[UA] An Apartment of Puzzles and Riddles

[Andrew Winnenberg]

Building (pun intended) off the ideas above, this seems like a great
setting for a campaign. The characters are a family living in the
apartment who, as they solve the puzzles, are gradually drawn into the
occult underground, and introduce the underground to their neighbors.
Or maybe they keep everything they find out to themselves, only
activating the final puzzle and breathing new life into Mechanomancy
as the climax to the campaign.

You could have a lot of fun with character development in a situation
like this too. Maybe the characters start off without obsessions, only
to develop their obsessions through their interactions with the
building. Even if they start with obsessions the puzzles could
gradually shape them in new directions.

And what happens when Abel unwittingly sets up a safe-house for TNI in
the building?

I may have to run this.

On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 10:30 AM, Anthony H. <ars.mysteriorum at gmail.com> wrote:
> 42?
>
> On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 9:08 AM, Bret Allen <arcturus91 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Now that is awesome. I would kill for that apartment (or more so for that
>> kind of money)
>>
>>
>>
>> In ua terms I would be worried that solving these riddles and puzzles is
>> gradually programming the minds of the family through symbolic manipulation
>> and thought processes.
>>
>>
>>
>> Maybe a huge mechanomantic device which requires the family to be it's
>> 'software', running through the machine like rats through a maze,
>> programming the family and being the ultimate moving parts for the machine.
>>
>>
>>
>> When they are done, perhaps they will help to solve some arcane equation
>> about human existence?
>>
>>
>>
>> Bret Allen
>>
>> ==========
>>
>> Editor - Sleepwalkers Magazine
>>
>> www.sleepwalkersmagazine.com
>>
>> www.sleepwalkersphotography.com
>>
>> tel -01782822750
>>
>> mob - 07795320920
>>
>> hq - 2 Queens Row
>>
>> Bournes Bank
>>
>> Burslem
>>
>> Stoke-on-Trent
>>
>> ST6 3FA
>>
>>
>>
>> From: ua-bounces at lists.unknown-armies.com
>> [mailto:ua-bounces at lists.unknown-armies.com] On Behalf Of Anthony H.
>> Sent: 13 June 2008 15:00
>> To: Unknown Armies
>> Subject: [UA] An Apartment of Puzzles and Riddles
>>
>>
>>
>> There's an apartment in New York on Fifth Avenue that an architect has
>> made into a puzzle laden with intricate riddles for the children of the
>> tenants. What will happen once it is solved? Is there more to this than
>> child's play?
>>
>> Here's the story.
>>
>> ___________________________________________
>>
>> Mystery on Fifth Avenue
>>
>>
>>
>> By PENELOPE GREEN
>>
>> Published: June 12, 2008
>>
>>
>>
>> THINGS are not as they seem in the 14th-floor apartment on upper Fifth
>> Avenue. At first blush the family that occupies it looks to be very much of
>> a type. The father, Steven B. Klinsky, 52, runs a private equity company;
>> the mother, Maureen Sherry, 44, left her job as a managing director for Bear
>> Stearns to raise their four young children (two boys and two girls); and the
>> dog, LuLu, is a soulful Lab mix rescued from a pound in Louisiana.
>>
>>
>>
>> They are living in a typical habitat for the sort of New Yorkers they
>> appear to be: an enormous '20s-era co-op with Central Park views (once part
>> of a triplex built for the philanthropist Marjorie Merriweather Post),
>> gutted to its steel beams and refitted with luxurious flourishes like
>> 16th-century Belgian mantelpieces and custom furniture made from exotic
>> woods with unpronounceable names.
>>
>> But some of that furniture and some of those walls conceal secrets —
>> messages, games and treasures — that make up a Rube Goldberg maze of systems
>> and contraptions conceived by a young architectural designer named Eric
>> Clough, whose ideas about space and domestic living derive more from
>> Buckminster Fuller than Peter Marino.
>>
>> The apartment even comes with its own book, part of which is a fictional
>> narrative that recalls "The Da Vinci Code" (without the funky religion or
>> buckets of blood) and "From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E.
>> Frankweiler," the children's classic by E. L. Konigsburg about a brother and
>> a sister who run away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and discover — and
>> solve — a mystery surrounding a Renaissance sculpture. It has its own
>> soundtrack, too, with contributions by Kate Fenner, a young Canadian singer
>> and songwriter with a lusty, alternative, Joni Mitchell-ish sound, with whom
>> Mr. Clough fell in love during the project.
>>
>> It all began simply enough, Ms. Sherry said, when she and her husband
>> bought the 4,200-square-foot apartment for $8.5 million in 2003.
>>
>> "I just didn't want it to be this cookie-cutter, Upper East Side, Fifth
>> Avenue kind of place," she said.
>>
>> The six-foot-tall Ms. Sherry doesn't fit the mold of Fifth Avenue either:
>> she is a former triathlete and nonfiction writer who is more interested in
>> her children's sneakers than in the offerings of the shoe department at
