First off, here's the puzzle for anyone who doesn't remember. There's a change I'm misunderstanding something, too, since I wasn't at the session where it was discovered, in which case please let me know.

The puzzle is a grid of 4x4 slots surrounded by 16 letters. My guess is that if we can find a setup where every row and column spells a word we can use that to solve the puzzle and profit in some unclear manner.

The letters are: DDEEEELMMNNOOPST

My thoughts on this puzzle are…

• Vowels are probably the key to cutting down the possibility space here. There are only Es and Os.
• Most of the vowels are probably in the center, because that's how words tend to work.
• Least one word must start and one must end with a vowel in each configuration (rows & columns). That's because if no rows have a word that starts with a vowel, the first column will contain no vowels.
• We have 6 vowels and 4 words per configuration, so probably 2 of the words have a single vowel and 2 have two vowels.
• Os and Es are both friendly to double-use (DOOM, PEEL), but given the above two facts I sort of feel like if we have a word like that the other word might need to have the two vowels on the outside?
• I have no idea if diagonals matter. Probably not, is my guess
• I think that rows and columns might be interchangeable? Like, if we set four words as rows and they work together to make all four columns be words, then they'd also work so that if we made them columns they'd just make the rows be words, right? Am I visualizing this correctly?

To make this a little less daunting, I've been trying to make rows of 4 words that use up all available letters. If we can do that we can move them around in order and see if there's any configuration where they all magically align to make the columns all say something. I tried it with the following words but didn't find anything:

STOP
MELD
NEED
OMEN

As y'all have started discussing character concepts by email (exciting!), I've started a thread here to chat about character ideas. Easy to access! All in one place!

Best,
Eric