So I'm the DM for a (generally) biweekly gaming group. We are spread out geographically, but all in the Eastern time zone. We use a couple of tools for communication, mostly Skype for voice and roll20 for map-support. Anyway, one of the members of my group is a paladin for Garl Glittergold. The group is at level 4 now, and I decided that Glittergold (also known as Watchful Protector, The Joker, Priceless Gem, and Sparkling Wit) has all of his paladins undergo a quest at around this point in their development.
As it turns out I also knew that the group was going to head through a portal near the very beginning of this particular adventure. They decided to all jump through simultaneously, which made it really easy. "As you all are jumping into the portal, you notice it change from a glowing blue to a glowing yellow."
They found themselves standing in a 30' x 30' room, with a 10' wide ethereal glowing scroll on the south side of the room that looked something like this:
They then saw that the northern "wall" was more like a shimmering/ glowing ethereal curtain. When the walked through that, they found themselves in a 50' x 50' room where the north, east, and west "walls" were all ethereal curtains. The north wall and the west wall were glowing, the east wall wall was dark. Essentially they had walked into a giant 5 x 5 grid, where each tile was 50' x 50'. If they followed a path laid out by the glowing light, it would eventually take them to a room where all of the walls were either stone, or dark, but in that room would be a large sized lantern archon (I know they aren't large size, but Glittergold enlarged this one. That's my story and I'm sticking to it) in the north east corner of the room. Not that any of my PCs have knowledge: the planes, but an NPC cleric with them did.
Anyway, when any body part of the party got into the same square as part of the archon, it said "Eeee" and left, leaving 2 new walls glowing. The party had found the puzzle.
following the archon the players find that it repeats a pattern of positions. Actually the solve the function of this part puzzle before they got through the pattern the first time. The pattern was:
Black lines indicate rooms, faint blue lines indicate 10' squares, and yes, that is a screen capture of Excel. While the paladin was investigating the 2nd position, they kicked all of the non-gnomes out of that "room". Around this time they also discovered they could ask the archon questions, and it would answer, though not always in a useful manner. For example: Q: "When is the puzzle over?" A: "When you have solved it or have given up."
The non-gnomes headed south, where one of them noticed some very faint lines on the ground, lines which formed an "F". They then moved to the room (marked above with a 9 and a 6) where they found the lines associated with the letter L. It was at this point that one of my players very quickly pieced together that the rooms correlated directly with the alphabet, starting in the upper left and reading like a book. He then told the other party members to have the archon move. When they had gotten to the 4th position, they were trying to figure out was "HATO" meant. They finally asked the archon if it's position within each room mattered, to which it responded with an actually helpful "yes".
From that they quickly recalled where it had shown up the previous 3 times, and generated the string "HeAdToOv", where the capital letter is the room, and the lowercase letter is the location within the room. They eventually got the string "HeAdToOvErLoOkHiLl" which is pretty obviously "Head to Overlook Hill".
There were some other small things which they thought might have been in important (Only the rooms with the letters C, D, F, I, L, O, Q, T, U, X, and Y had glowing letters on the floor, and they seemed convinced that the poem itself had some sort of clue to solving he riddle. Of course, the full puzzle isn't over yet. They don't even know where Overlook Hill is. And, as the last thing the did, they all stepped back into a portal, not knowing what lies on the other side >=).
If I were to run it again, I think I would have tracked how many questions the group asked the archon, and once they had asked 20, the only way the archon would respond is "I have already answered 20 questions". Another option might be to have the archon only answer yes/no questions. One of my favorite question and answers was "Are your movements spelling out a word?" to which the archon answered "no". This was truthful because the archon's movements were spelling out multiple words.
So there you have it. Feel free to drop this puzzle into a game if you are a GM, it can fit in quite a few places whenever you want them to spend some time working out a message. Heck, if you have a paladin of Garl Glittregold in your group and want to use the scroll and the cheesy poem, feel free.
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