Review: Traps & Treachery

Traps & Treachery
Fantasy Flight Games
169 pages + some ads and the OGL
MSRP $24.95 ($5 on RPG Now)

This book is d20 System supplement centered squarely on traps - often very elaborate traps.
It's kind of a cousin to Grimtooth's Traps, but much less ridiculously lethal. These traps range from relatively simple, to complicated but technically simple, to complex and over-engineered. The conceit is that they are from the workbook of an increasingly-erratic trap designer, who started out a bit practical and clever but who got crazier and let it show in his traps.

The book is broken up into five chapters.

Chapter One: Way of the Rogue - This chapter talks about the profession of the rogue, and not just traps. It covers theft, Thieves Guilds (with advice for both player and the DM making them),

It has prestige classes and new thiefly feats as well, which I can't judge because I don't play 3.x D&D. It also has new gear, new poisons, and new magic items - all of which are good inspirational fodder for a game with a little conversion. I especially like the Urchin Ring, which lets you attract 1d6 kids under 12 and order them about, and which gives them some thief skill bonuses while under your influence. Hah.

It's got practical advice, like not worrying about silent lockpicking after a noisy fight, using Silence spells to sneak a noisy group around, when it's useful to re-set a trap and when to just permanently disable it. It also makes the assumption that the player must describe how he or she is disarming, disabling, circumventing, or setting off a trap. It's not just "You make a Traps roll, move on." The latter is a common stereotype of modern gaming, but it's certainly not the case here. That makes it a useful supplement for folks who do purely descriptive (player skill centered) trap disarms as well as those who do description-assisted die-based (character skill centered) trap disarms.

Chapter Two: Trap Design - this chapter goes into the details of traps.

It covers them both game mechanically (CR x, y GP, etc.) and descriptively. It covers construction, activation (triggers, magical and non-magical), the trap's trapping mechanism, effects, and so on. The detail is solid, too - you get both roll modifiers and descriptions of the way it works. You get detecting traps penalties, but also descriptions of ways you might describe that - which naturally doubles as ways you might spot the trap descriptively, too.

Especially nice is are the sections "Traps As Challenges," "Traps As Security Systems" and "Traps As Special Effects" - covering the gamist, in-game, and verisimilitude-boosting aspects of traps in a game. It's all straight-up useful advice. Some of it might be obvious to a long-time referee, but it's well presented.

Oddly (to me), there is also a new monster in this chapter. A trap-loving monster, of course, but still, it just seems jarring. Still, new monster = potential source of good ideas.

Chapter Three - Mechanical Traps - This chapter is just an extensive catalog of mechanical traps (as opposed to magical ones - Chapter Four). Each trap gets a full writeup of type, construction, activation, trigger, mechanism, effect, attack rules (to hit, damage, save), DC for searching and disabling, CR, and construction time. They also get a very detailed description of the trap, with color text you can really use. It also has descriptions of how a trap could be spotted or disarmed, too - sometimes one is easy but the other hard, especially for traps with remote triggers.

Each trap also gets a picture, showing how the trap physically looks (great for the complex area traps) and works. Extremely useful.

Chapter Four - Magical Traps - Another catalog, this time of spell-based traps. It's exactly like the prior chapter but the effects are less "rock falls on your head" and more "spell kills you."

Chapter Five - Puzzles - The third and final catalog section, this time of puzzles. Some of them are trap-like, others more like obstacles, others more like IQ tests to achieve a reward. They're all pretty interesting and very inspirational even if you don't use them straight-up.

Like I mentioned before, it's very Grimtooth's Traps, but without the killer DM aspect to it. Many of them are overly elaborate, but it fits the conceit of a progressively less-sane designer.

Overall, I really like this book. It's OOP, but you can get it for less than cover used. If you like traps, I think it's worth reading. It's useful to me running GURPS, despite a completely different rules set, because of the extensive descriptions of the traps. Spells are all up on the D20SRD, too, so it's not hard to figure out what some obscure spell does, either. Recommended.

How Red Raggi become a GMPC

For those paying close attention, I mentioned a game yesterday - it didn't happen as I got very sick very suddenly. Ugh. I'm mostly better now, but that's what happened to game yesterday.

