Tombs of Amascut
It’s finally here! Old School’s third raid, Tombs of Amascut has launched, and what a launch it was. We’ve seen incredible triumphs and some truly ‘F’ inducing defeats. It’s been great watching you enjoy such a highly-anticipated chunk of content, especially since we tried a few new things: mechanics, accessibility options, and a more narrative-driven raiding experience.
This week’s update has already brought a slew of feedback changes, but we’re not stopping there! The team will continue to discuss your feedback over the coming weeks, making any changes we feel are necessary.
We’re also still deciding how you lot are going to earn the Ornament Kits for Ava’s Assembler, Elidinis’ Ward, the Max Cape and Osmumten’s Fang, something we hope to share in early September. Not long to go now!
As for the World Firsts, we’re happy to announce that both winning teams have been verified by our Anti-Cheating Team, so a massive congratulations to the following players:
World First – Tombs of Amascut Normal Mode
- 54n Kappa
- Animeme
- HardeSnikkel
- Kanao
- OBLV Poenari
- OBLV YUMMI
- Rovint
World First – Tombs of Amascut Expert Mode
- OBLV Jraze
All the winners will automatically receive 12 months of Membership, which we’ll confirm via your Player Inbox.
For those of you who tagged a friend when the trailer for Tombs dropped a few weeks ago, don’t think we forgot about you! We’ll also be selecting one pair per platform to also receive 12 months of Membership, so keep an eye on your associated inboxes for a message from either the Official Old School pages or Mod Sarnie.
Lastly, our most recent livestream focused on the countdown to ToA. If you missed it, you can catch up with the video below:
The Activity Adviser is live, in-game, and currently being tested by a lucky handful of players to see what kind of impact it has.
The testing phase is nearly over now, so depending on the results, it could go live any time in the next few weeks! We’ll have more information in September, so keep an eye out for further details soon.
Leadership Livestream
We recently had another Leadership Livestream, featuring Mods Markos, Kieren and Ayiza. They discussed lots of different topics ranging from the future of the game, account security and even the current Old School Team. If you missed it, you can catch up via the video below.
We plan to have more consistent Leadership Livestreams happen throughout the year so that you can hear about the bigger, top-level updates as well as our content and feature pieces.
Wilderness Boss Rework
It’s HAPPENING! Those of you who have read our Design Blog will already know that the long-awaited Wilderness Boss Rework is finally coming to the game.
For those who missed it, here’s the TL;DR: Callisto, Venenatis and Vet’ion are being reworked to deliver a proper multi-combat group boss experience, with exciting mechanics, the ability to keep topped up between kills in case of PvP, and epic rewards that make fighting these big ol’ beasties a risk worth taking.
Each of the three bosses now has their own lair within a big scary cave, filled with winding passages where you can chase – or escape from – your fellow players.
If multi-combat isn’t your thing, alternative, single-way versions of the bosses will also be made available – but they’re not completely risk free! Prepare for potential attacks with switches, freezes, and plenty of supplies on hand, at the cost of reduced drop rates and GP per hour.
We plan to deliver this update later this year, and we’ll update you on our progress through September. For now though, here’s a little teaser for you all:
True to form, Quest Speedrunning is coming up fast! The team have been working to ensure that the launch has just enough content for everyone to dip their toes into the exciting world of speedrunning, while leaving room to grow and add new quests over the five months after launch.
Mod Light recently released a blog explain everything you need to know about this thrilling new mode, which you can catch up on here!
Updated Mobile UI & New Client Features
The Mobile UI Blog has been updated to address your feedback.
As we mentioned in the blog, this is a key project because it means we’ll be able to deliver even more client features to your mobile device. We’re ready to proceed with the work and we estimate that it’ll be ready just in time for another new client feature – the highly anticipated Loot Tools!
