A puzzle for your players...
Joachim de Ravenbel
Surveyor
PIcture this: you come into a great hall. Two counter-weigths seem to hang from a big gear dissapearing in the middle of ceiling. In front of you, a great stone double door is border by two columns, all engraved with unknown runes.
There is of course a mecanism. Wait, you cannot see the detail of that mecanism but the schematic is carved in one of the walls.
Obiously, you must cut the heavy rope tied to one of the counter-weigth. Those are 20' high...
The schematic was of course done with CC3. The gears were macro made.
Funny thing is gears are made of black polygons with a white second color but when I wanted to print it with CC3, all the polies were full black. So I had to use yer olde jpg export instead...
Which rope will you cut to open the doors?
There is of course a mecanism. Wait, you cannot see the detail of that mecanism but the schematic is carved in one of the walls.
Obiously, you must cut the heavy rope tied to one of the counter-weigth. Those are 20' high...
The schematic was of course done with CC3. The gears were macro made.
Funny thing is gears are made of black polygons with a white second color but when I wanted to print it with CC3, all the polies were full black. So I had to use yer olde jpg export instead...
Which rope will you cut to open the doors?
Comments
CC-C-CC-CC-C-C-CC-C
where C= CLockwise, and CC = Counter Clockwise. Am I close or in left field?
However, if you cut the left rope the big gear will go clockwise. Or is your sequence from the left door ?
@Monsen : thanks, but the macro ensures that (plus a bit of move and rotate). The macro and some technical course some, what, 25 years ago. My, I'm getting old.
In case someone's interessted, the macro is attached. Type gear to get a vertical one, ger2 for the horizontal. Alas you have no control on the radius because it depends on the number of teeth and the step fixed to 5 units. The macro yields the polygons in whatever fill style you are...
Odd numbers seem better for the teeth#.
How long did something like that take to create? It looks very technical.
Bellow you can see a quick POV-RAY render of the room. The gear was done with a POV-RAY... macro!
This is to show you I frequently use CC3 to create image or bump maps for POV-RAY. You'll recognize the shematic on the wall. The doors and the column were patterned with bits from the same file.
My Guess? "Beware falling stones!"
P.S> Very nice design!
-Avotas
C-CC-C-C-C-C-CC -C
There should be a severealy detrimental affect to picking the wrong side and experimenting
Funny thing I just went through it with my players and they sort of adopted your grapple approach which I didn't mind at all because they sorted out the right side first and just tested it.
-------------
| . | | . |
----- -----
or
-------------
| . | | . |
-------------
vs
----- -----
| . | \ | . |
----- -----
It's one of those cases where the schematic shown could be made to go either way because of ambiguous information...
What is confusing is the 3D view that was done in a hurry to just show you the combining(!) of POV-RAY and CC3. I should have put the door on the far right side.
It went like that : at that point, only two PCs were left alive (no, I'm not the GM that kills a lot, it's a special summer campain where all the PCs are dead at the end of each session. The players were informed). So they guessed right, and to open the door, they threw a rope over the left counterweight, and pulled on each side. I said
"The door opens slightly"
"Could we get through ?"
"Hmmm, I think so"
"We go!"
"Sorry guys, the door closes again before you get there..."
At the end they used the ... corpses ... of ... their ... fallen ... comrades ... to weigh down the block of stone (because one of the PC was a shaman, their spirits were still in game)
Thats evil, thanks for the laugh!
-Avotas