I am currently toying around with the idea of having my players crawl through a fairly large dungeon, with the theme of an abandoned wizard's tower. This tower was built to demonstrate the merits of each of the eight schools of magic to prospective wizards. So I want to make a puzzle room for each school of magic. There will be other, more combat focussed rooms, such as an alchemy lab filled with wild oozes, or a golem, and such, but each of these rooms will be largely puzzle/trap focussed. So I would like some help coming up with puzzles for each type.
Abjuration
* The players could be tasked with moving a key across a room. The key itself has a small, insignificant enchantment on it that makes it glow, but the room is filled with magical lanterns that generate fields of force that don't let magic items enter. They need to through a series of switches that either turn on or off these lanterns, set up antimagic fields that allow the key to pass through the fields, or so on.
Conjuration
* Having trouble with this one. I'm thinking about having a strange portal in the floor, that leads to dark worlds, and the PC's need to get accross. They will somehow gain an item that lets them use minor creation, so they can make a bridge. Needs fleshing out.
Divination
* Also not fully decided yet. Perhaps there will be a series of clues that can only be seen with various magics. A pair of glasses that have see-invisibility to find a hint on the wall in invisible ink, but also in an obscure language, so you'll need another item to use comprehend-languages on. Having a good deal of trouble with this one.
Enchantment
* No real idea how to do this one.
Evocation
* Have movable statues that fire out beams, make a puzzle with that? It works, but I think its a little boring, any better ideas?
Illusion
* This room will actually appear to be another room entirely. The players are trying to get through the tower because at the top of it is a bridge leading to a flying platform. This room will appear to be the final room. They will see the bridge, but if they try to go out they will fall to their deaths. There will be a number of ways to know it is fake. The bridge is pointing in another direction, the room will have many windows and balcony's while the tower has none. And it will appear to be night or day, despite being the opposite.
Necromancy
* This one is also giving me troubles. I'm thinking about devices in the room raising friendly undead, and they need to use these undead to solve additional puzzles in areas the players can't reach. Needs fleshing out, and I'd kinda like to include the other aspects of necromancy besides just animating corpses.
Transmutation
* This one is also giving me troubles. Transmutation can do a lot of things, and I'm not sure how to do it justice.
So yeah, I think I'm pretty happy with the abjuration and illusion puzzles, but I am kinda needing help with the other ones.
Thank you in advance for your help.
What level are the PCs?
A possible idea for the enchantment puzzle. The PCs have to convince a series of ghost like creatures to give them directions through a maze. These ghosts happen to be highly prone to the suggestion spell but the PCs have to be clever in how they request help from each.
With regards to the transmutation puzzle, I'm reminded of that Japanese game show clip showing people in a room where everything may or may not be chocolate. So they're biting shoes, door handles, paper and stuff, trying to figure what's edible and what's not.
A similar thing could be set up where the materials of various items are not what they seem. That book on the shelf is actually cheese, which they'll need to place on a sieve, so that when they pour wine from that jug that turns into rats, the rodents will run toward it before turning back into wine, thus falling through the sieve and activating a weight-controlled switch... I don't know, it might be an idea to look at puzzles in old Sierra adventure games and apply transmutative effects to the various objects for flavour.
I think that Academy of Secrets has something like that.
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Wonderful idea, is the main thing I have to say!
As for helping you, one thing that's a little unclear reading this is: How lethal do you intend this to be? That, of course, has a big impact on what one could do with these puzzles. The Abjuration and Necromancy puzzles both sound like you're trying to make them non-lethal, but Conjuration and Illusion both sound potentially quite lethal.
As for helping you, a couple cheap ideas:
Conjuration - You could have a lot of fun with this. You could sort of combine Portal with adventure games, leading the party through a series of rooms that they have to use a combination of teleportation, summoning, and creating appropriate items to get through the individual rooms.
Enchantment - Very hard to do without sentient beings to manipulate, that's for sure. Maybe it could be a gauntlet of emotion spells directed at the PCs, and there could be a combination of beneficial enchantments mixed in to help them resist/counter the maleficent ones?
Necromancy - Arcane necromancy has all kinds of fun tricks, too many to list - but similar to enchantment, many of them hard to pull off without living beings present (other than using the PCs as pincushions for nasty curses). There's fear and curse traps, of course, and maybe you could have a magic jar apparatus and a pile of skeletons where a PC 'pilots' the expendable skeletons into death-traps and other hostile environments (a room with no air, poison gas, etc).
