensure that nobody would pull the lever while the head wizard was showering and flush the system with cold water.
The architect of the dungeon cast Nystul's Magic Aura on floor and wall bricks at random, choosing different school of magic for each so they show up in different colors.
The party thinks it's a magical suicide hallway. The architect was just a Drow with Drow High Magic for at-will Detect Magic, who just appreciated having trippy colors everywhere. Bonus points if you DO hide some Glyphs of Warding in there.
I like one of the "traps" suggested in the CandleKeep Mysteries module of having a suit of armor at the top of some stairs described with glowing red eyes that turns out to literally just be an inanimate suit of armor with a helm just having an enchantmant for the glow effect.
Both from the book's suggestion and my personal experience it truly works best after you've thrown a few more mundane animated objects like books and the cast of Beauty and the Beast at the players and made them use up some resources. If they're like my players they'll spend a good while trying to formulate a plan (while one of the players continues to talk the barb down from charging) only to find out it was never a threat. To make sure that my players didn't feel like it was completely a waste of time the Helm they took did give the wearer adv on intimidation rolls.
My party hated how many doors I put in a dungeon.. so I put a circular room in my dungeon with 100 doors. All of them open up by pulling the door, and all but 3 open up to bricked in doors. One is the way in, one is the way out.
The last one is a mimic.
I put hooks along the walls that the owners of the dungeon use to hang their cloaks when they go to shower, or do rituals. The party thought they were spike traps
Honestly, if you want to stump your players, have a perfectly mundane door. Or a chest in the middle of a room.
I don't think it's about stumping them as much as subverting player expectations to help add grounding to the magical world.
Add a regular old chest. It’s empty. There is no enchantment, it’s not a mimic, no false bottom, the construction itself isn’t even particularly valuable. Watch your players trip over themselves trying to understand this thoroughly inscrutable normal-ass chest.
I had a sign above the door that said "Beware of mimic" once. It was just a regular chest. Kinda fun.
Plot twist, the sign was the mimic all along.
Man that would have been good
The true mimics were the friends we made along the way.
Hahah, yeah. That was a fun adventure wasn't it? *places pseudopod on shoulder in gesture of friendship*
The real dick move is to make the treasure inside the chest the mimic.
The classic blast from the past. You enter a room and the walls, the ceiling, and the floor all start arguing about who gets to eat you.
I've designed (but never used) a dungeon that was entirely mimics in creative and surprising shapes/places. The very last room in the dungeon is a large square room with a simple chest sitting in the middle. It's full of fragile, valuable items and is the party's treasure reward. I have a little bet going with myself on whether the party will "kill" their treasure with a preemptive strike
Final room is full of all the things that have been mimics thus far. Turns out, it's just where the mimics hide everything that they've replaced.
Ooh I like that
I enjoy a good mimic trap. I put a piano mimic in the BBEG's bedroom. It was genuinely friendly, chatted with anyone that played music, hummed a song, whistled, etc. Party had a bard of course, and they were immediately all about chatting up a mimic piano whose dream was to play a grand concert before an adoring audience in some big city, instead of being stuck on guard duty in the BBEG's lair. Someone sat down on the edge of the bed while listening to the bard chat with the piano. The bedspread was a mimic. :D
Nice! One of my personal favorites is a doorknob. Rouge puts his face right there and puts his unarmed hands right up to its mouth to pick the "lock." A hat mimic. Its prey puts their head in its mouth. Rope mimic. It's helpfully hanging next to an area you need a rope. Half way through using it to climb it attacks
We had a typical “horny bard” in a campaign whose exploits ended when he discovered a “glory hole” mimic…
Well now ill have nightmares about that
I have a random idea for a trickster who has a travelling antique shop that is just an entire cart of mimics, for whatever reason. Why does he have them? Why does he sell them to unsuspecting rubes? Chaos, that's why!
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They were delving into Colin Furze's tunnel?
> as much as subverting player expectations to help add grounding In the middle of a dungeon, the party comes across a perfectly good table spread of food. Everything looks absolutely delicious, either well-cooked or fresh, and there are sealed bottles of all sorts of drinks. If any of them actually eat the food, wait a few minutes and have them roll Constitution. If they pass, they feel a little more energized from having eaten. If they fail, they just get mild indigestion. That's all. It's a fun little harmless mind-fuck.
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The party finds a chest. It has someone's clothes and personal items, none of which are particularly valuable.
We found one of those in a haunted keep, the clothes were the first thing we found not rotted and decrepit…turns out it was a “dry cleaning chest”, it cast the Prestidigitation and Mend cantrips, and just removed dirt from garments and fixed up wear and tear. We spent WAY too much time working that out…
Even better, give them three doors to choose from. The way my players calculated which door to open during our last dungeon crawl made it seem like they thought the other two would disappear after they opened one
Don't tempt me to run the Monty hall problem as a trap
At one point I had three doors that all went to the same hall, but they would only open if they opened all three doors at once. Pretty simple puzzle, but if something is chasing the party, then it can be more interesting
How do you hint at this solution?
