THE RUNES

I'm not sure this is the right place but whatever!
Michael I hope you are going to produce another one of these (not just yet) because Its been well worth it. Its been the most difficult, challenging, and infuriating thing I've come across but has kept me out of mischief (and other more legitimate things) for hours. I'm nowhere near finished either

Yes, I totally agree Sue!

I third that resolution. Made some good friends here too.

I fourth that.

Such simple puzzles.

We have all seen very similar things in various publications before. But. The twist is, never have they been made so difficult and intertwined as this. Pure genius.

Big Up The Runes. I think this will keep me busy for many months to come. The best ten quid I ever spent.

Cheers. BB.

I wrote in the end of the road I thought this was money well spent.
But I do have a sugguestion. Add a I'M STUCK! forum. I've been round and round in a thousand different ways on the N/G trail and am about to admit defeat. Many minds often work better than one, and an I'M STUCK, this is what i've done anything to add might help out some.

2nded and 3rded Kats I've been saying the same thing.

BB I know what you mean but I need some uninterrupted sleep I wake up at some unearthly hour with a EUREKA moment only to find its WRONG again sigh.
I have gone round Neptune and Pegasus so many times I'm DIZZY

It feels slightly churlish to say this, but some of us have been at that point for several months

The problem is that whereas the page puzzles had very particular answers derived in very particular ways, the trail puzzles don't work like that. They often have several stages, have varying entry points and require different insights to progress - and intertwine with each other in unexpected ways.

And unless you know exactly where and how someone entered a particular trail, it is very difficult to post a useful answer that doesn't inadvertently tell them more than they need to know which would then spoil the puzzle - and that's why we are here: because of the puzzle!

After all, you could always buy a puzzle book with the answers in the back and solve them all instantly...

My biggest problem is that I can see relationships between the puzzles. I ask the oracle about these, and keep getting a no-go. I've traveled the classical world almost literally from one end to the other. Although, I haven't been to Asia yet, unless you consider Persia and Babylonia Asia.
I go back and forth between different cultures myths and just keep coming up with more dead ends. I've been told it's OBVIOUS. Hmm, wonder who said that?
Maybe overthinking is still wrong when you get past page 26. But then, to decipher these things, I'm beginning to think the only way TO do it is to overthink.

My knowlege of Greco/Roman mythology is growing daily, they were a strange lot. Interesting though it is I don't know where it gets me.
I'm sure its all in the way you look at it, sometimes the overthinking bit throws a new angle at you, sometimes you are more confused than ever
Obvious NOT, Simple, maybe with HINDSIGHT.
I am NOT having a go here but being a puzzle setter obviously helps in the way to look at things, thats an advantage most of us haven't got

People seem to be misunderstanding what I mean by "obvious". In my posting in the philosophy forum, I said that everything was obvious, but my argument largely concerned hindsight - the comparison I used was with detective fiction. Perhaps a better example would be watching a magician perform an illusion. From the perspective of the audience, the trick is utterly baffling. But when you know how it is done, you can't believe that you were taken in by it - it's so obvious.

There is a lovely paradox involved here. One of the reasons that human beings have been such a success as a species is that we can see patterns in things. We make connections, not just between obvious things but over time as well ("look - the sun rises at the same point at the same time each year")
So we can solve Sudoku puzzles, because we learn to recognise patterns within them that mean that "if there is a 2 here and a 2 here there can't be one there" etc.

However, the job of the puzzle setter is to exploit this and make it a weakness instead - the art of misdirection. Consider the "Best Move" problems. The answers to these puzzles are obvious (in retrospect) but the general idea is to tempt the solver into finding a solution that may indeed work but is not the "Best Move". And the reason it works is that our pattern-recognition systems function in certain ways. When you see the correct "Best Move" solution, you can see why - and it is obvious why.*

Or those pesky "letter set" puzzles with the question mark. I would argue that every one of those is obvious - and yet I don't believe they are simple at all if you stop to think about the processes needed to reach that moment when it clicked. (The problem here being that these processes are very difficult to identify so it doesn't seem the same as with the Best Move puzzles.)

I don't disagree that much of The Runes is "simple" in the sense that our natural tendency to find connections between things, and this makes us presume that things are more complicated than they are, because we find connections that were never intended. That's how "conspiracy theories" get started, after all!
I still maintain, however, that it is also extremely "obvious" - the sleight-of-hand going on here may be different to that of a magic trick but it serves the same purpose. (When you kick yourself when you suddenly understand a puzzle, that's because it was obvious. Not because it was simple.)


(*OK, this may not be a great example, as Chess skills are wildly variable; for instance, I still don't think that one or two of the answers are obvious, and others may be struggling even to understand the first few. So if you are one of those people, then I apologise for using a bad example.)

Approaching these as cultural problems is not helpful. The puzzles are cryptographic and logical challenges dressed up in historical clothing. That is not to say that a knowledge of Western culture is completely useless here but the puzzles do tell you when such information is needed. Such advice is not always explicit but I can think of no puzzle where you cannot get well into the solution before recognising a need to research something specific. I am not going to be any more explicit in this open part of the forum.

I am completely and totally stuck, devoid of any idea of what to try next. The clues are so cryptic that I do not understand them (yet )
I'll state publicly here Scurra that to get as far as you have on your own(providing it was on your own) is an achievement to be praised

It's very hard to say whether you got anywhere entirely "on your own" with this sort of puzzle.
However, I will say that (like Gauntlet), I have found the correct method for solving everything myself. In two specific instances, it took a prod from someone to get me to look at what I thought was a failed approach again - and I found what I had overlooked or misunderstood.

But I won't deny that it really did help to exchange ideas and failed approaches with other people, if only because sometimes the process of actually writing them down concentrates the mind excellently. And also it's cathartic to laugh at everyone else's failings when you know they are equally laughing at your own.

Not one puzzle in The Runes could possibly be classified as unfair. Some of them may indeed continue to appear not to be "Simple" or "Obvious". Sometimes the clues do seem bafflingly cryptic. And yet, in hindsight, they all seem so easy. Even the ones I am currently failing to solve will no doubt prove my case. Eventually...

well could you use the stick that prodded you to prod us in the right direction then please (i'll let you have a corner of my padded cell when you need to bang your head)

If the prods are the one's I think he means I'm afraid the stick is stuck too