delsinsfire

[delsinsfire]

I just love the obsession german has with idiomatic little rhymes and alliterations.

Mit Sack und Pack. Glanz und Gloria. Schicht im Schacht. Flinke Füße. Mit Hängen und Würgen. Mehr schlecht als recht. Versuch macht kluch. Klar wie Kloßbrühe. Hätte, hätte, Fahrradkette. Saus und Braus. Ende Gelände.

our speech is full of little flounces and flourishes and tbh it's adorable of us.

[delsinsfire]

Do you have any advice on making easier puzzles? I LOVE puzzles, I grew up with adventure games where sometimes why something was the correct solution wasn’t obvious and I loved it because it made me think outside the box. My players … they suck at puzzles. They’re missing so many encounters and loot so they’re under level and under prepared half the time. They aren’t exploring or learning anything about the world. But I haven’t found a good way to tone them down without handholding them.

DM Tip: Puzzling it Out

While puzzles seem almost quintessential to the d&d experience, one of my greatest criticisms of how the game is currently handled is that there's almost no advice available to dungeonmasters about how they should go about designing or running puzzle encounters to maximize the fun at their table. We've got vague ideas about riddle doors, big setpiece traps, and clever envriomental mechanisms from the media we consume, but no idea how to translate those things into a format that works well in TRPGs.

Part of the problem is that there's no head's up display or physical feedback in a game of imagination like d&d: players are purely at the whims of the DM and what information they're willing/capable of providing, forcing everyone to spend a lot of time asking clarifying questions or trying out options that won't work. This grinds sessions to a halt, as not only do players need to figure out how to solve the puzzle, but spend twice as long figuring out what the puzzle is on top of figuring out if there even IS a puzzle in the first place.

Below the cut I'm going to give specific advice about how you as a DM can be better about implementing puzzles for your players in game:

My number 1 piece of advice for running a puzzle is to be OBVIOUS about it: Hint at the mechanisms involved when you initially describe the room and make them do something when the players poke at them. One of the greatest tools I've given to my party is letting them ask " what's the puzzle here?", at which point you describe the goal of the puzzle, the problem that they're faced with, and the different options they can interact with. You can keep some things out of the description, hidden or missing imputs, broken mechanisms that need improvisation or repair, but if you can be perfectly clear with what the puzzle is at the beginning , the party can dedicate their brains to trying to solve it from the get go, rather than spending most of their time at the table poking around in the dark. When they've done what you need them to do, make it obvious: have the door pop open, play the zelda "puzzle solved" sound, scream " YOU'VE SOLVED MY FIENDISH PUZZLE" in the dorkiest wizard voice you can manage, anything to let them save time and get back to the rest of the session.

No skill checks during puzzles: nothing's more annoying than knowing the answer to something and then being forced to try and retry because the dice aren't being kind. Players likewise shouldn't need perception checks to figure out basic elements of a puzzle's functionality anymore than they should need to roll to figure out if a door blocking their way is locked. The one exception to this is when they've devised a bullshit way to circumvent the challenge that's too flimsy to work on its own and needs a bit of the luck-gods blessing on order to work.

Puzzles eat up session time, so if you want to get things done this session use them as gates for optional content. Alternatively, Consider introducing a puzzle at the end of a session giving the party a whole week to think about solutions to get past it. People are generally really bad at problemsolving under pressure, and there's no reason your precious game time should be sacrificed just because the group doesn't feel like doing verbal trial and error for three hours.

General Puzzle tips

Everything I wrote in my post about “Proactive DM Voice” applies to running puzzles, you want to point your party at the problem give them an understanding that time is limited and that their decisions matter.

When they attempt a solution, tell them why it seems not to be working and if the reason is because they’re missing something, tell them that they’re missing something.

To make your puzzles more interesting without making them complex is to have them missing pieces, either intentionally sabotaged or simply broken from long years of neglect. This lets you highlight two advantages d&d has over other puzzle games: improvisation and exploration. Having your players come up with wild solutions is half the fun of including puzzles in your games. 

On the note of exploration, try to include atleast two different solutions to every puzzle somewhere nearby, whether they be lost parts for the puzzle or a means of bruteforcing the barrier it would normally unlock. This lets your players feel smart, even if its not the exact sort of smart the puzzle’s original builder would have intended.

One of the best ways to use puzzles is to use them to double up on dungeon rooms: placing a fight or other challenge in the same chamber as the puzzle to add a more interesting backdrop.

If your party is really stuck on something, rather than letting them make an intelligence check to know the answer, describe how the mechanism of the trap works and ask how they think they’d get past it/break it. Looking under the hood like this does give them a leg up, but still requires enough problemsolving to make them feel smart.

Environmental puzzles:

These are going to be your bread and butter for most ruined or abandoned dungeons, created either by intention or because objects in the environment landed just so to create a knot that the party now needs to untangle

Rather than letting your party flounder on something that isn’t solvable never be afraid to say  “That doesn't seem to do anything right now” or “looks like you’re missing a piece before you can make this work”. It’s videogamy, but your players will thank you for respecting thier time.

