The Syndicate

This is a walkthrough of the puzzles I created and sent to players. Epig once asked me if there are actual solutions to them, so I'll post what I told him as explanation for how these puzzles worked.

If you're asking if they can be solved, yes, all of them can be cracked.

If you're asking if there's something at the end of cracking them, yes, all of them contain a message that can be called a "solution" to the puzzle. Even Eloh's maze. So far, they've been a(n) (intentional) mix of "fluff" (meaning a message with no bearing to the game; the target, by solving it, would only find out he's been rused) and "bait" (a message with bearing to the game, meant to manipulate players' reads and perceptions; the target, by solving it, would receive a fabricated info he could or not be tricked into making use of).

PUZZLE 1 - technically BAIT, but meant as FLUFF - Sent to MovingPictures07. Confirmed he didn't give a shit.

-- I sent MP07, via the Host, an mp3 file named "737473696c6e6f736f6e686374616d"
-- the title of the mp3 file is made up of hex numbers
-- converted, they spell stsilnosonhctam, which needs to be reversed
-- reversed, the text spells matchnosonlists
-- "match the numbers (nos.) on lists" (meaning the list of players and roles)
-- the numbers that need to be matched are recited in the audio recording
-- the audio fragment is an excerpt of an electro-acoustic experimental piece called "September" by Keith Rowe
-- everything that actually belongs to Rowe's piece - from electronic noise and radio static to an excerpt of EMF's "You're Unbelievable" - is completely irrelevant
-- superimposed on two occasions (quite audibly, too, because I suck at mixing) are two fragments from "Freitag-Abschluss" by Karlheinz Stockhausen, the last part of his "Freitag aus Licht" electro-classical opera
-- two numbers are separately and obstinately recited in the two fragments, "Sieben" and "Zwolf", which is German for "seven" and "twelve"
-- 7 and 12 are, thus, the two numbers that need to be matched on lists
-- version A of matching is 7 from the roles (Janey Slater) and 12 from the players (MP07), but since MP07 knows his role, this result wouldn't make any sense for him (except if he is actually Janey Slater) and he would normally discard it
-- version B of matching is 7 from the players (G-Man) and 12 from the roles (Silk Spectre II)
-- puzzle message is thus "G-Man is Silk Spectre II"

I intentionally (i.e. not randomly) crafted the version B matching, because I had a theory (disproven, of course, by Sloonei's D1 flip) that G-Man and Sloonei might be the Silk Spectres, Laurie knowing who Sally is. BUT AGAIN, this entire message was entirely fabricated, in case MP07 would have cracked it.

PUZZLE 2 - BAIT - Intended to Llama, but he got night killed, so I got Epig's permission to send it to Dharma instead (I sent Epig the puzzle in advance, because of going hiking); ironically, Dharma then also got lynched D2 without any indication that he got something out of the puzzle. He probably didn't give a shit at all, either. I'm quite fond of this one.

-- I sent to Dharma, via the Host, a zip archive named "woobjxib"
-- "woobjxib" is codified (ROT-4) for "assemble" [I chose +4 because it was the first codified version in the sequence that had a pretty form]
-- just as a nice touch, "assemble" is tongue-in-cheek for both superhero teams (such as the Watchmen) assembling, as well as for solving this puzzle
-- the zip archive contains 23 png files, each with a symbol
-- each symbol is actually a letter, written in blue ink, imitating the style of Rorschach's signature in his journal or messages
-- each image thus contains a letter; in some cases, it contains two letters (TH, TI, RR)
-- half of the images are randomly flipped horizontally, the others are normal
-- the images have to be assembled correctly, puzzle style, to create the message
-- the message is "The detectives are corruptible"

The message was basically intended to bait Llama/Dharma into thinking the statement is true and potentially mess up with his reads. The most obvious candidate for a recruiter is Moloch. The message's rate of validity is pretty decent in all situations, except if Llama/Dharma was Moloch and knew his actual ability - alternatively, in case either was one of the Detectives, the message could still have a potential effect on him. I initially considered writing "the civilians are corruptible", but then I narrowed it down to the detective pair. It seemed the better version, considering half the civilians can be linked with Watchmen, so it's harder to believe they can all be recruited or corrupted. All the letters were handwritten by me on paper, scanned to my computer, cropped and saved separately (duplicates included).

PUZZLE 3 - FLUFF - Sent to Elohcin. I laughed my ass off when she seemingly didn't even get the joke.

