Death Trap

The adventurers have been hanging around town (or the pub, or where ever it is that your adventurers hang out) and they start hearing of a fabulous treasure that was buried by an evil wizard in some dank crypt. But, like most treasures, it's guarded by fearsome creatures and a nasty trap.

The wizard had lived a long life, and had only turned to the dark arts when he lost his wife and child to a swarm of hungry spiders. To his dying day the wizard hated spiders. The adventurers can thank the spiders though, since they robbed the evil wizard of his sole heir, thus forcing him to tuck all his riches in the afore-mentioned dank crypt.

If the adventurers ask around town they will run across an old man who says that his father was taken by force to build parts of the trap. You see, this father was a master alchemist who specialized in acids. The wizard needed the alchemist's skill, but did not trust the alchemist not to divulge the secrets of the crypt -- so once the alchemist had done his work, the wizard cast a spell, wiping the alchemist's mind of all the work done in the crypt. The son did recall, though, that his father came home suffering from both blade cuts and burns from working too close to the other traps in the vault.

The lure of treasure is no doubt going to overtake the fearless players, so they will eventually head off towards the location of the crypt. Outside the crypt they'll find three old, broken statues scattered about; an eagle, a spider and an orc.

When the adventurers finally make it down to the very bottom of the crypt, they encounter a room with four levers, one on each wall (North, South, East, and West). Looking around the room they see places in each wall where statues would have been, but over the years scavengers and hapless grave-robbers had looted all but the heaviest statue, that of the dragon in the West side of the room. A casual examination of the dragon statue shows that it is scorched in places, indicating that there is a flame trap in the East side of the room.

The adventurers will realize that the broken statues they found outside the crypt must have, in the distant past, been in this room. They'll also realize that any wizard who so hated spiders would never, ever, place the treasure behind a statue of a spider.

Any adventurer making a feng shui roll will no doubt realize that it is bad luck to place an orc statue on Southern side of a house, and especially bad form to do so in a crypt. In fact, the only way to put a statue of an orc in a crypt is if you have three other statues already in place to balance it before you install it. Further feng shui rolls will reveal that, in crypt building, it's bad luck to start on the north or south walls fist. Nor would it be proper to build the spider or eagle statue first.

So, here's the clues you have to work with: