I see what you did there…

Yeah, as I said in response to exocrinous, that would work. No idea why it slipped my mind when I typed my comment. I think I even thought of something similar, it sounded wrong in some way and so I went a different route.

Oh right, that would work.

Well, you could consider the solution to the riddle a pun though that’s quite a stretch. Though there is at least one modern rendition (in German) that directly uses a more pun-ny solution. It does’t quite translate to English but I’ll try. Basically, Oedipus thinks and thinks until he starts to complain “Ach Mensch…” which is roughly equal to English “Oh boy…” but “Mensch” is literally the German for “human” so it’s the right solution and the sphinx has to accept it. If you understand German, I highly recommend checking out this version. It’s “König Ödipus” by Bodo Wartke. He plays all roles himself on a mostly empty stage with only a couple of props and it’s absolutely hilarious. The sphinx is a lion hand puppet.

Edit: for anyone interested, here’s a youtube clip of the scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DogC57ZJuY8 (German with German subtitles)

In case you’re serious with the sphinx question: in ancient Greek myth the entrance to the city of Thebes was guarded by a sphinx who would only let you through if you could solve a riddle, otherwise the sphinx would eat you. Which riddle that would be changes from story to story but the most famous one is along the lines of “What creature walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon and three in the evening?”. This was eventually solved by king Oedipus who realized it was a human who crawls as a baby, walks on two legs as an adult and needs a walking stick as a third leg when they’re old. Depending on which version you read, the sphinx was either so shocked by him solving the riddle that it threw itself from a cliff or was simply slain by him.

Cave walls all the way. Can’t risk someone accidentally break or throw away what you’ve written.

Sources on literacy in Medieval Europe seem to be all over the place, reaching from the popular “Almost nobody could even sign their name” to “There was at least one person in most households who could read and write”. Here’s a discussion on Stackexchange that lists some sources.

The sad truth is, we may never know how literate people actually were. We can be relatively sure that especially poor people didn’t have any formal education and couldn’t afford expensive handwritten books. But that doesn’t necessarily mean people couldn’t read and write at all. A basic level of literacy was useful for a lot of people, especially craftsmen and traders. Not so much that they’d read and write whole books but enough for basic bookkeeping or passing notes to someone who lives in a neighboring village. The thing is, those are not the kind of things that would be preserved until today. Paper and parchment were too expensive for such trivialities but we have evidence from Russia that people wrote everyday correspondence on birch bark. With no need to store these writings, most people would have probably just reused whatever they were written on to light fires or just thrown them outside where they would decompose within a few weeks.

(this kind of ties into a fun fact about why so few authentic chainmail shirts have survived until today. Not because they got destroyed by rust but because after they lost their usefulness in early modern times, they were cut up and reused to scrub pots)

My longest “one shot” ever ended up taking 52 sessions over a little more than two years. What started as a very simple local festival where the party tried to win a cooking competition led to (not in order):

• one of the largest inns in town burned to the ground
• one party member pregnant with twins from two different fathers (one of them a different party member)
• at least six assistants of one of the other chefs dead by the hand of the one party member that has the worst combat skills
• the same party member killing a local merchant with a single punch in the face after he was accused of stealing when the thief was really a different party member (the pregnant one)
• one party member waking up in the Empress’ bed with a black rose on the pillow next to him
• one supernatural STD sent by the goddess of (essentially) sex, drugs and rock & roll ravaging the whole barony
• the one session where they visited said goddess’ temple being the only occasion where they were super PG-13

I know at least one of my players reads this community so feel free to add anything that I may have missed.