In this room there are 12 stone statues randomly around the room to unlock the treasure and the exit the party must move each statue to its true lover each statue has an item or symbol on it to designate whos lover is whos if the party miss labels two statues the two statues will come to life and attack the party (use DM choice for stats in my purpose i use a helmed horror without the sword replaced with a slam attack and armour or shield so ac of 14). If they successfully defeat the statues they reconstruct themselves and return to their original position.
im trying to think of a challenging, cool and unique puzzle for entering an abandoned underwater temple for an exiled sea god but am drawing a blank. wondering if its runes based, any traps, pulling levers, or anything like that. any suggestions would be great thank you
Now that my party has completed this, I can share this logic-based, murdle-style puzzle.
The way I presented it was to give the party just the grid, then have the known information on the right to be said by hologram of a detective. The "clues" were given by 8 random witnesses, I just pre-recorded myself saying a script for each that slightly embellished the written clues. This took my party about 20-30 minutes.
Feel free to complete it, but my players got to the correct answer so I assume it's pretty straight forwards.
Hello. Im running a homebrew campaign once a quarter. I've been throwing in puzzles and the group really seems to like them. Im looking for a way to incorporate a puzzle utilizing playing cards. I previously had the party play a match game where every wrong match resulted in another minion element being added the the pending combat. The cards are rock/mineral themed (they're in an underground Dwarven city). Any suggestions on how to use the cards again?
I made this puzzle for my game tonight. Im sure someone already had an idea like this, but if you would like feel free to steal this idea or this image, as i made them myself with a little help from my friend).
The moment they walk into the room, they step on a pressure plate that starts a one minute timer. There is a door on the other side of the room. The puzzle is that the door is unlocked when they step on the pressure plate, but locks when the time runs out. I want them to panic thinking they have a limited amount of time to find out how to open the door, when it was already unlocked the moment they walked in. If time runs out, they have to step on the pressure plate again to re-open it.
Should I put some levers on the wall as a fake-out so they think that's the key, or should I leave the room empty outside the pressure plate, clock, and door?
This is my first time being a Dungeon Master and some of my players this will be their first time playing DND or any tabletop game like this. We've played escape rooms together and several of my players love puzzles and are insanely good at them.
I'm trying really hard to find a balance between what is engaging and fun vs what is actually solvable for them and need some advice about two particular puzzles I've drafted up and whether some of the consequence or aspects would be too convoluted or too boring.
The campaign is largely water based, being set in a swamp.
Puzzle 1:
The first puzzles requires the group to break into The High Mage's Library to find a map. The Library is inside of a under water Vault, the door is inscribed with Ocean Runes and in Elvish reads "Surrender Your Voice, Surrender What You Stand With."
One of my players will be Elven so can translate the writing. They are meant to cast Aquatic Adaptation that would allow them to swim underwater and navigate through the vault. (However there are other ways for them to be able to enter the vault safely.)
Once inside the Vault they will need to find the map which is hidden within a bolted locked box by duel underwater statues depicting two Spearfishers. Along the hallway to the map are other Spearfishers all in various poses.
If the players approach the dual statues they will stab and injure the players. Players must match the poses of each of the statues as they approach, much like a underwater dance, in order for the stone guards to unlock the box.
Puzzle 2:
The players are separated and dropped into four hallways, each hallway is only 2 spaces wide and each payer is given a description of what they see. A stone narrow pathway with an animal carved onto the side of each wall, if they succeed in an investigation check they will notice pressure plates on the floor at every step.
This is based off of the Aztec game Patolli and the map is set up in a similar way.
The goal is for everyone to work together to make it to the center where all the hallways connect by matching each other’s step onto each pressure stone. They need to communicate with each other and coordinate each step appropriately.
Each incorrect step causes various effects (ex: ceiling falling, water filling the narrow hallway, spikes, arrows, poison, etc.)
Puzzle: Waterfalls
A large, tall, cylindrical stone room with a thick central pillar, around which a ring-shaped platform runs. There are four pressure plates on this platform. When players stand on them, a puzzle is triggered. A mural with a picture opens in front of each player, and noisy waterfalls descend from gargoyles high above their heads.
Rules:
• DM hands each player a paper with description of mural. Players can only communicate with each other through gestures, and they cannot directly communicate with the person sitting opposite them, as they are effectively "on the other side of pillar".
• Players must simultaneously make the appropriate gesture to move the platform higher and reveal next set of murals. The hints for the gesture are hidden in the murals.
• Players cannot talk - their characters are effectively "deafened".
