Tree of Providence

Solutions to the secrets hidden on http://darkscorestories.com. There are seven hidden videos to find. Answers are after the jump.

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Brief walk-through to catch people up on the events surrounding the disappearance of Oliver Drew at the StoryWorld Conference 2011.

• Oliver Drew, an Occult Transmedia producer, arrives in San Francisco for the StoryWorld Conference.
  • His website http://zoetrap.com gives a brief biography and lists several inventions having to do with the paranormal.
  • His twitter name is @_zoetrap. Included among his tweets are a couple of seances that he has performed.
• In the early morning of October 31st, Oliver decided to hold yet another seance, this time using his zoetrope. It did not go well. Communication from Oliver is abruptly cut off.
• Come daybreak, it has become clear that Oliver is missing. His girlfriend @eva_lake asks people to check in on his at his room in the Parc 55 Hotel.
  • Visitors to Room 2413 would have found a chaotic crime scene, complete with a message written backwards in blood on the mirror. The zoetrope is found on a table surrounded by tarot cards.
  • They also find a QR code on Oliver’s pillow that unlocks a Phone Security message that gives you a hint as to how to unlock the hexed folder. The answer to the clue “How many Tarot cards in the major arcana?” is 22 – or XXII if you use Roman numerals like those on many Tarot card decks.
• The Paranormal Press has also heard about Oliver’s disappearance and wrote an article about it. Included in the article is a QR code that leads to an iTunes app that connects your phone with Oliver’s.
• Oliver’s phone contains a number of different things you can interact with.
  • Mail: Lots of different emails from a variety of people. Sadly, there is not an online archive of the email texts that I know about. Biggest item of note is the fact that Oliver was researching an Arthur Warburton Lytton who was an inmate in Alcatraz who was known simply by the name “Prisoner L” (based upon the cellblock where he was held). Along with his inquiries at Alcatraz, Oliver was also going to talk to a Marianne Lytton Miller, the great-granddauther of Arthur.
  • Phone: Takes you to all the voice mails that Oliver’s phone has received (which are archived at Audioboo). Several are from Eva wondering where Oli is. One is from a PC Dave Watts wanting to talk to Oliver about an incident involving Marianne Lytton Miller on August 12, 2011. There are also several paranormal calls that come through during your use of the phone that get saved to voicemail.
  • Docs: Protected by a 3 word phrase. The phrase needs to be successfully entered in order to break the hex on Oliver’s phone.
  • Calendar: Calendar of events leading up to and through the StoryWorld Conference.
  • Twitter: List of tweets with the #swc11 hashtag.
  • Scanner: QR Code scanner
• While StoryWorld participants visited Oliver’s room all day to look for clues, Oliver’s phone updated a number of times with new emails, voice mails and clues.
  • Prisoner L emails a video of himself obsessing over the zoetrope.
  • A paranormal call comes in from The Fool. He seems to be begging for his life and asking Lytton to spare him.
  • A paranormal call comes in from The Lover. She talks about her husband (presumably Lytton) and how he was charming in public but cruel in private. She showed him an immortality spell that he became obsessed with.
  • Another email from Prisoner L. Talks about how close he is to completing his great work and that he just needs a few more souls.
  • A email from an unexplained contact comes in with a video showing Oliver sitting near a spinning zoetrope with Prisoner L’s voice in the background goading him on.
• A black envelope starts circulating around SWC11. Inside is a couple of cards. One is of The Hanged Man Tarot card with a strange letter I in the corner. On the back is a QR code unlocks a Map that points to Union Square in San Francisco.
• At the location marked on the map, players found a sign with a bit.ly address that took them to an audio recording of a fight between Oliver and Eva. Eva mentions how Oliver has been shouting a strange word (Capti) in his sleep.
• New evidence is found in one of the elevators at SWC11. Scanning the code unlocks a phone call from Oliver who sounds as if he was trapped inside the elevator.
• Around the same time as the elevator evidence was being discovered, a new unknown paranormal email came. It’s a video of Oliver begging to be let out. He tells us that we need to remember the word that Eva said he shouted in his sleep. That word is “Capti”.
• During the evening of November 2nd, @LEldritch starts tweeting about how one of his cards from his Lytton Tarot deck has gone missing. It was The Hanged Man card and it had been last used in a Tarot reading for Oliver. Looking through his other cards, he discovers that some of them have unexplained writing on them. He then tweets a picture of the recreated Tarot reading as well as how to read a Celtic Cross pattern. Reading the letters in the order given by the pattern, you get:

  1. The Chariot A
  2. The Magician N
  3. The Tower A
  4. The Devil M
  5. The Hanged Man I
  6. Judgement S

  ANAMIS isn’t a known word, but anagramming leads to ANIMAS or MANIAS as possible words.

