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View Full Version : DM Help Non-Euclidean Dungeon Puzzle Ideas



Grimmnist
2021-12-22, 02:51 PM
Since group attendance always gets spotty around the holidays I figured I would run some weird side sessions where I don't have to balance combat around an unknown number of players. Last night I ran a non-Euclidean dungeon, from my perspective as a dm the map of the dungeon was made on a hex grid where each room is one hex, however, the players in the vtt saw each "room" as a square with a large hallway along the perimeter. Using Foundry vtt and the Levels module I was able to change parts of the room as they players went around, making so that it took six 90degree turns to end up back where they started. I gave the players accurate directions to get to their goal (e.g. 2 turns clockwise and through the door, 1 turn counter clockwise etc.), however by blocking off one side of a hallway I was able to create a puzzle, the players assumed that 2 turns counterclockwise was equal to 2 turns clockwise, leading to them getting lost and having to figure out how to navigate.

Overall the session went well but it was very short, the whole non-Euclidean thing was more of a DM flex than a real mechanic since I couldn't think of any way to leverage the odd geometry other than a navigation puzzle. Next weeks session will also be in this same dungeon, and I'm trying to figure out how to put some creative puzzles in. The players have gotten to the important room and now they need to disarm a maguffin, I might just use some standard puzzles or challenges if I can't think of a way to leverage the unique structure.

Does anyone have experience playing or running a similar concept of dungeon or have any ideas for types of puzzles I could use?

Khedrac
2021-12-22, 03:38 PM
That actually sounds like the best attempt to do non-Euclidean I have heard of.

Notable other attempts:

The Dancing Hut of Baba Yaga - and old AD&D (1st Ed) adventure in Dragon magazine. The theory as that the hut was a tesseract with each small boock of rooms being on a different face. In practice there were a large number of small bunches of rooms with what were effectively teleporters between them as the external doors for each section. No overall map was provided which meant if the party did meet some of the friendly inhabitants and asked for directions the DM was going to have a nightmare actually giving any. There did not appear to be any logic behind how the sub-areas connected so the "tesseract" was really just an excuse.

B7 Rahasia - a Basic D&D module where on two levels there were some corriodors arranged in a square with teleporters at the corners. They also transmitted light so the party could see a group of figures in the distance who would run away if chased (themselves).

I cannot think of any others off-hand.

Telok
2021-12-22, 08:28 PM
There was a setting/adventure book for an ancient Egypt expy way back when that was for Fantasy Hero & Rolemaster (yeah, two sets of stats for everything, never seen the like before or since) and it had one adventure with a modest 4d dungeon in a pyramid. What it really had was a set of rooms/halls with non-eucludian tricks on them & a basic random dungeon generator with the note that you didn't have to care about dead ends or overlapping rooms.

Memory... a 20 turn hall, just a T junction but you had to take the same L/R branch 20 times to pass through. A hallway that turned into a shaft half way & dropped you 1000' above the pyramid. Infinite staircase. Mirror hall that swapped you L/R, all writing (if it didn't get swapped with you) became backwards and you started fighting lots of lefties untill you went back through. Counterweight room, dead end trap had 21 doors that all but 1 led back into the room after a short hall with a bend, as soon as enough weght was in the room the real entry door it slid out as the room tilted in a higher dimension, then there had to be more weight opposite the spot in order to tilt the room back, solution was to send one person back out and jam the door with something indestructable or get heavy furniture from another part of the dungeon.

Jay R
2021-12-22, 09:43 PM
Back in the 1970s, I started designing the tower of the Mathemagician.

Five of the dungeon levels were the sides of the five platonic solids (dice). The first one would be the cube. You drop into the middle of the room from a hole in the ceiling, and you're in a 10x10 room with a door in each wall. Going through it would put you in a similar room, but you didn't notice the 90 degree change in direction. Going straight through four rooms would get you back to the first one. So would going to the right three times, or to the left. Going straight for two rooms would get you to the opposite side of the die. What feels "up" is really down. There is a hole in the ceiling. Back up to the higher level? No, down to the next lower level. The only time you would feel the change in gravity is going through this hole (or others like it) and suddenly you're looking (and probably falling) down into the next room -- triangular room on the next level.

One level was a torus. The doors at one end took you to the other end.

One long corridor was a mobius strip. Walk all the way down, and everything looks mirror-reversed. If you went back up at this stage, you would discover that right-handed characters were now left-handed, and vice versa.

I never finished it.

