Puzzles and D'ni religion

Jmp12 · **Joined:** Sun Feb 04, 2007 8:16 pm **Posts:** 101

I'm thinking about the apparent fascination with puzzles that the D'ni had. One of the books about the D'ni kings, the King Naygen notebook, describes puzzles created to protect a vault in the Guild Council chamber constructed on orders of the king. Kadish also created the puzzle in the Watcher's Sanctuary, challenging others to try and solve it, as part of his attempt to bolster his own position as a religious figure, and of course his age Kadish Tolesa has puzzles leading to his treasure vault. Atrus's "places of protection" on Myst Island, (at least as depicted in the game,) also seem like puzzles intentionally designed as sort of eccentric combination locks.

My thought is: perhaps puzzles had a special cultural significance in D'ni culture, either as significant for religious reasons, (as in the Watcher's Sanctuary puzzle,) or perhaps as an art form of sorts. They seem impractical as locks, but perhaps the D'ni enjoyed creating and sharing them the way us surface-dwellers enjoy creating and sharing computer games, stories, music, and so forth?

Not sure we have enough to go on to know how widespread puzzle creation was in D'ni culture, but it seems likely they found them entertaining. And I thought it could be fun for us to speculate.

Khreestrefah · **Joined:** Tue Apr 06, 2010 5:01 pm **Posts:** 163

This connects with something that occurred to me in a discussion on another thread. One of the early fan "puzzles" from the time between Riven and Uru was the D'ni Crossword. This was posed as a list of words to fill into a crossword framework, to yield a clue to the next puzzle, the ultimate "reveal" being the beletsahrah or 'lechugilla' plant as a clue to the location of the Cavern.

This was long supposed to be something Rawa devised more or less on the spot, and it was questioned whether all of the words in the puzzle were "real" D'ni words. But over the intervening years many of these words have been "confirmed" in one way or another. This suggests the possibility that this Crossword is an actual D'ni puzzle, perhaps originally posed with clue to each word, the way our crossword puzzles work.

An even more intriguing possibility, if it is a genuine D'ni puzzle, is that there is a further cryptic layer. Perhaps the words in the puzzle can be rearranged into another hidden message ...

Shorah

korovev · **Posted:** Sat Aug 26, 2017 11:47 am

For reference:

Puzzles and D'ni religion

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