Delving into the hidden secrets of the past, we have found a set of puzzles, each of which holds the key to a different mystery. Help us solve these puzzles in order to reveal the truth, discover a new secret, and solve the Year of Mysteries! Each month, we'll reveal a new puzzle. Solve it to reveal more of the truth, and add your name or alias to the leaderboard to see how you rank among the other detectives in the Roll for Combat community!

Get the Year of Mysteries for D&D 5E and Pathfinder, and play as a mysterious creature from folklore and urban legend! Discover the hidden secrets and solve the puzzles of 13 unique mysterious ancestries throughout the year!

Tangle Town

You step into the unusually shaped village square to witness the townsfolk dancing around and around a series of eight maypoles. Letters written on the colorful ribbons they hold twist into words that themselves join to form larger words, but the dancers are moving too fast for you to clearly make them out. Each clue contains three parts, one of them, which will always be the first or third clue, defines an entire 8-letter word, while the other two define smaller sections of the full word, in the same order they appear. For example, a clue reading “Provisional worker delayed establishing pattern” would lead to the words TEMP (provisional worker), LATE (delayed), and TEMPLATE (establishing pattern); in this case, the clue for the whole word was the third clue, but it could have been the first clue. You must determine where to start writing the 8-letter word in a circle around its clue number and whether it is written clockwise or counterclockwise. Each 8-letter word shares two letters with its two neighbors. By examining the shaded letters, you can put an end to this frantic dance by naming the mysterious entity who caused it!