I've had GM PCs in the past - NPCs that were, basically, an active and involved PC except it was run by me, the GM. Players from my old games will probably remember Comet, Justinian, and possibly others I'm just forgetting now. That puts aside the times when I literally ran a PC even as I GMed - my wizard Neves was like that, since my cousin wanted more people playing and we only had himself and me in that game.

We didn't have one in my last game, although we did end up with some long-term NPCs accompanying the group - notably Vim, who lasted longer than you'd have expected.

I'm not a big fan of GMPCs, yet here we are with Raggi.

The PCs picked him up back in session 3, and despite the clear downsides to having him around, they kept bringing him back on their adventures with them. He kills gnoll children, happily butchers the wounded, kills anything he feels like, greedily chases gold, spend his money profligately, often charges wildly into combat without regard to his allies . . . to sum up, the phrase I use is "cheerfully awful."

The players tried to get him killed off. Their PCs didn't - Sense of Duty for one stopped them doing so - but the players kept hoping he'd get killed. His totally wild combat style seemed destined to kill him. But it hasn't; he's survived many fights that would have killed anyone else.

But he's grown on the PCs, especially after his stellar performance against the armored ogre brothers living at the top of the stairs down to level 2.

These days, the players call themselves "Raggi's Roughnecks" and joke that they are only one of his adventuring groups. The running joke is that when he doesn't make his appearance roll, they'll run into Raggi in the dungeon sometime with some other adventurers . . . "Oh, hey! Wow, is it Sunday? Uh, this is kind of awkward . . . ugh, look, I need to finish this thing - I'll call you guys!"

I still treat him like a general NPC. But it's amusing that he's such a highly respected member of the group. And he's become a GMPC in a game that was pretty much anti-GMPC.

Spray-Sealing Minis!

Hurrah! It's almost 50 here and not humid. I'm off to spray-seal a few minis. I wish I had more ready to go, but I was too busy. But I have a couple right here . . . and with luck one of them (a Bones orc) will be dry by tomorrow and can join his buddies below Felltower just in time for game.

Amusingly I was just getting set to spray some other minis when I realized . . . wait, those were supposed to be gloss finished and were already glossy but just needed some work on their bases. So I put them back. I almost let me enthusiasm for marking minis as "done" set me back.

Hurrah for warming weather!

Tracy Hickman on Pitching Dragonlance

I read this yesterday:

Dragonlance: Selling the Dream

Although I have mixed feelings about the impact of Dragonlance (I loved the stories when I was a teen, but the modules weren't great game material), I'm nothing but impressed by the approach. If you want to sell a project to people, pay attention to that article. They:

- Assembled people individually and in groups to pitch and/or develop the idea.

- They did their homework, and came to each group with what they needed to say and do to get their (clearly enthusiastic) support.

- They didn't take anyone's support for granted.

Wearing a suit was a nice touch. But it's clear they had an idea, developed it enough to get support and then went and got that support (and used it to roll up to the next level), did their homework, and put the work in the make it all click.

It's a short, punchy writeup of how you want to pitch your big idea to the big boss, really. Whether you liked what they pitched or not, they made sure it would be bought before they tried to sell it.

Review: Pyramid 3/64: Pirates and Swashbucklers

A brief review of Pyramid 3/64: Pirates and Swashbucklers.



I pretty much buy Pyramid when it has DF stuff I can't live without, or when it's all about pirates. This one has DF stuff I can't live without and pirates.

Swords Against Evil by Sean "Dr. Kromm" Punch

Besides having an awesomely Fritz Lieber-sounding title, this article also has excellent content. It presents four different spins on the Swashbuckler template from Dungeon Fantasy 1: Adventurers. The Aristocrat combines the leader-of-men aspect of the Knight with the swordsmanship of the Swashbuckler and the arrogance of blue-blooded fictional fops. The Buccaneer straddles the Barbarian and the Swashbuckler with a heavy dose of sea-going ability. The Duelist puts aside anything that isn't sticking a sword into a vital spot to be an even more focused version of the swords-and-chandeliers Swashbuckler. The Rogue turns the chandeliers up to 11 and combines swordsmanship with a lot more concern for stealth and palming valuables. It also has stats from Low-Tech for swords overlooked in Basic Set, allowing for even more flexibility in weapon choices. Nicely, the longsword (almost an ideal swashbuckler's weapon in DF) gets the nod, too.

