R1Q1: Boromir, Sir Frances Drake, Big Pussy, Osama bin Laden
They all were buried at sea. Some pedants insisted that Boromir was buried at the foot of a waterfall, but I'm pretty sure the body got to the sea eventually.
Why I wrote it as I did:
I knew I wanted a current-events flavored question and UBL was a great hook for it. From there, I went looking for others who were buried at sea. The list of real-life people known to be wasn't as impressive as I hoped. Fortunately, I found a site offering sea burials (not an endorsement) which had a list of fictional characters buried at sea, which even Wikipedia didn't have. In the category at first, but narrowly missing the 'truthiness' cut was James Bond, who was given a fake burial at sea during You Only Live Twice, giving name to the movie. My wife found Big Pussy while looking for a replacement.
How it played:
Rather well. About 3/11 solves, but plenty of good 'Wait, what?' as each new one was revealed and 'Ohhh, that's nice' at the answer. I think this question was a good example of the tone and reactions I wanted throughout the game. I'd like it to have been a little easier, but this is an obscure fact about almost everyone besides UBL. I could have included Adolf Eichmann as a more recognizable case, but I didn't really want two people buried at sea for about the same reason.
What I learned:
Misspellings are forgivable. Sir Francis Drake was misspelled Frances on the card, as in the title here. A simple 'misspelling not intentional' as I turned it was enough. It looked a little less professional, but people seemed to roll with it fine. This also applied to my other bad misspelling, Psydonyms (I have no idea how that happened). Copy-editing is important, as always, but when it's not on the critical path to the solution, it's correctable.
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