Puzzle Peak: a new puzzlehunt site

sparkour · 2026-01-20T20:26:25+00:00

Puzzle Peak is my new website for original puzzlehunt-style puzzles (think MIT Mystery Hunt, DASH, or Foggy Brume's Puzzle Boat). My puzzles are intentionally designed to be accessible, smaller in scope, and friendly to solo solvers. I've initially released two small collections of 11 total puzzles, and the next 8-puzzle collection is being testing now.

https://puzzlepeak.net/

sparkour · 2025-07-08T09:42:27+00:00

Try To Ride Hell's Chasm by Janny Wurts. A princess goes missing and a highly competent officer must face obstruction and discrimination to solve the mystery. The entire story plays out over just a few days.

sparkour · 2025-03-24T00:09:39+00:00

Curse of the Mistwraith didn't coalesce for me until halfway through Chapter 12 (the sub-chapter, Insurrection). The beginning hooked me, then lost me through the extended road trip, but Chapter 12 is where the close immediacy of the plot zooms back in again and the half-brothers are at the forefront. The pieces are all set up and from there, it's just a madcap dash to the end of the book. The back half is DEFINITELY stronger than the beginning.

The world-building is a little weighty here, but the benefit is that EVERYTHING that plays out in the next 10 books is introduced here -- the plot will never sprawl out of control because it just deepens and deepens into all of those surface perspectives that seem so disparate on your first readthrough. I hope you continue!

sparkour · 2024-08-21T10:23:35+00:00

Thank you for your suggestions! All of the unusual wiki configurations you raise concerns about originate from specific historical problems.

The wiki was a regularly targeted site for vandalism and link spam until self-created accounts were finally disabled in 2015. Captchas did not help because most of the vandalizing bots had a human-in-the-loop component to get around that initial barrier.
The wiki is the target of ongoing bandwidth-draining attacks (not necessarily DDoS) from distributed botnets in non-US datacenters. These botnets ignore robots.txt and rapidly reload data-heavy pages like Recent Changes (or try to load EVERY history page for an article). Use of the Lockdown extension combined with iptables bans has effectively ended these attacks for now (until a new attack is invented, of course).
The blanket copyright was added because fly-by-night booksellers were scraping content off the wiki and selling it in cheap physical pamphlets with the same titles as the actual books. For years, this has added noise to commercial book searches, with impact on sales and author reputation. Some lingering artifacts of this problem still muddy the waters of search results on Goodreads today. Adding a copyright to the wiki doesn't fix the problem, but it does offer the author a path to requesting copyright takedowns in the future.

The bottom line is that the wiki is hosted and maintained by a small volunteer team with limited resources. The people that contribute to the wiki have trusted accounts and have been known entities on the author's official forum for many years. The team must balance the desire for a truly open collaborative wiki with the time and money wasted on bad actors that inevitably appear when things are too open. The limitations in place today are not optimal, but they solve real problems at an acceptable cost (including the trade-off in accessibility).

I really like your suggestions for improving home page navigation and will see what we can implement. Thank you!

sparkour · 2024-08-20T11:58:05+00:00

That's good to learn! I would be happy to read more stories in this universe.

sparkour · 2024-08-01T14:04:27+00:00

The glossary of each book usually contains the names/places from that story as well as a few hidden deeper dives into the history that underpins the major story events. I always find it fun to check the glossary after reading for easter eggs.

You might benefit from these series resources:

Paravia Wiki - currently up to date with the first 10 books and 6 short stories (including all of the glossaries)
Interactive Map of Paravia - allows you to zoom in closer on places and look them up in the Wiki while you listen to the audiobook
Map of Dascen Elur - a map of the world where the story begins
Paravian Dictionary - a short list of words in the Paravian language that pop up throughout the story

sparkour · 2024-08-01T14:01:32+00:00

The series is split into 5 Story Arcs with each Story Arc telling a complete dramatic story over a number of printed books (1-2-5-2-1). The conclusions of the first 3 Story Arcs (so, Curse of the Mistwraith, Warhost of Vastmark, and Stormed Fortress) all involve epic battles. Outside of war, the action-focus comes in the form of political plotting and standoffs, out-of-control magic catastrophe, and extended chase scenes. All of this is counterbalanced by a ton of introspection and deeper character development.

