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Soul coins are one of the cool ideas bouncing around Descent Into Avernus. The basic concept is that souls damned to Hell are forged into coins on Minauros, the third layer of the Nine Hells, and then “used for goods and services, infernal deals, dark bargains, and bribes.”

This is great worldbuilding both literally and metaphorically: Devils making deals for souls is an epistemological satire of commercial dealings, and the trading of souls as literal currency simply extends that satire. But it also just logically makes sense that devils, having obtained a soul, would want to package it into as convenient and relatively compact a form as possible. And the universal form is such as to dehumanize the victims by establishing that the individual holds no significance to the devil.

The full function of soul coins is described in “Commerce” (DIA, p. 78), “Soul Fuel” (p. 217), and “Soul Coins” (p. 225).

Unfortunately, the book’s handling of soul coins is rather flawed.

First, the actual value and rarity of soul coins is all over the map. They are either very rare and incredibly difficult to find or incredibly common and the basis for all commerce in Avernus. In some places their value is pegged at being roughly equivalent to 6 sp, but elsewhere an NPC will offer 100 gp worth of gems for every soul coin the PCs can find for him.

It seems fairly clear that some of the writers on the book thought the soul coins were meant to be the de facto currency of Avernus, while others thought of them as rare magical artifacts. Or perhaps they started as the former, but then someone along the line got cold feet because… well… they’re souls aren’t they? Wouldn’t they be pretty rare? (Not necessarily. Eternity across potentially infinite planes can make souls as common or as precious on Avernus as you like.)

Second, there are inconsistencies in which functions of a soul coin require charges and/or how many charges it takes to exhaust a soul coin. For example, the stat block of a soul coin says each time you question the soul inside the coin it costs a charge (and each coin only has three charges), but there’s also an NPC with a soul coin collection that they chat with on the daily.

Third, at first glance Descent Into Avernus also does a clever thing by making soul coins the fuel for various infernal machines, creating an ethical dilemma for PCs who have to choose between not using those machines or literally burning up the souls inside the coins.

In practice, though, the only thing it really seems to do is actively discourage any non-evil character (and, realistically, prohibit any good character) from riding kick-ass war machines across the Avernian plains. And, I’m going to be honest, the war machines are a lot fucking cooler than the ethical dilemma.

Fourth, there’s some metaphysical vagueness, which is fortunately fairly easy to clear up. Are the coins forged exclusively from evil souls or are some good souls illegitimately captured? And, similarly, do the lowest order of evil souls sent to Hell end up as lemures or forged in soul coins? In both cases: Why not both? In the latter case, it’s easy to imagine that there all manner of Hellish intakes for new souls. (You could perhaps even imagine a different one for each of the Nine Layers.)

COINS AS FUEL

I’d make two adjustments to the coins:

• Talking to the soul inside doesn’t require charges.
• Expending all the charges in a coin (or using it up as fuel for an infernal machine) burns out the coin, but doesn’t destroy the soul inside. (Such coins need to be taken back to Minauros to be reforged, with the soul being transferred to a new coin.)

My goals here are twofold:

First, it’s interesting to talk to the souls inside the coins, so I don’t want to discourage it. Similarly, NPCs with collections of coins that they chat with or regularly consult/torment are cool.

Second, I want to dull the ethical conundrum for PCs using soul coins. There are still plenty of ethical conundrums here: Should you free them? The souls, uh… scream when you use them as fuel. But it’s not just an instant no-brainer for anyone who isn’t evil.

ALTERNATE FUEL: Devils need soul coins to fuel their war-machines because they’re not mortal. Mortals like the PCs, however, can directly fuel the war-machines. The mortal suffers 1d10 points of damage and fuels the war-machine for 24 hours. This damage cannot be healed by normal means, but returns at a rate of 1 hit point per day. A greater restoration instantly restores these lost hit points.

This also means that you can have devils riding across the Avernian plains with screaming prisoners strapped to their war-machines Mad Max-style.

Design Note: My goal, obviously, is to give PCs the option to drive war-machines without exploiting trapped souls. You might require them to track down (and install) a converter to do so, but I don’t think it’s necessary.

COINS AS COMPANIONS

Every soul coin is a unique NPC. I recommend leaning into this.

WHO THEY ARE: Check out 51 Soul Coins as a good source for random soul coin characters. The collection is a limited in its range (featuring almost exclusively average people who got gulled by a devil), so you may want to broaden its scope (with, say, historical figures, those who damned themselves to Hell without the help of a devil’s contract, good souls who were captured and forced into a coin, and so forth).

WHAT THEY KNOW: Soul coins are constantly aware of their surroundings, making them a potentially valuable source of information. Let’s give them a 1 in 6 chance of having useful information (i.e., roll on the Avernian rumor tables).

COIN MADNESS: Being locked up inside a coin for eternity is not conducive to a sane mind. Many soul coins have had their sanity shredded to the point that they are no longer coherent or intelligible (see table below), and even those who are capable of conversing may display strange tics of behavior and distress.

COINS AS CURRENCY

If you want soul coins to be prized as fuel for the war-machines, then they can’t be common enough to serve as coinage in Avernus. Which is a pity, because the use of an alternate currency would be an excellent opportunity to alienate and disorient the players (and their characters). “What do you mean I can’t pay with gold?”

