Ancient Runes

As I wrote about here, my new greatest passion is planning my kid’s Harry Potter Escape Room Birthday Party. Here is one of the puzzles I have planned, and how I went about creating the elements of the task:

Having an Ancient Runes class is pretty perfect for an escape room. Naturally, the students will have to crack the code of the ancient runes to get a code they need to unlock a locked box.

I thought it would be fun to make Ancient Runes a bit more hands-on by creating clay (e.g. salt dough) slabs on which I carved out a message to the Hogwarts students.

I wanted my daughter to have a good number of friends at her party, but in an escape room, this becomes difficult as the larger the group, the more likely that it’s hard for someone to see, or difficult to take turns. To help make sure that each guest gets to interact with the puzzles and have fun, when possible, I’ve split up the work. In the case of Ancient Runes class, I have a four word sentence the students will need to translate, and to give each party-goer a good chance of being involved with the translation, I created 4 different slabs with a single word on it. The students will be split into 4 houses, and each house will get one runes slab to work on.

I used a simple salt dough recipe, but to make it look more weathered, I added espresso powder to turn the dough more tan. Prior to carving it, I rolled the dough out and then beat it with a textured meat tenderizer. Then I rolled it a tiny bit over the top to help make the dimples look less synthetic.

I attempted to carve 4 pieces which I thought would turn into a fun little puzzle, but found that the dough pieces expanded at different rates and in different ways, and when all was said and done, the pieces did not fit together. (I was surprised by this; I thought that a dough with no baking powder, baking soda, or yeast would not expand. I was wrong).

To interpret words into runes, I went to a website in which the user types in an English word, and gives the user the same word written in runes. It was so simple!

For the party-goers to learn what various runes translate to in our alphabet, I decided to go whimsical. I created an ancient runes picture book in which each page has a cute forest animal on it, and the animal named below it’s picture in ancient runes. Given that I have no artistic talent, I decided to rely on the talents of someone else. I found a seller on Etsy who makes beautiful whimsical art and sells digital copies to people like me who can’t art. The art is advertised as being for “junk journals,” and it was perfect for my purposes. For this project, I bought a “Magic Woodlands” collection which included over 100 digital paintings of cute little animals for an extremely low price.

To save money, I printed my runes picture books at the library. I wasn’t sure how the printing would turn out, and was shocked when the prints came out glossy and crisp and beautiful! In my city, each library user can print $5 worth of prints per week, at a price of 20 cents per color page. Naturally, I’m slowly printing the Escape Room papers over time so that I can print it all for free!

After printing, I traced the writing on the cover of the Ancient Runes textbooks with an embossing marker, and then used gold embossing powder to give it a fancy little texture.

I’m so pleased with how Ancient Runes is turning out! I particularly love the Cutesy Animals Ancient Runes books! The prints are gorgeous!