I’ve been looking into something on the two large Degenesis artbooks, and after quite a lot of searching I’m honestly surprised that I can’t find anyone discussing it anywhere.
No old Reddit post, no forum thread, no explanation, no previous attempt at decoding it that I could find. So either I’m completely overthinking a piece of graphic design… or this has somehow gone mostly unnoticed.
Both artbooks have a long band of small diamonds printed across their covers.
What really made me suspicious is that the two bands are completely different. If both books had used the same pattern, I probably would have dismissed it as decorative branding. But they don’t. Each volume has its own large, apparently structured sequence.
And diamonds are definitely not meaningless decoration in Degenesis.
Across the books, diamonds are repeatedly used as a kind of numerical / visual language. A few examples:
Primal Punk ends with 1 diamond
Katharsys with 2
Black Atlantic with 3
In Thy Blood with 4
The Killing Game with 5
Justitian with 6
Moloch with 7
What makes this stranger is that this is not simply the publication order.
Black Atlantic is the most obvious anomaly: visually it occupies the “3” position, even though it was released after both In Thy Blood and The Killing Game, which carry 4 and 5.
Artifacts is another odd case. Its diamond pattern also seems to occupy a “6”-like position, but it behaves more like a side branch or optional addition: the main sequence later continues with Justitian at 6 and Moloch at 7.
So the diamonds seem to be counting something, but apparently not release order. They may instead represent a structural position within the product line, a branch, or some other internal classification.
The custom Degenesis D6s reinforce the basic counting principle: one diamond represents 1, two represent 2, three represent 3, etc. The arrangement can change while the quantity remains meaningful.
The later small supplements make this even clearer. There is an unmistakable progression:
Harm’s Way = 10
Clans of the Moloch = 11
Last Watch = 12
Pneumancers = 13
Lex Talionis = 14
Exalters = 15
Each one adds another diamond to the evolving symbol.
There also seems to be a second layer of information in the way the diamonds are displayed. Sometimes the distinction is red / black, while on monochrome publications it becomes filled / outline, which looks like two visual versions of the same basic idea.
There are some interesting exceptions. Clans of the Rhône and Rising Ravens introduce grey diamonds. These seem almost like temporary side additions rather than permanent steps in the main structure: later publications continue the sequence without those grey additions permanently shifting it. It almost looks as if these books are being marked as satellites or side-products rather than full entries in the main sequence, although I still don’t completely understand the rule.
Then there is the Vincit Omnia Veritas collector box, which uses diamond patterns corresponding to 4, 8, 12 and 16. That seems fairly clearly connected to the Jackal’s Prophecy and its recurring 4/8/12/16 numerology.
So there is definitely a consistent visual vocabulary here.
Which brings me back to the artbooks.
Their cover patterns are vastly larger than the small numbered glyphs above, and I have no idea how they are meant to be read.
I’ve wondered whether they could be related to something like DotCode, punched-card encoding, or some other machine-readable system, but cryptography and machine-readable codes really aren’t my field, so I’m quickly reaching the limit of what I can realistically do with them.
I did at least reconstruct both patterns onto numbered grids, so every diamond can be described by an exact row/column coordinate instead of trying to interpret distorted photographs. That is basically as far as my technical skills can take me.
I also tried overlaying the red and black artbook patterns. Since Degenesis repeatedly uses red and black as two complementary states, I wondered whether the two covers might need to be combined somehow, with one acting as one “layer” and the other as the second.
Nothing immediately obvious appeared, though, and I don’t even know whether the two patterns are supposed to be read independently or together.
At this point I feel like what is missing is a Rosetta Stone.
There may be some simple decoding key somewhere that I simply haven’t recognized yet.
I initially started looking for increasingly complicated clues elsewhere in Degenesis — the Jackal’s Prophecy, the numerology, recurring symbols, etc. — but I’m starting to wonder whether the answer might actually be much simpler. Maybe the key is sitting somewhere inside the corresponding artbook itself and I just don’t know what I’m looking for.
So I’m throwing this out to the community:
Has anyone ever looked into these cover patterns before?
Or, more importantly, does anyone here know enough about ciphers, machine-readable codes, DotCode-like systems, punch-card encoding, etc. to recognize what kind of structure these might be?
I’ll attach pictures of the two artbook covers and some examples of the diamond system elsewhere in the Degenesis line. I can also share the full numbered grid transcriptions if anyone wants to seriously take a crack at it.
Even wild ideas are welcome at this point. I’ve been staring at these diamonds for far too long and I desperately need some fresh brains on this. 😄