One of the best ways to give your party an advantage when dealing with environmental puzzles is to take the central mechanic of the puzzle and have them encounter a simplified version of it early on. Puzzle about getting an elevator unstuck? Have them do the same to a freight crane for a minor loot drop. Puzzle about draining the water from a flooded chamber? Have them empty a massive barrel so they can reach the keys inside.

If you want to be particularly devious, consider chaining environmental puzzles, making the ones they encounter earlier in the dungeon reliant on the solving of others deeper in. That gives you an excuse to reuse dungeon rooms, as the party circles back to play with the toys you’d previously singled out for later.

Riddles

Riddles are better suited to games with the fey than for locked doors, as anyone trying to keep someone out of their chambers would be better served with an actual lock or password than 

The exception to this rule is “linguistic gap” riddles, where a knowledgeable partymember is making a translation from instructions on how to get past the obstacle but due to age and cultural difference the translation doesn’t exactly match up: navigating a cave by “heeding the unseen serpent” and following the sound of rushing water, or “follow pelor’s patient gaze” to see where the sun points to at a particular time of day.  

If you must have riddles, use them as hints rather than obstacles, pointing out secret caches of supplies or secret passages that let the party skip past other barriers. That lets them feel smart for figuring out a shortcut, while still giving them the main road of progress to follow if they get stuck. 

Riddles also work when the architect is trying to prove that they’re smarter than the intruder, Riddler style, or wants to leave behind a false clue that leads them into a greater trap.

As a design consideration consider having the awnser show up as a physical thing somewhere in the dungeon, even if it’s just a representation the party can spot, or evidence that it once existed there. People’s brains are better at drawing connections then they are at coming up with random ideas, so figuring out that “all in armor never clinking/never thirsty always drinking” pertains to a fish is a lot easier if the party noticed a lot of fish in the fountain frescos a few rooms back.

Traps

I like to think that there’s two kinds of traps, death traps, and slap traps. With the former being large indiana jones style setpieces where the players desperately need to escape, and the latter being a minor hazard that softens the party up before an actual fight. 

Deathtraps are like boss encounters, and can be run either in tandem with a fight or as a sort of environmental puzzle on their own. Given that the architect probably didn’t intend for intruders to escape the method the party uses will likely be improvised, letting them feel extra clever for surviving, rather than simply lucky. 

Slaptraps are either best deployed as an ongoing navigation challenge , or as an unexpected threat introduced into another encounter. The days of random 20ft pits in the middle of hallways are a dark and godless time and we should not return to them

Traps that don’t have someone maintaining them will either break or leave behind bodies which attract scavengers. These are important signposting to a delving party that a trap might be coming up, so be sure to include them before you unleash a new trap on them. 

An old bit of advice Traps are put in places where the dungeon’s architect/current owner doesn’t want people to go, and as such arn’t likely to be in populated sections. 

I’m tremendously fond of Dael Kingsmill’s “Click” system, which turn traps from a random suckerpunch into a tense problemsolving encounter. TLDR: When a trap is triggered the party hears a loud “click” , and has a moment to do one thing in response. This action might grant them advantage or disadvantage, or fully negate the trap’s effects on them depending on what they chose as compared with how the trap hits them. It’s important to pair these sorts of traps with a dungeon room that has some details in it, so the party can guess in advance what the trap is.

Mazes, Codes, and Physical Puzzles

Despite how essential they seem to the genre, don’t try to run these sorts of obstacles by way of actually having your players solve them. They take too long and there’s too much of a chance for miscommunication to get in the way of progress. I’ve killed far too many of my sessions dead by throwing one of these in front of my party and expecting them to solve it then and there. Consider instead using my minigame rules to simulate the trial and error of working out something complex.

Art

[delsinsfire]

knight who is constantly searching for a good and noble king to serve but cannot fucking find one for the life of him so he has to become the good and noble king himself.

and now all these other knights are coming around like "please let me serve you" and like obviously hes going to let them serve him thats the point of being a good and noble king but its also. very annoying. one of you become the good and noble king for once lets trade

[delsinsfire]

decided to celebrate Make A Terrible Comic Day with another elden ring lore drop

[delsinsfire]

Some more Messmer study 🤭

I like this style for his hair more than the previous ones, so I think I'll stick with it at least for a while hehe

I love the design of Messmer's set! his helmet and all that draping fabric are so much fun to draw!!

