Traps

The first area to cover is traps. Traps are generally not too complex a thing in Dungeons and Dragons or in your RPG. In a fantasy setting you have physical and magical traps that players can go into, and since I write these from the point of Dungeons and Dragons, we’ll work with that system.

When using a trap there are a few steps for creating something interesting. Though not every trap needs to be that interesting. It, instead, is able to be used to set expectations if you want. I create a trap in a room at the start of the dungeon, every player is going to check every room for traps. And I think there are good uses for that. But let’s talk about those steps.

• Type of Trap
• Finding Trap
• Disarming Trap
• Setting Off Trap

Type of Trap

Each of these is simple in it’s own right. But you need each of them to be there. Firstly, what type of trap is it goin to be. Physical, magical, and if it’s physical, pit trap, spike trap, poison trap. Or if it is magical, fire, water, changes room, teleport? There are a lot of fun things that you can do. But pick that and that is going to determine some other things as you go down.

Finding Trap

Next is how can the players find the trap. Even if it is arrows being shot off of a floor trigger when they step in a spot, there are signs. Or a magical trap, there might be a glyph that is triggered. But I think there are two worthwhile numbers coming up with. First, what is the difficulty for just passively perceiving the trap? If someone is very good with their passive perception can they just spot it? Or what is the perception check to see it. And then, what is an investigation if they are looking for a specific type of trap.

The second one shows up more if it’s a known trap. If in room one there is a pit trap, in room two they might look for a pit trap again. That is investigating to find something specific. So use both.

Disarming Trap

Next up is disarming a trap. Know kind of how this is going to work. Let players maybe brute force it, if you don’t have a rogue in the party. The Barbarian rips up the pressure plate on the floor, sure. But generally, rogue with thieves tools. Or if it’s a magical trap, do they need to dispel magic?

But this is again about creating that difficulty for the check. It might be a 12 for a rogue with thieves tools and slight of hand to be able to disarm it. It isn’t that complex a trap. But if you don’t have the rogue that day, or the barbarian gets there first, it might be a 18 strength/athletics check to rip it out of the ground. So know what numbers you want. But more so, know the ballpark. If you think they may come up with an alternative way know if you want that to be as easy as a normal way or harder.

Setting Off Trap

Finally, they might just set off the trap. Now, traps can be their own mini little puzzle in a game. What is going to happen if the whole party falls into a pit traps. Now they need to get out. Or maybe it is going to be timed event now for them to get through clouds of poison while taking damage?

Sometimes it is as simple as, a volley of arrows shoot and that is it. Or the player literally gets their foot stuck in a trap (or hand if they were disarming it). But think about how you want to use the trap and the trap affect to advance story or create interesting interactions if you want.

Bonus Dungeon Master Tool – Traps and Expecations

I talked about this a little but I knew I wanted to come back to it. What is the expectation when you create a trap in the first room of a dungeon? Well, the simple answer is, there are going to be more traps. In fact, there are going to be lots of traps. The player is going to check every room for traps.

Change Them Up

Now that the players are checking for traps there are a few things that you can do. Firstly, change up the traps. Not every room should have a trap, but when you set the expectation that there can be traps don’t waste your and the players time by only having one in the first room. But change up the traps, magical and non-magical in nature.

Only One

Or, do only have a single one. But make it so difficult and terrifying that most groups would immediately run in fear. Since a good adventuring party doesn’t have enough fear or brains to know to be afraid, they will just keep checking for traps. If you do that, though, make the rest of the dungeon a cake walk. All the energy was on the start of it, the rest is just empty hallways because no one ever gets through.

Develop History

Another thing, and last one I’ll talk about, is you can develop history. The history of the dungeon could be new traps are being created so it means that someone is still down there taking care of it. Or you might find adventurers who were killed before and the players gather pieces of history from them. Nothing like the first room and the adventurers see someone dead in a sprung trap. Now you immediately plant concern and can give them some history with the adventurers journal as to what they knew of this dungeon.

Puzzles

That is more on traps than I had expected. But I think that doing a great job with traps can make for an interesting campaign. And it is going to give the rogue something to do besides trying to steal everything that isn’t bolted to the ground.

But now we are onto puzzles. And puzzles, I think, offer three different routes to go. Though, the routes can overlap in some ways. But I want to firstly talk about who the puzzle is for, that is two of the routes. And then finally, what if there isn’t an answer.

Determining Who the Puzzle is For

This might sound odd. But there are two groups that the puzzle could be for. When you create a puzzle it is either for the characters in the game. Or it is for the players out of the game. Neither is a wrong way to create a puzzle and doing both can offer a lot of fun in the game for the players. But this is the first thing you want to determine when you create a puzzle, who it is for. Because that is going to change what you do.

Puzzles for the Characters

Puzzles for characters are going to be less of the cryptograms, jumbles, patterns, things like that. Instead, for the characters, a brain teaser or pieces of history and knowledge needed are the type of puzzle that you are going to create.

You go to the temple of the god of death, for example. Well, what is it that your characters know about the god of death? You create a puzzle where they need to know something about it. The players outside of the game don’t know this god of death unless you gave them a document with it all in there (don’t do this it’s a waste of your time). But the characters in the game sure do because it’s the god of death, they’d have heard of it at least.

So think about the checks that you want them to make. It might be an investigation to see if they can tell how someone beat the puzzle before. Or it might be a religion check to determine what they remember about the god of death. Again, it’s the god of death, the characters know of it for sure, but do they know the right detail.

So a puzzle for the characters is all about the checks that they do. And you decide how hard or easy you want it to be. But if you make it too hard, also have a way around it.

Example – The God of Death

So let’s run with this god of death example. There is a dungeon where they need to get down to the lowest level. They know that there is a secret passage called the River Styx that they can use to get down to the bottom. But they get there and it’s locked away behind a riddle.

“Bestow they worship upon me, pay the tolls once, twice, and three. Coins of death marked for their fate. Hours gone don’t tarry late.”

Solution

So, what is the answer to that riddle? The players need to provide the total value of the cost to cross the River Styx either three times or six times. Once, Twice, and Three could be 1+1+1 paying it three times. Or it could be 1+2+3, paying the set each time. I think I’d set this as an intelligence check of 10, pretty simple if they want both options.