2022 and Beyond
Last Gazette, we teased that we are at a critical stage of determining the direction for the rest of the year and onward into 2023. This is nearly complete, the final decisions are being made and we are super excited about what we already have agreed to work on. Whilst we could say more about some content, we want to ensure we are confident in delivering our commited projects before we reveal all.
We’ve also got another Game Jam coming up in November, so you can look forward to more ideas coming from that. Please stay tuned for more updates regarding the rest of the year in the near future.
Hey there, ‘scapers! Hope all’s going well and your grinds are plentiful! For those of you who aren’t aware, one of my favourite things (apart from a nice sarnie of course) is puzzles. Whether solving or creating them, I just love a good, cryptic brainteaser.
Recently, we put together a series of puzzles for Tombs of Amascut to give you all a glimpse at some of the Invocations you can now see for yourself in the raid. You know, those really weird tweets you saw a couple of weeks ago?
We thought it might be neat to explain each of the puzzles for those of you who missed the opportunity to solve them before the raid. After all, there are sure to be plenty more treasure hunts to come!
The most important thing to me is that teasers like these require players to work for them in some capacity – it’s way more fun to discover something yourself than have it handed to you. That said, the biggest thing for my first set of puzzles, back in Leagues III’s Relic Hunt, was accessibility. We needed the main areas of discovery and exploration to be something that everyone could access, and they had to be safe, too. The last thing I or the company would want is to have people accidentally start downloading random files from shady websites!
So that’s why we hit upon the idea of newsposts as a way of delivering these puzzles – they’re accessible to everyone, and familiar to Old School players.
The first round of puzzles was a fun experiment, something we’d never really tried before. I was surprised by how many people got involved! It was an extremely joyous feeling, seeing the theories and methods being thrown around to solve the original set… even if some steps were a bit cheesy…
All our learnings from the Relic Hunt went into creating these puzzles and making them extra challenging… and extra fun!
So, that brings us to the Invocation puzzles. Before we dive in, it’s important to note that a lot of the puzzles involve common encoding or decoding techniques. Again, that’s something anyone can learn, or solve using the help of code-solving websites and Wikipedia.
Puzzle #1 – W҉h҉a҉t҉ ҉d҉o҉e҉s҉ ҉i҉t҉ ҉m҉e҉a҉n҉.҉.҉.҉ –
I’ll admit, this first puzzle had a small mistake on it. Nothing that affected the solution, but it would’ve made it a lot cleaner!
If you’re unfamiliar, the above image is Morse Code. Decoding it should reveal the Latin for Beneath Cursed Sands, but the ‘Sands’ part decodes to English! My bad.
So, if you head to the Beneath Cursed Sands launch post, you’ll see a few random letters sprinkled throughout with links leading to pages like:
- https://osrs.game/XIX
- https://osrs.game/XVI
- https://osrs.game/XVIII
Players familiar with our socials know that this is our official shortened link (osrs.game), but clicking the links takes you to the Old School homepage, because officially those URLs don’t exist. What now then?
Well, each URL contains a roman numeral. Take the numerical value of each (for example XIX = 19) in the order the links appear in the post and you’ll get the sequence: 1916189142061518920. Plug that into the shortened URL, and you’ll be whisked away to… Monkey Madness II?
Again, nothing looks out of the ordinary, but take a closer look and you’ll notice all the ‘ba’ particles in the newspost have been bolded and capitalised, and clicking one of them will take you to the Everything You Need to Know newspost. I wonder which monkey with ‘Ba’ in her name also appears in this blog?
Click the image of Ba-Ba, and you’ll get your first Invocation reveal.
You’ll notice that newsposts and shortened URLs are a common theme in these puzzles. That’s something we wanted to get people familiar with straight away.
