Quest for the Holy Scroll

[Gambit37]

I believe Christophe wrote that -- check the history for the page.

[Sophia]

It was added by a "dg2," who has few posts and is apparently long gone from the forum.

...as it says a little further up the thread.

Anyway, my solution is still the best one, however unsatisfying it is.

[ChristopheF]

The last two sentences posted by dg2 were taken from my web site as you can see here:
http://dmweb.free.fr/?q=node/249

I believe that's why Gambit remembered me

[Sophia]

Oh, such blatant plagarism!
If he weren't long gone we could ban him!
(we'll just have to make do with banning Trantor)

[beowuuf]

Aww, we can't do that anymore, he twats too many spammers...I think we need to start picking on linflas instead

[Wishbone]

I dunno if anyone tried this, but I was bored and was googling all the words. And I found this when translating the text from Slovenian to English:

"Grynix jernum quey whom skebow walk u spindle dey wefna enocarn aquantana."

Seems there are actually 3 real slovenian words there!

[sucinum]

Oh, didn't reread the whole thread, only stumbled across a "we might enter it to wikipedia" and thought maybe someone elese added it there.

[Gambit37]

Serendiptiy. I was just playing Scrabulous with my GF on Facebook and she played the word "Quey". I asked what's that, she said she didn't know but that the game had allowed it (I think that's cheatong playing a workd you don't know, but hey...)

Anyway, I went to answers.com and it gave me the answer of "Heifer" (Scot) -- so a scottish cow. But in the links on the right, "Also found in..." -- guess what, CSB was listed. I didn't notice that Quey was in the Holy Scroll text.

I'm sure it doesn't help, but was spooky none the less!

[beowuuf]

DM is everywhere, you can't escape on facebook! Bwahahahaha!

[Chris Pickett]

I just got bitten by this, thought I would post about my approach.

My initial reaction was that AQUANTANA is actually the word FOUNTAIN but had no such luck with the rest of the words. After a while, it looked like a substitution cipher might be a good approach. I found a pretty good applet here by googling for "cryptogram solving":

http://scottbryce.com/cryptograms/

and some hints here:

http://www.jimloy.com/puzz/cryptogr.htm

and here:

http://www.esg.montana.edu/meg/consbio/ ... rypto.html

I played around with N-->E and U OS-->I AM and stuff like that but didn't get anywhere. I tried using the elemental two letter spell symbols YA, VI, OH, and ZO for OS but that got me nowhere.

As previously observed, AQUANTANA is the most unusual word. I tried looking through my dictionary:

Code: Select all

$ awk '{
  if (length ($1) == 9) 
    {
      split($1, word, "");
      if (word[1] == word[4] &&
          word[1] == word[7] &&
          word[1] == word[9])
        { 
          print $1;
        }
    }
}' < /usr/share/dict/words 
alcarraza
elsewhere
entermete

but that didn't help so much. ELSEWHERE looks promising but it screws up the rest too badly. I tried out ENTERMETE and soon got ENTERHERE, but then the QUEY starts with NT. That might be right if EY starts the next word.

I would suggest a few approaches for people with time on their hands that want to entertain the notion of this using a substitution cipher:

1) Create a DM/CSB dictionary and merge it with /usr/share/dict/words (or whatever your dictionary is). You may be able to create this with the "strings" command, I'm not sure.

2) Consider that spaces may either be substituted for a letter, or may just be arbitrary breaks after encrypting the plaintext without spaces. More generally, the author may well have applied a weak secondary cipher to be mean.

3) The form of other scrolls in the game may give some clues. It seems from the picture:



that GRYNIX is possibly a title. Interestingly, GRYNIX is some newly released pen-and-paper RPG module about a lost city.

4) There may be code or even just a data structure for deciphering it somewhere. That a magnifying lens came with it sounds like maybe you were meant to put the lens up to the scroll and be able to read it.

Okay, I know you guys can improve on this!

[Gambit37]

Cool, interesting to see a new perspective on it. To be honest though, while FTL were very clever guys, I'm pretty sure they didn't spend any great length of time on this. Even Bob Retelle, a consultant with them at the time who wrote the hint book, said that this was a definite red herring.

[Gelvan]

well, that statement sounds a bit like "the government does not know anything about this"

What about the aproach to read it acoustic?

ki skebow = Skeleton Key
quey = key
quey = scotish cow
Grynix = Greenwich
rednim u os dey = reminds us from (dey latin for "from")
wefna = weys of
enocarn = in a cairn (wikipedia: A cairn or (Irish carn) is an artificial pile of stones, often in a conical form. They are usually found in uplands, on moorland, on mountaintops or near waterways.)
aquantana = atlantis

so it could be something like

scotish cows in Greenwich using a skeleton key (which opens all doors) remind us of the ways the celtic used to honor atlantis.

or more senseful

in the countryside of Greenwich one used the celtic burial ritual
as a reminder for atlantis. the cairn represented the same as the skeleton key in csb.

no go mystical.

[Gambit37]

Actually, that's quite interesting and probably the best explanation yet (if a little weird!)

