Shapes and patterns are not merely the domain of young schoolchildren. Old, bored wizards also seem to love making traps out of them. - A retired adventurer, probably.
In this puzzle, players must identify the next pattern in a set of sequences, before time runs out. There is a red herring to throw them off, and the timer will cover up parts of the pattern as it goes, so they need to make notes if they want to succed.
The Puzzle Room
You enter a chamber, a little over 30ft wide, and 70ft long. As you enter, the door behind you disappears, turning into flat stone and now matching the rest of the walls of the room. The tiles ahead of you feature rows of shapes. In each row, there are a circle, square, star and triangle. Some are outlined, while some are fully coloured in. At the far end of the room, you see four pits.
Present your party the map of the tiles above, and allow them to inspect it. The pits at the end are magically made to appear bottomless, and anything thrown in will simply fall until it cannot be seen or heard.
When the party choose to investigate the pits, read the following:
The pits are completely dark, and you're not sure how down far they go. However, at the edge of each of them, you find a sequence of four shapes engraved in the floor. A circle, a square, a star and a triangle.
Present your party the following four sequences, the correct sequence is number 3.
Once the party have discovered the four potential sequences, or if they have failed to investigate the pits after a few minutes, they will hear the grinding of stone, as the wall where the entrance one was is now encroaching on them.
Start a timer for the party. Every minute, remove a row of shapes from the map, as the wall begins to cover those sections of floor. Depending how stressed your party are, you may elect to give them more or less time. Feel it out, and keep them under the pump, but give them a chance to solve the puzzle.
Solving the puzzle
The first step in solving the puzzle will be to look at the sequences of each individual shape. Two of them are quite simple, and one will be obscure.
The star uses a repeated AB pattern.
The triangles use a repeated AAB pattern.
The squares use an outline for all square numbers (1,4,9)
The circles follow the Thue–Morse Sequence, which may be known to your more mathematically or statistically minded players.
The actual order of shapes in each row does have a pattern, but this pattern is a red herring. Solutions 1 and 4 use this order of the shapes, but have either the star or triangle patterns incorrect, which should clue your players into the fact that the order of shapes does not matter.
Once the players make their decision about the correct path ahead, or if they get forced to decide by the wall closing in, they will have to jump into one of the pits.
While I don't recommend having them fall to their immediate deaths, what awaits them on the other side is completely up to you...
A printable version of the map and sequences is available to download here.
This post is part 4 of my series for Whumptober 2021. The prompt for this post is "Trust Fall"
View other parts here.
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