Rereading the thread, noticed this:
The Shamutanti Hills wrote:Away from the bustle of the festival of youth you are able to get a good night's sleep.
That's the expensive Crystal Waterfall village. I assume the 5 gp bed rest isn't actually all that restful. Nice detail.
me, in book 1 wrote:...From a purely roleplaying standpoint, it would be pretty cool if it were possible to sic Jann on the Archmage of Mampang, but I strongly doubt the books support this.
Is Jann's AMF ever helpful?
Starmaker wrote:Darth Rabbitt wrote:When there are blind choices, go right.
angelfromanotherpin wrote:Of the four possible roads, only one is left unexplored and the rest have led to hideous deathtraps. This 'going right' thing has not worked out.
Oh the irony. I glanced through the book and there *is* actually a hint, in the form of a poem, to the effect that all non-left turns are traps.
On the other hand, we managed to avoid the carnivorous marshmallow in Book 2 through being immensely lucky with blind choices, so there's that.
Kharé - Cityport of Traps wrote:For sleeping of the sleepless ram;
Seek out the one they call The Sham.
Is book 4 unwinnable as a standalone?
Kharé - Cityport of Traps wrote:'Three years ago I was the Seventh Noble of Kharé until the black-eyed curse befell me...'
What is the black-eyed curse? It can't be just a poetic description of blindness because Hannicus (in Creature of Havoc) specifically begged to have it lifted.
Also, I didn't notice before, but Angel's reading of the rules for the harpies fight was really generous, not that it would have affected the result.
Mr Shine wrote:So tumblers two sealed deep inside
One lock made out of Golem's hide
By Courga's grace, and Fourga's pride
Er... I beg you to stand aside?
One of the many high points of the letsplay.
The Seven Serpents wrote:You cast your spell and wait to see whether anything happens. The shimmering haze reappears and engulfs the creature once more. As it rises, the Deathwraith is being transformed and another shape now stands before you. A stout, balding man appears in its place, who looks at you nervously and smiles. The Deathwraith has been an illusion!
And here MAG works like dispel magic.
The Crown of Kings wrote: If you do not turn back, you may find me at the Groaning Bridge.
So how to find Colletus at the Groaning Bridge?
angelfromanotherpin wrote:• Are you still faithful to your Goddess, Libra? √
• Or have you chosen or been forced to renounce your faith?
Credit where it's due: the warning to stay faithful was given on the first page of the intro.
me wrote:It won't hurt to find more components for the likely wizard duel in the end until the winds of magic throw Zed our way.
So that's what I assumed would happen in the end: Fletch and the Archmage throw spells back and forth until one of the options offered is ZED, which is a win.
The Crown of Kings wrote:20 gold pieces (plus your own 3 if you handed them over)
It's kind of annoying that chargebacks aren't universally implemented (see: the ferryman in Book 3).
angelfromanotherpin wrote:It's the Archmage's citadel, it's totally okay for his illusions to be Spectre of the Gun quality. The secret of the flames is just a password of a different color.
I'm still not buying it as it's implemented in the book.
Generally, I'm okay with illusions that don't hurt you but trick you into doing something dangerous, I'm also okay with illusions that act real if you think they are real - but the latter is
difficult to write in a gamebook. I suppose a passable implementation would be to just dump the protagonist to a death paragraph without a warning, thus precluding an "I think it's illusory" hunch-based decision, then have a secret reference lead from the death paragraph to the disbelief option (as it's done with the serpent of Time and the npc in Creature of Havoc). E.g. "There's a suspiciously empty room behind those Throben doors. Do you go in or look for another way? [Go in.] Suddenly fires, you die. [Hidden reference.] Wait, no, you don't."
The Seven Serpents wrote:In the dark chamber of night, do not light your way with the blood candle.
This hint creeped me out. It's somehow less creepy now that I know the place is literally called "Chamber of Night". Much like the titles of the "seasonal" Dragonlance books sounded pretty cool (to a teenager) until I found out those were just the names of months, as in "October dragons", "January dragons", "March dragons".
The Crown of Kings wrote:You can't be wanting to meet the Spiny Ones.
The Spiny Ones are quite possibly the scariest encounter in the book. Also, total fucking bullshit.
angelfromanotherpin wrote:But if the endgame seems rushed or narrow, it's because Steve wasted the space dicking us around on mountain paths.
The endgame doesn't make much sense.
The time-travel gimmick is cool, but the whole thing with the Archmage's disguise is pointless: he could have captured us any time. I looked at the magical options and most of them (except MAG) involve the Archmage one-upping the hero with a more powerful spell, after which it's choo-choo time. He could have just proceeded with the capture and imprisonment right from the first meeting. There isn't anything useful to us in the original room and there isn't anything useful to the Archmage in the prison room that he has to confront us later. For the plot to make sense, we should have gotten our hands on something important in that room or earlier, and not-Farren-Whyde could have sent us on a wild goose chase either to get us away from the important item or to make us waste the macguffin.
(One other thing I noticed in the spell section is that some apparently noncombat spells have combat applications, such as TEL allowing to predict the enemy Red-Eyes' actions and maneuver in such a way so as to have one of them be sliced up by the others' lasers. But you can never tell beforehand; other times, such spells are worse than useless and the enemy gets a free hit.)
(Also, Throg is really intelligent and prevents most spellcasting attempts: she destroys spell foci before the hero can get a spell off, wrestles away and drinks the healing potion if the hero tries to use one, etc. Not that it matters much, because going to the kitchen the first time around is fatal.)
Jann just straight-up,
choo-choo, offering us ZED devalues remembering it. Why would you do that, Steve.
Speaking of Jann, the book unfortunately omitted how Fletch rescued him from the prison tower.
Still, an awesome LP of good books. I'm kind of sad it's over.