Surreal - Word of the Year

Strange Days

I want to take a moment to recognize a recent, fun bit of news.  Surreal was chosen as word of the year by Merriam-Webster.

There is some discussion of the meaning of surreal - with a focus on its dream-like aspect.  Slightly more interesting, there is also a discussion of when use of the term spiked in mass media.  No, not with the MCG announcement or the kickstarter campaign - sadly.  Instead, we get a brief discussion of various events that journalists often described as surreal.

The description of political violence as surreal reminds me of a personal experience with the surreal.  Back in the summer of 1996, I was visiting friends where we watched the movie Strange Days (totally underrated movie - check it out if you have the chance).  We finished the movie and the VCR switched back to the local broadcast.  We had been watching the olympics.  When we switched back the coverage showed smoke rising from rubble, panicked people on the street, and the confusion following the bombing.  Over all of this was the olympics coverage banner.  It is only mild spoilers to point out that Strange Days ends with scenes of violence on crowded, rubble strewn streets.  To switch back to see that in reality created a sense of surreality.  The coverage of the bombing seemed unreal, despite the clear video coverage, because of the contrast between the movie and the news.

The description from Merriam-Webster combined with this memory gave me a new way to express surrealism.  A simple (therefore incomplete) definition could be "a vivid yet unrealistic portrayal - as in a dream."  This is just another way to think about surrealism and how to fit surrealism into your RPGs (Invisible Sun or others).  Describe elements in great detail but with a sense of impossibility/unrealism.

Also, the Skunk Anansie song was awesome :)

Incantations Episode 8 - The Blue Sun and Surreal Dragons

We're back onto the Path of Suns this episode, and we also discuss how we might make surreal dragons.

Show Notes

Segment One - The Blue Sun (The Careful Gaze of the Grigori)

• The Blue Sun -- link
• The Sandman -- link
• Midnight Nation -- link

Segment Two - Surreal Dragons (Reflecting a Different Truth)

Follow us at: @drscottrobinson and @tex_red on Twitter.

We can be contacted via email at incantationspodcast@gmail.com.

You can also get in touch with us on the Invisible Sun G+ community.

Music in the episode was drawn from the song "Beyond" by Wes Otis and Plate Mail Games. It is available at DriveThruRPG.

Invisible Sun is the intellectual property of Monte Cook Games.
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Automatism and Surrealism

Monte Cook Games sometimes describes the tone of Invisible Sun RPG as "surreal fantasy."  In keeping with that description, this post further explores the origins of surrealism as a school of visual arts.  In the last post, I discussed Dadaism as one of the precursors of (self-identified) surrealists.  It is important to remember a couple of elements from the Dada movement.

1. The Dadaists questions traditional sources of authority -- from politics to religion to art
2. Reason, itself, was implicated in the horrors of WWI

From this milieu emerged a particular set of artists who took the attack on reason and authority quite seriously - led by Andre Breton.

Andre Breton in 1924

Breton proposed that the conscious creation of art allowed for reason to pollute free expression.  Every deliberate act - including the creation of art - was contaminated.  This led to a natural question.  How does one create art without conscious intention?  His proposal was automatism. 

Automatism involves the use of automatic (rather than consciously controlled) movements to record expression.  In an extreme case, consider randomly hitting keys.  The surrealists applied this technique to drawing and painting.  The artist sketched in a seemly random fashion paying as little attention to the page as possible.  This means more than simply not looking at the page on which one is drawing - one had to try not to think of the page at all or the emerging image.  If an image did emerge (surely, there was not always an emergent image), it was thought to represent subconscious -- and to a surrealist, truer -- form of expression.

Breton applied automatism to other activities as well.  He worked with automatic writing in which a writer records every passing thought with as little self-editing as possible.  The goal was to produce a dream-like sequence of images or thoughts on the page.  The connection between dreams and surrealism here becomes clear.  Automatic drawing and writing was intended to provide access to the raw unconscious - just as dreams were thought to express.  

It is the emphasis on dreams that may serve as the strongest connection between early surrealism and the Invisible Sun RPG.  The images associated with the game and the discussion of the Actuality as being more real than what we know as reality (much like Breton's notion that the sub-conscious is more authentic than anything consciously created) provide some insight into the philosophical and aesthetic inspirations of the RPG.  

Incantations Episode 7 - The Invisible Sun Kickstarter ARG

We've got another single topic episode for you this week. We're talking about the Invisible Sun Kickstarter ARG, the puzzles, the solutions, and where things are at now.

