I’ve often
talked about telegraphing encounters, and in
one
blog post I’ve written about how
Gary
Gygax’s
Tomb of Horrors is an essentially “fair” dungeon, although it
is in no way easy to beat. When I was in high school, I played a party
consisting of the special characters in the back of the
Rouges Gallery, and I
killed them all trying to solve the Tomb myself.
My own foray
into the “deadly death trap dungeon” is
Tomb
of the Squonk, which was published by
Mystic
Bull Games as part of
Pulp Weird Encounters #1. I wrote
about it in the
DCC Trove of Treasures
here,
and it is available for purchase
here.
I wrote about running it at
Gary Con
here.
I am going
to direct you to
a couple
of reviews. The
Thilo G review
can be found
here
originally, and I would encourage you to visit
Endzeitgeist regularly as
the reviews tend to be informative. He is, perhaps, a bit too positive
regarding most of my output, but this is an exception.
Tomb of the Squonk was
not to his liking at all. In fact, the reviewer refers to it as a “dickish
design-paradigm”…and it really is, because it is inspired by (and an homage to)
Philip José Farmer’s
World
of Tiers series.
One of the Enzeitgeist criticisms is that some
traps “kinda lack means to properly telegraph them”. Similarly, Noah S. writes that “the foolhardy
adventurers would probably suffer a TPK either at the hands of the Squonk
himself or in their efforts to assist him” and “it seems very likely to me that
players not conversant in the old ways would suffer many many casualties”.
It is noted
in the text that “This encounter is designed for 4-6 3rd-level characters. Because
of the trap-heavy nature of the adventure, a party without at least one thief
is seriously handicapped, and may not survive.”
Gotcha D&D
“Gotcha
D&D” is a term for adventure design that sets you up to believe that X is
true, while the opposite of X is actually true. The idea is that player
expectations are subverted, which is fine, but in a way where rational
decisions are punished, which is less fine. Good adventure design is not a
series of “fuck you”s, where, no matter what the players do, they are screwed.
This is not
to say that no level of “gotcha” is acceptable. For instance, a dwarf has the
ability to smell gold and gems in DCC,
and it is certainly within reason to make a gold-eating creature smell like
gold to the poor dwarf. There is nothing wrong with the occasional creature,
like a rust monster, that inverts the normal paradigm of the heavily armed (and
armored) fighter having all of the advantage over her less-armored companions
in a fight. In fact, the early rust monster had no effective attacks if you
wore leather armor and beat it to death with a wooden club.
The goal should
never to be taking away the PC’s hard-earned stuff (or the PCs themselves)
without the players having any reasonable means to understand the risks
involved. Ultimately, the best designs entice the players to take risks,
continuing onward despite knowing that it is dangerous to do so. This is
similar to how a judge can create a magic item that is good enough to use, but
which has drawbacks forcing the players to consider how much they want to use
it.
In several
of the World of Tiers books, protagonists face a series of death traps
and overcome them. The death traps are real, and brutal. Many of them would
certainly kill the person who failed to discover and/or disarm or avoid them.
Our protagonists, of course, do manage to survive them, just as Conan overcomes
giant spiders and human adversaries, or Tarzan manages to kill lions with a
knife.
The goal is
to allow the players to experience a slice of Farmer-style Appendix N
action, giving them a chance to succeed, all the while making them understand
how slender the odds of success are. The Patricians are cruel, “childish,
petty, and spiteful”. The players’ introduction to the Patricians must convey
this.
The question
becomes: How? And how do you make if fair?
There are
going to be a lot of spoilers in what follows. If you intend on playing this
adventure, you should skip the discussion below.
Enter the Tomb
The goal is
to make the adventure fair. Despite being a death trap, a clever party should
be able to survive with minimal (or no) loss. The players should also come out
of it feeling that they were both lucky and clever to do so. The design has to feel “dickish” while
telegraphing enough information to allow the players to succeed.
As the
adventure describes, “About three months ago, Arvind Shar was captured by his
sister, Yona, who transferred his body into that of the squonk, a hideous
creature from a far distant plane. He has survived ever since on frogs, raw
fish, and the bodies of those who refuse to speak with him or help him.
Travellers who encounter Arvind are terrified, and in his rage he often kills
them. If the judge desires, the characters may hear rumors that a hideous creature
of the swamps has been accosting wayfarers in this region. Meanwhile, Yona
watches to gain full satisfaction from Arvind Shar’s humiliation.”
The
adventure starts when the PCs meet the titular Squonk in a swamp. He is “a sodden lump of darkness with an
elephantine trunk, bulging eyes, clawed hands, horns, and a thick tail ending
in tentacle-like grasping appendages. The trunk ends in what appears to be a stinger
of some sort. Spikes and boney nodules stud its hide.”
