Tricks and Traps I

My players love puzzles.  I've found myself researching all kinds of puzzles trying to work at least a couple in to each major "dungeon" or encounter area I put them in.  Here are a couple of puzzles I came up with that my players really seemed to engage with and enjoy.  I've stripped away the context, hopefully making it easier for you if you would like to drop this in to one of your own dungeons.

I.

The first of these is fairly straightforward.  It requires a room with eight statues, a plaque, and some kind of mechanism to be activated. In my game they were placed equidistantly from each other at the compass points in a circular room, but you could drop this in anywhere and change the description to fit.


The plaque reads:

Not in sequence, but all at once -
Ignore the shadowed archer who hunts,
But ask yourself of hunter, clerk, and woman
What is it that they have in common?
A maid, a hag, one young, one bent
And yet they both are heaven-sent.
Though some are old, some are in their prime
There are two others that you must find.

The statues, starting from the one immediately left of the door the party has come through, depict a woodsman with a bow (I), a beautiful, elven woman with delicate features (II), a gaunt man in the robes of a clerk (III), a monster with many segments like a centipede wrapped around a column (IV), a knight in full plate mail holding a sword aloft (V), a skeletal wolf wreathed in flames (VI), a stooped and ugly old woman (VII), and a grinning dragon (VIII). Each statue has a copper plate on its base with a roman numeral on it, starting at I and going to VIII.

The trick here is to press all four of the prime numbers at once (II, III, V, and VII). If this is done, the ancient mechanism activates.

What I like about this first one is that there are multiple logical ways to arrive at the right answer.  The most obvious is the prime numbers (at least to my mind) but my players figured it was anything on two legs, or anything anthropomorphic.  There are a lot of games you can play here - perhaps on a wrong answer one of the monster-statues comes to life as per stone to flesh, making the next guess easier but upping the ante with the possibility of a battle.

II.

The next one is a little more involved and could wind up being be very, very simple if you have a player who is familiar with blazon.  Blazon is the formal language used in heraldry to describe arms.  Each word has a very very precise meaning as does the phrase taken as a whole when you consider the placement of the words within the full phrase.  It's almost like an early image compression technique where, if given the blazon, anyone skilled in heraldry could recreate the arms.

In total, you will have six shields split into two groups of three - we will call these Group A and Group B.  Group A will have the blazon on a plaque below the shields.  This is meant to allow players to work out a bit about how blazon works so that they can form the correct images for Group B, which will have the plaques with the blazon but no pictures; the players are to then determine what goes on each shield.

Group A's shields are as follows:

Azure, a bend Or 

Party per pale argent and vert, a tree counterchanged

Gules, a Griffin with dragon wings tail and tongue rampant Or armed beaked langued and membered Azure between four Roses Argent

Group B's shields are blank but have plaques describing what should be there in blazon.  Descriptors are as follows:

• Gules, a serpent glissant Or
• Party per Argent and Azure, a saltire counterchanged
• Vert, a stag pascuant between four Roses Argent

Depending on how you want to set this up, you could have some pigments or paints nearby, or, what I wound up doing to make things slightly easier by limiting the choices and allowing some combinations to be ruled out, was essentially give them puzzle pieces with which they could create the shields.  The pieces were as follows:

• A green coiled snake
• A gold snake slithering
• An orange snake slithering
• A blue coiled snake
• A gold snake coiled around a dagger
• A green snake coiled around a dagger
• A white deer grazing
• A golden deer grazing
• A green deer grazing
• A green deer standing on its hind legs
• A blue deer standing on its hind legs
• X shapes in red, green, blue, white, and yellow
• Half X shapes in red, blue, green, white and yellow.
• 4 white roses
• 4 blue roses
• 4 green roses
• 4 golden roses
• A white skull with wings
• A red skull with wings
• A yellow skull with wings
• A yellow chalice wrapped in thorns
• A white chalice wrapped in thorns
• And finally - full shield shapes in Red, Green, Blue, White, and Yellow, along with half and quarter shield shapes in these same colors.

The correct combinations are as follows:

• A golden snake slithering on a red background (Gules, a serpent glissant or)
• A shield made up of a white half on the viewers left and a blue half on the viewers behind an X shape with exactly the opposite colors (blue half x on left side, white half x on right side). (Per party argent and azure, a saltire counterchanged)
• A white stag grazing on a green field surrounded by four white roses (Vert, a stag pascuant between four roses argent)

In the original adventure I used this in, I put the Group B shields on a locked door where the right combination triggered it to open, but of course it could trigger some other mechanism.

