101 Traps, Puzzles, and

Challenges to Add to Your

Campaign
Updated on October 16, 2019

Earl S. Wynn 
 more

Contact Author

Heere are 101 awesome ideas you can grab, modify, reuse, or otherwise tweak as many ways or
times as you'd like to give your players something fresh to run across every time they dive into the
danger zone. | Source
Looking for the perfect trap, puzzle or challenge to keep your players on their toes and add a
little spice to your RPG campaign or dungeon crawl? Well here are 101 awesome ideas you
can grab, modify, reuse, or otherwise tweak as many ways or times as you'd like to give your
players something fresh to run across every time they dive into the danger zone.

1. A room of freezing particles that stick to the skin and slow the characters down
significantly Add monsters/other challenges to taste.

2. A room strung with what looks like (initially) a net of thin, ghostly filaments. Turns out to be
monowire strung at random intervals (hard to see where until you're right on it) that makes it
difficult to cross. Monowire = a thread can slice through anything as easily as if it were
passing through air. Be very careful.

3. A locked door that must be broken down to pass. On the other side? An abyss. Breaking
the door down might cost your players a character or two.

4. An old man appears in a flash of light and offers to sell things to the characters. Does he
have a motive?

5. A perfectly ordinary-looking floor, empty room, etc. When the characters go in, the doors
close and lock, and the floor starts to tilt. It's on an axis, so movement on it tilts it in one
direction or the other, and it's going to take fast reflexes for the characters to keep from
slipping into the punjee pit below. Unfortunately, the key that unlocks the door is sitting on a
hook on the floor in such a way that it won't fall as long as the players are on the other side
of the room, but if the floor tilts the other way, then the key comes loose and falls into the
punjee pit.

6. A room filled with countless levers. One unlocks and opens the opposite door. The others
have various nasty effects (release sleeping gases, laughing gases, flood the room, drop
monster from a pipe in the ceiling [could be a complex mechanism with a whole bunch of
caged monsters up there...])

7. A long passage of murky, depthless water. Two boats are tied up at the entrance- one that
looks rickety and has a little water in the bottom, and one that is new looking, gilded on the
edges and looks really watertight. Turns out the "new" boat is actually an illusion, and it
disappears in a puff of smoke about halfway through. Add water encounters, tentacles,
piranhas, kelpies and the like to taste.

8. A powerful wizard creates a cavernous sinkhole beneath the city the players are in.

9. An illusory wall of fire, ice, water, lightning.

10. A room with a doorway 100-200 feet up. Walls are covered in tapestries. A random word
has been engraved on the wall. Turns out it's the secret word for one of the tapestries, (treat
as a flying carpet) but it has to be removed from the anti-magic clip holding it to the wall
before it will respond.

11. A curving downward staircase. Pressure plates on the staircase trigger an automated
crossbow/weapon at the bottom, making it seem like someone's down there. Turns out it's
just a statue wired to shoot bolts/bullets like that. The door through is beside the statue.

12. A hexagonal room with no obvious way out and an arrow drawn on the floor facing a
wall. Secret doors on every wall, each leading to another similar hexagonal room with
another random arrow. (You might want to map this out so you don't get lost, even if the
players do.) Makes a great maze.
13. A mimic that has taken the form of a door. (Turning the doorknob might cost a character
his hand!) Add splintered wood bits around the door to give the characters a "hint" or just
throw them off.

14. A jelly/blob creature partway through a door. (About a foot sticking out.) Turns out that it's
just the "tip of the iceberg" as it were, a little piece that had to go somewhere because the
1000 x 1000 ft room on the other side is already packed completely full with this thing's
enormous bulk.

15. A room with yellow lines that border the walls and break for spaces at even intervals 2-3
times. Where the lines break, there's a pressure-sensitive trap that spins the entire section of
the hallway to the left and ejects the character down into a pit of some kind or another (add
punjees, zombies, monsters, etc. to receive them when they hit if appropriate.

16. A room with a ragged, bottomless-looking hole in the center. Closer inspection reveals
massive toothmarks on the edge of the hole, and a deep breathing sound coming from far
down in the bottom. Great way to scare your characters. Add giant man-eating wyrm for a
little more spice.

