Real-world artifact suitable for gaming

[Zeropoint]

I just discovered the existence of a document called the Voynich Manuscript.

 

It's a small book, apparently written in the early 17th century, containing mysterious illustrations of plants, astrological drawings, and biological/chemical processes with large numbers of "nymphs". Accompanying the illustrations is text written in a script that has no apparent connection to any known alphabet or language. The document has defied all attempts at translation or decryption, and at determining the author.

 

In short, this book is a blank slate, waiting to be whatever it needs to be for your campaign!

 

Zeropoint

[Captain Obvious]

Re: Real-world artifact suitable for gaming

 

Cool stuff.

[Steve Long]

Re: Real-world artifact suitable for gaming

 

Cool -- definite scenario material. Thanx!

[BobGreenwade]

Re: Real-world artifact suitable for gaming

 

There's even some pretty decent potential there for a good Space Wizards scenario...

[Cancer]

Re: Real-world artifact suitable for gaming

 

The Voynich Manuscript was the subject of a Scientific American article in July 2004, I think. It seems to be an intentionally incomprehensible fake.

[bigdamnhero]

Re: Real-world artifact suitable for gaming

 

The Voynich Manuscript was the subject of a Scientific American article in July 2004' date=' I think. It seems to be an intentionally incomprehensible fake.[/quote']

Yeah, that's what I thought. (`Tho I didn't see the article.) Still, awfully cool source material...

[Zeropoint]

Re: Real-world artifact suitable for gaming

 

Some of the articles I read stated that statistical analysis of the word length and character distribution gives results very close to that of real language, suggesting that it is either real, or the product of a very sophisticated algorithm.

[Curufea]

Re: Real-world artifact suitable for gaming

 

Or it could be the product of nonsense symbols used for an existing text - without an algorithm.

[Basil]

Re: Real-world artifact suitable for gaming

 

The Voynich Manuscript was the subject of a Scientific American article in July 2004' date=' I think. It seems to be an intentionally incomprehensible fake.[/quote']

That article is online at:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=0000E3AA-70E1-10CF-AD1983414B7F0000

 

There's another discussion at:

http://wired-vig.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/rugg.html

 

Conclusion: Very probably a hoax, most likely designed to get money out of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II.

 

OTOH, if you want to make it an Evil Grimoire, or something even worse, in your game, go right ahead.

[Curufea]

Re: Real-world artifact suitable for gaming

 

Certainly saves time.

I spent too long making an evil grimoire for my last game -

I took the text from the German language version of the Divine Comedy and inserted images from the Games Workshop site of Tyranids to create a demon summoning tome.

[Lucius]

Re: Real-world artifact suitable for gaming

 

That article is online at:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=0000E3AA-70E1-10CF-AD1983414B7F0000

 

There's another discussion at:

http://wired-vig.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/rugg.html

 

Conclusion: Very probably a hoax, most likely designed to get money out of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II.

 

OTOH, if you want to make it an Evil Grimoire, or something even worse, in your game, go right ahead.

 

Well, if it’s a hoax, how do you explain

 

Some of the articles I read stated that statistical analysis of the word length and character distribution gives results very close to that of real language' date=' suggesting that it is either real, or the product of a [i']very[/i] sophisticated algorithm.

 

 

Or it could be the product of nonsense symbols used for an existing text - without an algorithm.

 

If I understand what you’re saying, that’s a simple substitution cipher – which would explain why it follows Zipf’s Law and apparently has rules of orthography like a natural language, but if that were what it was, it would have been decrypted by now.

 

There's even some pretty decent potential there for a good Space Wizards scenario...

 

Given things like the fact that the illustrations of plants don’t seem to show actual terrestrial plants, half my household is convinced the tome is an alien artifact.

 

On the other hand, the illustrations are described as “chimeras†combining parts from different real plants, so I still think it’s a stretch to claim they are plants of another planet or an alternate reality.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

Conspicuous by its absence

[Basil]

Re: Real-world artifact suitable for gaming

 

Well, if it’s a hoax, how do you explain

Some of the articles I read stated that statistical analysis of the word length and character distribution gives results very close to that of real language, suggesting that it is either real, or the product of a very sophisticated algorithm.