But it is also a specific coin. What is a coin marked for death. Well that might be a soul coin from the hells. A soul given up to a devil would be interesting payment to get across the River Styx. This one is more of a religion check, and I think while people know of the god of death, it is taboo to worship them, so it’s less common. Make it a difficulty check of 15 for religion, so tougher.

What If They Fail

So what if in this case they all fail their religion rolls. They don’t know about the soul coins. But after feeding in a bunch of coins and nothing happening are they locked out of the dungeon? No, there is a longer path that is more dangerous for them. But if you need a roll to succeed to progress the story, always gives a different, harder way for them to go forward. If it is just a case of finding some treasure that would be nice. Sure, it is possible that they never figure it out. But if it is for anything related to story, give them that other option.

Puzzles for the Players

Next up, a puzzle can be for the players. This one I think is a bit simpler. Yes, you still might incorporate checks that the characters can do to give the players hints. But it is all about the players for this one. A cryptogram is a great example of this. You give them a little bit of a key and then let them get going on breaking the whole thing. It is something that all the players can take part in, but it isn’t part of the game and it isn’t meant for them to roleplay it out.

I am going to skip an example on this, but it can be a lot of different things. I made a room with gouts of flames that were being shot out. As I describe what the players watch, I kind of expect the players to take notes and solve the path. It isn’t something you do by trial and error but in that case, I also make it simple. And if the players aren’t solving it, I give them an intelligence roll and give some more details that make the puzzle simpler.

Puzzles with no Answer

The final thing is something that I think more Dungeon Masters should do. This is going to be the best Dungeon Master tip overall for traps and puzzles. It is simply, don’t create a solution. This is something that you can do with puzzles but also just with issues that arise. Throw the players a problem and see what happens.

Why wouldn’t you have a solution, though? The simple answer is, the players can come up with one. And this is something that can be done in character as well. You just wait until they try something that you think makes enough sense or is cool enough to work. When they suggest it or they try it, it can work as simple as that. And let’s face it, there is one of you and probably two to eight players, so more brains, more creative solutions.

This also can let you set a time for it. If you think, I want them to sweat a bit on this trap, give them ten minutes to discuss it and try different things, or maybe even longer if it’s supposed to be key and important. Or if it is supposed to be pretty trivial, make it that way, let the first cool or fun idea work.

Example from My Game

This came to be because I actually created one of these, kind of, last night in my game. The players were on a labyrinthian type floor of a tower, the main dungeon in the campaign. Every room was the same except for a few had plaques on the wall. The big thing is that they needed to get to the stairs for the next level. To do that they needed to go into rooms and figure out where to go.

In the rooms, and only a few of them, did I leave clues for the players. But the clues were fairly general. In the first room it said the following.

First Puzzle

“Beware – Zombies
Go this way.”

That was next to one of the four doors in the square room (one per wall). The players had to decide what that meant. But little did they know, and they messed this up in an interesting way, was that every room a character went into had more and stronger zombies. So if they fought, each time the zombies would get tougher and tougher and more and more.

Second Puzzle

So the player went the right direction, eventually, after one had done a loop to see how it would work and ramping up their difficulty. Eventually they got to another room with another plaque and a dead adventurer.

“Two Far
[down arrow]”

This meant head back two rooms and go south. Now going back is going to cause more zombies and harder zombies to appear. At this point, by the way, the zombies had +23 to hit and were dealing 1D6+21 damage.

The Real Puzzle

So the new puzzle was simpler but harder. How do we get through rooms without getting hit by the zombies. They had already spent a fair number of resources on a battle or two with the zombies. And I didn’t give them a solution. If they had gone the ideal route, it wouldn’t have been a major deal. But because they went further and created more zombies, it was way harder for them.

So two flight spells later and the Warforged character being disguised as a zombie the players got to the right room. But they needed to do it in a way where they weren’t taking 3-4 attacks of opportunity each, Because say it was three, all likely hit with a +23 to hit, and that’s a minimum of 66 damage, a lot for even a level 16 bard.

Final Dungeon Master Tools for Traps and Puzzles

This is the reminder that I give at the end of all of these Dungeon Master tools. Or if not at the end, sometime in there. But the point of everything is to create a great experience at the table. And that means progressing characters and stories as you go along. When you create a trap and a puzzle that should be in your mind as well. Because when you do that the most fu n is going to be had at the table for both you and your players.

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The Idea

This is something different, normally I pitch campaigns, this time I want to do something different. This would be three one shots that all come together at the end. I would put together three groups of two players, maybe three players, and take them through the opening part of the race. Let them get to the tower, but when you can see the tower, that is when you end the session. Then you get all three of the groups together and let them fight over and all the way up into the tower.

The trick for running this will be timing. It’s pretty unlikely that all the groups would arrive at the tower at the exact same time. In fact, I think in the one shots you’ll have to be keeping track of timed elements to figure out who makes it to the tower first. Of course, getting up the tower won’t be easy, and you can do things to delay the first group more than the other groups. Then that last session, you have the groups arrive at different times, tell people to start at different times. So if one group was fast, they get there and get an hour to get as far into the tower as they can. Or maybe half an hour, then the other groups show up. Of course, now that the first group has cleared the tower to a point that makes it really fast for the other groups to catch up with them. Now it’s a question of, will any of them survive to the top. Will they work together or will it all fall apart?

So that first session, what would be the plan for that? I think that it should be about finding where the Wizard’s Tower is. create a general map of the lands, and create some points of interest, different ones for each group that they have to get through. One should be focused on combat, give them a number of small missions and then a clue for where the tower is. The next one could be about puzzles and riddles, again getting a clue for where the tower is when they complete it. Another could fall more into skill challenges, and you guessed it another clue. I think that three things would be solid for a one shot, you want them to do enough and lose some hit points, spend some resources, but not have so much to do that you’d need two or three sessions leading into it. The wizard’s tower is magical, so it can get hidden anywhere, so the whole race, I think, makes sense to take place in a day or at most two, so that the players are a bit resource poor leading into the final session.

Then that last session, we’re going to be staggering when people arrive to the table, like I said. The fastest group will do the job of clearing part of the tower. And then it can be a free for all as players and groups try to make it to the top of the tower. I would make this session as crazy as possible. Make nuts puzzles with high checks for things like dexterity and strength. Give really open ended challenges and just see what the players decide to do to solve them. Let PvP happen if the players want it to happen. Or they can work together. Because when they find the top of the tower, there will be a giant monster for them all to fight or get devoured by. I’m thinking like how it’s a monster in the vault in Borderlands that you need to fight. Let them spend resources and just have a blast with it. Who knows, maybe no one will make it to the top.

