'Dungeons & Dragons' Sends Out More Mysterious Keys and Clues for Real World Game

The mystery surrounding Dungeons & Dragons' latest game grows deeper and deeper.Last week, [...]

By Christian Hoffer

The mystery surrounding Dungeons & Dragons' latest game grows deeper and deeper.

Last week, Dungeons and Dragons launched a new "alternate reality game" (ARG) shortly after announcing its upcoming "Stream of Many Eyes" event. The game involves players finding a "stone of great power" sent to Earth by the mage Elminster (a popular character in D&D lore) and guarded by a person who had their memories of their past life blocked.

So far, the game has involved everything from Yelp reviews to trips to game stores around the United States and Canada. Now, it seems that the game is starting to spread out to include popular D&D personalities and even a few gaming journalists.

Last week, players (including myself) retrieved key-shaped USB drives from game stores that contained an image of runes. Each set of runes could be translated into a different D&D creature, ranging from the terrasque to a giant centipede.

The purpose of the runes were twofold - players used the runes to form an alphabet that could be used for future clues and the runes were part of another puzzled sent out by the Twitter account @Immortal4tress (which serves as a central hub of sorts for the game) earlier this week.

In order to crack the puzzle, players needed to shift each letter of the phrase "A Monster Fiercely Unduplicated" by the number in the sequence in the tweet to form a cipher. So "A Monster Fiercely Duplicated" became "RKJUYPSJYVEHXMBQSKMGEYVKPOGJ." The cipher was seven letters short of the number sequence in the tweet, so players then added the word "Owlbear" (the only D&D monster named in the runes from the keystore that did not have a pair of duplicate letters) at the end of the code and then shifted those to form the cipher "RKJUYPSJYVEHXMBQSKMGEYVKPOGJOHYSSYP."

To crack the cipher, players used another message decoded from Yelp reviews discovered earlier this week, which indicated that players needed to use one of the monsters as a keyword in a keyword cipher. By using "Gargoyle" as a keyword, the cipher became "CONVERT NEW GLYPHS TO PAGE WORD AND LETTER."

Right now, players are still waiting what the new code will lead to, but it seems tied to a second set of keys that were sent to several influencers, including Matthew Mercer of Critical Role, D&D video personality Matt Colville, podcaster Ivan Von Norman, and Bleeding Cool journalist Gavin Sheehan. Two of the four keys contained partial images of a shield that contain runes used in the earlier puzzles. It's assumed that these glyphs will lead to the next clue, which could be the key to "winning" the game once and for all.

Players also discovered an Instagram account that posted pictures that referenced the three type of spell components: somatic, verbal, and material. Coupled with a tweet from the @Immortal4tress account, it's believed that players need to figure out a specific spell to use on the stone's guardian and clear his name. Likely, the shield glyphs will point players in the right direction.

There's also this clue, which seems to reference the Instagram account:

It's not too late to join D&D's new game. A Discord server has been set up for players to collectively solve the puzzles, and a wiki page was made for players who have jumped into the action late. You can also follow the #nostoneunturned and #TeamVolo hashtags on Twitter for more updates.

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