As I describe in Random Worldbuilding – Coins & Currency, money can be a powerful channel for conveying information about the world to the players. And this would be a powerful one: Not only clearly signaling that “you’re not in the Realms any more,” but also viscerally signaling how Hell is fundamentally built upon the suffering and exploitation of mortal souls.

So here’s my recommendation:

• Soul coins are worth roughly 50 platinum pieces in purchasing power. They are rarely used in actual commerce, and instead serve primarily as a coin of account.
• Spent soul coins are more common, accumulating over millennia of soul coins being used up that aren’t important enough to reforge. They have a purchasing power roughly equivalent to 1 platinum piece.
• Obsidian chits are the common currency of Avernus, with a purchasing power of 1 gold piece. These chits are issued by various Dukes and warlords and backed by stockpiles of soul coins. Mad Maggie, for example, has a small stockpile and issues her own chits, as does the Wandering Emporium.

You can generally issue about 1,000 chits per soul coin. (That’s more than the strict conversion rate, but welcome to the wonderful world of being a banker.) If you want to get more complicated, you could postulate cheap chits or bull-chits — chits which were circulated by Avernian powerbrokers who no longer exist or whose soul coin stockpile was lost. These are still perceived as having some value and could be used as the equivalent of copper pieces.

Design Note: Such cheap chits could also be a window into Avernian history. Or just easter eggs. For example, the PCs might find cheap chits that were issued by Gargauth when he was Treasurer of Hell.

COINS AS SOULS

As described in Descent Into Avernus, p. 226, the soul within a soul coin can be freed by casting a spell that removes a curse. A freed soul is released to whatever planar afterlife it belongs in… which means that for most soul coins the soul is just churned back through Hell’s intake for new souls.

USING THE SOUL: A soul coin can also be used in conjunction with animate dead or create undead to bind the soul to the undead created. Such undead can be controlled by anyone holding the soul coin they were created from. If the undead are destroyed, the soul is released to whichever planar afterlife it belongs in (see above).

If you are in Hell, you can similarly cast infernal calling (from Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, p. 158) in conjunction with a soul coin to transform the soul within the coin into a lemure. The soul coin is destroyed in the process. (You’ve more or less just created the lemure the soul would have become if it had entered Hell through Avernus rather than Minauros.)

Go to the Avernus Remix

There are, broadly speaking, three ways to handle PC wealth in an RPG:

• Don’t track it or worry about it in any way
• Use an abstract wealth system
• Manage it in character (most typically by counting every coin)

All of these can work well, depending on what the game is focusing on and what effect you’re looking for. For example, when I’m running Feng Shui 2 the individual wealth of each PC is, at best, window-dressing to the pulse-pounding action.

A properly designed abstract wealth system, on the other hand, can be a valuable channel for communicating setting information. In Infinity, for example, I designed a system in which a character’s Earnings (an abstract value indicating how much income they have) can be used to provide a similarly abstract Lifestyle, with the Lifestyle you live determining your Social Status (which feeds back into the Psywar system for resolving social conflicts).

The cool bit is that instead of just one Lifestyle, there are four: Clothing & Fashion, Entertainment, Food & Drink, and Housing & Property. I could then provide short descriptions for each Lifestyle at each rating. For example:

Entertainment for the Elite and richer includes custom-designed experiences, niche happenings, and expensive participatory events: AR experiences mapped onto orbital insertions; pop-up nightclubs inside hollowed-out asteroids; recreation masques using morphing flesh-masks of historical figures; and other similarly unique opportunities.

This very light layer of structure let me really dig into what the panoply of day-to-day life was really like in this strange, almost alien setting existing on the transhuman cusp in a way that could still be easily accessed by the GM (what is this hyper-elite NPC wearing? where is the demogrant NPC living?) and also provide simple hooks for players looking to come to grip with their characters without needing to absorb the totality of every social class and circumstance.

On the other hand, consider Trail of Cthulhu: Here the emphasis of the game is on solving Mythos mysteries in the 1930’s. The game uses a single Credit Rating score which (a) has a very brief description to orient the reader to the historical epoch and (b) can be mechanically used to glean clues. Because that’s what the game is about.

COUNTING COINS

Which brings us to counting coins.

This is, of course, how D&D handles wealth. Which means that, like a lot of things D&D does, it has become an often unexamined default. Recently I’ve seen a number of designers and GMs decide that they don’t like tracking every copper piece, and their solution has been to count only a single, universal currency (i.e., only Gold or Credits or Cash).

Here’s my two bits (pun intended): If you’re tracking currency at all, then it’s worth tracking at least 3-4 types to give roleplaying flavor and logistical variation. If you’re NOT interested in currency-based flavor or logistics, then you shouldn’t be counting coins at all (and should instead use one of the other two methods I talked about above).

Flavor is ineffable, but there’s a difference between silver pocket change and coffers filled with gold; between the dive bar where people are sliding copper pieces across scarred bars and the high-class joint where people pay in gold. The noble who recompenses you with a small stack of platinum in a black velvet bag just feels different from the drug lord who pays you off with a coffer full of silver.

Note from My Player: I still remember that payment. My character kept that bag. It’s good stuff.

Logistics can include the encumbrance difficulties of lugging 10,000 cp out of a dungeon vs. 100 gp (prompting tough choices and ingenuity in problem solving). But it’s also stuff like currency conversions.

