Wednesday, April 21, 2021

Retrospective: Grimtooth's Traps

Trap-filled dungeons are an iconic element of Dungeons & Dragons (and, to a lesser extent, many other fantasy roleplaying games). Of course, filling a dungeon with traps requires, well, traps and even the most imaginative referee is likely to run out of ideas for them after a while. That's doubly true for referees like me, who've never been good at coming up with interesting and satisfying traps. 

That's why I find it surprising how few books of traps have been published over the years, at least when compared to books of monsters, magic items, or spells. Flying Buffalo's Grimtooth's Traps series, the first volume of which appeared in 1981, is one of the few books of traps I've ever read. Much Citybook (also produced by Flying Buffalo), Grimtooth's Traps is an anthology of traps written by a number of different authors (including Steve Crompton, Liz Danforth, Rick Loomis, Michael Stackpole, and Ken St. Andre, among many more). 

The book is presented as if the titular Grimtooth, a black-eyed troll, had collected all these traps "from the four corners of the earth" and passed them on to Paul Ryan O'Connor, who then typed them up for publication. Grimtooth himself provides sardonic commentary on many of the entries, cackling gleefully at the thought of how much mayhem a trap will wreak upon adventurers. Exactly how annoying one finds Grimtooth is a matter of taste. I know people who find his snarkiness genuinely amusing, while I don't find he adds much value the trap write-ups. In fact, I find Grimtooth actively detracts from my ability to take the entries seriously – which is a shame, because many of them are truly imaginative. 

The first volume is divided into four chapters, each one dedicated to a different type of trap. Chapter one presents room traps, chapter two presents corridor traps, chapter three presents door traps, and chapter four presents trapped items and artifacts. Each trap is described free of game mechanics, leaving it to each referee to decide best to integrate it into his preferred game system. These descriptions vary in length, from only a couple of short paragraphs to close to a full page. Since many of the traps are complex, or at least difficult to understand through words alone, they're accompanied illustrations or diagrams of their workings. These diagrams are probably the best part of Grimtooth's Traps; they do a very good job of clarifying how a trap works, as well as helping a referee decide how to use it in his dungeons. Finally, each trap gets a lethality rating, represented by skulls in the margin near their descriptions.

The quality and nature of the traps described in Grimtooth's Traps are quite variable. While comparatively few of them could be described as realistic, many are at least plausible, in that their mechanisms make sense. That's vitally important to a good trap in my opinion. Traps whose functioning is impenetrable aren't much fun, unless one is a killer referee who enjoys inflicting unavoidable pain on player characters. Unfortunately, there are more than a few traps of this sort in the book, such as, for example, a statue made of pure sodium that, when carried through a waterfall explodes, killing the carrier, or a spyglass that shoots a dagger into the eye of anyone who looks inside it. On the one hand, one can almost admire the fiendish cleverness of traps like these. On the other, though, they come across as cruel and spiteful rather. I have a hard time imagining any player whose character is subjected to these feeling as if he'd been fairly bested by the referee. More likely, he'll be ticked off and not without justification in my opinion.

All that said, I retain a fondness for Grimtooth's Traps. As someone who has trouble coming up with interesting traps, I appreciate the work that went into creating these entries, even the vicious ones. The latter are reminders of an older, more adversarial form of play that has largely fallen out of fashion nowadays but was once quite widespread (or at least not uncommon). Consequently, the book remains valuable as a historical document, if nothing else, though I continue to hope that I might one day make use of some of its fairer, more interesting traps.

25 comments:

  1. I know that when 13-year old Eric sent in 4 traps (one decent, one shabby, two downright terrible) all 4 ended up in Grimtooth Lite; it made the Fiend Folio look carefully curated. They did send me a contributor's copy!

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    1. That's terrific! It must have been quite a thrill at that age.

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    2. Hey now, are you trying to say such classic monsters as the flumph and tirapheg were ill-considered additions to D&D? :)

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    3. The flumph is the "E.T." of D&D, and The Eye of Fear and Flame sounds straight out of a Ronnie James Dio album. True, the Fiend Folio isn't in the same caliber as MM I and II, but it has its moments of brilliance.

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  2. It is actually quite odd that there have been so few publications on traps. James Raggi's "Green Devil Face" is actually the only other one I can call to mind, actually.

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    1. There's also Courtney Campbell's Artifices, Deceptions & Dilemmas.

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    2. I'll have to look into that, since this is the first I've heard of it. Thanks for the suggestion.

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    3. Nord Games recently put out a volume called Treacherous Traps which I actually quite like.

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    4. Another one is "The Handbook of Traps & Tricks" put out (and apparently still available) from Dragon Tree Press. I picked up my copy mid 80's and recall choosing it over Grimmtooth's.

      Here's a link:

      http://www.dragontreepress.com/DT_Sales.html

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  3. Grinmtooth's Traps is one of those rpg publications meant to be read for amusement , not meant to be used during actual play :-) I agree with your statement that lethal traps are not much fun during an actual dungeon adventure. Such traps are puzzles at heart, and there's a very fne balance in how much information the GM should give such that the players can disarm the trap, but not in a trivial way.

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    1. This is precisely why I appreciate truly clever and enjoyable traps: they're difficult to create.

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  4. Grimtooth's is the other part of that whole "Tunnels and Trolls isn't serious!" thing. I felt that, at least until Lite came out, the series were intended as comedy reads not for actual table usage.

    Grimtooth's Dungeon of Doom (a entire dungeon built around these silly traps) is something that one of these days (years...) I intend to run as the Christmas game at my wargames club. Any year now...

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    1. It's interesting that you connect Grimtooth and T&T. It makes sense, given that they're published by the same company. I wonder how many others felt similarly.

