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assassin's creed books in games

The Ravensthorpe Library — An Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Fan Project

A mysterious book with a hidden message. Find the PDF here.

Eivor sure seems interested in books. Just how many “books of knowledge” are in this game? What real-world books might they be? And what the heck happened to them all?

The Ravensthorpe Library is a fan fiction piece encoded and hidden in a collections of texts inspired by the ridiculously deep and wide bookishness of AC: Valhalla.

Legends, history, folklore, myth — for a book nerd, this game is Valhalla indeed. It seems like every other line is a reference to something, and that’s not even counting all of Eivor’s Havamal quotes. (Spoiler warning: what better way to learn the wise sayings of Odin than to jack into the animus and hear them first hand?)

Right from the beginning, the fan base got into linguistic fun. Someone translated the runes in the teaser shortly after it came out. The Isu language was just cracked. There’s plenty for a language lover to get into in AC: Valhalla, be it ogham text, norse runes, Latin church chants, or apparently inscrutable Welsh.

The Ravenshorpe Library is a collection inspired by the world of the game. The gnostic texts Eivor finds, poetry she reads, saints whose legend she hears, mythic events she witnesses — there was plenty to choose from, and it was an absolute blast to gather.

And hidden in the text is an encrypted message, a tale of the Assassins and the fate of Eivor’s personal library (which, by the way, deserves its own building). The little volume is part puzzle book, part fan fiction, and 100% a labor of respect and love for the amount of work the team put into the text of AC: Valhalla and the faith they show in the players by leaving us breadcrumbs which lead to a better understanding of the setting. I mean, Guthlac A and B? Harek Gand? These are some deep cuts I never would have even come close to hearing of were it not for the clues left in-game.

Now, I did a similar project for AC: Revelations an age ago. Pulling together The Sartor Classics was a bit different, since the list of books was given explicitly. This one had more of a feeling of sleuthing and discovery as I scavenged dusty corners of the internet looking for the texts being referred to. I hesitate to say how much time I spent trying to figure out which translation of the Bible was used for the quotes in-game. (Note: I’m still not sure). I can only hope archive.org got some benefit from the clicks.

For Sartor, I sent a copy of the book to Ubisoft. I had no contacts, so I picked a person from the credits whose job seemed like it might be the best bet. It made its way to the narrative team and Darby McDevitt, which was great fun. That odd stunt may have been a one-time deal — with lockdowns, who knows if anyone is even in the office these days?

Either way, I’ve got some reading to do!

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assassin's creed podcastery review

Astrocetology: Why I Wrote A Space Whaling Adventure Story

It was as if I had no choice, really.

You see, I had to write about space whaling.

Moby

The Moby Dick game is brilliant. It is beautifully done, for starters, with a depth of artistic detail which makes the game a must-own for anyone who decorates their home with old papers, faded prints, scraps torn from books. You know who you are. Every single one of the cards is worthy of matting, framing, and displaying in a prominent locations around your home, library, book-store, boathouse, or secret society lair, as is the box itself.

Gorgeous, right?

All that aside, though, it’s the deft creation of a particular feeling which makes the game notable in this case. This is not a game about beating the odds, forming a briliiant strategy, or fooling your opponents, though these skills certainly come in to play. In this game, you combat the constant feelings of dread as you lower down to hunt a whale, and shore up your defenses as best you can against the inevitable face-off with the great beast himself. In the rounds I’ve played, the term “bleak” has come up several times. You’re a whaler — you’re as likely to die as not from thousand varieties of bad luck. And the captain is driving you towards a near-certain doom.

At what low value was held the whaler’s life. The player feels a detachment from the lives of the crew. They’ll all end up dead anyway, often even before facing Moby Dick himself; best not to grow too fond. And what an unusually various crew it is. Men from all over, regardless of race or creed, hauling alongside each other where on land they would not be allowed to eat at the same table.

It’s about risk and reward and risk and risk. And these elements translate very well into a space-faring adventure.

Black Flag

Where the card game is about staving off despair in a merciless  world, whaling in Black Flag is about high adventure and bare-chested virility.

I mean, come on.