Michael Newton -- who programmed the DCS and built the original DM dungeon -- moved into anthropology and now promotes Scottish Gaelic culture.

I'm seeing a link here.....

[Gelvan]

You mean he does actually promote Gaelic and scotish culture now in real life?

read this article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairn

There's also a connection between scottish and irish cairns and the skelleton key could easily be attached to this, as they represent in form of a sea carn a navigation point.

What if the language IS actually gallic or something similar to this? Grynix could be Greenwich, but maybe there's a place in either scottland or ireland which is even more appropriate.

aquantana could be atlantis or just plain simple a water mark.

so it would go like "with a skeleton key you can open the doors which will provide you increased navigation like the carn which are burial sites and also navigation points to travel abroad landscape's or water which is difficult to navigate".

^^

[DragonsLover]

I asked Michael Newton and he doesn't know.

[Gambit37]

I think the response from various FTL people who've said "I don't know" actually means "I *do* know, but I'm not telling ya, because we like making you go crazy!"

[Sophia]

I stand by my explanation, posted a few pages back, that the scroll being found in a chest with some gor coins and a magnifier means that the solution was to be tied into the gor coin pack-in, that is, "look at a gor coin closely." I will also add that in the 80s when DM and CSB came out, Infocom had become quite a big hit including "feelies" (little bonus items) in with its text adventures, and they were frequently necessary in solving the puzzles in the game as well, so it seems likely FTL had some intention of trying to emulate this practice.

All that above about Scottish cows is, though clever, probably too clever for its own good-- some of it is a very big stretch and in the context of a game puzzle, which must be solid, it starts to look like utter nonsense.

[Gambit37]

I said Gelvan's explanation was the best yet, but I didn't mean it was the most plausible. Certainly it's the most entertaining though

I agree that your explanation is the most logical. Wayne (Holder) was apparently very keen on the 'decoder' tools that were given with other games and wanted to do something similar, so it makes sense. It's a shame they went to all that effort and then never gave us a puzzle that actually used it!

....as far as we know....

[Erik Bauer]

Mmmm.... on a lazy working day I was reading this thread and...

Tried to google for Grynix.

The results quicly brang me to this url:
http://www.tesseractengine.com/quire/ME ... rynix.html

That talks about an RPG supplement about the dungeons of a long forgotten city (Grynix)

At the end of the intro there is this writing:

See what toll
Time has taken
on a once
Vast and Glorious
Kingdom

Now, I'm not a linguist but the word count mostly is there, so I think it could be strictly related.
Now I'm going to investigate further about this Grynx city and update you.

[Erik Bauer]

Thinking better about it: that RPG supplement came out lately so I think maybe the developers could have played a certain Dungeon exploring game on Atari ST during their youth...

[beowuuf]

Maybe

[Gambit37]

That was my first reaction: "When was this published?"

[Jan]

But still, we can ask the developers of Grynix: The Lost City about it, can't we?

[Jan]

... by the way. In my pause for lunch, I was re-reading the beginning of this wonderful discussion, and, besides revealing we've been moving in circles for many years (I was "Jenda" - guest in this conversation), I found something interesting.

PicturesInTheDark wrote (Posted: 10-Jan-03 12:39)
(part 4) (...) "The appearance of the letters in the crypted phrase (a=6 b=1 c=1 d=2 e=7 f=1 g=1 I= 3 j=1 k=2 m=2 n=8 o=3 q=2 r=4 s=2 t=1 u=4 w=2 x=1 y=3 or descending ***n-e-a-r-u-I-o-y-s-d-w-k-q-t-c-g-f-j-x***) shows a, e, n and r prominent (corresponding to the three tables) but i, s, t are underrepresented." (...)

Now, look at "***n-e-a-r-u-I-o-y-s-d-w-k-q-t-c-g-f-j-x***" and tell me - how would you read it? At least the first letters?

PS I still believe it's a red herring. But it's nice to think about it again and again from various perspectives. Thanks, FTL!

I've got no time now - I must get back to work...

[zoom]

'Grynix jernum quey ki skebow '
anagrams to
'Query jerk buxom, sinewy king.'

(all the scroll would have been too long and I thought to show
the result here, since it includes king )

[iUSTINE]

I really doubt it's a red herring. Oasis Systems were specialized in spell checking software, don't forget.

I had this crazy idea that sometime in the past they made some utility program to code the text and that how this sentence ended in Dungeon Master. If we only could check if there is any such coding/decoding program created.

Maybe it was a crazy decision of a single man from FTL, maybe other did not even know about it, so they removed it from next versions. But who could it be ?

[PaulH]

Don't forget that the Vexirk who wrote that scroll was dyslexic.

[Lee]

The years of craziness here are marvelous.

[Rasmus]

I havn't read all the post so it is posible that this issue already has been solved, but wasn't csb to atari released in several languges? In that case maybe the words are diffrent in spanish compering to english.. If this is the case then we know what language we are looking at!

[ChristopheF]

CSB for Atari ST was only released in English.