A puzzle for your players...

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?

Comments

  • None. I am the fighter and would bash the door in :-)
  • edited August 2009
    OK. Any idea how I could add you brain sprayed on the doors ? I assume you'd go head first :)
  • MonsenMonsen Administrator 🖼️ 46 images Cartographer
    Very nice. Bonus points for making the gears look like they actually fit together properly.
  • The one on the left would be my guess. I went

    CC-C-CC-CC-C-C-CC-C

    where C= CLockwise, and CC = Counter Clockwise. Am I close or in left field?
  • Bonus points (my turn) for Skaryn who found the answer first !

    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#.
  • I like it, I like it quite a bit.

    How long did something like that take to create? It looks very technical.
  • edited August 2009
    Well, including writing and testing the macro, I'd say 1½-2 hours. Once the gears are drawn, it's basic CC3 (FastCad) work: lines to adjust the gear with precision (line from the center of first gear, ortho snap, horizontal or vertical, moving the second gear from the end point of a tooth to the intersection of the line with the circle of the first gear, erasing the line), circles to represent the pulley, TANGENT command to draw the ropes between two pulleys, line, trim, copy for the door, ATTC for the runes...
  • MonsenMonsen Administrator 🖼️ 46 images Cartographer
    Posted By: Joachim de Ravenbel@Monsen : thanks, but the macro ensures that (plus a bit of move and rotate).
    I fugred as much, but that means you have a properly written macro, which is still worth bonus points. :)
  • OK, Monsen, please don't hit me, I'll take gratefully your bonus points :)

    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.
  • edited August 2009
    So the real question is .. what do the runes on the stone say?

    My Guess? "Beware falling stones!"

    P.S> Very nice design!


    -Avotas
  • Cool. You don't even need to cut the rope, just hang onto one or the other counterweight until the doors open. :)
  • Heheh Joachim, you are correct, my sequence is off. I made some assumptions that the top is a pure clockwise cycle, and yes, I started with the left door, but the sequence is starting from the rope being cut.
    C-CC-C-C-C-C-CC -C
  • Posted By: sdavies2720just hang onto one or the other counterweight until the doors open.
    That's a good idea. The trouble is getting up there, which is not impossible, of course, even without fly or levitate ability (my PCs don't have). Perhaps I should add spikes beneath the counterweights to spice up, gnak gnak gnak...
  • If we were going that route, then a rope/grapple around either side and a good sharp pull would reveal if the choice was sound or not, or summoning an animal on top of one of the blocks :)

    There should be a severealy detrimental affect to picking the wrong side and experimenting :p
  • Posted By: kolyanaThere should be a severealy detrimental affect to picking the wrong side and experimenting :p
    It depends if the thing was designed as a trap or a test.

    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.
  • I must be dumb because I've gone through this several times and keep coming up that you'd cut the one on the right.
  • jslaytonjslayton Moderator, ProFantasy Mapmaker
    It depends if that edge-on view rope across the top winds to the same side of the pulleys or not, I would think. ASCII art:

    -------------
    | . | | . |
    ----- -----

    or

    -------------
    | . | | . |
    -------------

    vs

    ----- -----
    | . | \ | . |
    ----- -----

    It's one of those cases where the schematic shown could be made to go either way because of ambiguous information...
  • edited August 2009
    Zem is right, I was caught with my own cleverness(!). According to the schematic, you *really* should cut the right rope.

    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)
  • jslaytonjslayton Moderator, ProFantasy Mapmaker
    That's right up there with animating a dead party member and telling him to go bury himself. Or animating him and tacking a note to his forehead reading "please lay me to rest" and then giving him orders to return to his home church. Sometimes I miss the old group...
  • Jslayton,

    Thats evil, thanks for the laugh!

    -Avotas
  • Posted By: AvotasThats evil
    No, that's practical, but gave me a good laugth too!
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