The Tuning Room

Entrance to the chamber:  an iron door.  If the characters spend time examining it, they will note that it becomes very hot to the touch, then 30 seconds later very cold to the touch, then back to hot 30 seconds later, etc.  Listening at the door will also reveal a repeating pattern of five low-frequency musical tones.

Created in OmniGraffle.

Inside the chamber:  The room is 15' wide near the entrance, then there's a 5' bottleneck, and then it expands again on the far side.  The ceiling is high, maybe 40'.  The target treasure is on the far side (see diagram).

Near the entrance on each side is a statue:  one statue of a red dragon, and one of a white dragon, both facing the door.  They seem to leer at the delvers as they enter the room, grinning.  Once every minute, the red dragon statue spews a blistering cone of fire, and the frost dragon blows a biting cone of frost.

Beyond the statues, where the room narrows, a stone slab 4' tall blocks the way.  The slab is hanging from the ceiling, supported by five thick steel cables of varying thickness, starting with the thickest on the left and the thinnest on the right (similar to what one would find under the hood of a piano or on a guitar).  Higher up, out of reach, mechanical hammers strike the steel cables to create the pattern of musical tones.

If the characters look closely, they'll see that the stone slab is already a few inches off the floor, but this doesn't leave enough space for them to crawl through.  Also, the cables are thick enough and grouped together closely enough that characters cannot squeeze between them to climb over the slab.

A stand with the next magical instrument they must collect is clearly visible on the far side.

Solution:  Careful examination of the statues will reveal that the heads are not fixed into place; they can be swiveled around and aimed.  Aiming the red dragon head at the cables will cause them to expand, lowering both the pitch of the musical tones and the slab of stone, not helping the characters at all.  Aiming the white dragon's head at the cables, however, will cause the cables to contract, thereby shortening their length, causing the musical tones to rise in pitch, and raising the slab of stone to a height sufficient to allow the characters to crawl under it.

Another Music Puzzle

The characters will arrive at the edge of a huge pit.  They must get to the far side to retrieve another instrument for their quest.  Eight stone discs, big enough to stand on, float magically in open space over the pit.  Each disc has a number associated with it from one to eight as indicated by diamond-shaped markings.  The markings are configured like the symbols on playing cards, while the discs are arranged in a pattern relative to each other as shown in the diagram to the right.

The characters will be able to hear a simple, repeating melody playing overhead.  The melody will correspond to the root notes of a standard jazz progression:

I  vi  ii  V  I   (1, 6, 2, 5, 1, or  C, A, D, G, C)

This is the order that the characters will have to tread the discs in order to get to the other side.  Stepping on any of the discs out of order will dump the character into the pit below.  The minimum weight to activate a disc is 50 lbs, so the players won't be able to easily test them. The distances between the discs will be such that the PCs can jump from side to side (e.g., from  #3 to #2), or from one row to the next (e.g., from #2 to #4), or even diagonally to the next row (e.g., from #2 to #7), but they won't be able to skip rows (e.g., from #2 to #8).

You may have noticed that they will not be able to make it back to disc 1 from disc 5.  The players will need to make the connection that #8 can serve as a substitute to #1, just as the 8th note of a major scale is the same note as the 1st note in the scale, just an octave higher.  So the true pattern is 1, 6, 2, 5, 8.

This will not be an easy puzzle for them.  The pit won't be save or die, of course, but I will put something creepy down in the bottom - and a way to get back up on the near side - to add to the excitement.

City in a Carcass

In my last post I talked about my goals for a big dungeon adventure I'm making for the kids.  Today I'm going to describe the background of this adventure, and then dive into the overall structure.  That will set up the context for next time when I talk about some of the puzzles in one particular section of the dungeon.

I've already given a little bit of the background for this adventure here.  Some details have changed since then.  First, the carcass of the turtle-shaped demigod is upside down, which is the position the creature came to rest in when it met its doom (incidentally, it was slain by another demigod who figures prominently in part two of the adventure path, which takes place in Nimoriél...but that's a story for another day).  Second, the animal heads have changed.  They are now bird, spider, mole, and ardvaark, for reasons we shall soon see.

