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Story Hunt

Instructions


Story Hunt is a somewhat unusual combination of riddles and storytelling. The object is to find and read an entire story. On the main page, there are links to a number of different stories, but only the first chapter of each is freely available. At the end of the first chapter, you must use clues presented to you to find the next chapter -- and so on, until the story is complete.

It should be noted up front that familiarity with the rest of the RinkWorks site is important to solving the puzzles. You don't need to have explored the entire site, and you can still very likely fare just fine without being previously familiar with it, but very likely you'll need to keep a browser window open to explore RinkWorks to hunt down clues. Many of the puzzles refer to RinkWorks feature names, while others refer to elements within the features. The Site Guide will often be particularly helpful to you.

The puzzles are presented in a slightly different way, depending on which story you undertake. The Adventures of Fenwick Glumber are more puzzle-oriented and less story-oriented: the riddles are interleaved within the story, more likely toward the end of each chapter than the beginning if not throughout. The Strong Woman Chronicles are more story-oriented and less puzzle-oriented: the actual text of the story has nothing to do with the puzzle you must solve to get to the next chapter; rather, a brief riddle can be found at the bottom of each chapter to lead you to the next.

The answer to each puzzle is going to be a word or sequence of letters and/or numbers. All letters are lower case, and there are never any spaces or punctuation. To use the answer to get to the next story, you must insert it into the URL field in your browser. The URL to the first chapter of each story will look like this: http://www.rinkworks.com/storyhunt/N/, where the 'N' is not an actual 'N' but rather a number that corresponds to the number of the story. For the remainder of this illustration, we will assume we are reading story number 1. So the URL to the first chapter is going to be: http://www.rinkworks.com/storyhunt/1/.

When you find the answer to the riddle you must amend this URL to get to the next chapter. Let's say the answer was "rinkworks"; in this case, the link to chapter 2 would be http://www.rinkworks.com/storyhunt/1/rinkworks.shtml. Basically, you add the answer after the story number, then append .shtml. (It is important to remember to end with "shtml" rather than the more usual "html".) At the end of chapter 2, if you determine the answer to that riddle is "stoddard", you would link to http://www.rinkworks.com/storyhunt/1/stoddard.shtml to get to chapter 3, and so on.

Good luck, and if you get stuck early on, don't despair. Try a different story, perhaps, and then come back. After the first few riddles, you'll get the idea, and the puzzles will become a little bit easier.