The Squonk
asks for help. His story is that “he was seduced and captured by an evil witch
(who looked like a comely young lass, of course) who called herself Yona. She
trapped him in this horrific form, but torments him with the knowledge that his
true body lies in a tomb just within the low hills. If the party will only help
him, Arvind is certain that there is a fortune in jewels lying not far from his
uninhabited shell. He is lying, of course.”
Arvind Shar
flinches when he sees birds, calling them “the Eyes of Yona”. At one point, a
3-lbs shard of meteoric iron targets one of the PCs. It is unlikely to hit, but
is both damaging if it does, and demonstrates that there is, indeed, active and
deadly opposition to the PCs aiding the Squonk.
Reaching the
Tomb complex, the PCs are greeted with this:
Past the doors, you can see a 10-foot wide
corridor stretching out before you some 30 feet before entering a wider space.
The walls give off a soft radiance, making it easy to see. Lying near the
opening is a human corpse, obviously several weeks dead and crawling with
beetles and flies. The man’s head lies some 10 feet further down the corridor –
from this distance, it appears to have been neatly shorn off.
The trap
here is arbitrary and cruel – a laser beam which will most likely kill any that
walks blithely into the hallway. However, the dead body should (and, IME,
always does) telegraph the trap nicely. Notes are given to describe what a
thief sees who finds the trap, as well as how it might be effectively bypassed.
Going under it is the easiest way. No one has ever failed to discover this trap
when I have run this adventure. No one has ever been killed by it. Its
purpose is to warn the players of the existence of serious traps, as well as to
imply their frequently technological/sci fi nature.
The second
room must be entered to continue.
“The corridor enters into a square marble
room, 30 feet to a side, with an archway exiting in the middle of both the far
wall and the wall to your right. Marble benches line the west wall. The room is
otherwise bare. As with the corridor, the walls glow softly.
This area is
trapped with a heat field, which causes 4d6 damage to anything that enters.
Anyone foolish
enough to
remain in the room for a whole round takes an additional 8d6 damage. The heat
field is triggered by touching the floor – even a small stick is enough to
trigger the field – or the presence of warm bodies within the room.
Once the
field is triggered, it takes a few seconds to reset, allowing a character to
throw in an object to trigger it, and then dash across the room. Doing so requires
a Reflex save to succeed – DC 10 for creatures with a 30’ movement rate, and DC
15 for those with a 20’ move. If a character has taken precautions, such as soaking
himself with water, before the dash, he gains an additional DC 10 Fort save to
take half damage.
While this
field can be detected by a thief (DC 20), there is no way to disarm the trap
from here.”
A 3rd
level Thief in DCC has a +7 bonus to Find Traps, meaning that an average thief
has a 40% chance of detecting the trap if it is searched for. 4d6 is a lot
of damage, but it should be remembered that even reaching 0 hp doesn’t
automatically kill you in DCC. And, after the first trap, most players approach
this room cautiously. Tossing the head from the first encounter into this room
is, IME, the most common means that the trap is discovered. Characters with
infravision can, of course, see the heat, but other characters can see the
effects, and the one-round-on/one –round-off nature of the trap is pretty easy
to learn with a little observation.
I have yet
to see a character die in this room.
The third
area does not need to be entered. Characters are unlikely to realize that at
this point, however. A trap can seal this area, possibly splitting the party.
Possibly trapping the party. “A thief can discover the bronze plate by finding
traps (DC 10) (the edge of the plate is visible at the top of the arched
corridor) and can similarly locate the pressure plate. There is no exposed
mechanism to disarm, although the trap is easily avoided once it and its
trigger are located.”
Assuming
that the characters take even rudimentary precautions, a 3rd level Thief
has a 85% chance of discovering the trap, and using a 10’ pole will trigger it,
closing off the room before the PCs can enter. The best outcome is that the
party detects the trap, enters the room, and discovers that it is a decoy. This
telegraphs that decoys like this exist. If they then trigger the trap from a
safe distance, they can also realize how potentially dangerous the trap was to
them.
Now, I have
had PCs get trapped in this room. And, as the text notes, “Without magic, there
is no way to raise the plate from here.” Magically, a wizard or elf may try a
reversed enlarge or ward portal, or might use invoke patron, knock, levitate, or shatter. A 3rd level cleric
may ask for divine aid…but second sight
used earlier would have been less costly. In one convention game, a PC had the
magical Rah-Neld’s Raygun to escape a
similar – and nastier – version of the same trap in the next area: “When the
plate falls, it opens a sluice leading from a water reservoir into the end of
the corridor. Water will rush into the area, rising 1 foot every 10 minutes.”
