Building a puzzle

[Rahl]

I am currently writing a new campaign for my players. During the work with my campaign a problem has arisen and I need some suggestions on how it can be solved. In the first chapter of my campaign a new King has taken the throne, since it isn’t possible (nor time) for the new king to explain his actions, the players, among many others, sees him as an evil character. Anyway there is a far greater evil marching towards the land (only known by the new king). It is possible for the players to fight some part of this upcoming battle without allying with the new king, but I think they will find this enemy to strong to fight without the new king at there side. (but, there are some other ways they can succeed in this campaign)

Anyway, the object in the first chapter is to decide either to ally with the new king or not. To aid them in this decision they will find a lot of prophecies (about 40-50, one-page stories). These prophecies must be linked together in the right way for the players to see the true story about the new king. The prophecies will therefore beside a text, contain a clue to how it relates to the other prophecies (and if it is “true” or not). So what I need is a system, or a code, which the player must decode to understand which prophecies are true and which are untrue. The main problem is that I need a code which cant be broken without at least 10 or 15 of the prophecies at hand, but easily broken if the players has 30+ of the prophecies. It would completely ruin my campaign if the players by some freak accident suddenly finds one or two of the important prophecies true and therefore do not need to find the rest of the prophecies.

 

[Block]

One idea you might try is to have, say, the eighth line of each prophecy be part of the one true prophecy. In order to find out what the true prophecy says, the characters will need to find many of the prophecies to get enouth eighth lines to start making any sense of the one true prophecy.

The only problem with this is that it may take awhile for the characters to figure out that the eighth line of each prophecy is part of a larger prophecy. If they are not figuring it out, you could always place a couple of clues that would start them thinking about the eighth line, or whatever number you choose.

 

[Rahl]

Thank you “Block”, but I can unfortunately not use such a method because prophecies is not read in the usual manner in my campaign. (I should have explained this in my first post, sorry.)

In my campaign the prophecies are read and written in the same way as in the “sword of truth” books. Let me explain. If a “normal” character finds a prophecy he will only see the regular ten10-12 lines of some cryptic message, but a prophet or a seer will, because of the magic imbued in the prophecy, experience the prophecy like a film or a short story. This is done because a prophecy is not a simple thing to describe, instead of writing an inaccurate story of what the prophet saw he rather writes down some sentences, which will let another prophet gain access to the same experience. So when the players find a prophecy they will only see the cryptic message, which may or may not give a clue of what the prophecy contains, so they need to find a prophet or a seer to know what the prophecy really is about. When the prophecy is “read” together with a prophet/seer the players will get a handout (1 page short story) which describes the prophecy, and the code a addressed I my first post.

 

[kramis]

codes

I see a couple ways to go offhand, depending on your players expertise. If they are mathematically inclined, you could easily have some sort of forumlae, or complex math pattern, with numbers showing up in each prophecy. Ones that fit the pattern are true, ones that don't are false.

It would be easy to make a lot of misleadingly close false ones so that they would need quite large number to have a chance of figuring it out. The more they have the better the odds.

One off-hand example would be to use pythagorean triples, these are three integers that fit the pythagorean formulae ... in other words, if square the two smaller numbers and add the results together you will get the square of the larger number (2,3,5 is the classic example of this, in which case having a false one with 2,3,4 would be misleading since they might think the pattern is something else). This works best is they have some way of determing one or two are for sure true and at least one is for sure false.

Another way is to use a word code. Each prophecy shows some out of place object prominently. There will then be some association between the "correct" objects, but the "false" ones won't fit the pattern.

The pattern can either be based on the type of object (an obviously too easy example: all vegetables are true) or code based on the spelling of the objects (4 letter words are true, words without the letter "e" are true, etc.).

Anyway, some ideas to get you started.