I need other hobbies

So I spent about 1/10th of today manually encrypting a message for the D&D game I ran (That includes developing the cypher, writing the message, reworking the cypher so one of the pieces is actually useful, and then translating the final product. All of this is for something that the pcs are unlikely to even bother trying to translate. A quick warning to any of them who might read this: woking it out without knowing the algorithim is not worth the effort. I almost decided to make a bunch of nonsense into a handout, but I decided that I could go about it this way. (heh, I really like the system I came up with, though it doesn't really lend itself to automation very well as a lot of the difficulty in breaking it lies in the existance of two seperate methods of encryption, both of which are set up so that while there is no single unique way to represent a character, each codeblock represents a specific letter. This makes it much easier for someone who knows the algorithms to read the codeblocks than write them. I'll talk more about this after I run the adventure the paper is for.

As for the "but what? Cryptography in a fantasy setting?" complaints, before Newton entered the Royal Society there were books of code systems. The Chinese had an elaborate cryptography system at least centuries before the rennisance. I suspect that the romans had it, the greeks probably did, anybody with an alphabet will discover basic cryptography almost immediately. And the realms has more secret societies than you can shake a stick at. Mine is probably not the most complicated method in use on Faerun.