Ayotl, in better days

The Micqui built their city in the remains of this beast, and they dominated the people around them for centuries.  Their last sovereign before their empire collapsed was a queen named Esseniri, and it is for her tomb - and the treasure hopefully buried with her - that the characters seek.

Structure
Since the turtle is upside down, that means its carapace, or dorsal (back) shell, forms a giant bowl.  Tectonic forces have misshapen it over the ages, but for our purposes thinking of it as a bowl is useful.  An underwater river falls into this bowl and forms Mors Aeterna, the Lake of Eternal Death, which drains out through one of the heads into another river, deeper down.

This configuration also means that the demigod's plastron, or ventral (belly) shell, forms a ceiling high above the lake to enclose the space.  The river which dumps into the lake actually cuts through some of the ancient scutes in the perimeter of his carapace and slips through the crack between plastron and carapace before plummeting to the dark waters below.  For what it's worth, the part of the dungeon the kids are in now is cut into one of these perimeter scutes, and they are nearing the waterfall.  Back when the city was still on the surface, this section served as an observatory that the ancient scholars used to create their calendar.  Over the next week I'm going to be studying Mayan and Aztec calendars for ideas to slip into this particular section.

The vertebrae for the creature's two spines, which run perpendicular to each other and intersect in the middle, are for the most part intact.  Some of these vertebrae poke out of the lake to form islands.  Rising from the largest of these at the junction of the two spines is the Black Tower of Despair, which is impenetrable except via a magical gate which requires a special key to be opened.   The queen's tomb can be found beneath this black tower, and so they will need to find the key to get there.

Each of the four animal skulls - one for each cardinal direction - contains a different dungeon.  Among the treasures in each dungeon will be idols shaped like simplified versions of the animal heads.  Together these idols can be assembled together to form the key that opens the magical gate.

The dungeons will each have a theme corresponding to human senses, as follows:

• Bird: hearing.  This will be a music-themed dungeon.
• Spider:  sight.  This will be a dungeon that features the use of light and mirrors.
• Mole: touch.  The characters will find themselves misled by their other senses.
• Aardvark: taste.   The characters will find themselves being tasted by the last living tissue of the ancient demigod! (think Millenium Falcon in that living cave)

You may have noticed that I skipped our sense of smell.  That sense is represented by a rivalry between two races who now inhabit this subterranean region.  One race, called the Dark Ones, lives on the edge of the Lake of Eternal Death and fishes its waters.  These creatures do not cast aside their attire when it becomes too old and worn; instead, they simply add new layers over top of the old ones.  For this reason, they reek terribly.  The other race is one I made up myself, and they're called Nifflers.  They have no eyes at all and get by almost exclusively with their sense of smell, so it should be plain to see why they hate the Dark Ones.  The Nifflers inhabit some of the vertebrae islands and patrol the ribs which extend out from the spines and fuse with the carapace to form a network of tunnels beneath the lake.

Both races are hunted by a wyvern who ranges over the lake, and they try to appease him by kidnapping members of the rival race as sacrifices to the wicked beast.

This is the environment the kids are entering now, and they have no idea what they're getting into.  

Next time I'll give an example of a puzzle from the bird/music dungeon.

The Start of Something Big

I've started creating a huge dungeon for the kids, and I thought I'd share my process in this space.  It's a fairly ambitious project.  I'm shooting for the stars, and there's no way to describe it all in a single post.  Today I'll cover what my goals are, but first I'll provide a little bit of the dungeon's context within the overall adventure path.

Long time survivors of this blog may recall that I also run a Pathfinder game for my adult friends, and that my homebrew world they run in is pretty much the same one my kids run in.  Sort of.  They can't affect each other's version of the world, and they can't interact with one another.  This means that I'm effectively running the same adventure path twice, first with the adults who started as level 5 adventurers, and then with the kids who started at level 1.   So even if the adult party kills a major villain in, say, the Temple of Klethnu, that villain will still be there waiting for the kids when they arrive at the same temple.  Unless he's busy elsewhere, that is.