King of Nowhere
2021-12-23, 05:12 AM
I established the nether planes as non euclidean regions with screwed up geometry. You need good rolls in knowledge -the planes - to navigate it.
What i did in practice was putting 20 locations at random in a map. Some of them were notable, for example they had cities and people to interact with, or they had specific geo effect. Then i put them on a list, numbered.
The players started from 1, and they had to reach 20. The players did not know the numbers, or how it was arranged. The rules were
- a dc 25 would get them to the next number. The players studied for this, and i decided they could do this authomatically.
- a dc 30 would let them advance two or three numbers.
- a dc 40 on a prime number would let them go forward a lot (don't remember exact rules)
- if they failed a check, they got lost and returned to 1
- at every "step" there was a random encounter. They could avoid them with hide or survival, but the dc kept getting higher for every skipped encounter; would reset on actual fights.

So the challenge was getting to 20 without failing rolls or getting too much attrition.
It took the players many sessions to figure out the code. In the end, they cut the knot: they interacted enough with fiends that they managed to hire a guide.

Vahnavoi
2021-12-23, 05:28 AM
It's not exactly a dungeon idea, but you could just send characters sailing around the globe and have them do geometry on surface of a sphere to navigate.

MrStabby
2021-12-23, 06:25 PM
It's not exactly a dungeon idea, but you could just send characters sailing around the globe and have them do geometry on surface of a sphere to navigate.

Fair enough; although it sounds like we have very different ideas of what is fun.

I think the essence of a game is people using the feedback the world/description gives them to make choices. If the feedback isn't there or is too complex to understand then the players cannot make informed choices and therefore cannot (by my personal and limited definition) actually play the game.

I think that rather than doing thinks of the surface of a sphere, or using hyperbolic geometry you can esily do "non Euclidian" geometry on most battlemaps simply by using a Manhattan Distance. It is easy enough for players to understand, easy enough to adjudicate, and yet just strange enough to provide a nice change of pace.

Vahnavoi
2021-12-24, 03:33 AM
Fair enough; although it sounds like we have very different ideas of what is fun.

Learning how to navigate for realz IS fun. :smalltongue:

Back to topic, another easy-to-use non-euclidean environment is the map that wraps around all its edges. (Surface of a torus.)

MrStabby
2021-12-24, 09:58 AM
Learning how to navigate for realz IS fun. :smalltongue:

Back to topic, another easy-to-use non-euclidean environment is the map that wraps around all its edges. (Surface of a torus.)

Negative and positive curvature on one manifold? Crazy talk!

Pex
2021-12-24, 09:13 PM
I've run a dungeon that is a tesseract. How the players get into it, out of it, and what's in it is up to you. To map it takes preparation. What I did was build the 3D version using 8 d6s. I had all the numbers facing the same way and each die was a different color. This is necessary to label floors and rooms on 8 minimaps of the each room on two dimensional paper. Aside from doors at each wall there also were spiralizing stair cases because it's possible to go up through the ceiling trap doos and the floor trap door. Likewise the walls had their own staircases for when they become the new floor and ceiling combo. Two rules to use: 1) Down is always in the direction of your feet. When a wall becomes the new floor later down is still down. 2) You may only interact with objects that have the same down direction as you. You're in a multidimensional space. You can see the others, but that's it.

Mapping the dice is tricky. For each room there is one room you can never directly reach. You need to go to another room first. The hard part is when you cross the 4th dimension. Sometimes when going through a door the adjacent room is not directly connected in your 3d model. It's another die two dice levels away. When that happens your sense of direction can change. For example, by arbitrarily declaring a direction north, if you leave the room through the south door for the room you enter it's as if you came from the east door. I don't have the words to explain this better. You should be able to see it upon creating the 3d model and carefully follow what's the true adjacent room.

MrStabby
2021-12-24, 09:44 PM
I've run a dungeon that is a tesseract. How the players get into it, out of it, and what's in it is up to you. To map it takes preparation. What I did was build the 3D version using 8 d6s. I had all the numbers facing the same way and each die was a different color. This is necessary to label floors and rooms on 8 minimaps of the each room on two dimensional paper. Aside from doors at each wall there also were spiralizing stair cases because it's possible to go up through the ceiling trap doos and the floor trap door. Likewise the walls had their own staircases for when they become the new floor and ceiling combo. Two rules to use: 1) Down is always in the direction of your feet. When a wall becomes the new floor later down is still down. 2) You may only interact with objects that have the same down direction as you. You're in a multidimensional space. You can see the others, but that's it.

