Now that I've got some sleep and had another chance to take a look at it, I think that if it is just a substitution cipher I may be on track! I had worked on it horizontally flipped like OWI was hinting was the correct way to look at it. The last line is clearest and the letters I worked out for it make sense, it's really just the top line that I'm unsure about xP There were a few runes that could have been two different runes depending on if a line was there or not and it was hard to tell because of how scuffed up it was. Some of the runes were barely visible at all and I sort of hunted for them after I was confident about the other letters. But the fact that it's a coherent sentence
and it mentions cold and darkness (something the ASSET9X websites mentioned) gives me a lot of hope
Either way, I gave it the old college try haha
I updated the image so the runes are over where they would be in the actual picture. I figure I'll send it to OWI just to see; even if it turns out to be wrong, maybe it's still the right way to approach it, or maybe they'll have something new to say!