Such conversions can be nation-to-nation stuff that makes long distance travel visceral in its details, but it can also be the barmaid who bites the gold coin you tossed her, looks at your suspiciously, and says, “I can’t make change for this.”

Speaking of currency conversions: Many world-builders are drawn to the idea of having different currencies for different nations, but often these aspirational goals are abandoned due to the metagame logistics of tracking all that extra data: The players need to track all the different types of coins they receive, while the GM needs to both (a) stock the dungeon hordes with them and (b) figure out what each local market/merchant’s relationship with each type of currency is.

If this is an idea that appeals to you, however, you might try achieving the same effect WITHOUT increasing the number of coinage types being tracked by having each nation use a different metal standard of coinage.

For example, the Trade Federation uses silver coins; the Young Kingdoms prefer gold; and the Old Empire uses electrum. Copper is the common coin, used interchangeably by everybody. Platinum coins are mostly a currency of account (they don’t physically exist), but the ancient Draconic Empire used them and the richest cities/neighborhoods of the Old Empire use them occasionally.

HOW MANY COINS?

So why track three or four currencies instead of two or ten or forty?

In my experience, that’s generally the sweet spot where you get the benefits of flavor and logistics before hitting diminishing returns.

What you’re generally looking for is:

• A poor currency
• One or two currencies in the range of what the PCs typically use
• A rich currency denoting unusual wealth or power

With those relative values, you’ve gained the bulk of the semantic/narrative meaning to be milked from currency.

In D&D that’s copper, silver, gold, and platinum.

In a campaign where the PCs are drug dealers, it’s the scale from garbage bags full of dirty $1 bills that need to be laundered to flashing Benjamins at the club.

In Firefly it’s bulky trade goods that need to be fenced, credits, and immunization ration bars.

Of course, if you’ve got player buy-in and you think it’ll be useful to break Firefly credits into platinum, ivoprovalyn, propoxin, and hydrozapam… great! Go for it! Complicated exchange rates between credits and Browncoat scrip used on the black market? Hard coin exchange rates based on the planet? Sure! I can see cool scenarios coming out of that!

But if it’s just one scenario, you can probably go one level up in the abstraction. If the players are just tracking silver pieces, you can still dip in at any time and say that these specific silver pieces – the ones they found on the would-be assassin – are Turcan chits, and that’s really weird because you’re in the Lasartian Dominion where they typically use Stantian roundels. I mean, you might occasionally see a Garsian slat, but a chit? No way.

That’s significant in the moment, but you don’t have to start tracking chits and slats and roundels forever after just because it was important to this specific situation.

The point, of course, is that even when you’re counting specific coins, you’re usually still looking at those coins through a layer of abstraction. The abstraction to choose (as well as when and how you choose to break that abstraction) is as much a channel for information about the game world as the Lifestyles from Infinity. So think about what information you’re choosing to communicate and to what effect.

Go to Part 1

ADVANCED TECHNIQUE: LOCAL THEMES

The traps in a particular complex (or in one section of a larger environment, like a megadungeon) should follow certain patterns/themes/principles: The kobolds cover their pit traps with woven grass mats. The archmage painted rooms in his sanctum containing magical traps purple so that his servants would know to avoid them. Traps throughout the Storm Lord’s stronghold can be bypassed using the current passphrase. The smell of gas warns of the risk of explosion.

In terms of the game world, this obviously makes sense: The kobolds use the materials they have available. The archmage and the Storm Lord have practical considerations. The threat of gas usually threatens an entire mine or cave complex.

In terms of game design, these patterns allow the players to learn from their experiences. As they learn the patterns, the players are gaining expertise which they can then use (either to activate their character’s expertise or to trump it). “Do I see any black rubies inset into the walls? No? Okay, we’re probably fine.”

When executed well, this technique can shape the entire experience of a dungeon, creating interest even in areas WITHOUT traps. For example, I had a dungeon filled with sideways-gravity pit traps (that looked just like side corridors until you walked in front of them and then— Ahhh!). Once the PCs knew they existed, they had to (a) figure out how to get people out of them, (b) figure out how to get across them safely, and (c) spent the rest of the dungeon paranoid about every side corridor they came to. This particular group figured out that they could tie a weight to a rope and throw it into an intersection to see what would happen. Later, when they were running from a monster, they saw an unexplored side corridor up ahead and suddenly had a unique dilemma to grapple with.

Once you set these patterns, you can also play with them through variations and red herrings: We know that rooms with black rubies set into the walls are dangerous, but now there’s a room with red rubies. Is it safe? Will the red rubies have some different effect?

ADVANCED TECHNIQUE: FORTUNE-IN-THE-MIDDLE

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about how traps can be detected and disabled, but what happens when they actually get triggered?

Design traps that are more interesting than “single mechanical interaction = damage or no damage.”

Framing trap interactions using fortune-in-the-middle techniques can be useful here:

• “You hear the click of a pressure plate under your boot, what do you do?”
• “Suddenly arrows start shooting out of the walls! What do you do?”
• “There’s a sharp hiss and green gas begins shooting out of nozzles in the ceiling. What do you do?”

Even if the ultimate outcome is still damage-or-no-damage (as with the arrow trap), giving the players a chance to actively react to the trap as it’s being triggered makes the trap more interesting and engaging.

