Under the Cognomen of Edgar Allan Poe hints

Competitions IFComp
1

I’m a bit stuck in the middle of the game.

I have 11 of the clues. However, my avenues of research have all dried up.

I need to open the hatch, but the toper knows about that, so I need to vote. But voting just tells me to come back later. The maid also tells me to come back later.

I have the tobacco leaf, but I couldn’t decide if I was supposed to solve it by brute force or in-game. So I checked hints, and it says the clue is in or near the lighthouse, but I can’t open the hatch because of the above. I know the prisoner smuggled narcotics, and have tried NARCOTIC, NARCOTICS, OPIUM, POPPIES and MORPHINE.

My inventory is:

Summary

I am carrying

a singed gibus

a pledge card

a letter

a cipher wheel

a journal

a tobacco leaf

a note

a tunic (with an empty pocket)

My next step would be to lawnmower every hint to hope one is about my current situation, but that would be sad as I haven’t needed hints very much so far and would see a lot not intended if I tried that way.

My journal says:

Summary

Clues I have observed to date:

The coat Poe wore when found reeks of smoke and fuel oil.

Poe arrived at Gunner’s Hall several hours after the fire at Lazaretto Point Light.

The discovery of a gibus in the lantern room, much as one Poe would have worn, may indicate he was attacked at Lazaretto Point Light.

The toper at Gunner’s Hall says the man taken to the hospital was Edgar Allan Poe, and not a look-alike or double.

The leaf may have been smuggled to a prisoner or an inmate. The writing on the tobacco leaf appears to be an invisible ink made legible by holding it to a flame.

The Sons of Temperance pledge card Poe carried was signed six weeks ago, suggesting he’s not accepted a drink since.

A critic writing under the pseudonym “L.” devastates the character of several American writers, Poe and Griswold included.

An inmate named Reynolds Grimm recently escaped from Maryland Penitentiary.

“Wilmot” is the middle name of Rufus Griswold.

The escaped prisoner claimed he was the double of a famous writer, a “man who has his name printed in all the slick magazines.”

Upon Poe’s arrival in Baltimore via ferry, he was being followed by a bearded man.

[You’ve uncovered eleven out of eighteen clues.]

Locations in Baltimore I’ve learned about:

Gunner’s Hall is in the Fourth Ward of Baltimore, in the southwest of the central district near the Inner Harbor.

The light-house named Lazaretto Point Light stands far to the southeast at the end of the promontory.

Barnum’s City Hotel stands at Battle Monument Square in the northwest of Baltimore’s central district.

The ferry terminal at Fell’s Point is located south of the hospital at the broadening of the Patapsco River.

Edit: I know have gone through every hint available and still don’t know what to do, especially the tincture word. I followed the guide to get all clues but only have 15, my newest three being the following:

Summary

Poe’s shirt is stained with what appears to be wine.

The bearded man following Poe was refined and composed…a gentleman.

The escaped inmate bears a strong resemblance to Rufus Griswold.

I’m not sure which of the rest I didn’t find.

Since it’s late in the day and early in the comp, and I do not know when help will come, I’m going to decompile the game and search the code for tincture to get an idea of where I was meant to look for it.

Second edit: It looks like from the string dump that I needed to get the hatch code from the toper before deciphering the code. But the ladies are still too busy for me to speak with them! Which is frustrating because there’s no physical obstacle to speaking with them, it’s just my character’s decision not to.

Third edit: Ah, I see, at some point in the last few minutes the ladies became free, but I have no idea when that happened.

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I’m sorry you had this experience—I did not intend for this puzzle to be so confounding.

Looking over your notes, I suspect what was needed to unlock the next stage of the game was to ask the toper about “L.”, that is, the pseudonymous writer in the magazine you find in the hotel suite. I apparently did not offer enough clues about that.

I’m going to clarify the in-game HINTS about this, and add a clue or two in the game about this as well. It’s mentioned in the walkthrough. I’ll upload the changes as soon as possible.

Thank you for playing!

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Thanks for doing that! I only put that much effort in because I wanted to continue the story. If I had disliked the game I would have just stopped, and if I only had mild interest I would have waited until the next day. Your writing and characters made me want to continue in the very moment.