• Putting together the three main clues that we’ve been given, it is now possible (after trying several different combinations of words) to unlock the hexed documents folder:
  

  I: How many Tarot cards in the major arcana? XXII
  II: What is the word that Oliver said in his sleep? Capti
  III: What is the word spelled out by Oliver’s Tarot reading? Animas

  Inputting “XXII Capti Animas” into password prompts unlocks a Psychic Pass that tells of a jury of peers that will decide the fate of Oliver Drew. Soon afterwards, zoetrap.com updates with information on the Night of the Dead.

  FIND OUT WHAT’S HAPPENED TO OLIVER DREW AND DECIDE HIS FATE
  VENUE: CELLAR BAR, SAN FRANCISCO, 685 SUTTER STREET
  TIME: 7.30PM

  Happily, the website promises that what happens at the bar will be repeated online so those at home will be able to see what happens.

• Two new phone calls are received on November 2nd:
  • The first is from Marianne Lytton Miller. She talks about how her family was cursed by the zoetrope. She also tells how she was murdered by a man who wanted the zoetrope.
  • The second is Oliver pleading for help. It sounds like (and the attached photo seems to confirm) that he’s slowly being hung to death. He begs us to find him before he dies because then HE will come after us. [I actually never got this phone call so not sure if it was unlocked with a QR code or not.]
  • Both of these calls help to make sense of a tweet from Eva talking about Oliver’s seance activities. It seems several words came up: ‘Help me, hanged’ ‘Trapped Damned’ ‘Cursed Miller’ ‘Murders’ and 12 August 2011. [I'm willing to bet that Marianne was murdered on 12 August. But the question is: Who killed her? Oliver? An immortal Arthur Lytton? An insane Oliver possessed by Arthur Lytton?]
• Players at StoryWorld started finding pamphlets written by @LEldritch talking about Haunted San Francisco. On the back is another QR code that unlocks a new call from Marianne Lytton Miller. She says that we have a choice to make and that we shouldn’t make the wrong decision. She tell us to enter the three word code to find out what we’re needed for.
• I don’t have exact details as to what happened at the Cellar Bar, but around 8:30 PDT, zoetrap.com updated with a new video from Marianne. [I never got this video so I'm unsure if it was just released to the web or was supposed to be received by Oliver's phone.] She tells us we must decide the fate of Oliver. But there’s a catch – Oliver is the man that murdered her to get Prisoner L’s zoetrope.
  • Prisoner L, Arthur Warburton Lytton, was trying to kill 22 people and capture their souls according to the cards in the Major Arcana. He had killed 21 before he was captured and eventually died. When Oliver took the zoetrope, Prisoner L started coming after him since Oliver was the last soul – The Hanged Man. So now Oliver has become trapped in the zoetrope. Marianne tells us it is our choice to either leave Oliver trapped within the zoetrope (a place of pure pain and anguish) or to show him the mercy he did not show her and free him.
• The players in San Francisco voted to condemn Oliver. [I voted to free him because I wasn't completely convinced that he wasn't being controlled by Prisoner L/the zoetrope when he killed Marianne. I also wasn't convinced that giving Prisoner L his 22nd soul was a good idea. But I was overruled.]
  • After he was condemned, a new video from Oliver appeared on the website. [This video never appeared on my app also so no idea if it was supposed to or not.] It seems the players in San Francisco made the correct choice because Oliver is completely unrepentant about killing Marianne. She wasn’t using the zoetrope to its full potential and he was going to change that. Oliver shouts that he’s coming for our souls next, but Prisoner L starts spinning the zoetrope and Oliver screams for mercy. The video ends with Prisoner L reciting something in Latin – and @_zoetrap’s Twitter starts repeating that same phrase.
• And that’s where things end. Marianne is avenged, Oliver is condemned, and Prisoner L gathers his 22nd victim. Eva decides it’s all too much and heads back home. [I wonder if PC Dave Watts will question her about Oliver's whereabouts when she gets home.] No idea where the zoetrope is – but I’m hoping that it doesn’t fall into the hands of LEldtritch. I’m not sure he would be the best person to have it.

By the way, if you enjoyed the game and want special swag from the game (or even just to help financially support an indie game), there is still a little bit of time left on the Zoetrap IndieGoGo fundraising campaign. Who wouldn’t want a freaky tarot card or postcard from a homicidal spirit?