>> Barneys.
>>
>> Architects she met with made very cookie-cutterish proposals, until she
>> met Mr. Clough, now 35, who was a friend of a friend, and they got to
>> talking. He had smart ideas, like moving the front door and eliminating the
>> very grand and formal front hall, the kind with marble floors and too many
>> doors "that you'd put a round table in the middle of and flowers on top of
>> that," Ms. Sherry said. "A total waste of space."
>>
>> What Ms. Sherry didn't realize until much later was that Mr. Clough had a
>> number of other ideas about her apartment that he didn't share with her. It
>> began when Mr. Klinsky threw in his two cents, a vague request that a poem
>> he had written for and about his family be lodged in a wall somewhere, Ms.
>> Sherry said, "put in a bottle and hidden away as if it were a time capsule."
>> (Ms. Sherry said that her husband is both dogged and romantic, a guy
>> singularly focused on the welfare of children, not just his own. Mr. Klinsky
>> runs Victory Schools, a charter school company that seeds schools in
>> neighborhoods around the country, as well as an after-school program in East
>> New York that his own children help out with regularly.)
>>
>> That got Mr. Clough, who is the sort of person who has a brainstorm on a
>> daily basis, thinking about children and inspiration and how the latter
>> strikes the former. "I'd just read something about Einstein being inspired
>> by a compass he'd been given as a child," he said. The Einstein story set
>> Mr. Clough off, and he began to ponder ways to spark a child's mind. "I was
>> thinking that maybe there could be a game or a scavenger hunt embedded in
>> the apartment — that was the beginning," he said.
>>
>> Before long, his firm, 212box, was knee-deep in code and cipher books,
>> furnituremakers were devising secret compartments, and Mr. Clough's former
>> colleague, Heather Bensko, an architectural and graphic designer who had
>> been his best friend at the Yale School of Architecture, found herself
>> researching the lives of 40 historical figures, starting with Francis I of
>> France and ending with Mrs. Post.
>>
>> Ms. Bensko said she began writing chapters for a book, imagining scenes
>> from the childhoods of those inspirational figures and trying to connect
>> them. When that didn't pan out as a narrative technique, she invented two
>> best friends living in New York City who discover a mystery in an apartment
>> and, in the course of unraveling the mystery, a sort of treasure hunt, they
>> "meet" the historical figures.
>>
>> All of that was tied into gizmos Mr. Clough, Ms. Bensko and others in
>> their office hid in the apartment — without telling the clients — in a way
>> that is almost too complicated to explain.
>>
>> The renovation took a year and a half, and Mr. Clough, who acted as
>> construction manager, brought it in for $300 a square foot, a rather
>> conservative figure given the neighborhood and the scope of the project.
>> Designing and producing the apartment's hidden features, however, including
>> its book and music, took four years, said Mr. Clough, who absorbed much of
>> the cost in terms of his own billable hours, and relied on the generosity of
>> more than 40 friends and artisans who became captivated by the project. He
>> said he "begged, borrowed and stole" from them "in the collaborative
>> process."
>>
>> "People were definitely not paid," he said, "and we extend our thanks. It
>> absorbed the minds of many people."
>>
>> In assembling talents for his project, Mr. Clough aimed high. His first
>> choice for the author of the book, which contains clues to the scavenger
>> hunt in addition to the mystery story, was Jonathan Safran Foer, whose work
>> contains its own sort of coded narrative pyrotechnics. Mr. Clough sent him a
>> little tease, a Rubik's Cube of a sculpture made of anodized aluminum,
>> encased in an acrylic cube that opens into a puzzle stamped with his firm's
>> phone number and the word "Please."
>>
>> Mr. Foer was intrigued and gave him a call. In an e-mail recently, Mr.
>> Foer recalled that his daughter had just been born, and he was adrift in a
>> fog of new parenthood. "It was a very good piece of mail that came at a very
>> bad time," he wrote. "I was losing and ignoring all kinds of things that I
>> shouldn't have. Did we speak on the phone? The whole thing was so dreamy I
>> can't really remember. In fact, the project was never described to me as
>> simply as you did in your e-mail. Had it been, I would have rushed to do it.
>> I suppose that's the price one pays for being as mysterious as Clough is. Or
>> as skeptical as I am."
>>
>> The sculptor Tom Otterness was another hoped-for collaborator, but Mr.
>> Clough said Mr. Otterness's acquiescence was conditional on Mr. Foer's, and
>> anyway he would have needed to be paid. "Of course I couldn't have done it
>> for free," Mr. Otterness said this week.
>>
>> The apartment is quite attractive and perfectly functional in all the
>> typical ways, and its added features remained largely unnoticed by its
>> inhabitants for quite some time after they moved in, in May of 2006. Then
