Reddit reviews Grimtooth's Traps: A Game-Master's Aid for All Role-Playing Systems

Seems that the door/chest is lined on the inside with flint. Steel, meet flint. Sparks, meet gunpowder.

Dust of Sneezing and Choking - if you fail a save, you fall on the floor unable to do anything other than sneeze, cough and choke for some number of rounds/turns. Great time for a monster to attack.

As far as the other dust, I'll just leave that to your imagination. Wouldn't want to give too much away to any of my players that may be reading this.

Also, the Grimtooth's Traps book series has entire chapters devoted to 'curing' door kickers and room choppers.

Old modules for inspiration:

Keep on the Borderlands

The Village of Hommlet

The Isle of Dread

I-6 Ravenloft

Glorious game supplements:

GM Gems (Goodman Games)

Heroes of Legend (Central Casting)

Grimtooth's Traps

Need an adventure tonight?

Any old issue of Dungeon Magazine

I didn't actually include a lot of resources to read, there are many more out there, really as many resources as there are different ways to play "old school". I'd like to rectify that in this follow-up post (and if it seems like a lot of research, well, it is forty years of RPG history after all!), in addition to covering a few topics I forgot! What use is an incomplete guide, you know?

Old school play originally came from war-gaming (OD&D was a basically a game created as a supplement to a fantasy supplement for a medieval miniatures war-game - it often referenced the Chainmail rules and basically assumed you owned them already), and therefore the very original way of playing was as a sort of "world commander" (GM) creating a scenario that the players, taking on the roles of one or more individuals, would attempt to "defeat" (in this case working together, rather than against each other, as war-gaming usually went instead). This style of play is most evident in so-called tournament modules like Tomb of Horrors, or, in a more recent incarnation, the fourthcore movement, which endeavors to bring this sort of gamist challenge to 4e D&D's more modern ruleset.

Over time, the players usually began to think less of themselves as being a commander of a crew of soldiers and more as a puppetmaster acting out the role of a single person or rarely a few people, and thus the more modern (as early as 1980 of course!) method of playing RPGs came about. There have been varying levels of character immersion since then, but basically old school covers the whole gamut of "DM vs players tournament module" to "collaborative story telling and high adventure".

Dice, or at least random results to do with luck, are very important to old school gaming. Gygax was known to consider diceless RPGs to be fine enough games and good fun, but to not actually be RPGs (and as he invented the genre can we truly argue? I mean we can but that's neither here nor there :p), which required elements of luck represented by dice.

As old school RPGs evolved, their rules-lite nature became their defining factor. Things like weapon vs armor tables and weapon speed tables were mentioned by Gygax himself to be detrimental to the core rules of AD&D since they were too complicated, and that it was better to have a fast-running fascimile of reality than a slow-running slightly-better fascimile of reality. (Notably he said that he would've considered releasing them in a duelling supplement had he it all to do over again, but that even though he could've made truly complicated rules for combat, being an avid miniatures war-gamer, he avoided it on purpose for the above reasons).

Finally, "old school" sort of straddles the gap between "give the players what they want by breaking the rules" and "are you kidding? Stop powergaming by ignoring the rules!" as a result of the broad mix of above attitudes. The best way to qualify this, I think, is to consider each breach of the rules a magnanimous gift by the GM to the players, and that at any time you can simply say "nah, not this time". You'll find the level of rules adherance that is the line in the sand for you and your group sooner or later, though, so don't worry about it.

So, with all of those things I sort of forgot being covered, without further ado an OSR resources list:

The Dungeon Alphabet - A product from Goodman Games (the same people who brought us the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG) shows a serious understanding of what makes an old school dungeon, well, old school. It's in easy A-to-Z format, complete with tables (there's those darn tables again, I told you!) and tons of great information.

If you're at all familiar with 4th edition D&D, or really even if you're not, the items on the fourthcore site listed above is a good glimpse into the kind of mindset behind creating tournament style dungeon experiences. It also brings to the table a fourthcore alphabet, which is inspired by the above dungeon alphabet text, which is basically an A-to-Z on how to create a dark and deadly dungeon experience a la tomb of horrors. The two alphabetical tomes go well together, and neither is particularly reliant on system statistics but rather contain ideas.

Any of the Grimtooth's Traps books (some also available in PDF I think) go well with the above content for providing, well, traps, obviously. These are traps of the sort of fiendish DM-vs-players tournament variety, but by using the "rulings not rules" mentality can easily be softened as appropriate by just changing out some damage dice or making deadly effects merely debilitating as necessary.

The random esoteric creature generator is something that you can really get a kick out of for creating weird-ass monsters. As mentioned, stranger things are better, and sometimes even campy material is ok (random tables lead to a lot of this kind of thing :p). I highly recommend using it to generate a few critters and then place them in roughly appropriate areas or on roughly appropriate tables and just see how things go.

This post on ENWorld - This thing is brilliant because it breaks down dungeons to their simplest possible components. Applicable to any sort of level design, really, including for video games, but if you're going to make a megadungeon that's something to consider as priority #1.

This blog post - Contains really good ideas about how to fight giant critters using a few house-rules in an old-school framework.

