Tag Archives: Star Wars

Help Out Game Designer Owen K.C. Stephens!

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I love using this blog as a place to explore puzzly topics, to promote games and creators and share the love of puzzles with the world.

But I also love using this blog to spread the word about worthy causes.

And today I’d like to talk about the GoFundMe campaign for Owen K.C. Stephens’ medical bills.

If you’ve been a roleplaying game fan over the last two decades, you’ve probably played a game that Owen has shaped in some way.

He has been an influential game writer and designer for years, contributing to the Star Wars Roleplaying Game (both the d20 and Saga editions), Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, Starfinder, Everyday Heroes, The Wheel of Time RPG, and so many other games. Wizards of the Coast, Super Genius Games, Rogue Genius Games, Evil Genius Games (sensing a theme?), Paizo, and Green Ronin have all been homes for him over the years.

After an 18-month battle with colon cancer, he is still feeling the effects of his treatment and continuing the long, hard road to better health. And sadly, he is still buried under medical bills for his treatment and convalescence.

You can contribute to the GoFundMe campaign for him here.

And if you’re interested in learning more about Owen and his wonderful work in games, you can check out his website and his Patreon.

Normally, that’s how I would close out a post like this, but in this case, I hope you will indulge me with a personal anecdote.

Back in the year 2000, I discovered tabletop roleplaying.

A friend had just bought the new Star Wars Roleplaying Game (the d20 edition released around the same time as Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition), and knowing I was a huge Star Wars fan, he invited me to play.

After a short adventure he ran for us as Game Master, he asked if I’d be interested in learning to be a Game Master myself. (I later realized he did this not only because he thought I would be good at it, but because HE wanted to play and needed someone to run for him. My friend was and is a diabolical genius.)

I ran that game on and off for nearly seven years. It gave me the confidence to explore other roleplaying games, like the Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG, Dungeons & Dragons, Ninja Burger, and many many more, kickstarting a hobby that now spans more than two decades.

It also gave me confidence as a storyteller, pushing me to take writing more seriously (both fiction and nonfiction).

And all of that started with the d20 Star Wars Roleplaying Game.

Owen contributed to some of my favorite sourcebooks for that game (and several brilliant mini-adventures), helping make the galaxy a bigger and more interesting place for my players to explore. He is part of the fabric that helped shape me as a Game Master / Dungeon Master / Storyteller.

And I hope you’ll take a second to read about his story and help him out.

Best of luck to you, Owen, and happy puzzling, friends.

The Crosswordese Champion?

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Crosswordese is an omnipresent part of crossword discussion online.

It’s a scourge! It’s annoying! It ruins the solving experience! Can’t constructors just somehow avoid these particular three- and four-letter combinations, no matter how convenient or crucial they are to the grid?!

Rarely a week goes by without a Reddit post dedicated to the subject or a prominent complaint about some aspect of grid fill in one of the blogs/outlets dedicated to covering the daily crosswords.

And it’s understandable. Whether it’s yet another directional clue or a team’s abbreviation on a scoreboard, some entries just irk people. It raises their ire.

Oh no! The crosswordese is slipping into my everyday vernacular!

Quick, summon some longer vocabulary that’s not conducive to crosswording. Gumption. Hurly-burly. Syzygy. Defenestration.

Phew! That’s better. Now where was I?

Right, crosswordese.

I was pondering the plague of crosswordese, and it occurred to me that there’s probably one particular source that has contributed more crosswordese than any other.

But what could it be?

There’s the music industry, of course. There are loads of musicians common to crosswords: ARIE, ENO, SIA, ARLO, ENYA, DRE, ETTA, ELLA.

The same thing goes for celebs. UMA, ANA, ESAI, INA.

The sports world has its own infamous crosswordese as well: ORR, OTT, PELE, ELS, ITO, ALOU, AROD, ASHE, ILIE, SOSA, YAO, ISAO AOKI.

