Fashioning an Abraxas stone – A Setter’s Blog by Harpy
This puzzle was developed by the two of us – Charybdis (C) and Ploy (P) – entirely by email. In fact, over 50 emails were exchanged between conception and submission!
It started when P chanced upon the ABRAXAS entry in Chambers. Though neither of us is into dactyliography, we are understandably interested in therianthropic matters, and it was immediately obvious that here was the germ of an idea for a Harpy puzzle in The Magpie. So P came up with the basic elements for a puzzle: a grid which represented an abraxas gemstone, with a central area in which the solver would be required to sketch a harpy, reference to the magpie moth, and some exploitation of the numerical values of Greek letters (as given in Chambers). A nice angle was that such a puzzle would, in a sense, refer back to Mr E’s Magpie puzzle “The Featured Square” from December 2003, in which a sketch of the solver had to be drawn in the centre of the grid. C then came on board, and we were all set to turn this outline idea into a workable puzzle.
C suggested that the word ΑΒΡΑΞΑΣ (ABRAXAS) should appear in a curve around the central area, with the names of the Greek letters being provided by extra letters accumulating in the seven cells. P suggested that some clues should consist simply of numbers representing letter sums for words, and C proposed their grid entries should relate to harps. He also proposed including a few “woman-bird” words, such as PATROLLER in the grid. To the relief of P, C offered to do the grid fill! Around this time, P drafted the preamble, and came up with a treatment for the title which would include the magpie moth angle.
The above, of course, does not touch on the many other ideas which we explored in knocking this puzzle into shape. An amusing property of our selected grid fill was that by chance the word SMARTASS ran along one edge, exactly as it did for our previous Magpie puzzle. We trust that this will not be seen as reflecting on C, P or H! We then split the clueing 50-50, and sent the completed draft puzzle to our test-solver who solved most aspects of the puzzle, which helped us to refine the preamble.
The puzzle was then submitted to one of the Magpie editors, who forwarded it (unattributed) to the others to preserve its anonymity. We were very pleased that it got a good reception, and delighted that it was given Puzzle of the Month status. The editors came up with the idea of a Nov ’09 publication date to tie in with 119 in the title. The three-year wait until issue 119 seemed rather long! It was also agreed that any sketch of a creature combining attributes of woman and bird would be acceptable in submitted solutions.
Solver feedback suggests that this puzzle was well-received overall, which we were very pleased about. Thanks to all who commented. The main point of doubt/discussion was whether the letters of ΑΒΡΑΞΑΣ (ABRAXAS) should be written as Greek or Roman characters in the grid. In discussion with the editors, we agreed that either should be accepted, though the original intention had been for Greek characters only. However, we could see that the preamble wording could be interpreted to mean either, and if a solver had got this far they had clearly understood the theme. Sorry if this caused any unnecessary anguish!
It was good to see from the published harpy sketches that solvers fully entered into the spirit of the puzzle. A range of interpretations was apparent, with some of the harpies look quite benign - friendly even - for what Chambers describes as a “rapacious and filthy monster”!
Finally, we both found that working on this puzzle was a most enjoyable process, as it required close collaboration, and led to a result that we felt was promising.