Category: Puzzle Mechanics
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Design Diary #002: The Haunting of Dresden Manor
The last few weeks have been busy, between summer vacation and work and life! However, I finally found time this morning to sit down and work more on The Haunting of Dresden Manor. I’ve now completed a first draft of my expanded list of clues, evidence, threats, and spooks (I’m not calling them dangers any…
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Mystery Advice from a Master: Raymond Chandler
To help get me in the mindset for my new project, a mystery scenario called The Haunting the Dresden Manor, I spent a few days this month with one of the masters of the genre: Raymond Chandler, and specifically The Annotated Big Sleep, edited by Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and my esteemed colleague Anthony Rizzuto.…
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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…