17. A circular room with a fountain in the center of it. Looks like the floor is covered with
about a foot of water and gold coins are spread across the bottom. Turns out to be an
illusion- the water is actually more like ten feet deep with something scary and hungry at the
bottom (like tentacles and a big toothy mouth or another ooze or a horde of water-bloated
zombies)

18. A door with multiple knobs. Wrong knobs trigger traps.

19. A long maze of gooey yellow sponge passages just large enough for one person to crawl
through. Starts to shrink and harden if players take too long to get through

20. A room full of bubbles that show the players' nightmares, bad memories and fears to
them
21. A horde of ghost pirates come through the walls and attack the players

22. A statue of a big buff man holding his bicep, hand halfway between open and a fist, and
grinning. (Arm wrestle to get through)

23. An elaborate fake-out trap, like a room filled with obvious pressure plates (maybe
marked, like a rune-word puzzle that has to be stepped on) or big bold lines, that sort of
thing. Either the trap was disabled, or it's there to mess with people. Add
incentives/scariness by putting dangerous-looking arcing electrical things at the end by the
door, ominous nozzles, broken tiles that drop into magma... that sort of thing.

24. A room with an unusual light source (like a torch in a tube in the floor or something) with
a lot of shadows. One or more of those shadows are living, and hungry.

25. A room with a man hanging at the far end, his wrists and ankles in shackles, chained to
the wall and over the door. Walking closer to him tightens the chains (like a rack). He
screams in pain and begs for mercy every time they tighten. It could be an illusion—you
decide how much to mess with your characters' sense of right and wrong.

26. A room full of statues (8) holding corked vials. Setting off hidden pressure plates causes
the statues to drop them, releasing nerve gas. The door handle is a knife blade.

27. Anything from Indiana Jones.

28. A circular raised platform. Light comes down upon in. Only the penitent man will pass.

29. Two chains retracted into the walls 30ft apart. Pull the two together (feat of strength) to
open the door. Find a way to connect them to keep it open. The door falls quickly.

30. Eight levers in sockets that must all be turned at once

31. A long gravel corridor with a heavy statue of a laughing guy in football gear holding a
rope at one end and a car trunk at the other. Drag the man through the gravel to the car
trunk and connect them to pass.

32. A pool of bubbling sewage with a pipe under it leading to a toilet bowl that must be
climbed up through.

33. A wall of acoustic force that blasts the ears and takes a force of will to get through.
Makes characters temporarily deaf.

34. 8 holes in the wall, each with a steel rod inside. One opens the door, the other seven
shock the character. 1d4/turn. Almost impossible to get free- other characters will usually
have to pry the shocked one loose.

35. A massive, tsunami-style tidal wave immediately rises up to crush the characters. Run
away in fear or face it. Turns out to be illusion.

36. (Great for the next room) A real tsunami-style tidal wave rises up to crush the characters.

37. A thick wall of ice blocking passage that shoots blades out ten inches when touched.
(1d6)

38. A two-hundred-foot steel wall blocks the way. Handholds are razorblades of sharpness.

39. A room with gravity pulling four ways (up, down, left, right.) each "wall" is a five-foot deep
pit of molten gold

40. Two electrified handles on opposite sides of a thirty-foot chamber. Like the chains,
except the characters need to form a conductive link to power the door and get it to open.

41. A room with a mud floor. He who swims to the bottom and finds the tunnel to the next
room escapes
42. A room filled with sharpened bamboo poles sticking out of the room at evenly spaced
intervals, floor to ceiling. There's not really enough room to just slip by, and if one of the
poles is touched, it comes alive, dealing 1d4 hp damage to the character.

43. The players walk into a large room with a large stone ring sticking out of one wall. An
equal number of ghostly figures (to characters) step through the wall, one carrying the ball.
They're all pretty strong, and it should really be a challenge for the players to beat them, if
they do at all. You see, the winners are hauled away and sacrificed, and like Aztec
ballplayers, the ghosts think this honorable death desirable.

44. A table with two chairs and a statue of a smiling, one-armed hick that comes alive and
starts pouring drinks. Outdrink the hick.