-- I sent to Elohcin, via the Host, a Flash file named MH, intended to stand for Manhattan
-- the file is a four-level maze game, called "Info Maze", imitating the "Scary maze game" format, whilst promising "precious info" upon completion
-- the start page says "Pyramid Deliveries Presents" in Symbol font, followed by the game name and the instruction to complete the maze for info
-- each level (apart from the last one) is split into separate increasingly difficult paths (two each, first two levels, three on the 3rd level), leading to different end points, one fake, one unlocking the next level; every fake end point leads to a dead end panel, after which the game needs to be restarted from scratch
-- dead end panel for Level 1 [left path, the easier of the two] is the Boy George impersonation picture Epig used in Guess Who, with an excerpt of Simon & Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence"
-- dead end panel for Level 2 [up path, ironically the harder of the two] is a gif from Disney's The Skeleton Dance, with an excerpt of "The Gonk" from the "Dawn of the Dead" soundtrack
-- dead end panels for Level 3 [down path, up and down path, equally challenging] are gif scenes from the Comedian's death in the Watchmen movie
-- end panel ("win" panel for Level 4) [which is completely straightforward] is a blue image with Manhattan's forehead symbol and the message "The cake is a lie"
-- "The cake is a lie" is a famous catchphrase from the game Portal, used to mean a promised reward at the end of several trials without actual intent of delivering said reward
-- so the maze game is esentially one big ruse. The harder time you had to complete the levels, the better.

I created the whole game in half a day. :o I had no knowledge of writing Flash and didn't even have Adobe Professional installed beforehand. I chose Eloh as a sort of revenge ruse for her "intentionally giddy" Day 3 endgame. I came up with this after struggling to think of something else. I definitely wanted to do something Manhattan-related and my first idea was sending a message, apparently from him (written in bright blue), in which he would promise to take the target away with him on another planet (immunity, so to say), if the target would post some subtle message in the thread of wanting to go away or even out himself/his alignment in some way - Canuck-style in Roger Rabbit, but you can already tell how difficult it was to come up with the right bait. Then it hit me that the "promise" can just as well be no promise at all, at the end of completing the puzzle, so I worked with that instead.

Further symbolism and tongue-in-cheek-ism:
-- the color of the start panel, level mazes and "win" panel are all intentionally Manhattan-hinting blue;
-- Epig's picture and the skeleton gif are a soft idea of "spooky"; also
-- the idea, in case Eloh was familiar with the actual "scary maze game", that you had to risk doing this (for the sake of info) and get spooked;
-- the "Cake" ruse is even more delicious in connection with Eloh's baking skills;
-- the Comedian scenes made no sense, but in case it would make the target wonder (considering the Comedian might be dead), yay for more apophenia;
-- this kind of silly game would normally be way too trivial for anyone to believe it's actually from Manhattan, but whatevs.

PUZZLE 4 - BAIT - Sent to Scotty. It turns out it influenced him, so I'm proud of this one.

-- I sent Scotty, via the Host, an mp3 file named "БТСЦ"
-- title of the mp3 file is cyrillic for "BTSC"
-- the audio is fully reversed and needs to be undone in order to be listened properly
-- the file is a combination of radio stock static, different others sources and a spoken text
-- I asked an internet/PA friend (some of you may know him as Brian or JJLetho from ProgArchives) to record himself reading the text, because my English accent is pretty butts
-- the text is supposed to be a BTSC fragment from the mafia team:

"Well, that was one hell of a backfire... I told you it was a bad idea for espers to tap out so suddenly, even if he missed a few days... too many replacements during that day to seem credible... good effort anyway, ika, going crazy on everyone was probably the only thing you could have done. anyway, I think the best thing right now is to keep the pressure and everyone's attention [on MP]... with some luck, everyone will hound him and he'll go down... his read on me yesterday was [so crazy]... but hopefully I'll calm the waters and make him seem unreasonable... my vote on espers looks so good, after all... I'll use that cred to my advantage... I'll do my best to survive for as long as possible, guys..."

-- further radio static is juxtaposed between some of the sentences or covering important details in the second half of the text, such as "MP", for the sake of confusion - it hints at Russtifinko as Big Figure, of course, but, with the proper editing, it ends up a bit more vague [Scotty thought it was Eloh, hah!]
-- the text, of course, is completely fabricated and intended as bait, to influence Scotty's gameplay
-- other notable, but entirely irrelevant, audio excerpts added to the mix include the catchphrase "Rorschach's Journal" cut from his first monologue in the movie, electro-acoustic or static noise bits by Ryoki Ikeda (various albums), Jeph Jarman ("Matterings", 2015) and Keith Rowe ("September", which you may recall I also used in Puzzle 1), classical bits from Dvorak's Piano Quintet and Stravinsky's Petrushka, Manfred Man's "There She Goes" and Espers' "Moon Occults the Sun" (which is tongue-in-cheek for espers' mafia role)

I don't think there's much more to add about the purpose of this puzzle and its main bait. I took a gamble with that much alleged BTSC content, since roles of this kind don't usually intercept more than a sentence, but I thought the incentive would be high enough, should Scotty decipher the audio properly, in order to believe that the Mafia might have been intercepted and subsequently influence perhaps Scotty's game. Oh, did I mention that it worked?!