Show Notes

Segment One - Invisible Sun Kickstarter ARG (A Distant Light Pierces the Mist)

• Alternate Reality Game (ARG) -- link
• Path of Suns website -- link
• G+ Invisible Sun community -- link
• Kickstarter puzzles
• Clocks
• Our Kickstarter History -- link
• The Invisible Sun Kickstarter Is Different -- link
• Deluxe Games -- link
• Group Purchases -- link
• Shipping -- link
• Changing the Way RPGs Are Played -- link
• The Directed Campaign -- link
• The Active Sun -- link
• Details of the Contents -- link
• A Solid Door
• The door was made known with the Green Sun update -- link
• Solution #1
• The first solution was figured out based upon Paladin Revenant’s theory about the clocks -- link
• Putting the clocks in hour order and taking the roman numeral the minute hand is pointing at will give you the key: 376298415
• Door leads to Are You a Spider or an Ant? -- link
• Solution #2
• Clue about the clocks dropped in the Indigo Sun update -- link
• “There is more than one way for clocks to be keys”
• Ryan Chaddock and Robert Marino seemed to have figured this one out -- link
• Putting the clocks in order of the minute hands and taking the roman numeral the hour hand is pointing at gives you the key: 841793265
• Door leads to Are You an Ant or a Spider? -- link
• Solution #3
• Memory stick, The Blade, was found in a cache with an image of Wrong Cat and a text file. -- link
• The image had white text on the transparent background which read “If you are looking for lies, use Grey”
• What Also Opens the Door.txt had the following text: To see that the door is opened by a lie, you may need an extra eye.
• Another hint was dropped in a Tweet, which I cannot locate. It was an image of a clock, and I thought it was pointing at the fourth hour.
• Hour four on the clock is incorrect: IIII instead of IV
• Entering IIII in the door opens it
• Door leads to Fartown -- link
• Spiders and Ants
• The solid door puzzle leads to two different pages about Spiders and Ants.
• There has been much discussion about what Spiders and Ants are, but no solid conclusions yet.
• Monte is a Spider -- link
• Geocaches
• Several updates included GPS coordinates to geocaches
• Some of the caches had USB memory sticks that contained files that predicted keyfalls
• Digital contents of the caches -- link
• Two images were found
• Changery image asks about the solid door -- link
• Wrong Cat pointing to the third Solid Door puzzle -- link
• Clues were hidden in the background of the images
• Looking through the bytes of the images revealed no further hidden information
• Current state
• Shanna stated in the Kickstarter comments that there are two or three puzzles that have not been solved -- link
• This was before the third solution to the Solid Door puzzle was found
• Not all of the caches have been recovered, or reported on the G+ group
• Nothing conclusive was determined about Spiders and Ants

Follow us at: @drscottrobinson and @tex_red on Twitter.

We can be contacted via email at incantationspodcast@gmail.com. You can also get in touch with us on the Invisible Sun G+ community.

Music in the episode was drawn from the song "Beyond" by Wes Otis and Plate Mail Games. It is available at DriveThruRPG.

Invisible Sun is the intellectual property of Monte Cook Games.

Subscribe: iTunes | Google Play | RSS

Incantations Episode 6 - Design Diary 1

We've got some new stuff to talk about on Incantations. Monte Cook published a design diary and we go over the details he included.

Show Notes

Segment One - Dev Diary 1 (The Careful Gaze of the Grigori)

• Invisible Sun Design Diary 1: Stats -- link

Follow us at: @drscottrobinson and @tex_red on Twitter.

We can be contacted via email at incantationspodcast@gmail.com.

You can also get in touch with us on the Invisible Sun G+ community.

Music in the episode was drawn from the song "Beyond" by Wes Otis and Plate Mail Games. It is available at DriveThruRPG.

Invisible Sun is the intellectual property of Monte Cook Games.
Subscribe: iTunes | Google Play | RSS

Steganography and the Invisible Sun Kickstarter ARG

When the Invisible Sun Kickstarter was started there was an alternate reality game (ARG) that ran along with it. We're going to be talking about the ARG when episode 7 hits the interwebs, but in the lead up to that I had bit of related research that merited a bit more detail. If you're looking for a way to hide information from your players, or the spies in the van outside your window, give this a read.

Steganography

I was looking for a way to hide information in a way that my tech savvy players might be able to figure out for the Invisible Sun lead up campaign that I'm running. During my research, I stumbled upon a technique that I thought might reveal some additional information hidden in the images that were pulled from the caches that were found in the Kickstarter ARG. For reference, the images I've been looking at are From the Changery and Wrong Cat from the memory sticks in the caches. You can follow along by downloading those images, just right click the links or the images and download them.

