The Deciphering Tablet

A giant Rosetta-Stone engraving on the back wall of the Hollow House treasure vault — the combined, unfinished work of the four immortal scholars (Halren and the others) translating the lost language of the Elder race. It is accompanied by a vase of 10–20 smaller work-tablets (one smashed by intruders long ago). Recovered/claimed by the party in Session 42.

It comes as a multi-year puzzle: each in-character year a character spends studying it yields one clue, and the GM warns it is unsolvable in its current form without that investment (he solved a 3-clue version himself in "4–5 hours"). Fully solved, it would let the party read and speak the ancient Elder tongue — and so translate the warning text that guards the Prison of Seven Cells (and likely other Elder-race relics).

Session 42

• Found on the back wall of the boss-chamber vault, behind the door whose key was hidden in Halren's ribcage.
• Established as a slow-burn investigation reward: a long-term key to the ancient language and the pre-Fall lore threads (tied to the immortality research and the Elder race).

Session 44

• First progress. Jex spends two downtime weeks studying it as the "Puzzle of the Ancients," logging 20 of 365 days of progress (an above-average effort with his "modern problem-solving" eyes) — a reminder of just how long the full translation will take.

Session 53 — the party is carrying the thing they said they needed

• The scene, in full. Discussing why a first-level Comprehend Languages can't touch the Foredweller glyphs, the table lands on the historical answer: "They found a tablet with the translations, and that's how they broke the cipher." — "Rosetta Stone, was it?" — "So that's what we need to find for the ancient language." Nobody mentions that the party already has one, claimed in Session 42 and part-studied by Jex.
• And there is now a professional to hand it to. Minimika, chief translator of The Foredweller Research Facility, has spent a year on ten thousand unreadable Foredweller books and has confirmed exactly one word. She takes Silithane's charcoal rune-rubbings gratefully enough to keep them and mark Ankley Island on her map for a future visit, and she leaves him a contact rune for Sending. She is, on the evidence, the single best-placed person in the world to be shown this tablet — and she has not been.
• What she'd add to it. Her one structural finding is not on the tablet at all: in Foredweller writing, how deep a glyph is engraved encodes its magnitude. A shallow pair of symbols means cupboard; the same pair cut deep means prison. Any transcription of the ancient script that records only shape and not depth — including charcoal rubbings, and possibly the tablet's own copied work-slates — is losing half the meaning.

Session 55 — solvable

• Handed to the professional at last. Fenric had been carrying it for no reason anyone could remember ("I think I just have it because I happened to pick it up first"); Magra took it onto her sheet, corrected its recorded name from cube to tablet, and found its provenance logged as Candleman Cave. Then she and Silithane walked it to Minimika.
• What it physically is. A folding, hinged tablet that twists and reorients like a 9×9 Rubik's Cube — each face a 9×9 grid of options that can be turned, slid and set. Sturdier than anyone had dared assume: Minimika span and flicked it like a speedcuber for a couple of minutes before anyone told her it was an artifact, which quietly gave the party permission to handle it hard. "Listen, we can just fucking spin this thing, it doesn't break."
• Two more numbers. Lifting it in four higher-level Mage Hands (one to a corner — Silithane clocked the multicast immediately), Minimika rolled two 18s and placed two digits in the corners, one at each end of the sequence. Combined with the 3 in the centre the party already had, the GM ruled the puzzle has crossed the line from insolvable to solvable: "with those 3 numbers it's gone from an insolvable to a solvable puzzle. If you have enough oomph to you, you could do it now — but it's fucking hard." More clues remain purchasable with study days.
• Her method, and its limit. She works like a librarian: she knows where a couple of things go at either end of the shelf, and hasn't cracked how to alphabetise a language she can't read. What she brought to it was two decades of special interest in the Foredweller script, worth roughly two years' worth of clues to Magra and Fenric in their downtime.
• A copy left behind. She asked to spend ten minutes writing down every option on every face so she could build herself a clay replica — non-spinning, erasable — and keep working on it after the party leaves. Granted, on Magra's reasoning that only the original matters and a solved copy helps them either way. She may send further clues by Sending, having already exchanged the anti-spam rune with Silithane.
• The books on the study clock. Reconstructed at the table: 20 days were formally recorded, plus scattered untracked downtime, and the GM split the difference at 30 days on the item's quantity field. The exchange rate is one clue per cumulative in-character year — 365 days spread across seven people.
• Not solved by machine. Offered the modern shortcut in jest, Magra put it on the record: "I promise you I will not be using AI for this. And I am going to try to solve it."