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Serious Fun: Disaster Prep and RPGs
Today, I got the opportunity to apply my role-playing skills at work. By day, I’m a newly-minted member of my employer’s Emergency Operations Committee (EOC). As part of my orientation to the committee, other committee members and I “played” a tabletop disaster simulation, practicing the skills that we’ll need in case a real emergency occurs.…
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Game on!
Yep, since I last wrote on this blog, I playtested a bunch of puzzles, did a bunch of improv, asked a bunch of gamers about their frustrations, and ultimately… designed my own prototype RPG at Dundracon 2024! I’m very excited about it, since I think it combines the narrative freedom of D&D with the mechanical…
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Cipher Puzzles, Part 2
“These hieroglyphics have evidently a meaning. If it is a purely arbitrary one it may be impossible for us to solve it. If, on the other hand, it is systematic, I have no doubt that we shall get to the bottom of it.” Sherlock Holmes in The Adventure of the Dancing Men, written by Sir…
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Cipher Puzzles Part 1
“If he had anything confidential to say, he wrote it in cipher, that is, by so changing the order of the letters of the alphabet, that not a word could be made out. If anyone wishes to decipher these, and get at their meaning, he must substitute the fourth letter of the alphabet, namely D,…
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What are puzzles, anyway?
I had originally planned to have my first few posts be about ciphers. Ciphers, after all, are a great puzzle mechanic that can be easily incorporated into a TTRPG. But as I tried to wrangle my ideas into words, I kept coming back to a basic question: Why is a cipher a puzzle? Or, more…
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Welcome to Riddle & Rook!
Welcome to Riddle & Rook! I’ve created this website to share my love of adventure and mystery storytelling through puzzles and tabletop role-playing games (RPGs). I want to use it to share puzzles that I’ve created that can be easily incorporated by other RPG game masters (GMs) into their games. I also plan to use…