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Thank you for the kind words. I really appreciate it.

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Just finished the game (and liked it a lot)! So this is not a hint request, but I missed one of the clues and am curious which one…

Clues I found

The Sons of Temperance pledge card Poe carried was signed six weeks ago, suggesting he’s not accepted a drink since.
The coat Poe wore when found reeks of smoke and fuel oil.
Poe’s shirt is stained with what appears to be wine.
An inmate named Reynolds Grimm recently escaped from Maryland Penitentiary.
Upon Poe’s arrival in Baltimore via ferry, he was being followed by a bearded man.
The bearded man following Poe was refined and composed…a gentleman.
Poe arrived at Gunner’s Hall several hours after the fire at Lazaretto Point Light.
The discovery of a gibus in the lantern room, much as one Poe would have worn, may indicate he was attacked at Lazaretto Point Light.
The escaped prisoner claimed he was the double of a famous writer, a “man who has his name printed in all the slick magazines.”
A critic writing under the pseudonym “L.” devastates the character of several American writers, Poe and Griswold included. Knowing the identity of this critic may assist in my investigation.
The toper at Gunner’s Hall says the man taken to the hospital was Edgar Allan Poe, and not a look-alike or double.
“Wilmot” is the middle name of Rufus Griswold.
The leaf may have been smuggled to a prisoner or an inmate. The writing on the tobacco leaf appears to be an invisible ink made legible by holding it to a flame.
“L.” is short for “Ludwig.”
To open the iron hatch in the lantern room at Lazaretto Point Light, turn the lever right, right, and left, and then pull.
The empty bottle found in the light-house celler smells of wine laced with laudanum, a tincture of opium which induces hallucinations.
“Hludwig” is Old German for “Ludwig.”

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Thanks for playing!

To answer your question, the clue you missed was “The escaped inmate bears a strong resemblance to Rufus Griswold.” You can learn this by showing the toper the wanted poster.

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Really enjoying this game so far, bravo! The prose is beautiful and the concept extremely interesting.

@Allx and I have just found the cipher wheel and we have two ciphers we can use it on, but we’re hesitant to type in the DECIPHER command because we’re afraid it’s just going to solve the puzzle for us!

We’ve been trying to do it ourselves using various polyalphabetic methods, but we’re hitting a wall. We suspect there might be two layers to it — maybe one polyalphabetic and one simple substitution?

If anyone could hint at whether we’re on the right track at all, it would be greatly appreciated!

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The cipher wheel works with a different kind of method. You can solve it by hand but it sounds like you don’t have full information yet. In particular, this cipher revolves around a keyword.

Oh wait, I think I just didn’t know what polyalphabetic means, and it might apply to the method I described above. But you definitely need more info!

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Thanks for the help!! Maybe we’ll just keep investigating for now and see what we can find. I think we’re up to 14 clues. We haven’t done anything with the lighthouse yet, so that might be our next step.

Yeah, so far we’ve been trying variants of the Vigenère method, but I think either we’re using the wrong key phrases or there’s something else we’re missing! It’s been really fun to experiment with, in any case! We learned a thing or two about complex ciphers in the process (lots of other neat learning moments in the game, like finding out about collapsible top hats).

Based on letter count we can at least deduce what parts of the first message says — very likely starts with “EDGAR, MEET ME IN/AT BALTIMORE (PLAZA HOTEL?)”… we tried to use that to reverse-engineer the cipher but no dice, haha.

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Hmm, yeah, the cipher wheel does just solve it for you. And I don’t know what the cipher is: I just went back to my transcript and laid out the keyword along with the cipher text and the plain text for the letter and each letter of the keyword does NOT seem to correspond to a shifted alphabet: it’s almost like parts of the alphabet are just shifted and parts of it are scrambled more than that?

Also some of your plaintext guess is right and some is wrong.

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Hmmm, intriguing! Thanks a lot for the info! We’re most confident in the “meet me” and “Baltimore” parts and still mulling over the rest. Very curious to return to all of this after we’re done with our two other avenues for clues; we’re booting up the game again right now.