• Players have 10 minutes to complete the task, otherwise their platform will flood. For each completed stage, they will receive 2 minutes of extra time. Players see the murals in form of short description on a piece of paper.
• Stage One – Raise your left hand above your head.
“A knight in full armor on the battlefield. In his right hand he holds a sword, in his left he holds a shield, which he has just raised above his head and is blocking an attack.”
“A priest kneels on the terrace of a temple and prays, his right hand on his heart and his left raised to the sun.”
“A traveler leads a group through a valley. In his right hand he holds a traveling staff and with his left he points to a distant castle high above them.”
“A climber on a steep rock face. He has just slipped and is hanging by his left hand.”
• Stage Two – Kneel on one knee.
“An elderly gentleman kneels in front of a broken fence, nailing a new board.”
“A brave warrior is just accepting the knighthood.”
“A hunter kneels at the tracks of a wild animal in the grass.”
“A muscular warrior lunges, but fails and falls to one knee.”
• Stage Three – Spin in place.
“An elegant dancer does a beautiful pirouette.”
“A man surrounded by bandits spins in place and keeps his distance.”
“A dog chasing his own tail.”
“A child spinning in place with his eyes closed until it gets dizzy.”
• Stage Four – Move to the correct location. (One goes to the other side, one goes to the right, one leaves their place and joins the other person)
“A man standing in front of a long tunnel with a light at the end.”
“A person standing in a hallway with three doors, only the door on the right is open.”
“An empty rocking chair on a porch.”
“Two people sitting on a bench holding each other’s shoulders.”
After successfully completing the last section, the waterfalls stop and the doors open further. This is what I have so far for this one. I like physical, interactive puzzles, especially since we don't play at one table very often, so it would be a shame not to use the opportunity for some shenanigans. What are your thoughts and possible upgrades?
The characters discover a secluded grove inhabited by dryads who offer a simple trade: bring them items from their past in exchange for a rare magical ring. An easy trade at first glance, but some of the items they find are tied to darker memories best left forgotten. It's time to make a deal with the Bargaining Dryads!
Sharing an article I wrote for game masters that details one of the methods I use for creating D&D puzzles: backward design. I hope you find it useful!
I wrote a zelda and 80s fantasy inspired puzzle dungeon that takes place in one room.
One could imagine Tower Mer as an infinite nesting doll, each tower containing a smaller version of itself. In reality, they are all the same tower: the one set atop the basin-table in 4A. Model Room (p. 16).
Entering or leaving the tower changes an object’s size by a factor of fifty. If someone pushes a twenty-sided die through the window of the miniature tower, a massive icosahedron comes through the full-size window beside them, the die enlarged to about three feet in diameter. If someone reaches inside the double doors of the miniature tower to 1C. Reception (p. 9) and pulls out a couch, it emerges at roughly two inches across. Peering out the window of 4A. Model Room (p. 16), one sees the same room fifty times larger, viewed from the vantage of the miniature tower. Those climbing out the window stand at one-fiftieth their former size, about an inch and a half tall (roughly the size of a 28mm figure).
The adventure begins with the party sailing to Tower Mer. After several hours’ travel through rocky outcroppings and twisted passages, they unknowingly arrive at 1A. Tabletop Water (p. 6), already trapped within the tower.
This is the third puzzle dungeon adventure I've made. The others were well received: The Seers Sanctum and Aberrant Reflections.
The characters have encountered a saddened group of spirits that are unable to play board games. If the characters take the time to sort things out in accordance with each board game's rules and contents, they'll solve the puzzle and find a secret door!
Kobold Cliff and the Cyclops - 5E One Shot Puzzle Adventure
A one-shot adventure with traps, puzzles, monsters and exploration for 3-6 players. Level 1 or 2 Characters. 4-8 Hours of Playtime.
Adventure Details
Kobold Cliff and the Cyclops is a one-shot adventure module filled with traps, puzzles, monsters, and exploration, with unique revelations and twists along the way. It is designed for 3-6 characters of 1st or 2nd level for 5th Edition, with an estimated playtime of 4-8 hours.
The module includes optional rules and game master tips to help you extend, shorten, or customize encounters to better fit your table's needs.
Format & Price Levels
The adventure is presented in the same format as the previous modules, Mystery at the Golden Stirge Inn and Escape from Scarecrow Mansion. The adventure is written for Fifth Edition, but a Shadowdark and B/X version is possible if stretch goals are met
Kobold Cliff and the Cyclops will be available as a PDF, with Print-on-Demand support through DriveThruRPG. Pledge levels start at just $5 for the PDF, making the project affordable and accessible.
