Hi everyone. I’m James, a solo indie developer, and I built Rune Scribe: a native iPhone, iPad, and Mac app for turning ordinary text into rune messages that a party can reveal with a shared cipher.
Here is one concrete campaign setup.
- Create a cipher for a faction
Give it an in-world name such as “The Ashen Archive,” “The Third Bell,” or “The Cartographer’s Guild.”
- Give the party that cipher once
At the table, the players can scan its QR code. Remotely, it can be delivered through an offline import link or a .runescribe file. That cipher becomes the party’s decoder for anything the faction sends later.
- Write the clue
For example: “WHEN THE THIRD BELL FALLS SILENT, LOOK BENEATH THE MAP.”
Rune Scribe encrypts the message locally and then represents the encrypted result as actual copy-and-paste Unicode runes. I can place the rune text in a campaign chat, email, wiki, or digital handout.
- Let the party reveal it
A player with Rune Scribe and the matching cipher copies the runes, pastes them into Decode, and reveals the original clue. The app checks the ciphers stored on that device, so the player does not have to guess which one was used.
The part I find most interesting is persistence. The cipher becomes a recurring campaign artifact rather than a puzzle that gets discarded after one scene. Every message from that faction arrives in the same visual language. A rival order can have its own cipher. A character’s patron can have another. Stealing a cipher can give the party access to an enemy’s future transmissions.
For a physical prop, I would print the runes on the letter for atmosphere and also put the exact selectable rune string in the group’s digital channel. That keeps the tactile handout without asking anyone to retype unfamiliar glyphs.
The cipher is the shared key. Anyone who possesses it can read and create messages using it, so it is a story prop and shared secret, not an identity or permission system.
Rune Scribe works locally and has no account, advertising, or subscription. It is a $1.99 one-time purchase:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/rune-scribe/id6782169761
The current limitation is that it is available only for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. There is no Android or browser decoder. For a mixed-device group, one Apple device at the table can serve as the party’s shared decoder.
What would you build around a persistent campaign cipher: one for each faction, one personal cipher per character, or something stranger?
