*
The further you go along this passage, the more you can sense great Evil ahead, so you think you must be nearing your goal. You come to a cave where, though there is nothing to be seen, the aura is so oppressive that you cannot move. It is like an impenetrable, suffocating blanket, but it writhes with an evil force, and nightmarish images form in your mind. You feel your POWER draining away as you struggle to break through, and then your lifeless body drops to the ground.
Apparently a Game Over section....but one with an asterisk, and there's really no reason not to at least try going to the dream world to see if we at least survive there, so I don't think this needs a vote:
As soon as you begin to feel your POWER draining, you flip to the dream world and find yourself confronted by Morpheus, Ishtra's lieutenant. He is a gross, bloated creature, the source of all nightmares for the races of Titan. His body has no definite form, but seethes with the stuff of nightmares - foul creatures, great and small. He will send several nightmare creatures against you, to soften you up, before attacking you himself. You will have to fight, one after the other, a Harpy (POWER 10), a Clawbeast (POWER 12), and a Wraith (POWER 14). The Harpy is a winged demon that slashes at you with its talons; the Clawbeast swings its four arms at you, trying to rip your dream world body with huge hooked claws; the Wraith simply tries to drain your POWER by its terrible presence. Conduct each battle as normal for dream combat, by rolling two dice: if you roll 2-7, the monster has reduced your POWER score by 2 points; if you roll 8-2, you have reduced its POWER score by 2 points. At the end of each fight, restore your POWER to 1 less than what it was before the fight begin. If you lose all three battles, you are unable to remain in the dream world, and you flip back to 73, with no chance to return here. Otherwise, turn to 364.
Having to flip back to 73 essentially means Game Over, but at least we only need to win 1 of the 3 battles to survive, so its not too bad. Given that we have more than 2x the amount of POWER as our first opponent, the Harpy, hopefully we'd be able to win that one as long as the dice don't fail us too badly.
COMBAT LOG:
Dice roll = 10. Harpy is at 8.
Dice roll = 8. Harpy is at 6.
Dice roll = 9. Harpy is at 4.
Dice roll = 6. DVS is at 20.
Dice roll = 5. DVS is at 18.
Dice roll = 3. DVS is at 16.
Dice roll = 3. DVS is at 14.
Dice roll = 9. Harpy is at 2.
Dice roll = 10. Harpy is defeated.
Even our "weakest" opponent nearly reduced our POWER by half, but we prevail.
Technically, we should have to resolve the next 2 fights as well.....but I don't see the point, since our POWER score will be restored to 1 point below the starting score after the fight no matter who won. We just had to make sure we win at least one battle in order to move on to 364, so I'm just going to skip the pointless dice-rolling and just deduct 3 POWER points from DVS (1 for each fight) before moving on to confront Morpheus with a score of 19:
Now, instead of facing separate monsters, you must fight Morpheus himself, the conglomerate of nightmare monsters, who is trying to absorb you. Since Morpheus is no mere illusion, but a creature of the dream world, then you can be killed in this dream battle. Conduct the battle as if it were normal combat, but substitute POWER for STAMINA.
MORPHEUS SKILL 8 POWER 20
Will you stop fighting Morpheus when his POWER reaches 2 or 1, if you get that far, or will you finish him off?
Yeah, look at that low SKILL, the master of the nightmares world is actually less of a threat than pretty much all the nightmares it sent at us because this combat is resolved by SKILL instead of via the random dice rolls that are always at a fixed odds which are 40/60 biased against us. Like I said before, the dream combats in this book really haven't bee well-implemented....
COMBAT LOG:
Morpheus 14, DVS 16. Morpheus is at 18.
Morpheus 12, DVS 19. Morpheus is at 16.
Morpheus 17, DVS 24. Morpheus is at 14.
Morpheus 17, DVS 17. Tie.
Morpheus 15, DVS 17. Morpheus is at 12.
Morpheus 15, DVS 21. Morpheus is at 10.
Morpheus 11, DVS 15. Morpheus is at 8.
Morpheus 16, DVS 17. Morpheus is at 6.
Morpheus 13, DVS 19. Morpheus is at 4.
Morpheus 16, DVS 19. Morpheus is at 2.
And it didn't manage to hit us even once!
Do we want to kill it?