Digging For Lies - Ziggurat Rainbow Puzzle

mort655 · May 10, 2012

RangerWickett said:
Normally you wouldn't be able to get into the map room except by performing the ritual (i.e., solving the puzzle) in the rainbow room. Xambria and her crew had a similar reaction to Falkus's group. They saw the weird puzzle, solved it, then realized they'd have to solve it over and over again whenever they wanted to get into the map room. So they said "to hell with this" and just dug through the wall from the false seal room.

But what's stopping a group in the map room from just going through the southern door and into the rainbow room, bypassing the ritual?

Falkus · May 10, 2012

In hindsight; if I were to run the puzzle room again, I'd remove the monsters in the room until about halfway through the puzzle. I think the army of mutant centipedes crawling through the pit were what tipped my group over the edge to find another way around; they didn't want to risk the fight over the drop while simultaneously trying to solve the puzzle.

RangerWickett · May 10, 2012

mort655 said:
But what's stopping a group in the map room from just going through the southern door and into the rainbow room, bypassing the ritual?

Well, nothing. But why would you want to? The map room has the interesting info. The rainbow room is full of puzzles and monsters. There's no utilitarian value in going into it once you've already found a way into the map room.

gideonpepys · Jun 3, 2012

Perilously close to running this room, I realise that I still don't understand it.

The descriptions states that all the bridges are down and all the walls are up when the encounter starts.

When a character touches a crystal it 'activates' one colour, and 'deactivates' another.

So what happens the first time a character touches, say, the blue crystal? The blue bridge goes up and the blue wall goes down; but what about the orange bridges and walls which are 'opposed'?

Because if they are 'toggled' too, as they are set to walls up and bridges down, they effectively do the same thing as the blue bridges/walls (and both colours 'deactivate' when you touch orange).

Please excuse my stupidity if I am misinterpreting this.

MatthewJHanson · Jun 6, 2012

There's been a couple tweets since my original draft, but here was my intentions as the writer of the encounter:

"Activates" makes both walls and bridges of a color go up. So blue crystal makes blue wall and blue floor. It makes orange floor and walls go away.

Each crystal only does one thing. If you press the blue crystal twice in a row, nothing changes the second time. You would only want press it again if you pressed the orange crystal at some point in between.

Hope that helps!

gideonpepys · Jun 7, 2012

Thanks for your response, Matthew. I actually ran the encounter a day earlier, but I called it just exactly as you said. The encounter went very well. My players were gratified to see a good old-fashioned puzzle, particularly one that made sense in its location.

Isklexi · Jun 25, 2012

Um maybe i'm not comprehending RangerWicket's errata or not getting ve4grm's map alteration (I just got back from vacation and i'm a little slow), but making the first platform orbs red+blue and the southeast wall and bridge red doesn't look solvable.

According to to adventure text, red opposes green and blue opposes orange, so if you trigger both red and blue orbs (which you have to according to ve4grm's map) to reach new platforms, you are stuck. All remaining orbs are closed off by walls and no other bridges are available.

This problem doesn't arise if you keep the southeast bridge and wall as orange and make the initial platform orbs as blue+orange (matching the description text for the room) and make the orb on the eastern platform the red orb. This allows you to alternate between blue and orange to access new orbs.

gideonpepys · Jun 25, 2012

You need four people to solve the puzzle.

Noodle · Jun 26, 2012

Isklexi said:
Um maybe i'm not comprehending RangerWicket's errata or not getting ve4grm's map alteration (I just got back from vacation and i'm a little slow), but making the first platform orbs red+blue and the southeast wall and bridge red doesn't look solvable.

According to to adventure text, red opposes green and blue opposes orange, so if you trigger both red and blue orbs (which you have to according to ve4grm's map) to reach new platforms, you are stuck. All remaining orbs are closed off by walls and no other bridges are available.

This problem doesn't arise if you keep the southeast bridge and wall as orange and make the initial platform orbs as blue+orange (matching the description text for the room) and make the orb on the eastern platform the red orb. This allows you to alternate between blue and orange to access new orbs.

gideonpepys said:
You need four people to solve the puzzle.

I'm with Isklexi on this one.. ignoring teleportation/flight/jumping (i.e. only using bridges), then with ve4grm's map, then you can't get to either the western or eastern platform without pressing both blue & red. There's no way to deactivate blue and red at this point, because orange & green are both behind red/blue walls. It's very hard for me to distinguish red/orange on the hand-drawn map RW posted, so I'm still not sure what the original intent was.

gideonpepys · Jun 26, 2012

Fair enough. Maybe I'm reading the map differently, because when my players reached this room, they didn't have any problems.

Bit of a confusing puzzle, this one. But my players loved it once I'd ironed out the kinks (which may only have been in my head).