PUZZLE 5 - BAIT - Sent to G-Man, poor lad

-- I sent G-Man, via the Host, two jpg files titled "Pic1" and "Pic2"
-- both pics contain material written on a dirty paper template background
-- Pic1 contains a written text and the instruction to decode it, whilst Pic2 contains a sequence of numbers
-- the instruction at the bottom right of Pic1 was added simply to not torture G-Man more than necessary by wrongly using ROT forwards [which would normally be the right way to use ROT, except that I completely screwed up and wrote the cipher so that it needs to be rotated backwards, gah!]
-- the sequence of numbers in Pic2 matches the word and letter counts of the text in Pic1. It means that each letter needs to be rotated (backwards) according to its corresponding number in the sequence in order to be deciphered
-- however, the text is almost one entire massive ruse, because it's a "lorem ipsum dolor sit amet" template
-- I used a lorem ipsum online generator to generate the text and I banged my hands on the keyboard to generate the sequence of numbers; I did however manually rotate (the wrong fucking way, too!!) each letter in the text, for reasons of insanity
-- what this text does contain, however, is a four-word actual message, each word hidden in each paragraph of the lorem ipsum bullshit text
-- to not torture G-Man more than necessary [although, from the looks of it, he didn't even notice] the first three words of the message were rotated intentionally to create another legible word: "upstep" (paragraph 1), "pay" (paragraph 2) and "timmer" (paragraph 3). The word "timmer" was especially created to capture the target's attention towards what the message could be.
-- nevertheless, to still torture G-Man in some way, the legible word appearing in the fourth paragraph (nightkill - even more incentive to make the target curious, or even imply something, since timmer/juliets was NK'd) is actually bait, since it rotates into a nonsensical form. The word that, rotated correctly, reveals the fourth word of the real message, is the nonsensical "BEQOKWMJV", situated slightly earlier in the paragraph
-- the four words of the real message, if rotated correctly, are UPSTEP => MOLOCH | PAY => HAS | TIMMER => SEEMER | BEQOKWMJV => ABILITIES

The message was basically intended to bait G-Man into thinking the statement is true and potentially mess up with his reads. The timing seemed right at that stage in the game, when Moloch was hard to trace - although, given that G-Man was suspected as a Moloch candidate, it risked being rendered null, in case G-Man was indeed Moloch and was aware of his abilities.

PUZZLE 6 - BAIT - Sent to Rico... err wait hold on

What puzzle?

I intentionally took a break from sending puzzles, because with MP gone (and his role revealed), I didn't want to risk making people believe I could be the only potential actively player to manufacture these types of puzzles - well, there was also G-Man, but... I announced the Host I wouldn't be sending a puzzle that Night and on D7 I made the fake announcement of receiving one. It would also help me not be perceived as Ozymandias (in case players were wondering), since self-targetting was regarded as inconceivable. The message I said in the thread I uncovered was something I simply thought off, without any real basis. If I would have sent it to someone else, it probably would have read "Moloch only needs the former Minutemen and the Watchmen dead" - this was my hint, in the thread, at a more "subtle general win con", compared to the rest of the field.

PUZZLE 7 - FLUFF - Sent to Cookie

-- I sent Cookie, via the Host, a pdf file titled "red err sun"
-- the title is an anagram of "Surrender"
-- the pdf contains 12 pages, modified or not, extracted from a virtual copy of the Watchmen comic that I have
-- in an alternative sequence, 6 pages were an image of a clock with blood slowly pooring from the top of the page (they look to me like the back cover of distinct volumes of the comic, but I could be wrong and they could be fan art, added to the mix) and 6 pages from the comic
-- the latter pages were modified so that they highlighted only a panel, with the face of a Watchman member (one page for each of the six Watchmen), while the rest is covered in red
-- each Watchman panel also has a modified text in the dialogue bubble, compared to the original dialogue in the comic; unfortunately I couldn't find a free version of Dave Gibbons' original fonts (and I sure wasn't going to pay 39 bucks to acquire them!), so I used a lookalike VLC Letterer Pro font
-- almost* every modified text was transcribed from a game post made by every living (at that time) player
-- each modified text has a bolded word that is part of the real message of this puzzle; the bolded words are not in the right order
-- rearranged, the real message of the puzzle is "You are not fooling anyone anymore"

Without any real knowledge if Cookie was or not a baddie, the message was nevertheless intended to mess up with her game and intimidate her. The "Surrender" anagram in the pdf title was also appropriate for this.