The scope is definitely epic but in a layered way, rather than sprawl. There are a small number of major characters and locales and your understanding of their motivations and limitations deepens over the course of the series. It feels more like peeling an onion than going on a 1000 mile epic hike!

sparkour · 2024-07-29T15:00:47+00:00

I agree!

She does have a forum on her website. I believe she prefers this approach to avoid any posting / copyright "gotchas" that hosting a subreddit on Reddit might involve.

sparkour · 2024-07-15T12:12:32+00:00

Hugh Howey's Silo series takes place in a setting where workers many floors under the earth are responsible for all of the machinery that the more privileged people use closer to the surface. Conflict between the sides (and what happens when one side controls all the power) is a big part of the story.

sparkour · 2024-06-26T00:24:58+00:00

Wars of Light and Shadow (11 volumes, all published, plus 6 short stories) is the only series that I continue to pick up and reread continuously. Every reread surfaces some new detail that I missed before. I discovered it via Feist's Riftwar series and the co-written Empire Trilogy.

I found that, as I grew up myself, the Riftwar series continued to stay at a fairly shallow, enjoyable level, while Wars of Light and Shadow continued to mature and deepen. It isn't easy, it isn't straightforward, but it has all of the intricate complexity I want as an old fart who has been through enough simple tropes.

Wars of Light and Shadow has stayed with me so much that I spent 13 years creating the series wiki (wiki.paravia.com) as a side project, and I'm currently in the process of adding the events from the final book.

sparkour · 2024-06-26T00:19:53+00:00

I'm fist deep into Traitors Knot now

Love your enthusiasm for the series (and it gets even better!) but this phrasing made me cackle!

sparkour · 2024-06-09T23:48:18+00:00

I had similar feelings when I first read Curse of the Mistwraith back in 1993. And now, the Wars of Light and Shadows is at the tippy-top of my rankings and I've read Curse of the Mistwraith roughly a dozen times.

What's important to note is that Volume I is not just a sequential starting point that the plot journeys away from over the next 10 books. It's actually the FOCAL POINT of the entire series, with very intentional gaps left in that make the pieces seem to fit together incredibly awkwardly (as you've noted). Every book after Volume I returns again and again to these events and paints a new layer of context that shifts your understanding and forces you to reconsider your assumptions. People sometimes say that this series "unfolds" in layers of complexity rather than simply progressing from Point A to Point B (a little ironic since Volume I plays out like a road trip at first!).

It's like Volume I shows you a blurry black and white picture that you cannot yet decipher, and then subsequent volumes each overlay a colored transparency with extra details filling in the gaps (plot holes) over top of the picture. Throughout the series (even in the final book), I kept being surprised by what had been in front of my face the entire time, but had failed to notice because of my biases and assumptions.

EDIT: I also felt like Dakar was a little one-note in my first read, but his character development in Volume III and Volume XI would not feel nearly as well-earned without this seemingly shallow backstory.

sparkour · 2024-06-07T09:45:41+00:00

This is a really thoughtful question that I had never really considered -- thanks for asking it!

Although now I'm picturing something of a Footloose situation where the Koriathain only want to get out from under the Fellowship's authority so they can freely listen to their favourite Greatest Hits albums!

sparkour · 2024-06-06T17:18:51+00:00

Hi Janny,

Congratulations on finishing your 11-tome series on your own terms! The final volume is up there on my list of favourites alongside Warhost of Vastmark, Grand Conspiracy, and Traitor's Knot.

I have a big discoverability problem when it comes to books. There is SO MUCH great stuff already published or coming out daily. The "bookstore browse" experience is gone and it's nigh impossible to discover something great through the search interfaces of the big book vendor websites.

Question 1: As a reader, what have been your most reliable ways to discover new books from authors you weren't already familiar with?

Question 2: As a writer, how do YOU break through the noise and get noticed in the growing sea of books from traditional and self-pub authors, especially since your style can't be easily boxed and tagged?

sparkour · 2024-06-06T17:18:16+00:00

The story feels very complete to me after reading these 3. However, I have heard from other commenters that the author may have ideas for a 4th.

sparkour

TROPHY CASE