Trivia useful for puzzles

Authoring Story Research and Design
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Croc: Legend of the Gobbos is getting a re-release/re-master in a few days. Here’s a piece of trivia I’ve never seen mentioned anywhere else.

The original manual’s story chapter (at least in in the PC and Saturn versions) paid homage to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

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It’s just silly footnotes, you say. But no, it specifically mentions a Year of the Electric Can Opener. Year of the [Consumer Product] was something Infinite Jest did repeatedly.

On top of that, the game was released around a year and a half after the novel.

Probably not useful for puzzles, but maybe DFW-style back-and-forth footnotes are underused as a choice-based IF mechanic.

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Ever wondered why the Bible is so insistent you not make “graven images” of the Lord? Well, for many different cultures around that time and place, “cult statues” were at the center of their religion! These statues were carefully crafted to a god’s exact specifications, then prepared with a series of rituals known as the Mîs-Pî, so that the god could actually be summoned to earth and physically inhabit their statue. The statue was then washed, fed, entertained, and generally treated the way you’d treat a king or other very important person.

Since these statues would physically house the deity in question, it was not uncommon to steal people’s gods when you sacked their cities, an act known as “godnapping”. The oldest surviving Hittite text is about the king of Nesa going to war against Hattusa to recover a kidnapped god, referred to only as Sius=summin “our deity”. The Hittites called themselves “the People of a Thousand Gods” due to incorporating so many captured deities into their pantheon, and seem to have been the only culture to ever invent new cuneiform signs to more accurately represent foreign sounds. Because if you’ve kidnapped a god from the Hurrians, and you want that god to help you, well…you’d better be able to pray in Hurrian! If a Hurrian king doesn’t automatically know how to speak every language, why would a Hurrian god be any different?

For the Hittites specifically, the gods weren’t always housed in statues; sometimes they would use other iconography, like a gold disc for a sun god (“a” sun god because there were several of those—remember, “a thousand gods”), but more often, it was done with a standing stone called a huwasi (or ZI.KIN, a pun between the Sumerian words for “soul object” and the Akkadian word for “to inhabit”). Outside the major temples, these standing stones were the easiest way to summon a god whenever you needed one.

So why the prohibition in the Ten Commandments? Well, the ancient Hebrews were very insistent that their deity could not be summoned like this, and nobody should ever try it. Given that a decent amount of the Torah was put into its current form while they were being oppressed by the Babylonians, it makes sense that there’d be a lot of emphasis on not doing things the Babylonian way.

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This is becoming less of “trivia useful for puzzles” and more like “trivial tangentially related to puzzles” haha. But keep them coming!

I could see this being part of a language-based puzzle, though. Finding a god named, say, Poseidon, and then having to find the appropriate Greek-named object to offer to him.

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Oh right, I should put some puzzle suggestions too!

The reason I mention the huwasi stones is because they could potentially offer some sort of checkpoint system. You go to a new area, find the stone, perform the summoning ritual, and now your god can reach their influence through that part of the map.

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…just in case, right?

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It tends to end badly when people try! The Roman Empire tried over and over to summon this particular god away from the Jews, promising Him a lot more followers that Judaea could ever offer, in the hopes that He would stop supporting all these bloody rebellions against Roman rule. It never worked.

(The Romans weren’t quite as literal about summoning gods into physical bodies as the Hittites, but they did have a ritual known as “evocation” that they’d do before a battle, asking their enemies’ gods to come support Rome instead. If they then won the battle, then it was proof that those gods were now on Rome’s side, and they got added to the pantheon.)

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Gotta catch 'em all!

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I studied the Evocatio, among many other things, and I strongly disagree that “it never worked” (granted that one needs reading Flavius Joseph with three eyes…), because last time I checked, the Abramitic god indeed get much more followers in Rome, (and an english speaker should got that easily, because in English the Catholic church is called “Roman Catholic”…)

the divine Titus has done the Right Thing in his eyes (the loyalty between the Legions and their generals was mutual), and duly celebrates the Evocatio; he know what he actually was doing (that is, evocating to Rome the God encompassing all other Gods) because, has not only Joseph on his side.

no wonder that the Pope is both bishop of Rome and Supreme Pontiff, the latter title given by a Roman Emperor (Gratian), and is a key point in int’l politics: because one of its key Offices is still existant and active, technically The Empire is still extant and active… (no wonder that the Papal election calls every world leader to Rome…)

so, the Abramitic God was actually summoned on those hills along the Tiber River…

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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A little look into what studying ancient history is like:

Berossus the Chaldaean was an astrologer in the third century BCE who wrote a three-volume history of Babylonia. Until recently, his work was our main source on Babylonian mythology and religious beliefs.