I’ve been trying to follow the Facebook ARG The Inside Experience. It hasn’t been easy because, well, it’s on Facebook and it doesn’t really lend itself to the type of campaign that is being run. But I’ve been sticking it out. I’ve written several pages for a guide to the game, and while I was trying to update it today, I was emailing game addresses to get an auto-reply to go onto the next step to the game (since I like to verify things for myself before publishing).

As it turns out, I apparently missed the window for these auto-responses. Despite being found less than 24 hours ago by players, 2 of the 3 reported no longer work. I’ve tried with two different email addresses and have gotten nothing. As a player who has been following this game for several days, but is yet not tied to the computer 24/7, I find it very odd that the PMs would take away one of the main avenues to advance further in the game with no real explanation. And this is the second time that an auto-response necessary for advancement has been removed. At least the first time the next step was given out directly by the main character, but so far a quick glance at the current main page of the game has nothing about it. Yes, there are other groups talking about it – but not everyone is playing with a group (or even wants to attempt to join a closed group).

So, being the type of out-spoken person that I am about these things, I sent off an email to idecidewhatthefuturebrings@yahoo.com and yourfriendsaremyfriends@gmail.com expressing my displeasure. Since I have no idea if those accounts are being monitored at all, I’m posting my email publicly so that I can point it to them over Facebook and Twitter. This is not the only problem that I’ve encountered with the game, but I think it’s one of the biggest since I believe it completely impacts outlying players of the game.

to: idecidewhatthefuturebrings@yahoo.com, yourfriendsaremyfriends@gmail.com
date: Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 9:19 PM
subject: Seriously.. if you are going to have an auto-reply…

to send out clues in – THEY SHOULD WORK FOR OVER 24 HOURS!

Otherwise, what’s the point in having them? Is it just to give the people who stay up all night something special to talk about with people who have to go to work in the morning? It’s bad enough trying to follow what’s going on through all the crap being thrown around on Facebook – but to not allow others to get a chance to get caught up on their own without wallowing through that pile of shit is ridiculous. I somewhat accepted the utterly crappy way you handed AcornWallpaper and that wild goose chase you sent us on (did you ask for permission to use those thumbnails or did you just steal them from DesignYourWall.com?) I can understand sort of how you could mistype McArthur for MacArthur (but still it’s sloppy. No beta testers on your team?) But you know, 3 times is not the charm for you. It’s no longer just simple mistakes. It’s becoming a pattern utter disdain for the people actually trying to follow this. And I’m here to tell that it’s not okay. It’s really not. It reflects badly on you as a PM team. It reflects badly on Intel and Toshiba. It reflects badly on the entire game. Stop leaving your players out of the dark for no good reason.

Over this past weekend, I was witness to one of the most spectacular ARG launch fails I have seen in the 7 years I’ve been playing ARGs. It was truly beyond anything I had ever seen and I doubt if anything will come close to it in the future. It not only turned me off from playing the ARG once it actually did launch, but it also made me question the abilities of team behind the game. The saddest part is that most of the public perception problems with the launch could have been easily addressed with a little transparency from the Puppetmaster team. I hope that future Puppetmasters will learn from this incident and not repeat the same awful mistakes.

Read the rest of “How Not to Launch an ARG” »

So a couple of weeks ago, I started seeing a bunch of tweets talking about a new ARG that was going to be launched after the premiere of Savage County on MTV2. It was being called Help Us Escape and was written by Nina Bargiel (@slackmistress). As I had heard good things about her work on Valmont, I decided to look into Help Us Escape.

When I first started looking at Help Us Escape (HUE), there wasn’t anything to do as the Savage County movie hadn’t aired yet. So instead I did some Google searches on Savage County to see if I could learn anything about it. That is led me to SavageCountyGazette.com and how I found out about the Where Is Dorothy Kramer? campaign.

Where Is Dorothy Kramer? (WIDK) was the prequel to Savage County and focused on the disappearance and search for Dorothy Kramer, a high school student in Savage County. I was quite impressed that the story for WIDK went back over a month. This made me quite excited about playing HUE, because I figured if what I thought was the pre-game was over a month long, the ARG proper would be long and expansive.

With this in mind, I figured an ARG with so much potential material might require a guide, so I started writing up the WIDK storyline while waiting for the HUE game to start. It had been a while since I had done any guide writing so I was a little out of practice. That meant that it was taking me longer than normal to get stuff written down, but I didn’t feel rushed since I thought there would be a long timeline ahead of me. I think it took about a week, writing a couple of hours a day, to get about 90% of the guide to both WIDK and HUE written. I had noticed that there were very few updates for WIDK on weekends, so I had planned to finish the guide over the weekend and get the whole thing posted by the time new updates came in on Monday.

Then Help Us Escape ended. Well, crap.

Read the rest of “Thoughts on Savage County” »