Quote from: codetheweb on June 29, 2016, 04:58:41 PM

Instead, each code describes a place in the text adventure; and will only be useful in later stages of the puzzle.

That has been my assumption as well. Problem is that I see 4 different QR's which could describe the initial room:

You are in a cell. You can go through a cell door. You are in an iron chamber, the walls are lined with iron pipes. There are chains suspended from the pipes and rusted gears are scattered about the floor. The sound of dripping water echoes in the chamber. An iron plated floor. on which there is a skeleton and some rusted gears. A dusty skeleton, covered in rags. It's wearing a jacket.

QR6: Skeletons hang from chains and manacles against the walls. The floor is covered with iron gears, rusted scrap metal, and empty glass vials. You discover a leather jacket.

QR9: You are in a rusted iron chamber. Water is trickling from large iron pipes above you. On the wall someone has scrawled When in your house black crows give birth to white doves, then you will be called wise

QR11: http://textadventures.co.uk/games/view/5craldfdmkkzngf1davsna/days-destroyed

It is QR11 that got us in the cell.
There is a skeleton (though it is on the floor, not hanging), the floor has rusted gears and there is a (discovered) jacket. But not the vials from QR6.
The Iron Chamber of QR9 is a strong match, though the pipes on the ceiling vs walls are a mismatch. Dripping water matches, no mentions of gears or skeletons.

If it wasn't for the jacket I would not have any doubts about QR9. Also, since the crows/doves thing could be the much needed hint. And that hint contains "then you will be called wise", which goes well with the "Only the worthy may proceed" from the original tweet.

On the Aztec code... it will not work the way it is:

- The orientation marks are wrong (because of the mirroring)
- The code words in the upper half contain rubbish (haven't actually checked rotating 90 degrees first)

Assuming the Aztec is not a Red Herring... If we want to make it work, we must modify it, or: turn some black squares into white ones and vice versa. Could that be what the Black Cows giving birth to White Doves hint is about?

I've tried a few Game of Life iterations, tried moving the squares based upon the dot and/or the triangle but nothing I have tried produces a valid Aztec Code.

- I wasn't that hopeful about Game of Life anyway: reversing it on this scale is 'impossible' and the symmetry would remain, which goes for any method that would manipulate the QR based upon the blocks alone.
- The dots and triangles are not symmetric, so if they encode the manipulations to do, the result would not be symmetric.
- The result does not need to be an Aztec code, could also be QR (minimum 21x21) or Data Matrix (minimum 10x10)
- For Aztec, the manipulations must both add new and remove existing blocks, that's the only way to get proper orientation markers.

Another path... I took another look at the letter frequencies (leaving out the 3 uncertain blocks). Kappa plain text value is 0.0368, which is pretty much the value for a set of random letters. It indicates it is not a simple substitution cipher. For a long enough English text the value should be about 0.065. I then took some English text, applied some ciphers and looked at the KPT values. Playfair, Bifid, Vigenere with a short key all produced about 0.05. Vigenere with a long key (up to a One Time Pad) approaches the value for random letters of <0.04.

- While nothing sensible resulted from Playfair/Bifid itself, they also can take a key (which presumably is being held by the dragon ;P ) I have only tried bifid/playfair on the outer ring starting top-left (cf Aztec), I did try both clockwise and counter-clockwise.
- While a long key combined with Vigenere (or shorter with Vigenere Auto Key) is possible, reverse Vigenere on the outer ring did not produce any sensible key (assuming the 26 blocks of the outer ring encode 'The Journey Inwards....." For this I did try every position on the outer ring as start, both cw and ccw.
- The above also means a readable One Time Pad is not likely, however it could for instance be a One Time Pad based upon the row/column index of the letter in the 'Aztec' code.

D.