PUZZLE 8 - BAIT - Sent to G-Man, alas he died the same night

-- I sent G-Man, via the host, six items, out of which five were put in a zip; these five pictures were also encrypted with a password
-- the title of the first jpg file and the five zip files indicate the passwords that need to be entered to unlock the next picture in the sequence; they're also numbered, to not screw up the sequence
-- the first item is a jpg called "beast"; it is a old representation of the demon beast Moloch (with its name also appearing written on top); thus, the password to the next picture was "moloch"
-- the second item is a jpg put in a zip called "maker"; the pic itself is called "syracuse"; it is a painting by Giulio Parigi of Archimedes' parabolic reflectors allegedly used to burn ships attacking Syracuse; Giulio Parigi's name is written in morse code on the bottom of the painting, to hint at the painting's origin and meaning; the connection is that Moloch also tried to built a sun mirror weapon, until his plan was foiled by the Minutemen; but the "maker" is neither him, nor Parigi for the painting, but Archimedes' for creating the original sun mirrors; thus, the password to the next picture was "Archimedes" (caps sensitive)
-- the third item is a jpg put in a zip called "number"; the pic itself is called "inletters", hinting at the "number"; it depicts a scene from the Watchmen movie when Rorschach first checks on Moloch; I was hoping a number of Moloch's apartment would be detectable, alas not, so I referred instead to the "XXX" letters in the porn movie announcement, left on the screen; XXX, "in (roman) letters", is thirty; thus, the password to the next picture was "thirty"
-- the fourth item is a jpg put in a zip called "time"; the pic itself is called "isup", hinting at the location of the item to be deciphered; it depicts a scene when Molock opens the fridge in his kitchen; up ("isup" -> "is up") on the wall, right to him, is a clock; the time reads 8:20pm; thus, the password to the next picture was "twentypasteight"
-- the fifth item is a jpg put in a zip called "identity"; the pic itself is called "duh", hinting at the sillyness and simplicity of the puzzle; it is a text written in Watchmen font, on a blue (Manhattan) background, that says "Moloch is _____ ______ (duh)"; contrary to this being an indication of who plays Moloch's role in the game, but simply what is Moloch's name in the comic; the fact that Edgar Jacobi isn't actually his real name is a mere technicality; thus, the password to the final item was "edgarjacobi"
-- the sixth item is an avi put in a zip called "answer"; the avi itself is called "omg"; it is a video of a mountain marmot eating a carrot, because why not
-- therefore, the real message of this puzzle is "Moloch is a mountain marmot eating a carrot"... err I mean "Moloch is MetalMarsh"

The message was basically intended to bait G-Man into thinking the statement is true and potentially make him vote for MM. Him getting killed made the whole plan flop. Even if I was wrong about MM being Moloch, the puzzle having its effect and making MM further get votes would have suited me nevertheless, since I needed the Comedian gone.

PUZZLE 9 - BAIT - Sent to Made

-- I sent Made, via the Host, a PowerPoint show called "Presentation1" (I got lazy with the titles)
-- it contains two slides, one with a movie clip, the second with the avatars of the other remaining players, besides him
-- the movie clip is a mix of the "bloodied midnight clock" from the comic and a short scene from the movie with each of the Watchmen, over which an excerpt from The Doors' "The End" is played
-- the movie clip is irrelevant, except for setting the atmosphere of a gloomy endgame
-- the avatars in the second slide each contain a hyperlink (activated upon mouse click) to certain pictures on the internet, meant to imply the real identities of the players
-- Russ' avatar links to a gif of Ozymandias
-- DDL's avatar links to a picture of the actor playing Moloch being interviewed
-- Rico's avatar links to a picture of Bernard the News Vendor taken from the wiki page of the character (only thing I could find)

The message was intended to bait Made into thinking these identities are real and potentially make him vote for DDL as Moloch. Of course, I deliberately cast myself as the more reliable Bernard and Russ as Ozymandias. I also started fearing DDL might be Manhattan, whom I also needed gone, so the bait worked in that interest as well. If Made was Moloch, the message could still have worked as an "interpretation" of the identities, seemingly sent to him by Russ.