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[Sweeney]

I thought it might be fun to talk you guys through this, since no one managed to complete it, and in fact only a couple of people even made it to the second set of questions!
 
To recap, someone was murdered in an old mansion and you guys had to discover the answers to a series of questions that would lead you to the killer and their motive. The questions themselves, once answered by somebody, would open up more blog entries (or rooms) from which to gather clues and solve puzzles. There were also a heck of a lot of red herrings and dead ends I did my best to make the puzzles and clues at least semi-logical, although some suspension of disbelief was definitely required. Fun fact, I also threw away my notes a while back so I'm having to redecipher a few of the things I can't immediately remember
 
Please note, I'm going to explain them in "perfect" order, so things make more sense instead of doing too much referring back and forth. However, when actually solving the puzzles organically, it'd be much more likely to make a partial solve and figure out you needed more information of a certain kind - for example, finding the vigenere cipher in the Boiler Room and having to hunt down the keycode in order to decipher it!
 
So, the first question was "Where is the butler's key?" and was the only thing able to be answered on day 1. At this point, you only had access to The Drawing Room, The Office, The Wine Cellar, The Solarium, and The Armory.

Spoiler

Examining the shelves in the Office (a logical place to start) would reveal an array of weird pyramid tableaux, some of which had white and black stones. This is a game called Zendo, where the players use inductive reasoning to deduce a rule that the tableaux either do or do not match. Using the marked pyramids, you should have discovered that the rule to match was "Two pyramids of matching colour, both a different size to the third".

Spoiler

These are the tableaux that matched the rule:

Or: 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 17

Then, looking at the poster in that same room, you would find a reference to Shakespeare and the first line of Sonnet 18. Applying the numbers from the Zendo shelves, you would take the 5th, 6th etc letter from the next line of the sonnet and come up with: Thou art more lovely and more temperate - Armory.
 
So off to the armory! Inside the suit of armor was a piece of paper that looked like nonsense:

But luckily, @Nymh had given everyone a hint to try a rail fence cipher, which would decode this to read "The key is in locker delta five". Tadaa!

 
Finding the key unlocked The Kitchen, The Boiler Room, The Nursery and The North Guest Bedroom. It also enabled you to find the clues to answer questions two and three. First, "What is the murder weapon?".

Spoiler

You don't really have much of an idea where to start with this business, so let's just see what we can find. Visiting the Scullery will lead you to the work desk, where you will find a Vigenere-brand tool (interesting, make a note), a serious of color cards, and a series of letters and numbers. If you are on the ball,  you would notice that the letters and numbers could be hexadecimal codes relate to colors so lets take that down:
FF3EA5 | EEEA97 | E2B051 | FFA480 | D1ACCE | C9D77E | EEEA97 | B6E
Oh, no! The last one is only half there... But wait, don't these look familiar? These codes were also on the armory lockers! But... what do I do with these? Let's pop back to the Scullery for a second and look at the pin-board. There's a code relating to "Lock'n'Stock", which might be something to do with the lockers: IIICURRDDL. So let's start at locker 3C and go up, right, right, down, down, left. We arrive at "A97OVR". Now we have:
FF3EA5 | EEEA97 | E2B051 | FFA480 | D1ACCE | C9D77E | EEEA97 | B6E4E2 | 774D8E | 42ADD5 | 4F84C4 | B6E4E2 | CC1C3B | EEEA97 | OVR.
 
Let's take a break from that and wander over to the Drawing Room. Examining the bookshelves there will reveal a list of books which, if we ignore the one without an author, will spell out Carlstadt, New Jersey. Using the clue given by the biography of Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, in that same bookshelf, let's go ahead and see what Wiki has to say about Carlstadt! Under the Economy notes, you'll see that it is the location of the Pantone Corporation's headquarters! What if these color codes are Pantone colors!?

(Now, I thought some people might make the leap from colors to Pantone without the help, but I added the clues in the Drawing Room for an extra nudge).
 
If you looked them up, you would find that they matched the following:
Knockout Pink, Elfin Yellow, Yolk Yellow, Cantaloupe, Orchid Bouquet, Daiquiri Green and so on and so on. Ultimately revealing "KEYCODE BRAMBLE".
 
Now, let's move on to the Boiler Room. Upon investigating the tool chest, you discover that it was smashed open! A sure sign of villainy. There was also a list of tools, and some more nonsense. When decoding the list with a vigenere cipher, using the keycode BRAMBLE, you would find that it was another list of tools. Comparing the two, you would find that sandpaper, a T-square and a hammer were missing. The sandpaper was in the armory by the suit of armor, and the T-square was in the Scullery on the work desk - leaving the only truly missing item to be the hammer! Tadaa!

 
Question three, required to unlock the next set of rooms and questions was "Where is the victim's dossier?"

Spoiler

Actually, not too challenging this one, I thought! When you drop in on the North Guest Bedroom, where the victim was staying, you find a pretty barefaced clue on the bedside table:
"You will find my dossier when you find the trace of the half-shell and follow the coopers."
Should you have visited the Wine Cellar at any point, you may have made note of the rather gross mention of "turtle musk", or a "trace of the half-shell" at the tasting table. So we're in the right place; how do we follow the coopers? Well, a cooper is a barrel-maker, so let's take a peek at the barrels.
 
