None of This is Real

The mini-adventure in the Mongoose Publishing edition of Lone Wolf book 10, The Dungeons of Torgar, August Hahn's Echoes of Lost Light, is unlike the previous Mongoose mini-adventures in a couple of significant ways. Firstly, it takes place after the main adventure, not before it (which is why I didn't play it before making any of my attempts at Dungeons). Secondly, rather than giving the spotlight to a character Lone Wolf meets (or at least has the potential to meet) during the main adventure, it's an additional incident in the life of Lone Wolf himself. Which may come as something of a surprise to those who know that Dungeons ends with Lone Wolf plummeting into a portal to another world (especially if they are also aware that book 11 starts with him coming out of the other end of the portal, which really doesn't seem to allow a lot of space for additional escapades).

As Echoes is being slotted in between two full gamebooks, it has some special rules, and I'm not sure I like the look of them. Any changes to inventory made over the course of the mini-adventure are automatically undone, but any loss of Combat Skill or Endurance will be carried over into book 11, which is already the harshest of the Magnakai books as regards combat. Also, even though Lone Wolf recovered a fifth Lorestone at the climax of Dungeons, the additional Discipline it should have bestowed doesn't get added until the start of book 11. And Mongoose's reputation for less than exemplary quality control is maintained by the way that the Action Chart only has slots for 4 Disciplines, though a veteran character would probably have started Dungeons with 7 of them.

Okay, the start of the mini-adventure gives a reason for the lack of new Discipline. Darklord magic has somehow tainted the Lorestone of Luomi, which is the one I caught just before being plunged into the void. In order to properly assimilate its power, I must purge it of the evil influence. Consequently, I wind up in the mystical equivalent of a 'holodeck malfunction' episode from one of the Star Trek spin-offs: isolated in a simulation of the ruined city of Luomi, I must recover the simulation of the Lorestone from the simulation of the Shrine that houses it while avoiding being killed (and, of course, that's actual-killed rather than simulated-killed) by the simulations of the forces which destroyed Luomi. This is going to be fun! (Simulated enthusiasm).

I stand before the ruins of the city's front gate (well, a mystical re-creation of them, but let's take the 'this isn't real' aspect as read from now on, or it'll take a lot longer to write the playthrough). The remnants of the gatehouse and keep are on my right, a cobbled trail leads left, and a wall of black-green fire blocks the way straight ahead. The list of choices I can make adds the apparently easily overlooked detail that the cobbled path is also on fire, and Divination lets me know that an ambush awaits in the gatehouse.

At my current ranking, Nexus should provide protection from fire and noxious gases, so I'll take the burning route. It turns out that Huntmastery is more useful than Nexus here, but as I have both, that doesn't really matter. And the cobbles aren't on fire after all (silly me, interpreting the phrase 'burning path' in that way), but I do have to skirt around fire and rubble to get to the cobbled route. I head towards a section of wall, and randomness occurs, with a modifier for anyone who has Pathmanship. I don't have that Discipline (nor Pathsmanship, which is what it's always been called before now), but get a high enough number for the superior outcome anyway.

Reaching the wall, I reflect on the doubtless horrific nature of the real-world equivalent of the battle that devastated this place. An item check follows, and as I didn't take the route through Dungeons that would have enabled me to get the object in question, I have no legitimate grounds for checking if there's a valid reason for the 'turn to 101 and then return to this page' instruction rather than just having 101 end by directing the reader to the same section that this paragraph does. I could just take a look, but that might result in spoilers, so I'll leave it for now.

I am heading for the poorer quarters of Luomi. These were, of course, not protected as well as the region inhabited by the nobility, and thus bore the brunt of the invasion, so the enemy forces are going to be more heavily concentrated here. And in case that's not enough to convince me to turn back and face what awaits in the ruined gatehouse (the text doesn't explicitly call me a coward for coming this way, but the subtext is there), the fighting that took place up ahead was so terrible that it broke the simulation, splitting ersatz-Luomi into chunks of land that float in a void like the freaky antepenultimate level of Tomb Raider II, and the distance between the edge of this fragment and the next is too great for me to jump across. So do I try to figure out a way of bridging the gap or trudge back for the fight that Mr. Hahn appears so keen for me to have?

There was a time limit implied back at the start of the adventure, and there's no guarantee that I'll find a more easily-traversed rift beyond the gatehouse, so I'll try to find my inner bridge, or whatever it takes to make a way across. And my facetious suggestion of what this decision would entail turns out to be pretty much what happens: I meditate and connect with the spirit of the Lorestone in order to try and conjure up a safe path. My suspicions regarding the possible lack of easy passage beyond the gatehouse are borne out by an 'if you went that way and couldn't get across' direction at the end of the section.

Randomness determines the success or failure of my efforts, but the odds are in my favour, and I get a bonus for having a certain Lore-Circle. There's still a chance it won't work, but the number I get is more than high enough. A bridge of solid light appears before me, and I hurry across it to the next fragment of Luomi before it fades.