Ah, but it isn't a distribution like a natural language. As said in http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&articleID=0000E3AA-70E1-10CF-AD1983414B7F0000&pageNumber=2&catID=2

For example, the word lengths of Voynichese form a binomial distribution--that is, the most common words have five or six characters, and the occurrence of words with greater or fewer characters falls off steeply from that peak in a symmetric bell curve. This kind of distribution is extremely unusual in a human language. In almost all human languages, the distribution of word lengths is broader and asymmetric, with a higher occurrence of relatively long words.

 

The rest of that article, and the other one, show how such a distribution would be caused by a form of hoax-"language" creation known in the Elizabethan period.

[Lucius]

Re: Real-world artifact suitable for gaming

 

Ah' date=' but it [b']isn't[/b] a distribution like a natural language. As said in http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&articleID=0000E3AA-70E1-10CF-AD1983414B7F0000&pageNumber=2&catID=2

 

 

The rest of that article, and the other one, show how such a distribution would be caused by a form of hoax-"language" creation known in the Elizabethan period.

 

Hm. Not conclusive, but interesting. It does seem like a lot of work for a meaningless hoax, though.

 

And as for the "common words appearing two or more times in a row" I remember the Wiki article said that double and triple words "occur in Chinese and Vietnamese texts with roughly the same frequency."

 

But it does sound like a sound theory to me, and I suspect his suspect, Edward Kelley, sounds likely to do such a thing.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary analyzes that last sentence and finds:

One word that repeats twice, seperated from its repetition only by a single word of 3 characters.

Another word that repeats with only two words between it.

A two word combination that repeats with a minor variation, one character being tacked onto the end of the first word and two characters tacked onto the second.

The palindromedary concludes this post is a meaningless hoax.

[Basil]

Re: Real-world artifact suitable for gaming

 

Hm. Not conclusive' date=' but interesting. It does seem like a lot of work for a meaningless hoax, though.[/quote']

Ah, but if the theory described is correct, it wasn't meanlingless; it was intended to get money out of a gulible, rich ruler.

[Curufea]

Re: Real-world artifact suitable for gaming

 

Two more-

 

The Antikythera Mechanism.

http://www.skynightly.com/reports/Researchers_Find_Hidden_Greek_Text_On_Oldest_Astronomy_Computer.html

The Phaistos Disc

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaistos_Disc

[The Mad GM]

Re: Real-world artifact suitable for gaming

 

You can find images of the pages at this link:

 

http://highway49.library.yale.edu/photonegatives/

 

enter voynich manuscript in the search field. I don't think it's the whole thing, but if nothing else it's a great visual aid source.

[Steve Long]

Re: Real-world artifact suitable for gaming

 

Good find Mad GM!

[Robyn]

Re: Real-world artifact suitable for gaming

 

Or it could be the product of nonsense symbols used for an existing text - without an algorithm.

 

An effectively unbeatable encryption method would be to take two, or even three, different texts of exactly the same length and "add together" the values of each letter at every position. If anything less than all the books were intercepted, deciphering the original would be hopeless, since no single letter would necessarily bear any relation to the next. One could try to guess at the contents of the missing text by filling in "this must be that" letters and forming words, but that assumes the missing text is a legible (sensible subject) book. If all the books are nonsense, the encryption key is the real length of the text.

[Play4Keeps]

Re: Real-world artifact suitable for gaming

 

An effectively unbeatable encryption method would be to take two' date=' or even three, different texts of exactly the same length and "add together" the values of each letter at every position. If anything less than [b']all[/b] the books were intercepted, deciphering the original would be hopeless, since no single letter would necessarily bear any relation to the next. One could try to guess at the contents of the missing text by filling in "this must be that" letters and forming words, but that assumes the missing text is a legible (sensible subject) book. If all the books are nonsense, the encryption key is the real length of the text.

 

I'm not sure I got you. You're saying to transmit info in a cipher no-one can break, "add" together two-three different texts. Then nobody who doesn't have all the texts can figure out what the message is.

 

But if the person you're trying to send the secrret message to doesn't have all the texts, then HE can't figure out the message. And if he does have them, there's no need to send him a message he already has.

 

Or did you mean something else?

[Lemurion]

Re: Real-world artifact suitable for gaming

 

All I can say is that the Voynich Manuscript would work very well in a pulp game, and that's what matters.

[MPT]

Re: Real-world artifact suitable for gaming

 

If you want to create your own version of the manuscript then you can use the three Voynich fonts available from here http://fonts.goldenweb.it/index_file/l/en/d2/Freeware_fonts/c/v/start/250/default.html

[Robyn]

Re: Real-world artifact suitable for gaming

 

I'm not sure I got you. You're saying to transmit info in a cipher no-one can break' date=' "add" together two-three different texts. Then nobody who doesn't have all the texts can figure out what the message is.[/quote']

 

Exactly.

