
Cryptomancer RPG - Tomte
http://cryptorpg.com/
======
karmicthreat
Someone over in the SA Fatal and Friends thread did a review that was posted
here: [http://projects.inklesspen.com/fatal-and-
friends/binarydoubt...](http://projects.inklesspen.com/fatal-and-
friends/binarydoubts/cryptomancer/)

~~~
bjelkeman-again
He complains the manual is 400 pages, then proceeds to write a review that is
probably 20. And he isn't done yet. At least it is comprehensive.

~~~
jholman
That comment about it being 400 pages is not a complaint, I think.

------
bburky
This reminds me of the time my party argued about how much modern information
theory we were allowed to use in D&D. We wanted to maximize the amount of
information to communicate using Sending which states that it sends "twenty-
five words or less". Can I use a form of encoding and a compression algorithm?
Or can we make up words and can they be arbitrarily long?

~~~
pavel_lishin
Codes have been around since forever; isn't the problem that you have to make
sure the receiving party knows the algorithm, too?

~~~
johncolanduoni
Encryption yes, but compression encodings haven't.

~~~
my_first_acct
Compression schemes (in the form of code books) to save on telegraphy costs
have existed almost as long as the telegraph itself.

From [1]: "Elaborate commercial codes which encoded complete phrases into
single words were developed and published as codebooks of thousands of phrases
and sentences with corresponding codewords... Cable tolls were charged by the
word, and telegraph companies counted codewords like any other words, so a
carefully constructed code could reduce message lengths enormously."

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_code_(communication...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_code_\(communications\))

~~~
johncolanduoni
Is D&D set in a world where the telegraph exists? I've always gotten the
impression that insofar as it's linked to our history of technological
progression it is set well before that invention, while after the times of
e.g. the Caesar cipher.

~~~
my_first_acct
Good point. So here is a compression scheme from about 350 BC, describing how
to pass messages from one mountain peak to another, using a torch and a water
clock [1][2]:

"The water-clocks are an early long-distance-communication-system. Every
communicating party had exactly the same jar, with a same-size-hole that was
closed and the same amount of water in it. In the jar was a stick with
different messages written on. When one party wanted to tell something to the
other it made a fire-sign. When the other answered, both of them opened the
hole at the same time. And with the help of another fire-sign closed it again
at the same time, too. In the end the water covered the stick until the point
of the wanted message."

[1]
[http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Communication.htm](http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Communication.htm)

[2]
[http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Technology/AncientGreekTechnol...](http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Technology/AncientGreekTechnology028.html)

~~~
kakarot
That is AWESOME. What an incredible feat of engineering.

------
jfaucett
This is very nice artwork. I wonder if this is the same Chad Walker who worked
on Age of Empires and BloodRayne? They've done some pretty cool stuff too at
[http://www.walkerboystudio.com](http://www.walkerboystudio.com) .

------
saycheese
Really enjoy running across this and in the process ran across a nice list of
security games & related resources:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13148899](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13148899)

------
saycheese
Here's an log of a chat with the game's creator that provides a lot of
additional information: [https://gmshoe.wordpress.com/2016/06/21/qa-chad-
walker-crypt...](https://gmshoe.wordpress.com/2016/06/21/qa-chad-walker-
cryptomancer/)

Which links to an indepth description of how the game works by the creator:
[https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?781271-Cryptomancer-
A-f...](https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?781271-Cryptomancer-A-fantasy-
role-playing-game-about-hacking)

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jasoncchild
Cyberpunk...or wait...Shadowrun!

~~~
szul
Definitely feels like a variation of Shadowrun.

~~~
SolarNet
Except it's inverted. Shadowrun is cyberpunk with orcs and elves. This is orcs
and elves with cyberpunk.

~~~
szul
I honestly prefer Netrunner. I'd rather keep my fantasy and cyberpunk settings
a little separate.

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ryanmarsh
Has anyone played this? Thoughts?

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saycheese
How many players including the DM are required to play?

~~~
PhasmaFelis
Assuming it's like most tabletop RPGs, the answer is probably "one." Three to
six is more typical, though.

~~~
makeset
How do you play a tabletop RPG by yourself?

~~~
saycheese
Agree, though appears to be a thing; here's a pretty good guide to "solo
rpg/roleplaying":

[http://www.rpgready.com/solo-roleplaying-solo-
rpg/](http://www.rpgready.com/solo-roleplaying-solo-rpg/)

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umsm
Great artwork, but I'll never find time to actually read the 400-pages manual.

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monk_e_boy
hijack this to push HeroKids RPG game. I don't have any vested interest in it,
other than it is super rad and my kids love playing it.

~~~
saycheese
To give a comparison between the two, here are the two preview files for each:

Cryptomancer RPG
[http://watermark.drivethrurpg.com/pdf_previews/186678-sample...](http://watermark.drivethrurpg.com/pdf_previews/186678-sample.pdf)

Hero Kids RPG
[http://watermark.drivethrurpg.com/pdf_previews/106605-sample...](http://watermark.drivethrurpg.com/pdf_previews/106605-sample.pdf)

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cyphreak
I'm down. Anybody in Denver want to do this?

Is there a place for tabletop gamers to organize? I've always wanted to get
into it, but just not with the Doritos+MtnDew sort of people. A bunch of
infosec professionals playing this game would be highly entertaining, I think.

------
pfisch
So I guess we all think it is legit that this ad has 96 points in 3 hours.
More than anything else on HN in this time period.