Here, the feeling is excitement. You won’t die if the whale attacks you. A snapped line doesn’t whip anyone’s arm off. You want to land that harpoon throw and reap the rewards, Caribbean sun beating down on your back. It’s… a lot of fun.

Side note: I felt substantially more guilty for killing a whale than for plundering dozens of ships. Odd. 

Again, even as you glory in the thrill of the hunt, you feel as if whale oil must had value far beyond gold or jewels to be worth its pursuit.  And again, why would this not translate to the emptiness and danger of space?

Artemis

Tell me you’ve played this. A fantastic, home-grown spaceship simulation game which hooks everyone who touches it. My first experience with it was at a gaming convention, where the developer helped players through the basics and let us cruise around. And that’s when I first came across the rare space whale.

To the larboard!

 

A fun addition to the game, almost an easter egg. You don’t get anything for finding them, or indeed for shooting them down. They’re just there, making their way through the emptiness.

And they’re beautiful.

 

From the Void

With all of this percolating in my headspace, it was only natural my protagonist would find himself on the hunt, facing one of the great dangers of the nullity for a chance at a share of the valuable nano-oil which can only be found in the skull of the voidwhale.

Check it out if you want, and I’d love to hear what you think. You can subscribe here, too.

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assassin's creed

Assassin’s Creed 3 Preorder Bonuses – WHYYYY?!?!

I think we’ve established that I like Assassin’s Creed. So, what to do about the preorder situation? I want to play ALL the content. Every blessed bit of it. But different stores have different missions!

http://www.sidequesting.com/2012/09/assassins-creed-3-pre-order-exclusives-detailed/

Gamestop: The Lost Mayan Ruins

Best Buy: Ghost of War

Walmart: A Dangerous Secret.

Amazon: Capt of the Aquila, which is just cosmetic, maybe?

The Ubisoft Deluxe has it all, but is only for PC. Drat.

In Revelations, the preorder bonus brought you to a little run-jump dungeon and gave you a sword. I’m assuming these will be the same. Probably not much in the way of story.

But still.

 

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assassin's creed sartor book

Ubisoft Dares Fans to Decrypt The Sartor Classics

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assassin's creed sartor book

The Sartor Classics – A Response from Ubisoft’s Darby McDevitt

The lead writer for Assassin’s Creed sent me an email about The Sartor Classics!

Alex,

Just had a look at your incredible anthology – amazing work! We’re all quite humbled by the dedication and intelligence of fans like you, but not in the least bit surprised. AC games, for their mature and serious treatment of history, have always attracted fans with scholarly temperaments. And I think your project represents the apotheosis of this trend. Well done!

The selection of books that ultimately made it into ACR came about through a joint effort by me and a number of other people on the team. I began with a smaller list of books that I felt was necessary, then crowd-sourced from our team to find the rest. And since we had people from six of the seven continents working on ACR, it wasn’t difficult to find rare classics that a Western educated wonk like me was sure to miss.

FYI, one of the books we included, “The Flute Girl,” is quite rare indeed. The only mention of it I could find was in a book called “Istanbul: The Imperial City” by John Freely. I included it because it contains one of the earliest descriptions of Byzantium in world literature. The excerpt is small, however, so it may not be worth tracking down…

All the best!

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assassin's creed sartor book

The Sartor Classics a été reçu – a word from MTL

Part of a series of posts about the my Sartor Classics project. See all the posts here.

Hey, it looks like M. Durand of Ubisoft did indeed receive the book!

Good day Alex,

Wow, I just came back from vacations and received a very nice and strange gift! Had I ordered that? I could not remember of it, nor could I find any trace of it in my accounts. Livingston; who is this guy? Of course, searching for untold answers is my daily work and I was glad I could find an answer that easily.

Eh! Seriously, thank you so much; this is a crazy fan-made gift! I’ll definitely have a deaper look into it and let everyone on the team know about it! And congratulations on making it up to the credits. Hope you enjoyed the game.

Max

 

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assassin's creed sartor book

The Sartor Classics V — The End

This is last part of a series of posts about the my Sartor Classics project. See all the posts here.

After some Luluing, I had in my hands the final tome. All that remained was to send it to Ubisoft — but to whom? Of the hundreds of people employed by the company, who would be most likely to get a kick out of the project? Who picked these texts anyway?

 Apparently there is someone whose job is “Historian and Research”. This certainly sounds like the person I’m looking for.

After a few phone calls and an ill-timed UPS shipment around the holidays, the package arrived at Ubisoft Montreal in early January. Did it make it to Maxime Durand? Did anyone there even open it? If so, did they dig it?

My intent was to have this book arrive on someone’s desk unbidden, and with little to no explanation as to what it was, a puzzle based in the AC universe presented to those responsible for its creation in a way that would make them curious. So, it comes as no surprise that there is no word as of yet. If I do hear anything, though, I’ll be sure to let you know.

Either way, it was a fun project. It certainly stands as my most involved fan project to date, and if collecting old texts, writing codes, and formatting books is your idea of a good time, I recommend it!

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assassin's creed sartor book

The Sartor Classics IV — The Package

This is part of a series of posts about the my Sartor Classics project. See all the posts here.

I do love me a story within a story, and that’s what I tried to create here. Alberti’s bit is only part of the larger whole.

The first level is the book itself. Any AC fan will recognize the Durer portrait of Sartor on the cover, the initial indication that there’s something afoot within. A glance at the table of contents reveals the familiar list of books.

So, it’s a collection of books from the game. Sure sure. But the foreword talks about Sofia and Ezio, and gives a brief history of the library itself. Ok, so there’s something new here.

The foreword contains the words ‘Caesar’, ‘shift’ , ‘cipher’, and ‘three’, as well as having many letters underlined. In the version I sent to Ubisoft, I highlighted the words and made a margin note to key them on to the fact that there’s a puzzle here.

The hidden message in the foreword reveals that the book is distributed by the Order to new assassins, and that the main text holds encoded text in the Alberti Cipher. Level 2 of the story.

As the reader decrypts the message, a preface reveals itself. An assassin librarian in plague-year London decides to hide a story within Ezio’s and Sofia’s books before he dies. Level 3. The original books have survived, carefully preserved by the Order.

And at last Alberti’s tale, a brief biography highlighting his experience with the Assassins.

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assassin's creed sartor book

The Sartor Classics III – Hidden Messages

This is part of a series of posts about the my Sartor Classics project.  See all the posts here.

Now, the goal was to send the final product to the Ubisoft studio in Montreal and raise an eyebrow. I wanted to make them curious, to draw them in. Thus, I needed to keep things relatively transparent; while my original intent was to make finding the existence of the hidden message a challenge in and of itself, the likelihood of someone receiving the book and taking enough interest in the thing to notice any subtle clues — well, it seemed a little self-important on my part. 

Hiding a text within a text consists mainly of signifying something unusual within the base content. A slight different font, formatting — there are several methods. In the interest of clarity, I simply underlined the letters I needed.

And the trouble began.  Seems easy enough, right? Take the ciphertext, find the matching letters in the base text, and underline. Easy. Except when the ciphertext has a “q”, and the base text doesn’t have one for five pages. I found myself running out of space, and that right quick.

The best solution I could find was to just add the letters in, typos in the manuscript. The odd “z” instead of “s”. That sort of thing.  Not ideal, but functional.

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assassin's creed sartor book

The Sartor Classics II – Encryption

This is part of a series of posts about the my Sartor Classics project.  See all the posts here.

 

So, what to write about? Well, first I wanted to see what the state of encryption was in Ezio’s time. This led me to Leon Battista Alberti, who invented what we would call the secret decoder ring. And he was an architect. In Florence. In the late 1400’s. Who designed the facade of one of the buildings in the game, and is mentioned in the game’s database. And is a known humanist.

In short, this was the guy.

I penned a short story about this fellow and his connection with the Assassins. It had to be pretty short, since hiding it in the text would require some serious finagling. To encrypt the dang thing, I ended up writing an Alberti Cipher script to eat the text and spit it back out in code. Couldn’t find anything online that would do it.

So, I had a collection of texts and a secret message to hid therein. Now for the fun part.