Challenges

Now, I think this could be a good game to run. However, this is a very challenging game to run. You need more buy in from the people playing in the game. In a normal campaign, you can pivot a little as you realize what the players are really looking for in the game. But with this, it’s going to be harder, the game is almost on rails, though stuff like picking which spot to checkout first is going to be up to the players. If they fight the other groups, that’s going to be up to the players. But this would be more coordinating. How I’d probably do it is that I’d run the first session on the way to the tower over a single week and then that weekend, Saturday afternoon, I’d plan to meet up at a local FLGS that has food and drinks and make an afternoon and into an evening out of it.

Timing everything up as well is going to be interesting as well. I think that getting 30 minutes off of another groups time makes sense, so if one group is really late, they start an hour later than the others in terms of making it to the tower. Now, you could have everyone arrive at the same time, but it’d be kind of fun to have the groups show up to that last session at a staggered times to kind of create more of the feel of what happened in the game. Again, that makes it a bit trickier as you are trying to coordinate times.

Would You Run This Game?

Even for me, this game is a hard sell to run or play in. I like the concept a lot, but of all the people I have ran D&D for locally, I don’t know that I have enough to pull off a game like this. I’d really like to do it with nine people, three groups of three, and I could maybe make that work, but getting schedules to work together, that’d just be tricky. Even for six players, three groups of two, that is tricky. And I thought about this maybe at a con setting, but to commit to two sessions of a single game is a lot for a lot of players who really want to just get to trying as many things as possible.

How about you, would you run a game like this? Would you play in a game like this?

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His name is Kippington Thumble Elf-Hater, Kentish Bughammer, Kip for short. He’s a gnome who upon coming out of the tower had been given the skills to become a rogue. However, at this other school, there was an unfortunate incident, all alleged, involving a cake he may or may not have made that may or may not have been poisoned. Oh, and he has an untrusty squirrel friend named Karl, who mainly hangs out for food.

Upon Kip being introduced by Assendial, Bokken goes up and introduces himself, to the squirrel. Assuming that Kip is the squirrel, it nibbles on Bokken’s finger but gets bored pretty quickly. Kip doesn’t bother correcting Bokken on anything. The group catches up Kip on what has happened at the school, including Bokken outing Addrus and Parrag as spies, much to the dismay of both of them as the group had promised to help keep their secret.

It comes time for their final and Parrag comes down with the mumps so Kip has to join them, and Karl. The groups are brought up to the 2nd floor of the tower one at a time with their start times staggered by 30 minutes. Assendial gives them directions, they have to get through a series of rooms and to the teachers. Each room resets after 5 minutes, so they have a limited amount of time. They get scored based off of damage to their group, how many times the room has reset, and if they have caught any other groups who were in there before them. If they do catch a group, they get to go ahead of them and that group has to wait for another time for the room to cycle.

The first room that they enter looks like a foyer to a house. There is a fire place that is lit with a couple of torches in sconces by it, a book shelf filled with a number of books, and a chair with a table and some books on it. There is no door, in or out, once Assendial closes the door they came in on them. Bokken looks around the room hoping to find some scotch and finds a hollowed out book with a bottle of scotch and some glasses in it. Bokken pours himself a drink and sits down in the chair. Barrai thinking that there must be a hidden door looks around the shelf to see if there is anything, like an out of place book or something that would open a hidden door. He finds an out of place book and pulled it out. It causes the chair that Bokken is sitting in, and a part of the wall to rotate around, so when they look there is just a skeleton of an elf that is there. After Kip and Thrain investigate the bones and determine that these are in fact real bones or a real elf, Barrai puts the books back and removes it several times, this causes the wall to spin again several times, but they end up with Bokken back on the side they want. Bokkens next idea is to try and remove the torches, but he just ends up with two torches in his hand. Thrain investigates the sconces realizes that they aren’t attached as they should be, so he pulls on one and door frame appears in the middle of the room with a door in it. Eventually, after some more investigating they go through it.

They find themselves balanced along a ledge in a room with floating stones and lava on the floor. it looks a bit like a grand hall as there are chandeliers above it. They try and figure out how to get across the rocks that are floating there. Barrai is able to use mage hand to move one over, but it takes about minute, and then, after spending a bunch of time in the first room, the rooms reset and the rock goes back to where it was. They decide instead to use a grappling hook that Thrain has an 250′ of rope that Bokken has and Barrai mage hands the grappling hook up around the first chandelier which was just in range, it was 32′ form the ledge where they were standing. Smartly, though, I don’t know if the players were thinking about it, they decide to run the rope between the chandeliers and completely avoid the rocks and lava, as compared to their plan to swing on the rope. With the lava 4′ down from the ledge, a swing from one towards the middle would have most likely dragged them through lava, or at least caught the rope on fire, neither which is ideal. They manage to make their way across after a bit of a scare from Kip who loses is grip mid way across the rope, but is pulled back to safety with Bokken’s help.

In the next room there are two imps guarding two doors. As they walk in, one imp says “Welcome to our room, sit, stay a while. One of us tells the truth and the other lies.” The other imp says “Both of us tell the truth.” Thrain, the dwarf, immediately asks both of them if he is a dwarf, and they both say “No”. Doing an insight check on both of them, he knows that the second imp for sure is lying, but the first one might actually believe what he is saying. They ask them more questions trying to figure out a pattern or if maybe one tells the truth some of the time, but they eventually decide to try and restrain one, which gets them into combat. They kill one and get the other restrained and they open the doors. They had previously been told by the imps that one door had a dragon behind it and one a pit of acid, but all they see are two empty rooms. They toss the imps, one alive and one dead, into both empty rooms and they both fall through the floor, but they don’t hear the crunching of a dragon or the splash of an imp hitting acid. Attaching a rope to Thrain, and with Bokken holding on, Thrain is lowered through the floor, below he sees what looks like a forest, with a lake in the middle and an island in the lake, which he recognizes as the first floor where they’d taken their previous mid-term. He gets pulled up and goes down through the other door and sees the same thing just form a few feet over. The room resets and there are two imps in there again. This time they forgo much of the talking, and after a little bit of fighting, as Bokken opens up one of the doors and an imp tries to push him through it, Barrai puts them to sleep with the sleep spell. They spot rings on the imps fingers, so they look at them, however, they just look they are school rings from an infernal school and it doesn’t change the rooms or add any doors. Kip wakes one up and asks them a question along the line of “What would you do to not leave this room through a secret door?” to which the imp answers, “Kill us”, so they kill the imps humanely and a door appears between the other two.