Anyway, have some winged snakes close up pics 🐍😂

[delsinsfire]

I just got described as an "ad hating commie" by someone because I said a minute of youtube ads is unpleasant. fully spent 5 minutes arguing and defending youtube ads. insane stuff

[delsinsfire]

decentralize and clean up your life!!!

use overdrive, libby, hoopla, cloudlibrary, and kanopy instead of amazon and audible.

use firefox instead of chrome or opera (both are made with chromium, which blocks functionality for ad-blockers. firefox isn't based on chromium).

use mega or proton drive instead of google drive.

get rid of bloatware

use libreoffice instead of microsoft office suite

use vetted sites on r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH for free movies, books, games, etc.

use trakt or letterboxd instead of imdb.

use storygraph instead of goodreads.

use darkpatterns to find mobile game with no ads or microtransactions

use ground news to read unbiased news and find blind spots in news stories.

use mediahuman or cobalt to download music, or support your favorite artists directly through bandcamp

make youtube bearable by using mtube, newpipe, or the unhook extension on chrome, firefox, or microsoft edge

use search for a cause or ecosia to support the environment instead of google

use thriftbooks to buy new or used books (they also have manga, textbooks, home goods, CDs, DVDs, and blurays)

use flashpoint to play archived online flash games

find books, movies, games, etc. on the internet archive! for starters, here's a bunch of David Attenborough documentaries and all of the Animorphs books

burn your music onto cds

use pdf24 (available online or as a desktop app) instead of adobe

use unroll.me to clean your email inboxes

use thunderbird, mailfence, countermail, edison mail, tuta, or proton mail instead of gmail

remove bloatware on windows PC, macOS, and iOS X

remove bloatware on samsung X

use pixelfed instead of instagram or meta

use NCH suite for free software like a file converter, image editor, video editors, pdf editor, etc.

feel free to add more alternatives, resources or advice in the reblogs or replies, and i'll add them to the main post <3

last updated: march 18th 2025

[delsinsfire]

looks like i gotta start wearing this

[delsinsfire]

Adventure: A Taxing Journey

Remember you dolts, the longer we spend stuck in this mud wallow the longer it’ll be to you get paid. So put your backs into it and PUSH. 

A state is only as strong as the defenses for its taxation apparatus, which bodes poorly for the kingdom as the players are pressed into service for an overburdened treasury shipment. Supplied with secondhand arms and asked to protect an armored wagon lumbering low with treasure, there are several reasons they might sign up for an uncomfortable and dangerous march through the woods and the kingdom’s unmaintained roads. 

Adventure Hooks: 

The players were attempting to gain political favor, and have taken on the burden of guarding the taxwagon in hopes of being seen as dutiful servants of the crown. More likely though, escorting the tax shipment is likely to be a favor they’re force do do to get on the good side of a distrustful noble. This does however give you the excuse of getting them to a new settlement, opening up a whole new hub of adventures. 

If you’re looking for a quick and dirty opening adventure, have the party be recent recruits to a mercenary company which has been contracted to provide the treasury with guards. Normally this mission would be reserved for some trusted agents of the organization, but something predatory has been stalking the roads of late, and the newly minted mercenaries members came suspiciously recommended by guild upper management.  As management sees it, they can use the threat of the beast to negotiate better rates from the treasury, as well as a cushy retrieval contract should the beast slaughter all the current guards and make off  with the loot. 

What better cover for a thief than one who’s supposed to be protecting from thieves ? with some false identification the crew has been assigned to guard duty. Now if only they can protect the cargo and their ruse long enough to get the wagon to where they can heist it. 

Further Adventures: 

The crown’s unwillingness to pay its garrisons has resulted in a force of soldiers that were left to go brigand up in the hills. They’ve been attacking treasury shipments, which has justified the players as extra security. Far more than seeing themselves enriched, these brigands are planning something with their stolen treasure. What could their purpose be? 

The journey to the next city is long and uncomfortable, which makes a stopover in a small village half way through the journey a boon to our footsore footmen. The villagers are friendly and the inkeeper offers the wagon guard hospitality at his establishment, where the drinks are cheap and the company is charming. In fact, the inkeeper has hatched a scheme with a few trusted companions to waylay the wagon’s watchmen, allowing their stableboy enough time to hitch up the horses and sneak the taxwagon out in the dead of night.  Should the party fall prey to the plotting of the peasantry, they’ll awake hungover, bound to their beds, and with the innkeep and all his ilk having fled along with their charge. 

Rain threatens to wash out the roads and carry away the wagon, so the party is forced to take shelter in a cave or risk loosing the horses and all the treasure they carry. The only trouble is that the cave is the current home of a stormsodden owlbear that is less than pleased the party has made camp in its den while it was out on a foraging expidtion.  With their backs against a wall and an enraged beast intent on pressing in, they’ll need to muster up some courage to fight one of the forest’s most dangerous creatures. 

[delsinsfire]

commission Elven Season

[delsinsfire]

After the sun

[delsinsfire]

we are in hell

[delsinsfire]

Personnal storyboard based on my favorite scene of @eldenring shadow of the erdtree, the tragic confrontation with former comrades… The music of the fight (Those United In Common Cause - Elden Ring Shadow Of The Erdtree OST) is so beautiful I had to do something with it. It was a totally different exercise than the previous storyboard, with one simple arena but many different characters.

[delsinsfire]

Hum

[delsinsfire]

i beat myself up for not knowing enough about my special interests a lot but then i remember the average person off the street has no idea what the carboniferous is and i feel better

[delsinsfire]

[delsinsfire]

just found out in medieval france, having a lion on your coat of arms was so prevalent that there was literally a colloquial proverb to clown on knights for being basic and not having a real coat of arms. the hate game was so strong back then. imagine medieval hate anons