William Brandes Stoddard
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LARP Design: Castle Puzzle Box
🕑 Added 2025-09-22 17:07:10 +0000 UTCThis past weekend (19-21 September 2025), we ran the third three-day event for Citadel LARP, at Booker T State Park in Tennessee. Serella Savenko and I created another puzzle box, our most elaborate design so far by a very wide margin. We were initially building it to go into play at the July event, but that absolutely was not going to happen so we built the previous puzzle box to go in its place, and pushed this one off to September. Pipistrella and GFo very generously donated an afternoon to playtesting this one and found a number of critical errors on my part in time for me to fix them.
This started with a wooden castle model that I bought from Michaels.
The game is called Citadel and I immediately thought, what if a character needed to represent parts of the Citadel symbolically, not in a room-by-room literal basis? We made decisions about which of the major NPCs of the Citadel would be represented its rooms, and started digging into how. The players have solved the box’s puzzles, but there are still more secrets to piece together from the symbolism and interconnections found there, so I can’t talk in too much detail about the more subtle parts of the design.
This time around, I think I’m going to explain as much as I can, then let the rest of the post be a photo gallery showing the progress of the work. The project had some significant bumps along the way, like the flat tire on our trip to the art supply store that cost us many available work-hours. There was also the time my jerk cat peed in our tray full of materials and ruined a lot of things that were almost ready to get added to the box.
We weren’t initially planning to put “stained glass” (paint on vellum) in most of the windows, but Serella got really inspired to do more of them. There were also some windows we absolutely couldn’t cover, for reasons. It turned out to be a good thing that we put windows in more of them, because the PCs started solving the puzzles before they found the key for the exterior lock. The key was hidden in the building with the purple roof – the roof was only glued at one end, so that you could open the roof and see the key inside.
We had an idea for a red film window so that you could more easily read a clue written in blue into and obscured by a random red-ink pattern. You know, like the old video game copyright-protection books? Uh, a substantial number of you aren’t old enough to remember that I guess. Anyway, the obscuring pattern wasn’t obscuring enough for the film to be needed. No big deal, though – one of the things about having so many puzzles to solve is that some being easier than intended is good.
The way the whole thing works, you can’t open the black door (lower middle of the box) until you’ve gotten the six beads out of the other puzzle boxes and placed them on the circles that form that door. Then you can pull that small cell out and see that there’s a little figure, wrapped in gauze, strung up on silver chain, with bright blood where the chain is attached. This is one of the big mysteries of the whole box, as well as being one of the most difficult parts to make. Getting a hot glue gun into that cell was super hard, and I burned myself with hot glue many times.
Six of the rooms have a clue to a three-digit number. That three-digit number opens a small treasure box, found alongside the castle model, and each box is full of treasure, including one of the beads necessary to open the black cell. A seventh box is locked with a key, and that key is hidden inside the little jar... covered in Vaseline, which is the game's physical representation of a contact poison. So the PCs had to fish the key out with tools, and they also found two magic items in there, a ring and a charm.
Anyway. This project was very well-received by players, and that delights me.
Enjoy!
Photo Gallery
In this shot the trees, which my cat would later pee on, were merely placed there to get a sense for how they could look, not yet glued down.
The red film and the insufficiently-obscured message. Still an interesting idea, because it asked the player to look down the whole length of one side of the model to line up the film with the message.
This is still kinda my favorite part of the model, because you've come all this way to find something super creepy.
