A sinister set of two portals, the endless fall trap is a relatively simple setup. Two portals, vertically aligned so that falling from the top one causes you to enter the bottom, thus appearing up in the air and falling again form the main focus of the trap.
Being caught in the trap by falling into the bottom portal effectively causes one to fall forever, with acceleration due to the effects of gravity. As speed increases, someone caught in the trap will find it more difficult and dangerous to try and escape the trap.
Third Portal Variants:
Third portal variants have a third portal located away from the first two. The third portal activates a set amount of time after the trap has been cycling through its initial two portal scheme. The third portal then activates, causing the hapless victim to launch out of the third portal at great speed.
1: Third Portal is aimed at spikes.
2: Third Portal is aimed at hard surface. (Floor, wall, ect.)
3: Third Portal causes victim to fall into a pit of snakes and broken glass.
4: Third portal located on the top of a far mountain peak, launching the victim off the summit.
(Note: Inspired by comments on this submission: http://strolen.com/viewing/Recursive_Portal_Trap)
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A sadistic person could give the falling person food and water.
We can never have enough traps.
Euu! Endlessly falling but never impacting! After awhile it would be full of corpses and insane people! A gruesome trap, if I ever saw one.
Awsomeness of a trap in essence!
What Ramhir said! Corpses and insane people, ever-falling. Love the concept.
I will have to be honest here, and say that this trap bugs me for a lot of reasons. I don't believe that it varies significantly enough from your [Recursive Portal Trap] submission to justify putting it into its own sub. And it also loses points from me for being a straight copy from the game Portal. You didn't add value to the basic premise, other than the 3rd portal variants, and you didn't give any justification for the existence of these portals in a fantasy setting.
I agree that it would be neat to see portals used within a dungeon, but this submission leaves me wondering how they got there in the first place.
The recursive portal trap is inherently different for a few reasons:
1: The portal is entirely harmless without any ammunition fired into the trap.
2: Players are not physically disabled in any way, besides arrows and bolts sticking out of their bodies.
As to it being a 'Straight copy' from the game portal, the differences between a game where a player can create an endless loop of portals and an object within a game that is an endless loop of portals the player characters have no control over is pretty large. Portal did not originate the idea of one portal leading into another.
It popularized it.
A similar historical example would be the creation of calculus. (http://xkcd.com/626/)
Sure, Newton did it first, but that doesn't imply that Leibniz was working solely off Isaac's work.
As I have seen AG do on many submissions, I must now give a disclaimer: when commenting, I try my best to be as honest as possible rather than be as uncritical as possible. I never mean any offence to the author personally. In fact, I respect a lot of your work, Infested; this sub just left me feeling lukewarm on the first reading. I guess that Portal has trained me to view any pair of matched portals as virtually the same thing -- a nifty tool, but hardly worth writing up all the various combinations thereof. Hence my comment that this and the [Recursive Portal Trap] are really one and the same.
Still, I read through this again and tried *NOT* to view this through the lens of Portal and you know what? I kind of like it after all. I would still like some explanation for the existence of the trap in a dungeon -- I can't imagine that they would be common in a fantasy setting. Maybe there was a wizard who always wanted to skydive . . . probably met his end in his own harmless-looking trap.
I will re-vote.
I kept waiting for the portal creator to come by and do something horribly sadistic as the players keep whooshing by.
Have an HOH from me. :)
Re-voting.
I have an image of a bunch of skeletons of trapped adventurers endlessly falling. They could even be animated skeletons. An epic mid-air battle!
Interesting, though these very expensive traps do not make as much sense for me as they did when I was younger..