Scury-Dog Sorcery by Jason "PK" Levine

Scurvy-Dog Sorcery is a six=tiered (six level) magical style, drawing off the ideas and rules in Thaumatology: Magical Styles. It is squarely aimed at spells pirates would need to track, board, and loot, followed by a side order of avoiding naval opposition. It's a mix of perks, shortcuts to spells pirates need, and specialized secret spells to do things like identify loot or facilitate no-contact boarding of ships.

It's got a nice little history to it, explanations of where it comes from and how it evolves, and so on. It's also well designed. I can see picking this up and dropping it directly into an existing or future fantasy game.

Eidetic Memory: The Spanish Prisoner by David Pulver

This month's Eidetic Memory is a complete pirate adventure. It's historically set (in 1666), and gives some pirates a fairly linear task to get done. Basically, Henry Morgan wants to launch a raid and needs the information in the head of a pirate to pull it off. Said pirate needs to be tracked down. The game is set up for a convention, so it's not a sandbox as much as a linear series of encounters (although you can very easily change how encounters go, you can't really do much more than follow the guy you need until you catch up.) Still, it does the job nicely and it's enough for a short taste of piracy when you need it. It also acts as a bridge to a larger game if you follow up on the raid. Good stuff.

The Qanat Pirates of Old Than by Matt Riggsby

Underground waterway pirates. Picture a small area of cities connected by a mesh of underground water tunnels laid out along magical ley lines (for luck and other reasons). Now stick some barge-borne torchlit pirates, and you've got the Qanat Pirates of Old Than. It's short but complete and well-executed.

It comes with a nice maps of the tunnel system at a large scale that lends itself to either wilderness adventure or a pointcrawl. It also comes with tactical hex maps of the barges, although at least in my case printing them out made them hard to read so you might want to play with the darkness when you print it yourself.

Sailing the Open Skies by Christopher Rice

Skyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy pi-rates! (Sorry)
Magical, steampunk, and cinematic airships, from the pen of the extremely prolific organizer of the Pyramid Writer's Group. All of the airships are written up in both a normal vehicle stat line and a Spaceships 1d6 system, too, making them doubly useful. Easily useful for a skyborn pirate game, or GURPS-based Calidar.

Random Thought Table by Steven Marsh

A look at the idea of "good" pirates and why being pirates can basically skate by the morally objectionable aspects of killing people to steal their stuff. Mostly tied to Star Wars and Treasure Island. Interesting and thought-provoking, but my gaming didn't get better from reading this.


Overall, this was an excellent issue of Pyramid. I can pretty much get some use out of all of it, either directly (Qanat, Swords against Evil), or indirectly (using the airships from Sailing or the NPCs from The Spanish Prisoner). Very solid and well worth $7.99.

Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser on Murder

I just like this quote a lot:

Fafhrd said, "You were a drunken idiot-genius indeed tonight [. . .] Tying up our swords so we couldn't use 'em save as clubs!"
The Mouser shrugged. "Yet that sword-tying doubtless saved us from committing a number of murders tonight."
Fafhrd retorted, a little hotly, "Killing in a fight isn't murder."
Again the Mouser shrugged. "Killing is murder, no matter what nice names you give."
- Fritz Leiber, Ill Met in Lankhmar


Yeah. Pretty things up as you will, but it doesn't change what they are.

GM's Day Sale - Any recommendations?

So there is a big sale on gaming materials in honor of GM's Day over at DriveThruRPG.

Considering that I run GURPS, and play (but don't run) Swords & Wizardry, and considering my interest in original 70s/80s era games . . . what do I need to look into here?

I'm not sure I'm going to get anything, but considering the sale, I feel like I should at least browse around. What's a good item or two that's being sold for a good discount for GM's Day?