'Metal Bunny's Malicious and Delicious and Malformed Diamond of Mental Misery with the Sublime Sigil of Superior and Stressful Suffering of Dastardly

[Metal Bunny]

This is the quest result for;
Metal Bunny's Malicious and Delicious and Malformed Diamond of Mental Misery with the Sublime Sigil of Superior and Stressful Suffering of Dastardly and Diabolical Doom!

Or sigil or diamond of doom, for short.

I wanted to put this up on the.. 25th of december 2010, but I got distracted and then promptly forgot.


So.. I'm going to lay out the quest here, which is just 1 picture. Then some hints in spoilers.
Then, the answer in spoilers.
Then, how to actually solve it, in spoilers again.
Then, who actually solved it and why I stopped after 1 winner, because apparently, it was too hard to find more than 1 winner ¬_¬.

So here is the quest.
[attachment=2542:Sigil of doom puzzle.png]
That's it. Nothing else.
When it became clear that no one was brave enough to torture themselves, I added hints in a couple of stages.
[log=Hints]
[log=First Stage]
Color tips: The colors of the dots and stripes are important, the monotonous color of the squares are not. The colors of the squares are a hint at best. This puzzle is designed so that color blind people can solve it as well.

Shape tips: Every shape is important, but the circles and stripes are separate from the squares.

A line is a line and a circle is a circle, not a slightly bigger or smaller one.

Method tips: Concentrate on the colors, they are different for a reason, but they are surprisingly similar. Find out what the colors mean and you will know almost everything you need to know.
[/log]
[log=Second stage]
Not including the ugly color of the diamond itself and the black outlining, there are a total of 24 colours.
As said before, every shape is important, but the colors are completely separate of the shapes.
[/log]
[log=Last Stage]
First word spells ‘Welcome’.
The shapes will tell you where the first word starts.
[/log]
[/log]

Alrighty then, the answer:
[log=Answer]
The correct answer was *drum roll*
[log=lol]
Send me a pm with a picture of me, at Willow's shop, saying lol, and then say that the magic number is 175.
[/log]
[/log]

The method! Yay!
[log=Method]
I decided I wanted to make a tiered quest, or puzzle, but that these tiers, or layers or levels, had to be interlocking, or go beyond the convention.

Most quests are made in such a way that you can't continue without solving something else first. I wanted mine to be slightly different.

What I did was take a really generic and simple way of making a secret message; I substituted the alphabet for something else.
What people usually do is turn A into b, or x, or even m and subsequently make B into c, or a or even n.

What I did was slightly more nasty.

The hint (you did look at the hints right?), of 'there are only 24 colours', indicate implicitly, that I substituted the alphabet into a series of colours. Oh noes, the horror~!
Yes, there are 26 letters in the alphabet, but most people 'should' know that in a secret message, you don't always use all 26 letters. The letter X for instance, is almost never used.
I didn't use the letters X and J.

That was the first tier of one part of the puzzle.

The symbols, meaning the stripes and circles, or - and . , were very simple. Very simple *cough- some of you were thinking too complex -cough*.
It was morse code. You know, where they also use - and .?

Now here is something nasty that I did. I made the morse code stay inside the squares, but the secret message of the colours go outside of the boundary.
Meaning that the morse code was supposed to be read within the squares, but that the words of the secret message could be broken down into two, with one half in one square and the other half in another square.

If you deciphered the morse code, which wasn't that hard, then you realize that they are numbers.
They were numbered from 1 to 49, as it was a square of 7 by 7. If you look at the way they are ordered, it may not make any sense, but to help you out, it's a magic square order 7.
Google is your friend.

Anyway, the morse code was only useful for showing you what the order of the squares was. (read the hints).
With the very last hint, you could've started deciphering the colours. (read the hints).

Once you deciphered the colours (which could've been a real hassle, only the very last hint of 'welcome' would've made this a whole lot easier.), the following message would appear:

Welcome to Metal Bunny(’)s Malicious and Delicious and Malformed Diamond of Magnificent Mental Misery
Solve this riddle and perform the task to claim your wp reward
Sadly though you will not get any hints or tips for the riddle
When you stand before three paths diverging
With equal amounts of towers
That nurture new winds emerging
To gain great wishing powers
Travel one must and do their best
To catch me red handed in the act
In place from four strides to the west
Of breaking the anti lol making pact
Then send it to me with the magic numbers

Ah. How refreshing. For once I actually made an easy riddle. (I was thinking about going overboard with the interlocking stuff and crossing boundaries and do the riddle in dutch or latin, so that you'd actually still have to translate it, but that would've just been cruel.) (and I was feeling lazy).

Anyway, the morse code and the squares now come into play, even though they were given at the start. You have to know that it's a magic square, in order to send me not just a pm with me saying lol in it at willow's shop, but also the actual magic numbers. Which was just a magic number, but I was to lazy to change the whole frigging message, just to remove 1 letter.
I know this wouldn't have been a problem, because absolutely none of you, except for one, actually came this far. Really, was it that hard?
[/log]

The only person to successfully complete this puzzle was VonUngernSternberg
Not to mention that he was the only person to do it within the 9 frigging months I had this quest going, lol.
He also did it before the last stage hints, so.. Yeah. Shame on the rest of you .
Kudos to him, he got a wp.

Also, thanks for Shadowseeker for some test help.

Edited January 26, 2011 by Metal Bunny

[tankfans]

It was hard...

[duxie]

[size=3][font=verdana,geneva,sans-serif]i still don't get this... how to get the final answer: "[color=#282828]*drum roll*"? [/color][/font][/size]
[size=3][font=verdana,geneva,sans-serif]solved till poem, but had no clue how to find out the "magic numbers"...[/font][/size]

[Tipu]

I didn't know such a Quest was running. Aw i would have solved it.
Darn it missed a WP....

[Burns]

Yeah, and that quest closed a year ago, no need for further necromancy.