We're confronted with wine-makers' names, years, and some other numbers. Let's arrange them by date!

Spoiler

And now, let's take the "numberth" letter of each barrel's label. "DE", "N", "D", "RO", "L", "O", "G", and "Y". Dendrology, or the study of trees. What's a room in this house that has a tree in the name? And the word "Study"? Why, The Aldercombe Study, of course! Tadaa!

 
Nailing down the location of the dossier opened up The Aldercombe Study, The Library, and The Darkroom.The next question that demanded answers was "Who is the killer?"

Spoiler

This had to be based on the list of entrants, and one of YOU GUYS was always going to be the killer. Luckily, the Drawing Room had a list of guests to the party that could be referred to
 
So first up, we're visiting the Nursery, where we find a play table covered in a selection of poker hands. By numbering them 1 through 8 based on the comparative value of the hands, you get the following: 47153826. That'll come in handy in a moment.
 
Next, we're off to the study, where we find a series of index cards covered in letters. These cards have hearts at the top - why, that's a suit in a common deck of cards! Let's apply our poker numbers to these curious index cards, shall we? By stacking them up by their "heart order" according to the series of numbers we had earlier, we get this:

 
The eagle-eyed among you may spot "COOPS IS THE KILLER" up in there! But you would have been baited - the puzzle is incomplete! Let's return to the Guest Bedroom and take a gander in the wardrobe. We find what looks to be a series of coordinates which we can apply to our combined image to come up with:
"Check the guest list for the person after coops is the killer".
 
Away we go the the Drawing Room to check the list and discover that lo and behold, the person on the list after Coops is none other that @Kat! Tadaa!

In order to unlock the next location, the secret passage, you first had to find it's entrance. "How do you access the secret passage?"

Spoiler

This was an almost entirely self-contained clue, once you had found all the keypads hidden throughout the mansion. Which of them would access the secret tunnel, and what was the code? To find out, we head to the Solarium, and take a peek at the sundial.
 
Four shadows, cast by four lights (or "suns"). These give us four numbers which we will order by the length of the shadow: 6, 9, 8, 7.
We will enter this code behind the painting of four suns in the Aldercombe Study! Tadaa!

 
Now that we can access The Secret Passage, we have to find the where the killer moved the body from to conceal their crime. "Where did the murder take place?"

Spoiler

First of all, we need a playfair cipher. Now, there is one in the Darkroom, but that's actually a red herring. You have to make one, using the rules for playing fair (geddit?) from the poster in the Nursery:
"Share the toys, be polite to friends, be quiet after seven oclock, always enjoy the games" becomes:

SHARE
TOYBP
LIFND
QUVCK
WJGMX

 
Now, we have the plaque in the secret passageway the looks like an indecipherable series of concentric circles - but it's actually a non-traditional key to the playfair cipher we just built! We can make coordinate-pairs by taking the number of dots on the inner and out rings. The first set would be [4,5] for example, and going to the 4th row and 5th column gives us K. Continuing on, we get "KITCHENDOOR".
 
The murder occurred in The Kitchen! Tadaa!

 
Now, to unlock the final question and solve the whole damn thing, we must first discover "What is the code to the safe, and where is it?"

Spoiler

Another fairly self contained clue, actually. Find the poem on the noticeboard of the kitchen: it is composed of six lines, where each pair is pilfered from a different Shakespearean sonnet. Those three sonnets form the key code, being 52, 27 and 41.
 
But which safe does this code open? The one in the Darkroom, as it happens. The symbol on that safe is the Awen, composed of three lines (relating to the three sonnets), the symbol meaning the inspiration of the poet bards in the Welsh tradition. Or something. Google tells me it's related to poems and whatnot.
 
The safe is in The Darkroom, opened with the code 52, 27, 41! Tadaa!

 
Now The Safe Box is opened, all that remains it to figure out "Why is Gamora?". "What was the motive?"

Spoiler

As the last challenge, I wanted to make this one a little more open-ended and down to interpretation, with whoever got closest to my original idea earning the points. Subjective, I know, but I really thought it'd be a little closer at the finish.
 
Anyway. Inside the safe box was a set of cat figures holding stars. Three, to be exact. There was also a set of Michelin guides, and a reference to a Cantonese Golden Orange book. There was also, earlier in the game, a reference to cold fruit sauce recipes (in the Library).
 
Piecing all this together, with some enormous leaps of intuition, you might have come up with the idea that @Kat had stolen a recipe for kumquat coulis from the restaurant Manresa, and been caught by @Silentqueen. @Kat killed @Silentqueen to shut her up.
 
Tadaa!

 

Everything I didn't mention was a red herring The various knives throughout the mansion, the alchemical symbols in the Drawing Room? All false leads! Muahaha!

And there you have it. One very convoluted murder mystery. Pow.

[Dazz]

It's sweet to see the inner workings, even if half of it flies right over my head. How long did it take you in total to create the event?

[Sweeney]

It's sweet to see the inner workings, even if half of it flies right over my head. How long did it take you in total to create the event?

 

I don't remember exactly, but it was a couple days on and off. It was pretty fun, too Especially going back and adding all the non-puzzle pieces, because those didn't even have to make sense