A Review of the Role Playing Game Supplement CASTLE OLDSKULL – The Book of Dungeon Traps

CASTLE OLDSKULL – The Book of Dungeon Traps is a role playing game supplement written and published by Kent David Kelly.

This is a 274 page PDF that is available for $6.49 from DriveThruRPG but was purchased at the reduced price of $0.99 during a sale. It is also available as a Kindle and print edition from Amazon. The PDF is the version reviewed. Two pages are the front and rear covers, eight pages are the front matter, one page explains the book is not a complete game, five pages are the Contents, two pages are About the Author and six pages are ads for other products.

The two page Description is essentially the introduction and states that, although the supplement is intended to interface with The Classic Dungeon Design Guide, The Classic Dungeon Design Guide II and The Classic Dungeon Design Guide III, they are optional.

Chapter 1: Introduction covers the role of traps in a dungeon and how existing material has traps hard to design and hard to balance, as well as hard to differentiate. The Grimtooth trap supplements are mentioned but, as the author rightly points out, are designed for a different type of play and are often insta-kill machines simply designed to kill characters – and are therefore not that fun in a regular game.

Chapter 2: Designing and Placing Traps in Dungeons has ten levels of trap lethality, with overviews as to the sort of damage each level will do and what character levels they are aimed at. Next is how frequently traps should be encountered, based on the highest character level of a party. How traps should be placed, whether to go into their backstory, a d100 table of trap locations, albeit with nowhere near 100 results, and different trap triggers finish this chapter.

Chapter 3: Traps in Play has game mechanics for finding and disarming traps, including for character classes who are not thieves.

Chapter 4: The Trap Compendium is an alphabetical, from A to W, collection of traps by name, 1,000 in all. Each has a lethality level, a description and a description of damage. Many are variations on the same trap, such as arrow traps, but with different locations, number of arrows and use of poison. There are also variations; for example, javelin and bolt traps are similar to arrow traps, just with different amounts of damage for the weapon. In that example, the descriptions for the latter two trap types refer back to arrow traps, but the bookmarks are not fine enough to instantly click to them, nor are the traps hyperlinked back, which is detrimental to navigation.

Chapter 5: Random Trap Selection is a set of 20 tables for randomly rolling trap lethality depending on the character levels and location in the dungeon. These reference Chapter 6.

Chapter 6: Random Trap Determination has 20 d100 tables, with less than 100 results, of traps organised by lethality level. Some of the traps have examples, if appropriate and some have recommended monster by level, referencing Chapter 7.

Chapter 7: Trap-Related Monsters has ten tables of monsters that could be found in traps, organised by level as defined in the previous chapter. It recommends using common sense if a monster doesn’t fit the trap, or coming up with a way in which it might, and also references the Oldskull Dungeon Bestiary.

CASTLE OLDSKULL – The Book of Dungeon Traps in Review

The PDF is bookmarked, with the major and minor sections linked, although perhaps they could be deeper. The Contents covers the same level of detail and is also hyperlinked. Navigation is pretty decent, although, as mentioned earlier, when one trap type references another, earlier, trap, some means of getting directly to that trap would have been useful.

The text maintains a single column format and was almost error-free. There are a variety of black and white and colour public domain images, whose placement is often a bit erratic – they don’t always fill empty space but sometimes simply divide up tables in a less than rational manner. Presentation is a bit variable.

As with other supplements in the Castle Oldskull series, the main component of this one is tables – lots and lots of tables. Occasionally somewhat repetitive tables, as entries are simply other entries with changes. GMs who like something more than tables will probably not appreciate this supplement as much. Having said that, the tables do require rather less GM input than those in other supplements in the series. There are useful rules on trap finding – the book is somewhat system-generic, but it is definitely aimed at D&D based games, especially OSR ones – and the traps are organised well enough that they can be dropped into a game. There are also experience suggestions for the different lethality types.

This is a pretty useful trap supplement, more useful for Old School gamers than such as Pathfinder, but still useful in general. It is probably easier to use without extensive GM input than other books in the series, so probably has a wider appeal. CASTLE OLDSKULL – The Book of Dungeon Traps can be found by clicking here.