But those are huge swathes of pop culture. Is there a single pop culture property that has helped (or hindered, according to critics) crosswords the most?

There are a few that come to mind.

Peter Pan offers not just PAN, but SMEE, HOOK, TINK, and NANA.

The Beatles gave us ONO, STARR, and SGT (for Pepper).

Lord of the Rings is certainly worth mentioning, adding ORC, ENT, and LOTR.

Game of Thrones was ubiquitous at one point, helpfully resurrecting OONA and adding ARYA (and to a lesser extent BRON, SANSA, HODOR, and CERSEI).

Then there are some serious heavy-hitters.

The Simpsons has NED, MOE, APU, OTTO, EDNA, and STU (of the Disco variety).

On the sci-fi side, Star Trek offers WORF, TROI, LEVAR, LUC (as in Jean-__), and options for USS. Star Wars is handy as well, with ARTOO, REY, EWOK, POE, HAN, and LEIA.

Not to be outdone, M*A*S*H has plenty to offer: SWIT, ALAN ALDA, FARR, RADAR, and of course NEHI.

I considered awarding the Crosswordese Crown to one of the franchises above, but it occurred to me that I might have to look back a little farther to find the Crosswordese Champion.

Okay, a lot farther.

Some might take issue with me calling the Bible part of pop culture, but there’s no denying its influence in crosswords: LEAH, CAIN, ABLE, ADAM, EVE, ESAU, NOAH, ENOS, EDEN…

That’s a pretty impressive list of crossword regulars.

And yet…

My gut says I might have to give credit to Roman Numerals as a whole. I mean, has any single cultural/pop cultural entity saved more cruciverbalists who’ve constructed themselves into a corner?

And has ANY solver cheered or celebrated when seeing a clue featuring a math equation AND Roman Numerals?

The balance of crosswordese gibberish and solver disinterest just might tip the scales here.

What do you think, fellow puzzlers? Is it the Bible, Roman Numerals, or another source that I missed? Let me know in the comments section below!

How to Define Success vs. Failure in Roleplaying Games

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Roleplaying games are some of my absolute favorite pastimes. The simple act of telling a story with friends is rejuvenating for me. I love sitting at a table — or on a Zoom call — with friends and collectively creating an adventure in our imaginations.

I know that the dice and the rulebooks and all the numbers can be daunting for new players, but honestly, they’re just the laws of physics, fate, and chance given form. In the simplest form, roleplaying games consist of you telling the gamemaster / dungeon master / game runner what you want to do, and the dice determining how it goes.

In many RPGs, there’s a success/failure line. If you roll above a certain number, you succeeded. If you roll below it, you failed.

[Image from Stranger Things courtesy of The Verge.]

That’s certainly simple enough. But it can be frustrating for some players, new and old. After all, if you had to beat a 15 and you rolled a 14, why should the result be the same as if you’d rolled a 2? The 14 is much closer, after all.

Some roleplaying games stick to the strict success/failure model. But others have a different approach that players might find more rewarding.

star-wars-edge-empire-rpg-core_1_97bac45707850006a463c742ecc746af

Fantasy Flight Games offers a Star Wars-themed roleplaying game that has one of my favorite dice systems. There are different colored dice that represent different aspects of the game (your character’s ability to do something, the difficulty of the action they’re attempting, advantages and disadvantages to their action at the time, etc.), and the dice don’t have the traditional number values you’d expect.

Instead, they have symbols that represent success, failure, advantage, threat, triumph, and despair.

So, depending on the dice roll, it’s not just a success or a failure. You can have an overwhelming success, or an overwhelming failure, or many things in between. You can fail at the task, but end up with something unexpected and advantageous still happening. Or you can succeed, but with some consequence.

It opens up the narrative floodgates WAY beyond the success/failure binary option, and it has led to some of my absolute favorite moments in roleplaying.

Naturally, this requires a little more creativity from both the player and the game runner, but together, you can tell some fantastic adventures.