This site may have some overlap with megadungeons.com, but it's also another good megadungeon resource and old school site.

This post has more of those lovely random tables, this time for making random idols. Very helpful for creating the strange and unexpected.

Finally this post brings to bear an analysis of how to make magic systems that are a bit less ordinary by making them difficult to quantify scientifically. This is extremely hard to pull off without seeming entirely arbitrary, but being arbitrary is also sometimes part of being old school, so there you go.

By reading what each of these links and their related content have to say I'm sure you'll have your next few weeks full of burning your eyes out from staring at your monitor, but hey, I did say I'd try to be exhaustive!

And now, appropriately enough, I'm exhausted from typing so much, so I'm going to go to something else. Hope that all helped!

For PURE Eeeeeeeevil though, design your own module, liberally sprinkled with additions from the Grimtooth's Traps series of books...

Grimtooth

Enjoy your TPK:

http://annarchive.com/files/Grimtooth's%20Traps.pdf

...or if that turns out to be a dead link and not just a local issue:

http://www.amazon.com/Grimtooths-Traps-Game-Masters-Role-Playing-Systems/dp/0940244756

Ok I was an idiot. Direct links gone now. If you want those books you can purchase them legally from Amazon.

Traps

Traps Too

Lite

Fore

Ate

Bazaar

Dungeon of Doom

There's a similar thread here. If you've got the cash, you could try Grimtooth's Traps or The Book of Challenges.

Reminds me of Grimtooth's Traps :)

https://www.amazon.com/Grimtooths-Traps-Game-Masters-Role-Playing-Systems/dp/0940244756

You want Grimtooths traps.

http://www.amazon.com/Grimtooths-Traps-Game-Masters-Role-Playing-Systems/dp/0940244756

Also
http://www.amazon.com/Grimtooths-Dungeons-Dragons-Fantasy-Roleplaying/dp/1588461394

You'll have to do a little work to make them 4e compatable, but it shouldn't be hard. Most of these traps are more ingenious devices rather that straight up damage.

Also there was a great module for 2e called Axe of the Dwarvish Lords that had a dwarven city taken over by goblins. They trapped the whole place so a party of high level dudes are challenged by a bunch of gobs. It's an amazing map, huge underground fortress. But it's more guerrilla warfare than ingenious mechanisms.

Available on Amazon

I love traps! Every good dungeon should have at least ONE of them IMO. When run correctly, they're a great way to engage your players and get them to work together as a group.

When you design a trap, you need to have a couple things in mind.

The PCs need a way to know that a trap is present.
You (the DM) need to know what triggers the trap.
There needs to be a way for the inhabitants of the dungeon to circumvent the trap.

When running traps, it is incredibly important that PCs have a chance to detect the trap WITHOUT ROLLING. Detecting that a trap is present should not be the encounter. Tell the players about the bloodstain on the ground in front of the hidden wall spear trap. Mention strange bulbous rock formations on the ceiling if one of them is the trigger for a pendulum swinging down. Once again, DON'T MAKE THEM ROLL FOR THIS. The players need to have more agency in a trap encounter other than "which skill check do you want to roll".

Once they know something's up (presuming they connect the dots on their own, if they don't do this then tough luck for them), then the challenge of navigating past the trap comes up, and that's where the players get to come up with a plan and work together to overcome the encounter.

Some great reads to give you ideas on trap design are Grimtooth's traps as well as S1: The Tomb of horrors.

I co-DMed a larger group (between eight and fifteen people, eventually it got down to about seven regulars) and highly recommend that style. Not only do you have someone to plan with, one of you can focus on the story and the other with bookkeeping.

We would usually get together one night a week over beers (beer is essential) and figure out our general plan for the week, and also have a backup plan sketched out if they diverged from the usual "go to this town and talk to [this NPC]" D&D formulation. We had an overarching storyline we hoped they would follow as well as background on the continent in general, the seven or eight largest cities on it and their surrounding areas, and settled on a general hobgoblin infestation for what was plaguing whatever area they happened to be in. Then we'd carpool to the session and work out details or refresh what we'd talked about earlier in the week.

It speeds up D&D combat in particular tremendously to have one asking "What are you doing this turn?" and the other noting damage done and taken. Having someone else to briefly consult with on hard choices or where to take the story or given situation next without involving the players was also a huge benefit.

There were a huge number of other bonuses to this method: If someone was split off from the group, one of us would just take them in the other room and run their part of the story solo instead of making the rest of the group wait.

"Going private" would keep the other players in the dark about what the solo was up to, leaving a nice RP opportunity for that player to fill in or not fill in what happened to them once they rejoined the group. Conversely, the group could do the same to the solo player.

The other thing that I adopted in our last campaign was the belief that even though the characters were low-level the world around them wasn't necessarily the same. We devised dungeons that had really really nasty stuff three levels down with the easy stuff up top. Sure, we'd put a rockslide or something in their way to make sure they really wanted to go there if they ignored any sorts of warnings about what they might uncover. However, with high risk comes high reward--had they killed the big guy maybe there was a huge pile of gold or some amazing items to be had.

Also, you'll need a copy of this.