The voice of government. Well, one government anyway. Via a Cheyenne Government communication dispatched to web site UGO.com, players were invited to tune into a specific radio frequency (via Tom’s Black Hills Radio Control) to hear government messages.

These messages chronicled all forms of aid, support and infrastructure repair with respect to restoration “west of the blue line”. To get the scoop on all the dispatches from Radio Cheyenne, hit up the unFiction forums.

Jennings & Rall. It’s a name that’s been floating around the Jericho community since it appeared on the board at the Blackjack Fairgrounds. How big a role will J&R play in Jericho’s second season? You’ll find out soon enough.

The site was discovered when members of the Jericho community received J&R press releases in their email in-boxes. Were they really from the company? It’s hard to tell.

Reply emails solicited a further response from Tom Tooman that linked our “Nuts” with the unFiction community that was becoming increasingly familiar with Tom’s antics. 

Before long, everybody was meeting and greeting on unFiction, discussing the details of the Jennings & Rall web site. Is this real? When will the Ravenwood section unlock?

Some of these questions have since been answered…dig into the forums and see what if this company means well, or if their involvement means more trouble for everyone in the western United States, from Tom Tooman to Jake Green and beyond…

Black Hills Radio Control has provided players with a steady stream of chatter, clues and web site directives, but probably none as substantial as the Sacred Hat Casino. Like the Blackjack Fairgrounds, the Sacred Hat Casino plays a much different role for nearby denizens than it did prior to the attacks.

Formerly a popular tourist destination managed by Tom’s father, the casino’s now a central depot for re-established health, education, trading and communications systems. From a game play and Jericho fan perspective, the site offers a chance to dig deep into the online lives of a post-attack Cheyenne community and get a sense of how the destruction‘s fallout permeates every aspect of daily life.

Because Tom designed the site, it’s loaded with games, secrets and encoded methods of communication. For example, decoding the Mayan glyphs on the teepee uncovers a message: “it will happen.” Adding this to the URL unlocks a secret game, a post-attack riff on blackjack, called “23”, with cards designed from Mayan glyphs. Mastering this game (we don’t want to give away how!) leads to a second Sacred Hat game, focused on Divination. For more on the site and these two games, check out the player thread in the Unfiction forums! In the next entry, we’ll visit some corporate friends of ours…

Developing an ARG is tricky business. Some elements of the experience are clue dissemination tools like Black Hills Radio, but sometimes it’s nice to put some faces to the clicks, beeps and whizzes. Surreptitiously, the radio transmitted a signal that lead players to a blog maintained by a young Kansas newspaper writer, Danny. By reading the entries, players can get a sense of how a town—not entirely unlike Jericho struggled to survive in the wake of the attacks.

The adventure with Poe’s raven helped our players unlocked a new destination: Black Hills Radio Control. Here, Tooman had embedded several Morse Code clues. The first, a fragment of Civil War by Roman lyrical poet Lucan was decoded and posted on Unfiction. Lucan was writing during Nero’s reign (so be suspicious if any Jericho residents break out a fiddle in Season 2). Tom’s other codes helped players to solve a larger puzzle, and unlocked a major clue dissemination that players have been using for months now: the radio towers.

At this newly unlocked site players tuned into Tom’s personal radio tower network to scan frequencies and pick up signals across the Midwest. Signals were discovered from the military, from cities that had been hit in the attacks and from characters in the ARG (like Ryan Archer). It’s taken some truly amazing teamwork by the Nuts posting on Unfiction to crack all these codes! Read more about how they did it in the Black Hills Radio Control thread.

Tom’s mysterious satellite images ultimately brought players to a new site, AreYouABorder.com, which showcases an 1890 Magic Lantern  (a precursor to film and television) rendering of Poe’s “The Raven” created by Joseph Boggs Beale, an artist from 1890.  Why has Tooman chosen Poe?  Poe, like Tom, was a cryptographer. This puzzle continues Tooman’s pattern of splicing and embedding communications with his own messages. Hidden within the site experience, players found a form field (for a secret password) and had a run-in with an animated raven. To see how they tackled these obstacles check out this thread in the unfiction forum.

One intrepid player circumvented Tom’s plan and solved the puzzle before finding all of Tom’s clues. This unlocked another new site, AreYouABorderNevermore.com, now known in the player community as Black Hills Radio Control. This site has been integral in helping players decrypt communications from all over the post-attack Midwest, including messages from adversarial forces that may have Jericho in their sights. 

If you read the last post, you probably checked out the Unfiction forums and discovered how the stickers provided access to Ajkin.net.  The specific relevance of the term Ajkin will be kept a secret, but there has been plenty of speculation in the forums that is pretty illuminating. When players broke the code, they discovered a site with static Mayan glyphs. Overtime, this site became more functional, operating as a calendar through which players could use to predict events and new content in the game’s storyline. These glyphs were just another gateway, though, leading to satellite imagery that mysteriously morphed over several weeks. These images included scars, added by Tom, representing the known locations of the explosions. These transmissions were Tom’s (Tooman, natch) way of leading the player-base forward, while providing his personal commentary on the state of the post-bomb Midwest, as well as the history of his people. The towns of Jericho and New Bern, as well as the Blackjack Fairground, are just a small representation of the communities that survived the attacks and how these survivors are adapting to the new world…and its government(s). Eventually, Tom used these satellite images to communicate a new URL: AreYouABorder.com via Morse code.  Here, players discovered another trick of Tom’s…clips from an old Magic Lantern of Poe’s The Raven. And that will be the topic of the next post.

So the first thing that began this was a sticker. A rather mindblowing but deceptively simple looking thing.  We gave away (not us actually) quite a few at ComiCon in July of ’ 07, then the people that make the game mailed them to a few people, some of whom have acknowledged the receipt, others have not. This is of course part of the story, then the slow burn of the game began. Like a strange unchecked fire, the story arched through a rather unique board called Unfiction, where stories like this are explored, poked, debated. These players/interpreters began exploring everything to do with the sticker they could find. They tested it in scanners (it didn’t read) they added numbers, they tested the possibility it was a real UPC product, but then, eureka, the realized the numbers in the stickers read as an IP address and voila, a doorway opened. Now even cooler, the barcode was actually a code, a form of morse, that taught the user the password. And bang, they were in. The star pattern is cool as well, though no one has figured out what that means. Yet. 

How do you like our new toy? Like all of you we are new comers to the idea of the ARG (Alternate Reality Game), so if you know the what the how the where, then this will seem a little silly, but if you’re like us, we like this mysterious new medium. Let’s start at what it is: the ARG is a medium that breaks up parts of a story into pieces, fragments that the user reassembles. Sometimes there are puzzles, sometimes its like connecting dots, other times it goes beyond these two definitions. Though there is obviously a story, the way the story unfolds is an unusual mystery, here on this short blog, I thought we could give you guys some insight, maybe a hint or two, what might be lurking at your fingertips, access to a kind of Jericho underground, where an amazing story is waiting to be found. The ARG is led by a mysterious Native American named Tom Tooman, who, like our friends in Jericho, has woken up to a changed America and decides to take action. His path crosses with characters you will be meeting in the series and perhaps he might make an appearance himself, some things should remain secret. And, besides, it all leads up to our premiere. Sit tight, don’t relax, get ready for the ARG to take you deeper inside world that we began two falls back.