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Ninja Burger is a humorous quickplay roleplaying game that uses standard six-sided dice. In the game, you’re a ninja secretly delivering fast food. It’s very silly and great fun.

One rule in the game that can lead to enjoyable chaos AND take the sting out of the traditional success/failure mechanic of roleplaying games is that you are instructed to act as if you never fail. Even if you’re failed a roll.

So, say you’re using wujenitsu (ninja magic) to pretend to be a bag of golf clubs to sneak into a country club. But you failed your roll. The caddy who grabbed you is clearly carrying a ninja on his back, not a bag of golf clubs.

But you must proceed as if you succeeded, no matter how ridiculous things get.

Sure, failure has consequences in any game, even silly ones, but if you’re in on the joke, then failure isn’t so bad. Especially if you can find a way to make your friends laugh along the way.

dreadJenga

Dread is a roleplaying game that doesn’t use dice at all. Instead, you set up a Jenga-style tower of blocks, and to accomplish certain tasks, you have to pull a certain number of blocks from the tower without collapsing it.

It’s a brilliantly simple way to add tension to a game AND put your fate in your own hands. There’s no single unlucky dice roll that can condemn you to defeat. Just gravity and your own steady (or unsteady) hand.

And of course, as the game continues and the tower grows unsteadier — and your options for wood blocks to pull become fewer and fewer — the tension mounts and mounts.

Eventually, the tower — and your character’s chances — collapse in a clatter.

[Image courtesy of Lewis Brown.]

Of course, the rules of every roleplaying game are eventually up to the people running/playing the game. If you decide that the success/failure rules of your game should be more nuanced, you can do something about it immediately.

But for new players and new game runners, sometimes it helps to remind them there are always other options available. Whether you ditch numbers entirely for narrative dice like in FFG Star Wars, pretend failure isn’t failure at all in Ninja Burger, or ignore the dice completely with something like Dread, you can still build tension and tell some wonderfully fun, exciting, and action-filled stories.

Good luck, and happy roleplaying, everyone!

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Well, summer’s over, but we still have deals galore for you to check out. You can find them on the Home Screen for Daily POP Crosswords and Daily POP Word Search! Check them out!

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What’s Your Favorite Puzzly Place?

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We talk about puzzly things all time. We discuss puzzly moments from history, puzzly events happening now, and the many ways puzzles are represented in modern life, both obviously and less so.

But it recently occurred to me that we rarely talk about puzzly places.

There are escape rooms and board game cafes, puzzle hunts that span cities and college campuses, corn mazes lovingly cultivated every year, and geocaches with puzzly elements awaiting intrepid hikers and nature lovers.

If you picture “puzzly place” in your mind, what do you see? The Labyrinth from Greek mythology? The Winchester Mystery House? The Hampton Court Maze?

Oddly enough, the first place that comes to mind for me is a woodland area in England, famed for its strange rock formations, caves, and trees.

It’s known as Puzzlewood.

This 14-acre space, located in the forest of Dean, in Gloucestershire, is one of the most gorgeous and peculiar places in the world. It is full of meandering pathways, old mining areas dating back to the Roman era, and cave systems that breached the surface untold years ago. There are bridges and rock formations, many covered in the moss that has conquered any sign of human intervention there.

It reportedly inspired not just the Forbidden Forest from the Harry Potter series, but several locations in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings as well. It has been a filming site for shows like Doctor Who and Merlin as well as franchises like the Star Wars saga.

And it seems like a beautifully peaceful place for some puzzling.

It may not possess the order or intrigue of some of the world’s most famous hedge mazes, but in my estimation, what it lacks in design, it more than makes up for with atmosphere.

Puzzlewood truly lives up to the name.

What are your favorite puzzly places, fellow solvers? Do you have a favorite escape room, maze, or natural spot in which to get lost? Or is your puzzly place right at home with a puzzle book and some cocoa? Let us know in the comments section below! We’d love to hear from you.

