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It's a great list of puzzles and problems, and there are some really choice dilemmas in the collection. For my game and my players, though, there are some conceptual problems with most of these puzzles - the underlying framework that allows them to exist and be weird doesn't fit with the world in which we play, which, at its core, rejects the 'but magic...' explanation favored by a number of other DMs.
I'll call out some examples from the list, challenges that I liked but were too arbitrary in their current form to actually adopt to my game. These are all structural dilemmas - the artifacts of a group of creatures now no longer present.
"13. The room is proofed against magic. The door only opens when a bowl is filled with water from a spring down the hall. The hall is long, vented to volcanic heat, so the water will evaporate before reaching the bowl."
"42. The door's pneumatic workings run on saltwater. (Use the salt from preserved meats? Teleport to the sea? Use tears?)"
"90. In this dungeon, fire turns into poisonous black smoke (only illuminates 5') while noise causes the crystal walls to vibrate, creating illumination."
"105. All of the surfaces of this dungeon are electrified metal. Touching them with a conductive material will shock your balls off. At the back of the dungeon is the switch to turn this off. Thick leather boots are an obvious requirement. Leather armor is a good idea if you plan to do any falling down. Water is impassable. Picking locks in leather gloves is difficult or impossible."
The problem with these dilemmas is that they make living in such an environment rather difficult, if not impossible. Our dungeon ecology also must make sense, so we can throw out the idea of a bunch of monsters just chilling in their adjacent rooms waiting for lunch to walk in.
13 (Revised). The whole dungeon is located over an exposed magma vent, with steam issuing up from the depths by a series of cleverly placed channels. Due to this, all humanoids must drink double the amount of water per day they spend inside, and water has a tendency to either boil in waterskins or just flat-out evaporate. Heat exhaustion (in any armor) will present itself as a problem in short order. Due to the constant humidity and high temperatures, while no large creatures call this place home, it is the perfect place for all of the reptiles in the area (and wyverns and dragons) to lay their eggs. So every room will have eggs and eggs and eggs - the first batch of eggs to hatch will then eat the other eggs (and any other food that happens to come walking in) before leaving the dungeon to find more prey. They will then return to lay their own young in the cave. This means that there are likely to be number of powerful reptiles in the vicinity of the dungeon who are feeling rather protective of its contents. So if you don't kill them on the way in, they are likely to be waiting for you to leave.
The dungeon, which would have taken years, if not decades, to construct (tunneling is VERY slow, unless you have lots of high-level magic just available for tunneling). So, this was designed as a bastion of last resort for a group of fire-resistant creatures locked in a losing war against a group of heat-intolerant creatures. Because of this, the opening area is likely to be filled with ambush points and blockades that then open up to a relatively simple-to-traverse living area, where the goodies would have been stored (maybe there's a treasure room), and those goodies are likely to be some interesting fire-related tech or magical knowledge (not preserved on any kind of paper, though - inscribed stainless steel or zinc-plated tablets, or copper ones sufficiently tarnished that the writing is impossible to see and they just look like square-ish plates?). Because of the difficulty in creating such a dungeon, the whole complex probably isn't very large - maybe 15, 20 rooms on the outside.
43 (Revised). Who makes such a door? Where would such a door be placed? Unless every person who needs to access that door has a ready supply of saltwater at-hand, this door could not lead to anything important - you can make bank vault doors thick and impressive because almost no one actually needs to go inside. High-frequency security doors just use a RFID tag. So, either we abandon this idea (which would be silly) or saltwater has to function like a RFID tag - this means that whoever built this door, and the secrets behind it, have some kind of affinity for saltwater - maybe they have saltwater instead of blood: instead of hemoglobin passing along the oxygen, their body's systems naturally apply electrolysis or something to the water molecules, which would then mean they have a bunch of hydrogen gas floating around, which would make them very vulnerable to sparks. Hmm. Where have I heard of some heat-based creatures?
