The Keeper’s House is a puzzle website. The puzzles are just for ‘fun’: there are no significant prizes.
Many of the puzzles were written for an online community called Tuataria, centred around the work of the author, podcaster, YouTuber, philanthropist, football enthusiast, and all-round good egg John Green. Mr Green created various puzzles and online scavenger hunts to pre-promote his 2017 book Turtles All the Way Down: collaboration in solving these led to the creation of Tuataria and, in turn, this website.
No prior knowledge is required to solve most of the puzzles, but a knowledge of John Green’s work and interests would significantly help in places. However, without knowing Tuataria, many of the in-jokes will just pass you straight by, mostly harmlessly.
Your host here is The Keeper of the Hints👻💨, a somewhat chaotic fictional character that evolved out of guiding collaboration on the original 2017 puzzle hunts. He is conspicuously derivative of the work of, amongst others, Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, both of which wrote this sort of thing much better, and whose work you’d be much better off enjoying.
The Keeper exists everywhere simultaneously in space and time, because it’s fun. However, he generally uses British English spelling, because he thinks it looks clever and he enjoys hanging out in a place that drinks a lot of tea. In the puzzles and passwords, the Keeper therefore also tends to ignore diacritical marks and other letter variants, including accents (à, é, î), cedillas (ç), hačeks and carons (š), bars (ø), overrings (å), and diareses and umlauts (ö). Passwords are always lowercase and contain neither punctuation nor spaces – nothing but the 26 letters of the standard English alphabet.
The Keeper’s puzzles make no use of hidden links or images or other similar trickery on web pages, mainly because he’s not good enough a coder to do that. It may be possible to break this website by, amongst other things, brute force methods or general hackery. There’s very little point in your doing so, as you won’t even win the smug satisfaction of solving the puzzles properly. As teachers like to say, you’re only cheating yourself.
All text and puzzles on this website were written by and are copyright Rob Linham (@radinden). They draw on the rich tradition of puzzling and puzzle hunts, including experience notably of Puzzled Pint and DASH, but also bastardise the purity of puzzling in ways that will doubtless make experienced puzzlers quite irate. While the puzzles have been fairly thoroughly checked, errors have a way of creeping in and destroying the whole thing, like weevils unto biscuits. Your humble writer offers a pre-emptive apology and a shrug, but can be emailed at rob@linham.co.uk with corrections nonetheless.
The header image on the website is Cotswold Cottage by Maia C under Creative Commons on Flickr. The site is built on WordPress using the Twenty Seventeen theme.
There are no clues or puzzles on this page, because that would be the wrong sort of silly.