Deathtrap Dungeon

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Spoiler: This entire adventure is a dungeon crawl, February 11, 2021
Another one available through the Tinman Games FF Classics app.

DD is one of those books that tends to be one of the favorites in the FF series. It’s not bad and I certainly enjoyed it, but I never got the big deal about it.

The premise is a guy named Baron Sukumvit holds this Trial of Champions event in the city known as Fang. Because he’s a rich jerk with a lot of time and money on his hands, he’s created this insanely dangerous dungeon for this purpose. People enter and if they survive then they win ten-thousand gold. If they fail, then they die.

So far nobody has won and being the ego/greed driven adventurer you are, you decide to try your luck.

Yeah, it’s basically like a fantasy version of any of those 80s scifi movies where you got a gamshow based around trying to survive to the end. Surprised they didn’t actually put it in a scifi setting actually, but probably for the best that they didn’t.

Despite the simple premise, this is where the series started connecting other books and creating a greater world. It mentions the city of Fang being located close to Port Blacksand and few other background lore things.

Before you enter, it also mentions some of the other contestants. One of them is an armored knight, two of them are barbarians, one is an elven girl, and another is some ninja dude. And you’ll meet most of them all again at some point.

As to be expected for a book called Deathtrap Dungeon, the book is incredibly punishing. Having high stats is sort of vital due to some tough battles, but there are a lot of instant death scenarios. Some of them can be easily avoided provided you aren’t retarded like say crawling into a hole where a giant rock grub came out of. (Yes, you can actually do that)

Most of the encounters you have are either fights or some room where you have to make a skill check due to traps. While there are encounters that stand out, most of memorable ones involve you bumping into the other contestants.

You’ll also bump into a few trial masters that are in key parts of the dungeon. Sometimes they just give you a riddle to solve, but in one instance you have to under go a series tests, which I’ll get to in a moment.

The dungeon could be said to be divided into two sections. The only real difference is the second part is a little more lethal and you might have uncovered the fact that you need 3 gems to pass the final test.

Yeah, Ian with his item hunt again. Might have helped had you KNOWN about collecting vital gems from the start, but then again maybe it's just assumed that as a filthy adventurer you’re going to be snatching any valuables you can anyway.

So getting back to the first half of the dungeon, you’ll actually encounter one of the barbarian contestants known as Throm. The pair of you will actually agree to work together for awhile which is a bit of a first in the FF series to be traveling with someone.

Throm’s not too much of a talker though and you'll probably want to keep in mind that for this contest, THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE winner and eventually you'll part ways after a major encounter with one of the trial masters.

Around this point you move on the second phase of the dungeon, which I said seems a bit more lethal. A lot more instant death parts and tough battles, one of which is a freaking T-Rex, though for some reason they call it a Pit Fiend. (Because it’s in a giant pit I guess) You can avoid a direct fight with some luck and some skill checks as I remember.

It is also at this point you’ll bump into the last remaining contestants at some point. One of them even has one of the gems and that one is an unmissable encounter so it's sort of a "gimme" assuming you manage to defeat them.

One encounter of note that isn’t contestant related is one where you bump into a female troll who wants payment for pulling you up on a primitive elevator. You can fight her, pay her or talk your way out of it. Talking is amusing since you look about the room and see a picture of a male troll and make reference to it. She tells you that the picture is of her brother…Sourbelly! She then gushes about being very proud of him being a guard in Port Blacksand.

Assuming you have all the gems, there's still a last bit with the final trial master. Failing to have all the gems leads to a non-standard ending of being a flunky for that trial master and remaining trapped in the dungeon. Which couldn’t be a worse fate for an adventurer seeing as you’ll be working a regular 9 to 5 job.

If you have all the gems then you have to put them in correct order. This is sort of a call back to the Firetop key puzzle. Get them in the wrong order and you suffer damage, but if you survive it, you keep getting chances to put them in the correct order.

After you’re done messing around with the gems and finally get them right, you'll eventually emerge victorious to a cheering crowd and the baron has no option but to give you your prize. I can only guess that this crowd was somehow watching all this stuff unfold on perhaps a giant crystal ball.

There really isn’t a “final bad guy” to fight. I suppose is the closest thing to one is the last surviving contestant since it's a pretty tough battle and near the end of the adventure. There's also a tough fight with a manticore towards the end too.

But since it’s the dungeon that’s trying to kill you the entire story, that could be considered the “main bad guy.”

In any case, as I said I never got the hype with this one, but its still one of the better FF books.

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