Mapping the dice is tricky. For each room there is one room you can never directly reach. You need to go to another room first. The hard part is when you cross the 4th dimension. Sometimes when going through a door the adjacent room is not directly connected in your 3d model. It's another die two dice levels away. When that happens your sense of direction can change. For example, by arbitrarily declaring a direction north, if you leave the room through the south door for the room you enter it's as if you came from the east door. I don't have the words to explain this better. You should be able to see it upon creating the 3d model and carefully follow what's the true adjacent room.

I once built a dungeon like this. To be honest, it was a failure. My players spent longer trying to work out what connected to what and to make sense out of it than they did actually playing the fun bits of the game - I think it ended up just being a bit gimmicky. In terms of the value added for the time taken to both prepare it and the time taken for the players to get their heads round it, it just wasn't worth it. I don't know if it would be better or worse if I extended it and made it a theme of the campaign. It might just extend the frustration, or it might actually give them time to get to grips with it and for it to be a bit more intuitive.

In the end, they didn't even engage with the geometry of the thing, they just mapped it as a graph and focussed on what they needed to do to go through doors and it wasn't that different from other dungeons only mapping it was harder work, needed more attention and was a bit more tedious. I think this could work as a concept, I just never managed to pull it off well myself.

Telok
2021-12-25, 07:00 PM
Generally speaking d>3 dungeons are generally somewhere in two categories; the room puzzle and the mapping puzzle. Room puzzles are just another dungeon room with a gimmick, it can be a good interesting gimmick but its still just a static gimmick to puzzle out. The game Portal is a good example of this set up. Mapping puzzles are just node graphs with dungeon room descriptions and are generally only enjoyed by those who do actual mapping, the people who don't map or only kind of do map-lite just get annoyed that they can't get where they want to go.

What I'd love to see, but I suspect is effectively impossible in live rpgs, is a dungeon that's non-linear in time.

Vahnavoi
2021-12-26, 10:23 AM
Non-linear time is not impossible, but it is a pain in the ass.

The easiest way is to write game events from the end to beginning, so things in the "now" are influenced by things that haven't happened yet. The next step is to apply retroactive past, where things that have already happened can change based on what players are doing "now" or will (have to) do in the future.

In practice, this means you'll be working with hard self-fullfilling prophecies. Prophecies don't predict the future, they set the future; knowledge of the future is hence dangerous because it locksteps you into bringing that future about.

Even softer versions of the same will have your players dealing with dilemmas where the only reason something has happened/is happening/will happen is because player themselves predicted it and are acting in accordance with their prediction. A down-to-earth example of this happening would be "my prediction of being able to complete this painting in two weeks is the sole reason why I'm going to complete this painting in two weeks", a slightly more exotic one would be "my prediction that this society will crash due to rebellion, will only come true because I am choosing to rebel because of my prediction that this society will crash due to rebellion."

Isikyus
2021-12-29, 12:18 AM
I once ran an adventure in a (small) city block trapped in a toroidal space-time bubble. The party went there on some simple errand, but when they tried to leave, the road out took them back to the same spot one story up.

I mapped it as several connected square levels. Walking off the side of one level took you to the opposite side of the square, but one level up or down.

It didn't end up playing out as a puzzle though. Being a city block it wasn't too hard to navigate; the warped space mostly gave the PCs a reason to stay there and hunt for the monster responsible.

SpoonR
2021-12-29, 11:19 AM
One basic question, I’ve seen both versions. Is the space warping or looping so warped that you can see yourself? A line of sight through the warping back to where it started so you see your own back four rooms away. If you want loops without line of sight, make sure to include turns and maybe doors.

Pex
2021-12-31, 06:40 AM
One basic question, I’ve seen both versions. Is the space warping or looping so warped that you can see yourself? A line of sight through the warping back to where it started so you see your own back four rooms away. If you want loops without line of sight, make sure to include turns and maybe doors.

In a tesseract it is technically possible. As long you're not crossing the 4th dimension often times as long as you travel in the same direction you will get back to the room you started with the same down direction. The loop is four rooms long, and it's the same four rooms in the same order. It's only a question of how large the rooms are and lack of obstructing objects in the line of sight. For my dungeon the rooms were 100 ft x 100 ft x 100 ft cubes with stuff in them, so the situation never arose.

DigoDragon
2022-01-05, 09:20 AM
I never got to play with the tesseract idea, but I did steal the "Lost Woods" from the original Legend of Zelda video game for a dungeon.

I kept it simple--a four-way intersection that repeated unless they walked it in a specific pattern (I even kept it as the original solution). They figured it out in about 20 minutes thanks to a couple hints I put in other rooms. Always leave a few hints for the PCs. :3