Whose Tim Cosing?

Villains arrived in the mail today and I was looking through the rulebook and he's listed 20 times as a playtester. I know GTG does little hints all the time, but I can't solve this one

edit: Summaries.

It's Coming...

Quick! Everybody find the other playtester name that’s an anagram! That’ll be the next clue for sure!

Also, Tim Cosing has an account on here that leads to a Twitter account active since December last year and containing a QR code.  http://www.twitter.com/TimCosing

That QR code goes to http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.greaterthangames.com/replaceme

... which is the same place you get to if you play three Mega Computers in the Video game.

https://greaterthangames.com/forum/topic/intervene-8225

As my comment in the 'Intervene' thread suggests, ARG? Or at least, treasure hunt?

Tim Cosing's twitter comment "You. Find me." certainly suggests something along those lines. Note that the tweet "Too quick, K." went up shortly after Kratos13 posted about the Mega Computers.

EDIT: Also notice this comment from Tim Cosing: https://greaterthangames.com/comment/124577#comment-124577

hmm... replacements? Any mileage in what that might be suggesting? Replacements for who, and how, and why?

Could this be related to the speculation about villain decks turning into heroes? Not sure how the Mega-Computers would play into that, however.

This is getting weird for sure.  I'm intrigued for sure but it seems odd all of them came up in the same day.  

Edit: The first Twitter post would coincide with the day they announced they had villains on 12/22 and the second post on 12/31 would be the first day I recall anyone saying they got their copy.

Do you suppose there's any significance with where Tim Cosing appears on the list? The other names appear to be in alphabetical order. Let's see: Cosing appears between

• Blankstein -- Blick
• Blick -- Blount
• Burton -- Cabibi
• Crow -- Dade
• Garrett -- Gillingham
• Gottesman -- Graham
• Hansen -- Haulk
• Kramer -- Kramp
• Rabinowitz -- Rawcliffe

That's only 9 times; where did the "20 times" that started this thread come from?

I tried this in the iPad version and did not get the same results so this must be Steam specific. 

Lastly the join date of TimCosing account is 12/15/2015

Tim Cosing also posted in that thread on the Mega Computers: https://greaterthangames.com/comment/124579#comment-124579

How did I not notice all this?

Where is Guise when you need him to help clear things up?

So, I know it might be a little silly now, as I got distracted by other things more exciting things that happened with this, but the "8" times Cosing pops up would correspond to the number of boxes that comprise the game I.E.:

1.)Base Box

2.)Rook City

3.) Infernal Relics

4.)Shattered Timelines

5.)Vengeance

6.) Wrath of the Cosmos

7.) Villains of the Multiverse

8.) (last expansion?)/ Its coming

of course I think this only works if the next expansion is the last one... or maybe its not even that

Also of note the original poster of this thread is a new forum member......who I don't think has posted anywhere else before.

Edit: Corncakes is from Anchorage which is where the Scholar is from who is thought to be a nemesis of big bad in the last expansion. 

Curiouser and curiouser. Down the rabit hole we go...

This is neither the first, nor likely the last, time that I follow a giant anthropomorphic animal down a trans-dimensional conduit.  That's why I always pack a lunch and several SotM decks.

It's not the same website.  It's sentinelsofthemultiverse.greaterthangames.com.

Also, you can't log into it with your account.

Right there in the 'Intervene' screenshot, on the mega computer screen where he never was before. Conspiracies everywhere I tells ye!

I just noticed this as well. Reloaded the GtG page because I suddenly was not signed in...

I guess this is saying they're going to replace their website?

Edit:  It is linked to the login database for this site, as I couldn't create my account there.  It said it already existed.

I saw him there but I meant thread wise.  He has posted on some rare occasions. 

The OP is named CornCakes from Anchorage. There's a restaurant in Anxhorage that serves Corn Cakes called MyThai. I'm sure this is relevant.

http://www.tripadvisor.com/LocationPhotoDirectLink-g60880-d7020535-i115282209-MyThai-Anchorage_Alaska.html

The title also has a typo…or does it?

Possibly but there haven't been any other posts by them.  And like I said earlier their account is a new one likely made today. 

QR code in rule book also redirects to /replaceme...

I thought to replace "replaceme" with something else:

http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.greaterthangames.com/itscoming

By the way, the standard "replacement card" URL is different in a few ways:

http://greaterthangames.com/store/category/sentinel-comics-games/replacements

So, there are 9 lines in that new page, and 9 instances of Tim Cosing in the Playtesters list.  Can we find a pattern in there?

Search for TimCosings and select users (instead on content).

What if the last expansion represents an alternate timeline and comes with the characters from Quando Ahora? Or maybe it includes rules for moving cards amongst decks?

Tim Cosing…Time Closing?

If you look at the source for this page, it has the following comment embedded:

<!--124185-->

The title of the tab I opened it in is also "beginning" no caps or anything

124185 shows up in the middle of the fifth line, after the fifth word.

Also, note that 124185 is in the current range of comment numbers. Let's see if we can figure out what comment is 124185 on the forums ...

Hmmm … doesn't seem related, though it is suspiciously by MigrantP:

https://greaterthangames.com/comment/124185#comment-124185

OP post was at 3:13pm today. TimCosing's Twitter account posted at 3:03pm.

https://twitter.com/TimCosing/status/691712949698826240

"You.

Find me"

TimCosing (timcosing@secrets.shh)

TimCosing also said to look for him in the rulebook.

Two new tweets, just a few minutes ago:

Replace Me.

Flavor Text.

FYI, I was playing the iPad version, latest Digital Sentinels version 1.6.2 when I got the Intervene screen after 3 Mega Computers in Megalopolis.

Any flavor text that says "its coming"?

Seems like the flavor text comment would mean we are looking for

" the worst part between what you see and what actually is, the only truth now. You shall not feel my bones The protection of the most awful future Indeed...You are not real."

as flavor text.

I wonder if this has something to do with the Time-Crazed Prisoner. 

Flavor text from Time-Crazed Prisoner:

"No way out ... The lines point to it! It's all the same! It all counts! None of it counts! It will be here soon!" The mad ramblings echoed through the halls."

The text from http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.greaterthangames.com/itscoming:

"the worst part between what you see and what actually is, the only truth now. You shall not feel my bones The protection of the most awful future Indeed...You are not real."

This makes me think of the Time-Crazed prisoner from The Block:

"No way out... The lines point to it! It's all the same! It ALL counts! NONE of it counts! It will be here soon!"

(emphasis mine, but that's how i would read it, if I was the character)

So, my current alpha bet is the time crazed prisoner somehow got out and is trying to contact us to warn us of the impending doom.  The crazed scrawlings fit, but they seem more prophetic, as if the prisoner got caught up in a ritual that turned him into an unwilling herald of the convergence of the multiverse.

EDIT:  clearly Arenson9 beat me to it =] https://greaterthangames.com/comment/124740#comment-124740

I have to stop this for tonight. Someone please solve this by morning so I'll be able to concentrate on work tomorrow.

What if one of the potential flavor texts is from one of the La Capitan's deck? After all, the comment from MigrantP that the "124185" points to mentions Spain. Or is that a Red Herring?

I think it's more to do with the time zone issue than the location, as i didn't find anything in the capitan flavor text, but I didn't look at the art…

I was heading down a road of La Capitan as well.  Somehow that just feels right

Chrological Hotspot flavor text "Augh! This pain I can feel my bones tearing me apart!"

Tim Cosing -> Its Coming

I have wondered whether the pictures of the heroes and villains on the back of the "Villains" book have any relevence. Dark Visionary also keeps tripping something over the darkest timeline concept. We are missing something...

The villains shown are nemesi of the heroes just below them.

Long day and grasping at straws. Never knowing what is a clue and what is a false lead. 

Before I go,a recap:

?:

• Tim Cosing GTG account created with the email address timcosing@secrets.shh

Dec 22:

• TimCosing Twitter account created. https://twitter.com/TimCosing
• TimCosing Tweeted: Preparing
• Same day Villains was announced (in some way?)
• Has a QR code that goes to: http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.greaterthangames.com/replaceme?_ga=1.236341249.1202490120.1449812419

Dec 31:

• First post on forums that Villains had been received by a customer.
• TimCosing Tweeted: It's landed

Jan 25, 6:54am

• Kratos13 posted about playing three Megacomputers and getting an image (https://greaterthangames.com/system/files/forum/attachments/image.png) titled 'Intervene' that leads to: http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.greaterthangames.com/replaceme?_ga=1.163905983.1202490120.1449812419

Jan 25, 11:32am

• Tim Cosing posted, in reference to art found in the VotM rulebook: Is that all you found in the rulebook?

Jan 25, 11:39am

• Tim Cosing posted, in reference to Kratos13's posting: "Someone skipped ahead"

Jan 25, ~11:50am

• TimCosing Tweeted: Too quick, K

Jan 25, ~3pm

• TimCosing Tweeted: You.
•                                 Find me.

Jan 25, 3:13pm:

• CornCakes account created
• CornCakes is listed as being from Anchorage (as is Scholar, speculated as a likely nemesis of the final expansions' Big Bad).

Jan 25, 3:21pm:

• CornCakes started this thread, commenting that Tim Cosing showed up 20 times as a playtester.

Jan 25, 5:50pm:

• Solved the TimCosing anagram: It's Coming

Jan 25, 8:36pm:

• There are nine instances of Tim Cosing in the playtesters section of the VotM rulebook, between the following pairs of names:
• Blankstein -- Blick
• Blick -- Blount
• Burton -- Cabibi
• Crow -- Dade
• Garrett -- Gillingham
• Gottesman -- Graham
• Hansen -- Haulk
• Kramer -- Kramp
• Rabinowitz -- Rawcliffe

Jan 25, 9:33pm:

• QR code in rulebook also redirects to .../replaceme...

Jan 25, 10:21pm:

• Replacing 'replaceme' with 'itscoming' works: http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.greaterthangames.com/itscoming?_ga=1.131465231.1202490120.1449812419
• This is a page with the following line repeated nine times: "the worst part between what you see and what actually is, the only truth now. You shall not feel my bones The protection of the most awful future Indeed...You are not real."

Jan 25, 10:50pm:

• After the fifth word of the fifth line of the .../itscoming URL, there is the following number embedded as a comment: 124185

Jan 25, ~11:15pm:

• TimCosing tweeted: Replace me.
• TimCosing tweeted: Flavor text.

Cosing now tweeted "123456789" 

New Tweet: 123456789

Edit: Late on the uptake.

What is going on?!?

Also, TimCosing is a playtester.

Also has 9 letters.

My guess would be that "124185" are directions for unscrambling that line in some way.

9 pages in the manual. I think there still is something in here, but I am at a loss.

I dont have access to my rulebook right now and its KILLING ME

On page one of the rulebook, look very carefully at the shadowing the the word sentinels.  Only certain letters are shadowed.  The shadowed letters spell NINES.

Ooohhh and on the cover all are, and Sentinels is 9 letters, and replaceme, and vengeance.

Is there a way one of you guys can scan the rulebook and link a PDF here. It's bugging me that I don't have access to it right now

Verified all of the playtesters, sans Tim Cosing, are on the official list for this expansion. No extra names that shouldn't be there.

And intervene and OMGawd I need to go to sleep …

So, Tim Cosing being an anagram, maybe the insane ramblings are an amalgam of multiple flavor texts; therefore, pointing to something that may link them or be present(or absent) in all of them.

The closest I've found so far was Miss Information(VotM Deck), Endless Possibilities: "There are worlds of difference between what you see and what actually is, Maia"

This encompasses 

the worst part between what you see and what actually is, the only truth now. You shall not feel my bones The protection of the most awful future Indeed...You are not real.

So maybe the alternate Wraith on the art is meaningful. That would link to the Intervene hack of the Wraith's computer that helped kick off this whole nonsense.

New theory: Con(who has been known to have a time-manipulating device), reached back through the Mega Computer to try and forestall something horrible. 

Me too! Someone figure this out so I can sleep!

I'm leaving this currently to the night shift, I will check in after some sleep.

What are the issue numbers on the flavor texts that match the repeated lines? 

CornCakes is also 9 letters!

If that's the case, maybe why 9 is so important here. 9 villains of the multiverse who have matching flavor text. because La capitan has the card chronological hotspot which has the flavor text "Augh! This pain… I can feel my bones tearing me apart!" If this is the case, that covers two of the nine villains. So we are at

" the worst part between what you see and what actually is, the only truth now. You shall not feel my bones The protection of the most awful future Indeed…You are not real."

This is issue #4, by the way. and the one from miss information is issue #680, so probably no correlation there

timcosing, itscoming, replaceme, corncakes, and intervene all have nine letters. If you assign their letters the numbers 1 through 9, and then form a six-letter word by using the pattern 124185, you get:

timcosing: tictno

itscoming: itcino

replaceme: relrma

corncakes: concec

intervene: ineinr

I have tried all five of those as replacements for replaceme in the URL. They all lead to Page not found.

As noted, there are nine numbered pages in the rulebook. There are also ten sections of bio, one for each villain. I tried matching phrases from the 'itscoming' page to the various bios, hoping that I'd somehow find that there were nine sets of text that matched, and then I could try reordering the text according to the six digit pattern, but I couldn't match any of the text aside from unhelpfully small sets of words.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Everyone one of his tweets is also 9 letters (except for "Flavor Text").

EDIT: Feel like trying that again Andy with the tweets? Don't think those work either. :(

There's also 7 tweets thus far, so does that mean we should be expecting 2 more in the future?

It's also probably worth pointing out that he has 9 followers

Flavor text sources for the /itscoming line. Of course, it's from nine different cards.

the worst part between what you see and what actually is, the only truth now. You shall not feel my bones The protection of the most awful future Indeed...You are not real.

1. Enclave of the Endlings - Gruum - "Gruum was very strong, yes. And Gruum was tough as well. La Capitan's crew couldn't even slow its charge. But the worst part was the constant yelling."
2. Miss Information (VotM) - Endless Possibilities - "There are worlds of difference between what you see and what actually is, Maia"
3. Realm of Discord – Negative Energy Field – “Everything burned. Moving hurt, but staying in one place was worse. No matter what happened, one thing was clear: pain was the only truth now.”
4. Nightmist – Oblivion - "You shall not enter this world!"-Nightmist, Nightmist #22
5. La Capitan – Chronological Hotspot – “Augh! This pain I can feel my bones tearing me apart!"
6. The Naturalist – Indomitable Force – "The protection of innocence is the purest venture." The Naturalist, Cosmic Concurrence #7
7. The Visionary – Demoralization – "Visions of the most awful future can be rather disheartening." -The Visionary, Mind Over Matter #43
8. Apostate – Apocalypse - "Indeed…perish you shall!" -Apostate, Absolution #19
9. Infinitor – Lambent Reaper - "You are not real. You can still hurt me. This is not what I wanted today." -Sky-Scraper, Cosmic Concurrence #23

It also explains the grammar.

Congrats, grysqrl! You got a shout out in 9 letters!

EDIT: And TimCosing signed on recently!

Negative Energy Field - Realm of Discord - Pain was the only truth now.

Edit:  Ninja'd royally by Grysqrl!

Whew. Glad you figured those out, Brian. Tim Cosing seems to agree. 

Wait. Didn't I say I was going to bed? I mean it now!

