[Let's Play] Fighting Fantasy 29 - Midnight Rogue

[Queen of Swords]

Damn, that sucks. Hope you get better soon.

[Thaluikhain]

Ouch, sucks. Get well soon.

[JourneymanN00b]

Jesus, that makes two of us hosts who got positive from covid. SGamerz, I hope you are able to deal with the runny nose, nausea, and coughing, because I sure am having a difficult time with that three full days out.

[Beroli]

Apparently, I might have gotten both COVID and dengue.

This creates weird situation where I was supposed to be self-quarantined at home because o COVID, but at the same time I need to constantly go back to the clinic for blood tests reviews on dengue so they can track my condition.

Either way, my absence is likely going to be much longer than I expected,

Oh yikes. Good luck with treatment.

[SGamerz]

I will finish posting the summary this weekend.

As mentioned, ironically I've been going out even more often than I usually do during my 7-day "quarantine" period because the doctors need to monitor my blood palette levels due to dengue. This has to to be one of the most awkward combination of diseases to have gotten at the same time.

Good news: the blood palette levels is finally getting back up again, so I'm getting a bit of break from the constant blood tests..I've been getting many more times' amount of blood drained out of me for these tests compared to what that pesky mosquito took...

[SGamerz]

Even though this is a single-author book, it actually feels like a book of 2 halves designed by different people. I remember feeling a similar sensation of such a divide when I first read Warlock of Firetop Mountain - except that one actually was written and designed by 2 different people. The first half of the book that took place in the city had a more sandbox feel - if you ignore the bizarre part of not being able to visit the Noose after the first opportunity. Once you get to Barrow Hill, it's almost impossible to lose your way, since the book is almost completely linear - as mentioned, the only (brief) diversion in that section was the trip to the Poltergeist's room. That was the only point where there's any backtracking to be done, since there's no way to proceed further from that spot. And yes, as predicted, it was a STAMINA sink, since there's no way to fight or otherwise overcome the Poltergeist.

As mentioned, there are not that many choke-points in this book. Generally, this is one of the more generous FF gamebooks: failing checks (be it item check, Skill check, or failing dice roll/stat test) is seldom legal. Most of the time, you are given an alternative method to deal with a situation even when you fail to take the most ideal option, and at worst you still get to proceed after taking some damage, or going through an extra combat. There are, however, still a few situations that completely prevents you from finding the clues and reaching the 2nd half of the book. The first one, not going to the Noose at the first section, has already been thoroughly discussed. There 2 other situations I can think of that can completely doom you, and they are both related to Skill selection.

2 of the 7 Skills, as you have no doubt noticed, are way more emphasized than the others, maybe over-emphasized in one case. It's possible to find substitute items for 4 of the Skills: PICK LOCK, CLIMB, HIDE and SNEAK. So theoretically, you can have a "perfect" path that gains you access to all 7. In reality, though, you don't even need 3 of those! PICK LOCK is the only important one of the 4, and one Skill that you absolutely need. So yes, one way to fail the game is to not choose PICK LOCK at the beginning and then missing the beggar who will give you the lockpicks as a substitute. It is simply impossible even enter Brass's house or his office without either of those (which means you'll miss 2 vital clues), so I'm not sure why the book even bothers to check you for that skill in the later part of the book - there's no way you could have made it to Barrow Hill if you couldn't pass those PICK LOCK checks! The lockpicks are one of the few items that's specifically stated to not be a backpack item, so there's no reason the player would ever want to discard it once he found it!

There's another little bit about the necessity of PICK LOCK that makes some of the design somewhat iffy - although nothing that breaks the game. I think the safe with 2 locks and 2 keys was a pretty cool design, and one which theoretically should have given the player more variety of ways to gain the important clue. Basically, you need to unlock both locks simultaneously, so having PICK LOCK isn't enough (you can only focus on 1 at a time). You need either both keys, OR 1 of the keys + PICK LOCK.

If we try to pick one of the locks without any keys (or if we only use 1 key and have no PICK LOCK), this happens:



As to where we can find the second key (marked with 'R'), Brass wears it around his neck when he sleeps, so we would need to steal from him with PICK POCKET when he sleeps:



This is one of the more difficult puzzles: you need to past a SKILL check even if you have PICK POCKET. But it's also kind of wasted, because the only reason you may need to do it is if you visit Brass's house before you visit the Merchants' Guild. You only need 1 of the keys, and the one at the Guild is not only MUCH easier to get - it's impossible to miss unless you miss the vital clue at the Guild completely - in which case you'd already lost anyway. And as mentioned, since you can't possibly even get into Brass's house in the first place without PICK LOCK, there's no reason you'd ever need to get both keys. Just take the 'L' key from the guild and use PICK LOCK to open the second lock. Stealing the key from around Brass's neck, as cool as it sounds, becomes a pretty unnecessary AND risky exercise,