This one was pretty hard for my players (and they regularly outsmart me, not that that's a feat or anything) but became easier for them after they looked at the Group A shields.

Void

How does it feel
To you treat me like you do
When you've laid your hands upon me
And told me who you are?

   -  New Order, “Blue Monday”


They met in the Year of the Tiger and found they had both been born in the Year of the Tiger. She had looked at him slowly, her calm gaze moving down his body, and then up to his face again, and he could tell at once that she understood him, knew that he was a beast who possessed both a bottomless reservoir of rage and a talent for violence, and she was not afraid. He had taken in her eyes, golden flecked shards of malachite, and the perfection of her face and form. Her demeanor was aloof, cool, remote, but he knew instinctively that something feral smoldered just under the surface of her skin. He found that the wilderness was in her and of her and she was of it. He had desired her immediately.

She never asked anything from him and never touched him except when she wanted to have sex, and when they did that, it was selfish but not miserly. They took what they wished from each other to satisfy themselves with a fathomless thoughtlessness that only spurred them both to greater pleasure.

Like him, she would never allow herself to be controlled and this fascinated and frightened him. Had he been able to subjugate her, she would have bored him, but her total lack of need for him both hurt him and, perversely, attracted him and made him crave her all the more. From this paradox an intolerable fear was born in him, a fear which he could not name or face. And so he converted it to anger, and used it to stoke the fires of his wrath.

There had been a few attempts to integrate each other into their respective social groups. She had taken him to haut monde parties and introduced him to the upper crust, the true rulers of the scarlet city, but there he felt like a caged animal on display and grew impatient and stalked silently about the ballrooms and art galleries, his only happiness seeing the apprehension on the faces of those he had been presented to. In turn, she was uncomfortable in the lowlife dives he frequented and amongst the wounded outcasts, broken dope fiends, and houseless rogues he associated with. Soon they abandoned these half-hearted efforts so that when they saw each other, they did so alone.

One night she had promised to meet him at one of her apartments, a place he had a key for and which they sometimes used. She did not show up or send word that night or the following day. Initially, he was concerned. He wanted to contact her but lacked the means. But while waiting, he became convinced that she had finally recognized his compulsion to have her, and understood it for the weakness it was, and that she had decided to leave him. His choler grew and grew as he imagined it.

When she slipped into the bedroom the next night, she found him sitting on the bed, nude, the sheet folded loosely around his lap. She began to undress. He watched her quietly. She offered no explanation or excuse.

As she finished taking off her clothing, he launched himself from the bed. Her closet door was made from metal and he slammed his fist into it. It made a huge crashing noise, and he hit it again and again, the thin steel deforming and bulging under his blows, great metallic reports sounding each time he struck it. It had horizontal slats which acted almost as knives under the force of his assault, and they transformed his fist into a gory lump, shredding his knuckles and slicing his hand and fingers down to the bone, but there was no pain. Rather, he felt only a fey exultation as he prepared to unleash the well of his fury upon her and he stifled a laugh as he spun to do so, whipping his hand around to point directly at her. The centrifugal force of his movement cast blood from his hand to cross the short gap between them, touching her from a distance to leave carmine droplets on her face and the creamy skin of her bare chest and shoulders. She closed her eyes reflexively as the blood spattered her face.

“I am going to kill you,” he said.

Unlike the huge noise of the door, his voice was soft, his tone flat and utterly without rancor or threat. He was delivering a fact, nothing more and nothing less.

She knew it for what it was at once and her eyes flicked open and her whole countenance lit up, nostrils flared, throat, cheeks, and breasts suddenly flushed, her entire body quivering. She wet her lips with her tongue, tasting the drops of blood that had landed there. Her mouth pulled into a snarl, teeth bared and barred, and they hovered like that for a moment, gazes fused, showing their fangs to each other. As he stared at her, her glare became a hungry smile of anticipation. The expression betrayed her. As he craved her, so she craved annihilation. It was his ability to extinguish her that she was interested in and the broken promise was deliberate, the means with which she would court obliteration. The realization shocked him so much that it overcame his wrath, disarmed him, and he slowly dropped his hand to his side, stunned.

