Notes for Episode 11: The Temple of Antisanity (Patreon)

Here are my notes for tonight's session. Basically just me filling out everything missing from last week's notes. When the adventure is over, I'll post all the notes publicly. Note that this doesn't get us to the end! 

Figure they'll get through to some of the puzzles tonight, we'll see. I wanted to really sell the idea of "The Insane Old One" and fell back on puzzles to represent insanity. A classic D&D tradition. 

The puzzles are taken from the (MUCH longer) 2nd Edition adventure, The Crypt of Lyzandred the Mad published in 1998. Only 21 years ago! Practically brand new!

SPOILERS! Do not read these notes if you don't want the answers to the riddles.

Obviously these riddles challenge the players rather than their characters, but that's the point of D&D. You can no more "roll insight to solve the riddle" than you can "roll acrobatics to win the battle." I went through Lyzandred as a player 20 years ago and we loved it.

Mind you, my group were all math and science nerds and professionals. Most of my friends these days are artists and producers. My group solved these puzzles easily and the fun of it was; there were so many that someone who was good with logic, but bad with math, or good with math but bad with word problems, all got a chance to shine.

So I chose a math problem, a literal riddle, and a geometry puzzle. None of these are very hard and I didn't want to use more than 3 for fear of abusing my players. 

I'm SUPER interested to see how they react! They might hate it! In which case, good thing I only used three!