legendkeeper
patreon
Riddle post-mortem, progress update
🕑 Added 2019-02-12 04:27:13 +0000 UTCHey y'all! Hope you had a good Monday after a good weekend. Some of you might've noticed some cryptic postings on my part---Way back when I posted the LegendKeeper statblock, I had the idea it would be cool to hide something in it. I did so, but I moved on and nothing ever came of it. I was looking at it the other day and thought, what the heck, let's make a thing out of it, so that's what I did. FilipinoFire from the Discord summed up how it all shook out nicely, so I'll post that here:
Braden posted this riddle:
one is a beast
one is alright
the last one will vanish
before the next night
You might have the keys
But where are the locks?
Be the first to deliver
to the right box
So, three different solutions (secrets) were out there to be found. The highest profile/most worked on was the third (last one will vanish), as it was the most complex. He put a base64 encoded string in the background of a lens he posted to his Patreon page. "the right box" in the riddle text referred to an email address he set up for the riddle: therightbox@legendkeeper.com. This was the "box" that you were supposed to deliver each of the secrets to
The first secret was the first one to be solved. He edited the image of his LegendKeeper stat block he had posted to Patreon a while back to read "intuitive world-building beast" instead of "intuitive world-building application". Beyond that, no other edits were made to the image. First attempts to solve involved some complicated steganography analysis and guesses involving other text within the image. I solved this one after a tip-off by Braden that the secret referred to a literal "monster". I recognized the AC and HP stats on the LK stat block as also belonging to the Tarrasque, a monster in D&D. This was the first secret.
The second secret was solved by @Dadding, who combined the last letters of Braden's most recent posts, the first 6 of which spelled out "LEGEND". It was "alright", in that it was all the right-most letters of his recent Patreon posts. The third was solved by passing the base64 code from the Patreon lens through a Caesar cipher with a shift of 3, which we determined based on an addition Braden made to his FAQ, which read:
Julius Caesar? Julius Caesar? Julius Caesar?
Ľ̷ͅȄ̴̼G̵̰̀N̶̬͗D̶͓͂K̸̜͑P̴̢͑R̷̙͛A̵͕̐B̸̙̽C̵͈̚F̷̹̉H̵̲̑Í̶̢J̷̣̊M̸͉̈O̶̟͛Q̶̗̄S̵̖͑T̸̼̉U̶͎͝V̴̼͂W̶̦̃Ẍ̷͈́Y̶͈̾Z̸̹̀
Repetition of Caesar clued in to the use of the cipher as well as the shift, and the Zalgo text was the alphabet. After running the resulting ciphertext through a base64 decoder with the alphabet LEGNDKPRABCFHIJMOQSTUVWXYZlegndkprabcfhijmoqstuvwxyz0123456789+/=, you get I_WAS_PAYING_ATTENTION, the last secret.
I sent out an email to the puzzle solvers over the weekend. They'll be getting a cool badge and a few other nice things once the application is out. :)
As for progress, I made a good amount of it last weekend. I finally implemented what will be the final registration/login system. It features one-click sign in with Google, or a regular sign-in with email. I'll probably add more third-party authorizations later, like Twitter or Discord, but I think Google and generic email is plenty for now. I'm doing all of my sign-in through an established third-party auth provider, rather than rolling my own, so everything is nice and secure.
I also continued work on the secret features; some of the last bits are proving to be stubborn, but once I'm done with them, the first iteration of LegendKeeper will be feature-complete, and all the work from there is bug fixes and design implementations, which is pretty exciting.
I appreciate your patience as I work on the app! I dump a ton of hours into it every week, and I wish I could put even more into it! I propose that days become 36 hours long and for humans to get genetic modifications to only need 4 hours of sleep!
Ciao!
Braden
