This is a short bit of game inspiration: Locked letters.
I had no idea these existed until I saw this article:
Sealed Renaissance Letter Virtually Unfolded
Meanwhile, Matt Riggsby could probably toss off 2000 words on the subject for a GURPS article in, oh, a day.
The idea of a letter designed to be difficult to open shouldn't surprise me but it did. It's a useful thing for games - especially fantasy or low-tech games, where "We just X-ray it and then let it pass on, the contents read" isn't an option.
Game rules? I can think of a few. A straight-up contest of IQ vs. the one who locked the letter. The intended recipient may get a bonus from a clue in a seperate letter, or a pre-agreed sign, or of some sort. If a lock-er has a signature style, and you know for certain the lock-er and that style, this may be worth a bonus of +1 (for a complex or wide variety of puzzle styles or mild clue) up to a +5 (for a completely consistent style or a blatant clue.)
You can also make it a contest of other skills - Mathematics (Cryptology), for one, or Cryptography for another - with appropriate TL penalties either direction! Skill in Hobby Skill (Origami) should work against almost any lock if I'm understanding them correctly.
You could, of course, just cut it apart - but then you can't re-seal it. And some fantasy materials may resist cutting, or magical reading . . . or contain traps (magical and mundane) that make circumventing the puzzle a very bad idea.
The article implies somewhat greater security in letterlocking than folding actually provides. The purpose of letterlocking was to turn the paper into a physically secure package which wouldn't accidentally come open during long and difficult periods of transit (in the absence of separate envelopes), not necessarily an informationally secure package which would be difficult to get in to. We can't open them now not because it's inherently difficult to unfold paper, but because the paper is hundreds of years old and very fragile, prone to crumbling if you just look at it too hard, let alone try to unfold it even if you know exactly what you're doing.
ReplyDeleteThe game use I might make of it is having it be a point of forgery. Writers tended to have their own personal styles of folding their letters for transit. You can copy the penmanship of His Grace the Bishop of Oxbridge perfectly, but someone who knows him well may get suspicious if it's just rolled up and wrapped with ribbon and seal rather than folded up in his habitual pentagonal half-twist, or even if it's his original, it's a careful spy indeed who folds it back just the way His Grace likes it and avoids signs of tampering. Real security in Renaissance era correspondence was provided by...well, that's getting ahead of myself.
And hence the comment "Meanwhile, Matt Riggsby could probably toss off 2000 words on the subject for a GURPS article in, oh, a day." is somewhat justified :)
DeleteHe's 10% of the way there just in the comments section of my blog.
Delete"Real security in Renaissance era correspondence was provided by...well, that's getting ahead of myself."
DeleteDo I smell an article?