Background Chatter
From: Erik Stuart [1] Sent: Friday, August 06, 2010 5:48 PM To: David Shukan Cc: allen@cohnzone.com Subject: Re: FW: Doctor When
Quick random thought from my end: one idea (that Sean's working on) is the "figure out the locker combo puzzle". How about the answer to this puzzle telling them where the locker combo puzzle is? It's a cocktail party with the teachers/administrators/etc. from the school, and they learn that it's Mrs. Jones who keeps the locker combos in her desk. (Whereas Mr. White keeps the key to the equipment shed, Ms. Green keeps the password to the financial systems, etc.).
Allen's thought about "tachyonic residual blah blah" is great justification for hearing the voices.
On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 3:30 PM, David Shukan <dshukan@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm happy to "be assigned" the writing of this puzzle after someone determines how and where it best fits in -- I can take a framework of pretty much any context and any answer word and go to town. It will eventually require a few people to record it (which I expect will be fun), but I can fully design and script it. And perhaps I can get it recorded as well, but that's less clear to me.
I plan on contributing other ideas as well, though they may come slowly at the moment.
Dave
On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 2:36 PM, Allen Cohn <allen@cohnzone.com> wrote:
I'm liking this idea. We could easily have residual "tachyonic radiation" cause a chronosyclastic echo at a certain location. Since our heroes are bouncing around in time, we could make it a cocktail party...or the signing of the declaration of independence...or high school hallway or locker room conversation...or any famous gathering from history that Doctor When happened to have bounced into.
And where would the puzzle be? Certainly we could make it one of the "fix the broken time machine" puzzles (see 3.1, 3.2, 4.6, etc.). Also, we/I need to do some work on Part III and add more puzzles to it.
Allen
Original Message-----
From: David Shukan [2]
Sent: Friday, August 06, 2010 1:53 PM To: Erik Stuart; allen@cohnzone.com Subject: Re: FW: Doctor When
Allen and Erik --
Something reminded me today of a puzzle idea that I flirted with while helping write this year's Mystery Hunt, but that didn't materialize for various reasons. But I think it could work very well in the Dr. When context.
Essentially, it's "just" a logic puzzle, but the clues would be given entirely by a soundtrack of a cocktail party (or some other event). In the context of Dr. When, I'd envision that there would be a room teams would walk into, and there was an invisible cocktail party taking place around them (perhaps clearly from some alternate time-frame) on a 20-minute audio-tape loop. Teams would need to figure out that (a) this is a logic puzzle, (b) what the answer is (Mary is Mrs. Jones and is drinking champagne and owns a Siamese cat; Sally is Mrs. Smith, etc.), and (c) extract the puzzle answer from the solution to the logic puzzle. The atmospherics would probably be very nice, and multiple teams could solve at the same time (provided we have a big enough room, which shouldn't be a problem I'd guess).
Obviously, this doesn't have to be a cocktail party (though that was what I was toying with for Mystery Hunt purposes, where it would have just been a downloadable audio file). It could be anything that would work thematically. And it's wide open as to what the answer phrase would be.
Does this sound (a) workable, and (b) interesting enough to pursue? If so, I'll be happy to pursue it. You both know far more about the structure and needs of the game than I do (um, obviously) -- is there some place this seems like it would fit well? Otherwise, I'll look back through the emails and other info and see if there's a place that makes sense to me.
Cheers,
Dave