Most players
note the bronze door waiting overhead before triggering it. Corridors are
arched to a 12’ height, and the water rises 1 foot per 10 minutes, meaning that
the PCs have 2 hours to save themselves…or, alternatively, their trapped
companions. Again, while a surprising number of PCs have triggered this trap, I
cannot recall a single PC who ever died as a result.
After a
brief combat, the PCs reach a room which is really dangerous:
“The corridor beyond the massive bronze doors
is 20-foot wide ending in another set of massive bronze doors 70 feet away.
There are hexagonal niches built into the walls, three to the left and three to
the right, large enough for a man to easily stand within. Midway down the
corridor, the floor is marked with a large crimson hexagon 20 feet across –
above it, the ceiling disappears into a 20-foot-square shaft of unknown height.
The
hexagonal niches to east and west are all one-way gates into other worlds.
Anything tossed into them is lost, unless the character passes through the gate
to recover it – and then, he must find some other way home! If Arvind is with
the characters, he will caution them about the gates, but he is evasive about
the source of his knowledge.”
Characters
exploring these niches have wound up in other adventures – The Weird Worm-Ways of Saturn,
The
Giggling Deep, Lamentations of the Gingerbread Princess,
and others. They also allow the judge to introduce PCs to the worlds of Mutant
Crawl Classics, The Umerican Survival Guide, Star
Crawl, DCC Lankhmar, or whatever else the judge desires. A judge who
wants to include more treasure can do so here, and can include a gate wherever
it is located that allows the PCs to return.
But this
room contains a real trap:
“The hexagon
on the floor is different: it triggers a vortex that can pull a man-sized
creature (or two halflings, etc.) 30’ up the shaft to another gate. This one is
twoway and leads into the atmosphere of a super-heated gas giant. Any character
passing through the gate drops back down 1d4 rounds later – charred and asphyxiated.
The vortex
draws a creature up at the rate of 5’ per round and can be defeated simply by
adding another creature to the glyph – if there are more creatures than it can
draw, the vortex collapses. Creatures that are 10’ or higher when this is
discovered suffer falling damage as usual.”
Rooms are 15’
high in the complex, which gives three rounds where the victim is clearly
visible to rescue them. Thereafter, to see the victim, characters must enter
the hex…automatically defeating the trap. What could have happened should be
clear to the players, at least as a general outcome – the PC was heading up to
a gate. That it did not happen should also be, by far, the most common
outcome.
What happens
next is either (1) the Squonk escapes with a potential new body, and the PCs
follow it through a gate to recover their own, or (2) the PCs defeat the Squonk
and go on to the last room. If the PCs just enter the room, it will kill
them. Hopefully, though, by this time they have learned that just entering
rooms in this place isn’t a good idea. There is a way to disarm the trap (DC 15,
or 35-60% likely for a Thief who does not spend Luck). Using a pole, or
throwing something into the room, is almost certain to discover the trap as
well.
In the end,
the PCs can gain just over 3,000 gp worth of gems, but doing so causes the
archway leading from the room to “permanently becomes a gate leading to any
location the judge desires – this is Yona’s last vengeance, so the judge should
choose somewhere interesting.” This also deactivates the remaining gates, which
some players might think of as a greater treasure than the gems. I have had
players decide that the Tomb, with traps and gates intact, would make a great
lair for themselves!
Conclusion
I have run
this a number of times, and some of the players who have encountered it have
been relatively new gamers (in every sense of the word; some were kids). In
each case, the adventure worked as I had intended it to. Rather than being a
series of “fuck you”s to the players, it is a series of terrible things that
the players can resolve with wit and daring, allowing them to give a rousing
series of triumphant “fuck you”s to the judge after surviving yet another trap
which was clearly not meant to be
survived (from their standpoint).
And that is,
for a player, perhaps one of the best feelings you can have. You were “meant”
to fail, but you succeeded anyway. Don’t believe me? Read some accounts of how
player ingenuity conquered various tournament scenarios, from the very first Gen Con tournament to the very last.
Consider all the weird (and brilliant!) plans players come up with to defeat
obvious meat grinders in various funnel adventures.
At least
twice I’ve come up with solutions to in-game problems that left gaming legend Brendan LaSalle having to wing the
repercussions of my solutions…and I have to say, that is some of the best
gaming I have ever experienced from the players’ side of the screen. I don’t
know if our solution to the Damn Tasty! playtest last Gary Con was expected or not, but when
the players think they are being clever (as we did!) it is the wise GM who
avoids disabusing them of that notion.
But maybe
what I was trying to do wasn’t clear from the writing. I therefore would like
to open this up. Have you run or played in Tomb of the Squonk? If so, how did
it go for your group? Feel free to tell me if I am really off-base here!