From the Changery

Wrong Cat

There's a discipline called steganography which is the practice of concealing messages/information in nonsecret text or data. Both of the images have information that's been hidden in the form of white text on a transparent background. That is a form of steganography that's pretty simple and straight forward. That's a pretty good way to hide information for a wide audience if you want the information to be discovered. It's not readily apparent, but with a little bit of work, or happenstance, that information will be discovered.

You can go deeper, however.

One thing I discovered is that you can append bytes after the end chunk of a PNG file without corrupting it. If you pop either image open in a tool like HxD you'll see the opening chunk of the PNG, the starting chunk (IHDR) and at the very end the closing chunk (IEND). You can totally type whatever you want in at the end there without disturbing the rest of the file. I took a look at the recovered image files with this in mind which unfortunately revealed no additional information at the end of the file.

Digging through the byte data of the file did reveal some interesting metadata that Adobe Photoshop had dropped in. Creation dates, modified dates, the tool that was used (Adobe on a Mac), layer names (Have you found a solid door?), change logs (looks like it was converted to a PNG on a Windows machine), dimensions. Lots of fun stuff you can infer the history of the file from. Unfortunately, nothing terribly useful once again.

<xmp:CreatorTool>Adobe Photoshop CC 2015 (Macintosh)</xmp:CreatorTool>
<xmp:CreateDate>2016-07-26T02:14:30-05:00</xmp:CreateDate>
<rdf:li xml:lang="x-default">Words in White</rdf:li>
<photoshop:LayerName>Have you found a solid door? </photoshop:LayerName>
<photoshop:LayerText>Have you found a solid door? </photoshop:LayerText>

Neat, right?

What if there was more data?

Since you can dump data at the end of a PNG file, you can basically put anything you want there. Take the following image for example (right click the image or this link and download it).

This Wrong Cat contains more secrets

At first blush, nothing seems terribly odd about the image. If you double click it the image will open up in whatever program you view images with. This is where things start to get a bit odd if you care about image quality and how it relates to file size. The image is only about 200x250 pixels and shouldn't be nearly a megabyte in size. If you open the file up in HxD you'll see the standard PNG header at the beginning, but if you go to the very end you'll see some really odd plain text that reads "you_found_me" along with some PK and IEND characters. What you're seeing here are PKZip file headers, PKZip being the file format that's used to compress files.

The other way to pull all of the data out of the image is to open the image file up with a compression tool, like 7-Zip. Start up 7-Zip, then navigate to the directory you saved the image to and open the image. Normally, this would just open the image up in your image viewing program, but 7-Zip will simply open up the compressed file that's hanging out in there. Now you can just pull the data out of the image and do what you want with it.

There are two ways to extract the data that's in the file. First off, you can find the beginning of the zip file by searching for "PK". You'll find that header at offset 00003B30. Then you can copy everything from that point to the end of the file, including the "PK" characters you located. Once you've copied everything hit File > New and paste all of the data in the new file you've created in HxD and save it as a ".zip". Now you've got a clean zipped file that you can open up with a simple double click.

Yeah, it's not a way to hide information from players at the table. It's also not a great way to hide data if you want anyone to be able to find it. However, if you're running an ARG in which solving puzzles might take days or weeks, and your players like to mess with things in hex editors, then this might be something you want to look into.

Incantations Episode 5 -- The Green Sun and Secret Keeping Techniques of the Alchemists

This time on Incantations we wander back down the Path of Suns to the Green sun. After talking about the verdant expanses we talk about secret keeping techniques of alchemists and how they might be useful in our Invisible Sun campaigns.

Show Notes

Segment One - The Green Sun (The Careful Gaze of the Grigori)

• The Green Sun -- link
• The Parliament of Trees -- link (wiki), link2 (DC Wikia)

Segment Two - Secret Keeping Techniques of the Alchemists (A Distant Light Pierces the Mist)

• The Secrets of Alchemy -- link
• Twelve Keys of Basil Valentine -- link
• The Ninth Gate (movie) -- link

Follow us at: @drscottrobinson and @tex_red on Twitter.

We can be contacted via email at incantationspodcast@gmail.com.

You can also get in touch with us on the Invisible Sun G+ community.

Music in the episode was drawn from the song "Beyond" by Wes Otis and Plate Mail Games. It is available at DriveThruRPG.

Invisible Sun is the intellectual property of Monte Cook Games.
Subscribe: iTunes | Google Play | RSS