The images below can be reverse-searched to find they’re creatures from Heroes of might and magic 3.The flavor text is split into 4 rows, suggesting there’s some important aspect in each. The first line suggests we’re looking for heroes. Upon inspecting the list of heroes we find that wisdom is a very common secondary skill, which is also referenced in the second line. The third line suggests we’re looking for heroes with 2 skills, one of which is wisdom, and are interested in the other skill. Using class names loosely tying into the “in charge of”, starting spells, “native armies” and name lengths we fill out the grid as follows:
| Hero | In Charge Of | Starting Spell | Other Skill | Matching Creature | Level |
|---|
| Cuthbert | Lecturing on divinity | Weakness | Estates | Archer | 2 |
| Theodorus | Excelling at mystical knowledge | Shield | Ballistics | Gremlin | 1 |
| Voy | Voodoo enchantments | Slow | Navigation | Lizardman | 2 |
| Zubin | Engaging spells | Precision | Artillery | Orc | 3 |
| Zydar | Leading blasphemical research | Stone skin | Sorcery | Imp | 1 |
The first letters of the “in charge of” spell out level, so we use the levels of the creature to index into the “other skill,” then reordering the letters by the images order gives us the final answer STABS.
| Creature | Other Skill | Level | Extracted Letter |
|---|
| Archer | Estates | 2 | S |
| Orc | Artillery | 3 | T |
| Lizardman | Navigation | 2 | A |
| Gremlin | Ballistics | 1 | B |
| Imp | Sorcery | 1 | S |
This was the first puzzle I wrote and I wanted to include some references to the things I grew up with. Heroes 3 was a classic that still gets consistent viewership and updates and a fond memory for me personally, so eventually I settled on this idea of matching the multitudes of traits, classes, and skills.
Initially it was hard to clue with enough references and cross-verification of in-betweens, especially since the letters of LEVEL were really awkward to use actually. I’m sure I could've done a better job with more planning (originally I wanted to include math and damage calculations in there as well but that's possibly something for another day) but I think I'm decently satisfied with how it turned out.
One day before the hunt, I had also tested to confirm the images were reverse-googleable, but others discovered for some reason searching the images by right click -> search using google images led to no results, despite using the original, unmodified images from the wiki sites. This was really confusing, and doing some manual testing found out that taking a screencap and using that to search worked well enough. I guess sometimes you just need less pixels? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
During the hunt a lot of people used the initial clue of alchemy to pursue Piquedram, which I felt was enough that he didn’t have the wisdom skill, and that part is pretty heavily clued, but since it led to confusion we changed it midhunt.