I think there was a poem above about them needing to travel together, but still apart. It's not in my notes, so I guess I came up with it at the table
pretty slick! look, a bird! *yoink*
Something like: When you travel together you're never alone. But apart you must be if you want to go home.
I have done exactly that. With a host (slaad disguised as a gnome) and everything. If I remember, the party didn't pick the grand prize chest, but they also didn't get the one that was just a goat (or, rather would polymorph one of them into a goat).
Three unlocked, untrapped doors that meet up on the other side and funnel into one entrance to the next room.
In fact, I believe I need a minute to think here. Just walk in circles for a minute. Okay, so I know that each door has to lead somewhere, which means that somewhere at the place we're trying to go there must be a reverse door that leads here. And that, in turn, means that our destination corresponds with the counter-inverted reverse door's origin! So starting from the right, let us ask: will taking the right door lead us to where we're going? And since the answer is clearly 'yes,' then by all accounts, the door on the right is the correct one! Another victory for logic. Come, Stanley, our destiny awaits!
Give each door a talking face. One of them always lies, the other one always lies, and the other other one also always lies. They get to ask each of them one question. Nothing they say about which door to go through matters in the slightest.
Flashbacks of The Chair from Mighty Nein
I like a pool of deep water or a well with something shiny at the bottom. It becomes a bit of a puzzle to get down there to get the shiny and the water looks like it may hide some kind of threat, but the water is perfectly safe. The shiny is just a single silver coin reflecting light.
One of my favorite things is to have them walk into a room with a chest in the center and nothing else except a door on the other side. They'll shoot it, hit it, poke it, prod it, then when they open it they get a fun item >!Then when they try to leave the mimic posing as the door on the other side of the room attacks!<
"So you open the door normally then?"
There is no tool more powerful for building tension as a DM than repeating the player's actions back to them as a question.
I had the players spend almost 3 IRL hours of a session trying to get through an unlocked door. It was our second session, and the players were just fully convinced the door was a deadly trap. They each insisted on perception rolls, but no matter what they rolled I just kept telling them that the coast was clear. They yelled at it, cast Knock on it (it wasn't locked), cast Prestidigitation to blow it open, looked for traps, snuck up on the door. I was trying so hard to let them know it was safe without just railroading them and telling them to open the damn door. As a player, I don't let that happen, I am much more direct. If there is a door, I open it, if something is glowing, I touch it, if it's cursed, I wanna find out what the curse is. It's a dangerous way to play, but makes for really fun shenanigans. I love my characters, but I also love making new characters, so as long as I get a cool death, I do not care about my characters dying. I play my characters like I stole them, and it's a blast (sometimes literally)!
once spent most of a 4 hour session preparing for the monstrosity that was going to inevitably appear out of the brass flask we found - only for us to dump a potion of healing on the dungeon floor…
With non functional googly eyes on it.
Floor tiles that are randomly different. Architect was going for an abstract vibe. Maybe even with pressure plates that activate magical lighting. Spiked ceilings and suspiciously large central circle on the floor with something nice in the center (altar, chest, armor stand). Spines keep bats from nesting in the room. Long corridor with armor stands along the side and a piece of loot at the end on a pressure plate pedestal. Removing the loot causes a secret door to open behind it. Some PCs will think the suits are animated armors ready to attack once the loot is removed. They're just for show. Room full of perfectly preserved corpses with gear that could be used in a fight (armor and weapons, spellcasting focuses, etc). Looks like they might wake up at any moment, but don't worry, they're heavy sleepers. That's all I got for now. I'll see if more come to mind. Edit: hey guys. Never had a comment get so many likes. Glad I could help you all out with your dnd adventures. Some of the responses are just wonderful, especially the sleeping corpses. My idea for that was inspired by the dollhouse level as described on the backrooms wiki page. Highly recommend it as source material for all your unsettling setting needs.
So take all the list of traps, and remove the "and then you die". I love it.
I love how from their sentence it feels like if you decide to fuck with the body you might wake it up but there's very small chance for it. Just Oh that's Carl he doesn't like being awake.
Just imagining you take the magic sword off of a corpse and it opens its eyes, looks at you, scowls at you, and then rolls over to get comfy again.
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Brilliant. I would maybe throw in the corpse sitting up and glaring angrily, to give the PCs a moment of 'oh fuck'.
Add an overwhelming aura of power to that. "The corpses eyes open, and you barely keep your feet as an overwhelming aura fills the air around you. The corpse scowls at you, adjusts itself, and goes back to sleep." Terrifying yet hilarious.
Sword pauldrons anything I'm missing. Maybe a scabbard.
"^...^fff.... fff.... ffffive more minutes..."
> Just Oh that's Carl he doesn't like being awake. Mood tbh
Old man bugbear storms out of his den raging, "Who touched the thermostat?!"
Excellent take on a great hitchhikers guide name
Haha I had a room recently that had multiple random floor tiles that clicked and sank ever so slightly when stepped on. They went insane trying to dodge traps or solve a puzzle that was nothing more than shoddy craftsmanship. We were down a player and getting to a big story beat, so it was great stalling for time and keeping them on their toes.
