Traps

They prowl dungeons the world over, lurking around corners, behind locked doors and in treasure chests. They have no conscience to appeal to, no mind to reason with. Negative levels or ability drain won't so much as slow them down, and even no-save, no-SR spells like forcecage or maze won't do a thing. They can threaten any character, from level 1 all the way up to level 20, and take many forms. What deadly creature could this possibly be...?

Traps!

Yes, the staple of dungeon hazards, traps have been dutifully stabbing, poisoning, dropping, slicing, dicing and polymorphing-into-spaghetti-ing hapless adventurers since time immemorial. Generally they are something to suspect and avoid, to shove the rogue at in hopes of tasty XP before moving on. But in truth, traps are misunderstood creatures. Their name might inspire fear and caution in seasoned adventurers, but with a bit of kindness and a lot of gold, one can bend these gentle, beautiful, inanimate creatures to their own whims. With some careful set-up and some rather gross subversion of the game designers' expectations (as usual,) traps can be a source of immense power.


Consider this. If you want a spell cast, you either have to cast it yourself or pay someone else to do it for you. But what if you want a spell cast a dozen times? A thousand? Unless you have thousands of spell slots floating around, or millions of disposable gold pieces, you're going to need to look elsewhere.

The Dungeon Master's Guide has the rules for pricing out a custom magic item, in this case a use-activated item. The cost is equal to the spell's level x the caster level x 2000 gp, with an additional multiplier depending on the spell's duration (x4 for a duration measured in rounds, x2 for minutes/level, x1.5 for 10 minutes/level, and x0.5 for 24 hour duration.) So it would cost you 120 000 gp to make a use-activated item of prayer. That's pretty steep for an effect that isn't exactly impressive to anyone over level 5. So what's the elegant solution? Traps. No kidding, traps provide a (relatively) cheap and easy way to get a spell on demand.

The trick is that a magic trap can be set up to cast a spell when it's triggered - common choices include things like summon monster, lightning bolt, cloudkill and other such unpleasantries. Who says you have to program in an offensive spell, though? A trap of cure light wounds or moment of prescience is entirely possible within the rules, just not what one would expect. Secondly, one can make a magic trap automatically self-resetting (for 10x the cost) so that it can be triggered every round, ad finitum.

The thing is, traps are priced quite modestly, especially when compared to magic items, wands and the like. Theoretically this makes sense - the trap's purchaser is essentially paying for one 'attack,' which sits in one place that someone - who they may or may not want to target - may or may not trigger it, whereafter they may or may not avoid the trap's effects. Thinking about them this way, suddenly it seems hard to justify making traps very expensive at all. After all, even if you pay for a trap that resets itself, how many times do you think the same guy's going to fall for it? But of course, we aren't thinking about traps that way - we're using them for our personal gain.

So what does this mean? You can create a stationary spell dispensary for far cheaper than a use-activated item of the same spell would be. With a pricetag of 500 gp x caster level x spell level, that prayer trap would cost 7 500 gp, or one sixteenth of what the item would cost. Not a bad discount for shopping smart, huh? No need to have the trap be in a fixed location, either. Mount the trap on a wagon you're riding around, and you'll be constantly triggering a prayer effect on your party just by virtue of being there.

So getting a discount on useful buffs is nice, even with the cost of them being less convenient to get at or make use of. But what are the real implications of a spell dispensary, exactly? Collected here, I have a couple ideas for how to abuse the awesome usefulness of a self-resetting magic trap.


Make Room! Make Room!

It can be hard looking after a populace. If you're somehow in a position of power in a large city (or have reason to make a deal with someone who is) you might be eager for shortcuts and easy ways to solve city-wide problems. For instance, keeping the populace fed can be a real problem. Growing seasons aren't always bountiful, not every region or terrain is suitable, and sometimes things just go wrong. Why waste your land and working force on farms, though?

A self-resetting trap of create food and water will cost 7500 gold to build. Even a single trap at minimum caster level will cover the daily food and water requirements of 216 000 people. Every single day. Adding in a resetting trap of prestidigitation (for a staggering 250 gp) will allow everyone collecting their food to flavour it however they like, ensuring nobody gets bored of the provided fare, either. The time this saves, not to mention the space and workforce this frees up, can easily recoup the cost of a few traps and help propel a city into a metropolitan powerhouse.


Trapped For Your Pleasure

Normally if there are traps all over your house, it's because you're a villain in a poorly-designed campaign who apparently constantly wades through his own traps, waiting for pesky adventurers to show up. But again, no need to have a faceful of fireball every time you go to your own bathroom. Imagine a resetting trap of light every time you enter your living room, ghost sound to welcome guests or emulate a doorbell, or a prestidigitation to clean your shoes when you enter the front door or chill anything placed in a designated box (just refrain from calling it "ye olde refrigerator.") Prestidigitation in particular can produce all sorts of comfy effects, if you'll recall. All sorts of modern comforts can be roughly (and cheaply!) emulated through resetting traps containing various level 0 or 1 spells.

Bustin' Makes Me Feel Good

Feeding the poor and inventing The Clapper is swell and all, but I know why you're all really here. The road to power. What can you use traps for to create real, personal gain? Well, do you remember that vast and well-fed populace in the earlier example? Let's put them to work....

The Book of Exalted Deeds introduced a substance called ambrosia, which is literally the "physical manifestation of joy." You can quaff it for a buzz, but more interestingly, you can use a dose to pay for 2 xp in magic item creation. So if you had enough of the stuff, you could go full Extreme Couponing on the magic item market and never pay an xp cost again.

Now here's where things get interesting: the same book introduces the spell distilled joy, which creates a dose of ambrosia, drawn forth from a creature in a state of bliss. Ergo, if you were to build a resetting trap of distilled joy, you could pull a dose of ambrosia out of persons in a state of pleasure every round! If the DM hassles you about distilled joy's 24 hour casting time (which legitimately makes no sense - how would you know when somebody's going to experience a moment of rapture a day in advance?) then a factotum could cast it into the trap as a spell-like ability, which will always take one round.

So how exactly do you get someone that ecstatic? You can't just fake the level of delight required to pull ambrosia out of some shmuck, and your spell slots are too valuable to blow them all on mage hands and jerk off a whole crowd. Thankfully, the Book of Exalted Deeds comes complete with the third piece of the puzzle, in the form of the level 2 spell elation. Asides from a small, unimportant morale boost to the affected subjects' speed, Strength and Dexterity, they also "become elated, full of energy and joy." Plant a magic trap of elation opposite the one for distilled joy, and it will constantly allow for ambrosia to be extracted and produced. If need be, a trap of good hope should also work. (By the way, honest answer: have you ever seen the words "trap of good hope" before?)

So we have all the makings for an inexpensive ambrosia farm, but what about the cattl-er, people? Well, firstly, I don't think it's unfair to think that a populace would be not just willing but eager to subject themselves to said device, seeing as it has one or more pleasure-inducing spell freely used on them. A populace who visit the create food and water traps before heading over to the elation traps don't really require any further upkeep and are (inevitably!) going to be happy as well as productive (in a sense.) Not only is this setup not at all evil, the use of the [good] spells means it should in fact be actively good! But if you are faced with a populace of straightedge bores for whatever reason, the Leadership feat, or being a Thrallherd, can give you an enormous pool of xp batteries to pile into your traps.

Stockpiling XP for crafting should already be enough to make most DMs roll arbitrary dice behind their screen before declaring your character dead, but if you want to push the envelope, psionics are here to the rescue. Anchor plane, a level 8th psion power, allows you to create a manifest zone - a sort of window where the boundaries between planes are weaker, and where the trait of another plane is manifested. As an example, you could create a manifest zone for Dal Quor in order to take advantage of its flowing time trait - time progresses at ten times the speed it does on the Material Plane, meaning your little engine will be producing ambrosia ten times faster than normal. Add an additional, overlapping manifest zone for the Astral Plane, providing the timeless trait, and your subjects will never age or even have need for food. Theoretically, this could make an arbitarily large amount of ambrosia instantaneously appear the moment you manifest the zone for the Astral Plane, basically to the limit of empty containers being handy or your populace being cooperative... but that's a thought experiment for another time.