This section of the city is occupied by phantasmal Drakkar warriors, and it's in my best interests to try and avoid them while making my way to the next region. It's random number time again, with less favourable odds, and I only have one of the two Disciplines that each provide a bonus. Nevertheless, I succeed in reaching an alley unobserved, and travel through it to one of the major streets. From here I can hear the sounds of fighting to the right, and decide to investigate. There could be allies to be had here, and if so, their unreality might mean that their near-inevitable deaths will weigh less heavily on my conscience.

In a courtyard I see two men in Luomi bronze fighting a squad of Giaks. Make that one man. Before he can join the mound of corpses on the ground, I fire a couple of arrows at the Giaks and then charge into battle. I take a little damage while slaughtering the brutes, but it's nothing that Healing can't fix. The last soldier is already mortally wounded, but passes me a Hammer and attempts to tell me what I must do with it. His words are too faint to be audible, and I have neither Curing nor a healing potion to strengthen him enough for a second shot at passing on the message. I do have Divination, though, which enables me to probe his mind as he expires, thereby learning that I need to take the Hammer to the Shrine for which I was heading anyway and activate the hidden catch on the Hammer's head. Looks like I might have just picked up an essential item.

The courtyard has two exits, but only one of them leads the way I'm going, and the sound of Drakkar hordes provides a strong disincentive to check out the other one for curiosity's sake. I discard my Magic Spear to make space for the Herald's Hammer, knowing that if I survive this fantasy, I will still have the Spear in reality. The Hammer comes with a Combat Skill bonus, though not high enough to make it worth using in place of the Sommerswerd. Still, the way the bonus increases with increased proximity to the Shrine does provide a rough gauge of how far through the adventure I must be. Right now I seem to be somewhere in the second quarter.

The city's defenders attempted to create a barricade of shields across the street along which I now walk. They failed, but the very fact that they tried suggests that the street leads to somewhere important. There's another misspelled Pathsmanship check, which borders on ironic, as Pathsmanship was the Discipline I intended to get from the Lorestone I'm re-seeking (and still do, for the sake of a Lore-Circle). No Rank check, though, so this can't be anything to do with the ambush-detecting capability that the Discipline provides to sufficiently experienced characters.

Hang on a minute. I've just realised that when playing Dungeons I repeated a mistake I made during an attempt at The Kingdoms of Terror back in the 1990s. Though with less serious consequences, as forgetting that I didn't have Pathsmanship merely resulted in a rant about the ambush-detecting working so poorly, rather than getting my character killed. As far as I can tell, things would have gone the same way in Dungeons (apart from the rant) if I hadn't made that error, so I don't think there's any need to replay it yet again. Still, that was careless of me.

Back at the adventure, the street brings me to a courtyard where more Luomi guardsmen made a last stand (and Healing finishes making good the damage from that fight). While the locals put up a good fight, they fell in the end, and the green mist that still wreathes their corpses may be what ended their attempts at defending the city. If I didn't have Nexus, it could potentially make things unpleasant for me as well. Since I do have the Discipline, I cross the courtyard without trouble.

Beyond it I find another gap in the simulation, this one significantly larger. Creating a bridge across it will cost me Endurance, but the Hammer, the Sommerswerd and the Lore-Circle that helped with the last bridge all reduce the damage I incur. There's also a mention of the previously mentioned item I don't have, which gives away what the object can do. A function it could have served equally well on the route through the gatehouse, so I guess the explanatory detour to 101 was justified after all.

Creating and crossing the second bridge of light, I reach the part of the city that once housed commoners and workers. It's now in ruins - so devastated, in fact, that the destruction has spilled over into the text, annihilating the second half of the word 'everywhere'. Or that could be sloppy proofreading.

Getting across here will not be easy, but I could choose to make it trickier by disregarding Divination. Treating that option with the disdain it warrants, I allow my enhanced sixth sense to lead me to a burning building in which a concealed metal hatchway went unnoticed by the invaders. It's locked, but the telekinetic side of Nexus enables me to open it, revealing a secret passage. The text has one last go at trying to convince me that I'd have more fun going via the blazing ruins currently being searched by enemies, but I fashion a makeshift torch from bits of the trashed contents of the house and head underground.

A ladder leads down to a curving passage. An echo behind me suggests the presence of a cavern, so I opt to check it out. No, that's not a cavern. Wherever the passage originally led in that direction is now on the other side of the gap I had to exert myself to bridge, so the tunnel just opens onto the void. I'd considered and rejected the possibility of that being the case on account of the echo, which implied the existence of something solid for the sound waves to bounce off. Any physicists want to explain how they could be reflected by nothingness, or do I have a legitimate grievance here?

The void also exerts some kind of pull, tearing the torch from my grasp. I attempt to flee, but this time the random factor does not work in my favour, and I am also sucked into oblivion. Well, that was a rubbish ending.

So, should I have another go at this before proceeding to book 11, or treat the whole thing as a hallucination induced by sensory deprivation while falling through the portal, and have Lone Wolf tumble straight from the final section of Dungeons into the next book as any pre-Mongoose reader of the series would have had to do?