Puzzles

Sometimes the story asks you to think, not just roll. A sealed door, a warded sigil, a jammed lock — the Storyteller can pose a puzzle grounded in the moment, and you solve it by hand before the scene moves on.

The system owns each puzzle’s structure; the Storyteller skins it to your world, so a cipher becomes a smuggler’s coded ledger and a maze becomes the tunnels under a dead city. The solution is sealed — it never appears in your journal or the play transcript, so nothing spoils it.

The puzzle types

Five kinds are playable today, each with its own small interface:

• Cipher — decode a short enciphered message.
• Sequence — work out the rule and supply the next term.
• Maze — trace a path from entrance to exit on a grid.
• Lights-out — toggle cells until the whole board goes dark.
• Sliding tile — slide the tiles back into their intended order.

Each arrives with a story-grounded illustration, so it reads as part of the world rather than a minigame bolted on.

Solving one

When a puzzle appears, you can:

• Attempt it — enter or manipulate your answer right in the puzzle; it’s checked the moment you commit.
• Ask for a hint — nudge yourself toward the answer when you’re stuck.
• Set it aside — abandon a puzzle you’d rather not finish, and the story carries on without it.

Puzzles work across all three rule families — Vowbound, Mythweave, and Starsworn — wherever the fiction calls for a moment of wit. More types are on the roadmap.