So, this door is the water-dweller's answer to the fire-creatures of 13. Any water-dweller can gain entrance by opening up a cut on a finger/fin and letting some droplets go, but the fire-creatures, with their affinity for heat, would just evaporate any water before it got to the door's mechanism. And behind this door would be all of the things the water-creatures didn't want the fire-creatures to access - perhaps their families and spawning pools, perhaps their magic and technologies. So this door is either the front door to a massive complex or, perhaps, there are hundreds of these doors scattered throughout the countryside, in freshwater pools and in the roots of trees, and they open to small resupply depots, waystations, and the like for these water creatures. Small, one-room holdouts for them to resist the fire-creatures' assaults.
90 (Revised). How? How does this happen? OK. Fire turns to black, poisonous smoke. So, there's a gas in the dungeon that both turns black when combusted and is poisonous when combusted. Poisonous, like venom? Or something that makes it hard to breathe, but only when combusted? I don't even know how to make something like that work, except to say "magic did it." Nope. Let's tackle the second feature - crystal cavern walls that, when sound is produced nearby, reverberate and produce light. So, the crystals in this wall somehow convert soundwaves into light. And it does this at sound frequencies that are audible to humans - so these crystals can somehow take sonic energy, magnify it, and then turn it into light. Fuck whatever treasure is in this dungeon. These crystals are possibly the most valuable thing in the whole world. You want an energy-viable laser gun? Here you go. You want intruder alerts that function without magic? Here you go. Can I loop this effect, creating a machine that inputs light and outputs sound and create something better than a perpetual motion machine - it's a machine that is constantly generating more energy than was used to start it, an energy surplus to be siphoned into something else.
Let's come back to earth. There is a door, buried in a windless place. Behind the door are caverns filled with carbon monoxide, from an ancient immolation. The caverns were naturally formed by an ancient sonic device that has, for eons unknown, been steadily pulsing an audio signal. The sound waves have eroded the stone surrounding it, creating the cavern system. Because of this, the dB level of a sound is, I don't know, tripled. If you shout in this cave, you will die as your eardrums rupture and your brain jellies in your skull. Or something. As will all of your nearby friends.
105 (Revised). How much electrical power would this take? Just to electrify a metal 10x10x10 room to the point where bare skin touching it would be painful? This is not my area of expertise, but it looks like the Internet agrees that .1 to .2 amperes is lethal. This looks like a fairly elementary explanation of the principles involved. To transmit that .1 to .2 amperes to a human body requires a LOT of voltage (since the human body is fairly resistant), and when we factor in the inverse square law, this means that any facility capable of doing this has electrical generation capacities that put the current power industry to shame. Why would I go into such a dungeon, when by simply attaching an iron rod and sufficient cable to it I have the ability to bring electrical power to any arbitrary location in the world? Controlling access to the electricity seems a much more lucrative endeavor than venturing into the source of it and potentially turning off that flow. Think about what the protagonist of Twain's <i> A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court </i> was able to do with his handmade batteries.
To make this construction believable, we need a technologically-advanced race that has limited access to magic (since magic obviates most of the factors that led to the development and adoption of electrical power in the modern world) and has vanished from the world. If this group of individuals is sufficiently resistant that this kind of power would prove no threat to them, they would still not waste all of that energy coursing it under their feet all of the time - it would be a security measure and not a way of life (there are far more efficient ways to get current available everywhere: wall outlets being one of them). For non-resistant creatures, this is even more the case. So, we have a dungeon or site that is guarded by an impressive electrical field - the entrance is made of metal and all of it is highly electrified. Leather is about as conductive as skin and is therefore no help - it is telling that we don't use animal products as insulators when dealing with electricity. There's probably a switch just inside the gate to let invited traffic enter the facility that is strongly protected from outward intrusion.
One of the core problems with "it's magic" as an explanation is that it actually limits what players can do - the rules for magic are wholly arbitrary and intentionally don't necessarily follow an understandable logical pattern. Therefore, because magical things don't follow easily-understood rules, there will be resistance on the part of players to try to engage with such a puzzle from a logical mindset. And the DM is left with no guidance whatsoever to adjudicate how their players attempt to solve such a dilemma. With these revisions, I've attempted to maintain the core of the intended problem while extrapolating a likely situation that would create such a dilemma (which will improve the continuity of a game world) and have replaced magical thinking with anticipatable explanations for each of them.
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