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    2. I know I certainly associated the two lines, particularly with the Grimtooth mascot being a literal troll. Also the Citybook series, although they were a bit less gonzo overall and generic enough to use almost anywhere.

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    3. I also associate them, largely because so many of the traps were designed by people who wrote solo dungeons for T&T. I suspect that if the traps were ever used at all before publication, it was in T&T games.

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  5. Traps were a failed component in our games, whereas Tricksters (the Hermit) were boundless in their creativity, and their actions were easier to illustrate for the group. Similar dynamics were at work with information/rumor gathering. Some players loved the art and science of skulking for cogent information, while others were happy with the non-plussed "Beat it out of the Blacksmith".

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  6. I had a couple of these back in the day, but found them too uneven in terms of quality to buy more, or even to keep the ones I did buy. Too many Rube Goldberg traps for my tastes. The Citybook series was a more useful "generic supplement" line overall IMO.

    I guess it is odd that traps (and their more naturalistic kin, environmental hazards) don't get more love from the RPG (and particularly OSR) community. Maybe part of it is that system-agnostic traps lack the rules to interact with a given game engine without calling for work from the GM, although the same could be said for books of monsters, spells, or magic items. The Citybooks avoided that for me because NPCs and settings don't really need finished crunch as much as traps do.

    I'm also struck by the fact that the fairly popular Blades In the Dark RPG (which is all about playing a crew of urban criminals) barely even mentions the idea of traps, at least in the traditional dungeoncrawl sense.

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    1. It's true that many of the traps do have a distinctly "Looney Tunes" flavor to them. I still appreciate their cleverness, even if I'd likely never use them in play.

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  7. I never had too much issue with the "silly" in T&T, but the Grimtooth's books always rubbed me the wrong way. It's one thing to play T&T and just change silly spell names, but most of Grimtooths was not so easily "re-skinned", and struck me as a book for a style of play that I have absolutely no use for- the stereotypical Killer/Adversarial DM. I wonder how much of an influence it had on Kenzer and Hackmaster- it seems perfectly suited for someone like that.

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  8. I definitely bounced off Grimtooth's when I read it as being too goofy. On the flip side, I will plug my buddy's trap / room book Deadly Dungeons which I think succeeds where Grimtooth falls short.

    https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/271280

    https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/nick-ls-whelan/deadly-dungeons/paperback/product-1jqvr8yp.html?page=1&pageSize=4

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  9. I've always liked that book, mostly for the sheer cleverness of the traps and the style of writing. That said, I'd use (and have used) very few of them: I never really was that into "unrealistic" dungeons.

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  10. I always read Grimtooth as clever, entertaining comics, like Spy vs. Spy, or the work of Rube Goldberg: https://www.vernier.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/lab.PEP-16-rube-goldberg-machine.png

    Never as actual traps for a game.

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  11. Let's try that again, this time with formatting. :)

    I always read Grimtooth as clever, entertaining comics, like Spy vs. Spy, or the work of Rube Goldberg, like this:
    https://www.vernier.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/lab.PEP-16-rube-goldberg-machine.png

    Never as actual traps for a game.

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  12. It's interesting to contrast this with the style of trap design I saw in the G+ OSR - this is a great example: https://henchmanabuse.blogspot.com/2014/02/liquid-loot.html


    2014-02-11
    Liquid Loot
    Just another trap in the 4th level. It's an example of my favorite style, the kind the players willingly set off.

    8. Liquid Loot
    Floating in the center of this room are three rings of blue superconducting metal. They are nested within each other, and rotate slowly in three dimensions around a 1’ wide sphere of gold. Anyone approaching will feel the heat coming off the rings and the sphere – and in fact the sphere is molten, although that will not be obvious.

    Jamming a sword, 10’ pole, or other object into the rings will merely cause them to stop spinning – they will resume once the obstruction is removed. Note that they are powerful magnets, and a successful “force doors” check is required to remove any metal stuck to them. Further, the heat from the rings will soften most metal and burn wood – each round an item is jammed into the rings, there is a 40% chance it will be ruined.

    Approaching the rings with a magnet will cause them to fly apart, doing 1d6 damage to everyone in the room as they ricochet about.

    In either case, once the rings stop rotating, the molten gold within will fall to the floor, splashing all within a 10’ radius for 4d6 points of damage (save vs. paralyzation for half damage).

    Once outside the rings, the gold will solidify in 1 round, and be cool enough to handle in 2 turns. It will take an additional 2 turns to pry the gold from the floor, if it has splashed all over the room. The total value of the gold present is 6,000 gp.

    When nested together, the rings will resist being moved, and will heat any metal in the center to 2000° F. Apart, they are simply strong magnets. The rings are worth 10 gp apiece if sold separately, and 100 gp if sold together.

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  13. I really like how these books are written, I find it amusing and enjoyable as a reading material. As a referee, I also have used many of these traps, and that exploding statue? It's appeared in almost all my campaigns! Yeah, the idea is that it explodes and kills you, but the idea needs a mechanics to support it. I have used Save or Die rolls most of the times, but when the character that collects it is a magic-User (or a scientist of some sort), I allow the player a Save vs. Magic Device; if successful, they know the statue will react on water (this means there can be at least one and maximum two chances to avoid the trap without making the trap any less dangerous).

    I have never used the spyglass, but I can be solved with one and maybe two checks. Save vs. Paralyzation to react just in time and keep your eye intact, and Find Traps if the character that has the spyglass has suspicions (but not other character).

    Making traps has always a problem to me, I can't come up with many good traps, and I can't describe them in a way that the players can understand and make their characters disable them, so I rely on rolls.

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