This leads them into a room that I had intentionally created for the players. I’m going to write it out briefly the description that I gave them, but there are five pillars that are shooting flame, one in each corner and one in the middle of the room. The one in the middle of the room starts shooting flame backwards, while the others start from front left shooting along the left wall, the front right shooting along the front of the room, the back left shooting along the back of the room, and the back right shooting at a diagonal into the middle of the room. From there I explained how they move, basic idea is that you need to follow the right side and then take a step to the left to let the back door open again. One of the players, paying attention to what I was saying, was able to figure it out just from hearing the description once, which was awesome, so they breezed through that room.

In the next room, and final room, there is a Bearded Devil sitting at a table that magically has four other chairs appear around it. He motions for them to sit and says, “Come sit and enjoy some tea.” They sit and he pulls out what amount to a tasting flight of four teas for each of them. The first is a red tea with a fruity nose, the next is black and smells bitter, the third is a herbal green tea, and the fourth has a yellow color and smells of citrus. The Bearded Devil tells them that they have to try them in the right order and that the order is important. The players think about it and they assign a tea to each season, black for winter, green for spring, yellow for summer, and red for winter. They start with green, and Barrai takes a bit of poison damage, Thrain tries yellow and then red, taking poison damage for both. They offer the Bearded Devil some scotch even though they don’t have some, because Kip thinks scotch solves most problems. The Bearded devil says that sounds great, but he prefers Bourbon before Scotch. Bokken drinks the black tea and isn’t poisoned. He then tries the yellow tea and takes some poison damage. The Bearded Devil tells them that they have one more try or they’ll be fighting him. They think about it and decide since bourbon is earlier in the alphabet than scotch, maybe they should try alphabetical, which works for them and they are allowed to pass into the next room.

In that room they find the teachers waiting for them and the group who had gone ahead of them fighting as Narius and Castillia are debating how yellow or orange that last tea was with Narius insisting it was orange. At that point the session ended and the players leveled up.

Behind the DM’s Screen

This one I actually planned a bit more for sometimes. And I actually had two ways to bring in the new player. They suggested that transferring in made sense, so we went with that route. Otherwise I was going to somehow have Parrag end up rotating behind the wall and into stasis with Kip being brought back out and joining the group.

I also really enjoyed the creative ways that they tried to solve the problems. Could they have just jumped between the rocks, probably, but I wanted to see what they would come up with, and the swinging, while a bad idea was an option, but even better was climbing along the chandeliers. So you can have a room that is very dangerous, fire bad, and just let players problem solve, you don’t need a perfect solution, just give them options.

The pillars and fire room, that one, like I said, i wanted the players to puzzle that one out themselves. It took the time of me explaining it for one of them to figure it out, but I’m glad that didn’t take too long. For a puzzle like that, just running through would have been possible, but it was dangerous, so I wanted to make sure there was a good away through that made sense.

How does that session sound, is it one that would be fun for you to play in?

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So, most people are going to be somewhat familiar with the idea of an escape room. They have been something very popular in the US at least over the last handful of years and have been a concept for longer than that starting in 2007. The idea of these are that you and a group get placed into a room with a time limit on how long you have to escape. You need to work together to find clues, solve, puzzles, and get out of the escape room. These are generally themed around something, maybe you are trying to get out of an asylum or you are doing a jail break.

They’ve taken this over to board games in a few different ways and series of games. Some of the games are intertwined stories that expand over time as you go. Others are one off games that pit you and a group against a certain amount of time or will give you a score based off of how long it takes and how many clues you use. In these games you have things like ciphers to break, numbers leading to the next thing hidden on cards, in images, and so many more different puzzles.

Players in these games work together to solve these puzzles, it might be somewhat on their own, but generally there is free communication and collaboration around the table as you try different solutions and race against the time. Fairly often that means that these games could play an infinite number of players, but since everyone needs to see what is on the cards, there is limited real estate to do that, so more than a handful starts to become a little bit cramped.

But let’s look at some games in this style:

Gateway Game

Unlock – This is a series of games that aren’t connected except around mechanics. In these games you are using cards to find items, figure out puzzles and get to the next room so that you can eventually escape. It might be something like escaping from Oz or a submerged submarine or a haunted house. What these games do different than some is that you buy them as a one off or in a set of three. And each is playable once by the same group, but they aren’t destructive in nature. What I mean by that is not pieces need to be modified to solve any of the puzzles. It also uses an app integration for the timer and for entering in codes to see if you can unlock some doors or open a safe. This allows them to create some nice thematic tension with a sound track for the game you are playing.

Medium Weight

Exit – Now, there isn’t a massive difference between Unlock and Exit, both of them are pretty light weight, Exit is just going to have you stretch your brain more because you have more puzzles and more almost disconnected puzzles in it. Along with that, Exit is a destructive game. That means that you might end up pulling apart some of the box to get something or cutting up a piece of paper in order to able to easily solve the puzzle. The reason I say that this is medium weight versus Unlock’s gateway level is because that you can’t just focus directly on the puzzle, you have to go over everything because you don’t know where a clue to solve the puzzle might be hidden so it stretches the brain more but can be more frustrating as well for that reason, but if Unlock seems to easy, Exit is a slight step up.

Heavy Weight

TIME Stories – Now, I actually, again, don’t think that TIME Stories is too heavy, and there might be some people who disagree with this being an escape room game, but it certainly has a lot of the elements of it. You’re trying to figure out what is going on in a timeline after you and your team are sent into the past, future, another dimension, to stop something that is about to royally mess up the timeline. Your memories and knowledge are put into a body there so you can blend in, You go on runs trying to solve the case, and if you run out of time with the event happening the TIME agency can send you back in again, equipped with the knowledge that you have to try and solve it again. For this reason TIME Stories, while once you complete the case is basically a one and done, has a longer playing time and more game that you can get out of it. It’s also is easier to play over multiple sessions because you can more easily save between the runs that you make. Overall, not an extremely complex game, but it has more moving parts than the others do.

There are a lot more Escape Room games out there or games that have a similar feel to them. I did a Board Game Battle recently between TIME Stories and Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game, and while there are similarities, TIME Stories has more of an escape room feel versus Detectives more deductive feel. What are some of your favorite escape room style board games? Do you like escape rooms in real life, if so, how do the games compare to the places?

