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!

Ruins of Lost Quandary

You meet an excited archaeologist among the remains of an ancient city. She explains that little is known about the lost civilization of Quandary, but she believes that she is on the verge of a breakthrough. But first she needs to figure out the right places to dig. She explains her methods. “I’ve divided up each of the five most important ruins into five gridded areas, each of them a five-by-five grid separated into five areas indicated by darker lines. I need you to help me pick five dig spots in each ruin, out of the twenty five possible spots in that ruin’s grid, but the spots need to follow certain rules to make sure the digging is safe and thorough: We need there to be exactly one dig spot in each row, column, and area, but to maintain the integrity of the soil, no two dig spots can be adjacent to one another (even diagonally) in the ruin’s grid.

For example, if you chose to dig at the letter ‘S’ in the top left spot in the first ruin, you couldn’t dig in the O, V, T, M, or U that are in the same area, you couldn’t dig in R, or E that are in the same row, you couldn’t dig in the bottom-left R that’s in the same column, and you couldn’t dig in the A that is diagonally adjacent.” Once you’ve correctly determined the five dig spots in each grid, use the runes you’ve dug up to unravel the mystery of Lost Quandary’s architects.