Puzzle #2 – f̷̵̫̞̉͢i̵͓͙̱͚̎͟n̷̶̯͉̊̽̐ͦ͘d̸̡̩͍̔ͥ͜y̯̤͑́́̓́ȍ̸̢̢̮͚̐̚û̶͙̽̿͆̈r̶̷̲͍̭͐̾̀͟ẅ̷̷̢̟͇͈̒ă̶̸̝ͦ͊̿͋͞y̯̤͑́́̓́t̴͕͖͓̀h̶̯̰̝̻̿̓͢r̶̷̲͍̭͐̾̀͟ȍ̸̢̢̮͚̐̚û̶͙̽̿͆̈g̴̶̛̮̣͙͠h̶̯̰̝̻̿̓͢t̴͕͖͓̀h̶̯̰̝̻̿̓͢ę̷̵̧̖̫̗̆̊m̶̷ͪ̽͡ă̶̸̝ͦ͊̿͋͞z͕͓̼̼̽̃͘ę̷̵̧̖̫̗̆̊t̼͈̮̯͚̘̤̄̄͠y͇̪̫̗̤͚̒͟w̸͉͉̬̎͂ơ̹̥̎͛͗d̹̜̼̝̝ͯ͟ –
A maze with no real middle, and a Trout… what could this mean? The trick is that neither of these eye-catching elements will help you initially, but something else will.
Hidden on top of the maze, in the white space, is a barely-visible message reading ‘9th Birthday’. Drawing on your previous puzzling experience, you’ll know right away that this message is telling you to go check out the 9th Birthday newspost, where you’ll find another Trout.
Click that fish and you’ll find your first puzzle piece:
Off to find more Trouts, then! Looking through desert newsposts, including Tombs of Amascut ones, nets you seven more. Click ‘em, put the puzzle pieces together, and you’ll be left with an image that reads ‘OVERLY DRAINING’, with two holes.
Overlay this image with the maze from the original post and you’ll highlight parts of the maze that give you two five-number sequences: 25343 and 52445.
Now, remember what I said about code solving? A handy tip for solving any puzzle or ARG (Augmented Reality Game) is to check common ciphers like Shift Ciphers and Binary against the mysterious numbers you’ve got. In this case, the cipher we’re looking for is called Vigenere.
The Vigenere method uses a key to convert a string of characters into something else. Find the key and the associated text, and you can translate it to find the answer to your puzzle. In this case, though, I didn’t want you to decode something… I wanted you to encode it. Use a Vigenere cipher with 0123456789 and the key to the numbers we found (2534352445) and you can convert OVERLYDRAINING to FP7KDS5K4CECF0, the URL where you’ll find the Invocation reveal!
Puzzle #3 – 01110010 01100101 01101101 01101111 01110110 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01101111 01100011 01110100 01101111 01110100 01101000 01101111 01110010 01110000 01100101 00100000 –
This puzzle was tweeted with three grape emojis. We’ll put those aside for now, because it’s BINARY TIME!
The image text translates to:
Some more text, ‘remove the octothorp’ gives you your next steps. Head back to the Beneath Cursed Sands newspost, and you’ll see a new image appear:
The 2×3 sections of dots reference Braille, but translating it gives you two strings of characters that make no sense… and they’ll continue to make no sense, because this is a red herring.
If you instead look at the middle six dots, you’ll see they spell out ‘DEHYDRATION’ – the name of your next Invocation!
But that’s not all. The dots that spell out each letter of ‘DEHYDRATION’ actually have a numerical code which references each dot’s position:
Use that as a base and spell out each letter with the number sequence, and you’ll have a third URL, and a third Invocation under your belt.
Puzzle #4 – ꁲꋪꏹꂖꁏꌈꌚꌈꇃꇃꏹꏹꂡꀤꋊꁍ? –
There’s nothing hidden in the post text of this puzzle – instead, the numbers in the Curry are key. They’re actually the total poll votes and results of the Warding Poll from July 2019.
Head to the post, and you’ll be greeted with a 3-4 digit code – such as 818. That tells you the month (August) and the year (2018) of your next stop on the newspost trail! Follow it, and you’ll ultimately wind up at Halloween 2017.