45. A circular man-sized opening/door sweeping down into the floor. It's filled with something
sticky and viscous like honey or molasses. Beyond the floor (where it can't be seen except
by diving in,) it narrows steadily down to a fist-sized opening with a lever at maximum arm's
reach that opens a secret door (leading to the next room) but it's back beyond the mouth of
the pipe.

46. A room full of bouncing basketballs that the players have trouble wading through. In the
middle somewhere, balls start shooting in toward the characters at random, hitting them in
"stun" type locations, like the face and groin.

47. A large, olympic-sized pool with a rectangular shape and a rectangular bottom about 12
feet down covered in rusty-looking armor and items, etc. Turns out there's a jelly blob thing
down there that's translucent with the gear inside it completely covering the floor up to about
two feet from the bottom. It's hungry too, so the characters better watch out!

48. A room crammed full of rotten barrels filled with decaying dynamite. No room to get
around- over is the only way.

49. The players open a flimsy-looking door and find themselves face to face with a massive,
arena-style room packed with an audience of 10-20 thousand hungry zombies.

50. The players enter an empty room with a slowly strobing light (spell-based or technology,
whatever works in your campaign.) what they don't see is the monster/ninja/assassin stuck
to the ceiling above them.

51. A room filled with water and fish and contained within the room by magic or technology.
Whatever it is, you can walk through it, and you're going to have to if you want to see what's
on the other side. The water is dark and a little cloudy, but there's just some harmless-
looking fish visible, so it can't be that bad. (Until you get about halfway in and there's a shark
or a larger room with a bigger shark, or something like that.)

52. A long hallway filled with misters. In the center is a pedestal that does nothing, but looks
like it does something. The trick is in the misters- they're dispensing liquid LSD, and it starts
to take effect before too long. Longer exposure = more vivid hallucinations.

53. A large field of flowers and fruit and peace. The fruit has a sleep toxin. It's all an illusion,
and the "flush" lever can be found with a little searching. Turns out all the "food" was actually
sewage.

54. A zodiac spreads across the floor. Close observation shows that it has a thirteenth
symbol, closer observation reveals it's an unrelated symbol, (get creative- make it the ford
symbol or something) even closer inspection reveals that it's a pressure plate.
55. A single mirror at the end of the room. Looking into it reveals a face after a moment that
jumps out of the mirror and screams. He who overcomes his fear and screams back gets
grabbed and pulled through to the other side.

56. A fifty-foot chasm full of razor-sharp blades stands between the characters and their goal
or the next door.

57. Room with a mud floor. Door at the opposite end. This floor is sticky, like quicksand, and
about twelve feet deep.

58. Room full of about thirty gorillas that all look up when the door is opened. Watch your
players freak out. Gorillas are actually really gentle. They don't care what the players do, as
long as they don't hurt any of them, and if they do, the gorillas just run away or attempt to
defend themselves

59. A pedestal with a cute little rabbit sculpture on it in the center of a room. Does nothing,
but if they ever all look away from it at once (like if they're leaving) it roars and shakes the
room.

60. A room with a hyper-aging field in it (turns one minute into one year). Inside the field, the
room has given way to a lush forest with flowers that bloom, turn to fruit and drop all in the
space of a minute. There's a door on the other side.
61. A room with eight pools of water and eight flush levers. Pressure plates in the floor allow
levers to be used. Seven of them flush the characters into a pit full of water and zombies.
One opens the door

62. A room with an oddly golden haze hanging in it. In the center of the room is a squalling
baby on a dias. If the players scoop it up, it smiles and laughs, and then turns into a wad of
angry mutant flesh with talons that tries to latch onto faces and whatnot. At that moment, the
rest of the room turns into something living, like the inside of a stomach.

63. A room filled with an odd network of pipes that is so thick it's difficult to move through.
Closer inspection reveals some of the pipes are made out of substances other than metal
(like skin or wood) and the pipes react to being touched. If threatened in any way, or if the
room thinks it can take whoever's in it, it will burst pipes near that person, spraying them with
steam, ground glass, acid, or any number of other things the DM can come up with. Dead
characters/abandoned objects left in the room are absorbed to make new pipes.

64. A strobe-lit hall of warped mirrors. Every time the light flashes, something grotesque
appears. Add doppelgangers to amp up the fun if you wish.