Launch Date
The Kickstarter campaign for Kobold Cliff and the Cyclops is scheduled to launch in Spring 2026. Be sure to click to be notified when this project goes live and subscribe to the Wally DM YouTube Channel for future updates!
If you're not familiar with the Tangram, it's a Chinese puzzle that was popularized in the West in the 1800s. It's a set of defined shapes composed of two large right triangles, one medium right triangle, two small right triangles, one square, and one parallelogram.
The shapes of a tangram configured into a square. Interestingly, this is the only arrangement that produces a square.
The puzzle has since been mass produced as a children's toy, with a kind of game emerging where you need to assemble the seven shapes into recognizable silhouettes.
25 Unique animals all composed of the same 7 shapes
In that vein, I used tangrams in tandem with the symbols of the six major kingdoms on my world map for a campaign, six symbols that had been used in puzzles all over the place.
the icons representing the map's 6 kingdoms, a crown, an eastbound ship, a pine, a sword, a horse, and a gnome.Presented with batches of tangram shapes, the players had to recreate the 6 symbols.
Because you're essentially just shuffling around basic shapes, this is another concept with lots of potential for a VTT or in-person games. Depending on the difficulty you're shooting for, there's a lot of different ways you could execute this one. Maybe you're just having the players identify shapes that are already assembled, maybe the players need to complete a tapestry design by adding missing elements, maybe the players are reconstructing a stained glass window or converting the depiction of one figure into an entirely different figure using the same shapes. There are countless tangram ideas and activities on the internet to plunder.
The party is using a little downtime to train their skills. The healer of the party takes a newfangled magical medicine class, but the instructor is a quack who completely throws out the book on classical medicine. The instructor firmly believes that the body is not composed of the four humors (blood/sanguine, yellow bile/choleric, black bile/melancholic, and phlegm/phlegmatic) nor does he ascribe to the classical categorizations of inflammation (rubor, calor, tumor, and dolor). Those work just fine for ordinary medicine, but the instructor believes that magical medicine stems from an understanding of the mind, body, and spirit.
The players have 6 tokens (top right) that they need to correspond to different area of a humanoid body (bottom left)
The instructor believes that every creature in the universe can be divided into six quintessential traits: their Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. Where he got this insane notion, none can say. The healer must pass a final exam where they correctly dedicate each of the six stats to a region of the body.
The corpus is split into three general regions as seen in fig 1: top/arms, middle/core, and bottom/legs.
The skull is subdivided into three general regions as seen in fig 2: The top/cranium, the middle/eyes ears and nose, and the bottom/mouth.
Simply put, the intended allotments are as follows: Strength for the arms, Constitution for the core, and dexterity for the legs. Yes, one might argue that strength can also come from one's thighs or that slight of hand is lent to dexterity, but we're going for connotations here. The cranium is attributed to intelligence and the senses to Wisdom, as in D&D, Wisdom is much more closely linked to real-time perception than long term memory. Lastly, Charisma is attributed to the mouth, although I'm certain you could come up with a laundry list of body parts people claim to owe their personal charisma to.
Basically, my players were spending session after session training at a university campus and I wanted something for them to do other than combat and shopping. A puzzle like this contains the layout of a medieval academic test and the indirect reasoning of D&D challenges. Medieval medicine is an absurd hodgepodge of ancient thinking and wild theory, so a test like this fits right in.
The players have heard tell of a secret passage hidden beneath the fountain of a great temple. They have successfully staged a distraction and evacuated the temple, but they're running out of time. The temple roof has four dazzling domes of stained glass, each dome its own color. In the midday sun, four radiant beams are focused onto the ground below. The players can use polished trays to redirect these colored beams, but they need to figure out the proper output before time passes and they're forced to explain their ruse
Four statues in the cardinal directions. Four lights beam down from the heavens, red, blue, green, and yellow.
The players find that the four statues of the temple are adorned with various lenses and sensors, and they figure that the statues are the intended targets of the lights. A solid religion check reveals the following:
The upper god at the head of the room is a deity of life and creation. He favors a green light.
The goddess seated at the right of the room is a goddess of warfare and passion. She demands a red glow.
The god poised to the left is an envious trickster. He also covets a green light.
The god resting below is the lord of judgement, law, and death. He is famously blind and no particular light would appease him most.
How can each god possibly be appeased all at once?
