Introduction

If you’ve been following my story, you know I ended up missing the PAX Prime DM Challenge this year. I spent a huge amount of time designing my encounters and building my maps. This article is the first in a 3 part series detailing the encounters and maps I built.

The theme for the DM Challenge was “Dungeon of Horrors.” The idea was to design 3-5 encounters for a party of 9th level adventurers “that spotlights fiendish traps and diabolical puzzles, in the grand tradition of Tomb of Horrors.” I went back and read through the three versions of the Tomb of Horrors that I still have: the original, the recent RPGA reward version and the 4th edition hardback. The RPGA version was the closest to what I wanted to achieve (though I find the interpretation too literal). But something has been bothering me about 4th edition traps. My goal was to come up with 3 solid encounters with strong hooks and special effects.

It’s a trap!

Most traps in 4th edition, quite frankly, are boring. Greg Bilsland summed it up succinctly in a recent post. Either the party never triggers the traps (this happened to me multiple times DMing Season 3 of Encounters) or they notice it and someone disables it quickly. Most fourth edition traps feel like nothing more than resource sinks. One player is forced to spend multiple actions in combat to disable a device. That character should be running around the map smiting his foes – not tied to a square on the map trying to stop type X damage from draining the party’s hit points. Don’t get me wrong. This can be fun in the right encounter. Overall, traps feel too similar from encounter to encounter.

You must always be telling a story!

Here is my trick to making all your encounters dynamic. You must always be telling a story. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and earlier versions were great at this. Those versions of the game were combat-light and exploration-heavy. Every time you walk into a room, the DM describes your surroundings. As a player, you are automatically drawn into the story because you have to create a mental image of this location. This is especially true during combat. There are no grid maps or miniatures. You have to imagine the scene. 4th edition has a handicap in achieving the same level of player immersion. My experience is that players have a tendency to see a battle map in terms of squares and mechanics. The bloody pile of dismembered limbs, heads and torsos cast aside by the demon lord Baoba is simply “difficult terrain.”

The way to combat this is to insert interesting multi-dimensional features into your encounters. A floor that bounces like a trampoline. Rickety stairs that break and dump all creatures to the ground. Pretty much anything that makes someone have to think in 3 dimensions is going to have the desired effect. It’s sort of like George Lakoff’s idea about framing. If you read the phrase “Don’t think of an owlbear,” you will have already thought of an owlbear. Inserting three dimensional features into your encounter automatically engages the player’s imagination. They have to create a mental model their character’s surroundings. For bonus points, add some new simple mechanic. For example, in the trampoline room I would use the following rules: All bouncing creatures have a fly speed of 4. All creatures must touch the trampoline once per round or on the next round, the creature falls prone and moves straight down to the trampoline expending their move action. It’s a good enough start and easy to explain. Invariably, your players will come up with new ideas during the encounter and you will have to adjudicate rules of the cuff for backflips, wall running and body slams.

The map

My first map in the series is a gravity trap/puzzle. I wanted to create a map with unusual physics and some dazzling special effects. The party enters an enormous cavern with some ruined structures. It looks as if the area was once a carved room with incredibly high ceilings but most of the walls have crumbled away to reveal the cavern. Peering over the edge, all you see is inky blackness. Eighty feet up there is a circular trap door in the ceiling. There is a twenty foot wide section of wall that is still intact connecting the floor to the ceiling. Oddly, there are two large gargoyle statues on pedestals positioned on the perpendicular section of floor. The wall has a localized gravity effect with a 2 square height which allows creatures to walk on the wall. The gargoyles are not only statues. They are also switches that can change the map. One gargoyle controls the lock on the ceiling trapdoor. Spinning the statue left several times will unlock the door. The other gargoyle controls gravity effects in this room. Each position (0, 90, 180, 270 degrees) triggers a different effect. The effects are: turns off the localized gravity on wall, turns on the localized gravity on wall, turns off all gravity except localized gravity wall, inverts normal gravity (i.e. Everyone standing on the floor falls 80 feet to the ceiling trap door.)

One gargoyle controls the lock on the ceiling trapdoor. Spinning the statue left several times will unlock the door. The other gargoyle controls gravity effects in this room. Each position (0, 90, 180, 270 degrees) triggers a different effect. The effects are: turns off the localized gravity on wall, turns on the localized gravity on wall, turns off all gravity except localized gravity wall (i.e. zero G), inverts normal gravity (i.e. everyone standing on the floor falls 80 feet to the ceiling trap door.) You may wonder which effect is triggered when. The answer is whatever creates the most drama. As long as the effects are consistent, bring them out in the order that will be threatening but not wipe out the party in a single swoop. I also kept a group of bat-like humanoids on hand to swoop in and attack at an inopportune time -hopefully while the party is on the gravity wall to show off the unique properties of this map.

Map construction

Building this map was inexpensive. I bought black foamcore posterboard ($6), 4 3.8″x5″ thin metal plates($3.60), a roll of adhesive magnets($8) and a metal brace ($1.70). For the magnetic portion of the map, I cut out a 4″x16″ piece of foamcore. I evenly spaced and glued 3 of the plates to my foamcore with Weld Bond glue. I printed out my map tiles on cardstock and glued them over the plates.

Once the glue was dry, I flipped over the board and glued the last metal plate to the back. This plate would hold the map on my brace. I need to set the plate off the board a bit so I glued about 10 nickels to the foamcore and glued my plate to that.

One of my kids went to a pirate-themed birthday party and got a pad of paper with skulls on the cover. I ripped off the cover and affixed it to my plate to give it some more character. Once the glue was dry, it was time to see if the board would be able to stand up.

and a front shot…

I’m pretty happy with the way the map turned out. If I was going to construct this again, I would probably use better magnets. The adhesive backed magnets are not very strong. Large minis have a hard time staying on the board. During playtesting, I had a few mini avalanches – one would fall off and bring down the rest under it. If you handle them carefully, they will stay on the board very well.