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.