Whenever I set treasure hunt clues, I would try to allow enough opportunities for the solver to arrive at the answers. My clues might not be straightforward, but with logical reasonings and a bit of common sense, a regular team would have a fair chance to solve them. Whether or not those clues are actually solved in the end is quite a different matter altogether!
My clues are not normally to be taken literally—most of the time the intended meanings are substantially different from what is understood from a sweeping surface reading. Having said that, however, the "instruction" given in those clues must be clear, provided of course that the solver is able to "think out of the box", i.e. thinking laterally.
Imagine that you are hunting. You have been cracking your head for a while over 14 questions; not to mention trying to solve the so-called Crack-A-Pots as well as treasure clues. You have not not solved all the treasures, let alone the Crack-A-Pots; and there are also those forsaken black-and-white pictures of 8 people you have never seen in your entire life. You are sitting in the back seat, and all the intense concentration on the riddles are beginning to take its toll on you. You are coming up with a major migraine. Your bladder is also not cooperating, even though you try so hard to drink as little water as possible. And then now you come to the following clue:
Q15) A business where terrifying beings are found with heartless spirits getting disturbed with the answer?
Faced with the above clue, how and where should you start?
First, let's try to understand the flow of the sentence, and then hopefully we will be able to understand the trick behind the surface reading.
The leading words in the sentence, i.e. "A business..." refer to the business signboard within the sector.
The subsequent words, i.e. "where terrifying beings are found..." suggest that we are looking for a location. For example we might be looking for the word "cemetery" or "graveyard".
Then the subsequent "with..." means we need to connect that location to the remaining part of the clue.
Then we have "heartless spirits getting disturbed with the answer?" which probably mean that we need to anagram "heartless spirits" with what's found on the signboard (the required answer).
OK, we are ready to organise our ideas to derive the answer. This is what we get:
Business signboard = (Location) with (anagram of "heartless spirits" + required answer).
Which doesn't make much sense and renders the clue unsolvable!
However, the experienced hunter would know that the clue is inaccurate; he knows that the word "with" immediately after "found" should have been "when". If the word "with" is replaced with "when", the clue would become like this:
Q15) A business where terrifying beings are found when heartless spirits getting disturbed with the answer?
Now the "instruction" to the solver is entirely different. "When" is a conditional word in this case. It means that "terrifying beings are found" only when the solver does the process described within the remaining part of the clue; something like this:
The beverage will become sweet when added with sugar.
In other words, if not added with sugar, the beverage won't become sweet. I have discussed the problem with the word "with" while commenting on a recent hunt question. But as I have said in that post, it seems that KL hunters are used to this wrong sentence.
A major problem with this particular clue is to figure out "heartless spirits". And here I'd like to say that I have not forgotten the theme of the hunt. Even with the theme of the hunt at the back of my mind, it is still an extremely wide range of possibilities. What "spirits" might the setter be referring to? Could it be about "ghosts", "angels" etc? Or it might be referring to liquors; and there must be hundreds, if not thousands of liquors.
Moreover, even if we are able to narrow down the "candidates" somehow, we are still faced with "heartless". Generally speaking, "heartless", in the cryptic sense, usually mean to remove the middle letter of an adjacent word. If that is indeed the intention of the setter here, then we might be looking, first and foremost, for "spiits" (the letter "r" removed). Not to mention the many possibile words that can replace "spirits".
However, that is not the end of the problem. I have also seen "heartless" adopted to mean the entire internal letters in the word are removed, leaving only the first and last letters. For example "Heartless spirits" will result in "ss" (the letters "pirit" removed).
Assuming that the solver can somehow figure out which "spirits" the CoC is referring to; and which "heart" has to be removed, he still needs to combine the remaining letters with what is found on the signboard to arrive at something that can agree with "terrifying beings".
The official solution:
Terrifying beings = ZOMBIES
Heartless spirits = BOZE (spirits = booze; and then remove the middle "o")
Get disturbed = anagram indicator
BOZE + (Answer) -> anagram -> ZOMBIES
Therefore, the letters found in the answer must be IMS. Find any signboard containing those letters in any order.
A15) DOBI MIS
You see now how remote the possibility of arriving at the required answer? I am not saying that it is impossible to solve the question. It is possible, but not probable! If ever I set such a question, I would probably do it for a virtual hunt in this blog and I would allow several weeks for the solvers to try their luck. But I don't think that I will ever do anything close to this in an actual hunt. Besides, I can't imagine how many more possible answers that might arise from the millions of possible combinations by the masters and grandmasters in the field. At any rate, even if I did it in a virtual hunt (where I can narrow down the scope of search substantially), I would set the question like this:
Q) Disturbing heartless spirits here results in terrifying beings!
I still don't like "heartless spirits", but at least the clue would be short, precise and straight to the point. Yet it is still tough enough to give the masters and grandmasters a challenging riddle.
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