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That's a pretty sloppy code, though. There are several letters that appear both two spaces before a vowel, and three after a consonant, and so are produced by two different letters: C, G, M, S, and Y. "HASTHZBZLLJFJBZCDZNCZ" would produce the same result as "HVSTHEBELLOFOBECIENCE." I suppose the recipient would usually have a good idea whether a vowel or consonant belonged in a given position, but if you got, say, "MSW" in a message, it'd be down to context whether it said "JUT" or "OPT" or "OUT."
Anyway, it seems pretty clear here, except the first bit could be "HAS" instead of "HVS." We ought to RP the discovery at some point, too.
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"Huh! I'll have to get myself one of these."
Yeah, I usually get at least one for my characters, sometimes multiples so if one doesn't work another might. For 85g, its worth it, though some GMs might be a stickler on what kind of doors it will work on. I'm not sure if it will even fit in the book cases, but figured it was worth a shot and if two of us can work at it, it'll go that much faster.
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So I'm a bit of a computer geek, a decent programmer and have a slightly more than passing knowledge of cryptography, and over the weekend I had a look at that cipher in the clue 'Taldan cipher 2'.
It's a terrible cipher. It may sound halfway clever on paper, but it commits the one unforgivable cardinal sin of substitution ciphers in that multiple characters encode to the same cipher character
Plaintext character set is:
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
Cipher set is:
YEFGCIJKGMNOPQMSTUVWSYZAWC
This means that in an encoded text it's no longer possible to differentiate between 'A' and 'V', 'D' and 'I', 'E' and 'Z', 'J' and 'O', 'P' and 'U', and 'T' and 'Y'.
In a more practical sense, the message 'THE ORKS ARE ATTACKING' would cipher into 'WKC MUNV YUC YWWYFNGQJ' which can come back as 'THZ JRKS VRZ VTTVCKDNG', at which point you have to hope and pray that the person reading the message will try moving each possible both ways. This is relatively easy to do with a computer on hand, but especially out in the field where clarity can be the deciding factor between life and death, it's a bad idea.
The cipher used in the clue Taldan Cipher 3 is in fact an accurate substitution cipher, and with the considerately provided crib I've written up a quick encoder/decoder: linky
As ciphers go, substitution's still pretty weak, especially since compared to Vigenère ciphers you're relying on a string that's almost invariably impossible to memorize, so the substitution code would have to be written down somewhere whereas a word or a phrase can be memorized...
... Although I suppose in a world where death doesn't necessarily mean you can't answer questions anymore, "if you're about to be caught, burn or destroy the document containing the code" may in fact be a more secure precaution than "try not to be taken alive, or failing that, die under torture rather than reveal the code"... Hmm...
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It's worse than that, Vassago. Without a computer or similar easy text manipulation method, the decrypt is hard. Unless you've memorized the resulting character for each vowel, you have to try each combination of three forward or two back on the letters of a word until you've got something that almost makes sense, and then hope it's the word the sender meant. We're only lucky that there's relatively few vowels in the english standard alphabet or there'd be a real problem.
More to the point, it's only secure until and unless someone learns of the method, at which point every message encoded with that particular method can be deciphered.
Straight character substitution is somewhat better in that knowing that it's a CS type cipher means you can do statistical analysis on the message and start cracking the code like that, but you still need to find the code and if the message is short enough, that may take longer than the message is relevant.
Vigenère is even better than that because without knowing the shared word, you can't even begin to guess at the length of the substitution pattern. You pretty much need a crib or two or serious computing power to work out the possibilities, and in a pre-technology society it's pretty much safe as long as you don't use the same word for more than one message or make your word easily guessable.
Like I said, it's a terrible method that only sounds clever until you consider the implications.
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And my inner cryptologist is cringing at that cipher for multiple reasons, chief of which being that human brains are in fact terrible at coming up with proper random gibberish (fun exercise: read _Dune_, then try that arrhythmic walking method the book describes the Fremen use in order to fool sandworms. You'll go insane in fairly short order), not to mention that this results in huge missives and it's only a matter of time before some interceptor twigs to the fact that there's way more text than there could possibly be message worth sending, at which point skipping X characters with a variant on X until he gets words that make sense is the obvious next step...
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Worse, you cannot Take10 or Take20 on this, you have to roll.
any check for the rolled skill, but temporary bonuses
such as those granted by spell effects, other than crafter’s
fortune, do not contribute, as the duration over which
the Day Job check is made is undefined and represents
a longer amount of time than a spell’s duration would
permit the bonus to remain. You may take 10 on a Day Job
check, but you may not take 20 nor can you aid another.
Of course, its almost always better to roll because of how the amount increases rapidly.
Robert - 18811-14
Grand Lodge
Day Job:
See, if I had taken 10, I'd only have gotten a 19 which would be 10 gold. but with my 11 I got 20 gold.
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Is there any chance we'll be finishing today? :) I'm not trying to push or anything, but I know we aren't supposed to play characters in other scenarios that are currently being played in a pbp or a multi-session module, and I have a chance to play in RL today and wondered if I'd be able to play Robert or not. If not, I've got others, but it'd be nice to take him for a spin too. :)
Taa, any chance you moved to Mid-Michigan area? ;)
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Is there any chance we'll be finishing today? :) I'm not trying to push or anything, but I know we aren't supposed to play characters in other scenarios that are currently being played in a pbp or a multi-session module, and I have a chance to play in RL today and wondered if I'd be able to play Robert or not. If not, I've got others, but it'd be nice to take him for a spin too. :)
Taa, any chance you moved to Mid-Michigan area? ;)
Nope, DC. Very excited to get back to the East coast and away from the humidity of Houston.
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There was a small delay due to work issues. I was able to catch up on some stuff today and I sent out the chronicles and the game has been reported. Going to leave the thread active for a few more days in case there are any issues with the chronicles or reporting.
@Robert: When you run this F2F make sure to grab the cheat sheets from the shared GM prep. Someone did a great job on quick reference sheets for this scenario that I found extremely helpful.