u/Phteven_j

Hello fellow dragon and dungeon enthusiasts. I wanted to share a puzzle I ran at my last session that seemed to go over well. I put a lot of work into it and I didn’t want it to just disappear once we were done with it, so maybe someone will find it useful. For background, my campaign takes place in a classic fantasy setting that is being invaded by aliens with advanced technology the PCs are totally unfamiliar with, so it lends itself well to these kinds of situations. The setup for this was that the players infiltrated one of the alien landed ships and were trying to destroy it by overloading its power reactor. I put this together in 24 hours so it’s definitely rough around the edges and could use refinement.

For the reactor room, you can dress that up however you like. The important thing is that there is at least 1 control terminal for operating it. I put 2 in case they destroyed the first one since “I punch it” is not an uncommon tactic. I hand-waived that magic wouldn’t be very effective due to the safety mechanisms in place, plus it’s established that their magic can explode electronics so it would probably kill them. I put a lot of work into it and was OK with some railroading. Sue me :) The terminal has a bunch of buttons and switches as well as an output display with a gauge showing the power level and some other figures. There is also a text box that shows the current status of the reactor or any error messages related to the input. The goal is to get the reactor into an unstable state and then overload it. Trying to overload it too soon will cause it to trigger a safety protocol and won’t apply the changes, but you can skip that bit if you want. I made it so they needed the engineering technician’s keys to operate the terminal, so they had to hunt those down first. I gave them a physical set of keys for this, which will make sense later.

Terminal electronic display:

https://imgur.com/a/jSLMjka

Terminal control panel:

https://imgur.com/WbLA4fv

https://imgur.com/Op5MD2H

Here is a description of the fields I put in an Operating Manual for them (disclaimer: I’m not a physics man):

• Phase: The alignment of energetic orthogonal particle waveforms
• Flux: The rate of flow of energetic particle fields flowing over the surface area of the reactor membrane
• Containment: A proportional property of the required inertia to maintain consistent energy flow and prevent external leakage
• Parity: Parity refers to the mathematical concept of whether a group of integers can be paired into equal groups. Paired numbers have no remainder when divided by the lowest prime number. (This REALLY tripped them up, more later)

There are also these 2 switches with semi-obvious uses:

• Phase Amplifier
• Containment Inverter

Each of the values contribute to a sum that is the power stability. For the pie chart, I set up ranges with targets to make it hard enough that guessing wouldn’t solve it right away. These are how the values work, but I did not share this.

• Phase is linear 0-5 and adds onto the total
• Flux is linear 0-5 and adds onto the total, but inverse, so lower numbers are higher
• Containment is just like Phase, 0-5 and adds onto the total
• Phase Amplifier doubles the Phase
• Containment Inverter makes the Containment value negative (this one is mostly a red herring)
• Parity: Paired or Unpaired are basically Even and Odd

The sum of the 3 values is a number 0 to 20 that I then multiply by 5 to reach the percentage (%). The lower the value out of 20, the easier it is to solve because there are more possible combinations to reach that target.

Then it was just a matter of making some rules and providing cryptic but useful error messages. They did not know the requirements or the behavior of the inputs ahead of time apart from what the display can show. The display still updates even if the parameters are invalid so they can see what effect their inputs had.

• Target for instability is 67% - 89%. This corresponds to a sum of 14 to 17.
• Target for overload is 90% to 100%. This corresponds to a value of 18 to 20.
• Flux to Phase ratio: Phase must be less than Flux + 3 (P < F+3): “ERROR: FLUX TO PHASE RATIO TOO [LOW/HIGH]. CHANGES NOT APPLIED”
• All 3 values must match the selected parity (aka all Even or all Odd): “ERROR: INVALID PARAMETERS FOR SELECTED PARITY. CHANGES NOT APPLIED.”
• Instability must be reached before Overload can occur.
• Instability reached: “WARNING: SYSTEM UNSTABLE”
• Overloaded too early: “ERROR: POSSIBLE OVERLOAD DETECTED, SAFETY PROTOCOL ENGAGED”
• Overloaded correctly: “REACTOR OVERLOAD IMMINENT, EVACUATE AREA"

I built a physical control panel (about 12” x 12”) with some parts from Home Depot that the players can use to manipulate the machine and then see the updates in real time. Or they would have seen them in real time if I had more than 24 hours to put this together. I didn’t have time to configure an Arduino or anything, so the players put in their settings and applied the configuration which I then put into a spreadsheet that takes in all of the inputs and updates the status panel accordingly. I put the display on my TV and used my tablet to input the values. One important thing I did was to disable the panel from updating while I’m editing it so the effects of the changes aren’t super obvious if multiple are edited at once. During that state I set the status to “CALIBRATING”.

Spreadsheet:

https://imgur.com/a/kfOowaS

I think the puzzle was a great success. It took them about 20 tries to discover what each of the dials and switches did over the course of 45 minutes or so. I was worried they would get it in 2 or 3 tries. There was a definite sense of accomplishment on their part and the resulting explosion was satisfying for all of us. The biggest hurdle for them was figuring out Parity because they didn’t know the lowest prime number is 2 (thought it was 3). My mistake for assuming people geeky enough for this game would also be math geeks. I previously had that setting as “Even/Odd” but thought it would be too obvious.

There are exactly 3 solutions with the requirements I set. Can you figure them out?

What I would change or reconsider:

• The Containment was kind of confusing since its inverse wasn’t clear. But it served a good function as a red herring.
• Increasing the unstable range would have cut down on the play time a good bit. Like I said, I was afraid of it being too easy.
• Obviously I’d have liked the board to be electronically linked to the display. That would not be too hard without enough prep time.
• Providing more clues for flavor and as hints could be a good idea. I wanted this to be as alien as possible both to the players and the PCs , but maybe it was a stretch.
• I could only display 1 error at a time, which caused confusion when 2 things were wrong.

Thanks for reading and I hope someone enjoyed this at least. Feel free to hit me up for the spreadsheets if you want to run it - it’s all automated.