I find this to be true even when 95% of the possible reactions are likely to end up being mechanically modeled the same way: Drop to the floor, dive for cover, raise your shield, try to grab the arrow out of the air… It probably all boils down to a Dodge action that gives me disadvantage when making the attack roll for the arrows, right? Despite this, the player is actively engaged with the game world and a vivid picture is being collaboratively painted.

Random Tip: In situations like this, have the player roll the disadvantage d20 they’ve created. I’m indifferent to doing this in actual combat and it’s statistically irrelevant, of course, but it’s another way of getting the player engaged in the trap’s resolution.

This technique can often be particularly effective if the player has incomplete information on what they’re reacting to: They hear a click or a hiss; or there’s a sudden change in air pressure; or the sound of clockworks ticking down behind the wall. Do they freeze? Do they turtle? Do they run? Which way?

You might notice that any trap is resolved using a fortune-in-the-middle technique when it’s found before triggering: You’ve found a pressure plate in the floor… how do you disable it or bypass it?

Fortune-in-the-middle is also one of the reasons why the classic pit trap remains so popular: If you trigger the trap and fall into the pit, you are immediately faced with the question of how you’re going to get out of the pit. (And this can range from a relatively simple solution to a fiendishly difficult one depending on the nature of the pit.)

ADVANCED TECHNIQUE: DYNAMIC TRAPS

Any trap that presents the PCs with a new situation or dilemma is gold, and you can extend that response/problem-solving interaction beyond a single resolution point with dynamic traps.

Pay particular attention to traps that create or change the environment. Classic examples include flooding rooms (which you can extend to flooding an entire dungeon), confusion gas that turns friend against friend, or a trap that releases monsters that the PCs now have to fight. The trap is merely the instigation for a larger and more involved interaction.

Another example are the old school traps that teleport the entire group (or a single PC) to a different location: Not only do they create the immediate, ongoing, short-term complication of needing to figure out where you are (and how to get out!), but in the long-term such a trap can actually turn into a resource (with the PCs using it to quickly move around the dungeon).

Also: Traps that result in one of the PCs getting stuck immediately compel the group to figure out how to solve the problem. Consider a trap that causes anyone walking within a 10-foot square to fall into a magical coma. Somebody walks in and falls unconscious. Somebody goes to help them: BAM! Also unconscious. Can the rest of the group figure out how to get them out of there without succumbing themselves?

(You’re thinking of solutions right now, aren’t you?)

A variant of this is the trap wall that slides down and seals off a room or corridor. This one is interesting because its effect can vary greatly depending on how the PCs trigger it (and combines well with trigger uncertainty): If the scout triggers it, they’re now trapped on the far side. Or it might split the group in half. Or the whole group might get through and the net effect is that they can no longer backtrack (unless they reverse the trap or tear down the wall).

On that note, clearly triggering something and then not knowing what the trigger did is a great away to get the players engaged in paranoid speculation and anxiety. Maybe it’s just a broken trap. Maybe it caused walls to shift positions throughout the dungeon. Maybe it was an alarm summoning monsters from afar.

On the other hand, a non-obvious trigger with a non-local effect can create satisfying puzzles for the PCs. It may take them a long time to figure out that the walls are shifting every time they walk across the cartouche of the Grey Emperor.

So, to briefly sum up, think about traps that:

• Create new situations/dilemmas.
• Change the environment or create a new environment.
• Can also be a resource for the PCs once they figure it out.
• Endanger or imprison the victim of the trap.
• Have varied effect depending on position/circumstance.
• Have non-local (possibly wide-ranging) effects when triggered.

ADVANCED TECHNIQUE: ONGOING EFFECTS

GMs often fall into thinking of traps as bang-bang interactions. (Pun intended.) You hit the tripwire, an arrow fires from the wall, and the trap is done.

But it’s also possible for a trap to pose an ongoing threat or hazard. For example, if a non-drow enters the sacred hall, the statues of Lloth in the entryway activate and begin filling the entrance with webs while an alarm sounds. Or the turret of spinning blades that rises up into the room, once activated, continues  spinning for an hour.

Obviously such traps are often dynamic ones, with the ongoing effect creating the new situation or dilemma for the PCs to solve.

This can also include traps that reset. Traps that instantly reset (and can trigger every time someone walks over the pressure plate, for example) are fun, but traps that take 2-3 rounds to reset (so that you might think it was a one-shot trap only for it to reactivate and zap you again) can be devilish puzzles for the players to figure out.

Longer reset intervals are also possible, but are generally only meaningful in xandered dungeons where the PCs are likely to come back to the trap later. Longer intervals might also mean a trap that needs to be manually reset (i.e., the monsters have to come by and do it), and this can even include traps that have been disabled by the PCs (i.e., the monsters find their sabotage and repair it).

ADVANCED TECHNIQUE: TRAPS AS COMPLICATION

Traps don’t have to be isolated encounters. They can be incorporated into larger, more diverse encounters to add interest and complexity. For example, fighting an ogre chieftain in a big room is fine. Fighting an ogre chieftain in a big room filled with pit traps (that the chieftain knows the location of, but the PCs don’t!) is a very different and very memorable encounter!