Which mean there's probably only one tweet left, if he's sticking with the number 9

And he currently has 9 followers!

And if you lay all nine of those cards out... the first letter of each spells "Genocidal" ... which if you replace "itscoming" with "genocidal" you get 

http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.greaterthangames.com/genocidal?_ga=1.55794475.1093693210.1453782404

You're welcome =)

Yay!

*disco*

So, I know very little about QR codes. Is that string of numbers in Andy's links above potentially something important or do all QR codes have that?

http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.greaterthangames.com/replaceme?_ga=1.236341249.1202490120.1449812419 (manual)
http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.greaterthangames.com/replaceme?_ga=1.163905983.1202490120.1449812419 (video game intervene screen)

Thank you, everybody! I can go to bed now.

EDIT: That was fun!

Theres a nine number barcode on the comic - 982354617

EDIT: http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.greaterthangames.com/982354617

More! Yay!

And this points to Intervene.  Look at all 3 screens...  Anything special about the characters chosen for that word?

They must be refering to the intervene picture from the app. thats why Tim Cosing said they were skipping ahead, we werent supposed to see it untill we figured out everything til now

Maybe there are nine pages to be discovered?!

I'M GOING TO BED. RIGHT NOW!

Are those screens specific cards? 

For reference:

https://greaterthangames.com/system/files/forum/attachments/image.png

Edit: The middle screen is "Retcon" from guise deck

Yeah, I need to sleep. Someone figure out what 124185 means.

I recognize Don't Dismiss Anything, Retcon, and something from Captain Cosmic.

There are 9 screens...

We'll need a better picture to figure it out.

Also in the comic it says start from the top of the screens and go left to right.... oh boy

People are going to wake up tomorrow and wonder what happened.

[quote="DocBrown"]

Are those screens specific cards? For reference:https://greaterthangames.com/system/files/forum/attachments/image.png Edit: The middle screen is "Retcon" from guise deck

[/quote]

Here are the cards I see:

Middle screen: Retcon - Guise

Left, bottom screen: Don't Dismiss Anything - The Scholar

Left, Top Screen: Eye on the Prize - Chrono Ranger

Small screen at the bottom: Fixed point - Time Cataclysm

The far right one: Reveal the Flaws - Parse (Good catch, DocBrown)

Faded screen to the far right: Between the Lines - Parse (again)

I so hate that this is happening when so many of us don't have Villains yet.

The CapCos one is Parse - Reveal the Flaws

Okay, I'll add it to my list

Still not convinced 124185 matters, why are we saying to follow it down this path

The right white screen is legacy holding something back

NEVERMIND Its haka

Yeah, i'm fairly certain it's Parse's card "Between the Lines"

You are correct

Welp. I gotta go to sleep now. So you guys will be in charge of the list. I think what we have right now is a pretty solid start

Also going to bed. We just need the top three cards.... 

As my last act before going to (as I just realized what time it was)

Top Right: Progeny - Beginning of the End (Fitting)

As someone on EU time...

WHAT THE HECK HAPPENED LAST NIGHT???

Also, top left: Progeny, Scion of Blight

Cool things happened. Being on EU time does suck for keeping up with things like this.

Oh, and the middle upper image thing there is: Miss Information- "Diplomatic" Envoy.

So Scion of Blight, Diplomatic Envoy, Beginning of the End, Eye on the Prize, Retcon, Between the Lines, Don't Dismiss Anything, Fixed Point, Reveal the Flaws?

Hmm, that seems like one too many for this particular ARG…

Hmm? I count 9.

I don't get those strings of numbers, and I don't know where they game from in Andy's text. The QR code can encode a string, and the string encoded in the QR code from TimCosing's twitter account is " https://sentinelsofthemultiverse.greaterthangames.com/replaceme&quot; according to  http://blog.qr4.nl/Online-QR-Code_decoder.aspx (which I just picked randomly from Google). Does anyone else get those numbers?

Has anyone replicated the "three mega computers in megalopolis"? Does the same thing happen?

BTW, the playtesters normally get a copy of the manual to proofread. We didn't for Villains of the Multiverse. Sneaky bastards…

I wonder if the letters of Intervene being different colors means anything?  Almost looks like they're all differrent fonts that belong on different character cards.

I swear I've seen those fonts or at least those specific font colors somewhere. At least the last "n" and "e" look familiar to me for some reason.  Maybe each letter matches up with a card somewhere?  It's hard to tell since the image is so small.  Is there a bigger version of that image anywhere? lol

Then again I haven't really looked through all the cards in a while.  It may just be wishful thinking.  But at least it's an idea, right?

The number is coming from the code of the "its coming" page. Everyline is the same with the 5th having that comment mysteriously in there.

I isolated the actual bar code from http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.greaterthangames.com/genocidal , and none of the on-line bar code readers recognized the format. Eg, I tried this one: http://online-barcode-reader.com/ . It happily recognized where the bar code was (even on the original image without isolation), but didn't recognize the format.

Note that "982354617" is a permutation of the digits from 1 to 9, which sounds like instructions for the order to look at the images. But that didn't give anything sensible. (There are not enough vowels in those card names to get anything sensible from an anagram.)

Bunker is eating "Flavor chips" at http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.greaterthangames.com/982354617 . Maybe we should be looking at the flavor text of those cards?

(How did people recognize the card from that tiny "intervene" image? Did someone redo the challenge on a computer with a larger screen to get a bigger image?)

Aar, I need to go do some work...

I added a slightly higher resolution screenshot to my post in

https://greaterthangames.com/forum/topic/intervene-8225

Wow, so cool!

Sorry, I jumped the gun!  I realize playing three Mega Computers in Megalopolis is not a useful thing to do, but honestly, Wraith really had no other cards to play that game!

I wish we had a bigger version of that picture, too. I'm not sure on Scion of Blight. I'm looking at that image and the card side by side and I can't see it,  but I also don't have a better idea (it looks to me like a leaf, which is no help yet.)

Edit: okay, now I see it (I hadn't seen the better resolution one yet.) 

I just took out the 9 cards in the screen picture and organised them accordingly.

Here are the card's flavour texts:

1. Scion of Blight- "Damn! *koff koff* We gotta takes this thing out before it kills everyone!" - Expatriette, Freedom Five #763

2. "Diplomatic" Envoy- "We have got to work on Amina's communication skills..." - Tachyon, Administrative Assassin #4

3.Beginning of the End- "We're too late. It's already in Megalopolis. And I don't think we can stop it."- The Wraith, Freedom Five #767

4. Eye on the Prize- "You may take this moment to reconsider. I'll give you that much." - Chrono-Ranger, Draw!

5. Retcon- "Good point, my friend and fellow Hero the Wraith! We are a good team!" - Guise, The Best Book #1

6. Between the lines- "Good! Now, five centimeters to the left... perfect. Hit it." - Parse, Freedom Five #607

7. Don't Dismiss Anything- "What I want to find is the truth. What are you looking for?" - The Scholar, Emigrant's Song #2

8. Fixed Points- "This event must occur in every reality across time," Omintron-X posited. The Visionary just hung her head. Not one Vanessa Long could be safe.

9. Reveal the Flaws- "There! Run to the center! It's now or never!"- Parse, Freedom Five Annual #29

I thought there was maybe something in the issue numbers, but I didn't come up with anything yet. The cards do work as a story, though, except, as usual, I don't know what Guise is doing there...

Did the same thing, I have Grappling Hook out, just in case, it also helps me fill the large space that screen has proportional to the others…

The Parse quote from #9 is from the annual found at the ..../genocidal URL concerning Progeny.
Also, is it just me or all of the decks associated with those cards from characters/environments who have contact with time/space phenomenon? I.e. Parse 'experiences' the cosmic entity that reboots Omnitron.

Not sure that's much in this game, post Shattered, pretty much everyone has contact with time or space shenanigans

Also, don't forget, TimCosing is an anagram for Moist Cig!
So, something about moist cigarettes? This HAS to mean something...

I'm done for now...  lol

And the title of the thread is WTC!

could the colours of the screens be important?

Scion of Blight, Between the Lines and Diplomatic Envoy are White
Beginning of the End, Retcon and Reveal the Flaws are Purple
Don't Dismiss Anything and Eye on the Prize are Orange
and Fixed Point is Blue.

Are those the colors of the crystals?

Having pulled out my copy of tactics I can say that the crystal colours are

Black/White?
Orange
Green
Purple
Red
Blue

maybe the color of intervene are linked to the color of the screnes some way

The page numbers in the Votm rulebook are all different colors. If we look up the matching number from the colors of the word intervene, what I’d the resulting number?

I have to go to work …

also, the comic image is named 716453289, while the genocidal was named genocidal, so that may be relevent

That's the reverse of the number in the URL. Should we be reversing something?

It would be great if someone can scan the rulebook. I won't be able to do it until the afternoon.

WHAT DID I WAKE UP TO?!?!?!

That is where I'm at.   This thread was still on the first page when I went to sleep.   Trying to catchup now.

That's exactly how I feel, and I was hoping you would show up in this thread. Get to work ;).

I assume you will figure it out pretty quick, but just to put it here clues have been left that are leading to pages of a new comic about Progeny.

Assuming the I is brown on intervene, the resulting code using the page numbers doesn't seem to work forward or backward 171241976 or 679142171

The /genocidal image mentions all of the issues that are presumably in this story arc:

Prime Wardens 36-40
Dark Watch 4-6
Freedom Five 763-767
Freedom Five Annual 29

Has anyone figured out which cards have flavor text from these issues?

I WANT TO SO BADLY!

This is not something I can do while at work though. Hopefully all ya'll smarty-pantses leave some detective work for me. This is too good to not be a part of. Gimmi about 8 hours and I'll be on the case.

Hey guys!!! Tim Cosing is an anagram for "It's Coming"!!!

oh... I see you got a bit farther than that while I was out...

I thought i linke this last night, but obviously did not as I was tired. Full size screen cap of "Intervene" image grabbed last night at around 2 am.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/sh5ld7n7fmgm1u0/intervene.PNG?dl=0

Hope that helps with the sizing thing.

Im looking now and will edit this post a few times:

Freedom Five Annual 29 - Overdo It (KNYFE) , Reveal the Flaws (Parse), Elemental Outburst (Progeny), Scion of the Storm (Progeny), and Time of Tribulations (Progeny)

Prime Wardens 36-40 - Dynamic Siphon(Progeny), Scion of Flame(Progeny),  The Inevitable(Progeny)

Dark Watch 4-6 - No comics list Dark Watch from what is in the spoiler spreadsheet

Freedom Five 763-767 - Beginning of the End(Progeny), Hour of Reckoning (Progeny), Obvious Futility(Progeny), Scion of Blight(Progeny), Scion of Frost(Progeny)

Another suggestion before I head to work: the Intervene screen showed up in the video game in a battle in Megalopolis. I tried it a couple of times and found that it's necessary for Megalopolis to be the environment for Intervene to appear. The story description on /genocidal talks about various battles with different teams in different places. I recommend for people playing the video game to focus on those combos to increase the odds of finding other clues.

So, Rook City and Tomb of Anubis?

It might be worth pointing out that that short comic strip featuring flavour chips mentions specifically that the Wraith is monitoring Megalopolis with three mega-computers. Which would have led to that clue, had it not been discovered by accident.

I feel like the first few battles can be replicated in game, while the latter ones contain characters not available. Possibly transforming Nightmist into Mistbound while fighting with DW members and the Scholar.

At least using three mega computers in Rook City had no affect. 

I think this might be a bit of a rabbit hole. Mega Computer three times in Megalopolis is called out in bold in the comic :P

And it mentions the video game.

Can’t check in so much today. Can someone PM me when discovers are found? Thanks!

The colors of the screens I believe are important in some way right? Thats my feeling.

How do we intervene here?

harbinger! The colors of the screens correspond to page numbers, those numbers in the flavor text are letters. Formofthe....

http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.greaterthangames.com/harbinger

EDIT: the issue barcode doesn't seem to be the next page

you just beet me to it

now the question is whether that was the last page or if there's another clue we're missing...

Wow, a huge bonanza of story goodness!  Thrilling to follow.  Thanks to everyone who worked hard to figure it out.

The comic pages look amazing.  Poor Legacy got a serious beating.  :(  Also, in the mega computer page, Wraith looks so much more like herself than a generic female face.  (As Adam had been refining his style, I felt like some of the original quirky characteristics of her face were lost, but they are shown really clearly here, particularly in the shape of her eyes.  Plus: look, Silverleaf!  Shoulder straps!  :D)

So it looks like what most people had surmised is true: Progeny is just a harbinger of worse things to come, and whatever it ultimately serves will probably be the Big Bad for the final expansion.  Being European, I don't have my copy of Villains of the Multiverse yet, but I am still very excited to see where all this is going.  Any and all news about the final expansion is welcome.

Could you explain in more detail how you got to Harbinger? I'm at a loss

Each screen had a color, that corisponds to a page number in the villains rulebook

Based upon the flavor text of each matching card, we grabed a letter a number of characters in equal to the page number

Together forming the sequence "formofthe" which since this ARG is about progeny, is most of the name of the form of the harbinger card

A page I'm surprised that doesn't work is http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.greaterthangames.com/reckoning

fun fact, the barcode is the previous bar code reversed

Does reversing the number sequence produce anything when paired with the previous cipher? As I'm in the EU, I can't really do anything other than ask questions :P

blinks furiously

I'm seriously outclassed in this forum.

That's crazy good stuff out of you.

What Kitmehsu said, sorry if I wasn't as clear in the first post, I was a little pumped about having gotten it at all (been rolling it around since I got up.) 

So is that the end of the bread crumb line right now since the barcode for Harbinger didn't lead anywhere?

At the moment it would seem.

Wow...this is most probably the longest thread that's ever popped up in my less-than-a-day absence from a forum :O.

I think it may be worth pointing out this dialoge from the Bunker-Wriath comic:

"Look at the screens"

"Which one"

"All of them. Start at the top, left to right. It's all there"

The harbinger comic is also Freedom Five 767. Is there any cards with flavor text from there?

Beginning of the End from Progeny's deck

It's referenced on Progeny's card "Beginning of the End." But it looks like we're past that in the storyline at this point.

Here's the flavor text:  "We're too late. It's already in Megalopolis. And I don't think we can stop it." -The Wraith, Freedom Five #767

A timeline that RySmith6 and I made up only has 5 cards from Progeny that span this point in time in the comics: Scion of Blight, Obvious Futility, Hour of Reckoning, Scion of Frost, and Beginning of the end.

If we're talking about the FFannual

its: Progeny:Elemental Outburst, Scion of the Storm, Time Of Tribulations; Parse:Reveal the Flaws; KNYFE: Overdo It

after reading the new page of the comic I wonder if Hit and Run has anything to do with it. I feel like there is another page at least, maybe leading towards the reveal of the next expansion?

Man, it was just me and good old CornCakes in here when I went to bed last night.

Excellent work by all here!

Did we get anything out of the word "intervene" or its font?

Seems like a rather odd choice of word to not be a clue to something. 

Match the colors of the word intervene to the page numbers in villains and see if that gets us something.

Using the number string from the "Harbinger" comic barcode?

The page numbers in villains all have their own colors.  So map the color of each letter in intervene to the page number, record the 9 numbers and see if it matches anything or if it is its own page.

