If you’ve ever been entertained by tales of a daring adventurer dodging terrible traps and solving rune-based puzzles to avoid being impaled by spring-loaded spears, then you’ve probably wondered at some point…

Just who designed and installed all these traps, anyway?!

In the Salt Mystic worlds, there is an entire class of devious engineer called the Tomb Trapper. You can always recognize them by the worn leather trapmaster bag they carry.

You don’t buy a trapmaster bag; and anyone caught having stolen one is quickly found in glowing ash piles once word gets out. Inside that bag are wonders, no doubt: computronium sensors and morphium canisters that spring to programmable shapes, intelligent stonewisps downloadable into the very masonry of an ancient wall capable of generating riddles…

But the true genius of a Tomb Trapper lies in what they learned deep in the labyrinth city below the Yagrada River. That’s where the Tomb Trapper guild once kept a gloriously malicious school of trapmasters, and its deadly proving ground.

Anyone carrying that bag studied under the most twisted minds who’ve ever built explosive-dusted halls or wound rune-covered clocks or poured oil into flaming statues. They were a wicked, but torturous geniuses, those shadow-haunting monks of the labyrinth city. Anyone carrying that bag not only studied under such people, but also won the labyrinth they built.

To be clear, one didn’t win the labyrinth by escaping or just by sealing away all of your opponents also seeking to graduate. Yes, you had to do those things. It just wasn’t enough. You had to trap one of the guild monks as well.

In fact, that’s the irony of the dead labyrinth city now that it’s abandoned and full of cobwebs and echoes.

They had some excellent students.

(c) Brian Bennudriti

Tales from the Salt Mystic universe

Learn more about Salt Mystic here.