This can be particularly true with dynamic traps and traps with ongoing effects. A trap that can be triggered halfway through an encounter and completely changes the character or tactical situation of that encounter is a great way to spice up a battle. Such trap-like effects can also be deliberately triggered by the bad guys (they don’t have to wait for the PCs to trigger them accidentally!).

Running the dungeon as a theater of operations is great for this technique because any trap can dynamically become part of the tactical situation. Plus, once the players have learned to think of the dungeon like this, they’ll start using the traps they find to their advantage! “Let’s lure them back to the hall of alchemist’s fire and then pull the pin Diego used to jam the triggering mechanism!”

We’ve been talking about traps being integrated into combat encounters, but that’s not the only option. For example, traps can be combined with other traps to create cool, combinatory effects. A simple example I’m particularly fond of are pressure plates on the opposite sides of pit traps: You jump over the pit trap or climb out of it or disable it and walk across it… and then immediately trigger a trap on the far side.

(A Bigby’s hand that shoves them back into the trap they just avoided is always hilarious if used sparingly.)

Keep in mind that such interactions can be themes in a particular dungeon: The players can learn to be cautious of the far side of pits in Leopold’s Lair.

And what about other types of encounters? Could a nobleman lure victims into a charm person effect when negotiating? What about trying to solve a puzzle while an ongoing trap spits fire at you?

ADVANCED TECHNIQUE: NATURALLY OCCURRING “TRAPS”

We have a tendency to think of traps as designed mechanisms: Someone intentionally made the trap as a security measure.

But trap-like interactions can also be naturally occurring. Quicksand is the pulp classic, along with giant entangling lianas, spouts of lava, and icy crevasses covered by thin layers of snow.

If you’re having difficulty getting into this mindset, think about how the effect of a designed trap could naturally occur:

• A pit trap might be floor or rock ledge that has become unstable.
• A sleep spell that targets everyone in a room might be a cavern filled with soporific fungus.
• A fireball trap can be a cavern filled with explosive gas

A related technique are dungeon features that were designed for a practical purpose, but which can be traps for the unwitting or unwary. (“What does this lever in the old dwarven forge do? Ahhhhhh! Molten lava!”) You can also have features that have been broken down and become hazards due to neglect and the passage of time.

ADVANCED TECHNIQUE: BROKEN & SPENT TRAPS

Traps themselves can break down over time. The PCs can find their shattered and spent remnants as they explore the dungeon.

If you’re running an open table, this sort of thing is happening organically all the time, with groups coming across the wreckage left by previous expeditions. In any case, these scenes often paint a story of what came before: The skeleton at the bottom of the open pit. The flame spout hacked apart by a magical blade. The arrow hole with a piton spiked through it.

As such, these are cool dungeon details. But more than that, they are an opportunity for the PCs to learn about the types of traps that might be found in the dungeon. They’re an opportunity to gain expertise.

In many cases, traps don’t actually need to be broken in order to contain (or be surrounded with) evidence of the carnage they’ve wrought in the past. (Or, conversely, the absence of any signs of activity in an otherwise busy complex can itself be a clue.)

Go to Part 3: Traps In Practice – Raiders of the Lost Ark

People have a problem with traps: They’re boring.

Not only are they boring when they’re triggered — with the DM arbitrarily telling you to make a saving throw at the penalty of suffering some minor amount of damage — they engender boring play by encouraging players to turtle up and methodically, laboriously, and excruciatingly examine every square inch of the dungeon in torrid bouts of pace-murdering paranoia.

And if you feel this way, you’re in illustrious company. Here’s Gary Gygax giving some of the worst GMing advice you’ll hopefully ever read (Dungeon Master’s Guide, 1979):

Assume your players are continually wasting time (thus making the so-called adventure drag out into a boring session of dice rolling and delay) if they are checking endlessly for traps and listening at every door. If this persists, despite the obvious displeasure you express, the requirement that helmets be doffed and mail coifs removed to listen at a door, and then be carefully replaced, the warnings about ear seekers, and frequent checks for wandering monsters (q.v.), then you will have to take more direct part in things. Mocking their over-cautious behavior as near cowardice, rolling huge handfuls of dice and then telling them the results are negative, and statements to the effect that: “You detect nothing, and nothing has detected YOU so far—” might suffice. If the problem should continue, then rooms full of silent monsters will turn the tide, but that is the stuff of later adventures.

Uh… yeah. Do literally none of that.  But you can feel Gygax’s palpable frustration with the style of play his own killer dungeons had created boiling off the page.

Despite this, traps are a staple of Dungeons & Dragons. They date back to the earliest days of the hobby and they remain a prominent part of the game’s culture and its adventures. In fact, if you go back to the ‘70s and ‘80s you’ll find that traps weren’t just tolerated, they were gleefully celebrated.

Is that because people were clueless back then? They were just fooling themselves into thinking they liked traps?

No, in fact. It turns out that traps used to be different.

We’ll start by looking at how they were different, and then we’ll talk about why that’s important.

QUICK HISTORICAL SURVEY

If you look all the way back to the original edition of D&D in 1974, there are three things to note:

1. Thieves didn’t exist yet, and there were no skills (or other checks) that could be used to find or disable traps.
2. Traps did not automatically trigger. Instead, they triggered on a roll of 1 or 2 on a d6. (In other words, any time someone walked down a hallway with a trap in it, there was only a 1 in 3 chance the trap would actually go off.)
3. Carefully searching an area for a trap took 1 turn. This was a substantial systemic cost, because the DM made a wandering monster check (with a 1 in 6 chance) every single turn.

