Fallout 4's Puzzling Cryptogram

A lot of people have been busy exploring the world of Fallout 4, working their way through the main quest or building up impressive settlements. However, I recommend setting a little time aside to try out one of the games you can play on your Pip-Boy:

Grognak and the Ruby Ruins!

You can find the holotape for this game in the basement of the Memory Den in Goodneighbor. It's a mini classic turn-based RPG, and it's really fun. Simple gameplay systems and short, only takes an hour or two, but nostalgic and worth playing through.

You can choose to take two companions along with Grognak, out of a choice of four, each with their own special ability. Much of the game is fighting through enemy strongholds to earn permanent stat boosts to give out to your party members, while gradually pursuing your quest of reaching the Ruby Ruins to kill your nemesis, Grelok.

If you'd like a quick tip - Grognak is your best damage dealer, and I strongly recommend giving him all of the damage buffs, which really add up in the late game!

But the main reason I'm posting about this isn't to praise the game...it's to talk about this weird cryptogram you encounter later in the quest.

See, you can't reach the Ruby Ruins easily, a strange force pushes you back and turns you around when you get near them. You need to retrieve several artifacts and take them to a wizard, who will cast a spell that reveals a ghost in the area who's been preventing passage. When the wizard casts this spell, he says this:

GHISS IF NOJHS, JHISS IF KRUAUK, O CIMMAUNK SHUU SI SHIW WIERSULF SI SHU LOZONJ WIRLK, SI LU AUNCHIRUK SI SHU LOJHS ON SPHOROS AUNK ON FRUSK.

This is recognizable as a cryptogram, a letter-replacement puzzle where you need to figure out which letter is a stand in for another to spell out the real sentence. For example,

GXO TIAPD SZUQW YUH NICLK UFOZ GXO BEVJ RUM
THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG

Grognak doesn't give you any starting clues, as far as I could tell. However, sometimes you can make a few assumptions about these puzzles based on which letters are used and where. Sometimes all the vowels remain vowels, just different ones. And sure enough, there's an "O" by itself, which has to be "I" or "A." There are also multiple instances of "SHU," which as two consonants followed by a vowel, is most likely "THE." There's also a "SHUU" which would then become "THEE," which isn't unlikely to see in a medieval game setting.

However, this leads to an odd situation...the H in "SHU" is already an H. Could it be that some letters don't need to be replaced, and are already correct?

Also, if S = T, then we have a few words near the start of the sentence that end in "TT," which is really strange.

I've already filled in O = I above, and taking a look at some of the shorter words, it's likely that "SI" is "TO" and "LU" is "BE." The phrasing makes sense, "I thee to..." and later phrases like "to the" and "to be." And if we go with the earlier conclusion that some letters are already correct and don't need to be changed, "IF" looks like it's probably "OF," and "ON" is probably "IN."

There are also a few words ending in "_HT," which is most likely going to be "GHT," in words like night and light, and in fact some of the substitutions made above result in "NIGHT." It also gives us an "ING," which is promising.

There's still some bizarre stuff going on that really doesn't make sense. What kind of words are "GHOTT" and "BIGHT?" But other parts of the sentence appear to make perfect sense...

But look at the second line. "I THEE TO TO THE " You can almost read that as english as it is. It's very close to "I COMMAND THEE TO SHOW YOURSELF TO THE..." What if we just throw most of those letters in there and see what happens?

Wow, that practically solves it. Sort of. It looks like "AU" together simply equals "A" by itself, and similarly "PH" is just "P." It also appears that sometimes letters have been used both as themselves and as letters to be replaced. So "GHISS" is "GHOST," with the first S already in place and the second replaced by T, and "JHISS" is also "GHOST," but with J replaced by G. The last word is tricky, but I think I can figure it out...the full sentence is likely:

GHOST OF NIGHT, GHOST OF DREAD, I COMMAND THEE TO SHOW YOURSELF TO THE LIVING WORLD, TO BE ANCHORED TO THE LIGHT IN SPIRIT AND IN FLESH.

Which totally fits in context of the spell the wizard is casting at the time.

Well, I was hoping it'd be something a bit more silly like a message from the developers, but still fun to work through! I hope you enjoyed this look at a puzzle-within-a-game-within-a-game.

The site I used to work through the cryptogram was http://scottbryce.com/cryptograms/