Hey all,

I'm trying to play up the "everyone has a different agenda, so be careful who you trust," theme in my games, and I was thinking about having my players recover a classified/secret document that's still encrypted (or at least partially so). Ideally, I'd like for them to have a chance to slowly declpher the message by gathering either pieces of the cipher key or some codewords. Does anybody have any experience/ideas about how to implement this?

One idea I have seen is a GM preparing multiple copies of the document. They prepared the encrypted original and then produced several each one at different stages of decryption, various random words changed each page between documents. They also had alternatives if the players failed to interpret various sections when words were mistranslated. Excessive maybe but the result was quite impressive I had to admit.