In Supplement 1: Greyhawk (1975), the thief class was added. There was now a skill check that could be made to find and disable traps.

AD&D (1977-79) dropped the 1 in 3 chance of a trap triggering. This mechanic was still commonly found in published modules of the era, however, and, therefore, remained part of the meme-sphere for a time. However, as play moved away from open table megadungeons and DMs increasingly ran disposable dungeons designed for a single traverse, the 1 in 3 chance meant that some traps would never be encountered. The idea of PCs not seeing every single scrap of material in a scenario became a sort of heresy, and this mechanic phased out.

The use of wandering monster checks also became deprecated. First by significantly reducing the frequency of checks and, later, often eliminating the wandering monster check entirely. This eliminated the system costs associated with searching anywhere and everywhere.

Over the course of 2^nd Edition, modules slowly standardized trap stat blocks. 3^rd Edition then incorporated these into the DMG (actually presenting the most extensive resource of pre-built traps seen in a core rulebook up to that point). Whereas previously the presentation of traps had been organic and narrative, it was now largely formalized into a check-or-damage mechanical format.

3^rd Edition also substantially reduced the amount of time required to search an area for traps from 1 turn (10 minutes) to, generally, 1 round.

Jumping to 5^th Edition, we discover both the worst advice and some good advice for running traps jammed together on the same page.

The worst advice is the mechanical structure: Passive Wisdom (Perception) checks determine whether anyone notices the trap. If they do, an Intelligence (Investigation) allows the character to figure out how to disable it. And then a Dexterity (Thieves’ Tools) check determines whether they can actually disable it.

In other words, by 5^th Edition the mechanical resolution of a trap has devolved into an entirely automatic sequence of mechanical interactions which the players neither initiate nor make meaningful choices during.

No wonder people think traps are boring! You could do this with ANY element of the game and it would be boring! Imagine if every social interaction was resolved with a passive Charisma check to initiate the conversation, a Wisdom (Insight) check to determine what you should say to them, and a Charisma (Persuasion) check to see if you say it successfully.

Both the fiction and the mechanics have atrophied, and the fiction-mechanics cycle has broken down.

The good advice is this bit:

Foiling traps can be a little more complicated. Consider a trapped treasure chest. If the chest is opened without first pulling on the two handles set in it sides, a mechanism inside fires a hail of poison needles toward anyone in front of it. After inspecting the chest and making a few checks, the characters are still unsure if it’s trapped. Rather than simply open the chest, they prop a shield in front of it and push the chest open at a distance with an iron rod. In this case, the trap still triggers, but the hail of needles fires harmlessly into the shield.

Why is this good advice? And what does it mean to actually put this advice into practice?

HOW TRAPS WORK

Let’s briefly sum up how traps used to work:

1. There was a cost associated with initiating a search, so players had to make deliberate and specific choices about when and where to look for traps.
2. The 1 in 3 mechanic made the outcome of even identical traps less predictable: It wasn’t always the guy in front who triggered the trap. Sometimes it would be the last person in line. Or maybe the trap would go off in the middle of the group. Or you might walk past it safely on your way into the dungeon only to trigger it as you were desperately trying to run back out again. Completely different dynamics (and experiences) in each case.
3. There were no mechanics, so players had to creatively interact with a trap in order to both find and deal with it. And, on the flip-side, this also forced DMs to creatively define the nature of the trap beyond skill check DCs.

Let’s start with the cost. If you want to avoid every expedition being slowed to a snail’s crawl by paranoia (or players simply feeling resentful that they have to choose between having fun and avoiding an intermittent damage tax), then there needs to be a cost associated with searching so that the players have to strategically decide when it’s worthwhile to pay that cost. In other words, the cost forces the players to make meaningful (and interesting) choices.

This cost will usually take the form of time: Time wasted searching for traps makes you vulnerable to other threats. Wandering monster checks are one way of modeling an environment filled with active threats that can find the PCs. Adversary rosters are another. Any form of time limit can be effective, however, as long as the searching chews up meaningful chunks of that time.

Alternatively, recognize that there is no cost in the current situation and, therefore, no reason for the PCs to not laboriously search every inch and be as safe as possible. This usually means that no meaningful choices are being made during these searches, which is what The Art of Pacing describes as empty time. You want to skip past that empty time and get to the next meaningful choice. I recommend using Let It Ride techniques here.

Note: This may not always be the right call. If the players are having fun making those meticulous decisions, then they ARE meaningful choices and it’s OK to live in that moment. Similarly, these choices can also be used to effect. I’ve run horror scenarios, for example, where the fact that the PCs have been reduced to terrified paranoia is 100% the desired emotional space, and cutting past those moments of paranoia wouldn’t be the right call. The thing you’re trying to avoid here is boredom.

Next let’s talk about the trigger uncertainty. I don’t think it’s universally true that traps should have unreliable triggers, but it’s a concept that’s worth playing around with if you haven’t tried it. There’s a lot of fun stuff to be discovered in play here. To a large extent, you can just graft the old 1 in 3 mechanic back in. (Or use slightly different odds, like a coin-flip.) Alternatively, you might have a trap trigger 100% of the time, but randomly determine which party member or rank in the marching order it afflicts.