679142171

If I see the colors right…:

1=Yellow

2=Blue

3=Pink

4=Orange

5=Red

6=Brown

7=Grey

8=White

9=Green

Gladly. When it arrives from French customs

This may be too off track, but relevant. Has anyone looked at the Wrath of the Cosmos rule book, just in case? It would make sense, as much of the story thus far has been Progeny/coming destruction related. 

http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.greaterthangames.com/982354617

I didn’t see this page actually linked anywhere in the conversation. Not really a lead since we clearly know where it leads.

Wrath of the Cosmos only has a four-page character supplement.  The pages are all the same colour.

So is the title of this thread a clue? There is confusion in my mind between Who is? and Whose?

The first is asking who sis this person....

The second and the title of this thread leads me to believe that Tim Cosing is someone's something. I don't know much but could Tim Cosing be a title across multiple universes, and the owner of this tim cosing coudls lead to different outcomes for the multiverse?

Now to get into my crackpot theory!: Isn't the silver surfer the heald of some big bad guy, I think I only watched a terrible action flick about that guy, Could Tim Cosing be the big bad's herald, and in multiple universes there are different ones and we have to figure out which one to fight or in which order?

Could it be that the big bad (I'll call it Bob for ease) could have mutiple villain decks in the final expansion and we are trying to defeat each of them, perhaps the order in which you do so grants extra powers against subsequent ones? For example you choose to go after Bob "The Destroyer of worlds" first but since he is defeated Bob "Nightmare's Muse" gets +1 psychic damage anytime players a player has more than 3 ongoings played in front of her? Then if you go on to fight Bob "The Clown God" you have the previous handicap + At the End of villain's turn Destroy one ongoing.  With multiples of the same villain it leads to a campaign play (legacy game which seems to be a new hot topic) and players have to organize to decide the best way to defeat all the forms of the big bad to save the multiverse?

Or is it a simple gramatical mistake (or I am wrong and it isn't) and I am reading too much into this.

I am not very good at this crackpot theory stuff. Good work all you guys!

Whaaaaaat the heck just happened? My normal lunchtime visit to the forum just got seriously derailed.

I also wonder if the nine-letter phrase “hit and run” from the most recently found comic go somewhere. They don’t work in the URL.

And did anybody figure out what the string of numbers in the html comment mapped to?

I wasn’t thrilled about going to work this morning, but now I REALLY want to go home!

Well, there is one place in the rule book where we’ve seen the name Tim Cosing listed several times on connection with other names…so whose Tim is the important one?

"Whose" and "who is" seems like a simple spelling mistake.

However, I think you might be on to something with the bit I quoted above.  We've been told that the final expansion will give us a new way to play the game.  Perhaps this is it: campaign mode.  It's even somewhat implied by the story we've just read of multiple hero teams needing to fight Progeny in various locations to achieve even a temporary victory.

Personally I do not think we have drilled down the nines of the multiverse nearly enough.  I am thinking we are discussing some type of tribunal of 9.

I talk about "The Host" in one of my Footnotes threads on Apostate. The Host, if you recall, is the group affiliation of Apostate. It is also a reference to the heirarchy of angels in heaven. A type of "tribunal" within the Host would make a lot of sense given the reference.

How many damage types are there?

How many heroes are not yet involved in the Progeny battle?

Is the Ennead involved?

I guess I should end my lunch now…

Technically as many types as you can think of, since some cards change damage to a type of your choice and don't specify that it needs to be one of the existing types. It's a lot of fun to do fluffy bunny damage, and I'm very fond of sarcasm damage myself.

Replacing "itscoming" with the nine letter word "beginning" in the URL gets you to the same place, FYI.

also, I'm not sure about where this is, but the background of form of the harbinger card has a W 1-9 and based upon the flavor text, it may be where proginey first emergie

Has anyone tried this number code yet? For reasons I can't do it myself just yet.

No dice.

Nine is clearly significant, and hasn't really shown up in the story so far. I'm sure we're still missing things. Maybe there are nine hidden pages, for instance? Has anyone check the source of these pages?

You're right!!! I've wondered why that "W 1-9" was there since the art came out. I should have known it wasn't random!

Could this be our next clue?

Progeny definitely has something to do with threes or multiples of three. His symbol is prominently based on triangular divisions of circles.

Do the fonts for the characters in intervene match up with anyone's fonts for their names?

Anybody examine KNYFE's deck closely lately? She's Progeny's nemesis. 

Isn't the W 1-9 on the side of the wagner mars base? Or on the side of the Biosphere or whatever?  I always assumed that the card art for that card took place at Wagner Mars Base.

Probably not meaningful, but the colors behind the page numbers match the background colors of the Villain Bio boxes:

1 Biomancer
2 Miss Info
3 La Cap
4 Citizens
5 Greazer
6 Bugbear
7 Ambuscade
8 Operative
9 Plague Rat
(Sgt Steel's color is not matched to a page number.)

I've tried various methods of looking at the Villain Character Cards and Bios in the order listed and haven't found anything meaningful.  Maybe one of the scarily smart code-breakers here can see something I didn't.

I think we have squeezed all the juice out of "intervene" we are gonna get. It's the colors of the letters that led us to Harbinger.

I think our best best is the "W1-9" on the Form of the Harbinger card art. That seems really intentional.

I thought that was the colors of the screens…

Yeah, just checked, W 1-9 IS what's on the side of the Biosphere for Wagner Mars Base.

What's interesting is neither the genocidal page nor the harbinger page mention the heroes fighting him at WMB before he does his explodey thing and presumably goes to fetch his daddy, Mr. Progenitor.

So is that image actually from when he comes back for more?

In the first paragraph of the harbinger comic, If you look at the first letter of each line, it spells out Base Eight. Does that mean something to anyone?

Wow I am not very good at these crackpot theories but here is my thoughts because I cannot find what I though I submitted...

The title of this thread is not who is Tim Cosing is it Whose Tim Cosing. As such I think that it refers to the nautre of the final expansion and the final big bad. I think many would wonder how one big bad fills an entire expansion? I think this title of the thread is a clue to the nature of the expansion. The same big bad exists in many of the universes that form the multiverse and each of them have a Tim Cosing (like the silver Surfer being the Herald of something of some vague bad guy in a crappy action movie from a few years ago). The expansion will be multiple villain decks representing each of the final big bads from each of the universes in the multiverse and they are competing to end it all. As the Sentinels we will be trying to defeat each of them but in doing so each one we beat leads to bonuses for the next ones. The Meta puzzle leads to a campaign or legacy like game play with the outcomes of previous games carried forward. If you beat BOB :Destoyer of worlds" it might mean that Bob "Soul harvester" gets +1 psychic damage if a player has more than three ongoings in from of him/her. IF Four other Bobs are defeated Bob"Who wears spikey crowns" Might have multiple bonuses against you as a team. The meta puzzle of the order to go in and teams to use becomes interesting-er!

Yep not much of a crazy crackpot theorist sorry.

convert the barcode to octal and see if that works

arg, back to (wifi-blocked) workplace

You are right. When would they fight on WMB? Unless they chase his head after it pops off his body into space right? Continuing the story from the Harbinger comic?

Maybe we should hit the MegaComputer up with some games in WMB and see what happens?

You guys are way out of my league, but just wanted to say that watching this unfold is lots of fun. 

The octal numeral system, or oct for short, is the base-8 number system, and uses the digits 0 to 7. Octal numerals can be made from binary numerals by grouping consecutive binary digits into groups of three (starting from the right).

Didn't someone just say that Progeny seems to have a conenction with multiples of 3?

Anyone a math wiz here?

I think there are 9 pages and each is unlocked by a word using the first 9 letters of the alphabet:

A

Beginning

C

D

E

F

Genocidal

Harbinger 

Itscoming

Just wanted to throw it out there if the number 9 is important then there is very could easily be 9 comic pages. As far as I see it we may have found 2 or 3 depending on if you count the the 2 story pages as important or also count the bunker/wrath page as well.

yes I am what do you need calculated exactly ? or what number do we want figured up

/biosphere and /wagner-15 don’t work in the URL…

The numbers from the html comment and from the bar codes!

Completely agree – having a great time being along for the ride on this one. 

Whose Tim Cosing

W T C?

Wrath of The Cosmos?

Wait, cosmos... let's expand the "timcosing" anagram to include "whose"?  You can spell cosmos now, at least...

Anagram:

whosetimcosing

(not worrying about word order yet)

Cosmos Eight Win 

Cosmos In Weight

I Wing The Cosmos  (? lol)

Cosmos In The Wig  (is there a multiverse in Trump's hair?!  This MUST be the clue!)

For anybody who may want it, here: http://www.unitconversion.org/numbers/base-10-to-base-8-conversion.html

The  Harbinger Bar code in Base 8  is 5255032651 It does not do anything in the URL.

So isn't the whole question "Whose time is closing?"    Does that leave an interprettation for E IS L?  

Except "Beginning" and "Itscoming" leads to the same page, no?

Maybe the "I" is Intervene.

Tried this in the game and nothing happened.  

W1-9

W-8

Weight?

Wait?

I keep seeing "ARG" in this thread. What is that?

I think that base eight may be refering to a part of wagner, which means that his head may not have completely fled at this point in the story.

Alternate Reality Game

Win eight times in a row at Wagner Mars Base in the video game?

It's a long shot, and not likely… and I sure as heck don't have time to test it, lol.

It's possible.

I had a thought!

Anyone know the numbers on the self destruct counter? Maybe we convert that to base 8 or use it in a url?

02:53:66:73

02:53:66:73

What are the numbers on the Self-Destruct Sequence?
Edit: ninja’d!
Edit edit: in octal, that’s 2 43 54 59, or, as one number, 703931.

Looks like Base 8 to me!

Convert 02536673 to decimal from base 8 (or possibly 37663520) and maybe use that as the URL

Foote: above!

Do any of the iterations of this number work in the url?

703931 - Self-Destruct in base 10 from base 8.  Doesn't work.

I think all the working urls are going to be 9 characters exatly

I agree with this.

02:53:66:73 backwards is 37663520. Convert that from decimal to base 8 and you get:

217531440

that has 9 letters. someone try this for me

Did not work 

its a dud

What exactly are the units of this countdown? 73 and 66 probably aren't seconds, unless these guys are using decimal time.

Of note I've been trying various synonyms tied to words like scion, anomaly, and reckoning that are nine letters.  While most haven't worked when I tried http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.greaterthangames.com/deviation is the only one where I got redirected to a dnssearch page from my ISP

I'm going to look through my Freedom 5 and Progeny decks.

Reading that comic page, it sounds like some pretty specific abilities are being used. If we can figure out which cards are being referred to, maybe the bar code's numbers will be meaningful.

If we assume that the appearance of Tim in the playtester sequence is important, and we look at the letters of the playtesters he appears between we could extrapolate that there are nine words to use for 'replaceme':

Beginning (itscoming)

B

C

Genocidal

G

Harbinger

K

R

The first paragraph of the Harbinger spelling out "Base Eight" screams intentional. Theres no way thats a fluke coincidence. The W1-9 being on Harbingers art and in Wagner Mars Base might be related and seems like a solid clue.

I thought we were on to something with those number conversions, but maybe we just havn't found the right conversion yet? I'm convinced at this moment we are on the right track here.

This is a good point. I have no idea what the numbers on the countdown mean…

I always thought the countdown was strange because it didn't follow the typical HH:MM:SS format. Not sure if it is important here though or not.

Edit: I guess it could be DD:HH:MM:SS. *shrug*

So I did a little digging into the whole Wagner Mars Base thing, and found what might be a lead...

ENGAGE CRAZY THEORY MODE

So on the card Pervasive Red Dust, we can see the following: WI-477

So I plugged 477 (since it is base 8) into a converter and got 319 in base 10.

So I looked up in the card database the number 319, and found only one RECORDED card (as they haven't updated it yet with Villains of the Multiverse or the mini expansion yet) with this number: The Flavor Text of Electro-Pulse Explosive in Omnitron's Deck. Now remember our mysterious cosmic entity made Cosmic Omnitron right? And the text on the card says "Wait, I thought we already got rid of that bomb?" from the Wraith. So maybe, just maybe, in the video game we need to engage Cosmic Omnitron on Wagner Mars Base and have something happen with both EPE and Self-Destruct Sequence in play for our next hint

Of course, this is purely speculation at this moment since I haven't even tested anything out yet XD

Minutes(as what dramatic countdown has hours), seconds, milliseconds, microseconds. still fine, if unconventional. no human could read the microseconds meaningfully…

The units of the countdown are probably just minutes:seconds: 1/100th of seconds: 1/10000 of seconds.

Don't know if it could be useful or not, but the only heroes, if I read correctly, that are not involved on the genocidal and harbinger pages are Sky-Scrapper, Ra, Omnitron-X and the Naturalist.

( and now I know what my next game is : the four of them against Progeny on Wagner :D )

Wait a second…

looks at Progeny’s forehead symbol

looks at Foote’s avatar

:o

If we assume that "02:53:66:73" is written in base 8, it becomes 02:43:54:59" in decimal.

did anyone try and use the barcode from the harbringer page and the same cards that were used before to find that page to see if it forms something. Just use the same code but rearranged?

I agree, there is a very obvious divider between that paragraph and the others, in the form of that small comic strip

quick question where are you seeing the words Base Eight?

Go to the harbinger comic description, and look at the first letter of each line in the first paragraph (before the small comic strip). The letters spell out BASEEIGHT

So spoilers

If tactics is in the same timeline as the cards (I always assumed it was) Ra eventually disappeared, Omnitron-x seemingly gets assimilated with Omni-V (if I've correctly guess what happens with Omnitron in his scenario), and the Naturalist and  Sky-Scraper have not yet been mentioned in the tactics flavor texts. If these characters die in the course of the last expan I'm going to be upset

The first letter of each line on the top paragraph on Harbinger page.

Before

Awful

Several

Each

Entered

Its

Giant

High-Temp

Took

I’ve been thinking of Wagner Mars Base words that have nine letters, but “biosphere” and “pervasive” didn’t work in /replaceme. Not sure off the top of my head what other possibilities there are.

Other ideas:

• What do we know about “billionaire entrepreneur” Jane Wagner? Does she have a connection to Maia? http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.com/multiverse/environment/wagner-mars-base

• What other meanings could “BASE EIGHT” have? There’s no way that phrase is not meaningful.

Base Eight either refers to the mathy stuff we have been trying

Or it could refer to a possible WI-8 (as in, Wagner Instillation 8). We have confirmation of other WI numbers, why not this?

Edit: Does the Wagner Tactics play mat hold any clues?

Is there anything on the VotM rulebook that could potentially be converted into base 8? Or maybe something on page 8?

Base game and 8 expansions?

going to ask again just in case, has anyone tried to take the numbers from the barcode and use the same logic that got us harbringer? I am not at home with my stuff so I cant do it at the moment. It is worth a shot.

Relatively off topic, but has anyone brought up the fact that the >G logo on page one of the VotM book is wrong?

it shows the 4 face, not the 5 face.

is it maybe a refrence to the base set of eight heros?

There are 10 base heroes.

Disreguard then, I got mixed up with the tactics base set.

That's gotta mean something. No way they can mess that up.

Were any of the base set 8 heros strech goals in the original printing and kickstarter?

There was not a Kickstarter for the initial print run of this game.

I was thinking maybe it has something to do with the issue numbers. I have no idea what that would be, but maybe its something.

