Firechanter
2022-10-09, 05:23 PM
Ok here's the scenario:
The party (level 11 but no full casters) needs to get to the far side of the world, and quickly, there's a timer running (I'm thinking about a week). Conventional means of travel are all way too slow. Basically it would be a case for Greater Teleport but there isn't a level 13+ Wizard available who could cast it or scribe them a scroll.
What they do have is a Candle of Invocation (LE), they are aware that they could try their luck with an Efreet. However I'd like to offer them an alternative. There's word of a literally sunken temple of a Sea-Goddess, that is rumored to have a Teleportation Circle linked to a suitable destination. Now if they go for that, I'd like to make it a little quick and simple dungeon, 3-4 encounters, yadda yadda, but it should have a nice thematic twist.
In the old CRPG "Storm of Zehir" for NWN2, there was a quest / place called "Priory of Depths", which is the name of an Umberlee temple, and I remember that I enjoyed it as a player. Very atmospheric and all. I've long thought about running something like it in a P&P game. However, the key puzzle would probably not work terribly well in a tabletop game. It was such that there was a kind of pattern in the floor, and by stepping on different points you produce different notes, and you had to combine three correct notes into a chord and then play a melody of 3 chords, or something like that. And every time you produced a wrong tone/chord, there'd be a lightning strike.
[ofc if you wanted to be clever about it, you'd put on Resist Energy; esp as there wasn't really a good way to figure it out besides trial and error]
(If you care to see how it works in the video game, here's a yt clip at the correct time index: https://youtu.be/1cYe49zyHBY?t=355 )
So...
how could this puzzle be modified to be fun in a pen-and-paper session? Mind that none of the players is a good singer, so asking them to produce the chords themselves is out. ^^ There's also no bard in the group that could just get the melody right with a perform check or anything.
Ideally, it would be a thinking puzzle, that can be solved by way of logical deduction.
Any ideas? ^^
The party (level 11 but no full casters) needs to get to the far side of the world, and quickly, there's a timer running (I'm thinking about a week). Conventional means of travel are all way too slow. Basically it would be a case for Greater Teleport but there isn't a level 13+ Wizard available who could cast it or scribe them a scroll.
What they do have is a Candle of Invocation (LE), they are aware that they could try their luck with an Efreet. However I'd like to offer them an alternative. There's word of a literally sunken temple of a Sea-Goddess, that is rumored to have a Teleportation Circle linked to a suitable destination. Now if they go for that, I'd like to make it a little quick and simple dungeon, 3-4 encounters, yadda yadda, but it should have a nice thematic twist.
In the old CRPG "Storm of Zehir" for NWN2, there was a quest / place called "Priory of Depths", which is the name of an Umberlee temple, and I remember that I enjoyed it as a player. Very atmospheric and all. I've long thought about running something like it in a P&P game. However, the key puzzle would probably not work terribly well in a tabletop game. It was such that there was a kind of pattern in the floor, and by stepping on different points you produce different notes, and you had to combine three correct notes into a chord and then play a melody of 3 chords, or something like that. And every time you produced a wrong tone/chord, there'd be a lightning strike.
[ofc if you wanted to be clever about it, you'd put on Resist Energy; esp as there wasn't really a good way to figure it out besides trial and error]
(If you care to see how it works in the video game, here's a yt clip at the correct time index: https://youtu.be/1cYe49zyHBY?t=355 )
So...
how could this puzzle be modified to be fun in a pen-and-paper session? Mind that none of the players is a good singer, so asking them to produce the chords themselves is out. ^^ There's also no bard in the group that could just get the melody right with a perform check or anything.
Ideally, it would be a thinking puzzle, that can be solved by way of logical deduction.
Any ideas? ^^