65. A door with a large, unusual keyhole. The room is filled with keys and a handful of
random objects. All the keys but the proper one are coated in poison (sleep poison,
withering, etc. it's up to you) and the proper one turns out to be something really random like
a wine bottle (breakable... muahahaha) or a dildo (who's gonna want to touch that?)

66. A door that's totally barricaded over. If the characters tear down the barricades, they find
whatever it is on the other side that the door was barricaded against...

67. Set up a junction. In one room is a trap/challenge and a locked, unbreakable door but no
key. In the other is the key, but it's set on a pedestal in the middle of a cluster of ominous-
looking statues of armed warriors who are all staring at it. Whether or not the statues come
to life when the key is taken is up to you.

68. A simple looking room with a locked door and a key on a pedestal. When the characters
pick up the key and try to insert it into the lock, it crumbles to dust the instant it touches the
keyhole. The real key is still in the room, but it's hidden somewhere, either under the
pedestal or under a brick in the floor... the options are endless.

69. The characters enter a room filled with a hazy blue/red/green mist. It could just be mist or
an illusion, or it could be vampiric, leaching blood (Hit Points) stats, even artifact/item
powers. Maybe it makes all gunpowder it touches non-functional- there's a lot of room for
creativity here.

70. Create a trap or situation using something from a different time/dimension. For fantasy
settings, throw a couple of claymore trip mines at the characters. For futuristic settings, throw
a steam-powered monstrosity at them, or something involving magic (like a fireball-hurling
mage)

71. A device (or a room housing a device) that subsonically triggers the pleasure centers of
the brain to all who are exposed to it. May be triggered by a pressure plate in the center of
the room. Imagine- the characters might get caught permanently in the center of the room,
unwilling (or unable) to move simply because they're experiencing something akin to an
endless, massive orgasm. Sure, they'll die of starvation eventually, or maybe you could have
some kind of creature come along and nibble on them first...

72. A really creepy room with really creepy things the players can explore, play with, or even
take with them. Consider your living room, and then imagine if every piece of furniture was
made from bone and poorly stretched human hide. That kind of thing.

73. While in a town buying supplies, looking for work, or relaxing, a wizard in that same town
unwittingly opens a singularity bubble in his tower, making the town the focal point of a baby
black hole that the whole world is slowly imploding into. (Great start for a new quest.)

74. The players find themselves face to face with a giant steel double door covered in a
series of dark, symmetrically-aligned holes. Opening the door triggers the forty-at-once
wheeled arrow battery on the other side to fire its payload through the door.
75. A room full of corpses in various states of decay. They can either lay in wait for the
moment to rise and attack or maybe they really are just corpses. Or you could get creative
and have them rise up magically, but be nothing more than a puppeteer's toys.

76. The characters have to get into a building/dungeon/installation. Make the only entrance
be through the hopper of an automated meat processing unit. Alarm sounds if they break it.
Encourage them to get creative in their attempts to get in without being turned into
hamburger.

77. ...Or, maybe the only way to get into the facility is to "become" one of its
denizens/defenders. This could be as simple as acquiring a uniform, or as sacrificial as being
assimilated (cybernetically) or being transformed into something... otherworldly.

78. A long, windy passage with grates spaced at even intervals along the floor. A closer look
will reveal unnaturally smooth walls, the surface almost glassy. Before they get in too far, the
door they came through slams shut, opening a wide pipe that starts filling the room with
some liquid as all the floor grates seal. The liquid could be simple water, or, if you're feeling
particularly nasty, make it something more dangerous, like sulfuric acid. You can also make
the door at the other end of the tunnel a puzzle to open too, for added fun and panicking.

79. A room with dirt/stone walls, like the inside of a cave. Looks totally ordinary, but there
could be any number of things hidden behind the walls (large animals/monsters, mining
lasers, mechanisms that push the walls together to crush what's in the room, etc.)

80. Create a big central door with 3-6 keyholes in it. Every key must be inserted in it to get it
open. Now hide each of the keys in a different part of the dungeon/facility, either in some
really obvious (and therefore irritating) place, like on top of a fireplace mantle, or at the end
of some daunting challenge. Whether there's anything good behind this big central door is up
to you. There might just be nerve gas behind it or something equally dangerous. It's up to
you.
81. The players find an important door they have to go through, but a massive pillar has
fallen directly into it, jamming it and blocking the way.

