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View Full Version : In Need of Clever, Frustrating, and Mischievous Puzzles



Prymetime
2013-06-25, 02:33 PM
A little bit of backstory for those who may care: my group is about to go and meet with a group of loremasters who call themselves the Windspeakers. These loremasters learn their secrets from the wind as opposed to study with tomes. As a result, they are very high-WIS, low-INT: imagine an entire community of Luna Lovegoods. Very intuitive, very wise, but very difficult to hold a conversation with. Their leader is an eccentric, doddering old fool of a man. If you're familiar with Avatar: The Last Airbender, he is heavily inspired by King Bumi.

Now the group needs a favor from these loremasters, but in order to get they'll need to do something for the Windspeakers first. The leader sends them on a crazy mission to get "the egg of eternal truth" from the "temple of eternal truth," located on the highest mountain in the spirit world. What they don't realize is that this is a perfectly normal, if not perhaps large, egg, and the loremaster leader has always daydreamed about what it tastes like, so he is essentially sending them on a massive quest to fetch him breakfast.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to arrive at is that this temple is filled with puzzles befitting the nature of these flighty, mischievous, eccentric loremasters. I'm looking for a smattering of riddles and word puzzles as well as logic puzzles and just plain screwing-with-you puzzles. Plus it's always fun to share how evil you are, so I'm curious to see your most devious and ingenious of puzzles.

TL;DR What are some of the most clever traps you have encountered, designed to be infuriating when encountered but a memorable experience in retrospect?

Arkhosia
2013-06-25, 03:43 PM
A little bit of backstory for those who may care: my group is about to go and meet with a group of loremasters who call themselves the Windspeakers. These loremasters learn their secrets from the wind as opposed to study with tomes. As a result, they are very high-WIS, low-INT: imagine an entire community of Luna Lovegoods. Very intuitive, very wise, but very difficult to hold a conversation with. Their leader is an eccentric, doddering old fool of a man. If you're familiar with Avatar: The Last Airbender, he is heavily inspired by King Bumi.

Now the group needs a favor from these loremasters, but in order to get they'll need to do something for the Windspeakers first. The leader sends them on a crazy mission to get "the egg of eternal truth" from the "temple of eternal truth," located on the highest mountain in the spirit world. What they don't realize is that this is a perfectly normal, if not perhaps large, egg, and the loremaster leader has always daydreamed about what it tastes like, so he is essentially sending them on a massive quest to fetch him breakfast.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to arrive at is that this temple is filled with puzzles befitting the nature of these flighty, mischievous, eccentric loremasters. I'm looking for a smattering of riddles and word puzzles as well as logic puzzles and just plain screwing-with-you puzzles. Plus it's always fun to share how evil you are, so I'm curious to see your most devious and ingenious of puzzles.

TL;DR What are some of the most clever traps you have encountered, designed to be infuriating when encountered but a memorable experience in retrospect?

An interesting idea would be for a riddle in a gas-rigged room. Tiles with letters and phrases in an ancient language (deep speech or draconic?) are required to be pressed in order for a door to open. When an incorrect tile is chosen, sleep gas is released. After 5 turns, players feel drowsy, taking a -1 penalty to intelligence or wisdom. That increases by 1 each turn when a wrong tile is pushed. When the PC takes a penalty as large as said stats, they fall asleep, leading to another debacle.

Saito Takuji
2013-06-25, 09:22 PM
saw this somewhere, so not a creation of mine

party enters a circular room, that is verry/quite hot, with "doors" on opposite sides of the room magical impenetrable darkness covers the room (even to darkvision).

after a short time the floor starts tilting back and forth requiring a rather simple balance check, dc 15 mabey? (the floor is a larg disk on a pivot point) and from below bubbling is heard akin to boiling water/lava. the point is to make the check rather simple to succeed yet still possible to fail on something more than a 1-5 or so, kind of a judgement call

shortly after this rocks start falling onto the party dealing something small like 1d4 damage or so. perhaps requiring another balance check that round or increasing the DC of the balance

the doors on either side of the room should have fairly high unlock/bash open DC's and lead back where the came (the door the came in of course) or nowhere (just a blank wall on the other side. there are no secret doors on any of the walls.

eventually someone is bound to fall into the water down below, and if not after a few rounds have some grease or oil spill onto this disk to help increase the balance check. Whereuppon it is revealed that it is just room-temperature water that deals no damage, and is about waist deep, and the door to progress is down below.

if the party researches the bubbling, it is simply air being piped in.

if properly ran the Party should think there is either boiling water, or lava below the pivoting disk, may want to this into an anti-magic zone if the party has all sorts of flying magic or other items to avioid the balance checks

valadil
2013-06-25, 09:44 PM
Here's an obnoxious one I used in my last campaign.

Give the players a message written in invisible ink. One of the common methods for doing so is to write in lemon juice. When held over a candle, the traces of the juice turn brown and become visible. However, whichever NPC wrote the message was dyslexic and used melon juice instead. Now the players have an open ended puzzle to figure out how to get the text to emerge.

This is a two parter. When the text does show up, it's gibberish. When I ran this one, the player assumed I gave them a cipher to solve. Actually they already got the hint. The sender is dyslexic, so the text is jumbled. Not particularly hard to solve when you realize that's the puzzle, but that's after the math and computer geeks have gone off in the wrong direction.

Anyway, it's not the rudest puzzle out there, but I like the double use of a single clue.

Prymetime
2013-06-25, 10:23 PM
I like these! I suppose I'll make my own contribution.

I saw this somewhere online, but the entrance to the temple is going to be a large open archway with carvings that are depictions of four humanoids eerily similar to the part themselves. Scrawled between them and above the archway are the words, "SPEAK THE NAME OF THE ONE TO WHOM WE BOW AND YOU MAY ENTER." No matter what the players say, a fireball bursts out of one of the carving's mouths and strikes them for a bit of damage. The trick to this is that the players, as intrepid, independent heroes, bow to no man, and so the only correct answer is to simply say nothing at all and pass through. Should they attempt to just ignore the puzzle altogether in this way, they pass unharmed.

Arkhosia
2013-06-26, 09:51 PM
Here's an obnoxious one I used in my last campaign.

Give the players a message written in invisible ink. One of the common methods for doing so is to write in lemon juice. When held over a candle, the traces of the juice turn brown and become visible. However, whichever NPC wrote the message was dyslexic and used melon juice instead. Now the players have an open ended puzzle to figure out how to get the text to emerge.

This is a two parter. When the text does show up, it's gibberish. When I ran this one, the player assumed I gave them a cipher to solve. Actually they already got the hint. The sender is dyslexic, so the text is jumbled. Not particularly hard to solve when you realize that's the puzzle, but that's after the math and computer geeks have gone off in the wrong direction.

Anyway, it's not the rudest puzzle out there, but I like the double use of a single clue.

Or even better, make the dyslexic message a cipher!

valadil
2013-06-26, 10:02 PM
Or even better, make the dyslexic message a cipher!

Is it even solvable at that point? I think ciphered and then shuffled would be impossible. Of course giving the players an unsolvable encrypted message would be an awesome way to frustrate them...

Arkhosia
2013-06-27, 08:24 PM
Is it even solvable at that point? I think ciphered and then shuffled would be impossible. Of course giving the players an unsolvable encrypted message would be an awesome way to frustrate them...

And if it is solved, it turns out to be a note warning them of something that already happened!