Morrowind talk:Treasury Report

ResealEdit

How do I reseal it? — Unsigned comment by 144.131.67.65 (talk) on 24 March 2009

Try to read the report again. The game will ask if you want to try to reseal the document. –Rpeh^{•T•C•E•} 06:27, 24 March 2009 (EDT)

Decoding the messageEdit

I think that the code is defintely related to keyboard arrangement. As too many of the 4-letter combination of the letter came from the same row of the keyboard with a few exception.(Vvardfell (talk) 17:10, 4 January 2016 (UTC))

I was curious about this. It's interesting that this is the one cipher that hasn't been figured out, given that the game is now nearly 23 years old. I haven't cracked it, but here are my thoughts.

Playing with the Vignere, Bazeries, and Caesar ciphers didn't yield any success. Then, I found a promising post from someone named Dragonz Dancer on Game SAS, saying that they came across a similar code with four letter seauences in Umberto Eco's book, Foucalt's Pendulum. The poster says that this is a tabula recta or Trithemius Cipher. The plot of Foucault's Pendulum centers on a coded manuscript, but I only found two relevant chapters so far:

• From Chapter 5, characters from the novel ate using a program written in BASIC to find all permutations of the four letter word, YHVH, short for Yahweh (the Hebrew name for God): The problem is to find all the permutations of the name of God, isn't it? Well, this manual has a neat little program in Basic for listing all possible sequences of four letters. It seems tailor-made for YHVH. Should I give it a whirl?" And he showed Diotallevi the program; Diotallevi had to agree it looked cabalistic. "Try it yourself. When it asks for input, type in Y, H, V, H, and press the ENTER key. But you may be disappointed. There are only twenty-four possible permutations."
• From Chapter 19: All in good time, gentlemen. Trithemius presents forty major and ten minor cryptosystems. Here I was lucky—either that or the Templars of Provins simply didn't make any great effort, since they were sure nobody would ever crack their code. I tried the first of the forty major systems and assumed that only the first letter of each word counted." Belbo asked to see the page and glanced over it. "You still get nonsense: kdruuuth..." "Naturally," the colonel said condescendingly. "The Templars may not have made a great effort, but they weren't altogether lazy either. This first sequence of letters is itself a coded message, and I wondered whether the second series of ten minor coding systems might not give an answer. For this second series, you see, Trithemius used some wheels. Here is the wheel for the first system." He took another photocopy from his file, drew his chair up to the desk, and, asking us to pay careful attention, touched the letters with his closed fountain pen. "It's the simplest possible system. Consider only the outer circle. To code something, you replace each letter of your original message with the letter that precedes it: for A you write Z, for B you write A, and so on.

Interestingly, the "simplest possible system" mentioned in the book is used in Morrowind, but during the Redoran quest 'Disguise' where the player character intercepts Neminda's Orders. This might be a sign that someone on Bethesda's staff had read Eco's works. This simple system is called Atbash elsewhere.

I also looked at Vvardfell's idea and wrote out where the letters appear on a standard QWERTY keyboard as below, with normal characters being the middle row, subscript characters being the bottom row, and superscript characters being the top row>

KJAH SDFH KLJH FAKL SDJH FAKL DSHF KJAD SHFL KJA_N SD_CJ _NAS^{O ERU}H A^{UWO IYE}F HADS _CH_NK S_NCL K_NAS J^{ROR IEWU PIWE} HJKF _NBDS LKJ_{V N}KLA SD_NF ^OH^RF ^{OIQP REW}F HSAD KJ_VH ASKJ D_NFP ^OQRE HF^OI DSA^P

I can't really spot a pattern in this, but it is worth noting that a similar looking code is used in another Hlaalu quest, so I don't think this is simply a "test" of the player character's trustworthiness, though it is possible that both codes are nonsense written by one of the game developers. A few couple of ideas for anyone trying to figure this out:

1. Who wrote the Hlaalu questline? It seemed like a typical division of labour at Bethesda to assign faction questlines to a single writer. Knowing who wrote this and what their influences were might give some clues.

2. Reading Foucault's Pendulum all the way through to see if there are any other references to four-letter codes might also generate a few more leads

--Admos (talk) 20:42, 3 January 2025 (UTC)