The second most important of the 7 skills is, of course, SPOT HIDDEN. It's actually technically not 100% necessary - although it's going to be a LOT more difficult to win without it. It also has no substitute item, so this being the Skill that every player voted for definitely the right choice. However, surprisingly, there actually aren't that many situation where failing the Skill check is an automatic fail - again, you are usually given the chance to salvage the game after an additional trial or an alternative Skill check. Interestingly, the Skill that is most often checked directly before or after a SPOT HIDDEN check is SECRET SIGNS - another skill with no substitute. SECRET SIGN can technically be considered the 3rd most important skill, but its usefulness is a long way behind SPOT HIDDEN. Basically, another way you can fail this book completely is to not have both SPOT HIDDEN and SECRET SIGNS. You need either one of the 2 (and given how much more often SPOT HIDDEN is checked, it's a no-brainer between the 2 if you want to pick 1). There are at least 2 situations where you will hit dead ends if you fail the check on both of these skills - but having 1 of them is generally enough for you to continue. One of them is, in fact, finding the secret entrance to the whole dungeon itself at Barrow Hill - you simply cannot find the entrance at all without at least one of the skills.

There is, however, 1 strange situation where using SPOT HIDDEN is actually a trap option - one that you guys actually spotted. Using it to find "hidden mechanism" which we apparently couldn't reach with a dagger - using our hand to try and reach the mechanism was certainly a trap option, so good job spotting that!

Most of the other Skills don't see much love compared to the 3 above. I don't know if it's coincidence that nobody voted for CLIMB, but I would say it's arguably the most useless. There are 2 places late in the game when it gets checked to make your progress easier - but neither of the checks are necessary for your to win, and I believe in both situations the only penalties were a few STAMINA points damage or a dice roll stat test. So even the Rope and Grapnel never really filled a vital spot in your backpack. And there are a couple of situations where using it is actually the LESS optimal choice (I will talk about these again later) SNEAK and HIDE are basically there to help us avoid hostile guardians and unnecessary combats - but again, neither are essential, and penalties to failing the checks generally just mean an extra combat or having to pass another alternative skill check to get out of the situation. PICK POCKET can actually get us out of a few potentially sticky situations - I think saving potentially our life at one point - but none of these situations are on the optimal path, so we didn't really see much of the benefits, and generally wouldn't need it if we make the right choice. Using it to get the key from the scorpion and pick up the obsidian disc were the only points we really come to use it. To be sure, both of those were optimal choices - the obsidian disc was necessary, and the key from the scorpion was the easier way through - trying to pick the lock with PICK LOCK is actually more difficult and would require a stat test.

Regarding the item substitutes for skills, the substitute for HIDE is a black cloak that you can pick up in the house with the oars sign. The substitute for SNEAK is a bundle of cloths that you can wrap around your feet. You can loot these from the bodies of some footpads that you may encounter near the Merchants' Guild if you take more time to look around. Bizarrely, this is an item you can only find by failing a stat roll. Basically, if you succeed in a stat check (I forgot whether it's SKILL or LUCK), you manage to break through and escape without combat. If you fail that check, you need to fight multiple footpads, but you get to loot their bodies if you win.



And this is one of the situations where having CLIMB actually means you manage to escape from them without a fight (and therefore no opportunity to loot the substitute items).

Speaking of substitute items, there are also a few situations where the book distinguishes between actually having a skill and having an item as substitute. During the encounter where we had to decide how to deal with our own shadow, choosing to "avoid casting a shadow" is actually a viable option using HIDE (although it's only a temporary resolution, so our choice to disrupt the shadow was definitely the optimal choice). The book specifies that using a black cloak would not have been sufficient to "hide" from our shadow.

Another situation is when we try to climb to the top of the Merchants' Guild building - although note that CLIMB sucks here in either situation. This is where Thaluikhain mentioned the top of the building was glass-trapped - our hands get cut if we were just our Skill (STAMINA loss), but if we're using our rope?



So...yeah, just don't climb here. At all.

We already know the best way to get into the guild was via the back door, because the sleeping beggar will give us a lockpick. But even if we started with PICK LOCK, this is absolutely still the best point of entry by far. Whether you try to climb using skill and rope (and are then greeted by the above-mentioned booby trap) or climb up the "easy" way via the drainpipe (don't need skill for that), we'd run into a magical guardian:



There's actually a unique "anti-cheat" section here in this book where the text tells us: the gargoyle is magical, and you sword is useless against it. Do you want to use your magic weapon to fight it? And if you answer "yes", the book then goes: NO, YOU CHEATER, THERE'S NO MAGIC WEAPON YOU COULD HAVE PICKED UP AT THIS POINT. GO RESTART THIS BOOK FROM SCRATCH AGAIN AND STOP CHEATING!

It's actually still possible to survive the gargoyle encounter (if you resist the urge to cheat by claiming to have a magic weapon). It may be immune to your sword, but it's still very much breakable if it's dropped from a great height, so you can sacrifice an item (your rope and grapnel, black cloak, or some chain that you loot from the footpads) that you can throw it on the creature to send it plummeting down to the ground, you can destroy it. But why go to all that trouble when there's no hostile guardian at all at the back door anyway?