Finally, there’s creative engagement with the players. This is vital. If all you can do with a trap is make a skill check to Search for it, make a skill check to Disable it, and/or make a saving throw to avoid taking damage from it, then the trap will be boring. The players have to be able to creatively engage with traps the same way they can creatively engage other aspects of the game world.

However, achieving this does NOT require you to simply throw out the mechanics.

PLAYER EXPERTISE

In The Art of Rulings, I actually use a trapped chest to demonstrate the fundamental principles of making a ruling in an RPG because properly adjudicating a trap is an almost perfect example of how a GM can use the mechanics of an RPG effectively. To briefly review:

• Passive observation is automatically triggered.
• Player expertise activates character expertise.
• Player expertise can trump character expertise.

If we look at 5^th Edition’s mechanical method for traps, it exists entirely in the first two categories: Traps are detected through passive Wisdom (Perception) checks that do not require a declaration from the players (i.e., passive observation is automatically triggered). Analyzing the trap and then disabling it presumably require player declarations, but the rote formulation is the most basic example of player expertise activating character expertise. It requires no meaningful decision-making on their part: You detect a trap, you say you’re analyzing it, and then you say you’re disabling it.

To make traps more interesting, what we want to do is push that entire interaction up the hierarchy: Instead of starting with passive observation and ending with shallow declarations of player expertise, we want to start with the players making meaningful choices and end by opening the door to players creatively figuring out how to trump the basic skill check.

Start by requiring player expertise to search for traps. You can use 5^th Edition’s rules for passive checks if you want (I’m not a fan), but it should still require the players to say, “I’m going to check for traps.” As we’ve discussed, of course, there has to be a cost to this declaration for it to be meaningful. Otherwise it’s just a rote catechism of dungeoncrawling (make sure you say it or the DM will getcha!). What you want is for the characters to be making broad strategic choices about when and where and why they’re choosing to search (and, conversely, when and why and where they choose NOT to search).

In order for this to be effective, the placement of traps has to make sense. As the 3^rd Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide says:

The solution is to place traps only when appropriate. Characters and creatures put traps on tombs and vaults to keep out intruders, but traps can be annoying and inappropriate in well-traveled areas. An intelligent creature is never going to build a trap that it might fall victim to itself.

If the placement of traps is random or capricious, there’s nothing for the players to base their decisions on. The result will be either frustration or resignation.

As a rule of thumb, you’ll know you’ve gotten the balance right if the players start actively trying to collect intel on traps. (They might question prisoners, check blueprints, cast auguries, etc.) If they’re doing that, then they both value those strategic decisions AND have faith in the logic and consistency of the game world.

Design Note: You can also explore – possibly at the prompting of your players – resolution options somewhere between not searching and detailed searching. An old school example is tapping a ten foot pole in front of you while walking down a dungeon corridor. This standard operating procedure probably doesn’t reduce the party’s speed, but still has a chance of prematurely triggering a trap before someone walks into it. This synced well with the old 1 in 3 chance of triggering a trap: The GM could simply add such a check for the pole-tapping (or perhaps a 1 in 6 chance to reflect that the pole was less likely than a full-grown person to effect certain triggers).

The method thus had a significantly reduced cost (in gold and encumbrance costs for the pole itself, plus a penalty to stealth tests from the tap-tap-tapping), but a similarly reduced efficiency in terms of actually detecting the trap.

If the players are expressing a desire for some sort of “extra caution, but not so extra that we have to pay the normal cost for a detailed search,” ask them what that looks like. Maybe they’ll come up with pole-tapping. Maybe they’ll come up with something completely different! Then see if there’s a way you can model that with a minor cost and/or minor benefit.

Another option is Matryoshka search techniques coupled to passive observation. Rather than saying “you found a trap,” you can instead use 3^rd Edition-style Spot checks or 5^th Edition-style passive Perception checks to incorporate details into your description of the dungeon which, if investigated in more detail, would reveal the trap. (For example, you might mention the line of decorative holes running down the length of the hall… which turn out to be the firing tubes for an arrow trap.)

PLAYER CREATIVITY

When it comes to the trap itself, the description of the trap should not be limited to a mechanical effect. Understand how the trap works and communicate that to the players (either in response to their search efforts or when the trap is triggered). It is these details which allow the players to engage the trap creatively – to “get their Indiana Jones on.” This is what begins to move a trap away from being a rote mechanical interaction and turns it into an interesting and interactive experience.

There’s no hard-and-fast rule for this, but if the PCs start doing stuff like scavenging the tension ropes that reset a spike trap in order to tie up a kobold prisoner or draining the alchemist’s fire through the nozzles of a flame trap to pour down the arrow holes of another, then you’ve nailed it.

You’ll also start seeing the PCs thinking about ways to bypass the trap, often in ways that also bypass the mechanical resolution of disabling the trap. (This is where player expertise trumps character expertise!) For example, they might use chalk to outline a pit trap so that everyone can walk safely around it. Or put a board in front of the arrow holes in the wall. Alternatively, some of these solutions might simply shift the mechanical resolution: Placing a board across a pit, for example, might require Dexterity (Acrobatics) checks for everyone to walk across instead of Dexterity (Thieves’ Tools) to disable.