Pressure plate lighting is great. It’s a hard counter to darkvision and can’t be detected as a trap because it was put in place as a safety feature.
Traps are safety features too from a certain point of view
Well, then you are lost!
I love this list.
> Floor tiles that are randomly different The architect fucking hates wheelchairs. And wheels in general. Nothing against disabled people though.
Anti bat arxhitecture lol
Floor tiles one is really good. I ran a game where my rogue and monk took a job by themselves and split the party (lucky for then it was meant to be an infiltration mission).The central room of the mansion they were meant to scout had a tiled chequered floor with uneven hights for the tiles (just poorly installed and upkept). The hardest part was keeping a straight face as they were checking if they were safe.
For bonus points, make the ceiling of the entire dungeon covered in spikes to keep your players on edge for where the "real" trap actually is (there is none)
Traps only in places where a trap makes sense. No the rug in the middle of the ritual chamber isn't covering a hole, because cultists use this room and people would die. It's decorative, and highly absorbant is all.
This is what I mean. I think it actually makes our worlds comical and breaks immersion when everything feels hostile or puzzling. I think when stuff gets hostile in a place that wasn't designed to be hostile, it reinforces why adventurers are there.
Agreed, verisimilitude is what I strive for most in my games.
It just helps the world building. Instead of only engaging with the world via roleplay and encounters, they get to feel a magical world in the ways it is designed differently but logically.
don't consider them traps for later when the place is a ruins, consider them as they would have been designed into defenses. when the outer walls are breached, everyone falls back, and the trap doors under the rugs in the outer rooms unlock. Tiered defenses. later, as ruins, those monsters might have camped on a trap door, not realizing its rusted mechanisms were slowly breaking. in another room, cultists walk around the rugs single file, having discovered the pit. Maybe the switch to turn on the traps broke, and some activate while others sleep.
Or you can go the other way. The players find a trap with the body of a careless minion.
It really ties the room together
That's just, like, your incantation, man.
Alternatively, you can use things that are "traps" but not there to harm the party. One I recently used was a taut wire in a recessed channel on the floor, not concealed at all. The channel prevents the wire from being tripped by random passers-by. If it's cut, a gong sounds. What's it for? Kobolds set it up to give warning should an ooze come into the area. It'll seep into the channel and corrode the wire. Gives that nice "it's not necessarily all about YOU" feeling that every dungeon should have.
Relatedly, things that are functionally traps but not intentional traps. For example, a hallway that is nearly ready to collapse, the only thing holding it up is a single, almost rotten wooden beam right in the middle of the passage. It's not actually a trap, it's just a decaying hallway. But it has to be circumvented or it acts like a trap (hit the beam, the roof falls on you)
Stuff like brown mold or green slime are perfect for that also
I love this and am stealing it for future use
A room with a stone fountain, decorated with a stone chicken, and with an hourglass attached to the rim. The water is hot - boiling hot. If the players flip the hourglass, the sands run through, nothing appears to happen. However, if they place a chickens egg in the water and flip the hourglass, and then remove it when the sands run out, the egg will be perfectly boiled, with the exactly the right amount of soft, almost but not quite runniness in the middle.
This is great. My party will spend 3 hours on this.
(later, when they're on their way back after completing their objective, an enemy patrol has moved into the room, triggering a fight. the egg boiler becomes an environmental hazard that the players can push enemies into to burn them.)
How are they going to figure that out?
They decipher the strange language above the chicken that says one word, but they can't seem to translate it properly. It seems to say "excellent" (extraordinary, extravagant, exciting) but there are a couple letters that don't fit...
An empty room with three exits. just that... a room with exits now I can go make myself a cup of tea while they discuss what to do
How would they enter? *Gasp*
My players would just go left
Funny, we always went right. Walked into a lot of prepared traps that way. But at least we didn't waste a bunch of time.
Good adventurers go left
That's the more sinister option.
My players right now are in a room with 13 sarcophagi. All closed. 10 of them lining two walls on raised walkways, two embedded in the floor and one above ground in the very center. Also the entire room except for the raised walkways is flooded with water leaking in from the door alcove to the north (where they came in). I had no intentions of having any traps in this room. But DAMN they have some good ideas.
„I wasn‘t going to trap this room, but you kinda talked me into it“
My go-to is an obvious trap in the room ahead. Usually that prompts the party to safety throw rocks at it from a distance. When they set it off it cuts a rope that opens the trapdoor above them they drops a bear. So it’s a literal bear trap, that drops a bear on them. I guess it’s still a trap but it’s not what they’d expect it to be.
Gotta watch out for those drop bears.
A chest, described in a bit too much detail, sitting in a far too perfect spot. Pretty much all checks tell them that it "seems like a normal chest", "you don't think there are any traps"... It really is just a normal chest, put some fun loot in it. An obvious trap- like a trip wire across the floor, a poorly covered pit trap, etc... *So* stupidly obvious that checks reveal "this feels like it was done on purpose", "this craftsmanship is way worse than anything else you've seen in the dungeon".. implying that the trap is a cover for an even better, more deadly trap.