This is probably irrelevent, but Voss is from the base set, and his deck consists of 9 different types of minions. And since Progeny is also correlated with 3: all of them have 3 health

ha, right? I'm wondering if we're supposed to use it once the hunt mentions something missing, or if it's supposed to be something that we need an additional clue for. I tried using the octal representation of 4>G and >G4 (064076107, and 076107064, respectively), but to no avail. By the by, this is what I've been using for my octal conversions. we either need the correct three leter word(for 9digits), or 27 digits for a 9-letter word.

If this means anything at all…=]

The base set does have eight dinosaur + volcanoes. That's pretty much the same thing.

Nope, the original game was sold at Gencon 2011 with all 10 heroes and 4 villains.

What about "WMB" for Wagner Mars Base?

Edit: Or "WIN" for WI-9 (WI-Nine)

The only thing interesting on the Wagner Mars Base map is that the A's in the Name are triangles.  Which with 3 A's makes a nice set of three three sided objects.

EDIT:  Oh, and the Triangles base extends a bit past the corner.  Don't know if that is significant, just don't want to leave anything out.

Also Checmical is 9 letters.  Thought of that looking at the map.  Maybe they would include that for old time's sake?

The only 9 letter word is Biosphere, which has been checked.

The hazard attack is 3 dice, misses on 1 and 6, radius 0.  That isn't 9 numbers though.

It doesn't look like there is anything in the map.

Octal (base eight) is also sometimes used for characters. Here's an ASCII chart showing octal: http://www.asciitable.com/

The countdown clock is:

Start of text
+
6
;
…which seems kinda meaningless.

Wow, so this became insane over the past day.

It was noted earlier that the barcode on the harbinger page (716453289) is the reverse of the barcode on the genocidal page. Has anyone tried reversing the order of any of these ideas?

And no "thgieesab" does not work.

WI-9 could be “word interval 9”.

I wonder if the actual barcodes are accurate, like... if you scanned them, would it give the actual number listed below?

Someone earlier in the thread tried scanning them and couldn't find anything that would.  

One thing to note with respect to the harbinger page's barcode is that it has every number from 1-9. If you consider it as a cypher for a previous clue, it could produce an anagram. Notably, it works with the namesake of this thread, Tim Cosing. If you assign a letter a number based on its position, i.e. timcosing[br]123456789If you then rearrange it to match the barcode, what you end up with is: 716453289[br] itscomingSo it seems like others have found the significance of one of the barcodes before the barcode was found. Now where the other barcode fits into this, I don't know.

The Genocide barcode seems to come up as "replaceme" and Harbinger barcode seems to come up as the number that's below it, "71645328" (last few lines are blurry, one can assume the last digit is 9, since everything else matches)

So that's probably a dead end.

https://twitter.com/TimCosing/status/692098691876982785

Checkouts.

TWITTER ALERT: Tim Cosing just tweeted "Checkouts." I tried it, no luck. Mean anything to anyone?

Twitter post saying 'checkouts' from the Cosing account.

So many ninja here. At least, I'm pretty sure ninja remains ninja when pluralised.

New Tweet from Tim Cosing: "Checkouts."

Seems like barcodes are on the right track. Maybe it was not read correctly.

Villains, etc. aren't logged yet because I don't have them yet. Had to wait & place a retail order with my FLGS, which hasn't been shipped to them yet because (AFAIK) it hasn't been shipped to distributors yet.

This thread really needs a sticky "here's what we know so far" post, but I don't know if that can be done.  :-(  Can someone summarize all the progress so far?  I have the following links as relevant:

http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.greaterthangames.com/genocidal?_ga=1.184866921.1754738754.1441833728

http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.greaterthangames.com/982354617?_ga=1.184866921.1754738754.1441833728

http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.greaterthangames.com/harbinger?_ga=1.225743066.1754738754.1441833728

Last  I knew, we had "Base Eight" as meaningful, and were looking at the barcodes. (Though I thought the barcode from "genocidal" has already been used somewhere?)  Did we ever make anything of the number embedded in the HTML comment?

EDIT: Generally, in puzzling, you look at data you haven't used yet.  Is there information that was presented in earlier clues that hasn't yet been used somehow?

Anyone tried something with the Checkout for the cart?

This link https://greaterthangames.com/cart/checkouts doesn't do anything. But I'm not as clever as y'all!

no matter how many times I scan the barcode on the Harbinger comic, it always comes up as "71645328"  It's missing the "9" or the image is juuuust barely too blurry to read the last part.

In the case that it's intentional, is the missing "9" a clue?  I wonder...

http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.greaterthangames.com/421234220

http://www.unitconversion.org/numbers/base-10-to-base-8-conversion.html

converted 71645328 into base 8:

421234220

edit: lol we both got it at literally the same time.

You don’t n2ed to go through the weird website, GtG’s normal one with the stuff after the slash.

Got it!  http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.greaterthangames.com/421234220?_ga=1.225743066.1754738754.1441833728

Convert the barcode value without the nine into octal: 71645328 -> 421234220

Base Eight?

if you convert the number on the barcode, bar the 9, from base 10 to 8 you get this http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.greaterthangames.com/421234220

"It's all stuff you've seen before"

then it references the Freedom Four Annual #1

 http://greaterthangames.com/system/files/downloads/8.pdf

Maybe there's a clue there?

Was the Freedom Fanmail at the end always generic "Lorem ipsum..." script?  I thought it actually had a Q&A with Legacy before?

I had just reread it today and this is a change.

Ah, but I read it on the SotM site: http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.com/comic?page=32

No. No it wasnt…

TRANSLATION PLEASE!

If you have the PDF from the Kickstarter they did, it is actually fanmail. I cannot say if it was always like that since that added the PDF on here.

It doesn't all appear to be in the normal order as far as standard Lorem Ipsum script goes.  It may need translation...

It might be worth pointing out that there are 9 hyperlinks in the link to the annual in the downloads section. Each letter and the '.pdf'.

Original is at http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.com/comic?page=32 attached.  At least I think it's the original.

In the comic panel with absolute zero and Tachyon, there are bold words:

Baron Blade
A man
Yet

Also, “Ryan Frost” has 9 letters.

As far as I can tell, all nine copies are identical.

There are nine PDFs of Freedom Four Annual #1 at https://greaterthangames.com/system/files/downloads/X.pdf, where X is each digit 1-9.  These are not identical.  The only difference I've found so far is in the time on Tachyon's clock on page 16.

1 - 8:53

2 - 7:08

3 - 9:20

4 - 6:00

5 - 5:40

6 - 7:08

7 - 6:10

8 - 6:00

9 - 7:52

My puzzling instincts are screaming semaphore.

Baron Blade calls Legacy "a mere man" in the comic. Possibly relevant?

I only see one download of the comic? where are you all getting 9 from?

the link is broken up into invidual text here http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.greaterthangames.com/downloads.  Also, flag semaphore can't work, 8:53 would be on the same side so their isn't a matching signal

Change the digit in the filename.  E.g. 9.pdf -> 6.pdf.

In the URL there is a number. changing it to any number from 1 to 9 will still be the comic.

https://greaterthangames.com/system/files/downloads/1.pdf

https://greaterthangames.com/system/files/downloads/5.pdf

If you hover over the hyperlink, each letter and the '#1.pdf' are actually seperate hyperlinks leading to 9 different versions.

You can have two flags on the same side in semaphore, just not in the same position: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_semaphore.  By my reckoning, 8:53 would be O, or possibly I.

Decoding all the times as semaphore, I get OLSDNLEDI, or possibly OESDNEEDI, depending on how you interpret 7:08.  You could also call 5:40 an A, and get OLSDALEDI or OESDAEEDI.

Any of those mean anything to anyone?

The time on Tachyon's alarm clock has changed!

In the original, it's 6:00

1.pdf: 8:53

2.pdf: 7:08

3.pdf: 9:20

4.pdf: 6:00

5.pdf: 5:40

6.pdf: 7:08

7.pdf: 6:10

8.pdf: 6:00

9.pdf: 7:52

Edit: and ninja'd

Semaphore gives O L S D N L E D I, as far as I can tell.

I dumped the images from the PDFs and compared them. The only differences are on Tachyon's clock on p. 15 and the letter behind Legacy on p. 17. The letters go (per comic)

RAILFENCE

"railfence" by itself doesn't seem to do it.

EDIT: To be more precise, from the program I know that the only differences are on these two pages. Visual inspection shows that the only differences are these points on the page.

EDITx2: At http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.com/comic?page=17 there is a question mark in that spot. That is presumably the original, although it's worth checking.

Where are you guys looking for a hyperlink to the comic pdfs?
Edit: never mind; downloads page

So the info we have per the comics

1 - 8:53 - R
2 - 7:08 - A
3 - 9:20 - I
4 - 6:00 - L
5 - 5:40 - F
6 - 7:08 - E
7 - 6:10 - N
8 - 6:00 - C
9 - 7:52 - E

Did we ever use the barcode from the first (genocidal) comic?  It uses each digit 1-9 once, and could be an ordering for letters.

That barcode led us to the page of Tyler and Maia. It could still be relevant, but probably we're done with that one.

I tried putting those letters in order based on the clock times. There are four possibilities because there are two 6:00s and two 7:08s. None of the results got me anywhere.

maybe the times when combined with the letters will generate the coorrect letter.  We know that the 6 time is the actual time in the unedited comics, so those letters probably are modified.

I tried using the semaphore values as a one-time-pad style encryption method with RAILFENCE as a key, but nothing I tried seemed to work (granted, I haven't tried all of the suggested semaphore values yet).

The original comic has a ? instead of a letter.

A rail fence cipher is a thing, but I'm not sure what we'd do with it here. It's certainly one possible meaning for railfence though.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_fence_cipher)

so maybe there's a message hidden in the latin using a rail fence cipher?

Edit: except, it may be hard to do since it doesn't appear to have evenly spaced letters.

Or the clock times?

ODDALLIES

The semaphore letters are encrypted via Railfence.

http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.greaterthangames.com/oddallies

ODDALLIES

The semaphore reads out OLSDALEDI.  Put into a 3 level rail fence cipher and it spells ODDALLIES

http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.greaterthangames.com/oddallies

That would be occurring right after Progeny based on the issue numbers for Dark Watch.

And the clue LEET SPEAK is embedded in the first letters of each line there

our hint for the next is another paragraph that starts with leatspeak

The Harpy! 9 letters

wait...can someone explain how they put the semi-whatchyacallits into the cipher? 

Not Pinion but The Harpy?  I wonder if this is just for the purposes of this puzzle, or if they've decided to change her hero name in Tactics as well.

It may be a dead end, but I am typing up the Lorum Ipsum stuff.  First paragraph: 

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.  Fusce feugiat tempus lacus eu scelerisque.  Nulla facilisi.  Suspendisse mi ligula, cursus id tincidunt mattis.  Laoreet nec ligula.  In arcu purus, pharetra a pulvinar in, faucibus non libero.  Duis id elit in quam ultrices sodales a a lacus.  Fusce vehicula, ligula sed consectetur sodales, arcu ipsum pretium leo, vitae porta ipsum quam non libero.  Pellentesque lacus nulla, scelerisque ut ullamcorper sed, luctus a mi.  Nulla facilisi.

O...L...S

.D.A.L.E.

..D...I..

or maybe she changed it later.  So can people scan the barcode and see what we have here? 

The new barcode gives the number 3058301676667.

The actual number on the comic is 633000/126951.

Edit - Nevermind, I think my barcode scanning app is off. It doesn't get the correct number for the last cover.

Maybe she's the Harpy until whatever event befalls Nightmist, upon which she takes on the new name of Pinion

Probably going to be ninja'd but heroes do change their names. See; Robin - Nightwing, all of the different adjectives used by Spidey et al.

Reading from 1 to 9, the semaphore letters were OLSDALEDI.  How a railfence cipher is that you read the encrypted text by row from top to bottom, filling in so that you move up and down the rows.  If you use 3 levels it looks like this:

O        L        S

   D   A   L   E

     D         I

You then read from left to right going up and down the fence as needed and it reads ODDALLIES.

barcode = 804RD64M3

BOARDGAME

God damnit I'm so outclassed by everyones impressive minds! I've never even heard of semephore flag signal things let alone think to use them to decipher clock times into letters. damn guys. this is fun.

And The Harpy is in Dark Watch AT THE SAME TIME as Nightmist. Presumably before she expended all her magic in the Progeny fight.

What are we leetspeaking…?

You are ahead of me on getting it posted, too bad my latin is too rusty to be helpful. The first two lines are in the original Lorem Ipsem.

Ah! /boardgame doesn’t work!

Last expansion will have a game board?!  one can hope...

That looks like Leetspeak to me.

What do we do with that?

Edit: hmmmm…Hey Rabbit…wasn't there a picture of you playing a board game with SotM Locations and characters with it? FIND THAT PICTURE

next clues we need to utilize are probably:

804RD64M3   (which is BOARDGAME in leet speak)

and

633000/126951

Edit:

also CALM, POWERS, YOURSELF, FOCUS, CONTROL, and BETTER are in all caps and bolded in the oddallies image.  I don't know if that means anything though.

Seconding the need for a 'here's what we know so far' post, cuz lord almighty, there's anotehr 50 posts each time I look back in here.

Not sure it'll help, but: https://greaterthangames.com/sites/greaterthangames.com/files/forum/attachments/image_5.jpg

Could it have something to do with the fact that the second part of the number on the cover can be flipped and read the same? (I'm just spitballing ideas.)

Maybe there is something in that spoof video concerning the board game of the video game of the card game...?

That exactly what I was talking about Meerkat!

Maybe we should do a 'here's what we know' page on the wiki? I think it's getting to be too much for any one person to keep up.

@Foote

Play a PuzzleHunt sometime-- you'll get really good at this sort of thing.  ;-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puzzlehunt

Seriously, though, if you find this sort of thing fun and want an accessible way to try it more often, check out Puzzled Pint: http://www.puzzledpint.com/.  They run a mini-puzzle hunt at bars in a bunch of different cities each month.  If you happen to live in a city that runs it, it's a great way to get started with puzzling.

this thread is getting pretty unwieldy, but i don't think i read anywhere yet that there is a youtube video posted by a Tim Cosing, which is just audio of what seems to be a repeating message in morse code.  (also the title is the words MORSE CODE... in morse code).  i have been sitting at work listening to these beeps for ten minutes now and i can't parse them fast enough.  maybe somebody better at morse code than i am (so: just about anyone) can help us out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OykdjzneU48

Hmm, I'm pretty sure Boardgame refers to this: https://youtu.be/b-An777vXgg?t=111

=] Of course not. But that helped me laugh about this. I'm getting too antsy over all this puzzlin'

Edit: ninja'd by estelindis

LMAO! NO WAY!

This is getting out of hand!

Oh god...Morse code is my one weakness...time to get the manual again XD

The thing with finding this is, much like with 'Intervene', we risk muddying the waters by finding clues out of order.

the odd thing is, that was published Dec 22nd.  way before all of this...

also... how did you find that?  it's an unlisted video...

that might be a clue taht we're supposed to get to later.... They're really pulling out the stops. 

Quick, someone check to see if Tim Cosing is on Tinder! 

