It’s 8:22 and I’m watching TV and scanning Discord servers and scrolling Twitter and thinking about little black boxes with lists of words on them - when I get a notification.

New tweet from Loot Character. There will be an announcement tonight.

20 minutes later, a cryptic message in the Discord:

Rewinding a little bit

Loot Character was launched on September 9th via Tweet:

lootcharacter.com is a simple mint site.

You connect your wallet. You see an 8-bit character version of your Loot bag. You scroll down, and find a message:

Loot Character is an associative NFT, which means once you choose a guild, and mint a Loot Character NFT, that NFT is tied to your Loot bag. Wherever your Loot goes, so goes the character.

There’s a .2 ETH mint fee. ⅓ goes to your chosen guild, ⅓ goes to a gameplay treasury (where it can be found, earned, won, or stolen), and ⅓ goes to funding future game development.

The choice indeed decides your fate.

You mint your Loot character. You check OpenSea and see it in your wallet. And you see something else in your wallet. Another NFT:

“You may answer the riddle at mint’s end.”

Back to the story

35 minutes after the cryptic message, the game begins:

The note changed. The riddle was revealed.

At this point the Loot Character Discord had one channel. The guesses started coming. Fast. Wild ideas, reading-way-too-far-into-it ideas, ideas that ultimately were pretty close to right.

Then, the gamemakers opened gated guild channels. (You can only access your Loot Character guild’s channel.)

The Unknowable guild started working together. 4 minutes later, lunarmayor figured out the code - ethereum.

Then scotato and lunarmayor figured out how to input the code.

“You must connect your wallet to continue…”

lunarmayor and scotato couldn’t sign into their wallets to continue, so I went to lootcharacter.com -

I typed ethereum -

My screen turned black -

And I got a message:

lunarmayor and scotato finally got their wallets connected, and saw this message when they entered the code:

33 minutes later, grunt claimed the 4th key.

6 minutes later, scotato got another one.

3 minutes later, grunt claimed two more.

7 keys. We needed one more.

I put out a tweet.

@heyhaigh DMd me, joined the Discord, and we brought him up to speed:

heyhaigh got the last key. Unknowable guild got all 8 keys.

Round 1 was over in 2 hours 2 minutes.

Epilogue

🤯

👀

Aftermath

Since solving the first riddle together, the Unknowable guild has been busy.

We bought our own ENS.

Remember how 1/3 of the mint fee goes to each guild? That ETH, plus the 2 ETH reward is now in a shared Unknowable guild Gnosis Safe wallet.

We even have a Snapshot for decision making.

I don’t know any of these people. I don’t know real names, genders, what they look like, what they do for a living. Nothing except Discord handles, Twitter handles, and PFPs.

We share alpha:

We fire each other up:

We designed sigils in a shared Figma page:

We voted on a sigil, which will be minted as a an associative NFT that can only be claimed by members of the Unknowable guild.

Roadmap

Unknowable guild has all 8 keys from the first riddle. We have a treasury with a considerable amount of ETH in it. What are our options? What can we do? Here are some ideas:

• Continue playing the game and stacking ETH
• Buy NFTs with our ETH
• Mint and sell our own NFTs
• Buy a floor CrypToad
• Donate a percentage to charity
• Fund public goods
• Redistribute the funds to everyone and go our separate ways
• Build our own metaverse game
• There have been 197 Loot Characters minted. We could recruit the remaining 7582 Loot Bag holders to mint Unknowable Guild Characters. That would send .06 ETH per bag to our treasury, adding roughly 504 ETH to the Unknowable warchest

As I was writing this…

Loot Character revealed Riddle #2:

Did you see the leaderboard in that tweet? Did you notice number 8? It says Eight’s Riddle, not Unknowable. Turns out @heyhaigh is in both guilds.

Roadmap (Revised)

• Win Riddle #2