And if the PCs do disable the trap, I recommend asking them how they actually do it. (Or, at the very least, describe it specifically when narrating resolution.) When they disable the pit trap do they wedge it open? Do they nail a board over the top of it? Do they wedge it with spikes so that it can support their weight one at a time? The difference will matter if they end up getting chased back down that hall by ogres!

Getting this type of specificity can sometimes be challenging with magical traps. Check out Random GM Tips: Disarming Magical Traps for some thoughts on how you can make these more interesting than just saying, “It’s magic!”

Go to Part 2: Advanced Techniques

Go to Part 1

NODE 6: DAVIS FARM

• Located in Stearns County near Holdingford (the “moonshine capital of Minnesota”).
• About 90 miles north of the Twin Cities.
• Bootlegging is, in fact, rampant up here. The biggest moonshine-brewing operation is run by the monks of St. John’s Abbey, but a lot of local farms (currently mired in the middle of the Agricultural Depression that lasted from 1920 through 1934) get in on the action.

THE DAVIS FARM

• They farm corn and have a small number of cattle. The fields are harvested now, so there are just stubs of corn stalks jutting up here and there like a primitive, haphazard cemetery.
• They’ve had some light snow up here and the fields are dusted with it (although you can still see the raw, frozen dirt between the small drifts).
• The buildings are set back from the road, with a narrow drive running between the shields and then dropping over a small rise.
• It’s a simple farm: There’s a house, a barn, and a machine shed.

THE HOUSE

• Ellie Davis and Billie Davis live here.
• Living room and kitchen on the ground floor.
• Bedroom and bathroom upstairs.

THE BARN

• Stalls for a half dozen milk cows and mounds of hay for their winter feed.
• Hidden Kegs: Kegs of Minnesota 13 whiskey are hidden under the hay mound. (See Node 2: Minnesota 13 for analysis.)

THE MACHINE SHED

• Crowded with two tractors (one no longer working) and the Davis’ pick-up truck, along with corn hooks, plows, hay rakes, harrows, and grain bins.
• Fake Wall: The back wall of the machine shed is fake. There’s a hidden room in the back with Ellie’s still.

THE STILL

• Chemistry: It’s a sophisticated set-up. Ellie is re-naturing the denatured alcohol and then using bubblegum to hide the lingering flavor.
• Ethanol Barrels: Label coding on the bottom of the barrels indicates that they came from Node 7: Harris Chemical Plant.

ELLIE DAVIS

APPEARANCE

• Prop: Photo of Ellie Davis

ROLEPLAYING NOTES

• Witty and uncouth.
• Big grin.
• Thumbs through her suspenders.

BACKGROUND

• She’s the brains of the operation. The only bootlegger in Stearns County who can deal with the denatured alcohol Oleg gets from the Harris Chemical Plant.
• Went to college, but had to come back home when her mom got sick. Ended up marrying “that big goof” Billie and settled down to the happy life of a farm wife.
• Got into bootlegging because it seemed like everybody else in Stearns County was doing it, and with the chemistry courses she took in college she’s got a knack for it.

CLUE

• Reassurance: She knows the source of Oleg’s denatured ethanol is from the Harris Chemical Plant. (Label coding on the bottom of the barrels.)
• Reassurance: They sell their Minnesota 13 through Oleg Andersson (who runs it into Minneapolis and St. Paul).

NOTES

• Ellie Davis is inspired by the story told by Elaine Davis of her grandmother, a central Minnesota farm wife during Prohibition, who leapt into bed and pretended to be sick when a bunch of G-men spilled out of their cars into the front yard. She delayed ‘em long enough for her husband to make sure the kegs were safely stowed under the hay mounds in the barn.

ELLIE DAVIS: Athletics 6, Driving 4, Firearms 4, Fleeing 5, Scuffling 7, Weapons 6, Health 8
Alertness Modifier: +1 (eyes open)
Stealth Modifier: +1 (Hides in plain sight)
Weapons: Fists (-2), Whatever’s Around (0), Shotgun – while at the house, (+1)

BILLIE DAVIS

APPEARANCE

• Prop: Photo of Billie Davis

ROLEPLAYING NOTES

• Cool, dry sense of humor.
• Ignorant, but not in a willful way.
• Speaks slow. (And gets slower if you’ve pissed him off.)

BACKGROUND

• Billie is a farmer who helps Ellie with her work on the stills. He can keep the fires lit, and knows what you can drink and what’ll make you blind, but not much more than that.
• He’s never left Stearns County.

CLUE

• Reassurance: He knows the source of Oleg’s denatured ethanol is from the Harris Chemical Plant. (Label coding on the bottom of the barrels.)
• Reassurance: They sell their Minnesota 13 through Oleg Andersson (who runs it into Minneapolis and St. Paul).

BILLIE DAVIS: Athletics 12, Driving 4, Firearms 4, Fleeing 2, Scuffling 6, Weapons 2, Health 12
Alertness Modifier: -1 (focused on work)
Stealth Modifier: 0 (unskilled)
Weapons: Fists (-2), Farm Implements (+0 or +1, depending), Rifle or Shotgun (+1)

Go to Node 7: Harris Chemical Plant