You don't think they have been setting this up for a while? I wouldn't put it past them. Adam had to draw all this art and the code trail and the web coding and everything

But lets get back on track here. Boardgame…

It's morse code… of morse code… Double layer translation?

EDIT: …OF THE WORDS FOR DASH AND DOT?! I pity the intern who had to do all of this…

For Checkout, could it be going through the checkout process on the "Replaceme" screen?

Like maybe trying to check out with a certain card or deck?

What are the numbers below the bar code, in octal?

633000 -> 2324250

126951 -> 367747

But seems unlikely to be useful, since we've already used the octal clue.

I was figuring that it was to push us (I say us, I mean everyone actively contributing) back onto the right path because it was tweeted as 'Checkouts.' as we were talking about how we'd hit a figurative wall because we thought the barcode had nothing to do with anything.

-....- .-.-.- .-.-.- -..-. .-.-.- -....- -..-. .-.-.- .-.-.- .-.-.- -..-. .-.-.- .-.-.- .-.-.- .-.-.- -..-. -....- .-.-.- .-.-.- -..-. .-.-.- -....- -..-. .-.-.- .-.-.- .-.-.- -..-. .-.-.- .-.-.- .-.-.- .-.-.-

That's what I'm hearing.

New tweet from Tim Cosing: 'Tut tut tut'

EDIT: Ninja strike again! And I reloaded the page just to make sure.

Twitter says "Tut tut tut."

New tweet

Tut Tut Tut

Might be a weird coincidence but on boardgame geek item 126921 is Ambuscade's mini expansion.  did get anything for 633000.

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/126951

new tweet, tut tut tut

Boardgamegeek object 126951 is Sentinels of the Multiverse: Ambuscade Villain Character. Can't be a coincidence.

Not sure about 633000.    

633000 = Geek? 6 could be a G, E = 3, 1000 = 1k?

EDIT: Which makes the whole thing read Boardgamegeek: 126951. Perfect.

I actually meant as ascii pairs.

Just FYI, the morse code points to morse code characters that then need to be translated.

The morse code actually translates to another sequence of dots, dashes, and slashes:

-../.-/.../..../-../.-/.../.... 

Translating _that_ sequence gives: DASHDASH, which is morse for the letter M.

Full letters page text is below.  There are probably a few mistakes as the resolution isn't great, and also because I have only a little Latin (just one semester to give the basics of its structure; all I can do is slowly translate a text with a dictionary beside me). 

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.  Fusce feugiat tempus lacus eu scelerisque.  Nulla facilisi.  Suspendisse mi ligula, cursus id tincidunt mattis.  Laoreet nec ligula.  In arcu purus, pharetra a pulvinar in, faucibus non libero.  Duis id elit in quam ultrices sodales a a lacus.  Fusce vehicula, ligula sed consectetur sodales, arcu ipsum pretium leo, vitae porta ipsum quam non libero.  Pellentesque lacus nulla, scelerisque ut ullamcorper sed, luctus a mi.  Nulla facilisi.

Aenean molestie tortor a odio eleifend egestas.  Etiam eget nisi ac est elementum eleifend.  Nunc adipiscing iaculis massa quis bibendum.  In consequat accumsan ullamcorper.  Ut gravida ullamcorper erat in ullamcorper.  Pellentesque lacus dui, porta eget eleifend sed, tincidunt vel lorem.  Vestibulum mauris augue, luctus in rhoncus id, volutipat id tellus.  Phasellus ullamcorper porta orci, quis feugiat arcu molestie sed.  Vestibulum ante ipsum trimis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia curae; ut ullamcorper dui vel ligula dictum facilisis.  

Maecenas non elit vitae velit euismod scelerisque, aenean eu felis lacus, adipiscing volupat ligula.  Donec iaculis lectus est, at bibendum nulla.  Proin in velit sit amet libero porta varius in quis tellus.  In quis metus neque, vitae scelerisque nisl.  Ut at posuere purus.  Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torqent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos.  Vestibulum pretium semper libero non condimentum, quisque adipiscing porta nisi, sed elementum lacus interdum sed.  Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent

I think the "Tut tut tut" was telling us we need to focus on the Boardgame before we go to the Morse code video that was mysteriously found.

I'm a minute and a half in of the double translation and I have DASH

There's too many layers

EDIT: ninja'd again =]

The Twitter comments seem to be the re-active side of this ARG. Commenting on how we do. In this case, I suspect the admonishment is because we found a clue out of order.

Also, heck yeah! I didn't get 'gainsay', but I got admonishment.

I'm sure the tut tut tut is from jumping ahead.

I found out the significance of 124185!

Unity

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/124185/

and then of course, Ambuscade for 126951:

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/126951/

tired ambuscade both normal and leetspeak to no effect, going to look through his villains deck now

because I AM TIM COSING.

no, i'm not.  i just googled 'tim cosing' in an effort to find the twitter account again.  i don't know.

hell, maybe i am Tim Cosing, like some kind of sleeper agent or something.

No, your name doesn't have 9 letters. 

Hooray! A long-standing mystery solved!

What is 124185?

it was a comment imbedded in the itscomming page

The "tut tut tut" is probably due to us going to the YouTube video, which is now private.

So they've given BGG codes for both ambuscade and unity through various means...

maybe something to do with the set they came out as mini-expansions along side of?  dunno... or maybe they hid something on the BGG pages?

Unity and Ambuscade are both mini-expansions.

They came out as stretch goals for the KS of the Enhanced Edition.

Dunno if it's relevant but didn't they both release with Silver Gulch (BGG number 134388) with the video game?

Wow, I'm not sure who to be impressed by most: the GTG crew for setting all this up or you guys for powering through it.

Prompted by Estelindis' post, just thought I'd add, as something of a Latin scholar in days gone by, the "Lorem ipsum color sit amet" text is a dead end in terms of translation. It's not proper Latin; I believe it's a jumbled up selection of Latin words used fairly commonly as placeholder text (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum). So I wouldn't expend hours with a Latin dictionary trying to make sense of it! That doesn't mean there isn't an important pattern to spot in it though...

I don't think Unity is part of this clue. Thats just me though.

Hmm, maybe it has less to do with their BGG pages and more to do with them as characters?  Are they ever seen together in any card art?  If so, which cards?

Also, where is Unity during Progeny's attack? she isn't mentioned in the previous story reveals, afaik.  Maybe she's currently preoccupied with a solo adventure with/against Ambuscade?   Don't know how that trail of thought could help with the puzzle, but I do admit, I am curious what she's up to while Progeny is running rampant.

The Unity reference seems different to me. This bar code clue in full was “boardgame geek” and a pointer to Ambuscade.

Unity may come back later…

Yeah, that's the thing.  I know that Lorem Ipsum is jumbled Latin - and, honestly, typing up all the text, it didn't seem to make much sense (even accounting for my general lack of Latin expertise).  But I can't be sure there isn't some kind of pattern.  I would've assumed there wasn't much chance, but bringing things to the level of a sixteen minute morse code video makes me wonder.

I mean, if it wasn't important, why didn't they leave the letters page as it was…?

Possibly nothing, but the Bio on the SOTM site: http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.com/multiverse/villains/ambuscade

is markedly different from the image loaded on BGG: https://boardgamegeek.com/image/2844447/sentinels-multiverse-ambuscade-villain-character

Multiple differences:

Ansel G Moreau;

To this end, he employed...

and a few others. but probably nothing...

Still, I wouldn't have thought to use 124185 as a BGG object id if not for the boardgame geek ambuscade clue.

It's not unreasonable to think that it was there as an example of what we should do with any other 6 digit numbers we have come across.

The unity but came from one of the very first clues. The page with the 9 lines of quotes from various flavor text. It was the number hide. In the fifth line after the fifth word. So we might have skipped something.

well based upon the previous patterns, we are likely looking for some sort of number, since they seam to alternate between comic panels linked to by numbers and story reveals linked to by pass phrases

Old stuff, but I scanned in the Villains rulebook, so that those who haven't received it yet can play along. There may well be more things hidden there. For one thing, there's the mysteriously misprinted logo.

http://pages.iu.edu/~dpthurst/tmp/villains-rulebook.pdf

How about his Villains rule book bio?

Thanks! Has anyone scanned the QR code in the front of the rulebook?

Thank you, dpt!  You are wonderfully kind to do that!  :D

yes, it leads to the /replaceme page

That was done really early, and leads to the ‘replaceme’ page.

Want to bet that logo is counting down?

Cool, I thought it had been done. Thanks for the responses.

This is very easily the best thing to ever happen after work. I'm likely not to be much help, but know you've got my support!

I haven't found anything in the comments, forum posts, or images on the Ambuscade BGG page.

Ambuscade did go to Mars, could that be relevant?

Same. I looked all over that page and nothing jumped out at me.

Possibly it was just a pointer to ambuscade and there is another clue elsewhere?

What ways could we put Ambuscade into leetspeak?

4m8u5c4d3 doesn't work.

YOu know what's interesting is that a bunch of the images on the Ambuscade Page were uploaded 10 days ago. This includes the front and back cards. Considering the game has been out for quite a few years I think that might be worth looking into.

That's what I've been thinking.  I think we should see if there are any cards where Unity and Ambuscade are in the art together.  Seeing as their clues were both BGG object ids, they may be linked together.  Maybe the clue itself is silver gulch? Since it came out alongside both of them in the videogame. (Silver Gulch's BGG object id = 134388)

We should also persue the two separately as well, so looking at all of their cards for clues.

Are there any other numbers or anything that hasn't really been utilized yet?  Looking back at things like that was what led to finding the Unity clue, there may be something else to look back on with either Ambuscade or Unity in mind (or any of the more recent clues… should someone run some other things we've come across through rail ciphers?  Never know right?).

I'm just kind of stumped now, since if it's anything like before, the next solution should be a 9 digit number, and we've looked over pretty much all the number clues we know of so far.

The person who updated the pictures has been a BGG user for years and uploaded a lot of pictures of promos and mini-expansions over the past couple weeks.

I was trying to follow this, but the uploader seems to just be uploading tons of stuff in general.  Long time memeber lots of activity too hard to sift through.

Having checked out a bunch of various Lorem Ipsum generators, as well as the text of De finibus bonorum et malorum by Cicero, nothing in particular about the Lorem Ipsum in the FF4 Annual stands out to me.  Some bits of the text turn up in some Lorem Ipsums, some other bits in other ones.  And there are plenty of words that I can't seem to find anywhere in De finibus bonorum et malorum.  As such, I'm giving up looking into that, as it seems likely to be a waste of time, even if I still don't understand why they put Lotem Ipsum at the end of the annual instead of the letters page that was already present.

In Ambuscade's villain deck, 2 cards could be related to both him and Unity.

Enticing Target - has a Unity flavor text quote.

Shrewd Ambush - has both Ambuscade and Unity pictured. Flavor text by Guise

Both flavor text are from The Deadliest Game #7 and appear to happen at the same time.

Could the fact that the page calls Lillian  "The Harpy" be a clue ? I was under the impression she calls herself "Pinion" 

Automated Turret in Abuscade's base deck has Unity flavor text.

I had a go at a summary post:

So CornCakes posted this thread, about how Tim Cosing is listed nine times as a playtester. Matchstickman solves the anagram - It's Coming.

Comrade Bubbles finds the Twitter account: www.twitter.com/timcosing

Powerhound finds that the QR code on the front of the Villains rules leads to what looks like the Replacements page, but is not... (http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.greaterthangames.com/replaceme). Powerhound also points out that CornCakes is a fake account, from the same hometown as the Scholar.

Donner points out that the above link is a different website, and that logging in there doesn't work. dpt replaces 'replaceme' with it's coming: http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.greaterthangames.com/itscoming. arenson finds the number 142185 embedded in the middle of the source.

Tindiyen suggests that maybe we need to find " the worst part between what you see and what actually is, the only truth now. You shall not feel my bones The protection of the most awful future Indeed...You are not real." in flavor text. grysqrl finds most of the quotes that match, Chogb puts those cards together to spell 'Genocidal': http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.greaterthangames.com/genocidal

DocBrown puts the barcode from the Genocidal comic in the magic place: http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.greaterthangames.com/982354617

The Mega Computer stuff in this was actually discovered a while ago by Kratos13; anyway, so an image (https://www.dropbox.com/s/sh5ld7n7fmgm1u0/intervene.PNG?dl=0) can be found in the Steam game by playing three Mega Computers in Megalopolis. A bunch of people identify the cards on the screens, then mackcrockett matches the colours of the screens with pages of the rulebook, uses those page numbers to pull a corresponding letter from the flavor text of the card in question to produce 'formofthe', which he finishes with 'Harbinger': http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.greaterthangames.com/harbinger

VisForYoshi spots that the left-most letters in the first paragraph spell out base eight. Eventually, brettwo thought to knock the 9 off the barcode and convert the result into octal:  http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.greaterthangames.com/421234220

Derp spots that the letters page of Freedom Four annual 1 is now in Latin; Bubbles spots there are actually nine versions of the comic online; brettwo spots that Tachyon's clock is different in each, and translates those times into semaphore, giving OLSDALEDI; dpt spots that letters behind Legacy change between the comics, and spell out railfence; Meerkat suggests a Rail Fence Cipher, which brettwo uses to solve the board: http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.greaterthangames.com/oddallies

jagarciao spots that we need to use L33tsp33k, Derp scans the new barcode and converts it from L33t to English - it reads 'boardgame'. racingstripe finds a weird video of at-least-three-layer-deep Morse code posted by Cosing, is admonished by Cosing, and the video is made private. tyches coin finds that 126951 - the second half of the barcode's number - is Ambuscade's ID on BoardGameGeek, and Meerkat spots that 633000 is L33t for Geek. And that's what you missed on Glee.

I'm going to bed.

Deadlist, a nine letter word, is d34d1i3s7, but I don't think that does anything.

Thanks, Meerkat! Awesome work.

Yes!! I made a contribution that made it to the summary!!!

Take that, Mom!! I AM useful!!

Isn't one of Ambuscade's mini nemesis guys a nemesis of Omnitron X?

Could he be the geek?

Looking for clues in Ambuscade's bio in the Villains rule book, but not finding much.

I've tried taking a lot of 9 letter key words/phrases in Ambuscade's bio (including his name and alias) and plugging them into the "replace" me, as well as translating them all into leetspeak. No luck so far.

Anyone try convering "Ambuscade" to leetspeak and using it as the URL entry?

yup. 4mbu5c4d3 does not work

I am carrying on with the Morse Code.  At first, when the initial 52 seconds gave two dashes (three layers deep, wow), which signifies M, I assumed the entire sixteen minutes was dedicated to spelling out Morse Code.  But from 0:52 to 1:17 gives another dash, and three dashes is O.  I'm going to see how the next bit works out.

If you find the answer, hold on to it until we get that far in the puzzle =D

It's a sequence of numbers.  I'm halfway through it.  If it does turn out to yield something useful, of course I can hold on to it if you think GtG don't want it out yet.  Though, frankly, I'm expecting that if the numbers do lead to anything, they've probably already pulled it down, just like they made the morse video private.  (I happened to already have it open in a window, and I'm still using that.) 

So engrossed in the puzzle am I that I completely forgot about the Handelabra livestream.  Chat with the community and enjoy a Shattered Timelines game?  No, not me.  Instead, I'll listen to a really long series of beeps...  It does get easier as I progress, though.  The patterns become recognisable. 

