Puzzles in Taenarum

And I looked, and behold, a pale horse! And its rider's name was Death, and Hades followed him.

Following up the post the other day on puzzle theory, here are a couple of the larger inventory puzzles in the mad god's dungeon.  I don't know if any of my recent adult players are currently reading the Lich House; if so - warning - spoilers.

The Regalia of the Death God
Hades has hidden 7 artifacts in the dungeon that must be brought together in order to get past one of the deepest portals.  These 7 items are the Regalia of the Death God - the drinking horn, bident, key, helm of darkness, scepter, and throne of Hades, along with the pale horse.  There are clues to the importance of the items throughout the upper levels - friezes, statuary, even some riddles that allude to them.  Each has a magic effect that's worthy in its own right.  There's a boss figure on each level, an archon of Hades, that guards a clue to one of the Regalia as one of its duties.  Obviously, I'm telling you, the readers, but otherwise this is all knowledge the players will need to learn through adventuring and rumors.

The thing I like about the Regalia is that once the players learn about their importance, it creates a natural competition to get every piece.  NPC adventurers will be gunning for player groups that flaunt one of the items, and the players have a reason to do the same if an NPC group gets ahead of them in the dungeon.  The quest for the 7 items has great potential for mischief and driving exploration.

Hades' Box of Mystery
In some ways, I'm trying to make the dungeon of Taenarum evoke aspects of the video game experience on the table top.  I want some of the puzzles to involve scavenger hunt style inventory challenges.  For instance, each major level features three inter-related objects - a chained tablet, a key, and an impassable door.  The impassable doors are obvious and pretty easy to find on each level.  They can be safely ignored and bypassed.  The chained tablet is harder to find.  Written on the chained tablet is a riddle or clue leading to the hiding spot of the special key to the impassable door.  Beyond each impassable door is a Mystery Box, which produces one random item before going inert and resetting.  (I'm picturing a glowing treasure chest like something from the Legend of Zelda).  Once a group has solved a specific Mystery Box, it never functions for them again.

Hades views the dungeon like a giant casino.  As god of wealth and the underworld, his kingdom has collected the wealth of ages - the lost treasures of Atlantis, the secrets of the Hyperboreans, and prized things from all the prior ages of man.  His minions carve the hollow spaces of the world for precious metals like gold and silver.  It doesn't matter if any single group of adventurers succeeds in the short term and escapes with plunder; he's wagering that they'll continue to delve deeper, into more dangerous places.  Like any bookie, mob boss, or casino owner, he knows the house always wins in the end.

For the most part, I'm using random dungeon generation techniques to create a lot of content quickly, but these types of multi-room puzzles that span dungeon levels don't emerge organically from random results; I've taken a little time to generate some of these ideas top-down to tie everything together.

Puzzles and the Dungeon

The Dungeon of Taenarum substitutes a "mad god" for the "mad wizard' who normally has created a sprawling, multi-level dungeon complex.  Because it's meant to embody the archetypal dungeoneering experience, it needs to have lots of puzzles.  I'd also like to work in some of the classic word puzzles, like the knights and knaves puzzle (the one with the two guys, one always tells the truth, the other always lies...it featured in the movie Labyrinth).  Since Taenarum will get explored by kids and family, this would be their first exposure to a lot of the classic puzzles.

Before I go on - please share any of your favorite puzzles or riddles in the comments!  Taenarum involves around 40 dungeon areas, so I'll have plenty of room to incorporate the classics.

Most of my puzzle-solving experience comes from the video gaming world and early computer games.  Let's take a look at how some of the common puzzle types carry over into RPGs.

For starters, puzzles tend to be either self-contained or not… single room or multi room.  You have the design space to make single room puzzles more arbitrary and difficult, because the players can just walk away.  Pro tip:  don’t build your dungeon so that the players can't bypass a difficult and illogical puzzle!  Riddles and Interaction puzzles are single room puzzles that are common in the dungeon.  Interaction puzzles are things like figuring out how to trigger a secret door, or disarming a trap.  I love putting in objects as resources that allow the players to interact with the environment... like using the wood to build a bridge and cross a chasm.  Video games also feature self-contained Mini-Games (ie, timewasters) but I don't see as many of those in dungeons.

Multi-room puzzles involve Information puzzles and Inventory items.  The most basic inventory puzzles is "the key" - finding the right key for an otherwise locked door.  Old time computer games frequently featured item puzzles that made the player find the right single use item for a circumstance… like giving the food from 3 to the hungry bear in room 7 in order to keep going; a more complicated model involved mixing items (like mixing the poison and the food to get rid of the bear completely).  Quests for magic items and artifacts are the meat and drink of fantasy adventure gaming, but otherwise we don't see a lot of Zork-style inventory use.

The other type of multi-room puzzle is informational - using a piece of information or pattern found elsewhere to solve a puzzle.  The classic examples is the combination to a safe - you can't open the lock until you find where the combination is hidden.

I'm sure most of this is old-hat to the readership, so at worst I've attached labels to things you already knew implicitly.  I'm mainly cataloging the puzzle types for self-reference and to remind myself of a few maxims:   If a puzzle is a blocker, make sure it's logical and fairly solvable; reserve the arbitrary puzzles for areas that can be bypassed.  Let the players learn about the problem before they encounter the possible solutions, so they're asking the right questions about the environment.  Finally, the table top medium allows a degree of lateral thinking and player creativity unsupported by computers, so don't design puzzles with only a single pre-formed solution in mind.

I've got the first 100+ rooms of Taenarum stocked and ready for adventurers.  In my zeal to learn how the Anti-Beedo would make a dungeon, I've heavily leveraged random tables.  "Special" rooms and puzzles are hard.   There's no short cut to creating them beyond perspiration and diligence.  Self-contained rooms and puzzles frequently come across as a bit arbitrary, whereas the multi-room style of puzzle requires more forethought - and works best if it enhances the overall theme of the dungeon.  I've found myself taking a step back a few times to lay the foundation for the multi-room puzzles.  The effort is worth it as I assume they'll become nice quests as players learn about them.

Puzzles are a big topic.  I'll circle back and look at some of my favorite puzzles from TSR and some OSR products as a follow up to this post and see what insights we can learn from those that have gone before.