That defunct forum is also where I wrote up my first attempt at the adventure, 'zine editor Alexander Ballingall's Resurrection of the Dead, so I can't link to the write-up. I remember that, as my character started the adventure unarmed, I tried to acquire a weapon, which turned out to be a very effective means of remaining unarmed, getting penalised for my lack of eagerness to confront hordes of undead with my bare hands, and then being torn apart once the adventure forced me to seek out the army of the living dead and endeavour to slap them into submission. Mr Ballingall attempted to justify the Luck penalty with which I got slapped by saying that it was necessary to take away Luck early on so that the reader would appreciate getting a Luck bonus later on. With that kind of policy, it's a good thing that Fantazine contributors don't get paid for their articles.
I'm not sure how balanced the adventure is, so I shall take the risky step of accepting the dice as they fall during character generation. And promptly regret it, as I wind up with:
Skill 7 (currently reduced to 4 as I have no weapon)
Stamina 17
Luck 10
Well, I'm almost certainly doomed. At least the rules do indicate that the 'no weapon' penalty should be disregarded if I have to make a Skill roll: lacking an item designed for harming others does not lead to increased clumsiness or mental enfeeblement, no matter what the NRA might say.
I return to my home town of Bandur Green following a successful trading expedition, and am disappointed to find none of my friends in local hostelry The Frantic Rat. And I was all set to spend the evening telling them my new haggling anecdotes. Nobody's in when I try going to my friends' homes, either: some have even boarded up their doors and windows, and my good friend Karl (who would have loved to hear about how I got that trader to pay 7 gold pieces for goods worth only 6) appears to have abandoned the place entirely.
Eventually I bump into fellow merchant Forvin Louve, who invites me back to his home, but he's so busy talking about recent strange goings-on that I never get the opportunity to regale him with the tale of how I sold an alabaster polecat for almost one-and-a-half times what it cost me. Apparently there have been strange lights and 'odd things' glimpsed on the heath (plus some people have apparently seen haunting noises there, though that could just be sloppy sentence construction), a farmer went missing, as did most of the search party sent after him (the two exceptions having respectively been fatally mutilated and (in the case of Karl) gone mad). Oh, and there was a break-in at the Merchants' Guild just before all this started, but that's undoubtedly completely unrelated to everything else, correlation not equalling causation, and all that... Louve only really mentioned it on the off-chance that it might be helpful for me to learn that all these incidents of which I was unaware happened just after something else about which I knew nothing, even though they're surely not linked in any way...
The following morning I decide to do something about these peculiar happenings, since my skill in getting a good bargain is obviously just what's needed to sort out whatever menace proved more than a match for a group of twelve men. To start, I decide to see if the landlord at the Frantic Rat has heard any useful gossip. Or would like me to tell him about the profit I turned on a cask of Cragrock Cider. The tavern is pretty quiet at this early hour, and I'm surprised and a little concerned to find the text asking if I've gone looking for a blacksmith yet. I don't remember anything worthwhile having come from blacksmith-seeking on my previous attempt, so I hope this is a sneaky way of ascertaining whether or not I've actually wasted half the morning.
Barnock the barkeep is an old friend, so I start by asking what he knows about Karl's misadventures. Being such a good pal, he charges me money for the information, which is delivered in a syntax so changeable as to hint at multiple personality disorder. It turns out that the men who found Karl brought him to the pub, where he scared off half the clientele by babbling about the dead. Given the unfortunate man's constant harping about dead people, the local militia have formed the conclusion that Karl and the party he accompanied were attacked by Trolls. So the defenders of law and order in Bandur Green are the equivalent of the racist cretins who post comments on Yahoo! news.
Any other local news worth paying for? Not really, but I have to cough up to find out. Apart from things I've already learned from Louve, and gossip about which I don't care, all Barnock has to tell me is that someone attempted to defile the grave of local war hero Narron the Steady, and whoever perpetrated that break-in that has nothing to do with anything else seems not to have stolen anything.
Maybe the retired locals seated at a nearby table will have something useful to tell me. Nope, apart from reiterating a few things I already know, they just start arguing over minutiae, and I wind up getting hit in the face and losing a point of Luck (blasted sometime later Luck bonus - none of this misfortune would be happening if not for you). Well, visiting the pub has been a strong argument in favour of teetotalism.
Leaving the tavern, I'm presented with a variety of options (including going back into the Rat if I've already tried everything else, which raises questions about the structure of this adventure). Someone has set up a stall on the common, so I go there to see if that's where weapons can be acquired. No, it's a gambling booth run by a gypsy. The author should be commended for going against harmful stereotype, as there's no cheating going on here, but a gambling establishment (even on as small a scale as this one) that doesn't give 'the house' even a marginal advantage is not going to be economically viable. I win back almost as much as I paid out in the pub, and quit while I'm ahead.
Next I try checking out the cemetery. After the obligatory visit to my parents' grave, I am presented with several things to try. The site of the attempted defilement is an obvious choice, but I may be compelled to leave once I've been to it, so I'll try looking at headstones for
Now I head for the crypt mentioned by Barnock, finding that the stone urn at the foot of Narron's bier has been smashed. This is not massively informative in itself, but the crypt has a convenient back door, so I have a nose inside. Which leads to the discovery that this is one of those adventures where you have to visit lots of places but in the right order, as I have not yet had the opportunity to procure either of the items that could be of some use here. This is particularly tiresome as they seem to be all that might provide some protection against the Wight that is lurching towards me.
The subsequent encounter goes about as well as could be expected. By which I mean that the crypt gains a new occupant, who isn't actually a member of the family that owns it. Still, I'm rather too dead to care about any scandal that might ensue.
This attempt at Resurrection has been frustrating in a different way from the previous one, as I can see hints of what may be a decent mystery here - the 'unrelated' break-in, the destruction of the urn, the rift between Narron and Thrawn... But depending on how closely the reader has to stick to the 'correct' route through the adventure, finding out the truth that connects these disparate elements with the undead menace may involve a tedious process of trial and error to figure out the right order in which to visit places. One of the things I like about the Webs of Intrigue gamebooks is that clues generate leads, enabling the reader to make informed decisions about what to try following up next. Being able to infer that you should have gone someplace else first, but only on account of being asked if you've been there yet, or owing to an item check that's the first hint that the object in question is even available, as in this adventure, does not compare.
Oh, and not having the option to at least try and look into the break-in at the Merchants' Guild (or, if it does become possible at some stage, needing to jump through assorted yet-to-be-identified hoops before getting the option) is irritating. Less of an annoyance than arbitrary Luck penalties thrown in just to make the reader feel grateful when the author deigns to provide a crumb of bonus, but still bothersome.
The amount of experience I have of the different Fantazine mini-adventures is variable, to say the least, and I've only had one attempt at more than half of the rest of the run. Some of those attempts were far too brief for me to be able to fairly judge the quality of the mini-adventure in question, but I can say with some confidence that this is not the worst of them. Subsequent blog posts should help me ascertain which of the potential candidates is the worst, so I shan't start ranting about some of the less fun stuff to come just yet.
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