Share questions, ideas for articles, or comments with us!

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In addition to having the well-known combat mechanisms of Gloomhaven, Frosthaven will feature much more to do outside of combat, such as numerous mysteries to solve, a seasonal event system to live through, and player control over how this ramshackle village expands, with each new building offering new ways to progress.

Board Game Geek

There is some information on BoardGameGeek, but more information in a panel that Tom Vassel led at Pax Unplugged with the creator of Gloomhaven and Frosthaven, Isaac Childress. So I’m listening to that now, and I”m going to be taking notes of what we know thus far. So this might be a bit of a scattered post, but it’s important stuff for the fans of Gloomhaven, and now you don’t need to watch the whole video that is up on Pax Unplugged’s Twitch Channel.

First, Tom asks about if you need to play Gloomhaven first, and can you use Gloomahven characters.

• No, you don’t need to play Gloomhaven first, this is completely stand alone
• Yes, there are ways to use characters or items between games, but Frosthaven is a different much smaller location, so you don’t have access to all of the Gloomhaven items, and you even have to craft your own items.

The Six Base Characters:

• Banner Spear – Tank character. Noble character, mostly melee, and something called a formation attack, which is like an area of effect, but allies need to be in a certain locations.
• Necromancer – Has summons that aren’t lost, because of course they do. An Aesther character, summons undead, obviously. You lose health when you summon them though.
• A lot of characters have extra resources that you have to keep track of, like the Necromancer with her health.
• Stepping up the mini game with them having more dynamic poses.
• Deathwalker – She creates shadows on the board. Shamanistic type classs, who ushers people into death. Can manipulate shadows to deal more damage and usher monsters into the after life.
• Drifter – Inox character. Survivalist character who loves living off the land. About keeping himself alive as long as possible. Persistent abilities with chargers that can then recharge
• Geminate – Harrower Character – Split conciousness sort of character. Two different forms, melee and ranged, and two separate decks of cards 7 in each, and you change forms and the cards can force you to change form. Can choose to switch on long rest.
• Blink Blade – Quatryl character, can manipulate time. Can slow down or speed up time, and runs around and stabs and then runs away. Time token resource, faster is better, but needs to recharge. Bonuses or detriments on cards if you are going fast or slow.

Different races in this area, 3 new races. They actually start out as threats in the game, and you can become their friends or subdue them, and you unlock them. Augox, cousins of the Inox. More primitive and bigger, ice yeti. Have two separate sects around religion, ice or snow, so I’m assuming we’ll get two playable characters one from each? Lurkers are another character. They are ocean creatures, Northern Sea, they invade from the sea. Whole Lurker civilization, a wave thrower. They are psychic. Robots. Eventually you can play as robots, they are wandering around the north.

Basic story

• Frosthaven is outpost in north, north west of Gloomhaven.
• Have to pass through between Copper Neck Mountains and Imperial Mountains. Gets cut off in the winter.
• Initial story is that you are trying to protect the town, find ways to keep the town safe.
• Frosthaven is a very small outpost.
• Big thing in the game is building up the city, and using resources to do so. And unlock new things in time.
• Craftsman is big thing, and Alchemist. Craftsman can make items and combine items to make them better. Alchemist can create potions, trial and error. You can make bad potions.
• And you’ll have to build up the defenses of the town. Town has a defense rating.
• Calendar system, as you come in the summer and then in winter things start freezing over.
• Every time you go to a scenario the calendar progresses.
• Winter event deck is all bad things.
• Depending on defense rating bad things happen or you fend them off.
• You can still find items.

Loot system has changed.

• Still collect tokens, but they aren’t money.
• At the end of the scenario you can exchange them for a card from the loot deck.
• Build a loot deck for each scenario.
• If in a forest, loot deck might be money or resource or herb or something else, like items or special items.

New map with world map, top half is traditional map of the world, bottom is town. There are bigger stickers that help explore what the world actually looks like. Lots of space to build up buildings in the town, but you decide how it’s all built.

More monsters to talk about.

• There will be some repeat monsters.
• Undead monsters, frozen undead.
• Frozen Corpse – like a living corpse, but frozen.
• New status effect, brittle, next time you suffer damage, you suffer double damage.
• Living Doom – Most powerful undead
• Living Doom can summon living spirits based on his health
• New status effect called Bane. Solution to instant kill mechanic. If you don’t remove it by healing, at the end of next turn, you take 10 damage. Way to deal with instant kill cards.
• Instant kill was considered overly powerful.
• Polar bears, because bears.
• The Abale, fishmen characters. Spelling is probably wrong. Fish king from his original game.

Puzzles as well:

• Kind of complicated to explain.
• At some point in the game you get something similar to the town record.
• Extra side story, get more lore into the game.
• There will be cool things it unlocks.
• How you go through the book is by solving puzzles that you do through the course of the campaign.
• Give you clues that’ll lead you to various aspects of the game.
• Limited details, because spoilers.
• Series of puzzles, that are informed by everything else in the game.
• Not sure what to do, play more.
• There is a big puzzle in Gloomhaven, there is no feedback in the puzzle, so he wanted to give a puzzle with more feedback in the game.

What’s the learning curve from Gloomhaven?

• Similar to Gloomhaven, it’s going to throw you in there.
• The combat mechanics are all the same.
• The town mechanics are introduced over time, so not much overhead.

How have things progressed from the first to the second one?

• Puzzles changing.
• Forgotten Circles, breaking up scenarios into various sections, successes and problems with it. So you don’t always see everything up front, and they can hide things better.
• Taking that and giving more information up front, but still doing section system.
• Forgotten Circles, set-up in the middle, here they are not doing that.
• Surprises, but no surprise set-up.
• Same length of campaign.

How do you get it?

• Coming to Kickstarter in March 2020.
• Ideally, if it goes according to plan, delivered in less than a year.