The problem is, Berossus’s history didn’t survive. Fortunately, though, the first-century-BCE historian Alexander Polyhistor wrote a summary of his books, including numerous quotations.

Unfortunately, Polyhistor’s summary also didn’t survive. But in the third century CE, Sextus Julius Africanus included some excerpts of Polyhistor in his enormous Chronographies, a history of the entire world.

Except, the Chronographies didn’t survive either. Still, a century later, Eusebius of Caesaria used large sections of it in his Chronicle, another, shorter, history of the entire world.

Which would be great…if the Chronicle had survived. It didn’t. But in the ninth century, the Byzantine historian George Syncellus wrote a summary of it, and this one finally did survive to modern times.

So until recently, our main source on Babylonia was Syncellus’s summary of Eusebius’s quotations of Africanus’s excerpts of Polyhistor’s summary of Berossus. Berossus himself was probably adapting his history from official state records, but he doesn’t mention any details of them…at least not in the snippets we have.

This is, unfortunately, the usual state of things across 2,000 years of history. Some writers were luckier than others—Christians have spent those 2,000 years making more-or-less-faithful copies of the Gospels, for example, while many other authors were entirely lost and forgotten—but for the most part, any “firsthand” accounts from ancient times are actually sixth-hand at best. This is one of many reasons we have to take ancient historians’ writings with a very large grain of salt. Even if the ancient historians were being entirely accurate and unbiased (which nobody ever is), there are plenty of opportunities for the text to be distorted or rewritten over time.

…but, I did say “until recently”. Because archaeological excavations in Egypt and Mesopotamia—and the lengthy process of deciphering hieroglyphs and cuneiform—eventually uncovered some actual primary sources, written all the way back in Berossus’s day and before! An administrative document from 258 BCE lists a high priest named Bēl-Re’û-Šunu (“Baal is his shepherd”) working at the Esaĝila temple in Babylon—probably Berossus himself, before translation into Greek and Latin and centuries of transmission mangled his name.

What’s the useful part of any of this? Well, kind of more “overall worldbuilding and writing” than “puzzles”, but:

  • It’s very, very easy, practically inevitable, for information to get lost over thousands of years. Unless your characters are immortal, their knowledge of what the world was like millennia ago is probably heavily distorted at best.
  • But, records can survive directly from those times, if they’re written on something durable like stone, metal, or baked clay, or if they’re stored in an ideal climate (Egypt is just about perfect for preserving organic material like papyrus). And those records might confirm, clarify, or completely rewrite the knowledge that’s been passed down through all those years.
  • History is cool!
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Daniel, do you understand that you’re suggesting this also to a military/Naval historian ?

Battlefield excavation and Naval forensics has given too many insights on how things really happened, and trust me, the debate can became wild… but what about a plot about excavating a battlefield, and ending being targeted by the services of a country which disagree on the new insights ?

The plot isn’t limited to thriller/espionage genre, but can easily ported to SF (space wrecks are relatively easy to access…) and fantasy (specifically, there’s an IF fantasy world where last war was fought 10,000 years earlier, AND has someone capable of reliving past lives thru magic… :wink: )

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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Following up on the above:

Now, Berossus is still a valuable source, because the Babylonians themselves didn’t really write histories. Historiography was primarily a Greek invention, in the West; in the Near East, we mostly have annals (“this is what I, the greatest king of all time, did year by year”) and chronologies (“in this year, X was king; in this year, Y was king”) and sometimes individual anecdotes (“this is a weird thing that probably happened a hundred years ago”) without an overarching narrative or analysis of what happened. Berossus, who had studied the Greek histories and tried to write a history of Babylonia in the same style, had more narrative to his books than any of our Mesopotamian sources.

But, even if we don’t have ancient historians writing what we’d now consider actual histories, we do have tons and tons of administrative documents and letters, which we can piece together narratives from! For example:

Rabia-ša-Marduk (or Rabâ-ša-Marduk; the š is conventionally pronounced like a “sh”) was a very uncommon name in ancient Mesopotamia. It literally means “great are the works of Marduk”, but as far as we know, only two people in attested history have that name, and they lived centuries apart. So whenever we see that name, we can make a good guess it’s one of those people.

Receipts from the city of Nippur show that Rabia-ša-Marduk was quite good at his job, because he was consistently being paid well for his services. One of these receipts specifies explicitly that he was a “healer” or “physician” (A.ZU). Eventually he was supplied with provisions for a trip to Babylon.

