 June 7, 2012 - 10:01am | Anyone remember John Carpenter's "In the Mouth of Madness"? There was a puzzle to locating the missing writer in the covers of his books. There was all these red lined shapes that seemingly had nothing to do with the cover art. Once the shapes were cut out of the dozen or so book covers they could be put together as a map of New Hamshire and led to a mysterious town there. Imagine a fanous frontier author hiding a puzzle in the covers of his novels where the cover art has a planet in the background. Once the planets are identified the form a sort of map by drawing lines beteween their star system and the intersection of those lines is the secret location. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 June 8, 2012 - 6:17am | Yes based on an H.P. Lovecraft novel. Now consider the electronic media and you could do some interesting puzzles with the books, titles, covers and so on on the characters Nook or Kindle or whatever. Sounds like a great job but where did you say we had to go? |
June 8, 2012 - 3:08pm | Hard to cut up a kindle and assemble a puzzle though,  I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 June 8, 2012 - 4:53pm | Neat, but coverless books have no resale value ;) |
June 8, 2012 - 7:56pm | Neat, but coverless books have no resale value ;) This is true. I was hoping that someone might have some other ingenious puzzle ideas. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 June 8, 2012 - 8:35pm | You could still use some type of paper or stone tablets as the media. Maybe, have an eccentric writer who loves the old media, write some stories. Then in those books somehow, whether covers or art inside creates a star chart to somewhere. You know those eccentric writers that hide away something, maybe a small fortune they made illeaglly in their past and regret it so they don't really want it but don't want anyone else to have it either, but are afraid to lose it. Another idea is to use some type of genetic marker. Maybe the pc's have some science background or work with an npc scientist who has discovered a strange genetic marker on the flora and fauna on a planet being explored. Each creature or plant has a piece of the puzzle. That puzzle leads to s star map showing the tetrarchs lost home world or something like that. |
June 9, 2012 - 3:13am | @ Karzan: Star Trek, TNG did that and the romulans, klingons and someone else was in competition with Picard and company to unravel and assemble the code hidden in the DNA of dozens of species spread across the galaxy. which when the code was finallly assembled and loaded into a tricorder it projected a hologram of a long dead progenitor that gave a very touchy feely love one another message. could be the puzzle is in art instead of book covers. I guess the thing to do is to make a list of mundane things like books, paintings, ale tankards, ect and you role on list A then make a list of Person, place or thing and you roll on list B Perhaps a third list of word code, number code, color code, picture/shape code and then you roll on list C This generates 3 values and then you figure out, "How can I use beer tankards to be a numeric code to reveal the location of a person?" I'm very interested in using puzzles in RPGs but some of the advice I've seen was: to use a cross word puzzle in a fantasy RPG! It just doesn't fit. The Classic of course was from The Fellowship of the Ring- "Speak Friend and Enter" to gain entrance to the mines of Moria. I just feel that the puzzle aught to fit the genre and not clash with it. EDIT: just remembered 'book codes' which are 3 numbers representing words. If you have the right edition of a book it is very straight forward to figure out. first number is the page number, second is the line number on that page and the third number is the word in that line. The problem being that we generally lack actual hard copies of the books that populate an RPG setting. There would be two ways to handle that. One: creating a document that is the clue and hook for the adventure and have it be the book code. Two: use the rule book as a stand in for the in setting book. I suppose that there could be a third option- if the RPG was Call of Cthulu then you could use a real world King James Bible, or if you allow for Earth in your Sci-Fi RPG then you could use something like Moby Dick, The Man in the Iron Mask, or The Epic of Gilgamesh as the book code. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
June 9, 2012 - 4:46pm | There's all sorts of digital encoding possibilities for an electronic media, up to and including adding those "weird red lines" to a JPEG file...collect (save to storage/drive device) the dozen or so files and there's the map. |
June 9, 2012 - 9:52pm | If you used artwork such as sculptures, ther could be several pieces that are seperate. Each one could be an adventure to aquire for a collector. Legal, illegal, whichever. Then when they are put together, they form some star chart and the pc's have a final adventure to complete the whole thing. The artwork could be 3D holographic art. Only when the 5 pieces are put together with their original projectors does the code come through. |
