Traps!

Here's my take on a trap chart in the Roger the GS style.  If you read straight across you get a standard trap that should be easy to work with even at the last moment in play.  If you mix and match the columns you get weird stuff you need to interpret a bit and is intended more for pre-play prep.

A few notes.  If you are rolling to get something weird you can still get the straight-across result.  Rather than re-roll I put in to add insects or animals to get some Indiana Jones style snake pits or bug filled rooms.  The trigger column was the last thing I added and the fact that some are nouns and some verbs bugs me, but it should work.  For the chute being "revealed" I was thinking of staircases that flatten out, the chute was always there built into the feature itself.

Let's roll some and see how we might interpret them:

4, 3, 5, 4
shim, gas, swings, block
Whew, that's a tough one on the first go.  Okay, let's say a section of a hallway is a big pendulum.  Knocking out a wooden shim will cause it to swing, replacing the current section of hall.  It contains a gas that is heavier than air and makes anything in it float to the ceiling and get stuck.

 2, 7, 10, 9
latch, noose, (shoot out, open), channel
Hmm, okay, a chamber with four doors.  Opening the "wrong" door causes a noose to shoot out and land around the opener's neck and start, slowly, constricting.  Opening the door the designer wants you to go through causes the noose to go slack.

7, 1, 6, 1
touch, darts, jut out, wound
This one seems pretty straight forward.  The walls of an area are lined with tiny, sharp points.  Brushing up against them causes them to jut out and inflict damage.  I would say battles in the area would be at a negative because the battlers are being careful not to touch the walls.  Or maybe roll a save every time you miss to see if you've bumped into a wall.

Well, you get the picture.  Let me know if you have any suggestions or questions.  Hope this helps in designing your dungeons.

Every Secret Door a Trap

As a fourth level DM one of the things I still haven't mastered is relaying details to players from the abstract imagined world.  What I mean is, anything I mention specifically is assumed to be important because I mentioned it.  If I'm not careful an offhand detail for atmosphere will set players on long, goose-chase searches.  Or, on the other hand, an actual important trigger is easy as pie to find, because, well, again, it had to be mentioned.

This isn't a problem for me with traps because I try to make traps visible anyway.  But it relegates secret doors to either easy finds (if I have a specific trigger designed) or impossible finds (search every section of wall you suspect and roll to see if you find something).

I'd love to hear how other DM's negotiate this difficulty, but in the mean time I figured out a kludge of a fix.  Make every secret door also a trap if triggered incorrectly.

That way you can have your "There is a moosehead mounted on the wall here" type triggers but players that turn it the wrong way can run into trouble.  I'd want the trouble telegraphed the same way I do normal traps-- bloodstains, bones, body parts.  And that would mean the existence or (approximate) location of secret doors would not, in fact, be secret any more, but how to pass through them would be.

But then, if you have traps peppered about a dungeon, a trapped secret door might not be obvious.  Players seeing it might assume it's just another trap and avoid it altogether.  And only normal things that tip off secret doors ("hey, there's a blank spot on the map here!") would send them back to re-check it.

Anyway, here's an example of what I had in mind: a square room has a mosaic running hip-high around all its walls.  Each wall has underwater scenes with mermaids, shipwrecks and a single giant clam with a pearl in it.  There is a bit of bloody cloth jammed into the crack between floor and wall.  Pushing one of the pearls will 1) open a a pit trap below the whole room 2) open a dummy secret door to a dead-end hallway and shut the door behind you in 5 rounds 3) nothing 4) open the real secret door.

I guess that might be more of what people call a "trick," and it certainly makes more work for the DM to put in than a plain vanilla secret door, but it's another possible approach.

Trap?

This old illustration of a lime kiln looked to me like something bad waiting to happen to an adventurer: