Great Spycraft/Alias Campaign Inspiration

[Chaldfont]

The Voynich Manuscript: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich

I heard about this on a documentary and it just stuck in my head. Then, I saw the first three seasons of Alias on DVD. My friend who loaned them to me is dying to play an Alias-type Spycraft game and I immediately thought this would be a great inspiration. Maybe someone else can get some mileage out of this awesome Macguffin.

Is the Manuscript a hoax? If not, what mystical things are encoded within? What organizations might be interested in the manuscript? Maybe there are several code keys required to decipher it. Maybe there is a secret brotherhood charged with protecting its secrets.

 

[Ranger REG]

Any chance there is a copy of the actual document in PDF?

It would also be a sweet bonus if there are researcher's notes I can download in PDF also.

 

[Chaldfont]

I did a short search for one, but couldn't find it. I thought it would be sweet to print pages off and give them to the players.

It might, though, be even more fun to doctor up some of your own pages and have the players decode it with some long-forgotten code key/Cardan grille arrangement.

You could have SO much fun with this. I immediately thought that it would be cool to have the manuscript detail an elixir which awakens psi powers in the mind. That would be a fun way to introduce Spycraft psionics. Maybe some organization has already discovered a partial mixture that grants psionics but also has dire side effects (like madness). You could link that to the nefarious MKULTRA project (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mk_ultra) where the CIA secretly dosed people with hallucinogenic drugs.

Can you tell that I love Wikipedia?

 

[Chaldfont]

Hehe, I just reread the article. I forgot that the VM has been linked with the Necronomicon.

Too cool!

 

[C. Baize]

The Voynich Manuscript: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich

I heard about this on a documentary and it just stuck in my head. Then, I saw the first three seasons of Alias on DVD. My friend who loaned them to me is dying to play an Alias-type Spycraft game and I immediately thought this would be a great inspiration. Maybe someone else can get some mileage out of this awesome Macguffin.

Is the Manuscript a hoax? If not, what mystical things are encoded within? What organizations might be interested in the manuscript? Maybe there are several code keys required to decipher it. Maybe there is a secret brotherhood charged with protecting its secrets.

In our shadowchasers type D20 Modern game, my wife had pages of the manuscript spontaneously appear on the printers of some of the characters on some random morning... They're great pages to use.