In Aššur (not Babylon), archaeologists found a tablet giving eighteen recipes for curing headaches of various types, signed “Rabia-ša-Marduk”. The handwriting on the tablet is Babylonian, not Assyrian, so this was probably from a Babylonian library that was looted by the Assyrians. And this tablet contains several recipes that were later included in a standard textbook of magic and medicine, known as the Therapeutic Texts—but in an earlier, less edited form.

A couple decades later, the Great King of the Hittite Emperor writes a conciliatory letter to the King of Babylon, addressing some earlier complaints (which unfortunately we haven’t found). Apparently the predecessor of the King of Babylon had sent a highly-skilled exorcist and healer to serve at the court of the Hittite Great King’s predecessor’s predecessor, and the Hittites had never let them return to Babylon.

In the letter, the Hittite Great King emphasizes that he’s not in the habit of detaining artisans: the exorcist had died of sickness shortly after arriving, but the healer, Rabia-ša-Marduk, was allowed to leave any time he wanted. He’d simply chosen to stay at court because what he was offered there—a grand estate and the hand of a Hittite princess in marriage—was better than what Babylon could offer!

We also know, from many other sources, that Babylonian magic was famous across the Near East, and Babylonian exorcists and healers were in high demand. Even if the Hittites thought their practices were strange and foreign, we also have records of adapted Babylonian rituals being integrated into Hittite use centuries before Rabia-ša-Marduk was brought in.

So putting this all together, what do we get? It seems like Rabia-ša-Marduk was born in Nippur and trained to be a healer there. He was quite talented and well-paid, and soon headed to Babylon to ply his trade in the capital, where some recipes he wrote would eventually be integrated into the standard textbooks on medicine. He must have been one of the most famous healers in all of Babylon, a place famous for its talented magicians of all types, because when the King of Babylon wanted to curry favor with the Hittites, Rabia-ša-Marduk was sent to serve at the Hittite court. In fact, he was so talented that the next King of Babylon wanted him back, but he refused to return—because he’d been offered a marriage into the royal family if he stayed in Hittite land!

(Of course, the Hittites might have been lying, and Rabia-ša-Marduk could have been coerced to stay—but given that he was probably in his 60s or 70s by that point, it doesn’t seem like any threats would be necessary. Uprooting an established life with a family at that age probably wouldn’t have been an appealing prospect.)

We don’t have any ancient biographies or chronicles about this man, but by piecing together all the different administrative records, we’re able to get a decent picture of his life. And I find that absolutely fascinating. Most of the primary sources we have from the ancient world are tax documents and accounting spreadsheets rather than grand epics, but those records can still tell us a lot about the lives of the individual people in them.

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In Bronze Age Mesopotamia, there was a famous and very elaborate (nine tablets long!) ceremony known as the Maqlu (literally “Burning”), intended to protect someone from witchcraft. It starts by preparing a crucible, aligning it astrologically with the current positions of the stars, then drawing a magic circle around it to protect it from outside influence. Then clay and wax effigies of the witch are prepared and thrown into the crucible as the exorcist recites a series of incantations:

Whoever you are, witch, who took clay for my (figurine) from the river,
who buried figurines of me in the ‘dark house’,
who buried my water in a tomb,
who picked up scraps (discarded by) me from the dust-heaps,
who tore off the fringe (of a garment) of mine at the fuller’s house,
who gathered dirt (touched by) my feet from a threshold,
[…]
She trusts in her artful witchcraft,
but I (trust) in the steady light of the Fire-god, the judge.
Fire-god, burn [her], Fire-god, incinerate her,
Fire-god, overpower her!

If successful, this was supposed to make the witch burn, melt, and/or explode as the figurines did. The ritual continued all through the night, alternating between spells intended to destroy the witch and spells intended to protect the victim.

But wait a second. The “witchcraft” described here involves making effigies of someone in order to harm them. Isn’t that exactly the same thing the exorcist is doing in this ritual?

No, it’s not: there’s one key difference. The magic done by exorcists (Akkadian ashipu) was sanctioned by the state, while the magic done by witches (Akkadian kasshapu or kasshaptu depending on gender) was not. It seems like the concept of “witchcraft” arose in Mesopotamia when the government and the major temples wanted to establish a monopoly on magic and stamp out any unauthorized sources. So “witchcraft” is defined as any magic that’s performed without official government approval, the same way the police taking someone prisoner is an “arrest” but me taking someone prisoner would be “kidnapping”.

