Puzzling things out...

flatscan

Mongoose
I'm looking to include a puzzle in my game this weekend. However, I'm having the hardest time coming up with something appropriate. What do you Conan GMs use as reference / crutch for coming up with a fiendishly clever puzzle / trap?
 
The people I play with, myself included, don't seem capable of solving puzzles. I'm not even sure that puzzles for more clever groups are all that great as there's a bit of too easy or too hard or too much reliance on a particular person that tends to occur. For instance, at True Dungeon events, I don't really engage much because my friend is so good at solving those sorts of things.

Just some not terribly helpful thoughts.
 
I've come closer to regular TPK's with puzzles, especially in Conan, than with anything else.

I've found that good Conan-y puzzles tend to be trap and various types of pitfall based, most having been extrapolated from the various stories "Conan leapt aside with a pantherish twist as...." sort of thing. I've also used situations whereby what the players _think_ is a trap-filled tunnel actually isn't and all it leads to is a swamp on the edge of the Styx....

...inhabited by a few giant crocs, purple lotus and hippo.

It's amazing how effective simple traps can be.
 
Yeah, I don't normally run puzzles in Conan myself, but sometimes the situation calls for it. Basically just trying to come up with something that could work in the Hyborian Age as a puzzle with a trap consequence for failure.
 
In a non-Conan game, it took the party 15 minutes to figure out how to get paste a simply portcullis that couldn't be opened by a simple feat of strength.
 
flatscan said:
Yeah, I don't normally run puzzles in Conan myself, but sometimes the situation calls for it. Basically just trying to come up with something that could work in the Hyborian Age as a puzzle with a trap consequence for failure.

I once used a door to a vault that had been magically sealed. It was carved with arcane symbols that had to be touched in a certain order to open the door. If the symbols were touched in the wrong order, blasts of electricity would affect those nearby. Clues to the right sequence of symbols had to be searched down far from the dungeon itself (hundreds of miles away).

- thulsa
 
I tend to run puzzling plot elements on the background, but which are not necessarily needed for the game proceed. However, so far I've used two actual "dungeon puzzles" worth mentioning in my campaign.

1) In Pteion, there was a chamber with four doorways, one of which the player group entered from. As they were inside, the doorways were blocked with heavy stone slabs. On them was writing about history of the world and Stygia in particular. There was a moving part in the stone slabs that had to be pushed in a chronological order. Doing so in wrong order was punished by poison gas being blown in the chamber. Things mentioned in the texts were stuff a blind storyteller had told the characters about several sessions earlier, so the players had to rake their memories for clues.

2) While robbing an ancient Acheronian tomb in Tartarus, underneath Messantia, the characters came in to a hallway that contained entrances to six tombs, with six statues near the doors. In the middle of the hallway was an ancient well. Once they had spent some time in the room, the entrances were sealed with heavy stones and water started pouring forth from the well. The characters (and again, players) had to deduct what the statues symbolize and pull their arms in right order while the torrent of water was getting even heavier. They had a quite tight time limit in this one, with serious prospects of drowning.
 
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