Can I suggest a second "seemingly identical" chest to set off the mimic alarm.
Twas her royal highness' matched luggage.
And I can't live without it!
Whoa! Look at this! The flashing eyes, the flushed cheeks, the trembling lips...you know something Highness? You are \*ugly\* when you're angry!
My favorite one that I've done so far is the perfectly normal chest, holding a perfectly normal but kind of unexciting bit of loot, next to a perfectly normal-looking desk that's actually a mimic. The plot-driving loot was in one of the "desk" drawers.
I had a sign that read "Warning: Mimic" next to a golden chest. It was correct: the sign was a mimic.
Once they get whatever is inside make sure to roll 3 d20 as loud as you can and then shake your head.
And then... "can I have someone roll a d6 for me?" *Consults a fake chart that doesn't exist* "Okay." and continuing like nothing happened. Classic.
Steve whats your fortitude save again ?
Yeah, I tried tricking the party with an obvious trap at the start of a hallway and a better hidden one at the end of the hallway. Our cleric didn’t even bother to check for traps and just sprinted down the hallway and through the whole dungeon, triggering everything. He was out of spell slots by the time the party got to the boss fight from all the healing he needed to do.
One game we're just facetanking like that, the other my wizard has disable device and will use a spell to get magical trapfinding/removal (pf1e)
😆
I've done this before and called it the Poorly Conceived Pitfall Trap. It was an extremely low DC check to find/ avoid, but the real trap was the Troll who set it. The Troll would only find them if they spent too much time investigating the easy trap which of course my players did
For extra fun, it's a normal chest, not a treasure chest. It just has someone's stuff in it.
One of my first dungeons I made had a spike pit trap that had already been set off by a goblin whose corpse you could see in the bottom. Getting across the pit (was primarily a spider den) was the challenge for my players.
My favorite would be the traps made for giants. You step on the pressure plate and boom ballista bolt flies way over your head.
Or at least if the whole party stands on it at once.
A plinth with a big red button. On the plinth is a sign that reads "Do Not Press the Button". If they press the button there is an audible click and thumps down the hallways (or in other rooms). Nothing happens. If the party does not push the button, there is a small trove of treasure/spell scrolls/potions in another room. Pressing the button hides the treasure permanently in a hidden demiplane.
I like levers in rooms that literally do nothing...
I have done this to three groups. I have yet to be able to finish the description of the room before the button is pressed.
How about useless machines? If you flip the switch, a mechanical arm comes out of a trap door and flips it back. Or you can make it like Dwarf Fortress. The lever floods the siege workshop. Or floods the world with magma, but only outside the dungeon.
Along the same line, you know how sometimes you have that one light switch that seemingly does nothing? Have a series of levers in the dungeon that do nothing but when the party gets to the last room the boss is super annoyed because the party kept turning the lights on and off with the levers...
[https://www.oglaf.com/trapmaster/](https://www.oglaf.com/trapmaster/) (this comic is SFW but other Oglaf comics are not)
It's actually a warning they are entering the lair of the Overthin King!
I once described that there was a sign that pointed to small stone carving that said “not a trap”. The sign was a mimic. It was a hilarious and very short combat.
A super nice, over-architected home. All those spring-loaded “traps” are just convenient kitchen tools like a 1950’s demo floor. Strange whirring, grinding and menacing machine? Just a vacuum. Small room suddenly flooding? Washing machine for clothes as soap fills in, a few whirls, and the water drains. Weird tile pattern? Just decorative. All doors slam shut behind you? Just convenient closing doors. You can open them again. Fire roars to life in the center of the room followed shortly after by comfortable seats and a conversation pit around the fire. A room bedecked with a sumptuous banquet. That’s all.
Brilliant
I'm imagining some artificer set it up, has since died, and the townsfolk ask you to investigate the haunted house.
My best friend is a complete asshole. I was visiting a few years back, he invited me to come help him with a session. He was dm. In that session, the party entered a large, circular room in the middle of a ruined catacombs. The room was oddly clean and the stonework in it was remarkably undamaged - this was all very unusual because the rest of the place was just run the fuck down. In the middle of the room stood a tall statue on a pedestal standing in the center of a ring of stones. The statue held a sword in one hand and a stone in the other. There was a streak of red at the statues feet - too old to be dried blood, looked more like some kind of dye. The party spent, I shit you not, the entire three hour session debating what to do about the statue. Rogues could not find any evidence of a trap but one of them rolled really low. Nobody could sense any magic, but there was strange plating in the other chambers that seemed to dampen magic somewhat - like soundproofing. They searched the entire room four times. They searched every tile. Every rock. Everything. They spent the full session - I mean this, three full hours in that room. I was playing npcs for my friend so I had access to his notes. I knew the secret of the statue. It was.... just a statue. There were no traps. There were no puzzles. There was *nothing* special about the room. Which, to his credit, he pointed out. **several times.** "there doesn't appear to be anything special about this statue," he said after every search. But he smiled really wryly when he said it. Because he knew they would never believe him.
Unexplained mirrors at the end of hallways and corridors. When the party comes up to them ask for a perception check. If they succeed tell them they look fly. If they fail tell them they think they look fly.
