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[King of De Nile]

Blocks, Blocks, and More Blocks

[Skipjack]

Yay! Past the girl with the tape.... man! I was making that thing way more complicated than I needed to.

Past the roaches.... on the gargoyle.






I probably should get some work done today.

[Tibiazak]

runes

[Skipjack]

[Tibiazak]

ok, thanks for the hint. when i said "i don't have the time or inclination" i meant that i didn't want to have to sift through however many different alphabets there are to try and translate it... i like to have my options narrowed down. with that hint, i think i can figure it out.

[tipsila]

[Skipjack]

[King of De Nile]

[Albedo]

I don't have much free time at the moment, so I'm just going to put an untested idea out here for the blocks puzzle:

[tripitaka]

Hi Albedo
It seems homophonic subsitutions are a way to successfully hide character frequency so that sounds promising here.

Edit:
There is a crime-solving web page which deals with attempts to crack an unsolved group of ciphers known as the "Zodiac" letters (one solved one was found to be homophonic)... and unsolved ciphers have previously seemed to interest grngecko (Voynich, Kryptos).
Curiously, the address of the page is http://crimeshadows.com/sisco.htm
...when grngecko was prompted about the blocks page he said he was going to the region of the shadows - so things like that jump out at me now!

Cryptool allows random homophonic encrytion and when applied in reverse to the blocks puzzle letters the output doesn't look too awful, maybe a bit of tweaking to the assigned letters would improve the output

[tripitaka]

As an aside, for those curious about the text of one of the Zodiac letters which was solved (Zodiac 408) it is available at http://crimeshadows.com/sisco.htm
WARNING*** - NOT for the faint-hearted, that Zodiac guy was one sick puppy. If the Zodiac ciphers are relevant here then, if nothing else, it would certainly reinforce the theme of Torment

[Aiobhan]

I realize I pretty much bailed on y'all after I got to the blocks.

But I am watching, and... if you guys manage to crack this thing, I swear to god I'll have to buy you all a latte or something. This is ridiculous.

[tripitaka]

Hehe well it doesn't seem much progress has been made despite all the efforts so I don't think you're in much danger of buying a round of lattes!

Anyway, one of the solved Zodiac ciphers (Z408) was a homophonic cipher based on a 53 letter alphabet, another partially solved cipher (Z340) was based on a 63 letter alphabet.

If (a BIG "if" I know) this is relevant then hopefully we don't have to resort to puzzle block-orientations to pack out the alphabet, so maybe it works the other way, single letters mapping to multiple (presumably sequential) letter choices. When I put the block puzzle letters through cryptool's random homophonic decryptor thingy the entropy drops (thats good isn't it?) so maybe if we had a better template to map the assigned letters the output would further improve, I wonder if the Zodiac alphabets might represent possible templates?

http://www.dtm.ciw.edu/chris/z/ gives a tentative key for the Z340 cipher as

ALATEPHHISSEIHOIRSTUBSSAEVEWSAAAMEEAGMES_STKLLTHCNLLTDAOSSEBLNE

Could we map this to
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklm(SLUG)nopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghi???

The Z408 alphabet could be similarly presented based on the available decodes and might be a better option since the key is definitive as that cipher has been completely solved.

[tripitaka]

Regarding the picture of the little girl on the blocks page, I recall my first thought when seeing it was "The Excorcist"

I have noticed that one of the Zodiac killer's plaintext letters is known as the Exorcist letter. http://www.zodiackiller.com/ExorcistLetter.html

Still on the topic of Zodiac ciphers, I found another key for a cipher (Z378) apparently now used as a template example for Zodiac solves

http://www.zodiackiller.com/discus/messages/29/642.html?1167787613#POST8911 )

The key is:
EYENAGMNDREEDNRSWREETFCTTHHTFILVTLOOOIHAOAASSSOBHU_KPUPJ

The deciphered text for that cipher is "As grey traces of dawn tinge the eastern sky, the three travelers, men of Willow Dale, emerge from the forest shadow.
Fording the River Dawn, they turn south, journeying into the dark and forbidding lands of the Necromancer. Even now the
intensity of his dread power can be felt, weakening the body and saddening the heart. Ultimately they will become empty,
mindless spectres, stripped of will and soul. Only their thirst for freedom gives them hunger for vengeance..."

- which immediately put me in mind of grngecko's other clue relating to a song sung by a servant of Tolkein's wraith lord.

Edit:
Bugger! that key doesn't seem to work.
Just when it seemed that grngecko's clues were starting to make sense too!

[StarkRavingMad]

Well, an excellent try nonetheless, trip. I feel like you're getting closer to this than I am. I've been trying various decryption methods on strings, basing those strings on the orientation of the slugs (like some sort of variant of the circles puzzle from earlier), but I haven't come up with anything but gibberish and writer's cramp.