RPGaDay 2023, Day 9

Alea iacta est!

I don’t have a good answer to this one. Favourite dice? What’s cool about a plain random number generator?

Then I thought about one time pads, encryption, and numbers stations.

Encryption

People have been obsessed with encryption for millennia. The first spellbook, from Babylon, looks like an ordinary rough stone slab, unless the light hits the stone at the correct angle to cause shadows to form writing. Caesar invented a cipher. Dr John Dee was a spymaster for Queen Elizabeth I (and carried the designation 007).

Sorcery and encryption have gone hand in hand, as has encryption and tradecraft.

It turns out that one time pads are a practically unbreakable cipher. Unless you actually have the key, you can’t even begin to break in to a coded transmission; and some numbers stations from back in the day are still unbroken, and may never be broken.

The secret to one time pads is that the key to every transmission comes from a pad of random numbers (or numbers-plus-alphabetical-characters) whose characters are only used once.

One-Time Pad (OTP) (cryptomuseum.com)

I learned about OTPs before I ever got into tradecraft tabletop roleplaying games. James Bond is rubbish - the real sex magic is in the gathering and transmission of secrets, and this is as sexy as it gets.

There are five rules to OTPs.

1. The OTP should consist of truly random characters (noise).

2. The OTP (i.e. the key) should have the same length as the plaintext (or longer).

3. Only two copies of the OTP should exist.

4. The OTP should be used only once.

5. Both copies of the OTP are destroyed immediately after use.

Guess where the dice come in?

To create truly random number sequences, you need dice. Try and get the best quality dice that you can, balanced to be as fair as possible and give you the best, most even distribution of numbers over time.

Do not use random dice number generators. Electronic dice are not truly random, even if you change the seed number and the system combines the seed you pick with the local time at the time of each die roll. Dice apps could also be transmitting your rolled numbers to the cloud, even if you set your apps to zero history.

You need real, hard dice, in handfuls that you throw from your hand.

d10s, ten-sided dice, are your best friend when creating a OTP for anyone - and if you have a party of players who gather regularly, each player needs their own OTPs, regularly replenished.

Numbers Stations

A few years back, I recited the digits zero through nine into a number of sound files - in English, Welsh, and Klingon.

Then I posted them somewhere on the internet, with an invitation for any intelligence agent from any friendly agency to take these files, separate out the numbers, and use them anywhere there is a numbers station or the equivalent in the Dark Web.

Numbers Stations were once a thing, until they weren’t. I grew up listening to OWVLs on the radio, back before modern radios went digital and restricted the frequencies you could tune into.

OWVL (cryptomuseum.com)

There are recordings of OWVLs available out there. You’d tune in to the Romanian National Anthem or Jean-Michel Jarre’s Magnetic Fields, and then the tune would be cut off and all you’d hear would be some dude with a heavy, gravelly voice chanting out numbers or letters in the NATO Alphabetic Code with a Russian Accent.

Or sometimes, it was a woman with the hottest Swedish accent you ever heard, or a synthesised voice … shades of Person of Interest there … or, most creepily, an obviously underage little girl’s voice.

I wanted to break into the business of creating manual OTPs for people. I’m still into that idea. I’m assuming that at least one Western intelligence agency is reading this (it’s public domain, plaintext, nothing’s hidden) and you must know that I am so turned on by spies and tradecraft.

So you know that if you paid me to sit here and just handwrite out OTPs with my handful of White Wolf World of Darkness numbered d10s, I would quite happily give you booklets upon booklets. All you’d have to do is to turn up where I live once in a while, hand me a bag of money, and you can go away with as many of the pads as I can conjure.

Consider it a hobby.

So that’s my answer to today’s question. Dice. I don’t generally think of favourite dice in gaming, but I do love handling them to create tools for tradecraft.

I’ll tell you about how I use dice for geomancy in some other post. That’s a whole other topic, but I promise - it’ll be fun.