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Have you checked out our special summer deals yet? You can find them on the Home Screen for Daily POP Crosswords and Daily POP Word Search! Check them out!

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Solution to our May the 4th Jedi Logic Puzzle!

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Last week, we celebrated Star Wars Day (aka May the Fourth) with a Jedi-themed brain teaser for our fellow puzzlers and PuzzleNationers to solve!

How do you crack this Star Wars-inspired Jedi mystery? Let’s find out together!

On a small planet in the Mid Rim, a group of Jedi defeated several squads of battle droids. Reporters had a hard time piecing together descriptions of the five Jedi who saved the day, even after interviewing many witnesses.

The only thing the reporters were sure of? The names of the five Jedi:

  • Drosco Wrs
  • Ko Duus
  • Pramyt Gorc
  • Wendo Grars
  • Seredwok

Each of the Jedi wielded a different color lightsaber (green, yellow, blue, orange, or purple). Each held a different title within the Jedi Order (Padawan, Knight, Master, Instructor, or Council Member). And each of them was a different species (Barabel, Bith, Nautolan, Twi’lek, or Wookiee).

Based on the information gathered below, can you figure out which lightsaber color, title, and species belongs with which Jedi?

1. Drosco Wrs (whose lightsaber is either orange or green) is neither the padawan nor the knight.

2. Either Ko Duus or the Bith is the council member, and the other has the yellow lightsaber.

3. The Jedi with the blue lightsaber (who isn’t on the council) is either the Twi’lek or the Wookiee; if Twi’lek, then Drosco Wrs is the instructor, but if Wookiee, then Seredwok is the instructor.

4. The padawan (who has neither the blue lightsaber nor the green lightsaber) is not Seredwok.

5. Wendo Grars (who isn’t the knight) doesn’t have the yellow lightsaber or the blue lightsaber.

6. The Barabel (who is either Pramyt or Seredwok) isn’t the Jedi with the purple lightsaber.

7. The master has either the purple lightsaber or the yellow lightsaber. Neither the purple lightsaber nor the yellow lightsaber are wielded by the Nautolan.

So, where do we begin?

Well, there’s a lot of information here about the lightsabers, and that’s where we can start.

We know that the Nautolan doesn’t have the purple or yellow lightsabers (rule 7) or the blue lightsaber (rule 3). Similarly, we know that the Barabel doesn’t have the purple lightsaber (rule 6) or the blue lightsaber (rule 3). But we can also deduce that it doesn’t have the yellow lightsaber, because either Ko Duus or the Bith have the yellow lightsaber (rule 2), and Ko Duus isn’t a Barabel (rule 6).

That means the green and orange lightsabers are split between the Nautolan and the Barabel. That also means that Drosco Wrs is either the Nautolan or the Barabel, because his lightsaber is either green or orange (rule 1). But since he can’t be the Barabel (rule 6), Drosco Wrs is the Nautolan.

Let’s start our chart there:

sw puz 1

But we know more about Drosco Wrs. He is neither the padawan nor the knight (rule 1) and according to his lightsaber color, he is not the master (rule 7). He is also not the council member, who must be the Bith or Ko Duus (rule 2), so he is the instructor.

Because he is the instructor, we now also know that the Twi’lek has the blue lightsaber (rule 3).

We also know that the Jedi with the blue lightsaber isn’t the padawan (rule 4), the master (rule 7), the council member (rule 4), or the instructor (since Drosco Wrs is the instructor and his lightsaber is either green or orange). That means that the blue lightsaber is with a Twi’lek who is a knight.

Let’s update our chart:

sw puz 2

If we return to the Barabel, according to our chart they’re not the knight or the instructor, and they can’t be the master based on their possible lightsaber color. So they’re either the padawan or the council member. But the council member is either Ko Duus or the Bith (rule 2), and Ko Duus can’t be a Barabel (rule 6). So the Barabel must be the padawan.