Questions from the Audience:

• Is Frosthaven too cold for Ooze? Don’t make that assumption.
• Can you be bad and get rewarded? There’s always moral ambiguity.
• Reputation system, evil and good, don’t feel tempted? Working on events to make them more dynamic and give them better options.
• Where is Frosthaven compared to Gloomhaven? Extending the world, North and West of Gloomhaven.
• Will there be a pie eating video if Kickstarter game is a success? It’s not out of the question.
• Coming from Gloomhaven, what are you taking away from that, that is biggest learning point? Main thing, more town building, town management aspect.
• How come bears haven’t destroyed Gloomhaven? Bears can’t climb walls.
• Trading Items going to be a thing? Still can’t trade items. When you create a potion, you decide who gets it.
• Necromancer in this one not the small box one like they were planning? They realized it was too complex, summoning was too complex for an introductory sort of game for more casual gamers.
• Bane Mechanic going to be put back onto Gloomhaven? Maybe
• Loot tokens represent resources, more of them on the ground, money on the ground doesn’t make sense, wood does? Might be a little more
• Is charging elements still going to be a big part of the game? Elements are still going to be a big part of it. Still going to keep the elements balanced.
• Why did you transition from being a physicist to board game designer? Got tired of physics. Decided to make it more of a career. Kickstarted first game in grad school.
• Any tweaks to combat rules that are interesting? Besides new status effects, combat mechanics are generally the same.
• Will there be a 3 damage token? Yes
• Do you get more cards or health, since this game seems like difficulty has been ramped up? No. Necromancer starts with 6 health.
• Any changes to achievement quests? Didn’t feel like some of retirement goals were tied together? Any more customization for the decks? Personal quests are going to be changed, not going to be random. Going to start with a much smaller deck of things you can accomplish, as you unlock things, you unlock more. Because you’ve unlocked it, you can get it done in a reasonable amount of time. Perk system remains. Not much more customization for characters. Not much more unique backstory. Events will be a similar system, and outcomes might be tied to character with some sort of trait versus just character types. Battle goals will be more balanced.
• Summons don’t scale well, any change with that? Some of summons that can resummon which is a change.
• Is Enhancement system going to remain the same? Enhancement system will remain the same, will be unlocked over the course of the game.
• Where does Frosthaven take place timewise? Set afterwards. Doesn’t matter for the most part, not much interaction. Finally going to get cypher to solve thing without the cypher at the end of Gloomhaven, probably?
• Equally as difficult to get in as Gloomhaven? About the same difficulty. Might introduce tutorial system. That’s what Jaws of the Lion is for.
• Gloomhaven was more semi-cooperative, can’t trade or sell between, is this going to be more collaborative? Town building is more collaborative. But still more semi-cooperative. Still dark brooding jerks.
• Any plans for recharge pack? It is something they are talking about.
• PVP? Toyed with idea with original one, but going first was so much better. Didn’t work out balance wise. Hasn’t be revisited and don’t plan to.
• Mind thief plushy? Longer project, but working on it.
• How does Calendar work? Just one year, just those two seasons? There are multiple years. Go through cycle of summer/winter, summer nicer things, winter worse things.
• How far does it progress each scenario? Every time you finish a set of scenarios will progress one time unit, and 15 time units per season.

Wooo, that’s all the information, I can catch my breath again. But that’s Frosthaven. Sorry for the wall of text, but not much for images thus far, and I’ve spent some time with this, so I’m not going to track them all down.

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A dungeon in Dungeons and Dragons is normally seen as a festering hole in the ground, like you’d end up with in classic games. Instead it really is anything where there is an entry point and a goal where you go in and get something or defeat some boss, or to get to a certain location that only the exit can lead you to. Then there are challenges along the way.

You can see how this looser definition makes it much more useful for your game. Your “dungeon” could be going through a section of the underdark in search for another entrance to a “dungeon” on the surface that then the players will still have to go through. So your dungeon could literally be leading to another dungeon and that works well.

Your dungeon could be the gauntlet of challenges at the end of a campaign that lead up to the big bad monster who your party has been going after the whole time. Or it could be two rooms leading up to that big bad, but it’s a point of entry. I think something even as simple as a foyer in a manor and then two paths leading to two waiting rooms and then a waiting room to the main hall where the big bad Emperor of the Frozen Realm sits works for a dungeon. You’ve given yourself a chance for some combat, you’ve possibly, if you want one direction to be better, added in a riddle or a puzzle for the players to figure out.

I’ve given some examples of what different dungeons are, but that only shows what some dungeons might be, but not why you’d want to use a dungeon.

A dungeon is nice for the DM, because it gives you a fairly straight forward session or sessions to plan. Your players are always going to do something that you wouldn’t expect, always, but in a dungeon, because you’ve already planned it a fair amount, it’s not going to be as difficult to deal with those random things. This means that you’ll have less on your plate to come up with things on the fly, and have planned encounters in more detail than you normally would have. It also means, that if you’re partly in and the session comes to the end, you already have some plans for the next session.

Also, because of the planning you can do ahead of time, this is something that you can tweak slightly and move to another game at a later time. There are plenty of monsters in the monster manual that you can reskin it to. If the first game is more classic fighting goblins, looting treasure, kicking down doors, you can create a dungeon to put them in to get to the big bad. Maybe, now you are running an elemental campaign. Now you can swap out the goblins with elemental creatures, raise the challenge level of your game and raise the difficulty of your traps and use the exact same dungeon set-up. Just with reflavoring how you describe things and what monsters are in the dungeon, you now have a very different dungeon.

Beyond making things easier on the DM, they also offer a chance for variety and world building in your world. If you need to drop bits of history to the players and don’t want to just run a session where they are in the library getting talked at by the librarian, a dungeon is a great way to go. Now they are going to kick out some goblins, or so they think, but it’s going to be a chance for you as the DM to sprinkle in some knowledge of the ancient world that will matter for the players later, while they are still getting to do something.

It also allows for making really unique pieces for the players to play through. And I don’t mean setting up some big map with minis that the players get to look at and ooh and ah over, unless you can do that (I can’t). But it allows you to create the mad wizards tower that the players have to fight their way up. It allows you to do a crazy underdark/Mind Flayer story or the maze of a Beholder. These places are going to be places that will be remembered by players and a chance for cool and crazy moments to happen that players will talk about for a long time afterwards. For me, creating those moments is something that I want to get better at, and a dungeon and planning on dungeon are a good way to do that.

Finally, I think it’s a good time to use dungeons as benchmarks in your story. So, if you’re a player, you might suspect this, but most DM’s don’t have the whole story planned out before they get started. We have a beginning, maybe, and an end, most likely. If nothing else, we have a concept for the game and an idea of who the big bad is for the game. But sometimes we have ideas where we know we want, around level five, this thing to happen to move the story forward, and at level ten, this other thing. Making those benchmark spots into dungeons really lets you move the story from one spot to the next arc of your story as it leads up to your big bad. And when you don’t think of a dungeon as a festering hole in the ground, now all of a sudden you have a lot more options.

