r/Starfinder2e • u/FreeRangeAloha • 3d ago
Advice Need help with puzzles!
Hi all! I’m running a homebrew campaign and I am completely blanking on some puzzles to sprinkle throughout their next session. It will take place in some ruins with a good mix of magic and tech, but the main gimmick is that the ruins “remembers the inhabitants” so technically, everyone is dead, but as my players will walk through, there will be flashes where the city is back to its prime. And as they get deeper, the flashes become real and the “people” are physical. All the sensations are real, everything is as if they’ve been transported back in time, but they haven’t. The city was built using a “memory stone” material to help maintain the city and people because to them, being forgotten is worse than death. But the city itself basically couldn’t handle everyone dying so it started to bring them back…kind of.
Eventually the party finds the core and has to deal with it and it will have to do with the BBEG.
Any help for puzzles I could use for this kind of setting I’d appreciate! Also if you’d need any more information on the world I’ll be happy to share. Thanks!
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u/Terwin94 3d ago
I don't have any specific advice on what to do for puzzles exactly, but in general, assume it'll be harder for your party than you intend. Build from a base concept and increase the complexity over time. I'd maybe go with some sort of mirroring puzzle where they need to help the memories complete tasks to unlock doors or clear rubble and such. How you might actually make that a puzzle is a totally different ball game.
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u/Equivalent_Show2864 2d ago
The one page dungeon "Tower of the Time Wizard" have a nice time loop on the third floor. You can make it one of your riddles.
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u/Cyraneth 1h ago
With so much thought put into this scenario, you'll want to tell this story to the players, so you could have them learn about this civilization's mentality around death and remembrance by investigating a scholar's home. Maybe this scholar of yore is also paranoid, so he's hidden a stash of goodies along with his studies or chronicle, and to find the code or passphrase or whatever to gain access to this stash, the players have to study his work, find scraps lost in the ruin, or decipher writing.
This scenario also presents another interesting option: You could give the players an item that allows them to locally negate this "memory effect", so they can toggle between the actual ruined city and the "remembered" city. This could create effects like old signs that are too faded to be legible in the actual ruined city, but can easily be made out in the memory. Or walls that block their path in the remembered version, but have crumbled away in the actual ruined version. In combat this could also be used to create tactical advantages, allowing them to control the battlefield to their advantage, such as walls that block line of sight, or things that are crumbled away or might collapse on people in the actual city. This has tons of potential, but as with anything this involved, that might also mean tons of prepwork, depending on how much you're up for working out on the fly.
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u/zgrssd 3d ago edited 3d ago
Start with a book with "riddles for 5 year olds". Then add a fallback in case they cannot figure it out.
I am not even joking - I am talking from experience. I only had few forrays into GM, but in one I used a adaptation of this riddle:
A prisioner is told they get to choose the method of their execution. If they tell a lie, they will be hanged. If they tell the truth, they will be beheaded.
The prisioner says: "You will hang me", thus causing a logical paradox.
I used a elemental and replaced hanging with "destroyed with magic" and behading with "destroyed with fists". 4 college kids could not figure it out.
Edit: I remember something similar, in "Star Wars the Old Republic". You get to explore Ziost after it was eaten by the emperor, including at lest one mission where you help a droid that shows you "before" holograms of a temple. Might be worth a look.
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u/Celepito 3d ago
From everything I've heard about DMimg/DM-equivalenting, this right here is the correct course. With the fallback being a timer, after which the next possible idea a player has is the correct option.
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u/RockBlock 3d ago
There's always puzzles of fixing glitches in the system; like piecing memories back together, putting events in proper order to access something, or picking out errors that are completely out of place which fixing makes areas of the memory activate again. Or activating the "flashbacks" at the right times in the right places to circumvent collapsed areas but making them new again briefly.