>> one night four months later, Cavan Klinsky, who is now 11, had a friend
>> over. The boy was lying on the floor in Cavan's bedroom, staring at dozens
>> of letters that had been cut into the radiator grille. They seemed random —
>> FDYDQ, for example. But all of a sudden the friend leapt up with a shriek,
>> Ms. Sherry said, having realized that they were actually a cipher (a Caesar
>> Shift cipher, to be precise), and that Cavan's name was the first word.
>>
>> Another evening, Ms. Sherry and Mr. Klinsky were lying in their
>> custom-made bed when a rod running along its foot snapped off. "I'm
>> thinking, What the heck kind of cheap bed is this?" said Ms. Sherry, who
>> phoned Mr. Clough the next day.
>>
>> His response, which might have taken a less adventurous person aback, was
>> that she take a wait-and-see attitude, that the bed bit was part of a larger
>> "story" and that all would be revealed in good time. Oh, and he told her to
>> just snap the piece back into the bed. (Ms. Sherry learned later that the
>> piece of wood is meant to be wrapped with a leather strap — part of a
>> decorative molding in another part of the house — which in its coiled shape
>> reveals a message.) That Ms. Sherry gamely complied is another example of
>> how flexible she is as a client. "Most people" — like her friends and her
>> mother, she said — "couldn't believe how hands-off I was about the whole
>> project. But I do think you have to trust people. You can't stand behind
>> them breathing down their neck, particularly if they're creative."
>>
>> Finally, one day last fall, more than a year after they moved in, Mr.
>> Klinsky received a letter in the mail containing a poem that began:
>>
>> We've taken liberties with Yeats
>>
>> to lead you through a tale
>>
>> that tells of most inspired fates
>>
>> in hopes to lift the veil.
>>
>> The letter directed the family to a hidden panel in the front hall that
>> contained a beautifully bound and printed book, Ms. Bensko's opus. The book
>> led them on a scavenger hunt through their own apartment.
>>
>> But not all at once. The 18 clues were sophisticated and in many cases
>> confounding. The family, Ms. Sherry said, worked in fits and starts over a
>> two-week period, calling Mr. Clough for help when they got bogged down,
>> which happened with increasing frequency as they approached the last of the
>> clues. Indeed, as Ms. Sherry and Mr. Clough told their tale, this reporter
>> had to ask Ms. Sherry if she ever questioned her architect's sanity. "Yes,"
>> she replied cheerfully.
>>
>> In any case, the finale involved, in part, removing decorative door
>> knockers from two hallway panels, which fit together to make a crank, which
>> in turn opened hidden panels in a credenza in the dining room, which
>> displayed multiple keys and keyholes, which, when the correct ones were
>> used, yielded drawers containing acrylic letters and a table-size cloth
>> imprinted with the beginnings of a crossword puzzle, the answers to which
>> led to one of the rectangular panels lining the tiny den, which concealed a
>> chamfered magnetic cube, which could be used to open the 24 remaining
>> panels, revealing, in large type, the poem written by Mr. Klinsky. (There is
>> other stuff in there, too, but a more detailed explanation might drive a
>> reader crazy.)
>>
>> The Sherry-Klinsky clan remains largely bemused by the extent to which Mr.
>> Clough embellished and embedded their apartment. But Ms. Sherry and Mr.
>> Klinsky are not immune to the romance of objects or messages hidden in
>> walls, or what Ms. Sherry called "winks from one family to another."
>>
>> "You move into a place and you have your life there, and your memories,
>> and it's all temporary," she said. "Especially with apartments, which have
>> such a fixed footprint. I like the idea of putting something behind a wall
>> to wink at the next inhabitant and to wish them the good life hopefully that
>> you have had there." Two years ago, when Ms. Sherry and Mr. Klinsky left the
>> El Dorado on Central Park West to move into their new apartment, Ms. Sherry
>> tried to create such a wink. She loaded an MP3 player with music they had
>> loved and listened to during their time there — James Taylor singing
>> "Jellyman Kelly," songs by U2 and Jakob Dylan — and tucked it behind a panel
>> filled with electrical equipment.
>>
>> Six months ago, "someone drops off the MP3 player with our doorman here,"
>> she said, "along with a note that read something to the effect of — You
>> cannot believe where we found this thing. Good luck in your new home."
>>
>> ___________________________________________
>>
>> The link to the story is HERE.
>>
>>
>>
>> For a picture slideshow of the house, click HERE.
>>
>> --
>> "Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt
>> the real and the unreal..."
>>
>> - H.P. Lovecraft
>>
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>> http://lists.unknown-armies.com/mailman/listinfo/ua
>>
>
>
>
> --
> "Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt
> the real and the unreal..."
>
> - H.P. Lovecraft
>
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