In the Girl Genius Secret Blueprints for Volume One (now out-of-print, but soon to be available at drivethrucomics.com) we used the lovely blank space on the inside front & back covers to include a cutout decoder wheel for puzzles and promotions in the books and at conventions. We haven't done much with it since we went online back in 2005, but it would be nice to change that. So now, we've made a high-resolution PDF for you to download. You can make your own!
Note: there is only so much fun that we here at Studio Foglio can stand. Coded messages arriving at the Studio Foglio offices will be delegated to the only employees with time to decode them. And the cats are dreadfully slow at answering messages. Thank you!
Make Your Own Decoder Wheel!
Click here to download the rather large (50.08 MB) PDF
If craft projects aren't your speed, may we present:
The Beautiful Online Decoder!
Created and kindly donated by Paul Schaper, who knows more about making this sort of thing work properly than we ever will.
(Actually, there used to be many online versions of the code wheel. I'll have to take a look and see if any are still out there.)
Because eight of the symbols on the decoder are not on a computer keyboard, we have adopted a character substitution for the eight characters illustrated in the table below. So just type the encoded message into the encoded text box and click the decode button, or encode your own message by typeing it into the decoded text box and clicking the encode button.
= * Blue (inner) ring
= @ Red (outer) ring
= ^ New target ring
= % Spin counter-clockwise
= # Yellow (middle) ring
= $ New code ring
= + Spin clockwise
= & Ignore/resume
A Note on the Translation of the Alchemicals to ASCII symbols:
When I made the code wheel, I didn't really do it with keyboards in mind, and I used a bunch of Alchemical symbols as commands within the code. Below we have listed the accepted standardized ASCII translations that we have been using for Web based encrypting.
= * Blue (inner) ring= @ Red (outer) ring= ^ New target ring= % Spin counter-clockwise
= # Yellow (middle) ring= $ New code ring= + Spin clockwise= & Ignore/resume
Please note that the "0" with the slash through it that you will see in our printed magazines is a zero, used to distinguish it from the letter "O". Also be advised that when a character not on the decoder wheel appears in a coded message, it merely represents itself. The code wheel contains only the letters of the English alphabet, numbers from zero to nine and the eight command symbols, so all punctuation follows the above rule. That is, a question mark in a coded message represents a question mark, etcetera.