I'm thinking they'll largely not be terribly lethal. The illusion one will be pretty dangerous as a sort of last test type of thing. But I don't want them to be wholly safe either, I want a little tension.
I have consulted on another forum, and have come up with what I think is a pretty good enchantment puzzle.
The room will be empty except for for pedestals holding four colored orbs; red, blue, green, and clear. And the exit door has four slots to insert the orbs in a 2x2 square configuration. There is an arrow pointing upwards from that square. Whenever a player grabs an orb, he becomes unable to let go of the orb until he exits the room. Further, when this happens he gains one clue to the proper configuration, and one restriction.
Red: Hint, the blue stone goes East of the clear stone. Restriction: You may only speak to answer questions, and must lie while doing so.
Blue: Hint, green stone is south of the blue stone. Restriction: You may only speak so as to speculate. You may not talk about things you know for certain.
Green Hint, the red stone is in the northern row. Restriction, you may only speak when correcting someone else's errors.
Clear: Hint: The arrow on the lock pointing upwards is considered SOUTH in this exercise, not NORTH. Restriction: You may speak freely, so long as you do not reveal your clue.
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Conjuration: Have a room that is like a half-finished maze, with missing floor and wall sections.
Have a series of buttons at the entrance, each controlling part of the missing wall and floor pieces, but also adding extra pieces. Most of the buttons either take away necessary parts of the floor, or put up walls in direct path of the exit. Only a certain sequence will open the path to the exit.
Allow K engineering or survival checks at average DCs for hints. Int checks or perception checks at higher DCs.
PCs have to figure out which buttons are pressed/unpressed to have sufficient floor to get to the exit without creating a wall blocking their exit.
Also parroting: What level are the PCs?
I've actually done several things like this in the past:
Abjuration-> Literal magical barriers that block certain types of magic or cancel out certain spells, turning into a series of on/off switches for spells that normally completely bypass otherwise mundane traps/obstacles adding a layer of complexity.
Conjuration-> stolen teleportation puzzles from the first generation of Pokemon games where different tiles lead the characters through a nonlinear maze to traverse an entire dungeon (macro challenge), or a singular room (micro challenge). Can include extra paths to hidden treasure or necessary mcguffins to complete the dungeon.
Divination-> puzzles involving "find the correct key" or "where's [Waldo]" like puzzles keyed to different magical auras. Can also come in the form of matching pieces based on magical auras, either measured in school or CL. Requires the Detect Magic cantrip to accomplish generally.
Enchantment-> series of obstacles whose successful linear completion nets a floating morale bonus, the puzzle is only complete when said morale bonus reaches a specific threshold. The linearity of the physical room itself is immaterial so long as whatever game mechanism the puzzle requires engagement from is satisfied. Failure at any point in progression requires a do-over (in the case where there is only one solution) or instills penalties that accumulate.
Evocation-> my friend actually helped me devise a pseudo sudoku puzzle that used elemental runes rather than numbers and required the players to find the correct path lest they be hit with whichever element they incorrectly stumbled upon.
Illusion-> very easy to make puzzles based on illusion, fake doors and paths are most common.
Necromancy-> give out negative levels and restore negative levels to modulate communication between success and failure in whichever puzzle format you like.
Transmutation-> use haste/slow effects to denote the correct path throgh a hazardous terrain.
The characters are all levels 3-4. So they can take a few hits, but don't yet have a lot of magic to cheese past the puzzles.
The characters are all levels 3-4. So they can take a few hits, but don't yet have a lot of magic to cheese past the puzzles.
A simple necromancy themed puzzle: the PCs need to pass a locked and trapped door (DC30 disable device check). Through the keyhole they can see a key on a table and a skeleton that they can command to retrieve the key and open the door. The catch: the skeleton only responds to simple two word commands. Inside the room is also a well containing icy cold water with a glowing gold ring at the bottom. Creative PCs could use the skeleton to retrieve the magic ring from the bottom of the well since it doesn't breathe and is immune to cold. Later on the skeleton might also be used to sneak past a wraith hiding in the floor without triggering its life sense ability.
An idea twisted from Arcanum (I believe) for Evocation: you have a series of doorways each in back of a deep, impassable pit. There are three torches, not lit, next to each doorway. The party is to light ONE torch from a distance (using Spark, for instance), and then a drawbridge slides out. The real puzzle is that the doorway leads to a different room in a maze, depending on which torch is lit.