Mooncursers Puzzle Solution

(Back to Mooncursers puzzle)


This puzzle consists of a small amount of flavor text and eleven numbered pictures. The star-date of the log is simply the date of the Mooncursers' Handbook Game (August 19), one year before our game "takes place," so it can be ignored. But the rest of the flavor text says that the smugglers were in a "two-star system" — the common name for a two-star system is a binary star system.

We were nice and identified all of the images for you (because we hate trying to identify images online or figure out exactly what something is supposed to represent — is this an airplane or a plane? And if no one on your team knows Hebrew, how do you tell that an aleph is an aleph?). The words all share a letter set of {P,I,E,N,H,A,L,R}. So with that out of the way, the first thing to do is to convert the label-numbers to binary. You get the following:

PIE      1000001000010
PINE     1000001010010
PEAR     1000001100001
HARP     1000010101000
ALEPH    1000011001100
PIPE     1000101000010
ALPHA    1001010001100
PEARL    1010001000101
APPLE    1100101000100
PLANARIA 1111000010111
AIRPLANE 1111001010110

Then it becomes a case of mapping letters to positions. For example, PIE and PINE have almost exactly the same set of letters and numbers, so the 16s place must be an N. And if we compare PIPE with these, we can ascertain that the 256s place is a P. Eventually, one ends up with PARAPHERNALIA.