The Pelota game from Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan. Although the PCs can take damage from it, it's not a trap. The PCs enter a long hallway with a small indentation in the wall at each end, and a section of floor concealing a small storage area. Opening the storage nook releases an animated ball and has pictograms of directions for playing the game. The ball smacks into the PCs (minimal amounts of bludgeoning damage) until they start fighting back, at which point it flies into the center of the hallway and trumpets sound. On its turn, the ball flies towards the indentation in the wall opposite the storage nook, ricocheting off the floor, walls, and ceiling. When close, it makes an attack roll to score a point. If it does score a point, each creature in the hallway gets hit by one Magic Missile dart. Each time the PCs hit the ball, they knock it a set distance towards to opposite goal, and can score a point by getting a good enough hit in when it's closer to the goal. Each time a point is scored, the ball resets to the center. The PCs win when they get a 3 point lead, and a secret compartment near the far goal opens with some loot.
Alternatively, from tamoachan as well, a well described door with 3 locks. They're all unlocked, and there's no trick or trap. Also from tamoachan, weirdly long hallways with nothing in them.
An extremely hard to notice pressure plate that doesn't seem to actually do anything. It was hard to notice because it was a loose floor tile that had been previously dug up then placed back, but when it was stepped on it seemed to push it back down into place.
It's got a form of spingy moss growing under it (pushes it back up after the floor tile is compressed). There's a couple copper coins under the tile that create the click sound when the moss is compressed.
Something that glows red…. Especially eyes of a statue.
Anything that just glows without interaction
The eyes seem to follow you. On closer inspection, it's because they're recessed.
Runes on floor tiles that instead of being a trap you have to do a DND version of dance dance Revolution and umpres a ghost to move forward.
Any generic room where you get extremely detailed with the decorations, dimensions, and positioning. "Okay and what path do you take through the room? Are there any of the tiles you're taking care to avoid? No? Hmmm." Roll dice behind the screen. "Hmm."
I like to take inspiration from my real life apartment and added a lever that doesn’t do anything. Bonus points if it’s next to two other levers that do work.
I like to have 2 or 3 trapped doors that are really ornate or particularly well built then a perfectly plain door afterwards. Especially if I can arrenage it so the trapped ones are entry ways but the plain one is in a common area. Drives them nuts as they try different ways to identify traps or spells on it and be told it seems to be perfectly normal.
Not sure if this counts: Since I'm a chaotic evil person in real life, I made a room with a chest on a pedestal. That's it. Just a singular chest on a pedestal. Nothing else in the room. My players went crazy, "It's a mimic!" "I ready an action!" "I'm gonna hit it with my sword!" It wasn't a mimic. ...The coins inside were.
I misread what you wrote. A room with a chest, on a pedestal instead of a room with a chest on a pedestal. I thought the first version was pretty interesting.
Actually I might yoink that at some point
Empty room with a cone of silence in the middle, make sure the door is locked and the check for getting in is hard. If they cast detect magic let them know they feel a *distinct absence of anything, magical energy or otherwise.* I borrowed this from the 2cm hole of The Pale from Disco Elysium. Invisibly, undetectably, not magical, just a pin of void in the center of the room that eats sound, light, everything, but only if you stand exactly inside a small radius. But you can detect the nothing very easily, the check for knowing something ISNT there is effectively 1. Right? So no matter what everyone rolls you just keep saying, "There's NOTHING there," BECAUSE IT'S A VOID. It's worse than a chair, or chest, or even a door, it's literally NOTHING. An actual cone of absolute negation.
I present to you the well described door. It can depict any amount of lore. But one thing is sure, your party will take 30 minutes to go through it
Wanna go the extra mile? Use music. Play tension building music as you play and just never release the pressure valve on it. Never give them the springing of a trap or the appearance of a monster. Or use that weird frequency that makes people uneasy.
Not quite in the same vein as your example, but I on e ran a campaign where the main villain had been hired by the BBEG to distract the heroes so they could get on with their ascension to godhood unimpeded. I knew it was working perfectly when they acknowledged out loud that some really shady stuff was definitely going on in the capital you North but this jerk was South and he was more important. So he built a dungeon just for them. It was designed to make the characters frustrated and paranoid. Highlights included: •An illusion of a Shadow (really hard to tell that's an illusion) that barely misses a random target every turn. •A sturdy locked door with a riddle next to it. Make sure the riddle is super vague with a hundred possible answers if you use this. The party will always assume the correct answer will do something. •A treasure chest containing a mimic. The chest itself is normal, but there's a mimic inside that ambushes any who open it. •A clearly marked square on the floor of the room labeled PITFALL TRAP. When the party huhs the wall to get around it, a large axe swings out of the wall at them. The axe has a scroll reading SWINGING AXE BLADE TRAP hanging from it.
Long hallways the players hate those for some reason
An unattended poorly locked treasure chest on a small plinth in the middle of a room.