She closed the interval separating them and fell upon him, her nipples grazing his chest as they toppled roughly back on to the bed. She held her thighs tight to his sides and buried her face in his neck. He felt her teeth scrape his throat as she straddled him. She sat up and moved her hands to his chest, pushing down. Having mounted him, she began to grind against him. He slipped his fingers up her side to touch her face, the blood from his flayed hand leaving a crimson band on her thigh and the taut skin of her stomach and ribcage as he slid it across her pale flesh. She took his ruined fingers to her mouth and kissed them, staining her parted lips ruby with his vitality.

The muscles in her buttocks and abdomen contracted and relaxed, contracted and relaxed, her movement driven by her core, slow but powerful, delicious friction, excruciating pleasure. As she neared completion she moved her hands from his chest to his throat and began to squeeze, cutting off his breath. She was strong.

“No.  No, no, no,” she moaned the word again and again, pleading, almost sobbing in rhythm with the rocking of her hips, her brow knitted in ecstasy. He gripped her forearms, but did nothing to defend himself, allowing her to use him, wholly abandoning himself to her. The blood pounding through his body became an unbearable pressure in his head and face and then a ringing in his ears that drowned out all other sound and pulsed in time with the pump of his heart and the surging of her repeated denials. His vision began to blacken at the edges but even in the tunnel of oxygen deprivation he was aware of the excited, eager look she wore as she locked eyes with him. As hypoxia gripped him and he slipped towards unconsciousness, he saw sourceless, coruscating flashes of incandescence and his existence as an individual ceased. This, more than any single physical sensation, pushed him over the edge and for a moment he was completely gone. His gratification gratified her in turn and she too ceased to be a single being as they crossed the void to meet and intermingle fleetingly with each other in perfect, animal understanding, in incommunicable communion.

When he returned to normal consciousness, he felt like a color that had faded under an unendurable and pitiless sun. She was lying exhausted and completely limp over him, thighs and calves against the sides of his body, her cheek resting against his shoulder. She rolled off of him and then began to stroke his chest gently. The modesty of it surprised him. Always when she touched him it was lustful; never had she shown this kind of demure affection to him before. His head and throat and hand throbbed and his lungs burned. He had been unaware of the space between them until it been removed. Now he recognized the true and vast emptiness that separated them.

He understood then that no matter what else might happen, she was lost to him, irrevocably lost. A profound and hollow desolation welled up in him. With the surety of prescience, he knew this was unavoidable. It would be. Now or at some point soon. There was nothing left but to leave forever or to face doom with her; if he stayed, they would be wholly at the mercy of the intensity and combination of the emotions that they had just unleashed, eros and thanatos merged into a single overwhelming force that would drag them into an inexorable, insatiable, and effortless spiral of death. Hers or his, he couldn’t know; perhaps both. She knew it too and she seemed to welcome it, engulfed by the desire to be destroyed. There might be a single chance to escape the hungry gyre of oblivion; there might not.  Once the devouring helix had begun to consume them, no human agency or power would be able to gainsay it or help them escape.

Overcome suddenly with the loss of her, he sat up on the edge of the bed and faced away from her, holding every muscle tense and motionless. He stared vacantly at the bare wall, willing himself not to cry. He was absolutely silent, absolutely still, using all his strength to hold himself frozen, daring not even to breathe, trying desperately to deny this savage, newborn truth.

He felt her hand on his shoulder and looked back at her. She tried to smile, but the expression fled from her face like a terrified animal. She, too, understood the fate in front of them now, hanging there like a noose. She embraced him, and the sudden and wholly unexpected tenderness of her caress permitted him to accept this new and ravaging reality and to allow himself to feel the grief of it. He returned her touch and gave her license to do likewise. They rocked slowly back and forth in each other’s grasp and wept soundlessly together.

After a length of time, the tears slowed and then stopped. They both lay back on the bed, spent in every way. Soon exhaustion claimed her and she slept. It was time. He stood and dressed silently and prepared to depart. As he left the bedroom, he looked back at her longingly. In the dim light, his blood was a maroon ribbon twined about the side of her body and neck and a bracelet circling her left forearm. Her hair was spread languorously about her face like a halo of polished onyx. In slumber her countenance was untroubled, exquisite, almost angelic. He wondered briefly but earnestly if she would look so beautiful after she had been murdered. Then he turned away abruptly and walked quietly from the bedroom to the door of the apartment and opened it.

Leaving behind everything, he stepped over the threshold and crossed alone into the gulf of the night.

Mictlāntēchutli

The tech priests had promised to make him a god.