So what do you think? Do you think that there are good reasons to use dungeons? Do dungeons feel too focused for you or too much like a railroad for you?

This wraps up the Welcome to the Dungeon! series. Let me know what you thought about the series as a whole?

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So how can you start to add that into your Dungeons and Dragons game?

I do think it’s fun to use because you get more variety in your dungeon when using them. I also think that they can be tricky to use, so I have a few “rules” or suggestions when using puzzles in your dungeons.

1. Don’t Make it Block the Story
Puzzles are a tricky thing to do right, and the biggest issue with doing them right is that sometimes the players and the player characters get stuck on them. A simple color puzzle might seem easy to you based on the hints you were dropping earlier, but the players might have missed it completely. Now they need to get through the puzzle to face the boss of the dungeon, but now you’ve just spent two hours of them getting frustrated and you getting frustrated because they can’t figure out the puzzle. Now, if it was a room that they knew had cool treasure in it, but it was off to the side in the dungeon, they might try and get bored and finish the dungeon, but you didn’t block the story.

2. Don’t Make it Have a Single Solution
This one I’m borrowing from Nerdarchy and other places, but a good puzzle isn’t going to have a single solution. If you have a single solution and they can’t get it, again you’ve blocked the story and enjoyment for everyone in the game, including you. More so, it’s possible that your players are going to come up with a creative solution to the problem that you didn’t think of, and it might be a better one than yours, so let them go through and make that work. Nerdarchy has talked about how one of them doesn’t always have a solution at all to their puzzle. They’ll just make the puzzle and wait until they hear a solution that they like. Now that might be extreme for what you would want to do, but be open to other solutions.

3. Have Clues/Rolls For the Puzzle
Seems fairly obvious, but if you have an idea of what you want, come up with ideas of how you can lead the players to an answer. Come up with things that the characters can roll to find clues. Are they going to be able to discern what the first color is in a color puzzle based off of a really good arcana roll? However, don’t just give the answer. If they are just going to be rolling to find out that the answer to the color puzzle is that you push the colors in the order of ROYGBIV, there’s no need for that puzzle. But if you describe it as the first button is cracked slightly and if you investigate it, you might be able to see inside it to figure out what order that color button should be pushed, you could start giving them clues. Or even if you didn’t want to do that, you could make it an obvious reference back to something that they saw in a previous room that was supposed to be a clue so they could start puzzling it out the way you expected.

4. Put a Timer on it
This one might seem less obvious, but if the players are taking a long time figuring it out, give them a break by sending a Goblin or other patrol around that makes sense for your dungeon. This should just be one or two guys, but maybe while someone else is working on a roll or trying to rewire the puzzle so they can make it through, the rest are fighting. But give those moments that make it feel like the dungeon is a living and breathing thing. But beyond that also put a timer on it in your head how long they can be stuck at this. If it takes too long, there’s nothing wrong with a goblin who has figured it out, or the big bad of the dungeon even, opening it up, and coming out and attacking the players and short cutting it. But this means you don’t burn a whole session or more with your players being stuck.

5. A Wrong Answer Should Bring them Closer to the Right Answer
Going back to the color puzzle to explain what it is, say the players start out by pushing the green button, there should be something, probably a D6 of electrical damage to tell them that it was wrong, but when they push the red button first it shouldn’t give them any damage. So even if they have to piece together the order and don’t figure it out because of your awesome clues, they are still going to be getting closer and they only have to the potential of getting smashed with 20d6 damage total if they are really unlucky. But again, it might help them get closer to the right solution faster.

6. The Wrong Answer Should Have a Cost
To tie in with the previous one, the wrong answer should have a cost, no matter how big or how small. If there is a right answer, like with the ROYGBIV one that the players need to figure out, there should be a cost. However, the trap shouldn’t have a major cost, the person who created the puzzle likely wouldn’t want to actually kill themselves if they got it wrong. So a D6 of damage for a lower level party, that is pretty big, for a higher level party, it’s still using up some lower level resources that they might have wanted to save for the big bad.

Now, you can see how a few of these things might be hard to do at the same time. Only having one right solution might be the case for the ROYGBIV color puzzle, but that one you should set-up really easily so that the players with a tiny bit of experimentation can figure it out. And I’d really lean into doing everything else if the players don’t get it quickly. Send in a goblin who is wearing a red shirt and do that until they get it really obviously in there head that red might be important.

But having a puzzle is really about having fun, and letting the players figure something out more than the player characters. This is one time where meta gaming and table talking about what you as players are thinking is important. It’s going to make for more of a fun time than everyone thinking quietly or the person who is playing the 4 intelligence barbarian just sitting there twiddling there thumbs and not helping because there character is dumb, even if they are very smart.

Sometimes you will build the puzzle for the characters, but in that case, they should be extremely simple and should be something that you know that player knows. Maybe it’s for the player who has the Sword of 1000 Smites (or some other made up magic item), and they have to make the decision if they want to find what they hope is a better treasure or something about their long lost family member who went missing when they were ten, but lose the sword by sacrificing it. That’s less of a puzzle, though could be a worded as a puzzle, but the real game part there is for the player to decide what to do as their character versus figure out some riddle.

Have you used puzzles in your games? Have you ever made one that your players got stuck on?

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Yes!

I wanted to talk about one half of Dungeons and Dragons, and that is the dungeon. I haven’t talked about dragons yet either, but that will be some time later. Instead, I wanted to talk about how you can build interesting dungeons in your D&D game if you want to use them. Dungeons aren’t something that I use that often, or at least what would be considered a dungeon traditionally.

So let’s define what a “dungeon” is for the sake of this article.

A Dungeon is any sort of building or location where the players need to get through it by progressing forward, either to a goal or an exit.

So that might seem wrong to you, you’re thinking of some labyrinth hidden deep under the ground in some remote area that has been long forgotten. That certainly is a dungeon, but a mad wizards tower climbing high into the air is a dungeon. A Minotaur’s labyrinth is also a dungeon. It could be the ruins of a city on the surface, or a druids grove that they’ve grown up to protect them.

All of these options really do want you to move forward or are likely to have something that you want at the end. You’re going to have to fight through monsters and deal with traps.