 

But if the person you're trying to send the secrret message to doesn't have all the texts' date=' then [i']HE[/i] can't figure out the message.

 

That's a necessary hazard, and present in pretty much any "send them a message that others can't intercept" scheme. If you can't get the key to him safely (i.e., without the key itself also being intercepted), he'll be just as baffled by the cipher as everyone else is.

 

And if he does have them' date=' there's no need to send him a message he already has.[/quote']

 

But if he already has them, what's the point of encryption anyway? It's not like you need to communicate with him, at that point; he already has all the information you encoded years ago, and silence is an indubitably superior means of secrecy.

 

If he has some of the texts, though; and he knows which to use, or can figure them out; you can send him the others (provided your copy, too, is exactly identical letter-for-letter), and interception of those will yield nothing (unless the book is common enough for the interceptors to also have a copy). It's basically like packaging the message and key all in one, but without the usual disadvantages of that approach. If you kept copies of all your old correspondence with that person, and you know they went through before either of you became worth watching, you can tell them to dig out the old letters (this is almost ideal).

[Lucius]

Re: Real-world artifact suitable for gaming

 

The kind of code Roby is talking about works something like this.

 

Let's say you and I both have a copy of a book - say, Rebecca. If I want to send a message, I write out the message.

 

They are concentrating troops on the northern frontier, at least 2 full divisions arrived in the last month.

 

Then I look for those words in the novel. (this version only works if we're using a book that HAS all the words we're likely to need.)

 

So when I find the words, I translate them into some kind of numeric code - say, xx - yyy where xx is page number, yyy is the number of words you count on that page to get to the word you want. So if "They" appears as the 12th word on page 63, I can write

 

63-012

 

and that means "They." A benefit of this kind of code is that of course the word can appear many times in the book - so it could have been

 

74 -104

 

Enemy cryptographers will find it very hard to break a code where the same word could have numerous different encryptions.

 

 

An even more sophisticated method would be to break it down by each individual character - so that what the code number you get directs you to is a letter in the key-book rather than a word.

 

If I understand what Robyn is saying, the proposed code would involve looking up a letter in BOTH of two DIFFERENT books, and then translating that letter-combination into another letter that is part of the message. Thus, if

 

74-1134

 

indicates letter "A" in one book and "S" in another, and you know the rule is to translate the letters into numbers via the common scheme

 

A = 1, B = 2, etc.

 

And add the resultant numbers together, then subtract 24 if the number is greater than 24, and translate THAT number back into a letter by the same scheme, then

 

74-1134 = "T"

 

Got it now?

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary wants to run through that one more time, slowly....

[Robyn]

Re: Real-world artifact suitable for gaming

 

If I understand what Robyn is saying' date=' the proposed code would involve looking up a letter in BOTH of two DIFFERENT books, and then translating that letter-combination into another letter that is part of the message.[/quote']

 

Correct, though thankfully a lot simpler in the looking-up part: the letters are taken in order, sequentially, from the beginning of the book. (If you run out of one book and there is still more content in the other book, you stop there anyway. You can always pick up at that point later, to avoid using the same area of the one book repeatedly. Come to think of it, there's no reason you couldn't use one of those codes Lucius was describing to tell your intended recipient where to start their deciphering.)

 

With two books, though, anyone who picks up the gibberish portion and makes some lucky guesses may be able to reassemble enough of the readable book to figure out what it is, and buy a copy. This is why I suggested three books (two readable ones, and one unintelligible). There are effectively four copies, then; readable 1, unintelligible, readable 2, and the hidden message.. If they have the unintelligible text, they can guess at the hidden message but won't be able to identify the readable book, because the other letters used in that equation are actually formed from two different books. The same goes for if they have either of the two readable texts. What matters here is that, even if they manage to intercept one, there are still two more they don't know the values of. There are too many variables.

 

If you really wanted to be tricky (and your intended recipient had plenty of time to waste on decrypting), you could encode several different messages in the same area (you have a whole book to play with, remember), even making them contradictory, with the "real" message being identifiable (again, only to your intended recipient, ideally) only by the use of certain words which are known to both of you. This would confuse and possibly mislead anyone who did figure out your cipher.