Temporary Storage Solution

One of my Christmas gifts to myself was this great box.  It had personal hygiene products in it, but I'm a gamer, so did what gamers do and threw that in the garbage.  This box, though.  Sliding top, solid wood, pretty swanky.  At some point I will need to create some inner partitions, but I'm waiting until I get more dungeon terrain done.  

It'll be a lot easier to figure out what size compartments I need once I know what all needs to go in there.  At this point we are up to:

Wizard library

Wizard laboratory

Bunkroom

Dining Hall

Mystic Garden

Hall of the Blood Columns

The Well

The Glowing Angelic Statue

The Stone Tree

The Pool Room

Lone Mirror Room

Black Altar of Death

That's a pretty good dungeon, but now...we need some traps!

Mirror Mirror In the Hole

Still on the road, so just a quick hit today.  For those of you that haven't figured it out yet, my posts are scheduled weeks in advance.  As you read these words, I am cooling my heels working in San Francisco for a month.  While I'm gone, please enjoy this filler post featuring a single cheap piece of furniture.

It's just a simple wood frame with some reflective paper glued to it.  Nothing fancy construction-wise.

I love love love otherwise empty rooms that contain one single feature.  In ordinary circumstances this might be a normal mirror.  Finding it as the only feature inside a large stone room deep in a dangerous dungeon, the odds are good that it is as valuable as it is dangerous.   Even just putting in place as a valuable magic item will challenge the players.  Now they can ignore the obvious loot or struggle to haul something as fragile as it is bulky up and out of a hostile environment.  Good luck with that!

Puzzle Room

Imagine your characters walking into a large chamber dominated by this thing.

The top is simply a 10mm wizard courtesy the fine folks over at Irregular Miniatures.  The base is part of a Kid's Meal toy that's been bopping around the bits box for years.  I always knew it would come in handy for something.

This is another one of those fun little items that offers a lot of potential.  There is a reason for the massive size of the base of this statue, and a reason for all those purple glyphs etched around the base.  Hitting the right glyphs will open up a door to treasure.  Hitting the wrong glyphs will open up the door to a dormant undead monstrosity.  Anything else triggers green bolts of energy from the staff of that robed figure.

What I love about features like this is that you can stash the code to unlock the door somewhere else in the dungeon, and that treasure map unlocks the secret to this tomb.

The Iron Cage

Here's a nice and versatile dungeon feature.

It could be a cage trap set to drop on the unwary.  It could be a cage containing a rare and expensive monster that, whoops - the party just stepped on a release mechanism and now it's escaped.  Or it could contain that lost princess you've been hired to find.

The two portcullises crafted as hallway blockers can easily be pressed into service with this feature to make an even cooler looking cell block.

Another War In A Box

Inspirational!  From poster Teardrop World over at the Lead Adventure Forums, check out this fun approach to a war in a box:

This is just a peek - check out the full thread (link) for a lot more pictures with a lot more detail.

Another Field Report

South of San Francisco, in the sleepy downtown San Bruno, you can find a loverly little game shop called Heretic Games. Warning to you mutants and chaos-tainted types, the store is watched over by one of the Emperor's  faithful.  Standing around six and half feet tall, he's more of a tabletop version than a fluff version.  Your humble editor was more interested in chatting with the lovely store staff than hanging with this grim watchman of the universe.

Apparently, my work computer can't rotate images 90-degrees.
I had to update this from a photo from my phone.  Absurd.

Spear Trap

Another quickie for your lookie.  A wall of spears that leap out at adventurers who don't exercise enough caution.

 

This dungeon feature looks a bit rickety on its own, but it was built to fit over the "walls" of the 2.5D dungeon, like so.

You may have noticed that my scale figure swapped out weapons - his spear for an axe.  The last one was inadvertently basecoated black along with these traps.  Whoops.  Gotta remember to leave your scale figure on the desk when you hit the spray stand, people.  Rookie mistake.