Now put all those numbers together (you did save them, right?) including the month and year of the Warding newspost, and you’ll get a code which translates to: ‘I AM THE BEGINNING OF THE END’.
That’s my way of telling you to look at the beginning of each newspost. Like, right at the beginning. Like, the first letter.
Put together, those letters spell ‘WALKTHEPATH’, which is your final URL for this puzzle.
Puzzle #5 – ᔕᗝᒪᒪIᑕI丅ᗩ丅ᑌᑎᗪIɊᑌᗴ –
Those of you who’ve taken on Old School’s most hardcore challenge will instantly understand the first step of this puzzle. Rearrange the 3×3 squares to get the Hardcore Ironman symbol, and then head to the Hardcore Ironman newspost.
Clicking the header of that newspost will take you to your next clue, a string of letters. If you look closely, you’ll see that the letters of the alphabet go in sequence with the 1st, 2nd and 3rd characters in the sequence – barring one U, which was supposed to be a V. Sorry folks!
Use a shift cipher on the position of each group of three letters (for example, SVO = 1, TWP = 2) spells out ‘Run’.
Enter Hardcore+Run as the URL, and you’ll get… another puzzle! What, you think we’d make it easy?
On this page, you’ll see coloured dots. Connect the matching ones and it spells out ‘MMCMXCIX’. In Roman numerals, that’s 3999. Add it to an URL, and you’ve got the second-to-last Invocation.
Puzzle #6 – Where is it? –
Second-to-last? Yes, there was a cheeky hidden Invocation which I thought we’d let you all find on your own. Remember the grapes from the third puzzle? Well, if you hadn’t noticed, the last five puzzles all had some kind of food item involved.
- Puzzle #1 – Cake in the Background of the post
- Puzzle #2 – Trout that help you find the pieces
- Puzzle #3 – Grape Emojis in the post.
- Puzzle #4 – Curry with the numbers in.
- Puzzle #5 – A Lizardkicker hidden in the bottom right.
Put them in order of their appearance and you’ll get one final puzzle! Using methods you should, by now, be familiar with, and the numerical code for AMASCUT, you’ll find the final Invocation.
Wasn’t that a wild ride? Hopefully, you now have some insight into the wonderful world of puzzle solving, and the creative process that goes into creating each one. We do thoroughly enjoy setting these puzzles, and we don’t intend to stop any time soon… so keep an eye out!
If you enjoyed this, I highly recommend the Runestone Hunters Discord, a place for like-minded ‘scapers who love a good puzzle or two. Since the Leagues III Runestones first appeared, I’ve watched it slowly grow from a handful of intrigued puzzle enthusiasts to a collective of fantastic individuals ready to help people with both puzzles and Old School in general. They’ve even got their own clan now!
I’ve learned a lot from them myself, and that’s definitely going to help with future puzzle events. We just want to say a massive thank you to everyone who participated, as it genuinely makes us smile watching you all solve our puzzles!
One final note. The Medal winners weren’t the only ones to receive a strange, coded message recently… I can’t say what was left at the office, but we have our instructions and I don’t want to think what might happen if we don’t follow them. The only thing I’m allowed to say is that it won’t all be for nothing.
Thanks so much for reading, and have a wonderful rest of your day!
Mods Arcane, Archie, Argo, Ash, Ayiza, Boko, Brow, Bruno, Curse, Daizong, Ditto, Dylan, Ed, Elena, Errol, Fed, Gecko, Goblin, Grub, Halo, Havik, Hornet, Husky, Jalo, John C, Kandosii, Kieren, Kirby, Kurotou, Lenny, Light, Lottie, Mack, Matheus, Maylea, Markos, Meat, Moogle, Morty, Nin, Nylu, Regent, Redfield, Roq, Ry, Sarnie, Sigma, Skylark, Soffan, Sova, Squid, Steve W, Tide, Torrance, Veda, Vegard, West & Wolfy
The Old School Team