Somewhere in a magical land a small golden chest is delivered by an white eagle to a soon-to-be heroine. She opens it with shaky hands, knowing what it means that this gift has been delivered to her. Indeed, the first thing which falls out is a parchment bound and sealed by her mentor. The letter reads:
The chest also contains a map and 22 small scrolls, each listing a wisdom spell written by the mage in his runes.
The position can be found on the map. Use the following grid to specify the coordinates:
- This puzzle (in slightly different form) was 'solved' by an unintended short-cut (now closed), but is still requiring a 'proper' solution. You might find it by backward-solving it form the now known solution, but there is more fun in not doing so. (I hope.)
A hint:
- The lake and the compass both hold a clue...
A full eye-opener hint (strong spoiler!) added after the full solution has been posted:
The map overlaid with a hex grid (spoiler!)
Answer
I believe the full explanation is as follows...
We need to visit the 8 X
marks around the map, but need to "end [our] trip in the dark forest" and avoid the witches tower, so we'll start on the lower left and proceed clockwise around the road.
Multiple hints point towards hexagonal tiling: The six pointed star, "honey, she still rules", seven minus one mages, the lake (looks like 4 hexes stacked), the compass on a 60 degree tilt, etc.
So if we draw a 60 degree grid over everything (using the lake as a guide for spacing), we get the following (I've labelled, in blue, all the features that appear in the spells in order from A
to V
):
You can now see that for each X
we need to visit, there's a feature that has three copies that all triangulate on the given location. I've labelled these, in green, in the order in which we visit them.
Now, if we take these 8 spells in the order travelled, we end up with the following list (which is where Dennis Meng's solution picks up):
From here, reading down the columns produces the text:
From the dead tree in the swamp, go South. Halfway to Mount Dragon, stop. Where you cross the road is the Holy Nut.
So, taking the dead tree in the swamp (assuming the swamp is indicated by the reed looking icons), we have roughly Ed
(the lone P on my labelled map) and Mount Dragon (assuming it's the biggest, most foreboding mountain) at roughly Ak
, you can see a clean "South" line based on the hex grid, which cuts the road at the bottom right of the Cg
grid square, as indicated by the big yellow X on the labelled map. And so, here lies the Holy Nut!
No comments:
Post a Comment