~~~
saycheese
Point of HN is to share.

As long as what is shared follows the guidelines, that's literally all that
matters.

Everyone once in awhile you'll see something that's clearly attempting to
exploit HN to promote whatever they're pushing, put I don't see anything that
fits a pattern like that and appears to be well within the scope of the
guidelines.

~~~
pfisch
Is the point of hn to make a bunch of bot accounts on proxies to massively
upvote your ad in the first hour?

~~~
ekiru
I think you're right that that is not the point of HN, but I think HN attempts
to automatically (and the HN moderators attempt to non-automatically in some
cases) detect various kinds of voting abuse, including that kind. It's
possible that these detection mechanisms are flawed and that this story was
upvoted in that way but managed to get past those mechanisms, but another
possibility is that people found the concept interesting and upvoted for that
reason (or hoped for it to produce some interesting discussion). Many of the
other comments (most of which do post-date your original complaint, of course)
do seem to support the hypothesis that some HN users would find it
interesting.

With that said (and assuming you have sufficient karma to flag stories), I
think that believing a story to have reached the front page via such abusive
voting would be a good reason to flag the story, which will bring it to the
attention of the mods, who hopefully would be able to determine whether
anything improper was in fact going on.

~~~
pfisch
So do you think the mods are paid more than the marketers pushing stuff to the
top? As a person who has benefited from having posts on the top of reddit I
can tell you that there is a massive incentive to manipulate the system and
that mods do not really have enough incentive or resources to stop them. It is
basically like trying to keep drugs from crossing the border. The people who
make money from the drugs can marshal massive resources in order to get the
them across the border, and the will/resources just aren't there on the
opposing side to really stop them.

r/gaming is massively gamed, r/news the mods are in on the gaming and have
made it illegal to post links that don't lead to big news sources. This was
done under the guise of making r/news more legit I guess, but it is hard to
believe the fix wasn't in. Also mods of r/gaming are probably also in on it
because there is just too much money at stake. Try to contact some of the
users posting gta 5 gifs on the front page and see how real they are if you
don't believe me.

It strains credibility to believe that this post had a massive number of
upvotes in the first 3 hours and almost no comments, and it is a pretty
blatant advertorial. I think it did gain some real traction after that, but
when you boost something into a high visibility position it always generates
some decent numbers. The question is would it have actually gotten to the top
on its own? I really doubt it.

There is no smoking gun here and there never will be. It is incredibly easy to
make 100 accounts on proxies and make some comments with them and then upvote
a post. We are talking about one employee for less than a week of work. The
payoff is very large and it is basically untraceable by mods. It happens all
the time on reddit and hn.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
I am _massively_ skeptical of this. This seems to be the sort of thing that
would come to the top on its own.

Also, this isn't Reddit. The commuity and moderation are pretty different
here.

In addition, do big advertisers even know about us? We're pretty niche, and
not all that well recognized outside of the programming community.

~~~
pfisch
"This seems to be the sort of thing that would come to the top on its own."

Maybe, but not in that time period.

"Also, this isn't Reddit. The commuity and moderation are pretty different
here."

If anything Reddit does more to defend against this sort of thing.

"do big advertisers even know about us?"

I have seen so many posts on the top of hn talking about "the hn effect" It is
ridiculous to think that people in pr and marketing aren't paying attention to
that, while gaming product hunt and reddit.

I own a software studio that makes software and I am noticing how vulnerable
HN is. Other people have obviously noticed as well.

[https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=498634.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=498634.0)

that is from 2014

------
marmaduke
why is first image a elf lady? shoudnt hackers be sort of gender neutral?

~~~
KirinDave
I looked. I actually don't see that art pushing many of the fantasy art sex
trope buttons:

1\. Wearing what looks like not-outrageous closes. 2\. There is no obvious
cleavage. 3\. There is no willing-come-hither smile at the PoV 4\. Indeed,
they are ignoring the PoV.

Look, that whole Male-Gaze thing is not about erasing all aspects of feminine
form in art. That'd actually be a worse outcome if our goal is better and
fairer representation. It's about pointing out that Cindy from FFXV is a
pretty manipulative and somewhat denigrating trope in fantasy art.

Think about how many _male_ body types have become acceptable in fantasy art
over time. Old men, fat men, emaciated men, short men, slouchy men, skinny
men. We're getting progressively more comfortable with men of color in fantasy
art as well (although still a long way to go here in many ways). Healthy or
sick, brown or pale, native or imperialist, writers find a way to make
identifiable and enjoyable protagonists out of a lot of male archetypes, and
for what it's worth most of that is great.

But when it comes to women, we see WAY fewer allowable templates and they tend
to skew towards what the male consensus finds desirable. When we really sit
down and see what's fair game for these genders, obviously that's not terribly
fair.

That's the principle complaint people are trying to redress. By locking every
female archetype to what a 25-year old man fantasizes about, we create fewer
opportunities for a real and textured world and create a sensation of
isolation, distance and difference among those ignored groups.

~~~
marmaduke
You're right. I looked up "cindy ffxv" since I didn't know and by comparison
this is one is cool.

I guess I was expecting an image which says more about what happens in the
game.

