William Brandes Stoddard
patreon
LARP Design: Second Puzzle Box
🕑 Added 2025-07-22 03:43:55 +0000 UTCWe ran a one-day event for Citadel LARP this past weekend (19 July), and we put our second puzzle box design into play this time. Serella Savenko helped me with every step of planning and building this one. I want to thank Elena Simon for providing the box itself, and Laurie Zolkosky for driving back to Atlanta to get the damn box because I… left it on my living room floor.
Exterior
Sorry about the portion of the image I’ve edited out with a paint.net tool. It’s concealing a spoiler for Citadel players. As opposed to the attentive monster on top of the box, who is a threat to Citadel players.
Anyway. An ordinary box. When the players received it, there was a hasp lock clipped to the latch. Citadel uses hasp locks with paracord tied into square knots for our lockpicking system, so this was the kind of lock PCs can pick. The rest of the locks in this challenge are not the kind they can pick.
I didn’t take a ton of work-in-progress pictures this time around, but here’s what I’ve got.
Interior
Here you can see that there’s an interior box suspended by four chains, each locked with a combination lock. An additional chain encircles the inner box. You can’t see it in this image, but a small key-operated lock is holding that encircling chain shut.
Here we’ve added tiny skills to the chains: three hang from the upper left chain, one from the upper right chain, two from the bottom left chain, and none from the bottom right chain. I didn’t take additional pictures between this step and it going to the PCs, but as you’re about to see, we added several more things.
This is the box after the PCs completed it and I reassembled it. We’ve glued a page of encrypted text to the inner lid of the box and painted two domino bones on the right-hand side of the inner lid; also there are domino bones (but substantially less than 28) scattered around the inside of the box.
Finally, a closer shot of the encrypted text, with the players’ decryption work penciled in:
As you can see, the encrypted text offers some additional clues to open the locks, but they were enough to get players to the solution. The box came into play at about 3:45 pm and was solved by 6:30 or 7 pm. I was off doing other things and don’t know exactly when they finished.
The Puzzles
1. The answer to the upper left lock comes from the “the count of the stars that wander” (six, in Citadel astrology), the number of signs in each Aspect (three), and the difference betwixt (6 – 3 = 3). This isn't solvable without some knowledge of Citadel lore.
2. The upper right lock’s answer is the domino puzzle. Of the dominoes in the box, there were only three that completed the sequence between the two that are painted on. That’s still six faces, so you were supposed to total each domino (3:1, 1:4, 4:2, so 4, 5, 6).
3. The bottom left lock’s answer is the “count every link in your binding… if your chains are different…” One chain was a different length, so the players were supposed to count the number of links from outer box to lock, then the number hanging below that point, then the links from lock to inner box. Of course, they started solving other locks and taking them off the chains before they understood this clue, so it was much harder than intended. But the clue was hard to get in the first place. It worked out okay but if I had it to do over again, I would do something else.
4. The bottom right lock comes from “the skulls that depend answer the emptiness.” I think Serella had an even better phrasing of this, but I’d lost it by the time I had to write the text. The answer is 3, 1, 2.
5. The key to the encircling chain was hidden on the outside of the box, under one of the leather straps on the top of the box. It took some work for the players to find it.
Inside the box, treasure… a false bottom… and more treasure. Because that’s the kind of gamerunner I am, and I was confident that the PCs would find it all.
I had a good time making this and imagining the players enjoying it. I wish I could have lurked around and seen each step of the way. Congratulations to the players involved, and I hope that the people who didn’t get to play with this one will get to work on the next.
The image of something golden encircled in shiny steel chain was the core inspiration for this puzzle box, for obscure Citadel story reasons.
Hypothetically, if you’re a LARP-runner or otherwise just interested in puzzle boxes, I’d love to find a new playerbase that would enjoy this, and I can help you change the combinations on all the locks so that you can write your own puzzles and clues.
Comments
William Brandes Stoddard
I neglected to thank you for your playtesting work, which I appreciated immensely!
Geoffrey Fortier
Great example of physical puzzle for LARPing. I love that it is not abstract like like so many seen in other games, but calls upon player knowledge, game lore and actual skill. For those not familiar with the LARPing group, they are HIGHLY experienced with traps, puzzle and codes, so keeping them busy for that amount of time is actually a major challenge.
