A Great Resource For Puzzles In Your RPGs

When crafting our Sidequest Decks: 5 Challenge Quests (each card is a mini-adventure, main map on one side, quest outline on the other side) we needed ideas for puzzles and riddles, as most cards contain at least one of these elements. Although each quest loosely adheres to the “5 Room Dungeon” concept, it’s important to note that not all quests in the deck revolve around dungeons or rooms. Some include additional social encounters, puzzles, combat scenarios, twists, or treasures.

Crafting puzzles and riddles for tabletop RPGs presents a significant challenge. One must carefully balance the need to challenge the characters vs. the players while ensuring fairness across various character abilities. How does one provide an advantage to a character, such as a wizard with exceptional intelligence, without disregarding the knowledge that any character would inherently possess about the setting? One approach is to prepare clues when characters make ability or skill checks.

Returning to our primary focus, despite successfully developing numerous puzzles for our 5 Challenge Quests deck, we encountered difficulties in their creation, particularly in avoiding rehashed puzzles from other RPGs or popular culture references (“Speak ‘friend’ and enter,” for instance). Recently, I had bought one of the Deckscape “Pocket Escape Room Games,” and I was very impressed.

While w didn’t have this resource during the creation of our 5 Challenge Quests, I believe it would have been invaluable. Although some of the 60+ cards in the Deckscape game primarily drive the sory forward and some puzzles span multiple cards, the game features over 20 mini-puzzles.

I recommend drawing inspiration from these puzzles, but advice you not to use them directly, as players who have recently played a Deckscape game may recognize them. For instance, one puzzle in Deckscape requires players to fold a booklet in a specific manner to reveal a clue. You could use the same folding idea but have a hint about a different fold method. Another puzzle hinges on a palindrome; you could devise a puzzle where the solution is realizing the answer is a palindrome, albeit with a different setup.

Deckscape offers various games within its product line, each potentially containing puzzles better suited to your game setting. For instance, another game features puzzles set in an ancient temple, aligning more closely with that theme.