Why do we even have that lever?

I gotta say, dude, you have stumped me. I genuinely can't think of a logical reason for this beyond "ridiculous security system" or "party game made by hovering assholes," and i don't accept generic answers like that from myself. Tbh, if i saw this in a video game I would stop playing for fear of what other, more contrived security systems they would try to throw at me in the endgame. You got me.

 

it's from ori and the blind forest, and that's the most contrived thing in the game

the 2 other keys are in places that make sense

mt horu is dangerous and locked up to stop people from going in and dying, and so the key is placed in a difficult-to-get-to place that has gauntlets of spikes and lasers, and due to debris blocking the path it is even harder to get to than normal-so basically only a badass able to survive in mt horu can even get to the key, and the game implies that it's also got a tendency to randomly light up brighter than the sun, which is something that only light spirits like ori can be fine with so it's sealed all the way at the top of sorrow pass in an area that's dead anyway and inside a crystal structure which dissipates the light to just a constant safe glow

and you actually see the guy who stole the ginso tree's key running away with it and activating traps, and he hides it somewhere much more dangerous and hard to navigate for ori than for himself

and then there's the gumon seal which is in the misty woods for some reason?? and the misty woods keeps shapechanging and it's described as deceiving the minds of all those who entered so presumably hallucinations or something? also spikes and lasers and various enemies and the goddamned projectile flowers in the narrow tree tunnel and why! why is it there! who put it there and why! the owl doesn't fit through the door so it can't be a frantic effort to stop her from getting in and causing havoc and i just cannot think of any reason for it to be there

 

anyway a new one because apparently that one is too hard

why are some of the doors in this mansion locked with magic thorns?

 

Because I can:

In retrospect, we all agree that the trees were a mistake. It started out as a memorial garden to Admiral Honoria. Amazing lady, grew up on this very remote island. Very interesting plant life. Came here as a stowaway in her youth, joined the navy, rose up the ranks like you wouldn't believe. By the time she retired, the king had been widowed for quite some time. Their affair would have been a scandal if she weren't so well-regarded. It was still a bit of a scandal, just not the type that upsets people. The couple obviously made each other happy. They lived to a very respectable old age and passed away peacefully within days of each other. It's quite a nice love story, really.

The king's daughter, heir to the throne, had never been especially close with the admiral, but there was a great deal of mutual respect. She commissioned the memorial garden. Nothing ostentatious, the admiral wouldn't have wanted that, but there was a statue and some very nice landscaping.

The trees weren't originally part of the plan, but someone donated a sapling, and as they were native to the island where the admiral was born, it seemed fitting. Nobody realized they were quite so... well-suited to the local climate. They grow like crazy and it's almost impossible to kill them. Their sap has hallucinogenic properties, which is mildly interesting when there's one tree. With an entire forest, it turns out you get an overwhelming miasma of mental fuckery. Just breathing the air is enough to get an obvious effect.

Well, it's obvious now.

When there were fewer trees it was a lot less obvious.

As the trees became harder to control, the memorial garden started to have a reputation. People said it was haunted. The gardeners kept quitting. It got more and more overgrown and creepy and deserted, which made the rumors even more pervasive.

Then the sap started contaminating the water supply. Again, this would have been much easier to spot if it hadn't been such a gradual event.

Things got pretty bad. People got seriously paranoid. Like, seriously. Maybe you've noticed some of the, erm, defense precautions.

It's kind of hard to track the timeline after a certain point. We know that the city finally closed itself off entirely. Somebody decided it would be a great idea, for security reasons, to install this elaborate lock system, make the key really difficult to even transport, put it somewhere nearly inaccessible, and then put the actual lock in the middle of the haunted garden. Nobody was thinking very clearly.

Eventually people caught on to what was happening. Accounts of this time vary so wildly that we don't really know much about the recovery process. Somehow the city recovered. They opened up all the other gates again eventually, but nobody was all that keen on opening the hallucination forest gate again.

Look, we're awfully glad you're here, and that you're okay, but do you think there's any chance you could just... tote that thing back to where you found it? It would be a public service.

 

that was amazing and i love it

 

Thank you for the prompt, it was really challenging and a lot of fun.

 

Holy shit. A response other than “its a dungeon.”

Verily, please give me a sensible puzzle to ninja dodge around

 

Whoops, I probably should have actually written in the post that I wasn’t adding one to avoid having multiples running. Here’s the current one:

 

Theyre magical locks that require the blood of the noble family to get through. Don’t want servants or guests getting into sensitive areas and all that. The first version required members of the family to slice open their hands with ceremonial knives, but as the spells were refined they needed less and less blood to activate the locks, until only a drop was needed. The thorns double as a bit if dramatic flare.

eta because it's the middle of the night and i genuinely forgot to ask a question: why are all the animals in this dungeon ten times their normal size?

 

(I still didn’t manage to get it to not be a security system. Woulda been extra fun if I could’ve, but oh well! If the super deadly obstacle course had been easier to spin as anything besides deliberate and man made, there could have been a possibility for competing terrible invasive species and a city with amazingly rotten luck. But it’s just hard to explain this particular setup plus the lock situation as anything but a dedicated yet completely irrational attempt by the locals to keep people out. So at least I could provide motivation for a dedicated, irrational security system. Sometimes you gotta settle I suppose!)