I’d love to hear from the author eventually about how the cipher was made and how it can be hand-solved. I know it’s not intended to be manually cracked in order to beat the game and we’re really just making things harder for ourselves, but it’s such a fun and unique challenge that we didn’t want to pass it up!

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Hrm… if you assume that the letter starts Edgar, meet me then we have:

cipher 
wilmo
YHXNW
EDGAR

twil mo tw ilmotwilm otwil motwi
GYUF OB VQ PMMULYXFR TYZRF ICUDX
MEET ME -- -----E-T- ----T -----

lmotwil motwil mot wilm otwilmot wilmot
ERHVQUV BUNNCO XDL VCRD QXQUCNWS NUGQBQ
-----E- ------ --- ---- ---E-AR- -E--E-

wil, motwilmo
VVD, YWXPZQIJ
---, -R------

So that explodes your Baltimore theory, but also we might ask who is the letter from? and make further progress from that?

(this is assuming that each letter of the key corresponds to a monoalphabetic substitution but not necessarily a straight caesar shift)

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I’m happy to explain it, and was planning on doing so in my post-comp author’s notes / postmortem. I feel like I should wait until then, unless you really would like to know now?

I will say this: You are correct. The ciphers can be solved outside of the game (they’re not just gibberish that the wheel “magically” turns into readable text).

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Huh. No, I don’t think that’s how it works, because looking at the solution for the letter, the letters we know in each alphabet can’t be rotations of each other. So I don’t see how this would work with a cipher wheel. I guess there’s something else going on?

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Ahh, that’s an interesting way to test it! Great idea! We never got that far because we haven’t managed to get anything intelligible at all from any individual word (so we figured our deciphering method itself must be wrong). There definitely seems to be something extra tricky about these!

So are the keywords actually WILMOT and TINCTURE? When we didn’t get anywhere with those, we started trying all kinds of variations and related words, but knowing that they’re correct should help us focus our efforts in the right place.

Awesome, I suspected as much but it’s great to have confirmation! Thank you! If we can know for sure that the keywords are what they seem, we’ll try to keep at it a while longer :slightly_smiling_face: otherwise, we’ll try to find them before we attempt to go further. We might ask for more hints at some point, if it’s not a bother!

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WILMOT is right, but TINCTURE isn’t - it’s a clue to the actual keyword, but further investigation in the game, or a bit of background knowledge, is needed for the last push.

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I’m getting close to the point where I’d like to know now. I’ve spent a few hours with the cipher texts and the solutions and I still don’t feel like I understand how this works. I’ve figured out that if you repeat the key along the plain/cipher text, then each letter of the key corresponds to a substitution cipher. And I see that the two letters in common between the two keys (L and M) don’t contradict each other, so it seems like each key letter corresponds to the same substitution, but I still have no idea how those substitutions are generated from the key letter with a cipher wheel, because they’re not rotations of each other, and they’re… there are some bits of alphabetical and almost-alphabetical order in most of them so I assume they’re scrambled somehow by the key letter but I don’t yet see how. And I don’t see how you would be able to solve them from scratch: it doesn’t feel like the messages are long enough (12/13 letters per key letter) to really do letter-frequency guessing, and while I initially thought that Ally’s assumptions would let you chain into a solution of the first one, I tried working through the progression and that seems… like it takes some wild guesswork. There just aren’t that many repeated letters.

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Yeah, the L/M alphabets strongly suggest that they’re rotations of each other, except that the Qs are totally different. the N alphabet from LAUDANUM initially looks similar but the spacing is off in several places, and none of the other WILMOT alphabets seem to be similar at all. I think I’m stumped as to how you’d do this with a cipher wheel.

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Here’s a spreadsheet of the letter translations in the solutions: unless I’m making a lot of errors repeatedly this doesn’t quite make sense to me. poe.ods - Google Drive

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I’ll need more time to write-up a full explanation, but I would like to clarify one point:

I’m not saying that, and I don’t believe the game suggests that either. What I said earlier was, the in-game ciphers are actual ciphertext that can be deciphered with the proper algorithm and key. I never expected the player to decipher the text manually (but rather to use the wheel and keywords clued by the game).

I’ll have a fuller explanation later.

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