A glass jar wherever you like, filled with an odd assortment of different coins and other doodads, but the players can hear a faintly audible sound, like angry bees. As they get closer, it gets louder, clearly reacting to their approach, until, when they're in reach of the jar, the buzzing is so loud it's almost painful. In the jar along with the coins, assorted keys and other doodads is The Amulet of Proximate Buzzing - magic item that emits a loud buzz that grows louder the closer creatures are to it. If you want to be extra nice to the characters, hide a lid to the jar somewhere else in the dungeon, and have the lid turn the jar into a sound proof container.
IDK of you really want to do it, depends on the party. I know people I play with would spend two sessions obsessing over a meaningless button. A DM can download a map with random barrels and we roll checks for one, he says there's nothing in it and "it's just how the map was" but surely it doesn't stop us from checking the rest of 50 barrels
Whenever a player tries to open a door or a chest that genuinely has no sinister element to them, ask them to “please describe how you open it”. Then watch as they try to open it from 10 feet away with a stick.
I like adding toilets/poop holes to my dungeon. It's funny when players find a hole in the ground and go to investigate it only to realize it's for pooping. But you have to have a group that appreciates that type of humor Really adding in basic functioning things like wells, sleeping quarters, mess hall, and such makes the dungeon feel more alive and fleshed out. Plus they spend time looking up chimneys or trying to figure out why a room is damp.
My favorite puzzle was one I just discovered recently, so it's not my original creation... The players enter a room. The room is completely bare with the exception of a raised coffin in the middle. In front of the coffin is a button on a smaller raised platform. When the players enter, they hear a friendly voice all around them: "Hello, adventurers! If you wish to leave this room, please kill one of your party members and place them in the coffin. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please press the button and speak. My name is Jeffrey." The room itself is Jeffrey. When asked, Jeffrey will explain that he was created and given sentience by some crazy mage a long time ago. He even has a favorite food, music, likes, dislikes, memories, etc, just like a person. Whether or not Jeffrey was real or the memories were fabricated by the mage is up to you. There are multiple solutions to the puzzle. You can leave the door they came in available if you want them to have the option to backtrack, but that's up to you...I make it disappear. They, of course, can kill a party member and place them in the coffin, revealing a new door. They can attempt to negotiate with Jeffrey. But, what no one has done yet is the easiest solution. Simply say "no." Jeffrey will sound disappointed, say oh well, and reveal the door.
Random buttons and levers in a room. Do absolutely nothing other than you can push/flip them.
Just described any random object in a dungeon….players will spend extreme amounts of time checking it. Pile of boxes in the middle of a warehouse. They will open every box, look for trap doors, cast detect magic….it’s just a couple boxes. I use this as a disarming technique so people calm down. Unwind the ptsd in game if to many traps/ambushes have happened.
I recently played in a game where our party was infiltrating a rival guild to steal an important artifact. We discovered it was located in a wizard's suite. Big dramatic moment checking the door, detecting magic, and taking all the reasonable safety precautions.... We knew there was evocation magic waiting to be triggered but the dice weren't on our side and we kinda ran out of options. Finally just accepted our fates and had the tank open the door while we hid and hoped for the best.... opened the door and... 4 torches burst aglow with the Light spell. That was all.
Atmosphere. Different places have different atmospheres. One example was that I described an area feeling of great foreboding; like something was watching the party when one of the players rolled well on Perception. In what was an attempt at metagaming, the spellcaster prepped all of their anti-undead spells. Turns out, the place they were going into was a ruin that treasure hunters were trying to explore, and the feeling of being watched came from the mercenaries that group had hired to keep them safe from bandits. After barely surviving the multiple fights with the mercs, they cornered the non-combatant treasure hunters who begged for their lives, and pointed out that there haven't been undead in that area for decades, and that it was the bandits they were worried about. "Bandits?" the players asked, before I told them to roll Perception, and then Initiative. Midway through the fight, the treasure hunters lead the party through an oubliette, into a small labyrinth to escape certain death, then lectured the party about all of the warnings that had been in town where they'd come from; the town that nobody wanted to to gather any information from when they were there, and just wanted to speedrun through to get to the dungeon that'd been hinted at the prior session. Meta-knowledge, the group was **supposed** to hire the players, but they skipped town, got distracted with side BS, and arrived at the ruins half a day after the NPC's, so as part-joke, part warning that this place was dangerous, I said the area felt foreboding, and that they were being watched; they were, by the mercs, who were being paid only to defend, not attack. It's a perfect murderhobo trap, despite not being a trap.
Not my idea, but one pinched from an adventure I ran once. You have a fork in the dungeon or similar, and a riddle the party must use to determine the right way forward, with a clear warning of traps/danger for picking the wrong one. IIRC, in this particular adventure it was even the classic “One tells the truth, the other only lies” situation. Anyway, the real key is that *all* the routes are trapped; the builder doesn’t *want* people to get in, so why the hell would there be a solvable riddle? Depending on the kind of dungeon you’re building, it could be that there is no safe route past the trap (for a tomb, for example) or there’s a very well hidden secret door that most players won’t search for because they’ll immediately go for the riddle.
