Welcome to the Archives
Selected works from the Scriptorium — puzzles, adventures, and immersive worlds brought to life.
The Archives are home to a collection of projects that best reflect the spirit of The Mad Pen & Quill.
Story-rich puzzles experiences, tabletop adventures built around collaboration and cleverness, and immersive creations shaped with an eye toward wonder, surprise, and that glorious moment when everything suddenly clicks.
Featured Projects
The Funhouse
Classroom Pop-up Escape Room
Inspired by the students’ in-class reading and shaped in consultation with their teacher, this pop-up escape room transformed curriculum concepts into a hands-on, story-driven puzzle experience. Student teams rotated through six collaborative stations, each with their own unique escape room puzzle challenge, that blended close reading, deduction, and playful discovery — making the material feel active, social, and memorable instead of inspiring the usual “will this be on the test?” energy.
The Keeper’s Quest
Escape-Room-Inspired D&D Adventures
The Keeper’s Quest is an ongoing series of interconnected, standalone D&D adventures that blend rich roleplay, escape-room-inspired puzzle design, and player-driven discovery. Run through StartPlaying and in select live events, each session is built to reward collaboration, curiosity, and clever choices at the table.
A recent in-person installment featured custom NPC voice performances from respected creators across the escape room and immersive puzzle world, adding an extra layer of theatrical magic to the adventure.
The Darkspyre Series
Expansive Escape Series with Original Lore
The Darkspyre Series is an original run of immersive, at-home escape room adventures created for family and friends — but built with the scope, care, and narrative ambition of a much larger world. Across interconnected stories, recurring characters, custom props, elaborate sets, and layered puzzle design, each installment transformed ordinary spaces into places of mystery, danger, and discovery.
Darkspyre is where my love of puzzle construction, theatrical worldbuilding, and long-form storytelling most fully collided — gloriously, messily, and with considerably more fake crypt architecture than any reasonable household should contain.