I want to hear what you found, out of order or not!

I can't believe we are stuck,  you guys were crushing it while I was in a meeting at work.

It certainly looks like we hit a stall...

I say hooray for the community, for turning out to be cleverer than they expected!

An evening of going through my various Ambuscade cards has turned up nothing likely…

I've been writing up a summary of what we've discovered so far. There's quite a lot! I've been really impressed by how much teamwork there has been, and the astonishing number of different people that contributed key points.

One thing to note is that we have not in fact used the colors of the letters in "intervene". Mackcrockett used the colors of the screens on that page instead.

Yeah, I've been pouring through his cards, trying to find likely clues.

I've tried various forms of the word Ambuscade in English and French. I tried most of the nine-letter words in his solo-villain cards. I'm trying to figure out if there's anything we can do with the Slaughterhouse Six (it's not abattoir6). I went off on a weird Vonnegutt tangent (I really wanted the next clue to be icenine, but alas).

Has anyone else wandered down any interesting roads?

The result from the triple-layered morse code is 918273645.  When I put it into the "replaceme" field, nothing resulted.

Perhaps it's intended to transform something else?  It's a nine-digit number that uses each of the nine numbers once.  Or maybe the page that it's supposed to reveal isn't ready yet, and that's why they made the morse video private.

Time to retire to bed, where my sleeps will be haunted by fevered beeps.

(To quickly explain, only three characters were used: -....- dash; .-.-.- dot; and -..-. slash.  The dots, dashes, and slashes from these were used to spell dot and dash and to represent slash.  These then turned out to represent numbers, five characters long each, separated by slashes.)

Has anyone tried emailing the tim cosing email to see if some kind of autoreply comes back?

So, I've done a little digging on the Ambuscade info on BoardGameGeek, and noticed that the bio on the image for his mini-pack bio card doesn't match up with his official bio. I'll show what I've found different by Bolding the text in the Bios

-----------------------------------------------------

From the main Sentinels of the Multiverse website's bio on Ambuscade: Ansel G. Moreau, world-famous French action movie star, has a few dark secrets. His hobby of big game hunting has spiraled out of control - his constant need for bigger and more threatening prey has him hunting the very heroes that protect the earth! To this end, he employed a shady genetics corporation to give him superpowers, but the process went terribly wrong, scarring his million-dollar face and ending his acting career.

However, he did gain some new, energy-manipulation abilities from the process, which he plans to put to good use. Taking the name Ambuscade, he employs his new powers and a vast arsenal to hunt the heroes he considers to be the most dangerous and powerful. At the top of his list? Haka, the ageless Maori warrior. No one else could provide a sufficient challenge to one as skilled as Ambuscade, the world's most efficient and calculating hunter . . .

---------------------------------------------------

From the image at BoardGameGeek (not the description on the main page): Ansel Moreau, world-famous French action movie star, has a few dark secrets. His big game hunting hobby has spiraled out of control - his constant need for bigger and more threatening prey has him hunting the very heroes that protect the earth! He employed a shady genetics corporation to give him powers, but the process went terribly wrong, scarring his million-dollar face and ending his acting career.

However, Ansel gained energy-manipulation abilities from the process. Taking the name Ambuscade, he puts his new powers and a vast arsenal to work, hunting the most and powerful heroes. At the top of his list? Haka, the ageless Maori warrior. No one else could provide a sufficient challenge to one as skilled as Ambuscade, the world's most efficient and calculating hunter...

--------------------------------------------------

Hard to say what any of this could mean, or if it means anything at all even, but it at least is something to experiment with as we try to unravel our current clue.

Character Witness from the Celestial Tribunal Deck seems exceptionally appropiate at the moment.

Flavor- A section of the chamber wall slid aside, revealing four heros. "The human team known as Dark Watch shall now speak to the character of Lillian Corvus."

That said I can't find a connection.

Most likely, they had to edit the text down to fit on the card.

I feel like we’re missing (or forgot) some piece of the puzzle. Like we have the key, but not the ciphertext. Maybe if we make a list of all the known clues, where they were found, and where they led, we could get some idea of what to put together for this step.

Edit: another thought for an interesting list would be all the ways to write “Ambuscade” in leetspeak.

It's late, and I'm on my phone. But, while I was getting kids in bed, it occurred to me that the word Sentinels has 9 letters.

The colors of Intervene were matched up with the page number colors in the VotM rulebook. Am I misremembering something?

Tried that, and in leet speak as well. Nothing.

How far back do you want to go? After discovery of the Odd Allies page:

1. First letter of each line of the first paragraph spell "leet speak"
2. The barcode, when scanned and translated from leet speak to english produced "boardgame"
3. The first part of the number under the barcode (633000) translated from leet speak produced "geek"
4. On boardgamegeek.com, searching for the item number matching the second part of the number of the bar code (126951) leads you to the page for the Ambuscade mini-expansion.

Those are the things that seem pretty solid. Ambuscade is a nine-letter word; it stands to reason that the solution may be an anagram thereof.

Possibly relevant:

• The number that was comment-buried in the /itscoming page (124185) leads to Unity's bgg mini-expansion page.
• The colors of the letters in "intervene" still haven't been used for anything.

No, the colors of the screens were used. Intervene (the colors and the word) have not been used for anything as far as I can tell.

A summary would be good. Especially any clues we have that we have not found a solution for. Haven't been able to follow for a while.

Have you checked the Summary thread? There is one. Someone mad a Summary post a page or so back as well you could look at.

I was thinking of going back through everything, sort of as an organization and brainstorming exercise. Past clues have come from disparate places, and some number of them sometimes combine to produce the next clue. It would get me thinking about where to look next. I’d do it myself now, I haven’t contributed anything that paid off yet and I’m kind of excited about it, but I have some real world things to take care of before I go to sleep.

Maybe I’ll skip work tomorrow to do it. Good luck to the other continents for this night…

The colors of the letters of the word "Intervene" are the same for each letter... I mean, each "e" is yellow, the two "n"'s are grey... could this be some sort of key...?

With my rulebook in hand...:

1=yellow=e

2=blue=v

3=pink=?

4=orange=r

5=red=?

6=brown=i

7=grey=n

8=white=?

9=green=t

Any other way to find what the 3, 5 and 9 are linked to maybe?

I posted my own summary over here: https://greaterthangames.com/forum/topic/summaries-8248#comment-125240

On the Boardgame Geeks website, the sampling of Ambuscade cards in the other images section has exactly 9 cards.

https://boardgamegeek.com/image/1446689/sentinels-multiverse-ambuscade-villain-character

Too true, too true. You have said it, young Caspit. We must search for more clues!

-Guise "The Deadliest Game" #7. Shrewd Ambush

I'll just leave this here for inspiration

Also, is there anywhere where we can look at the original freedom four annual #1? Maybe difference are there only to highlight information presented in the original...?

In the page source for http://greaterthangames.com/421234220 there is a comment that says 134393

On BoardGameGeek that leads to the page for Eternal Haka promo card.

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgameexpansion/134393/sentinels-multiverse-eternal-haka-promo-card

I've been trying unsuccessfully to try "Checking Out" with various orders on the replaceme page, to no avail.

I thought "Checkouts." was a hint to keep looking at the barcodes?

Oh, thanks! Someone had suggested that before, but I hadn't quite understood the suggestion.

Speaking of barcodes this page lists the barcode for Ambuscade https://www.barcodelookup.com/0798304258721

Possibly, but not necessarily.  Also not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Good catch! Surely not a coincidence. I didn't see other obvious hidden comments on the other pages.

http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.com/comic appears to be the original.

So we have BGG Object ids for Unity, Ambuscade, and Eternal Haka so far… maybe there are more we need to find?

Still don't know what to do with them… 

One other thought, the lower image on oddallies has six bolded words: calm, powers, yourself, focus, control, better

Can we do anything with those? I've spent some time looking at flavor text - Unforgiving Wasteland, Stun Bolt, and Sustain the Portal each has multiple of those words (and plenty other cards have at least one), but I haven't figured out what to do with that.

It might be nothing, but the Prime Wardens Haka card has, on the defeated side, Haka chained to a wall by what looks like Unity's signature style, while Ambuscade looks at him.  It's a connection to the three BGG references.

Are these base powers? The one thing I can think of with Better is base Scholar's "Better Living"

Yeah, I think I mentioned those earlier, but didn't give much more thought to them.  I'll look into it some.

maybe part of another video game setup…

to the video game!

No, those words are found in the flavor text (not game text) of the cards I mentioned. Base powers don't have any flavor text.

Going by the word -> number -> word pattern, we're looking for a number again. We might be done with LEETSPEAK (since it was used to figure out the bgg url, like RAIL FENCE was used to figure out the previous URL). So far we have 3 bgg pages (Ambuscade, Unity, and Eternal Haka). Maybe there's some significance to some of the different numbers on these pages, or other differences in these pages?

Here are some examples:

• weights: 2.35 2.17 2.67
• HP: 50 26 33
• Play Time: 30 60 45
• The Purge review number: 609 613 616
• Recommended ages: 13 8 13
• Ratings: 8.1 7.8 7.4

I imagine it would have to be numbers that can't change.

I think it’s probably a long shot anyway, but I think any of those numbers can be reasonably expected not to change during the timeline of this event. But obviously something they actually control would be the most likely candidate.

By the way - the 124185 comment was on the "beginning" page. At the time, I had found that if you take away all the letters of the word "nine" from "beginning" you had "bgg" but did not think of using 124185 with it.

Just to point that either each of these pages on bgg are individual clues, as they appear one at a time in our investigation, or they are parts of a message we won't be able to decypher before we have all the pages.

Okay, so I was thinking about how we're stuck on what to do with the clues uncovered from the Odd Allies story page, and I began to wonder if the name itself might be a clue somehow.

Odd as in odd numbers?  I took all the even numbers out of the BGG object ids we've uncovered, but I'm not even sure this is the right train of thought...

Ambuscade: 126951 = 1951

Unity: 124185 = 115

Eternal Haka: 134393 = 13393

At first I thought of putting Unity's and Haka's together, since they're "allies" and it's the "odd" numbers, unfortunately that only gives an 8 digit number, 11513393, or 1339115.  Ambuscade and Eternal Haka were given as clues in the same page, and they would definitely be "odd allies" if they needed to work together, and it would make a 9 digit number, but nothing happened when I tried.  Neither /195113393, nor /133931951 worked.  In any case, I hope sharing this new perspective shakes something loose with someone else, because I gotta get some sleep.

Hey all! Reddit brought me here, and HOLY CRAP is it fun watching this puzzle play out. As for where the group left off, I tried an idea that yielded no results, but I figure maybe my thoughts might trigger some of your thoughts to move us along...?

I saw the "leetspeak" clue in the ODDALLIES comic. Everyone parsing out "Boardgame Geek" led us to Ambuscade, and that's where we las left out heroes. Looking at the same paragraph we pulled "leetspeak" from, the LAST letters of each of those same lines spells out "health pts." I took a look at Ambuscade's starting HP, which is 50, and on a whim, Google'd what that is in French: "cinquante." Seeing that it spelled a nine-letter word, I got giddy with excitement that maybe I had figured something out. Unfortunately, plugging "cinquante" into the 'replaceme' URL didn't go anywhere. But I figured mentioning the "healthpts" thing might be of use to any of you? 

I tried! :/

That's a really awesome find!

Taking the healths we have so far, we've can convert their health totals to letters using leetspeak as our encoding

Unity - 26 - RG

Ambuscade - 50 - SO

Haka - 33 = EE

yes but until dpt made one it want concise enough

edit: also I hope he updates it as we go because it was the first summary I could follow

Thought, since it looks like the barcodes are important, have we figured out the barcode on the odd allies page. Feel like this should be the focus.

nevermind I see that we have after looking at dpt summary. I am going back to sleep. I can't think straight right now.

I also tried "cinquante" in leet speak as "c1nqu4n73", "c1n9u4n73", and "c1nqu@n73"... No dice.

Have we anagrammed "CornCakes"?

I think "Earns Cock" possibly isn't what we're looking for…

Probably the same with "Cancer's OK"

And just as a note: There's a picture in that Board Game Geek webpage that shows a "sampling of Ambuscade cards."  Sonic Mine, Automated Turret, and Ambuscade himself are the only three cards visible in the picture that are targets with health points showing. Anything on those cards that might help?

Or, considering a lot of the tie in back to the Villains explansion, is there anything with Ambuscade's new starting health that relates to any of this...? 

(I'm so tired...)

Because my dogs got me up earlier than I wanted, but I know they'll just want food in another half-hour, I tried some nonsense:

HEALTHPTS seems too deliberate to be random, so, mega kudos to >G for finding the right combination of word choice, kerning, and art to distract us all from the last letters being a sensible phrase. (thanks CraftyCurler!)

Classic 'Scade, where the BGG page was, has 8 different cards(not including copies) in his deck that have health. including himself, those max healths are(alphabetically) 50, 8, 5, 6, 9, 10, 1 which was nine digits, but that was nothing =[

HOWEVER, Villains 'Scade has 7 targets (enticing target twice, and the slaughterhouse six with 6hp each), with 'Scade himself having 27 hp. (again, aphabetically)27,6,3,3,6,6,6,6 was also nine digits, but turned up nothing.

Sorry to flail miserably =] Good luck!

Not helpful, but for the record: I sent Tim a private message reading "Does anything in particular happen if I send you a message?". He responded: "It does not."

Amusingly, another 9 letters.

Edit: as an aside, although it most likely won't happen, it'd be cool if we got all these images in a format we could use to make wallpapers from.

Found another code, thise one in replace me

<!-- One Two Six Nine Four Nine --> 

Edit: and it links to ominitron II's promo

http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.greaterthangames.com/100263350

EDIT: HP totals of the four linked characters, in the order they were hidden: Omnitron (100), Unity (26), Haka (33), Ambuscade (50).

sorry for the double, but breakthrough: http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.greaterthangames.com/100263350

ninja'd

looking at the page, unlike the others, it has alt text for 'uif"

Might be nothing, but hovering the cursor over this image gives the letters 'uif'.

Neat! I would think it’s a cryptogram, but I stink at those.

I think that the symbol code links to unitys bots, as each character matches one (Absolute zero - cryo bot, Bunker-turret, Legacy - Champion, Raptor bot, bee bot, blade - platform bot)

EDIT: AGain Meerkat?

So Augustus' code reads:

Turret, Cryo, Champion, Raptor, Champion, Bee

Turret, Turret, Platform, Bee

Bee, Cryo, Bee

Sorry ;)

I don’t think you are.

EDIT: People post too fast!

If the code is to do with the bots, do we include Augustus as well?

I googled "Augustus's Code" and it seems it might be a simple cipher where each letter is replaced by the next in the alphabet. So "uif" would become "vjg" for example. I'm not sure if that helps but I wanted to contribute to this incredible process that has unfolded. 

Or if uif was already encoded, take it one step back and you get "the". Which is promising.

Great work! I've update the summary. I'll try to keep it up to date, but of course won't always be able to.

Huh. I'm only on page 1 now... it looks like a LOT has gone on since I last came on here... but here's my (possibly already obsolete) theory.