They kept their promise.

They called him Lord of the Underworld.  But he had other appellations as well.  He Who Lowers His Head, He Who Dwells in the Windowless House.  The Broken Face, He of the 11^th Hour, He Who Eats the Stars.

They had many names for the Lord of Mictlan.

They called him “He Who Dwells in the Windowless House,” and indeed he swam in an amniotic tank covered completely with armor.  He had given up much to become a god.  It had been worth it. The priests had taken his limbs; the stumps rested now in haptic sheaths.  

They called him “Broken Face.” Inside the tank he floated in a bright red fluid more efficient than blood.  His mouth and nose were removed, useless, showing the gleaming white bone beneath.  When he needed nourishment, the tank delivered it.  When he needed oxygen, it was directed into his foramen ovale by the autosanguinary system.  They had removed his eyes.  Fibers carrying light ran into his optic nerve now, his visual cortex processed information from all around him, his maimed brain attuned to a storm of electromagnetic data and radiation in wavelengths mere humans could never dream of.  His necklace of eyeballs saw in all directions.

They called him “He Who Eats the Stars” and indeed, his belly was filled with the heat of the sun, nuclear fire that drove his immense form forward.

Today he would bring Mictlan to the people.  Today Mictlāntēchutli walked. His servants, the Mictecas, were his most loyal lieutenants and embodied his will, added their own to his in the Manifold, became his arms, his legs, his voice.  As one being the King of Death strode the land looking down on all.

Today they called him Nextepehua, “Scatterer of Ashes.”  The lasers focused the light of the sun in his belly, radiant destruction, power measured in yottawatts, leaving fire and nothing where the beams touched, evaporating men, machines, fortresses, all.

Arms raised, he stood ready to tear apart the dead as they entered his presence.

Why You Should Buy In The Hall of the Third Blue Wizard

Probably anyone who stumbles on this corner of the internet is already familiar with David McGrogan's site and work, and is thus aware that he recently brought a 'zine into print called In the Hall of the Third Blue Wizard.  Likely most visitors here backed the project on Kickstarter.  But for those of you who weren't aware, didn't back it, and haven't considered purchasing it, you really SHOULD.

I wrote up a big long thing about the way projects like this support developing writers, give them an outlet, and add a new publisher to a landscape that is in dire need of them, and those are good reasons to support a project like this and buy the zine, but I deleted all that shit because the main reason to do so is the content.  The content is first rate and there is a lot of it.  The artwork, while sparse, is striking - a favorite for me is Fresco With Orcs by Joel Sammallahti (I also really like The Transmuter by Luca Vanzella).

The fiction is good and ranges from really funny (Thirteen Dwarves, The Chevrelier) to exciting (She Who Came Once to Oldgraves) to unique (The Beloved and Oft Counted Tale of the Marvelous Birth).

The RPG content is first rate and there is plenty here to pick and chose from even if you don't use any of it wholesale.  The NPCs in Offspring of the Siphoned Demon, for example, are wonderfully unique and would be a lot of fun to run, and could be dropped in to a lot of places where there is worship going on.  The puzzle dungeon of A Turn of Fortune is something I think my players would probably eat up if I ran it for them - they love puzzles, more about that soon, hopefully... And there's plenty more, all of it good.

For those of you familiar with the divine madness of the Grand Commodore blog, Moonrhythm Mire by Dave Greggs will not disappoint.  The influence from Jung's Red Book is evident and expertly handled, the characters are inspired (as is the writing) and each part complements the others to form a really quite perfect whole.  Still, there are parts here you can snag if you don't prefer to use the entire thing - the example four man Underwater patrol make for an intense and frightening encounter if presented and used correctly.  Each is a unique villain in their own right, and combined they make for a very nasty surprise for overconfident adventurers indeed (as my players found out when I lifted them from this adventure and used them in one of mine).  And as outré as these guys are, they are among the more pedestrian of the terrors waiting in the mire.  There is a certain poetry to this adventure as well - I'll call out as just one example the use of the phrase "The moon appears, the ghosts dance" which acquires a sort of haunting (no pun intended) rhythm through repetition as one reads through the timeline near the end.

Moonrhythm Mire would make the cost of admission worth it all by itself, but honestly all the material here is quite good, and you WILL find things you will want to use.  You will find In the Hall of the Third Blue Wizard in both pdf and print version at Noisms Games.  Do yourself a favor and pick it up.