Having SPOT HIDDEN when we entered the guild also meant that we avoided the building's special alarm system:



If you're familiar with the Jib-Jib, then you know that it's arguably the loudest creature in Titan, and I like that it's being utilized as an alarm system. Failing the skill check is not an insta-fail, though: you have 1 combat round to silence the alarm by killing the Jib-Jib (it's a SK 1 ST 2 creature), so it's not an overly-harsh trap. But if we fail to stop it, we'd be forced after it starts screaming (and miss the vital clue there).

We pretty much took the optimal path at Brass' house either: there are quite a bit of other content, but nothing that we need, and quite a few that can potentially force us out of the house without finding the clue!

As mentioned, we can't get in at all without PICK LOCK. Climbing the drainpipe, unlike at the guild, is not a bad choice by itself, however, since it allows us to find out a bit of the house's interior layouts by looking through the windows. They're all barred, though, and we can only get in through the door.



Encounters with Brass's family members should be avoided at all cost. Thaluikhain mentioned the son, who's a sleepwalker and whom, yes, we may mistake for a ghost and attack:



Part of the effect is deliberate: Brass son explains in the handbook "Blacksand!" during the AFF adventure that he deliberately dresses in white while sleeping so that anyone who see him sleepwalking will avoid him (there was a time when he climbed out of his house through a window and went out while sleepwalking).

There's also the daughter, whom we may awake in her room and prove no less effective a screamer than the Jib-Jib:



We were also wise to minimize any exploration of the downstairs room, where servants and the resident dog live:



A lack of SNEAK and HIDE may get their attention, and a lack of PICK POCKET while we try to extricate a singe gold piece from a suit of standing armour may bring it as well. And once we get into combat with them, we've failed - there's no way to avoid being knocked out, captured and jailed even if we manage to kill the dog in combat.

For the iron door we found in the study, it's a trap as well, and actually one of the trap rooms that would have doomed our quest we failed the checks for both SPOT HIDDEN and SECRET SIGNS (we get locked in). And even before that, we have to face Rincewind's Luggage this guardian:



There is, interestingly, loot to be found here. Beating this chest creature actually gets us the silver whistle, which we could have used to drive away the flock of bats attacking us at Barrow Hill. The chest monster (SK 5 ST 6) is only slightly more skilled while having only half the STAMINA of the bats, so an argument can be made that this is not a completely bad encounter to have. But we would have to have missed SPOT HIDDEN in order to trigger this encounter, so I'd say it's probably not worth the trouble of having to deal with all the other troubles you will have without the skill.

One last picture I'm positing here: this was the ogre that we might have had to fight if we hadn't been able to SNEAK past it.

[Thaluikhain]

Yeah, the book split into 2 halves thing is mentioned by more or less everyone who discusses this book, including the author, who apparently wasn't too pleased with the end result.

As an aside, IIRC, one solution to dealing with the shadow is to throw something at the torch and darken the room. It's because of the ambiguity of what you can throw that afterwards I always made sure to take junk items if possible, so I'd have some items to randomly sacrifice without losing anything worthwhile.

[SGamerz]

Actually there were 2 things that I meant to add, but forgot earlier:

1) The "treasure room" behind the Wooden Golem-disguised door was indeed a trap, as the players anticipated. There was a snake that would surprise and attack us. However, if we survive the trap, we find the map that helps us navigate the maze. Thankfully, not having the map just means we need a successful LUCK test to survive the maze.

2) Even though the extra life system never came into play, I don't regret using the money mechanism for it, because I feel that money really IS underutilized in a book where you play a thief. There's literally only 1 part where money is actually useful in the book: bribing the City Guard Guard patrol who caught us (and even that is easily avoidable with the right skills). The guard at the front entrance of the Merchants' Guild is not even bribable - not because he's too honest, but because he's too corrupt to even stay bribed. He'll take your money and then attack you anyway.

You can use it for gambling at Pinfingers at the Rat and Ferret at the Noose...but the only purpose it serves is to win you even more money that you have no further use for!

[Thaluikhain]

You can, IIRC, try to buy information about Brass, and if you roll over the amount you paid, he guy tells you about the metal brass instead of the merchant Brass because you didn't pay enough, and still takes your money. I also like that at some point you can see someone being shot at with arrows in a street where you can get shot at with arrows in City of Thieves, which is a nice call-back.

[SGamerz]

Yeah, but the information he gave is hardly worth any money. He tells you the Coin symbol is on everything Brass owns - you already know that his symbol is a coin, so it's not exactly brain surgery to figure out. He tells you about the safe with 2 locks and 1 of the keys is kept on his person - as I pointed out earlier, since you can't even complete the book without PICK LOCK, you really only need 1 key, and the one Brass keeps on his person is the one you should skip anyway!

The ONLY place you actually need money is to pay Madame Star for the all-important reference number.

So, as I mentioned, the use of money is kind of disappointing for a thief RPG.

I DO, however, like the way the book allows you to handle most obstacles the sneaky way without needing to resort to combat. The only things that spoil the effect are the mandatory combats with the SKILL 10 Crystal Warrior and Possessor Spirit. Without those, this would have been on of the few books you can actually win with a 7/14/7 characters, but those 2 combats drag it down.