And since Seredwok isn’t the padawan (rule 4), Pramyt Groc is the Barabel and the padawan.

But that’s not all. We know that the Barabel’s lightsaber is either green or orange, and the padawan’s lightsaber can’t be green (rule 4), so we have our first complete row.

sw puz 3

It’s taken a lot of work to get here, but now things are rolling.

Drosco Wrs, our Nautolan instructor, could only have a green or orange lightsaber (rule 1), and since orange is the padawan’s color, we now know his lightsaber is green.

So green, blue, and orange are all accounted for, and the council member cannot have a yellow lightsaber (rule 2), so the council member has a purple lightsaber, and the master has a yellow lightsaber.

Wendo Grars can’t have orange, blue, or green, based on our chart, nor can she have yellow (rule 5), so she has the purple lightsaber, making her the council member.

Our chart is looking pretty full now:

sw puz 4

Since Wendo Grars is the council member, Ko Duus must be the wielder of the yellow lightsaber (rule 2), which also makes Wendo Grars the Bith.

And process of elimination gives us one name left — Seredwok — and one species left — Wookiee — to assign.

So our completed chart looks like this:

sw puz 5

Oh, we also hid a little puzzly easter egg in this puzzle. Each of our Jedi names were anagrams of popular puzzles:

  • Drosco Wrs = Crossword
  • Ko Duus = Sudoku
  • Pramyt Gorc = Cryptogram
  • Wendo Grars = Rows Garden
  • Seredwok = Word Seek

Did you manage to unravel this devious Jedi-themed logic puzzle? Did you spot the wordplay in the Jedi names? Let us know in the comments section below! We’d love to hear from you.

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May the Fourth Be With You!

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Hello fellow puzzlers and PuzzleNationers! It’s Star Wars Day, and what better way to celebrate than with a puzzly Star Wars brain teaser!

Yes, we’ve created a Jedi-themed logic puzzle for you to unravel! Can you crack this Star Wars-inspired mystery?

On a small planet in the Mid Rim, a group of Jedi dispatched several squads of battle droids. Reporters had a hard time piecing together descriptions of the five Jedi who saved the day, even after interviewing many witnesses.

The only thing the reporters were sure of? The names of the five Jedi:

  • Drosco Wrs
  • Ko Duus
  • Pramyt Gorc
  • Wendo Grars
  • Seredwok

Each of the Jedi wielded a different color lightsaber (green, yellow, blue, orange, or purple). Each held a different title within the Jedi Order (Padawan, Knight, Master, Instructor, or Council Member). And each of them was a different species (Barabel, Bith, Nautolan, Twi’lek, or Wookiee).

Based on the information gathered below, can you figure out which lightsaber color, title, and species belongs with which Jedi?

1. Drosco Wrs (whose lightsaber is either orange or green) is neither the padawan nor the knight.

2. Either Ko Duus or the Bith is the council member, and the other has the yellow lightsaber.

3. The Jedi has the blue lightsaber (who isn’t on the council) is either the Twi’lek or the Wookiee; if Twi’lek, then Drosco Wrs is the instructor, but if Wookiee, then Seredwok is the instructor.

4. The padawan (who has neither the blue lightsaber nor the green lightsaber) is not Seredwok.

5. Wendo Grars (who isn’t the knight) doesn’t have the yellow lightsaber or the blue lightsaber.

6. The Barabel (who is either Pramyt or Seredwok) isn’t the Jedi with the purple lightsaber.

7. The master has either the purple lightsaber or the yellow lightsaber. Neither the purple lightsaber nor the yellow lightsaber are wielded by the Nautolan.

Good luck, fellow puzzlers! This puzzle requires NO actual knowledge of Star Wars to solve. All you need are your puzzly wits!

Let us know if you solved it in the comments below! And May the Fourth Be With You!

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!

You can also share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and explore the always-expanding library of PuzzleNation apps and games on our website!