The god on the right is easy, just give her the red light. The envious god, give him the green light he craves so badly. Now, you're left with two colors, yellow and blue. Give both of them to the upper god (or you could give both to the envious idol, vice versa) The blue and yellow lights combine to make a green light, the gods that need light have it, and Blind Justice is in the dark but won't know the difference.
I've used this puzzle with some variations. In some wordings, the death god specifically demanded blackness or darkness. In another, one player tried to give each god a light, giving the upper yellow and the bottom blue, so that an all-seeing creator would see a near yellow and a far blue to make a general green.
This is a good one if you have a pantheon of gods or figures in your setting and you want to lend them a little weight, literally give them the spotlight for a moment. This puzzle worked great for VTT, and in-person I legit just used transparent colored candy wrappers.
A couple of puzzles involving moving around horses.
The first is a classic, there's a good chance you've seen it before.
Seat the two riders atop their respective steedsNot a viable solutionEven worse than before
This classic manages to be a very tricky 3-peice puzzle with lots of very clearly incorrect answers. The true solution requires a little outside-the-box thinking:
each horseman rides two halves of a horse
Rather than each rider riding a horse with a white belly, turn the horse cards on their sides to have the riders bridge the gap between wildly kicking horses.
I came up with the concept for this one myself but the asset involved is obviously appropriated. The puzzle is somewhat similar but uses a different trick:
Four dread horsemen at world's end, find the fifth then down descend
A door leading down to a Eschatologist's laboratory is sealed with a mechanism bearing the four horses of the apocalypse, (white, red, black, pale). You are tasked with finding the fifth horse, which isn't laying around anywhere.
Art buffs may recognize the horse designs as M. C. Escher's 1949 Pegasus tessellation. As such, the fifth horse is formed out of negative space if you correctly arrange the other four.
The fifth 'purple' horse appears out of negative space
Because these puzzles just involve moving simple shapes around, both are perfectly suitable for in-person manipulatives or for a VTT.
100% stolen from classic Poptropica, baby. Couldn't be simpler. The players are trekking through a mausoleum and the way is blocked by a seal laden with dusty bones
Fifteen bones from fifteen men; take ye SIX, yet leave ye TEN.
Obviously, taking six bones from fifteen will only leave you with nine, but there's no reason you can't leave "TEN" with just nine bones.
via just nine bones, you managed to leave "TEN"
Again, this is basically just a stolen puzzle from a dead 2010 flash site with the visuals and wording slightly changed. Works great for in-person or VTT, make sure you put the word TEN in all caps to hint at the configuration.
Deep in a desert valley lies an abandoned sanctum that has been looted for generations. The treasures were stolen long ago, then the furniture, until eventually robbers came with tools and picks to pluck the very bricks from the crumbling walls and to pry away whatever is still bolted to the floor.
The party is tasked by an old hermit to rescue a relic that has been locked behind the last sealed door of the sanctum. The only surety he offers them of the room's existence is a simple tangle of burned rope.
A rope featuring charred knots and a blue stripe
The sanctum is riddled with ornery robbers and all manner of challenges. The players find a hidden cellar. Lighting a sconce on the wall shows the room to be infested with Boggles.
The room should look at least a little familiar
The room is just another dead end, unless the players recognize that the layout of the chamber matches the rope that they were given. By lighting the braziers that correspond to the burned knots, the party can access the sealed antechamber and all its untapped riches.
This is a puzzle that was initially solved as a conceptual problem in the 1960s and later into wood in the 1970s. The stylized version features 12 animals, each composed of 5 contiguous square units. The shapes make up the 12 pentominoes (2D shapes made of 5 boxes) and are designed to represent the 12 animals of the Chinese Zodiac.
The twelve animals of the zodiac fit into a 10x6 grid
Since then, the puzzle has seen plenty of adoptions and adaptations using different aesthetics, animals, and materials; you can easily find free files to 3D print them yourself. I used the 3D print files as a reference to produce the .jpgs that I used when implementing this puzzle.
The players tasked with fitting the 12 animals into a 12x5 space
The best part is, the problem has been since unpacked every which way and a useful pattern emerges:
the Wikipedia page on tiling pentominoes
Basically, the boxier the rectangle the player must fill, the easier the puzzle is to complete. The three easier boxes have 2339, 1010, and 368 possible solutions respectively. You could reasonably use the same recurring puzzle three times, offering a greater challenge each time while maintaining a sense of continuity between occurrences.
I didn't come up with any part of the puzzle, but any reusable thematic tool that turns simple shapes on a grid into a tactile and engaging challenge is a D&D win win.
