[drewcrawford]

KQ6, in addition to being one of the greatest adventure games of all time, had some of the best copy protection.

The manual had an extensive "encyclopedic" section that was part background material, part hint book, and part ingenious copy protection. For example it included the following 'poem' as background material about one of the game areas:

      Three roses laid upon the bower, 
      A scythe for he who cuts the flower, 
      A crown, a dove, most noble race! 
      Thy bones make sacred this dread place.

As it turns out, this poem is really a solution to a puzzle where you must walk on the floor tiles in a particular order to survive:

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/WUw771rvxhc/hqdefault.jpg

There were several solutions that were cryptically hidden in the manual like this, such that people who hadn't read it would get stuck at various points.

The real genius however was that this was before the Internet, and so if you wanted hints you had to call Sierra on their special 900 (toll) number to get help.

[artmageddon]

I remember this as well! There were also some incomprehensible glyphs on the tower climb, leading up to the Winged One's(just prior to the Catacombs in your screenshot) that were only printed in the manual.