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Mar. 26th, 2014 08:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretFor the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
invisible_ficathon, I was assigned to write Escape from Zyzzlvaria fic. This requires about ten minutes of background to explain- roga got it last week while I was writing, but you're getting it now.
One of the highlights of my calendar year is the MIT Mystery Hunt, a weekend-long puzzle competition in which teams strive to solve a set of extraordinarily complicated and creative puzzles in order to reveal the hidden location of a coin on MIT campus. The Hunts have gotten more and more elaborate over the years, both in terms of the puzzles and the theatrical stagecraft wrapped around the puzzles and have developed their own language and style. There are certain particular puzzle types that you'll only see at Hunts. One such example is the Chaos puzzle, in which a constructed language invented for the puzzle must be deciphered before the puzzle can be solved.
Another example is the Duck Konundrum, the trademark puzzle of a Hunt veteran named Dan Katz. Duck Konundra consist of long and ridiculous lists of tricky step-by-step procedures that must be followed in order to get an answer. They also involve a live duck. In the second of these puzzles, players had to set up a half dozen board games and then follow a series of complicated steps for manipulating the pieces on the boards. Information on one board was used to drive moves on other boards, so making a single mistake on one of the steps would propagate and screw up results all across the puzzle. One of the board games was Escape from Zyzzlvaria, a board game which did not actually exist, but which the player could deduce enough about from the text of the puzzle to partially recreate in order to solve.
Several years later, Dan Katz was involved in running the Hunt again, and the entire Hunt was themed based on the Escape from Zyzzlvaria board game. The various characters were acted out, the fake board game was actually constructed, and a number of the puzzles helped build out the fictional game even further.jadelennox, my recipient, has been Hunting for at least as long as I have, and asked for the characters of the game to get one more adventure. And if the story could also be a puzzle, so much the better.
I will confirm that the story contains a fairly simple Mystery Hunt style puzzle. The instructions that go with any Hunt-style puzzle are the same: There are no rules of structure, and any resources you want to use you can use- Internet, books, other people, flamethrowers, laser beams, etc... The puzzle should not require you to break the law to solve. And the first aid kit is not a puzzle. Somehow, you will be able to get a short word or phrase out of the puzzle as an answer. I will happily confirm answers if you PM me.
As far as characterization, I didn't have a lot to go on, so I mostly stuck to the characterization guide in the answer key to a puzzle featuring a parody of the Hitchhiker's Guide to Zyzzlvaria, and crammed in Star Trek jokes when those weren't enough.
The result is a very silly story that I am very happy exists. It was strange to write, though. I sketched out a rough outline of the plot, a drawing of the logic grid, and a list of clues that I needed to insert into the story somewhat naturalistically in order to make the puzzle solveable. As I wrote, I crossed off clues as I included them. The resulting narrative was rather on rails, because there were so many particular story moments it needed to hit, but my brain kept trying to drive me off the rails. Many of the clues involved the bridge, but every time my protagonist tried to go to the bridge I decided the story would be better if he went elsewhere instead, so I had to figure out other ways to drop the clues about the bridge. In its sort of linear shaggy dog story format, the piece it most reminds me of is my first If on a winter's night a traveller fic. Though there are huge differences between the pieces in tone and style, they were both written to rather severe structural constraints. It's a good thing to try to do every once in a while, I think.
"Where on the Brass Rat is Captain Blastoid"
invisible_ficathon, I was assigned to write Escape from Zyzzlvaria fic. This requires about ten minutes of background to explain- roga got it last week while I was writing, but you're getting it now.One of the highlights of my calendar year is the MIT Mystery Hunt, a weekend-long puzzle competition in which teams strive to solve a set of extraordinarily complicated and creative puzzles in order to reveal the hidden location of a coin on MIT campus. The Hunts have gotten more and more elaborate over the years, both in terms of the puzzles and the theatrical stagecraft wrapped around the puzzles and have developed their own language and style. There are certain particular puzzle types that you'll only see at Hunts. One such example is the Chaos puzzle, in which a constructed language invented for the puzzle must be deciphered before the puzzle can be solved.
Another example is the Duck Konundrum, the trademark puzzle of a Hunt veteran named Dan Katz. Duck Konundra consist of long and ridiculous lists of tricky step-by-step procedures that must be followed in order to get an answer. They also involve a live duck. In the second of these puzzles, players had to set up a half dozen board games and then follow a series of complicated steps for manipulating the pieces on the boards. Information on one board was used to drive moves on other boards, so making a single mistake on one of the steps would propagate and screw up results all across the puzzle. One of the board games was Escape from Zyzzlvaria, a board game which did not actually exist, but which the player could deduce enough about from the text of the puzzle to partially recreate in order to solve.
Several years later, Dan Katz was involved in running the Hunt again, and the entire Hunt was themed based on the Escape from Zyzzlvaria board game. The various characters were acted out, the fake board game was actually constructed, and a number of the puzzles helped build out the fictional game even further.
jadelennox, my recipient, has been Hunting for at least as long as I have, and asked for the characters of the game to get one more adventure. And if the story could also be a puzzle, so much the better.I will confirm that the story contains a fairly simple Mystery Hunt style puzzle. The instructions that go with any Hunt-style puzzle are the same: There are no rules of structure, and any resources you want to use you can use- Internet, books, other people, flamethrowers, laser beams, etc... The puzzle should not require you to break the law to solve. And the first aid kit is not a puzzle. Somehow, you will be able to get a short word or phrase out of the puzzle as an answer. I will happily confirm answers if you PM me.
As far as characterization, I didn't have a lot to go on, so I mostly stuck to the characterization guide in the answer key to a puzzle featuring a parody of the Hitchhiker's Guide to Zyzzlvaria, and crammed in Star Trek jokes when those weren't enough.
The result is a very silly story that I am very happy exists. It was strange to write, though. I sketched out a rough outline of the plot, a drawing of the logic grid, and a list of clues that I needed to insert into the story somewhat naturalistically in order to make the puzzle solveable. As I wrote, I crossed off clues as I included them. The resulting narrative was rather on rails, because there were so many particular story moments it needed to hit, but my brain kept trying to drive me off the rails. Many of the clues involved the bridge, but every time my protagonist tried to go to the bridge I decided the story would be better if he went elsewhere instead, so I had to figure out other ways to drop the clues about the bridge. In its sort of linear shaggy dog story format, the piece it most reminds me of is my first If on a winter's night a traveller fic. Though there are huge differences between the pieces in tone and style, they were both written to rather severe structural constraints. It's a good thing to try to do every once in a while, I think.
"Where on the Brass Rat is Captain Blastoid"
(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-27 01:53 pm (UTC)Also, while I'd heard the term "shaggy dog story" before, this time I actually looked up what it means. Apparently that's my favorite type of joke to tell. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-27 01:56 pm (UTC)