The Rosetta Stone

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 10:00:00 +1200

In the last post, I introduced Elphabese, the cipher used in the Wicked hub. The cipher only works if players can actually learn the script. The first puzzle in each of the hubs is meant to be simple and relatively-quick. I’ve seen other escape rooms place one or two posters around the room with a sort of key, letter to glyph. I wanted something that felt more natural and in-universe.

The real Rosetta Stone solved a version of this problem. The same decree, inscribed in three scripts: hieroglyphs, Demotic, and Ancient Greek. Scholars already fluent in Greek held the key. By comparing the scripts, they worked out the hieroglyphic mappings. Same content, different scripts, one meaning.

I’m aiming for something similar here. Elphaba’s grimmerie is the centrepiece of this hub (more on that later). Players will find it sitting on a desk. The Rosetta stone for this cipher is excepts from the grimmerie, four torn-out pages causally lying on the desk. Each page will contain a short spell, written in the cypher glyphs as well as in a sort of pseudo-Latin.

One decision worth explaining: the second line is pseudo-Latin, not English. There are a couple of reasons for this. The first has to with pronunciation. I wanted spells to be used to progress from one puzzle to the next, I’ll be using electronic speech recognition to make this happen. For this to work, the decoded spells need to crafted to have only a few, predictable pronunciations. That meant using made-up words.

If we’re going to use made-up words, they should fee like they come from another language. Latin seems to be used a lot for this in the fantasy genre, and I can see why. They aren’t real words (even in Latin), but they feel magical. Because the transitional spells will use pseudo-Latin, it makes sense that the Rosetta Stone device should too.

The grimmerie pages also include an English “translation”. I’m putting these on the bottom of the page to make it clear that this is not the text to be matched with the glyphs. Eventually I’d like to use real (or real-looking) handwriting for the English part, but my handwriting isn’t good enough for that.

The glyph alphabet has one more layer to it: each glyph has a name, and each name starts with the letter it represents. The Flame maps to F. The Arrow maps to A. Players who notice this can confirm their mappings quickly, even without the bilingual sheets in front of them.

Four of these spell sheets can be found on the desk. Each covers a different spread of letters, teaching different parts of the alphabet. The first is Flamma et Lux — Fire and Light.

This exposes fourteen unique glyphs. That’s more than half the alphabet, but doesn’t quite cut it. It’ll have to be combined with the other pages to fully decode the first puzzle.

Elphaba's Study — Elphabese

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 19:39:00 +1200

One of the early design decisions for this project was that each of the four hubs should feel genuinely different. Not just in theme, but in how you think. Every group of players should be using completely different mental muscles — so that when the groups reunite at the end, nobody has accidentally given the game away.

That means giving each hub its own puzzle type. One group will be breaking a code. Another will be hunting for something hidden. A third will be sorting and ordering. And the fourth will be piecing together a sequence. The goal is for each hub to last 30 - 45 minutes, but to feel like completely different experiences.

Wicked gets the cipher.

The Setting

We’ll be using my office, with the entire group in the same room. So, we’ll split the room into quadrants, one for each vault or hub.

The first vault is Elphaba’s study: a dim, layered space that feels like it belongs to someone brilliant, unconventional, and not particularly interested in visitors. Strange books, stranger notes, a desk that clearly sees more use at 2am than at noon. The atmosphere should feel slightly unsettling — the good kind of unsettling, where you’re not sure if you’re trespassing or being invited.

Scattered through the props and materials in the room is a writing system that doesn’t belong to any language the players have seen before. It looks a bit astrological.

The Puzzle Mechanic

The core challenge is code-breaking. Players encounter a custom script — one I’ve been designing specifically for this build — and have to decode a hidden message using only what’s available in the room. No knowledge of the musical is needed. No prior experience with cryptography required. Everything they need is there.

The script is built around a consistent visual logic. Each character is constructed to look like a constellation. This is a working draft, I intend to refine it to make the dots resemble stars a bit more. The symbols aren’t just arbitrary, there’s a pattern to it. The idea is that they could just match the symbols up, or they might discover the pattern, which would speed up the decoding. Here’s a sample of the first iteration:

The puzzle escalates as players work through it. The early steps are accessible — designed to get both players actively engaged (remember we’re splitting the group up, with two to three players per hub). By the end, they should feel like they’ve genuinely cracked something.

What Players Experience

Two or three players arrive at Elphaba’s study. They find the script almost immediately, but can’t read it. They find something else — also in the study — that helps them begin to decode it. The challenge is connecting those two things, and applying what they’ve worked out.

The physical experience is important here. This isn’t a puzzle you solve on a screen. The materials are in the room, handled, referred back to. There’s something satisfying about holding a piece of paper with an encoded message and slowly working out what it says.

When they crack it, the TV fires a short clip — Elphaba’s vault unlocks, the scene vaults release their grip on the curse, and the players carry their artefact (a small green vial) to the finale table.

What Comes Next

The Elphabese alphabet is designed and complete (though I’ll continue to refine it). The overall puzzle structure is clear in my head. I also know how I want to present the code and the decoding hints. I’m hoping to share the general idea here without revealing the exact details (which would contain the solution).