You enter a huge room room with a domed ceiling, The room is 60 feet across, the ceiling even higher. There does not appear to be another entrance/exit with the exception of what looks like a wall of water on the opposite end. Diffuse light, from unknown sources, allows you to see the room in detail. Centered in the room is an 8x8 grid, alternating black and white squares. Each square is 5 feet along the edges. Lining the outside of the room are statues, approximately 5 feet tall, 8 per side of the room. Along the left wall the statues are of castles, along the right wall, knights in armor on a steed, on the wall you entered on, holy men, and across the way, noble queens sitting on thrones. A lone statue of a king sits halfway between you and the beginning of the grid.
Use us all,
Group by Group,
Let us play,
But stay out of harm's way
For the record, the goal of the puzzle was to place each group of chess pieces on the board without one being able to take another one. This is trivially easy until you get to the queens. Turns out there are only 12 solutions. Go visit wikipedia and search on chess 8 queens to get more details.
The party struggled with the queens for over 30 minutes. At that point, Alexander made a History check to determine if he had perhaps seen this, or something like this in the past. He rolled a 20. So I looked up the solutions online and gave them 4 of the 8 pieces. They had it solved 5 minutes after that. I should add I screwed up the rooks since it was 12:15 AM and I was having a little trouble staying awake.
2 comments:
Great puzzle on this one, Josh. The hint was just enough to clue us in to what we needed to do. And that 8 queen piece was hard! I can't help but wonder if we all would have figured it out more quickly if it was earlier in the evening.
That reminds me. I think there may be some interesting things we might be able to do with existing powers as a group that we haven't discussed.
For one thing, I still feel like I'm not sure what cool powers our cleric, fighter and rogue have. (I'm pretty clear on Jeff's cool tricks. We got to see a showcase of most of them that night.)
Maybe in-character we should discuss what it is each of us are capable of doing so we can offer suggestions during a fight.
The other thing I'm thinking is there might be some cool creative things we could do if we had time to prepare. For example, Kuppy Jr has the ability to ignite a flame at distance. If we started carrying around flasks of oil that we could throw, which would break on contact, we could set 5x5 squares on fire. And who better to give flasks to throw than Half Pint, with his ridiculous dexterity? Might be nice to have some of those handy.
Also, we discussed briefly the possibility of tossing the halfling to the ledge that was ten feet up. We should test out how much his full weight (with gear) is, and whether the dragonborne has the strength to throw him that far. With his athletic skill, a maneuver like that could be useful in the future. We might even make it a part of combat: When facing a shoulder-to-shoulder line of bad guys, we could toss the halfling over the line, he would somersault and land behind them and get to backstabbing.
Similarly, if our mage summons a floating disc, could that be used to get our partymates up to the tops of ridges and ledges more easily? There's lots of stuff we might want to plan ahead for, is all I'm thinking.
Also, I'm thinking about optimal party formations. What works best for us in what situations. We probably only need to agree on a handful of 'set' formations, and that will speed things up slightly.
One of the things that struck me on our first outing is that we don't have much of a clue (except maybe for Adam) what powers our characters have. I think we'll work much better as a team if we have a sense of what we can do. So I propose in the coming weeks, we post a short description of key abilities for easy reference. I'll start:
Warlock
Ongoing:
(1) Init: +2 init if you can see and hear me within 10 squares.
(2) Tactics: If you spend an action point, get +3 attack when you use the attack.
At Will:
(1) Strike: Give one ally a free melee attack. +3 damage. If the rogue misses a sneak attack and still has combat advantage, this gives him a second sneak attack.
(2) Viper Strike: If I hit something and it shifts, I can give anyone standing next to it a free opportunity attack. Useful for marked foes.
(3) Wolfpack: Before I attack, I can give any one person a free 1 square move. This is useful. The rogue can be two squares away, then stop. Then I can shift him adjacent so he can sneak attack the next round. Keep this in mind.
Encounter:
(1) Favor: If I hit something, 1 ally within 5 squares gets a +4 attack roll on the thing till next turn.
(2) Word: 2x per encounter, close burst 5, 1 ally gets a healing surge plus 1d6 hps.
Daily:
(1) Lead Attack: If I hit bad guy, everyone in 5 squares gets +4 attack on him till encounter ends. If miss, everyone gets +1.
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