What if it's a hint at a new hero, with Tim Cosing as his real name, who has the ability to duplicate himself (a bit like the Multiple Man)? He could have a playstyle where all of his cards are additional character cards with their own HP and powers (and, possibly, incap abilities), the idea being he's making clones of himself that do various things (with each individually being rather fragile).

the issue I see right now is there is 13 characters here. Instead of 9. How do we play this into the 9 theory

It's likely to be a question or something that points us into the direction of the proper word.

Actually now that I look at it bee bot is the end of each line. Each bot represents end of the word? But that doesn't explain the bee bot in the last line that is at the beginning

Just to add that was the first thing I did when we got an email address, no dice, delivery failure.

Mine was much weirder. After I sent this email, I got a random vall from Mumbai.

Also, if there are three words, does the second start with the same 2 letters and the third beginning and end woth the same? Or would the letters change through the code?

Each bot represented in the Augustus code has different HP:

Turret:9

Chaampion:8

Cryo:7

Platform:3

Raptor:2

Bee:1

going off the uif becoming the and just using the first letter in each bot name gives:

SBBQBA 

SSOA

ABA

this doesn't make sense

not sure if we should look at hp either. Was also thinking if the 6 bold words in the odd allies page could help but not sure how

I just got up - fantastic job, everybody! Thanks especially to dpt and Meerkat for their excellent summaries. You are amazing.

Anybody know why Augustus has one book with a circle on its spine? Is its placement important?

Also, there are 13 symbols and 13 books. Each book's spine is facing left or right with the exception of the book on Unity's head. Hopefully this is a signal and not just noise...

mmmm maybe a sign if we should go forward a letter or backwards?

Oh, good – I'm not the only one who tried this…

Doing the Augustus thing on the bots, assuming bot order is HP order:

Champion, Platform, Cryo, Bee, Cryo, Turret
Champion, Champion, Raptor, Turret
Turret, Platform, Turret

CPCBCT
CCRT
TPT

Then doing Augustus again:

BOBABS
BBQS
SOS

That’s almost something?

I might be horribly wrong but given that Unity says "no one can understand you" perhaps we are looking in the wrong place? I note that there are 6 bold letters, and 3 in the alt text, that totals 9! (though I can make nothing of the results through an Augustus Cipher)

I have to go to work so can’t check this myself, but there are the same number of books as glyphs, so the augustus code might have to be modified based on which direction the books are facing?

have been trying this with no luck. there is either something I am missing or some other logic 

Wait, I did my thing wrong. I forgot Swift and Stealth Bots’ HP.

I’m gonna try to follow Matchstickman’s lead on my phone…

Edit: nvm, but a “bishop cipher” is a thing!

if you use augustus that replaces with the next letter in the alphabet all of the letters in bold, you get BSHIOP ("thebishop" does not work), if that helps anyone.  It's possible that is not of consequence but might be part of the clue with the symbols

People must be enjoying themselves. I haven’t heard one comment of “They did this instead of Tactics!”

What is the 9th letter of Turret Bot’s flavor text, etc?

Really? You had to go there?

According to this website (first one that pops up in Google for Bishop Cypher) the first step assigns each symbol a number... the bots' HP seems the obvious choice... and look. Later on that page they use it to find a code hidden in Lorem Ipsum text as an example...

http://waxwingpuzzleco.com/bishops-cipher/

In Unity's bubble ARGH! and NO. are in bold.   

the flaw being that a bishop cypher requires two symbols to generate a character, we have an odd number

It depends how the mapping to the source text applies. That web page uses two enciphered numbers to encode line number and character. Maybe we only have to go by character - hence my question about flavor text. Or maybe it’s the following characters from Unity’s speech bubble?

9 7 8 2 8 1,
9 9 3 1,
1 7 1

Edit: I get “AYCRCA AAGA AYA” from her bubble. Not there yet…

lorem ipsum? Where have we seen that before? 

And no one understands lorem ipsum.

Lorem Ipsum was seen in the altered FF Annual 1 comics for the fan mail.

If we subtract one from each of the Bot's hit points, all of the Bee Bots would be gone, leaving NINE bots in Augustus' speech bubble:

Turret, Cryo, Champion, Raptor, Champion, Turret, Turret, Platform, Cryo

Or in HP (after removing 1)

8 6 7 1 7 8 8 2 6

It feels like the post-cypher "The" in the Unity picture alt-text is part of the clue, but I already tried "TheBishop" as the replaceme substitute, to no avail.

(Thanks to marclabrie502 for pointing out that I neglected to remove 1 from the 3)

Good catch atras. Maybe my logic of ignoring the bee bots could be correct then

.

Atras, in your last post, the 3 is supposed to be a 2 :).

You're not supposed to. It's placeholder filler text to create the look of actual text in order to preview a layout.

yeah…I know. I was referring to the fact that we have a document revealed by this puzzle game that contains a large amount of Lorem Ipsum and that it's not meant to be understood. Unity is telling Augustus No one can understand him, and if you look at the Bishop cipher page it uses Lorem Ipsum as an example. Maybe a coincidence, maybe not.

For the sake of me not wanting to sift through 10 pages, could you kindly link me to this document?

http://greaterthangames.com/system/files/downloads/4.pdf , last page.

There's a transcription somewhere in the thread, but I don't think it preserves line breaks, which are going to be crucial, I think.

EDIT: And I ninja strike two opponents at once!

I'm awful at these kinds of things but I do want to offer my sincerest appreciation to all of you who are working on this. It is tremendously enjoyable to read through and you are all heroes in my book for taking on this challenge.

hre is the link to the Lorem ipsum text

http://greaterthangames.com/system/files/downloads/8.pdf

http://greaterthangames.com/system/files/downloads/7.pdf

Thanks! I wonder why there are several links for the same comic each link ending in a different number...but it was probably already explained earlier. These kinda of threads are not very newcomer friendly, as far as being caught up to speed :P

There were different versions of the comic with slight changes in the background art that led to completing one of the steps.

There is a summary thread just below this for that exact reason.  The different numbers were indeed revealed as part of a clue for a previous puzzle.

With line breaks (not, honestly, that I'm sure much can come of looking at this, plus I may have made a few mistakes here and there due to resolution not being great and there sometimes seeming like an extra i between letters - or not):

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, con-
sectetur adipiscing elit.  Fusce
feugiat tempus lacus eu sceleris-
que.  Nulla facilisi.  Suspendisse mi
ligula, cursus id tincidunt mattis.  
Laoreet nec ligula.  In arcu
purus, pharetra a pulvinar in,
faucibus non libero.  Duis id elit
in quam ultrices sodales a a
lacus.  Fusce vehicula, ligula sed
consectetur sodales, arcu ipsum
pretium leo, vitae porta ipsum
quam non libero.  Pellentesque
lacus nulla, scelerisque ut ulla-
mcorper sed, luctus a mi.  Nulla
facilisi.

Aenean molestie tortor a odio
eleifend egestas.  Etiam eget nisi
ac est elementum eleifend.  Nunc
adipiscing iaculis massa quis
bibendum.  In consequat accumsan
ullamcorper.  Ut gravida ullam-
corper erat in ullamcorper.  Pel-
lentesque lacus dui, porta eget
eleifend sed, tincidunt vel lorem.  
Vestibulum mauris augue, luctus
in rhoncus id, volutipat id tellus.  
Phasellus ullamcorper porta
orci, quis feugiat arcu molestie
sed.  Vestibulum ante ipsum prims
in faucibus orci luctus et ul-
trices posuere cubilia curae; ut
ullamcorper dui vel ligula dictum
facilisis.  

Maecenas non elit vitae velit eus-
mod scelerisque, aenean eu felis
lacus, adipiscing volupat ligula.  
Donec iaculis lectus est, at biben-
dum nulla.  Proin in velit sit amet
libero porta varius in quis tellus.  
In quis metus neque, vitae sceler-
isque nisl.  Ut at posuere purus.  
Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad
litora torqent per conubia
nostra, per inceptos himenaeos.  
Vestibulum pretium semper libero
non condimentum, quisque adipisc-
ing porta nisi, sed elementum
lacus interdum sed.  Class aptent
taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent
 

o.O  I swear that wasn't there before, lol…  I literally looked at every page we had revealed so far "Ctrl+F"-ing  for "!–"  I mean yeah I guess I could have missed that… But replaceme was one of the ones I was extra thorough in.

Are we gonna have to start doing that after EVERY CLUE now?  argh!

Probably not; we've solved that puzzle, so hopefully no more will pop up.

Taking a different apporach, if each symbol is a letter, there are very few 4 letter words that start with the same letter. If it looks at a letter and shifts it one place, the second word could have 1 letter shifted one way and the other letter shifted the other. Not sure how they should be shifted, but here is a llist of possible letter combinations. Not all of them make up words.

ZB

AC

BD

CE

DF

EG

FH

GI

HJ

IK

JL

KM

LN

MO

NP

OQ

PR

QS

RT

SU

TV

UW

VX

WY

XZ

YA

Wait?! Someone from Handelabra is commenting! I thought you guys were in on this. Are you supposed to "intervene"?

not sure there's much there but if anyone is curious, here's the LAST letter of each line in the lorem ipsum (as opposed the first letter that has worked with other clues)

paragraph1: nesisuntadmmeaai

paragraph2: oicsnmltmssaesltms

paragraph3: ssantsrsdasocmtt

I also tried using the books Agustus is holding as a guide. I thought the books might mean subtract 2, subtract 0, subtract 2. If you do that to the numbers derived from the HP's you get. 

7566 9931 5

This removed the raptor and bee bots from the first row, nothing from the second, and the 2 bee bots from the last.) Unfortunately it did not work.

as I mentioned on the stream last night, aside from helping with implementation details in the software, I have zero additional information.

so basically, I'm just as excited about this as everyone else :)

Isn't the next clue a phrase not a number?

Yay! Help us! Although you do know if there are more secrets in the video game, don't you?

I don't know if it makes any further difference, but everything after the first line of Lorem Ipsum text is unique and therefore easy to manipulate. "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, con-sectetur adipiscing elit." is the only standard part of such text.

Just to get my head straight, you've used Augustus to reveal Bishop which is now being worked on the HP numbers from the golems in the speech bubble right? And we are looking for a word to fit the pattern of numbers/words that we've seen so far? I am completely outclassed in puzzle solving but still trying to play along in some way

Also wondering if the "o" on the side of one of the books is connected to the appearance of the letter somewhere in the Lorem Ipsum text?

Technically, the Augustus cypher did not reveal Bishop (at least not correctly). I could be wrong, but if it was intentional, why wasn't it spelled correctly?

I think this is right, bishop is just a false positive

Just thinking about the use of Bishop, could it work as a chess reference to read the golems diagonally? Any other uses of Bishop other than as a cipher?

edit: nevermind, looks like I'm following the wrong thread.

Tried using google translate to help with the Latin, but it changes dramatically depending on where you put the line returns. It will take more time than I have to play with it to see if it is a useful lead. 

Has something more simple been tried? Like taking the bot healths and converting to the good old base 8? Not to mention, the layout does look somewhat similar to the Railfence from before, would that be worth trying again?

I'm probably just grasping at strwas here, but something's better than nothing.

Also, other than the embeded numbers from the last clue (Which technically was using a source code, no the hints themselves), no puzzle refered to information given in a previous hint.

Hey…this guy just joined this morning, and has a nine letter name related to Unity who seems critical to this puzzle somehow…

Maybe we should take this advice?

Also strwas is spelled incorrectly, just like bshiop was.

The version without line returns was posted earlier in the thread.  Nonetheless, it's largely nonsense, so Google Translate will not be of much help (not that its Latin translation has ever been great compared with popular spoken languages, in my opinion).

This user found the discussion via a thread I posted in Reddit, and is a user there for more than two years.

That’s because I mutter this exact sentiment every time we find something new and I dont want to spread my bitterness to a thing I’m enjoying =P

Wow Lateralis has nine letters

A ha!

Thanks–and apologies for assuming a gender (guy), by the way.

Time for a stretch! Not too many 4 letter words start with a double letter. One of them is "eels". Isn't there an eel on one of Tempy's cards?

For all I know, the user is a guy!  But yeah, I try to avoid assuming. 

Aquatic Correspondence.  

to go with this thought process. All words in English that have the same two first letters

Www, eel, eek, ooh, eels, oops, ooze, eerie, llama, llamas, eerily  oozing

so eels, oops and ooze look promising. 

It seems pretty deliberate that there are exactly as many books as there are symbols. Maybe the direction of the book is the direction the letters were shifted? And the book on Unity's head is a letter that was unshifted?

So, if the bindings are the direction: LLLLL URRLL LLR

Or if the open sides are the direction: RRRRR ULLRR RRL

L = Left, R = Right, U = Unshifted

Oops cold be Setback, and Ooze could be Pike Industrial.

the issue is what is the word that would form this. If we go by first letter, cryo and champion bots both start with c and nothing I can think of makes sense with that there

Using a program I put in the cryptogram and shifted the letters based on the books (the one I top of the head I counted as going to the left). I got these results:

BALDLY OOPS SAY
BANING EELS SAG
BANING OOPS SAG
BANING OORT TAG
CALMLY OOPS SAY
CANING EELS SAG
CANING OOPS SAG
CANING OORT TAG
CHENEY OOPS SHY
CHENEY OORT THY
DIETER OOPS SIR
DISUSE OORT TIE
LIEFER OOPS SIR
MEAGAN OOPS SEN
MEAGAN OORT TEN
MISUSE OORT TIE
MUTATE OOPS SUE
REAGAN OOPS SEN
SANING OORT TAG
SEAMAN OORT TEN
TRICIA OOZE ERA
TRIVIA OOZE ERA
URNING OOZE ERG
VIEWED OOPS SID
VIEWER OOPS SIR
WANING EELS SAG
WANING OOPS SAG
WANING OORT TAG
WIENER OOPS SIR

"Calmly oops say" reminds me of "Whoops, Sorry!" from Setback's deck. Probably not relevant to the puzzle, though.

That's it! lol

What happens if we convert the books to a binary number?

The books in the left stack have a 0 on them, and all face the same way.  The number from the other stack is either 97 or 66.

We have 13 1s and 0s?

I did notice there are 9 books with the covers facing left....maybe significant.

Actually I tried joining months ago but my Email just didn't recive the account activation email, so I had to set up a new account on a new email.

As for the name, that's literally a coincidence, I've used this handle for years.

Assuming left is 1, then the binary number comes out as 3982 in decimal or F8E in Hex. What that means, I have no clude, but there you go.

And assuming spine left is zero? The book with the 0 is spine left.

I tried the following, all of which yielded nothing.

I took the HP of the bots (9782819931171) and then shifted everything left and dropped zeros for 867178826. (nine digits) 

Then tried shifting it all right for 8939242282 (ten digits)

Then tried shifting according to the books each direction (with the one on unity's head being unshifted) for 86717262 (nine digits) and 89391884226 (eleven digits)

None worked in the "replaceme" section. 

If the pattern is words then numbers, the next one will be a word.

Everything has been in nines so if the decrypted values go into the URL something has to be trimmed out to make it nine characters.  

Trajector,

As you asked that gives 113 and 71 respectively.

unless the phrase points you to the answer like by harbinger.

Last row - Bee, Cryo, Bee = BCB = Shifted -8 = "TUT"

I seem to recall TimCosing saying that on his twitter.

Born in Arizona, moved to Babylonia,
Ooooooo!
King Tut!

…anyway, I’m starting to think that “bishop” was a red herring.