82. A room with another smaller room inside of it. Blood and gore have seeped out through
the door of the smaller room and soaked the floor. If the players go inside, they find a
sickeningly macabre scene of dismembered corpses- then the door locks, and the walls (or
the ceiling) sprout knives and start to move.

83. The players find a music box in some random part of the dungeon/facility. It plays a
simple tune. Later (how much later is up to you) they come across an impassable door filled
with holes about the size of a dagger blade. When a dagger is inserted into a hole, it makes
a specific and unique tone. The door is a sound-based lock- play the song from the music
box to open the door.

84. An impassable door in a room with a large monolith in it. On the face of the monolith are
glowing runes that are each a different color and shine their light across the face of the door.
What opens the door is up to you- maybe the characters have to cover up a key rune word to
open the door, or maybe they have to cover all the runes but those that make the word, or
maybe they need to create a certain color (or series of colors, as with multiple locks) in order
to open the door.

85. A living door with a face greets the characters as they come into the room. He doesn't
want to let them through, but if they persist, then he says he requires a living sacrifice. If they
try to get through anyway, he chooses one of them at random and traps them in a
constricting magic jar. He can be persuaded to let his target go, but only at a steeper price. If
they pay the price, he lets them through.

86. A normal-looking room with some decent furniture in it (a couch, a coffee table, several
easy chairs, a bookcase, a clock, etc.) There's also a water fountain and a bowl of fruit on
the table. When they go inside, the door locks behind them and becomes impassable. (As
the other door already is.) How to get out? The clock on the wall is open and magical-
turning it advances time (or reverses it) in the room, but only on the objects in the room (and
the doors). They can reverse it to reopen the first door, or they can push it forward until the
doors rot away and fall off the hinges. (Or open automatically- something like that)

87. The players enter a gallery of odd-looking paintings, and both doors close and lock. If
anyone pauses to look at the paintings, they feel themselves drawn into them like they could
just step forward and be in that realm. If they try, they get sucked into the painting and must
deal with the denizens thereof (fight a knight, fight a creature made of clocks, be subject to
the world of "The Scream".) The key is in one of these painting worlds.

88. The players walk into a room just in time to see a man with a jackal's head (Anubis)
confront a man who looks like another adventurer. He says "Only he whose heart is so pure
that it weighs less than a feather may pass to the other side. Show me your chest so that I
might judge." The adventurer does so, and Anubis reaches out and removes his heart, then
weighs it, and finding it weighs more than a feather, he hucks the heart into the mouth of a
nearby crocodile and the adventurer dies on the spot. Anubis then looks at the characters
and repeats his first line. In truth, the whole thing is an illusion, but the shock of having one's
heart devoured as such is enough to kill a character.

89. The characters walk into a room with a door at the other end. The room is empty, and the
door is locked, but whoever tries to open the door triggers a trap that opens the floor beneath
him/her and he/she falls into a shallow pit for minimal damage (mostly just surprised.) If they
find a way to get past the door, they find that it's just for show- it's just stone on the other
side. The real door out is a trap door at the bottom of the pit.

90. The characters enter a room with a locked door and a dome of glass overhead through
which they can see the sky. Put the key somewhere really obvious to unnerve them- like on
a hook next to the door. The real trick is if they break the glass on the dome, the sky illusion
shatters too, and an underground lake (previously held back by the dome) pours into the
room/dungeon/facility through the hole. You can also make the door more complex to really
put an edge on things and give the characters an additional reason to break the dome.

91. The characters enter another gallery full of paintings. The door out is locked and
unpassable but is interesting in that it seems to have a strange mesh quality to it. How do
they get out? There is a letter written on the back of each of the paintings, and when they're
combined (and de-jumbled) and the password is spoken aloud, the door opens. You can
make it something really cheesy like "open sesame" or even go for full words on the backs of
the paintings and require them to put together a sentence that could even be a hint to
another puzzle further on (lots of people learn by doing).

