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Message: <blockquote data-quote="nogray" data-source="post: 5456450" data-attributes="member: 28028">Extensive IdeasSorry for the length, but here are a set of ideas to use or discard. Have a set of challenges in various categories, perhaps written out on cards, where the PCs have to collect a certain number of solutions to unlock each of the secrets.As an idea, let's say you have five categories of activities (physical, mental, social, general adventuring, and player) and five layers to each (V, E, C, N, and A). You might also have a back-up for each activity, if you are a glutton for punishment (or if you get a lot of ideas). After "unlocking" the whole thing (perhaps a minor skill challenge in itself, involving some language puzzle), the characters can spend a minor action to select a row (category) or column (letter), with the other determined randomly, or a standard action (or two minors) to select both row and column. Give the player the card. It describes the challenge to unlock that letter, or at least it sets the scene.You'll want to determine the action cost, but I am thinking that minimizing that might be a good idea. All or most of the challenges take place in a semi-real illusion that has all its effects immediately. Once they have made the selection, go right into narrating the challenge and let them resolve it. If they fail or give up, that ends their turn, but if they succeed, let them continue their turn as normal (minus the actions spent to select the challenge). As a variation, you could have each "round" of the skill challenge take a minor or move action, or something like that.Physical cards are the characters are reenacting the discovery of a physical item that bears some secret. The skill challenges can be pulled from movie scenes, like Indiana Jones uncovering that golden idol. All athletics and acrobatics and endurance, maybe some thievery. Give the situation and let the character go at it. This is happening in a semi-real illusion, though, so you can have a "you travel the desert for weeks: make an endurance check" part of the challenge. You can also have certain failures cost a healing surge or something like that, if you so choose.Mental cards are them using skills to do research to discover a secret. Arcana religion, maybe heal. Think Sherlock Holmes or CSI for uncovering secrets of that sort. Languages could play a big role, here, as some of the clues they are deducing could be written in different languages. I could see that being quite interesting, as you could have a special minor action to exit the challenge at a point with progress "saved." I see this as an example: "You traced the wounds on the body (heal success) to this butcher's weapon, then saw the ritual he was conducting (arcana success), now you need to decipher what he was summoning. The book is written in Elfish. Oh, you don't speak that? Spend a minor action and you can exit the challenge and let another party member come in for that." The elf-reading fighter spends a minor action on his turn to enter and read the text, but can't make a religion check for squat, so he spends a minor to exit, and the original solver spends his to get back in and gets a "having read the text, you figure out that the butcher was summoning lich vestige (religion success), who told him (some secret ..." and the card is now a success.Social cards are all about negotiations and such. Same sort of thing as mental challenges, too, with languages potentially playing a big role. As a twist, you might consider the characters having to fail (or succeed in sabotaging) a negotiation. Perhaps reveal this with a history check ("You realize you are involved in the first peace negotiation between Bael Turath and Arkhosia. In that, the Turathi ambassador is known to have been killed by the Arkosian delegation, but he whispered a secret to his understudy before passing; you are the ambassador's understudy.")General adventuring can cover both mini-combat scenes and complex challenges that involve more than one area above (say a negotiation, then a physical, then a mental). Maybe have a fight of one character vs. four or five minions, or a single normal monster -- likely lower in level to keep it fast. You could also run it as a combat "skill challenge" where they can use at-wills for a hit is one success, an encounter is a hit for two and a miss for one, and a daily for a hit for all the successes (three) or a miss for one or two. High level narration might be the key, here. And as a possible incentive to move quickly, have the semi-real illusion monsters inflict real damage or (in the combat skill challenge one), have the character take a surge (or half a surge) worth of damage per round. With five activities to choose from, there is no reason you can't mix and match, too.The last one, player skill, is just giving the party a riddle or puzzle. Emphasize that they can't let it get in the way of their actions in combat, and that anyone can give the answer. This is the one that I am least sure about, though, so you could easily have some other category or a duplicate of one of the others.Anyway, they have to collect V-E-C-N-A (from any category) to unlock the secret ability, or more interestingly, the action that will unlock the secret ability. Maybe for the action/initiative one, Vecna's hourglass becomes visible and they must break it. Then for bloodied the characters have to consume blood from Vecna's alchemical storage. To be really brutal, make it so that if Vecna becomes bloodied before all of the characters do this, he discorporates for one round and heals to full. For death, I am thinking of a Villains and Vigilantes module where there was a golem with the Hebrew word for "truth" on its head, and one way to shut it down was to erase the first character of that word, making it read "death" in Hebrew. You could have the same discorporation penalty (this time healing to his bloodied value) or just let him keep on trucking with negative hit points. For this one, maybe have the supernal phrase "Vecna's knowledge of secrets leads to lasting truth" be engraved on gold plates, and the characters must change truth to death (with a melee or ranged bludgeoning, force, or thunder attack), and rearrange them to "knowledge of secrets leads to Vecna's lasting death"If you are interested, I will happily come up with more specifics for challenges, and I would love to discuss it more. I'll even work for brevity, next time. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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