Think Augustus' hat might be relevant?

What about the flavor text from those bot cards?  At work without cards, but may be worth looking into.

Probably nothing, but if you use TCCRCB TTPB BCB and put it through a +12 cipher you get:

FOODON
FFBN
NON

Are there any cards that have those letters as an acronym and have food on them?

Like I said, probably a longshot.

Also, did anyone else feel like Unity when we were doing the leetspeak stuff?

yes. That's all I could think of while reading that.

Maybe the O on the second book is telling you to uae the last letter since it is the last letter of cryo.

Unity’s bots have artwork that lines up, right? Does that give us a useful sequence of numbers?

New tweet: bookstore

Wait. Look at the spines of the book. I'm seeing either 0, 1, or 2 marks. Inculding the one on Unity's head, there's 4 books who's spine we cannot see (the same number as bee bots, meaning they may have to be eliminated). Mayvbe the number of slashes on the books is how many shifts we have to make on each letter

Edit: I counted and what I counted was in Agustus's hand from top to bottom: 2 0 2 1 1

In Unity's stack from top to bottom (not including the unseeable spines): 1 2 2 1

Morning, everyone!  Just catching up.  Doing a quick brain dump, as much for myself as anyone else.  Also, I need to do some work, and thought my ramblings might trigger someone else.

Besides what's been mentioned, also of note in this image is that the books are of three different colors: red, blue, and what I'm calling brown (though green would make me happier).  The matching number of books and symbols seems to be important, but the book on Unity's head bothers me.  The positioning makes it so that the only data we have about that book is the color (red).  This leads me to think color is the relevant piece.

I also agree that the circle (maybe a zero) on the second book in Augustus' hand seems important.  Don't know how yet, though.

I was trying to figure out what the "Bookstore" tweet means.  To me this is must mean find new source material for the cipher.  I have been digging in the Lorem ipsum for hours with nothing to show for it.

What are other potential cipher texts?  Could it be the flavor text for each of the Bots?  Can someone post those? 

What about converting the numbers gleaned from the picture into an ISBN code?

I think the bookstore tweet is just their way of saying the books are important while trying to find a nine letter word.

I'm definitely on to something. That's the ISBN # for the wasteland which is the book eternal Haka is reading. 

You mean The Wasteland by T.S Elliot? 

W A S T E L A N D

8 Letters, wasn't there something about 8 earlier, or are we looking for 9 letter words, it's getting hard to follow from an outsider perspective. 

Count again.  ;-)

Alas, wasteland is not the solution.

http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.greaterthangames.com/xbtufmboe

EDIT: Augustus shift 'wasteland' :D

I got it.  WASTELAND converted with the Augustus cipher is XBTUFMBOE.

That is one crazy image. That will take multiple reloads to get all the images from that.  For me it stops on a zombie when I would expect it to loop.

Welp. we should probably start composing what card art appears on here

Reloading didn't work for me, but I copied the image to a new tab and it will reload. Lots of cards are shown on that, will take several watches to see all of them.

I downloaded the gif and opened it in quicktime, that allows me to see it picture by picture. I'll make a list...

So, who wants to figure out what all those cards are?  From a quick glance, I noticed (in no particular order):

Unity's Hasty Augmentation and Volatile Parts

Legacy's Next Evolution

Something from Omnitron IV

Something with Miss Information (I think)

Likewise. Amoung the images I definately saw Focused Plasma Cannon, Next Evolution, What Doesn't Kill You... and the Conveor Pannels. Not sure about order, though.

EDIT: So Electro-Pulse Explosive and Bio Engineering Beam were on that list as well.

I downloaded the gif and used http://gifmaker.me/exploder/ to separate the images. There are 25 of them, and now to look through and figure out the meaning.

The first two are:
 

Adaptive Plating Subroutine from Omnitron I

Bio-engineering Beam Omnitron X

Link to images:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/hgfq93ufebbw9bz/AAA79Tfp4e-oUidigAJwoniOa?dl=0

I can't do it because the site is blocked at work... but someone with access could load the page and record the sequence with their phone and play it back slowly to identify all that cards...

Edit: or just look at wyken09's helpful post right above this...

That last one is a Zombie

I think all of the cards are in alphabetical order--one for each letter of the alphabet?

Unless some are missing....

There's 25 images, their cards all start with a different letter of the alphabet

That's a lot of Omnitron Cards in there. And what's that last one with Baron Blade, some sort of Evil Young Legacy, and Legacy? Never seen that one before.

But there's no card for U. It goes from Terraforming to Volatile Parts.

http://greaterthangames.com/omnitronu

I don't have access to my cards right now, so I can't list all the images, but it seems that Omnitron (several versions) is featured pretty heavily. 

A quick glance looks like we're missing a 'U' card. 

They're in alphabetical order Starting with Adaptive Plating  Subroutine (heheh) and ending with Zombie

Random cards that I recognize off hand kinda confim this: such as Guassian Cannon being right before Hasty Augmentation

Edit: Ha! ninja'd like nobody's business

Yahtzee!

Beat me to it by mere moments!

Looks like morse code under that barcode.

Well as an Omnitron-X fan, that titlates my occelot! I did have the idea bouncing around in my head that OmniX and Omnidrone would fuse (as alluded to in Tactics) to form some sort of Ultimate Omnitron, can GTG stop linking my brain with things please? Or at least get a better signal so it's clearer. 

That card is You Won't Believe Your Eyes, from the new Maddame Mittermeir's environment

If we assume that the number under the barcode is in hex, it converts to 590163245

Also, the first letter of each line in the first paragraph are an anagram for "sad e-robot", which means nothing, but amuses me.

Edit: Or "sad reboot"

The issue listed is Freedom Five 783 which is 16 issues after the last one used in the Progeny saga.

Ah, cheers. I haven't played any of Villains, so that explains it.

can we get the bar code translated?

232D2D2D is a color code I think, I can't figure out what it is though.

We've solved the cards.

They were alphabetical in order and didn't include a U.

As most of them were Omnitron, the next page was guessed as https://greaterthangames.com/omnitronu

Not a color code-- those are six hex digits.  Though I suppose the last two could be an alpha value.  But still, that would just be a gray or black, as the three components are almost equal.

Split into all 25 pictures but the file is too big to post :(

He's talking about card names in the /omnitronu text. "Ultimate Evolution" sounds like one, but I can't place it. I might be making that one up.

HEX color codes are six characters.  First two are red, second two are green, and last two are blue

I meant in the omnitron comic. 

Take Down is also there. This is a solid thread.

Some are 8 digits: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6909896/hex-colors-in-android-are-some-times-8-digits-how

So it seems we can ignore the first 2, which leaves us with a gray color: http://www.color-hex.com/color/2d2d2d

Color codes are divisible by three, since there are three color components, red, blue and green.

This looks like hex to me.  Converting it to decimel yields: 590163245

Converting 232D2D2D to hex gives 590163245 but that doesn't work as a link, but it is a nine digit number which aer usually important.

Okay, finally got my reader to recognize the barcode:  it came up as 06822057

only 8 digits, but that's what it came up as.  I'll be making more attempts at rescanning it just in case it read it wrong.  But for now, go with that number.

Omnitron-U is seen on Chokepoint's card "Stripped Ressources". Not relevant to the thread, but still interesting...!

Edit: "Stripped Ressources" card is from Freedom Five #773 (as per flavor text). The issue of the Freedom Five titled Omnitron-U (https://greaterthangames.com/omnitronu) is #783... just an observation.

Thats 10 digits, has 2 fives, no seven and a zero.  which breaks the normal rules on the numbers

Hmmm. what's with the "=" sign? Youtube videos have an = in the URL...I'm sure there are plenty of others that do as well.

so 06822057 = 232D2D2D may be the clue.

There's the equal sign under the barcode.  So, perhaps, somehow 06822057 (from the barcode) and 232D2D2D (underneath) are equivalent?

EDIT: Ninja'd

Nope, just nine digits. No eight either. It follows all the rules of being a nine-digit number.

If you convert 232D2D2D from hex to decimal and divide by 86 you get 06822057.

Can't help but to join in all the fun. Nice find hynju, that can't be a coincidence. What about the grey morse-code like symbols under the barcode? There are of course 9 of them.

Are you sure?  When I convert, I get 232D2D2D -> 590163245, which is not a multiple of 06822057.

I must correct.

It is not.  I should know better than to trust calculators.

But this might still be the path to follow.

I spotted True Purpose, which is Chrono Ranger's promo power

Thinking of card names, here are the candidates I spotted, in order:

Is there a Fright Train card “End of line?”
Prophetic Vision
Ultimate Evolution
Take Down
Plunder?
Twisting Back Alleys

Edit: switched over to the spoilers sheet. the Iron Legacy card is “final evolution,” so that’s not it. And there’s no Fright Train card with the name “end of line” after all.

hynju's math looks to be incorrect. 232d2d2d converted to decimal is 590163245, which isn't divisible by 86.

If the symbols under the barcode are morse code, it spells SSD (I think)

Don't tell me what to do Tim!  :p

make your barcodes less fussy ;)

j/k

New Tweet "Scan Again"

For folks who are scanning barcodes, how are you doing it? I've been hoping for a tool that doesn't involve smartphones or anything like that.

Okay,

232D2D2D -> 590163245 = 6822057 * 86 + 003466343.

I'm not finding that any of these numbers work, unfortunately,

I've tried scanning it on my phone and it does not like the image.  For some reason it can't recognize that it is a barcode.

all of the barcodes have been rather fuzzy... took me quite a while for it to recognize the first few.  this one seems to be the worst of the lot...  ugh!

(edit: the main issue is that since the barcodes are diagonal, and not high resolution, the lines have jagged edges instead of straight edges.  so it's harder for the app to recognize the spaces between the lines when they are close together.  If they were vertical, there'd be no issue at this resolution.)

Probably worth noting that the last two links (xbtufmboe) and (omnitronu) have broken the numbers/letters/numbers pattern.

new tweet "reloading'

probably something wrong with the image

Where are people getting the 86 from?

I'm still confused about where exactly wasteland comes from. Ppl don't like to show their work around here

I'm trying to update the summary. Can someone walk me through exactly how to extract the ISBN for Wasteland?

I'm thinking the xbtufmboe link is just part of the clue which lead to the omnitronu link. All the ones that seem to "count" have been telling a story of some kind.

I'm curious about The Harpy and Omnitron-U reveals. New heroes for the final expansion?

They sure are monitoring us closely!

Nowhere in particular-- it was the result of incorrect math.

However, with the updated image and clearer barcode, maybe we'll get a number that does work.

Indeed, Foote! It's making the whole rigmarole hard to follow at times.

I believe it came from the tweet Bookstore from Timcosing and the only book seen in Sentinels is on the Eternal Haka card.  

The mech golem in the bubble give numbers according to their HP.  You type the 13 digit number you get in a isbn converter and you get wasteland from t.s. elliot.  Someone pointed out that the book eternal haka is reading is a book from t.s. elliot (probably wasteland).   When you decode with the augustus coding (i.e. shift a to z, b to a, etc. ) wasteland you obtain xbtufmoboe.   

The HP of the bots in Augustus’ speech bubble, in order, are the ISBN. (Just Google the string of numbers!)

Then, the link came from using the Augustus cipher (shift one letter right) on the word “wasteland.”

Could reloading relate to the comment earlier that the first paragaph spells out reboot and ads. Has anyone tried those in the replaceme?

the hp from the bots made up an ISB for a book called The Wasteland

Barcode is as follows:

?ctlr1KupV>

so

?ctlr1KupV>

=232D2D2D

here's hoping this time it scanned correctly... lol

(I'll STILL keep trying a few more times, just in case, heh)

It looks like the Omnitron-U cover was reloaded. The morse code looking bits look different.

You obviously don't play many games with Nightmist or Gloomweaver.

'reloading' refers to the fact that they just made the barcode larger in the /omnitronu comic.  My phone still can't recognize it though.

Really?

My scanner just coughed up 53130020

ISBN 9782819931171  = Wasteland

man...

rescanned and got :

40447285

rescanned, yet again, and got:

$i6>31KupVMD

EDIT:

The one before was:

?ctlr1KupV>

which also had "1KupV" in it... strange...

I'm sure the actual result will probably be a full number though.

this really is not a good sign if the scans do end up mattering

I do but this is the only book in the game with a name on the cover that I've ever noticed.  

If so…

Count left to right 1000, up 5?

Rescanned again, sigh:

73084020

Tim, our mysterious overlord, may have to tweet when we have the right number from these scans, lol…

Edit: guess I should list the code Julia got when she scanned:

53130020

We were stalled on decoding the bot speech balloon and going down some dead-end paths, so I suspect he "checkout" and "bookstore" tweets were clues to help us realize that we needed to plug those bot HP numbers into a different tool... like the checkout counter of a bookstore, and when it matched The Wasteland (a book that already appears on card art), we knew we were back on track.

Isn't Nighmist's card with the book on it named 'Tome of [Something]'? It's been a long day.

Hey, hey, hey. Don't go using my title in vain.

;)

sigh tempted to be evil and create a code that just runs through all 9 combination of letters and numbers in the url and if it says "page not found" to just jump to the next one.

Naw I am to lazy.

Its called Tome of Elder Magic but the book itself only shows an eyeball.  That book does not have a title on the cover.  

For what it's worth, I was finally able to get my phone to scan the barcode, and I received 06430962.

maybe the barcode is all of those things at once

eventually one of these scans will be right.  I gotta post them all as I scan, though, because who knows, this may in fact be it:

?itay1Q1pV>A

Edit:

Jorcbrow scanned:

06430962

How were people seeing Morse code in the bar code?

There is a new tweet. Might wanna scan that one

Is is also bitly1QupVMD ?

Because I got that twice. But I'm pretty sure it only scanned half the code each time.

The card isn't animated, but the eyeball blinks the title in morse code.

The dots and dashes below the "=232D2D2D". They're much less pronounced on the reload.

This is a shortened URL that takes you to Wikipedia's Hexadecimal page.

Edit: bit.ly/1QupVMD -> Hexadecimal - Wikipedia

In the first upload of the image, there was some kind of morse code.  Finally,it isnt since when Tim reloaded the picture morse was not apparent anymore.

https://bitly.com/1QupVMD

goes to 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexadecimal

It's back on the newest tweet.

Tim added a better and clearer picture with the tweet : Have a gift.   those who can scan can try again on this one.

OK, the hex clue is meaningful.  232D2D2D (in hex) -> 590163245 (in decimal).  That nine digit number is not the solution.  Must be something more.

Thanks for chuckle seeing that image in my head

Oh, hurray then! I was almost going to write a strongly-worded review to the designers of my barcode app, but I take everything back in that case.

So we’ve looking for 232D2D2D in hex after all? That’s 35, 45, 45, 45.

I think we are forgetting there is an equal sign there so what does it mean

I was looking at that too, it looks like HP of villains. Possibly from the new expansion.

translated out of hex it is  #— I think

3 dashes is "O" in morse code

#O?

What about rearranging the dots and dashes under the barcode according to 590163245?

Boy, it's exhausting keeping up. I think the summary is mostly up-to-date now, except I'm not clear whether or not we got a clear reading of that bar code.

I agree with your translation.

Hash dash dash dash?

Oh man, I wish I hadn't been proctoring testing just now. I totally have a barcode scanner here in the school library!