Killing adventurers and you

Each of the cards in our deck had a number of features. Primarily, they all had attempts at amusing names, aided by a huge list of types of traps we’d compiled, which would then combine in even more hilarious manners. They also had a set of 6 possible outcomes, ranging from killing adventurers, to the trap itself blowing up. That’s pretty much everything, as we started out.

So, armed with some slightly dodgy maths as to balanced numbers, we stacked up some dice to track the lives of some poor adventurers, and walked them into our gauntlet of Pit Traps with Sharks, Collapsing Rolling Boulders and Torrential Tar. At each step, a d6 determined the fate of the adventuring party, sometimes callously slaughtering them all, sometimes quickly advancing through all the traps to mash the dungeon’s (obligatory) self destruct button and kill us. It was a dangerous time for all involved, especially the trap cards that got fairly frequent modification.

At some point, we realised that our plan to keyword trap components that worked together wasn’t really necessary. So what if you have Explosive Sharks, or Huge Choking Dust? We adjusted our rules: now cards just had to make grammatical, if not physical, sense, opening the door to Deep Steel Portcullises, and Invisible Explosive Runes.

Not that this really fazed anyone.