Thorinth: The Letters Return

I’m putting H.A.'s letter at the top of each of these, sorry to anyone who wants to poke at all the puzzles.

Last year, I sent a box to Saberlane that seemed to have a magiqal past to it (seen here).

I made the foolish mistake of not copying the letters inside before sending, and two of them were lost after Sabes sent them off to other Mounties to solve.

Imagine my surprise when, while organizing my digital files, I came across a document I didn’t recognize.

It was a copy of the seven letters, and the numbers on six of them were different than before.

Here’s the less-puzzling of the seven letters:

Through one of our mutual acquaintances, Mercy came to access what the men seem to be calling the All-Seeing Eye. Knowing it for what it was, she sent it on to me in her last correspondence, believing someone of my House would know best what to ask.
When the Eye opened to me, it told me of Hope for the fight in which our mundane brethren are embroiled. As for the second request, a far future was Illuminated. One where our Houses no longer have need to meet in secret betwixt one another as we do now.
It is with these descendents in mind that we leave these messages. Each of our secret group has written a small note, twice-encoded to keep others in our respective Houses from stopping us, addressed to our future counterparts. To my knowledge, none of them contain any Earth-shattering information about our Houses, just a short greeting from each of us.
The Eye granted me the two cyphers used, and left with a clue to decrypt it.
The book will Guide you to play fair.
It means nothing to me, but it may to you.
Until your time comes, we shall continue to protect It, even from one another.
Faithfully Yours,
H.A.

And here’s the letter that was labeled “Thorinth” (I had to screenshot it, pasting the contents wasn’t working :cjmagiq:)

7/16: So, a couple of the numbers changed again… Here’s a new screenshot?

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“The book will Guide you to play fair.”
I went straight to the Guide to Magiq, assuming each set of three numbers would lead to a specific letter and this is what I got.

I believe it should be read vertically, with each pair of letters needing to be decoded further.

thornletter

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So I finished that first part at 2am. It was an itch that needed scratching. I wouldn’t have been able to sleep without finishing that off but I was really tired at the end. :martytired:
I have now woken up and I still have an itch…

The second cipher, then. I had a look to find out what I could on letter pair ciphers and came upon one that just leapt out: the Playfair Cipher. You first have to build a 5x5 grid to use as your encoder/decoder, but it must be built off a keyword or phrase.

I’m going to try out a few options, starting with using “Thorinth” and see if anything makes sense.

I need coffee.

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“Thorinth” will be my bet.
Each of the other Guilds/Houses have a page that was ‘delivered’ with the letter.
The letter is the same, but the caption on the coded text differs for each Guild/House.

The Ebenguard one appears to have had words appearing a little after they tried Page/Word/Letter using the Guide

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“Thorinth” isn’t working. Using it you can build three different grids depending on which letter you drop from it (commonly you’d omit either Q or Z, or combine I and J into one box).
I’ve worked vertically and horizontally, on all three grids and reached gibberish.
So either “Thorinth” is wrong or I’m making a mistake somewhere.

I’m about to head to work, so help in verifying that I’m correct thus far would be greatly appreciated.

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I’ve put it few a couple online playfair decoders. (lazy)
The following keys have produced gibberish

“Thorinth” “thornmouth” “magiq” “guide” “house” “neithernor” “sanctury” “All-Seeing Eye” “Illuminated” “Collector” “First Council” “Council” “faith” “the faith” “book of the wild” “book of kings” " The book will Guide you to play fair."

I’ll try to find some time this evening to double check the page/word/letter decoding.
Ive also found reference to a double playfair cipher, might be worth trying if we think that the initial book encoding didnt count as part of ‘twice-encoded’ for some reason.

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A double playfair would then need two keywords.

Do we know H.A.'s full name?

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What about Briars? As in Book Of Briars?

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Have you tried “mindflame?”

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Or maybe “thought”

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Did we ever try The Guide as the keyword as in Guide To Magiq? Or Ackerly Green’s Guide to Magiq?

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Might be a shot in the dark but have you tried “play fair” ? As the keywords?

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I tried Briars, Book of Briars, Guide, The Guide and The Guide to Magiq this morning, all with no luck.
I’m currently on another break at work so I’ll try any and all suggestions when I get home in a couple hours.
Just keep 'em coming. :smile:

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Okay, I had a couple miscounts on my part in one of the others, and found a couple here as well. I can message you the copy of your work with notes on it if you’d like? I also edited the screenshot in the spots I goofed on.

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Absolutely. That would be helpful, thanks.

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The numbers on the original image change cries
Please forgive me while I go to Amazon(sorry quick delivery) buy a copy of the guide and scribble on it for quick decoding.

Edit: Amazon out of stock…
Edit edit: AG also don’t have it. Digital solution it is then.

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Actually, you’d want the original puzzle numbers for the print book, silly extra words for clicking…

Original puzzle numbers that also had misprints. :sweat_smile:

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I found it intresting that the letter had random (or are they?) Capitols on certain words…

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I’m fairly confident that this is using the guide. The max page ref we have is 73 and the Guide has 73 pages.

My partner is epic and has made me a tool that I give numbers and it gives me letter and word. Great but…

1st column 3rd set down

27 26 1 Word ‘Or’ Letter ‘O’
32 25 2 Word ‘a’ letter blank…

Do we think the numbers are going to change again?
Is the blank intentional? I’ve not seen blank included in any playfair cipher examples
I didn’t take a screenshot pre-update, @Ashburn was this one of the sets that changed?

I’ll carry on and see if I can speed up the process with some OCR

Edit: Bug in tool, removing punctuation seems to have done the trick.

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It was not one of the ones that changed, however if it’s going based off of exactly what the text is on the Guide’s site I did notice after a copy/paste that some pages are missing/have extra spaces that don’t show up when looking at the site itself, so it might be catching one of those instances.

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