Treasure chest

The moment the lid comes up

A reward that arrives as an announcement is worth less than the same reward that arrives out of a box. It is the same information either way, and the box wins every time, because the box makes the room lean in. That is the whole of this page: something you wrote, hidden behind a lid, with a condition on the lid.

What goes inside is up to you and is usually not a prize. The next clue in a hunt. The rule that applies for the rest of the game. The real combination for a real box in the next room. A name nobody was expecting. Two hundred characters is enough for any of those and short enough to read out loud without losing the room.

Three locks, three different games

A number code makes the chest a puzzle: the answer to something is the code, and typing it is how you prove you have it. The name of a key makes it a collecting game, and it pairs with the keys and locks page, where the keys are handed out. The host's tap makes it pure theatre: the chest opens when the story says it should, and the lock is not the point at all.

Mixing them across several chests is where this gets useful. A hunt with one code chest, one key chest and one the host opens at the end has three different feelings in it, and none of them needs a component that can be lost.

Set it up somewhere private

The one real caution: everything here is on the screen you are setting it up on. The code is hidden behind a toggle so the panel can be open in a room, but the contents are in plain text in the editor, so write them before the players are looking rather than while they are. Nothing is uploaded, so there is no other copy anywhere and nothing to leak.

For a dial with clues given out one at a time rather than a lid, the safe is the page next door. For keys that are collected before any of this matters, start at keys and locks.

Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for

The tool runs entirely in your browser. There is no account, nothing you make is uploaded, and nothing you type is sent anywhere or put into a link.

The page itself is not silent, though: it carries advertising code and a visit counter that sets no cookie, and the cookie page says exactly what each of those does.

This page remembers your settings in your browser under pph.chest.items and pph.chest.muted, and nowhere else. Clearing your site data for papercarnival.com removes it.