Let’s also talk some about what dungeons aren’t?

Dungeons aren’t a static thing. The old school dungeon was a collection of monsters and traps thrown together to create a challenge for the players. You’d have an orc in one room, a bugbear and some goblins in another room, a handful of drow the level down in the dungeon with a bunch of random traps and puzzles thrown in the middle of them.

Instead, Dungeons are living locations. While the current inhabitants might not be the original builders of the Dungeon, there is going to be a reason for the monsters to be there. Maybe there are goblins living on the upper levels, and some drow on the bottom levels of the dungeon, but they aren’t going to be living in rooms next to each other, they’d have killed each other. So maybe they would split up floors of a dungeon, leaving buffers between them. The same way, it’s going to have traps or puzzles, have the monsters figured out how to deal with them, or do they just avoid the section that has managed to squish members of the goblin tribe, so it makes where the trap is obvious to adventurers?

Dungeons also aren’t there for no reason. Someone has built them, so they are going to have had an original purpose, which might be the same purpose as of now, but there was a reason. So there also has to be a reason why it is like it is now. But if you’re going to put a random wizard tower deep into the forest, there are going to be stories and legends about this place and a reason the wizard put it there for a reason.

So now that we’re all on the same page as to what a Dungeon is, let’s talk about what is going to come up after this?

We’re going to talk about the ecosystem of your dungeon and why that matters.

We’re going to talk about using puzzles in your dungeon and what that might do to a dungeon.

We’re going to talk about how traps work, and how you avoid bogging down your dungeon with traps.

We’re going to talk about why you’d use a dungeon in your game.

So join me in those upcoming articles as you think about building a dungeon for your game of Dungeons and Dragons.

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So what’s the crazy Peder talking about? Board Game Battles is going to be a new article series where I or Kristen or a guest poster, writes about two similar board games, compares and contrasts them, and then declares a winner. The games can be similar mechanics wise or theme wise, just something consistent across them that people compare them. The first match is Exit versus Unlock.

The Contenders:

Exit and Unlock are both escape room board games. You’ve probably heard of the trend of escape rooms around the country. These are rooms where you are “locked” in and maybe given a clue of where to start, but then, in a time limit, you need to figure out various puzzles and find clues to get the code or key to unlock the door and escape the escape room. The two games battling are like this, but instead of going to a physical location, paying a chunk of money, these all come in small boxes. I don’t really know what they weigh, I just needed it for the intro. Both of the games come in very small boxes with cards, maybe a book, or possibly a few other things. These are very small games, but there is plenty of game to each of them.

Exit

The Exit game that I’ve played had a booklet that you used for solving your puzzles. You’d look for clues, fold pages, and mess with the box and other odds and ends in the box to try and figure out the puzzles. If they got too tricky for you, you could flip over a card to get a hint depending on what puzzle you were working on. Then once you think you’ve solved the puzzle, you would match the characters of the key to the symbols on a wheel and that would give you a numerical clue. You’d then flip a card with that number and see if you got the right key or not. If you did it would give you more information to solve future puzzles, if you didn’t, you’d know to go back to the drawing board. Once you’ve gotten the whole thing completed you check your time and you get a ranking on how long it took you.

Unlock

Similar to Exit, however, Unlock doesn’t have a booklet and it has an application instead. The application is where you enter in the various keys and codes you need to throughout the game. And instead of counting up, the time counts down. So you’re trying to combine cards, look for clues, and make equipment and figure out the answers confidently. However, if you get it wrong, you have to press the got it wrong button in the app (if a card tells you to) and now you lose time. And suddenly your hour of time to solve everything is getting shorter faster. When the time runs out you “lose” technically, however, you can continue with the time counting up now and you still get a rating at the end.

Compare/Contrast

There are a few big differences. The first being the Exit games booklet. This means that you are all crowding around a booklet and that they can lay out some elaborate puzzles. This was sometimes put to good use in the Exit game that we played, and also allowed you to manipulate the pages to line things up differently to solve puzzles. Beyond that, the Exit games use the whole box. The one that we played, you had to use the box insert to figure out one of the puzzles and really you should have pulled it apart, but we were playing with a store copy, so we couldn’t do that. The other big thing is the timing. While the Exit game counts up and you can play for as long as you want, the Unlock game counts down. In my opinion, I like counting down a whole lot better. This means that you can’t just agonize over a puzzle for a long time, instead you’re feeling the crunch to come up with an answer and get the puzzle solved. And with that, then you are torn between taking a stab at something and solving it quickly or potentially losing time because you got it wrong. Finally, the app is different as well, there was actually an audio clue for the unlock game we were playing, and that was fun. It also has a nicer way of giving hints as you can do that through the app.

Both of them have interesting puzzles though, and they do try and develop a little bit of story as time goes by. For a very small game, both of them pack a ton of content in as well. each of them has a number of puzzles to solve and while you have to solve all of the puzzles to get out in the end, you don’t have to solve them in a certain order. Sometimes there are a couple that you can be working on.

The Results

So, who wins the first board game battle? I’m giving the victory to: Unlock

There are a few main reasons why I think unlock is better. First, while Unlock is more limited on the puzzles it can do, because it’s only using the cards, that makes it easier for more people to be engaged. Some people can be looking at other cards than other people, and you can spread them out more on the table. Even with three people playing the Exit game, it was hard for all of us to be at the book at one time, and that was what was really needed to get a lot of the puzzles completed. Secondly the timing makes a big difference in the game. Counting down and worrying about running out of time is way  more stressful than counting up, and it makes you want to work faster. That pressure is a good thing as it makes the game seem like it means more to complete. The app is also very nice as it allows them a bit more that they can do with puzzles, and it’s less fiddly to get a code entered in than for the Exit games. Finally, the Exit games are not reusable. Yes, I played a store copy, so that means I am technically wrong, but really the box/insert/booklet should all be mangled to a point that no one can play it again. Sure, with the unlock games we’ll play them once and not be able to play them again, but we can pass it on to someone else, that is not the case with the Exit games.

Final Thoughts

Both games are fun, and if you are fine dropping the money, about $15 into the Exit games for a one off experience, they are a lot of fun still. I think that the Unlock games just work a little bit better and are a bit better thought out in terms of a board game experience. Neither are bad though, and you aren’t guaranteed of having a good time, but if you like those puzzle sort of games or if you like escape rooms, you’ll likely enjoy either of these games.