The Pathfinder Gamemastery Guide is out, and it provides several neat tools. One of these tools is the suite of instructions about how to build a hazard. These are more useful (and less labor-intensive) than they appear, because they also let you modify existing hazards to different levels. Let’s see how!
First, let me take a classic trap, the poisoned dart gallery, from the Pathfinder Core Rulebook.
Poisoned Dart Gallery Hazard 8
Complex, Mechanical, Trap
Stealth +16 (expert) or DC 31 (master) to notice the control panel
Description Countless holes to launch poison darts from line a long hallway with a hidden control panel on the far end.
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Disable Thievery DC 21 (expert) on the control panel deactivates the trap.
AC 27, Fort +13, Ref +17
Hardness 14, HP 56 (BT 28) to destroy the control panel and disable the trap; Immunities critical hits, object immunities, precision damage
Dart Volley (Reaction) (attack); Trigger A creature enters the hallway or ends its turn in the hallway. Effect The trap makes a poisoned dart Strike against the triggering creature, then rolls initiative.
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Routine (1 action) The trap launches one dart against every creature in the gallery as 1 action. Because it launches darts continuously, the trap can also use the Continuous Barrage free action (see below) to launch darts at each creature during that creature’s turn.
Ranged poisoned dart +21, Damage 3d4 piercing plus flesset poison; no multiple attack penalty
Continuous Barrage (Free Action) Trigger A creature within the active gallery finishes an action. Effect The trap makes a poisoned dart Strike against the triggering creature.
Flesset Poison (poison); Saving Throw DC 22 Fortitude; Maximum Duration 6 rounds; Stage 1 1d6 poison damage and clumsy 1 (1 round); Stage 2 2d6 poison damage and clumsy 2 (1 round); Stage 3 3d6 poison damage and clumsy 3 (1 round)
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Reset The trap deactivates and resets after 1 minute.
That’s neat, but it’s useful only for a narrow range of hero levels. Let’s try to make it lower level to suit a group of starting heroes. Let’s make it a Level 2 hazard.
The first thing to do is open up the Gamemastery Guide to the section on Hazards (page 75), and start comparing the numbers at Level 8 to the numbers at Level 2. Let’s start at the top and work our way down.
The trap’s Stealth DC is 31, which is Extreme. The same DC for a level 2 hazard is 21. That’s easy enough; it’s also easy enough to drop the master proficiency to expert. But it also uses Stealth of +16 for initiative, and the Stealth and Disable DCs table doesn’t have modifiers like that. Actually, it sort of does; a Stealth skill of +16 is really a DC of 26. That’s right in between the numbers for “High” and “Low” on the chart. In fact, we’re going to see a lot of numbers fall into this range, and you might want to do what I did: put in those middle numbers in a new column squenched in between them called “Moderate.” A Moderate DC for a level 2 hazard would be 16.5, which we’ll call 16. That’s a bonus of +6. Again, I’m dropping the proficiency needed, from expert to trained.
I’m not just dropping the proficiency willy-nilly. You can look at the Maximum Proficiency table and see what’s the “right” proficiency for a hazard’s level. Generally, in going from a level 8 hazard to a level 2 hazard, proficiency should drop by one step. That’s what I’ve been doing.
The Disable DC is Thievery DC 21 (expert), which tells us two things. First, that’s lower than “Low” for a level 8 hazard, so this trap is supposed to be easy to disable if you can spot the control panel in the first place. It also requires expert proficiency. So not just anyone should be able to do it; some level of training is necessary. Ours new trap should be Thievery DC 13 (trained).
The trap’s AC, Fortitude save, and Reflex save are “High,” “Low,” and “A Little Worse Than High” on the table, respectively. Looking at the line for Level 2, our new trap is AC 18, Fort +5, Ref +9.
Similarly, it’s Hardness and HP are a little low for its level; in fact, they’re right in line with a level 7 hazard, curiously. So let’s make ours right in line with a level 1 hazard: Hardness 5, HP 24 (BT 12). Everything else on that line should stay the same, as the trap of any level should be immune to critical hits, precision damage, and so on.
The next numbers are the attack stats. The attack is +21 and the average damage is 7.5 That’s…weirdly low. The attack modifier is just about right, being 1 point higher than a complex trap should have on the Offense table, so our trap is going to have an attack of +12. But a complex level 8 hazard should have damage averaging 22. Why is it only a third of that? I can see two reasons: first, the Continuous Barrage means the trap is going to be making a lot of attacks every round, so its damage should be higher. But its attacks are also poisoned, and poison deals damage, too. If we double the average damage because the trap attacks off-turn (to 15) and double the amount of damage the poison does (2d6 has an average of 7), then we get to 22. Maybe that’s how it’s supposed to work?
