I ran a pretty neat puzzle recently, and you should totally steal this for a next session!
Finding A Puzzle To Adapt
I figured that zebra puzzles make for fun templates to adapt at the table. I used https://www.brainzilla.com/logic/zebra/ to browse for suitable puzzles, and first checked if I could solve it myself. Then, I made note of all the clues and the solution.
Swapping Out The Parts
In my session, players faced an as-of-yet unknown threat that they knew was slowly awakening (spoiler: a dragon. It was a first RPG session for a few players, so I wanted to go classic and big). The wizard who put this dragon to sleep left notes in his workshop to either put the dragon back to sleep, or kill it.
I tied the dragon to a dormant volcano, and tied regional consequences to the various outcomes:
- Killing the dragon would also kill the volcano, and the nearby valley would slowly wither and die.
- Putting it back to sleep would cause the dragon to wake up again in 50 years.
- Letting it wake would cause an eruption (ten years of ash and fire), but after that the valley would thrive. Except that an evil sorcerer stands ready to mind-control the dragon, but that’s not the point.
The puzzle for the slaying potion was also a bit easier than the one for the sleeping potion.
For the Slaying Puzzle, I went for 3 elements: Putting in the right ingredients in the right order with the right alchemical preparation (grounding up, boil, burn).
For the Sleeping Puzzle, I went a bit more complicated: 4 ingredients with 4 various measures and 4 actions, with the measure clues also relating to each other (“Ingredient X requires a measure of 20 grams more than ingredient Y”).
For the ingredients, I used the Elder Scrolls wiki (lol).
Putting It On The Table
The ingredients were left by a wizard 300 years ago, which allowed me to implement an easy time limit: The moment the ingredients were disturbed, it would take exactly 15 real-life minutes before they would spoil.
That’s it, that’s the puzzle. Whoever comments first with the correct actual solutions to both, gets a free copy of Block, Dodge, Parry.