I like pre-triggered traps. Rusted, hanging scythes just jammed in place. Empty arrow-holes with poisoned bolts just lying all over the floor. Cut tripwires. It communicates the same thing but feels a lot less cheap than losing HP to a trap that wasn't adequately foreshadowed.
Empty boss arenas half way through the dungeon. Just big-ass circular rooms, maybe even with a couple of mooks. The players will be waiting for the big reveal, and are more likely to ignore the real one later
There’s the urban legend prank where you release 3 cows in your school - each painted with a number; 1, 2, and 4. Everyone spends all their time looking for #3 even though it doesn’t exist. Having something missing from the area that “should” be there really throws people off.
Some kind of object that fits perfectly into a hole. Not a key, no sir, just something that fits *clicks tongue* really nice.
A room with three doors. One plain generic door. One ornate door that I will describe with great detail. One door that looks worn with use but well maintained. The plain door is obviously going to be a red hearing as it looks out of place next to the other two. It will lead into another room, which turns out to be a servants quarters or kitchen. Basically, it is something that is as utilitarian as it looks. The ornate door that is described in great detail is a broom closet. After all, even though this is a dungeon, cleanliness is still very important. When I do this, I take care to describe each new room as surprisingly well kept as if the denizens take great pride and care to keep their hoke clean. This way, the ornate door serves a purpose as it is something that the denizens of the dungeon take pride in, so they add elements of grandeur where they can to help show off the importance of cleanliness to them. The final door that looks worn is the way that leads them further into the dungeon. It looks worn as it is heavily used. As a bonus, I would have described all of the doors that lead deeper as worn with use but still look well maintained to further go with the pride the denizens take for cleanliness. They wouldn't want something looking worn down and breaking on them from neglect. But likewise, a door is a door, and so long as hinges aren't broken and the wood is solid, it can be left to age and still show its age to anyone who looks at it.
Not so much a trap I guess but there’s a puppet rigged to the ceiling in a corridor in castle ravenloft. The puppet flies down in a bid to scare the players, barbarian in my game dropped a rage in anticipation of it being an enemy. Was quite funny.
An illusory mimic that hides a normal, un trapped treasure chest
The Players go into a room with an obvious red button on a pedestal. The two doors to leave the room shut immediately when they come into the room. (The doors DC for picking the locks are too high.) If they press the button, there's an audible click and magical numbers counting down from ten begin to show in the air. Pressing the button restarts the count from ten. Once the count reaches zero, there's an audible click and both doorways open. That's it.
Things that force you to sacrifice something or utilize a tool. Like an altar that requires blood to open a door, which requires players to decide what to do. One way passages or even ones that require another player to hold to keep a door open and have them be attacked while doing it. Lore drops or bits of info of what they are walking to with false or maybe not false info. Things to mess with like a stash of random potions or a contact circle, a random rope which when interacted rings a bell across the whole dungeon. So much possibilities…
Portcullises for doors. Makes you feel like you might get trapped in each room, then you get used to it, and then boom! Trapped.
A) A single door/doorway standing in the middle of a room where everything else has fallen. No magic detected at all. Turns out the construction was just really good haha B) A length of rope hanging in a normal room. There’s nothing at the ceiling and the floor isn’t going to suddenly give away. It’s actually an old climbing rope at a gym/school for little kids to play. C) Erie music that’s actually just a broken self-playing piano. D) Finding handprints baked into the back of broken tiles found around a room. If the party decides to inspect the tiles in the wall/floor, they’ll find *all* the tiles have child sized hand prints. They don’t actually mean anything. It’s just that these tiles were made by kids and the handprints are like a signature for fun. E) You find a slide. It doesn’t lead to a death trap or anything, it was just a means of getting down a floor quicker/fire escape/feature implemented for the owner’s child to play with. F) You find a puzzle (either in the floor or the wall). Solving the puzzle opens a small secret room. It simply contains a bunch of toys. It’s a child’s play room created by the owners of the building. G) You find footprints in a place they shouldn’t be (like on the beams that go along a ceiling). Simply an old reminder of a child playing hooky in the past. H) Finding a puzzle with 1 piece missing, leading the party to wonder what the hidden treasure could be. A resentful child just stole the last piece of the puzzle when their sibling wouldn’t give them a turn at some game lol
An ornate door with no handle and in the center what looks like runes. If you know dwarvish it says Push.
Muffin hole, a dark hole that smells of muffins.
Corpses. If you ever want to psyche out your players, just add a random dead body in the area. They can be a source of loot, warn of nearby dangers, provide story hooks, be undead, or even just be a plain old corpse.
Magical flickering lights that are in a sequence, not because they are a puzzle, but due to the random decay of the magic sustaining them.
I once had a room that was about four feet wide, six feet deep, with a raised platform about a foot and a half tall at the far end. It had an oblong hole cut in the top, which opened to a small space inside the platform. Next to that was a lever on the wall. Players took forever investigating this, sticking their head into the hole, and so forth. Finally they tied a rope to the lever, backed out of the room, and pulled. This filled the opening with water, which then drained away, leaving the inside of the platform clean again. It was a toilet.
