Ten years. Ten riddles. One hidden message.
A few days ago I promised a second contest, and here it is. This one is bigger, longer, and rather more devious than a screenshot draw.
How it works
Starting today, a new riddle unlocks every three days (at noon, server time), from August 14 through to September 10 (Riddle ten’s date isn’t quite set in stone. There’s a good reason for that, and you’ll find out in due course.).
Ten riddles in total, one for each year this site has been going.
Every riddle you solve reveals one fragment of a hidden message. Collect all ten fragments, work out the order they go in, and submit the complete message. Everyone who gets it right goes into the prize draw.
That’s the whole game.
Where the riddles will take you
Not all of them live on this site.
Some send you digging through the decoration database. One points you at the official LOTRO site. And several send you into the game itself, to track down a specific NPC or a scene you may well have walked past a hundred times without ever stopping.
All of the in-game locations are free-to-play zones, reachable after the intro, with no quest prerequisites. If you’re on the wrong server or haven’t played in a while, rolling a fresh character takes three minutes and costs nothing (you’ll need a char on Sting).
The prizes
Thanks to the LOTRO team, there's an awesome prize pool this time. 20 winners in total:
| Prize | Winners | |
|---|---|---|
| Tier 1 | 400 Homesteading Coins + a Kingdoms of Harad: Ultimate Fan Bundle expansion code | 1 |
| Tier 2 | 400 Homesteading Coins | 1 |
| Tier 3 | 1,000 LOTRO Points | 3 |
| Tier 4 | 500 LOTRO Points | 5 |
| Tier 5 | 100 LOTRO Points | 10 |
How the draw works: every correct entry goes into the same pool, and winners are drawn completely at random. The draw runs from Tier 1 down to Tier 5, and each participant can win only one prize, once your name comes out, it's removed from the remaining tiers.
Solving fast earns you nothing but bragging rights. The tenth person to finish has exactly the same odds as the first.
The rules
One entry per person.
Duplicate submissions from the same person will be merged, and only the most recent one counts. Entering several times using different email addresses is cheating, and any entries found doing it will be removed from the draw entirely.
No riddle ever expires.
Every one of them stays open until submissions close. Miss a few while you're away in August? Come back in September and catch up. Nothing is lost.
Hints unlock automatically, 48 hours after each riddle opens.
They're hidden behind a spoiler, so you'll never have one ruin a riddle by accident. Try to solve it without first, if you can.
Your progress is saved in your browser only.
If you clear your browsing data or switch devices, you'll need to solve those riddles again (they're still open, so nothing is truly lost). There's a Save my progress button on the hunt page that downloads your fragments as a text file. Use it. Really.
Submissions close on September 16 at 11:59pm (server time).
Winners are drawn at random from all correct entries and announced on September 18.
Cheating won't be tolerated.
Multiple entries, and any attempt to game the draw, mean disqualification. Ten years of this community have run on trust, and I'd rather not start policing it now.
A word on sharing
Let's be honest about this: the answers will circulate. Someone will solve riddle 4 within the hour and post about it on Discord. I can't stop that, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
What I'd really encourage is that you try each riddle yourself first. That's the whole point of the thing, and finding a hidden NPC on your own is worth a great deal more than being handed a name.
But if you get properly stuck, or you just want to compare notes with someone, go ahead. The draw is random among everyone who gets the message right, so a player who was helped along has exactly the same odds as one who found everything alone. Nobody loses out.
So talk about it. Argue about riddle 8. That's half the fun, and after ten years of this community, it would be strange to pretend otherwise.
Ready?
The first riddle is live now.
And if you haven't entered the screenshot contest yet, that one runs until 26 August: Anniversary Screenshot Contest.
Good luck. See you on the other side of riddle ten.
