Seems like a silly question, doesn’t it? But have you ever actually looked at it?

What is a Trap?

A trap is, in this author’s opinion, any object, mechanism, stratagem, or procedure, which seeks to surprise the adversary with an unexpected difficulty. To be a trap, three things must exist:

• Pre-planning
• Triggering Condition
• Result

What is a Trap FOR?

A trap can be used for many reasons. The obvious ones are to hurt, incapacitate or kill someone who’s going where they shouldn’t or trying to take your stuff without your permission.¹ Lesser-known but also popular are traps designed to alert guards, or mark intruders in some way.²

But are these the only uses of a trap? No. One can use the presence of traps strategically, to steer an intruder in a desired direction. How, you ask, O gentle reader? Simple. If I showed you a lake of lava to your right - will you not move left? I thought so. Traps can be used in the same way. Given the choice of two hallways, if one hall is lightly trapped, and another nearly impassable due to the forest of trip-lines, most would-be intruders will take the simpler route. More often than not, the intruders are on a tight timetable, and the delays imposed by the more difficult path are not an option.

Traps can also be used tactically - separate the trigger from the active part of the trap, and you can decimate the rear echelon of a force on a battlefield, or take out the healer in the rear of a party.³

Best of all to my mind are the traps that seem to do nothing at all of value… but cost you in the end. These are some of the most difficult to employ. I remember one I saw the one time I ventured into Ashbury while the Sessuar had control there. The Exchequer’s office had a thin powder coating, made of cornstarch and fragrant herbs⁴ spread on the floor, which was applied each night and swept out by a designated servant each morning. The local lord’s hounds were trained to track the particular scent of this mixture on command, EXCEPT when mingled with this servant’s scent. Imagine the surprise of the thieves who had broken in one night, when the dogs came a-calling...

So, we can see that a trap can have many uses, and some do not even require the trap to fire. Keep this in mind! The entire key is to get the intruder going where you want them to go, or if you are the intruder, figuring out where the trap setter didn’t want you to go.

All of the above is great, if the trap is on a path or in a hallway or in a room - but what if it’s in a box or chest? Aha, you cry! This I can understand without you, Plex! Traps on boxes are only ever there to safeguard what’s in the box! Oh, gentle reader, you just keep thinking that way, and let me know whom you want for the resurrection.

The little known truth is that traps on boxes can serve the same purposes as traps on rooms, trails, hallways, doors, what have you - to delay the intruder, unnerve the intruder, or just harm the intruder. Even un-trapped boxes can be used this way - there are few things that make thieves more nervous than an innocuous-looking box out in the middle of a room, two rooms after the box that blew half the party to bits. Even if it’s untrapped and empty, the intruders invariably will delay to ensure that they can safely pass it.

The key here is to take the intruder’s goal (thievery, spying, or what have you) and place so many obstacles in the way that the goal cannot be accomplished.

Now that you have some idea of what traps TRULY are, and the many ways they can be employed, it’s time to move on to some detail in Chapter Two - The Guts of a Trap.

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¹When I say “Your stuff”, I make no distinction between your property or the property of whoever hired you to protect it. In my opinion, neither should you. If you don’t care to secure the client’s items with the same care you would use for your own, then you’re in the wrong business.
²Pardon me for bragging, but I AM the one who developed and popularized the Paint trap. More later...
³Of course the healer’s in the rear - it’s SAFE there! Riiiiight.
⁴The combination is in my Alchemical notes, and is not of value here.