Friday Encounter: Stepwell Passage

Following on from my last Friday Encounter, here's another dungeon puzzle I've used in a recent session.

This encounter is designed to be used as a dungeon room. The room is dominated by a large stepwell - a pit dug into the ground, with a series of staircases leading downward along its sides to allow groundwater to be carried up. The twelth step from the bottom is covered in gold leaf, while the rest are bare stone. The pit is lined with multiple levels of archways stacked on top of each other, allowing water to be retrieved from different points. Each archway contains a door - some are closed, and some are open to chutes leading either up or down to control the flow of water. The doors have no handle, knob, or mechanism and cannot be opened manually. Furthermore, at the very bottom of the stepwell is a door inset in a golden frame.  Also in the room, there are four pillars in a line leading toward the stepwell, each of which has a wheel set into it.

When the PCs first discover the stepwell, the water is sitting at the level of the third step from the bottom. By turning the wheels attached to the pillars, they can open certain doors on the walls and allow water to flow in or out of the pit, thus raising or lowering the water level. The objective is to raise the water level to the gilded step.

Essentially, this is a simple math puzzle - each wheel raises or lowers the water level by a certain amount of steps. The wheels must be turned completely in order to work, so you can't get a partial effect. You can't have a "negative" water level - if you were to drain more steps than are present in the stepwell, the whole stepwell drains.

You can adjust the values as needed (perhaps even using more or less than four pillars if you want), but here's what I did in my game.

• Pillar 1 (furthest from the stepwell) lowers the water level by 8 steps.
• Pillar 2 raises the water level by 5 steps.
• Pillar 3 raises the water level by 10 steps.
• Pillar 4 (closest to the stepwell) lowers the water level by 3 steps.

So, if the water level starts at Step 3 and the goal is to get it to Step 12, the puzzle can be solved by draining the stepwell by turning the wheels on Pillar 1 or 4, then using the wheel on Pillar 3 to raise it to Step 10, then Pillar 2 to raise it to Step 15, then Pillar 4 to lower it to Step 12. You get the idea.

Once the water level hits Step 12, a gong sounds, and all water flushes out of the stepwell. The gold-rimmed door at the very bottom then opens. In my campaign, this door led to the next area of the dungeon, but you could have it contain treasure or a magic item or the like.