So if you want historical precedent for a government trying to establish a monopoly on magic and use it to incinerate any rogue sorcerers, Mesopotamia is a good one! There are plenty of examples of authorities trying to establish themselves as the only source of wisdom and religious truth, but this is the only one I know of where using sympathetic magic to explode someone was punished by getting exploded with that same sympathetic magic. If the state wants a monopoly on violence, it stands to reason that should include magical violence too!

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…so my takeaway here is that officially-licensed wizard’s guilds are 100% historically accurate.

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If their minds work like human minds, even if they were immortal and lived through the events, their knowledge is probably distorted as well. I mostly remember what the world was like 5 or 10 years ago, but there are a lot of stuff that I have forgotten, or misremember. Mandela effects and other kind of fake memories are quite common, and then there are just details that we forget about because they didn’t interest us all that much, or stuff that we remember in the wrong order, counterintuitive truths, nostaligia, etc.

Of course, if I want to find informations like “who were the Health ministers in my country in the COVID era”, I don’t have to rely on my memories and can double check online and get accurate information easily. But an immortal being who was alive thousands of years ago couldn’t do that because the sources aren’t there, or aren’t as accurate as they would like.

Maybe there is a game mechanic somewhere, where an immortal being is trying to recreate a very old memory and has to go back and forth between what they think they are remembering, what the non-immortal historians have managed to piece together, and what the sources tell. Maybe the historian’s records could help add details (right or wrong) to a memory, lead to remember an old friend’s name, someone who is mentioned in primary sources that no one thought to investigate before because they weren’t there and that name means nothing to them.

Maybe I’m just rambling, but I do think it could be an interesting loop.

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In high school, I did Latin. One of my history projects was about Caligula. I used some superstitious stuff from Suetonius that a book I was using was using. For instance, Suetonius wrote this:

"Many omens of Gaius’ approaching murder were reported. While the statue of Olympian Jupiter was being dismantled before removal to Rome at his command, it burst into such a roar of laughter that the scaffolding collapsed and the workmen took to their heels; and a man named Cassius appeared immediately afterwards saying that he had been ordered, in a dream, to sacrifice a bull to Jupiter. The Capitol at Capua was struck by lightning on the Ides of March, which some interpreted as portending another imperial death…

I passed on the editorialising of the book in my project, which was something like, “How many of these things actually happened we don’t know.”

When my teacher marked the project, she wrote “None?” in the margin.

-Wade

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On the note of imortals and the fallacies of memory…

Consider how oftenpeople of older generations "Don’t understand the way kids talk these days, or how many native English speakers alive today struggle with the English of Shakespeare or the King James Bible and the general difficulty of learning a new language in adult hood.

Now stretch that out to centuries or millenia of lived experience. How hard would it be for an immortal to keep up with the evolution of language sufficiently to converse with modern people? How much would an immortal born in a time when literacy was a rare skill and who was not literate in their youth struggle as literacy becomes a common skill everyone is expected to be proficient in? And, if they did manage to keep up with linguistic shifts well enough to function in modern society, would they eventually forget their mother tongue as it dies out among the mortals?

Imagine being an immortal trying to remember something from a childhood a millennium past, having been both literate and a prolific note taker in your you and diligent archivist in your immortality, only to realize your well preserved childhood diaries are incomprehensible because you learned to write in those new fangled Latin letters when the mortals adopted them and have corresponded with the Latin alphabet for centuries and neglected to practice reading and writing the runes that no one has used seriously since the Latin alphabet took over… And that’s a young, Anglo-Saxon immortal in modern day England. Someone who’s been around since Ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia has probably had to learn several writing systems in their lives if they have always been literate.

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Thanks for the insights, mewtamer !

Y’know that I’m indirectly taking this issue (people looks at perceived ‘kinks’, but overlooked the 10,000+ year old war veteran; I’m old enough to have conversed with people whose fought the first world war; guess why 1) Lansothe’s war actually ended all wars… and 2) why I ended being a Naval and military historian…) but in the Raileian case, I think that Nature gives brains commensurate to the life expectancy.

