Ciphers from the Society

For those who haven’t seen it yet, a code was recently intercepted. Myself and several others were able to decode it, and in order to share our knowledge I will post both the cipher and the solution below.


osczivmewpophpvgvwrxusgpwxijwoumhpglvvpieykhcbxxkhhrmvayhgcuskcvwtmgmyfrfmewjqtqzqhdshvigdgkbgmhxbwlrmgmsk


Keyword is society
Solution:
“we are coming lord stone was not pleased with the last attempt perhaps a more direct and deadly form of attack is needed expect us”

Thank you, Cara.

Last attempt? What do they mean by last attempt? Is this a previous foe of Travance's? Any information pertaining to this would be greatly appreciated. It is always best to know as much as possible about an enemy before engaging them.

For the sake of those who are novices at cracking codes such as these,

How exactly was this decoded? What was the process?

This cipher is a particularly nasty beast, Django, and was cracked by process of elimination. Normally these codes are based on letters, where one takes a normal sentence and replaces every letter with one that's some set number behind or ahead of it. As an example, the words "I see you" could be crudely encoded to "J tff zpv", with each letter being replaced with the one ahead of it on the alphabet. We ruled that code out when attempting to process it only produced more gibberish.

Instead, it was discovered that there is a more advanced cipher which basically does the same thing, replacing letters with others, but instead ot using the same alphabetical shift as before, it replaces letters based on a keyword, "society" in this case. The actual process involves comparing the letters of the regular message to all possible shifts of the simpler cipher on a twenty six by twenty six row chart based on which letter of the key you're on and manually writing the result for each letter. If you know the keyword, you can do it backwards, which is how we did it. Achieving the keyword was done by...well, us magicians still have secrets to keep.

-Terzak

Keladry,

They sponsored [strike]mercenaries[/strike] goons to come to Travance and do what they do best.

Of course, Travance did what it does best and now some gentleman Stone is a bit grumpy as a result.

Jokes aside, he very likely means business and I would suggest not letting your mind wander too much if you're in sparse company.

--Chet