Once you’ve decided “I want to give them a scroll now” or “I think it’s time they deserve to get a spell staff”, how do you go about choosing which spells those are?
I assume different people have different ideas here, there isn’t one right answer. This is meant to be an open-ended discussion prompt.
One of the best items a GM has ever given me was a series of 3 spell scrolls with homebrew spells on them, each of which was encrypted using a different cypher. At the time, but the GM and I were uni students doing a course on security, so it was fitting. One had a riddle, where the answer to the riddle was the key to a Vignere cypher. A second was a series of lines that formed a hexagonal variant of a pigpen cypher (but I forget the precise details).
The third we never actually managed to solve fully. At first it appeared as a bunch of letters in a grid. We learnt that it had a map drawn on it in ink that revealed itself under the letters when the scroll (a physical prop the GM gave me) was heated. A riddle given alongside the puzzle was obviously meant to be used with a transposition cypher on the scrambled letters, but we never worked out exactly how to transpose the letters.
Riddles are a classic part of fantasy RPGs, but far too often they’re incredibly dissatisfying or even frustrating because they both require out-of-character solutions and they block your progress in the story until they can be solved. I really loved these scrolls because it tied the solution to the puzzle to something completely separate from the main quest. It still required solving out-of-character, but at least I could take it home with me and work on it in my own time, rather than being distracted at the table with it.
edit: oh :( you deleted your comment while I was writing my reply. I enjoyed your reply. It was a good contribution to the conversation.
I deleted my comment because I came from the TTRPG network homepage and didn’t realise I was responding to pathfinder. I gave quite a few D&D 5e specific examples and was a little worried people wouldn’t be happy about it.
Oh I see!
To be fair, my answer there was also back when we were playing 5e. But I felt ok sharing it here because the general story was system agnostic, dealing with how puzzles with a reward are cooler than puzzles that block story progress, and reinforcing the cool idea you brought up about using custom homebrew spells as reward items.
