Blog Carnival: Code Talking

This month’s Blog Carnival prompt is language, which means it may as well be pandering directly to me. I still ended up wasting the entire month hemming and hawing over what to do - dreaming up conlang plans because why not add more to my already enormous backlog - but thankfully I finally realized that I could just do the sensible thing and write about something I have actually used in an actual game.

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Back in the Delta Green campaign I ran last fall, one of the sessions included a puzzle that used the Navajo code talker cipher as its central component. It went like this:

The players found a scrap of paper with some code words scribbled on it by a dead agent, a SIGINT check identified it as pulled from the code talker lexicon, and I provided the translations as if they had the booklet with them. When converted into English and then converted out of the alphabetic cipher, the string of end result was

S-L-P-Y-T-M-N-N APRIL

which after a couple minutes of puzzling out, they decoded as pointing them towards the Sleepy Time Inn on the other side of town, Room 4. Key in hand and the next breadcrumb in sight, the players went off to the next stage of the investigation. I had several players comment after the session that they really enjoyed the puzzle and felt it was just the right amount of complexity and difficulty.

That is practically the holy grail of rpgs. Naturally, I’ve been cooking up how to use it in the future.

The first and most obvious improvement is to just print it out and hand it to the players (minus the vintage racism and with better formatting) when they open up Clyde Baughman’s footlocker (or other similar green box) and just let them hold onto it as a resource for whenever coded phrases show up later in the game. This is basically the same principle as the Field Guide to Hot Springs Island, though much more compact.

Second step is to make more complex messages - a basic alphabetic one works well as an introduction, but the code was a lot bigger than that and by virtue of it being a military code the wordlist covers most most player-character actions right from go - tracking enemy movements, describing field conditions, commands to attack and retrieve and secure and so on. Beyond that it can be easily modified or used in novel ways: months for numbers, using the alphabet cipher for code names (ex: if I wanted to describe a ghoul I would probably use CHINDI LACHAEH, which would translate literally here as DEVIL DOG but also as the letter sequence DD) , mixing the alphabet cipher with other words (ex: the term used for “when” would be rendered in English as “weasel hen”), and so on.

The major caveat here is that using the code as-is really only works for games that take place in our-world-but-different - something where you can take advantage of its existence as a historical artifact. Finding it in a green box can open up an entire implied plot of marines coming back from the Pacific Theater having seen some things they shouldn’t have and continuing to use the code in secret, passing around booklets during the Cowboy Years as a quick and dirty way of securing messages - all that would be lost in a world not our own. In those cases I’d still say that it’s a great model to use with a word generator and a bit of elbow grease - that approach can be easily tweaked to the setting in question, and you can indulge your conlang compulsions without having to do anything with grammar or bogging down players without having to learn the words for utensils or whatever.

(It should go without saying that while the code uses Navajo, the booklet was not meant to teach anything about the language or how it works  - any pronunciation you’re going to attempt will bear only minimal resemblance to how it actually sounds and there won't be anything of Navajo's beautifully complex grammar.)

I don’t have a particularly good conclusion for this post - out of practice, I suppose - so I’ll wrap up by saying that this was one of the highlights of that campaign (I really should share my notes, shouldn’t I?), especially for something that took very little effort on my end. Goes to show you that a bit of verisimilitude in the right place can go a long way.