 

Spoiler: oh no the video embedded it big

(the projectile throwers are flowers! and some of the plants are brambles...you could probably use the competing terrible invasive species thing and then have a bunch of paranoid hallucinating people build dedicated spikey/lasery security systems integrated with various horrible competing invasive species! )

It's not that the animals are that huge. It's that the shrinking spell on the dungeon's entrance made you, and all your equipment, several times smaller-the dungeon was originally built by dwarves, who are a burrowing people much smaller than humans, and to facilitate relatively easy interactions the place has a spell to make people smaller or bigger to roughly match the size range of dwarves, and it broke and now you're tiny and all the animals are about twice their normal size.


It does not help that the dungeon no longer serves its original purpose, and is mostly filled with animals and the hostile cultists that kicked everybody else out and proceeded to basically mangle the place.



Why does this lawnmower animate and try to run you over when you touch it?

 

Student wizard. Was not immediately destroyed after creation because the senior wizards thought it would make a good object lesson for the junior wizards in not messing with things they didn't understand.

Why do sections of the floor become red-hot at fixed intervals for fixed lengths of time, with no connecting walkways between the heat-shielded floor sections?

 

Well what are you walking around the palace oven for?

 

Why do only some statues come alive and chase you?

 

Because the children who lived in this house were very lazy and did not want to do their exercise. So their parents hired a wizard to enchant some of the statues to randomly come alive when one of the children walked past, forcing them to run. Unfortunately they went for the cheap wizard who did not enchant the statues to come alive just for children but for everyone, all the time. Which meant that the house became unlivable and the family moved out. They had had enough of all the running around and were quite exhausted.

Why do the chairs in this house disappear as soon as someone wants to sit on them?

 

They're magic constructs, initially supposed to do the exact opposite: appear when someone wanted to sit somewhere. The wizard team responsible for the various enchantments in the house didn't notice the problem, and the owners started bringing folding chairs until they could find someone to fix it.

Why does connecting the power lines in this dungeon require moving entire rooms around?

 

these aren't rooms. they're blocks. toys for something much bigger than you whose parents were trying to teach it about electrical currents. You're playing around in the abandoned toy castle of a giant. Best hope it doesn't come back anytime soon.

Why are these doors color coded for keys you have to hunt down before opening them?

 

Well, everyone's had that problem of having to hunt on your key ring for the right key. So the lady of the manor - lovely woman, really - decided to solve that by commissioning doors and keys that were colour-matched, so that she couldn't possibly forget which key was the right one.

She's never been good at remembering where she put her keys, though...

Why is this route between two trade hubs so full of monsters?

 

Ah, that. The short answer is class strife.

The long answer is that there are a lot of storied, illustrious mage families who were completely strapped for cash. High level magic education is a huge investment. It’s expensive to train as a mage, so you pretty much had to work for the nobility in order to afford your children’s tuition. Nobody noble would hire your kids if they didn’t receive training at a respected institution.

What with all the infighting going on among the nobility, the economy had gotten really shaky. There were still people with deep pockets who could afford to pay a good salary, but few enough that they could be very selective about who they hire. The nobility doesn’t really trust mages at the best of times since they have enough power to be a potential threat. What with the developing climate of paranoia, the only mages who could get hired were the ones who maintained impeccable reputations of tradition and respectability.

It costs a fortune to do magic if you only use traditional ingredients without allowing for any substitutions. The young lady next door might be willing to pay you to take the yellow feather root out of her garden, but if anyone discovered you were using that instead of the imported red variety, your reputation would be ruined. Your children would be ruined.

You know who benefits from a situation like this? People who import red feather root. Merchants made a killing off all these herbs and gemstones and anything else that people think is more traditional somehow if it’s foreign. I won’t even talk about the societal upset caused by the sudden uptick in wealthy merchants. That’s its own entire topic.

Anyway, with the continued economic instability, crime started becoming more of a problem. Trade routes were an obvious target because they were carrying a lot of valuable items across a lot of territory. Protecting caravans became a bigger and more expensive problem. Some merchants began using magical creatures as protection. They would hire a mage, or let a customer pay for their purchases in trade. There wasn’t much pushback from mages because they needed both the income and the imports.

Magical creatures are a gray area as far as tradition, and require no expensive ingredients to work with. The merchants were much less demanding customers than the nobility as well, which made the work popular. The nobility didn’t have much to say about any of this anyway because it was not to their benefit if nobody could afford to provide magic services, or if magic became expensive enough that it would start to hurt even the wealthiest.

Unfortunately the bandits were hiring too. They also had money and rare ingredients. And they had a growing foothold in society thanks to the political unrest. For a while it was an unofficial war to control the most valuable trade routes.

The monsters won the war. If you get enough magic in one place it eventually starts attracting even more magic. That’s one reason why you need wards. A trade route is one of the most difficult things to ward because its very nature is movement, and the movement doesn’t even go in the same direction like a stream. And that’s not even accounting for the physical size. Once there were enough magical creatures, there started being more magical creatures, and not tame ones. Eventually the magic levels will disperse, but it may take a generation or two yet. People are doing their best with cleanup efforts to try to help it along, but for now trade is still much more difficult and dangerous than it used to be.

And that’s how we finally got modern magic reform laws. Yellow feather root is now legally identical to red. It’s against the law to value well-recognized substitutions differently.

So if you still want to sell that red feather root, I’ll take it. But I’m not raising my offer. You’re lucky I’m willing to take it off your hands at all. I’d be picking feather root out of the garden myself, but it gives me a rash.

Incidentally, if you’re looking to earn a bit of change, I could use some help with the garden.

Why is there military strategy written in invisible ink on a canvas resting on the easel in this young man’s bedroom?

 

He's a member of a secret rebel group, and they hide their strategies and so on in invisible ink! In this case, in a painting.


Why is the airlock in this spaceship only fully operable by ghosts?