Ah I had 2 wrong. I wasn't sure on 20 so I just put reality in, reality room sounds legit.

I realize now that the reason I struggled with 12 was because when I copied it down I'd copied the * at the end of the word channel instead of the start. So I'd convinced myself that the answer was five. Johnny Five from short circuit, Channel Five, the UK home of Neighbours and Big Brother, and uh. Five opening. :D

Was fun though. Thanks.

As one more piece of trivia no one probably cares about but me, one interesting thing about the cipher is that, if you knew nothing else other than what the (x) code meant, to brute force the hex your odds would be improved from

1 in 3.3 x 10^23

all the way down to

1 in 1.4 x 10^17 just by dint of knowing which positions held a letter vs. a number.

If you could solve just half of the lines you could knock that down to about 1 in 3 x 10^8. Piece of cake, right?

Congrats all who got it and thanks for solving.

I'll add a special mention to grimwerk who's the only person as far as I'm aware who solved this before the third clue getting all 20 answers by himself.

Initially I wanted the puzzle to contain only the 3 words, but when I saw I could make some of them into sentences I decided to go for it. It made it a bit more complicated, especially since for example words like "will" appeared as a verb in the sentence, but were to be used as a noun with the keyword. To make up for the extra complication, I made sure the first clue mentioned that the extra words can be ignored.

I also made sure that as far as possible, the keyword would mean something different for each of the 3 words, and/or be related to a different field. So for example:

airport
seaport
spaceport

would be just too boring. A much better choice would be:

airport
Portland
port wine

And I might mention, that my last puzzle was solved within 3 hours. It's not related, but I might well link to it in case anyone want to give it a try...
http://www.gog.com/forum/general/esoteric_challenge_giveaway