21. Portrait of Plunder (Part 2)

Portrait of Plunder was a little frustrating at first, but we were rewarded for our patience with some incredible art, like this one!

It took almost a week, but we finally solved Portrait of Plunder and were able to progress to the final round on Thursday. At time of writing, we are stumped again, now on the final round, but I will save that for next weekend's blog.

Do you remember how we found pigpen in the cards that spelled out some random parrot words, like frost and robot? As I wrote last week, we typed these out at bit.ly addresses, but it only turned up empty OneDrive folders. We imagined Rare had set these up to head off trolls or something. Actually, we were on the right track! They were the names of Twitter accounts set up by H.

There were four Twitter accounts. Each one had the beautiful portrait of pirates playing Blackjack, as seen in the photo above. Each of these portraits looked identical at first, but actually each one had different Roman numerals etched into the bottom right of the card table, spelling out XVII (17).

The profile pictures of these four accounts were also quite peculiar. They had hidden messages in them that led us to a mysterious website: youareapiratepuppet.com. This website was a single page displaying nine facedown cards:

What were these cards? How would we flip them over? Note the tally marks on the left, counting out six (6).

Things were getting more and more exciting. We remembered that the faces of nine cards were also visible in the blackjack painting. One genius immediately figured out what to do: For the 8 of diamonds, they took the eighth letter from the word "diamonds." That's S. They did this for all nine cards and got this word: HEARTLESS.

We typed in a new URL: youareapiratepuppet.com/heartless. It worked! At this new URL we were presented with a gorgeous, hand-drawn map of the Sea of Thieves.

Portrait of Plunder was frustrating at first, because we were stuck on the same page for days. But once we progressed, it quickly transformed into a fast-paced and exciting little adventure with stunning art around every corner! Note the number 17 on the right of the map!

Unfortunately, this is where Jimi's role in Portrait of Plunder came to an end. It was time for sleep and then a busy day of work. While I was away, my crew managed to figure out the solution of the puzzle. It was quite exciting!

There was a riddle that accompanied the map. It turned out that capitalized words in the riddle were anagrams of places on the map, like Sanctuary Outpost. By gathering the coordinates, you can get this code: B07R1SSGJ5. That turns out to be the Amazon book code for one of the Sea of Thieves Origins comic books, The Price of Gold. This comic tells the story of Humphrey the Hoarder.

Do you remember the three numbers we found hidden throughout the mystery?Using the XVII from the blackjack table painting, the tally marks carved into the table on youareapiratepuppet.com, and the 17 on the right side of the hand-drawn map, my crew cleverly checked the 17th word in the 6th square on the 17th page of the comic. It was GRUDGE.

The answer to the puzzle could be found at youareapiratepuppet.com/grudge

It was 3GDURG. Whew! What an adventure!

As always, this code opened an in-game voyage for us to enjoy. The first voyage took place in the Shores of Plenty, and the second in the Ancient Isles. Predictably, this voyage was based in the Wilds. It was very similar to the earlier voyages, though I found it slightly less enjoyable. (I enjoy the Wilds less than the two previous regions.) However, when I turned in the key and opened the chest, I burst out laughing. THERE WAS ANOTHER CHEST INSIDE THE CHEST.

This was one of the funniest moments I've seen in Sea of Thieves. I am excited to see what is inside the final chest!