92. A pit trap opens beneath a character and then seals overhead as it triggers locks on all
doors in or out of the room. Inside the trap and in the room are a series of switches that do
things like fill the opposite space (pit trap or room above it) with water or release sleeping
gas or fill the room with arcing lightning- those sort of fun things that can be combined to
create a really hairy situation (like a flood of gasoline and later a fireball) Luckily the switches
are on/off toggles, even though the machinery is old and might take a moment or two to
respond. There's also one switch that opens the doors, but both have to be turned to "on" to
work.

93. Create a fun trap that will catch stragglers- a good example would be an L-shaped
hallway with a door at both ends and the floor covered with about three inches of gasoline.
As soon as the door in the boot of the L is opened, the opposite door sinks into the ground
five feet, revealing a large flame thrower that toasts anything in the long part of the hallway
and lights the gasoline on fire. Whoever opened the door and anyone else with him/her
better beat feet fast, and hope everyone else that caught the brunt of the fire made it out
okay.

94. The characters walk into a room that's filled with a misty red haze and there's a
noticeably odd iron tang to the air. You can put things hiding in the mist, but the presence of
the mist alone should be enough to mess with the characters. Later (like a room or two down
the line, they walk into a room, the doors close (they don't have to lock) and with a crackle
and hum of electricity, a hypersensitive electromagnet that covers the whole ceiling comes
alive. This will, of course, grab weapons, armor, anything magnetic- including items not
properly cleaned after the red mist room. Next, the room begins to fill with water (or
something else- it depends how nasty you want to be.) There's a drain on the other side of
either door though, so if they can get free before they drown, there's still hope of escape.

95. The characters walk into a hallway filled with rushing air enchanted to extinguish any light
sources, so they have to stumble around in the dark. This leads to a large room that is
likewise enchanted, but unwittingly stepping on a pressure plate in this room disables the
enchantment and triggers a cache of 50 coins each enchanted with a very bright continual
light spell to drop from the ceiling. The combined light of player's light sources and the coins
is blinding- especially combined with the fact that the entire room has been covered in
mirrors... Add monsters that leap out and jump on blinded players as you see fit.

96. A room with a number of sealed glass insets and a locked, impassable door with the note
"In case of fire, break glass" pinned to it. Most of the glass boxes are filled with Halon gas,
which blasts out and chokes the characters exposed to it (or you could put in something
worse) and one of the insets opens the door (or maybe just floods the room, if the door turns
out to be a dud in your scheme of things.)

97. The characters enter a room and suddenly steel walls fall from the ceiling and separate
them, creating individual hallways from which there appears to be no escape. The walls
should be soundproof too. As soon as the character looks away or gets desperate, someone
appears who he/she loves or really trusts, and this someone tries to keep them there by any
means necessary. Add rising water or heat or other deadly panic-inducers for extra fun. How
to get out? Work up the nerve to attack and kill the illusory person.

98. A locked, impassable door that, when touched, beeps and says "Password please."
nearby is a large, onyx pyramid on a pedestal that, when touched, steals the spirit of the
person who touched it and randomly injects the spirit of one of its other captives into the
vacant body. One of these souls knows the password, and a number of them are violent,
insane, or previous adventurers with their own agendas who won't be too keen on giving up
the body they're in.

99. A large, unpassable door that won't budge. On either side of the door, two to a side, are
four long, flexible copper wires that are rolled up. Also in the room are a number of fruit trees,
including oranges and grapes, and a number of clay pots. The trick to get through is to make
four primitive batteries to power the door by filling pots with acidic fruit juice and putting the
copper wires in them.

100. Another room where the door closes behind the characters and becomes impassable.
There are no other visible doors, and the room is starting to flood. The trick to getting out? A
concealed trap door on the ceiling that can only be reached by swimming as the room fills...

101. A wise-looking (or famous) sage/messiah waits for the characters in a room with no
visible doors. He/she greets them, speaks with them, and if asked where to go or how to
proceed, the sage tells them that only in death can one see and go through the door which
lies in this room. It is locked to all else. Attempts to find the door should fail. The sage will
continue to "help" them accept that they have to die, and will gladly kill them if they wish,
(absorbing their spirits as payment and keeping them from passing to the next world, so they
are just dead, gone forever.) The only way through is to confront the sage, who, after the
players start getting aggressive, turns into some kind of hideous monster that turns out to be
a real test of the characters' strengths. Killing the monster reveals the door and unlocks it.