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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest 6801328" data-source="post: 7801769">I posted this in another thread, but can't remember where, so I'll have to reconstruct it.WARNING: DRAGON HEIST SPOILERSFirst, in the basement Trollskull Manor I added a subterranean leair, behind a secret door hidden behind a wine rack that consisted mostly of those diamond-shaped wine bottle bins, but also 10 "display" cradles that held one bottle each.  "For the good stuff."  (If I were doing this again I would have prefer to have a variety of hand-outs, including one of the basement showing the wine rack.  It couldn't be the only hand-out because that would tip them off too strongly.)Second, I turned an upstairs room into an old office stuffed with papers and ledgers and books and detritus.  The PCs started digging through this, trying to find out the history of the place.  I prepared a series of clues that they would discover as a function of both time spent and Investigation checks.  I didn't love the Investigation checks (no consequence for failure) but there you have it: I don't always meet the standards to which I aspire.  Anyway, I won't spell out all the clues, but the key ones that relate to this anecdote are that they figured out the previous owner must have been attempting some kind of summoning, and they found something that looked like a bar code, with 10 black or white bars.  I held my breath here, hoping they wouldn't put two and two together...not yet...and they didn't.EDIT: Another detail: as part of the thank-you for rescuing Raenar and Floon, they were given a case of fine wine.Next up, I used The Lady of Trollskull Priory from dmsguild, and to that I added a spooky, 10 year old girl with weird powers of prophecy.  They rescued both the lady and the little girl, and in the "thank you" scene the girl said, "I hope you find what you're looking for under your house."The players all jolted like they had been struck by lightning.  They raced back to the house and started tearing it apart.  One of them closely inspected the kitchen fireplace, and I asked to explain what they meant by "inspected."  He actually nosed around up in the chimney, so I described a curious flu, that looked like it was joined by another flu coming up from below.  They pulled out their map of the house, and from the location of the kitchen fireplace deduced on what wall of the basement there would likely be a secret door.Back downstairs they went, and in re-describing the room, explained the wine rack again.  When I got to the part about the display cradles for single bottles of wine, this time I didn't say how many.  But one of the players got excited and asked how many.  As soon as I said 10 he pulled out his notes and said, "I get oiur case of wine that Raenar sent us, and place bottles in the 1st, 3rd, 6th, 7th, and 9th slots!"Click!There was cheering around the table (more than I've ever seen from rolling Perception and being told, "You find a secret door.") . Which I think was due both to the fact that the secret door was a kind of (mini) climax that built up over 2 or 3 sessions, and because they felt good having figured it out themselves.  (Even if I did nudge them with the prophecy, although there were still several other ways they could have found it.)EDIT: The wine bottles, in binary, equalled 666.  But nobody figured that bit out, despite having one software engineer and one computer scientist out of four players.  I didn't mind gating that behind out-of-game knowledge because it wasn't relevant to the adventure.  Pure easter egg.</blockquote>

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