Dungeon Blueprint: Rhyme Time

This week on Dungeon Blueprint I attempt to create rhyming poem riddles. Or something like that. Also, deciding on a game system to use for these articles.



First off, I'm looking at using a specific rules system for general tabletop gaming posts. Hopefully it will make meatier and more useful articles. The current category for contenders is OSR -- probably Labyrinth Lord or Swords & Wizardry, maybe Adventure Conquerer King System or Dungeon Crawler Classics.

So, that's that.

Now for some rhyming riddle poems I came up with:

The Shadows Fell Upon the Stone
Where Blades of Iron once were Hone
But Battle Came and Stole Away
The Secrets of the Attache

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The Stars Above Resonate
With a Force the Gods Abominate
They will bring an End to Time
At the Sounding of their Chime

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As the Four Winds Entwine
Their Essences Align
To Form the Path True
And Danger, Cut Through

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It should be obvious that I haven't written poetry or riddles before. Still, for a game these are more than adequate -- the party of adventurers would likely translate them roughly, anyway. Use of riddles should be
pretty obvious for any campaign so I won't harp on that and get to how I envision these riddles in use.

First riddle: This one is a two parter, you have the first two lines which point toward a grindstone and the second two which point to something that is more intentionally tricky -- attache, which could be a person or a briefcase. In this case I'm going to use the person in the form of their crypt -- the attache died during a siege/war. This works well for a crypt, city ruins, etc. The grindstone would be the key to finding the attache's crypt and would either be a real, standing grindstone or a relief of one on a wall -- I rather like the idea of it being apart of a relief. The shadows would be literal shadows -- a tiny opening in the room with the relief would cause any light from outside to bath the walls inside, with the change in time of day shadows would eventually fall upon the grindstone and reveal to those that know what they're looking for the opening.

Second riddle: I see this taking place in a cave, one that was used by an ancient race for religious purposes. The stars above would be crystals growing from the ceiling and, when tapped, their chime would cause the  wall paintings (the Gods) to open up as secret doors which reveal the crypt used by the ancient race to preserve their most important members -- they are very well preserved, magically so. Possibly undead.

Third riddle: This would be a dungeon or an ancient temple and the riddle involves getting past some particularly deadly traps. There would be four separate rooms that each have winds blowing into them. These winds could be channeled with old pieces of pipe laying around and fitted together to bring them together into one larger main room. The entwined winds become visible and blow from their connected point across the room to a hole on the other side. The visible wind forms a path through a series of hidden traps (pit traps, arrow traps, spike traps, etc.) in the otherwise dull room.

And that's just one interpretation of each of them. The creation of the riddles didn't take too long, just a few minutes each. To make them I just came up with the first line, found a word to rhyme with the ending of it.
Then repeated it a second time for the last two lines. As long as it sounded interesting, it worked for me.

From there comes the creation of an encounter -- like those above, that I came up with on the spot. They aren't the best, but with some polish nearly anything could be used. Finally, some extra touches. The image in this article is one idea -- handouts for players with the riddles in the languages (ancient or not) that they would be trying to read in the game. The image is the first riddle done in an alphabet I created earlier today  just for this purpose. The actual message is in English, it's just the look of the alphabet that has changed. This was an easy change that took only a few minutes but should provide a nice bit of depth.

That's it for this week, next week I'll have a system picked out and
something with it.