Let’s reverse engineer that. We need a damage total of 9. That should be twice the damage of the darts plus twice the damage of the poison. If the dart does only 1d4 damage, and the poison does only 1d3 damage, then that puts us right at 9 (2d4 average is 5, 2d3 average is 4). But I don’t love having to use 1d3. I’d rather increase that to 1d4 if I could, and maybe drop the attack bonus a little bit (to +11) to compensate for the slight increase in damage.
So the darts will do 1d4 damage. But what about the poison? The easy part is its DC; that drops from DC 22 to 14. (For this, I had to cheat a little bit, by using the monster creation DCs on page 66, as the table in the hazards section doesn’t go low enough for this low DC. It seems clear the designers didn’t want this poison to be particularly debilitating, probably because you’re hit with it so often!)
But adjudicating poison damage is difficult, because there aren’t yet any rules for designing a poison to a particular level. We can only go by example. Flesset poison doesn’t exist anywhere else in the rules, but we can take a look at level 8 poisons in the Core Rulebook (like wyvern venom) and at level 8 creatures that use poison in the Bestiary (I guess a level 7 medusa is close). Ooh, wyvern venom is WAY too powerful in comparison. The medusa venom is about right, really. Maybe I should look to level 2 monsters to get a good poison analogue. I note that both the giant viper and the giant monitor lizard have poison, and it doesn’t ever go above 1d6 in damage. Since we’ve already established that our poison is does 1d4 damage, that should be our limit. Clumsy 1, then clumsy 2, then clumsy 3 seems in line with giant monitor lizard venom (which is enfeebled 1 then enfeebled 2), so I feel like I can keep the clumsy effect. I also should call this weaker poison something other than “flesset poison.” I’ll get cute and call it “flessette,” because it’s littler.
Here’s the new hazard!
Poisoned Dart Gallery Hazard 2
Complex, Mechanical, Trap
Stealth +6 (trained) or DC 21 (expert) to notice the control panel
Description Countless holes to launch poison darts from line a long hallway with a hidden control panel on the far end.
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Disable Thievery DC 13 (trained) on the control panel deactivates the trap.
AC 18, Fort +5, Ref +9
Hardness 5, HP 24 (BT 12) to destroy the wooden control panel and disable the trap; Immunities critical hits, object immunities, precision damage
Dart Volley (Reaction) (attack); Trigger A creature enters the hallway or ends its turn in the hallway. Effect The trap makes a poisoned dart Strike against the triggering creature, then rolls initiative.
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Routine (1 action) The trap launches one dart against every creature in the gallery as 1 action. Because it launches darts continuously, the trap can also use the Continuous Barrage free action (see below) to launch darts at each creature during that creature’s turn.
Ranged poisoned dart +11, Damage 1d4 piercing plus flessette poison; no multiple attack penalty
Continuous Barrage (Free Action) Trigger A creature within the active gallery finishes an action. Effect The trap makes a poisoned dart Strike against the triggering creature.
Flessette Poison (poison); Saving Throw DC 14 Fortitude; Maximum Duration 6 rounds; Stage 1 1d4 poison damage and clumsy 1 (1 round); Stage 2 1d4 poison damage and clumsy 2 (1 round); Stage 3 1d4 poison damage and clumsy 3 (1 round)
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Reset The trap deactivates and resets after 1 minute.
Of course, we can go the other way, too. Without bothering with all the math, here’s a much higher-level version of the same trap.
Poisoned Dart Gallery Hazard 15
Complex, Mechanical, Trap
Stealth +28 (master) or DC 43 (legendary) to notice the control panel
Description Countless holes to launch poison darts from line a long hallway with a hidden control panel on the far end.
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Disable Thievery DC 30 (master) on the control panel deactivates the trap.
AC 37, Fort +23, Ref +27
Hardness 22, HP 90 (BT 45) to destroy the steel control panel and disable the trap; Immunities critical hits, object immunities, precision damage
Dart Volley (Reaction) (attack); Trigger A creature enters the hallway or ends its turn in the hallway. Effect The trap makes a poisoned dart Strike against the triggering creature, then rolls initiative.
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Routine (1 action) The trap launches one dart against every creature in the gallery as 1 action. Because it launches darts continuously, the trap can also use the Continuous Barrage free action (see below) to launch darts at each creature during that creature’s turn.
Ranged poisoned dart +30, Damage 5d4 piercing plus flesstar poison; no multiple attack penalty
Continuous Barrage (Free Action) Trigger A creature within the active gallery finishes an action. Effect The trap makes a poisoned dart Strike against the triggering creature.
Flesstar Poison (poison); Saving Throw DC 32 Fortitude; Maximum Duration 6 rounds; Stage 1 1d10 poison damage and clumsy 1 (1 round); Stage 2 2d10 poison damage and clumsy 2 (1 round); Stage 3 3d10 poison damage and clumsy 3 (1 round)
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Reset The trap deactivates and resets after 1 minute.
All this work has some practical use you can see right now. I put the lower level version of the poisoned dart gallery trap into my most recent project, a solo adventure called the Duskwalker's Due. You can get it here!