OTOH, on fallacy of memories, if one became immortal for NON-natural causes, is inevitable that the “mass storage” and “file system” of the brain hits its natural limits. (I appreciated a quip in an old RPG bestiary about “lichs are always insane” I read some decades ago…) so, your narrative positing are definitively sound. I can even posit that, if we take the legend that Cain’s mark was vampirism, Cain itself don’t remember that he’s Cain and more generally, vampire’s memory issues IS an interesting twist ready to be thrown into the Materia of Vampires !

now, Filiaa, as you have surely realised now, I actually worked along these very lines (not with immortals, of course, but definitively elders…) and I can safely assert that Medals are given for memorable actions, veterans have issues with dates, marches and so on, but remember perfectly the action when got the Medal. so, on the basis of direct experience, I think that your suggested narrative is not only very solid and sound, but can be based around not only primary sources, but also reliquies and mementos…
[after some minutes of “brain in high gear” on Isekai] this allows even an harmonic merging between the classical “treasure hunt” and the “knowledge and lore hunt” I’m advocating. Everyone kept mementos of their HS and academic days…

Trivia definitively more than useful, and not only for puzzles…

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio

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JRR Tolkien’s fantasy langauges evolve over time, even if they are languages of immortal people. Sindarin and Quenya are descended from the same older language, before a few thousand years of cultural separation. It’s interesting to consider that when the elves go West at the end of LOTR they’ll probably encounter whole new languages - how strange it would be to meet with family/friends you have not seen for thousands of years, then realise your languages have diverged as well as your experiences?

For some trivia of my own, book sizes are sometimes described as folio, quarto, octavo etc. A quarto book is commonly understood to mean a book about 30cm tall. However, traditionally speaking, these terms refer to the book construction rather than its size. A folio is made by simply folding each sheet of paper in half to form 2 leaves, or 4 pages of the book. For a quarto fold the sheet in half then half again, to form 4 leaves / 8 pages (sometimes the book is left ‘uncut’ and the reader has to slit the pages open themselves with a knife). Fold the paper 3 times to get an octavo, 4 times for a 16mo, and so on.

Older printers mostly used the same paper sizes, so a quarto was always about 30cm tall, and over time the terms shifted definitions to mean standard book sizes rather than the method of construction.

But in hobbyist bookbinding circles, terms like folio/quarto/octavo retain the original meaning and refer to very different sizes. Hobbyists aren’t starting from the big sheets of paper that professional printers use. We mostly buy A4 or letter paper, so a modern handbound quarto most likely means a book of ~15cm tall, or A6 size if starting from A4, made from piece of copy paper folded in half twice.

Maybe there’s a puzzle here where you have to search for the right book in a library, described as an octavo, so you go in expecting a book about the size of a regular hardcover; then have to realise it’s actually a letter-octavo, meaning a pocket sized book ~12cm tall. Or some secret information is written in a 32mo, and the player has to work out that’s a tiny 5cm tall book, and to look for it in small hiding places a regular book would not fit in.

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Duly taken note :wink:

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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Now, what do you call a book made from binding a stack of unfolded sheets along one edge?

And if a modern standard quattro is ~30cm tall, that suggests an unfolded sheet of A2 as the starting point, assuming it’s a quattro in the folding sense… and that a 16-tro made from A0 would be the same size as a quattro made of A2… and going to extremes, a single sheet of A0 could be turned into a 512-page book of A8 size… though good luck actually pulling off the 256-tro fold(the record for repeatedly folding paper in half is higher than 8 times, but because of how thick the stack gets and how much paper bunches up in the folds, you need really big sheets of paper and I’m not sure A0 will cut it).

ANd speaking of paper sizes, it’s well known that cutting a rectangle with an aspect ratio of sqrt(2):1 in half across the shorter dimention or joining two such rectangles along their long sides forms smaller/larger rectangles with the same aspect ratio, and both the A and b-series of paper sizes are based on this(though they appoximate the irrational sqrt(2) to the nearest millimeter).

What isn’t as well known is that a rectangle of sqrt(n):1 can be similarly divided or combined in sets of n rectangles to form rectangles with the same aspect ratio.

To illustrate:

sqrt(n):1 is the aspect ratio of the starting rectangle.

Cut it into n rectangles across the short dimention and we get 1:sqrt(n)/n

convert from ratio to fraction, we get 1/(sqrt(n)/n)

Division by fraction is multiplication by reciprocal so we get 1 * (n/sqrt(n))

We’re not allowed to have radicals in the demoninator so we multiple by sqrt(n)/sqrt(n) to get (N*sqrt(n))/n and simplying gets us sqrt(n)/1, the same aspect ratio as the original.

Oh, and the standard size for a modern Tarot deck is a nearest millimeter approximation of sqrt(3), so you can esaily scale a deck larger or smaller by powers of 3. Just in case you want to have a Trittro tome for extra magic… or a heptattro to go the extra magical route with a sqrt(7) aspect ratio.

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