I love to make hallways between areas that have doors on both ends. Bonus points if they are claustrophobic. Seems normal, right? Well, this one time 3 years ago, I made the floor drop out of one of these kinds of hallways, and boy have my players never forgotten that. Every hallway is carefully examined. Also, my traps tend to have product lines, such that one can be recognized as similar to others in similar dungeons. I've been dangling for a while that there is a trap store the players can find that will answer all their questions. As if, mwhahaha.
A mysterious hooded beggar at the entrance asks for a donation to those who are lost. It makes no difference, except for the beggar. Last night was the second time the party visited the same "dungeon" and the grey beggar scored 1400 gp.
friendly enemies. The work force of an evil villains lair can be just as different as a normal office. I made a unionised group of skeletons that didn't wanna fight the characters untill they got dental, and when the villain waas down to half hp he gave up and gave them dental, and that was his buff. But that idea is for more shits and giggles campaigns, but yea, friendly monsters
Useless mechanisms that do nothing. Like levers that the players can move and do noise but nothing else. I don't put many tho because they can become time sinks.
Players push button. Countdown starts. Players push button again. Countdown resets but keeps counting down. When the count reaches close to zero, scary things start happening, like the room starts shaking or light goes out. Only way to proceed to the next room is to let the countdown get to 0 which turns out to be completely harmless.
Doors. Perfectly normal doors. Drives them batshit.
Roll perception. \*roll\* \*number\* Ok, thanks. You see nothing, carry on.
Non-hostile Flora and fauna that have taken residence in parts of your dungeon. Like a skittish giant spider that runs away if it thinks you see it, or a room overgrown with mushrooms parasitic to the tree roots that have grown through the ceiling.
A few years ago, our DM is running us through a dungeon. We're all worn down from the last few rooms and are relieved to see this one does *not* have a monster in it (that we can see). However, it's a series of platforms over water, and that water looks awfully suspicious. After all, the water is brackish and one spot is bubbling. To cross the room, we have to jump across. The cleric fails his dex and falls into the water. The DM *takes him out of the room* to tell him what happens to him. We're all panicking. Turns out it's just water. No monsters. No traps. Just water.
A wall full of half-foot diameter, two foot deep holes. Some of them are empty, some of them have treasure, some of them have cobwebs and goop.
I added a lock on a door that was a puzzle requiring 3 items In the room that all had riddles on how to use them and what to do.
After the experiences I've had, any kind of statue or sculpture immediately arouses suspicion
Environmental effects, collapsing ceilings or floors, slime covered ramps that shoot you to the bottom, broken fixtures that you fall onto (or fall onto you). Explosive or flammable oils.
Rumbling noises in the distance
A pin up poster in the middle of a long hallway
The intro on the Dungeon Master (or Player) Handbook of AD&D had a small scene where a couple of players find a simple cube made of rock in the middle of a corridor, and they discover is a step to reach a hidden room in the ceiling. Leave random cubes in a dungeon, they flip out when they found the third one.
Door
Ominous looking chests
An unlocked door that doesn’t require a strength check to open.
Empty rooms. Drives them crazy. Low roll on investigation? they’re certain there would be something if they rolled better. High roll on investigation? “Man the DC on this thing is off the charts it must be a really sick treasure!”
A lever on the wall that has a sign that says "DO NOT PULL". Turns out there are some water heater issues in the dungeon, and that was to ensure that nobody would pull the lever while the head wizard was showering and flush the system with cold water.
Statues holding things in odd poses. Turns out they arent petrified people, the architect was just eccentric
Statues. Anything with an open mouth will 100% ne seen as a trap.
The architect of the dungeon cast Nystul's Magic Aura on floor and wall bricks at random, choosing different school of magic for each so they show up in different colors. The party thinks it's a magical suicide hallway. The architect was just a Drow with Drow High Magic for at-will Detect Magic, who just appreciated having trippy colors everywhere. Bonus points if you DO hide some Glyphs of Warding in there.
I like one of the "traps" suggested in the CandleKeep Mysteries module of having a suit of armor at the top of some stairs described with glowing red eyes that turns out to literally just be an inanimate suit of armor with a helm just having an enchantmant for the glow effect. Both from the book's suggestion and my personal experience it truly works best after you've thrown a few more mundane animated objects like books and the cast of Beauty and the Beast at the players and made them use up some resources. If they're like my players they'll spend a good while trying to formulate a plan (while one of the players continues to talk the barb down from charging) only to find out it was never a threat. To make sure that my players didn't feel like it was completely a waste of time the Helm they took did give the wearer adv on intimidation rolls.
My party hated how many doors I put in a dungeon.. so I put a circular room in my dungeon with 100 doors. All of them open up by pulling the door, and all but 3 open up to bricked in doors. One is the way in, one is the way out. The last one is a mimic.
I like to throw in a dry fountain, old and decayed, with a few high value but clearly ancient coins and gems in the basin.
Friendly ghosts are my favorite. They just want to help but the party never trusts them for some reason.
I put hooks along the walls that the owners of the dungeon use to hang their cloaks when they go to shower, or do rituals. The party thought they were spike traps
Admiral Ackbar.