First, a definition for the uninitiated.  An "adventure path," in the sense that I'm using the term, is the set of adventures that the characters will engage in over the full span of their career, from whatever level they start at to whenever the characters are retired.  Adventure paths don't necessarily cover the entire PC career, but they do at least encompass a set of adventures that are connected to each other to form some narrative.  This particular adventure path I'm making will be it for these characters.  Once it's over, the kids retire these characters and we play something else.

The overarching structure of the adventure path that I've created/am still creating for my players consists of four parts.  The adults started with part two, the kids with part one.  I started running the setting well before I had an adventure path in mind, though; the adventure path has grown organically from the initial adventures that I created, specifically the "part two" that the adults just finished up after a year of playing in the elven city of Nimoriél.*  But the overall adventure path is a subject for another day.  I mention it today just to give some context for the dungeon I'm making.

Which brings me to my goals for this dungeon:

1. Advance the characters from level 3 to level 6;
2. Incorporate the dungeon seamlessly into the adventure path;
3. Challenge the players mentally;
4. Teach the kids about a wide range of subjects without them realizing it.

The first goal is to advance the characters from level 3 (their current level), to level 6, which is the level they will need to achieve in order to be ready to survive the horrors waiting for them in the Nimoriél greater metropolitan area.  Three levels worth of experience points represents many encounters, so the dungeon has to be fairly big.

My second goal is for the dungeon to feel like part of the overall adventure path.  That won't matter until much later, of course, long after they have advanced to Nimoriél and points beyond.  Right now the kids have no clue that this adventure path even exists, but years later I want them to look back on all our sessions with a sense of wonder and realize how they all fit so seamlessly together into one cohesive unit.   That's my pride talking, I admit.  I want them to look back on the adventure path as a whole, and each adventure and dungeon along the way, and reach the inevitable conclusion that their dad was a total bad*ss game master.  And I want them to see how I did it and inspire them to reach for similarly lofty creative goals.

An adjunct to this second goal is that I want the dungeon to tie together with what they've done up until this point.  I want to foster the illusion that I had the whole thing planned before we even began.  Eventually they'll know the truth because I'll share my techniques, but let them wonder for awhile.

My third goal is to make this a mentally challenging dungeon, mainly from a problem-solving perspective.  My kids compete in Future Problem Solvers, and I've noticed that since starting FPS, their problem-solving skills have really sharpened.  I've got to come up with something challenging enough to keep them interested.  So this dungeon will have lots of puzzles, none of which will be solvable by mere skill rolls.  And though it will have no shortage of nasty creepy-crawlies, several of the enemies they face will not be beatable by combat.

I'm feeling even more ambitious than that, though.  What I've done is created a structure for this dungeon such that the whole thing is one big puzzle, with subsections which are also puzzles which themselves contain puzzles.  You'll see how this works when I describe the dungeon structure next time.

(Also, the adventure path itself is a giant puzzle of sorts.  Tiny little seeds will be planted in this dungeon that will be clues for unraveling the biggest of mysteries when the characters have advanced to become legendary heroes and everything they hold dear is on the line.)

My final goal (aside from simply having fun), is to sneak in some educational elements.  As always, I'll take a stealth approach to this:  if the kids are having a blast and don't even realize they're learning, then the mission will be a success.  The following are a few subject areas that I know I'll be addressing:

• Music theory
• Ancient Mesoamerican civilizations
• Astronomy
• Geometry 
• Logic
• Anatomy
• How to kill vampires

This last skill is of particular importance.  Not all vampires sparkle.

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* Spanning just three weeks of in-game time.  In other words, we met once per week and played the setting for one year, but the characters were only in and around the elven city for three weeks.

I mention this to give scale to the adventure path.  Parts two and three are the biggest, and part four is the smallest.  I estimate the whole effort could take three to four years.  This assumes we actually get chances to play.  If you've read this blog at all, you know that's a long shot.