This should be the last part of my playthrough of Rhianna Pratchett's FF gamebook Crystal of Storms. As at the start of the previous instalment, I need to find a couple of objects for a Goblin Technomancer, though this time I have more specific details of the items in question. Despite being seriously wounded (or perhaps recognising that he’s already beyond help), Vizzig gives me a Healing Potion before I head off to search for the artefacts he requires.
Earlier I turned down the
opportunity to explore the kitchens of the sunken Citadel, but now I need to
get hold of a silver goblet, I think it worth checking to see what kind of
drinking vessels can be found there.
I return to the Nimbiferous
Chamber without incident, and proceed to the kitchen door. A moaning sound
issues from behind it, and the book has me steel myself to confront whatever
horror awaits within, so I’m anticipating the 'twist' that it's something unthreatening - an injured
chef, or maybe a Sky Watch officer who panicked following the fall of Nimbus,
fled to the kitchen to seek solace in food and drink, and is now regretting
having overindulged.
Not far off. It’s my commanding
officer, trapped under a mound of debris, and vomiting into his helmet. He’s
understandably surprised to see me, as he sent me off the island a short while
before disaster struck. I explain what I’ve been doing since the incident, and
he commends me and outlines his own rather less heroic actions, which boil down
to ‘chose to get something to eat before searching for other survivors, was
standing in the wrong place when part of the ceiling collapsed, has now lost
all sensation in his legs’.
The Captain asks if I can
extricate him from the rubble, and after downing Vizzig’s potion in order to
bolster my strength, I attempt to shift enough of the wreckage to enable him to
get out. Checking the rules, I find that the roll against Stamina required of
me is on fewer dice than anticipated, so the odds would have been favourable
even if I hadn’t healed up, and the potion has done enough to make failure
impossible.
Once I’ve freed the Captain and
helped him into a more comfortable position, I search the kitchen. No silver
goblets, but I do add a cleaver to my assortment of weapons, and a pie to my
food supplies. I also look through the hole in the ceiling, observing that the
room above appears to be a workshop. The Captain informs me that that’s where
Engineer Krazic developed a lot of technomantic prototypes, which prompts me to
climb up for a closer look. Information on the weapons Krazic has been developing
could mean the difference between life and death – and there’s always the
possibility that the clutter up there might include something helpful or
essential.
A Skill roll determines whether
or not I make it into the workshop, and I succeed by a wide margin. Multiple
rooms have been knocked together, both horizontally and vertically, to create
space for work on something big, and there’s a set-up for raising and lowering
a platform. A quick search turns up a candle that meets Vizzig’s requirements
and another potion for boosting Attack Strength.
The only other thing I can do in
here is activate the movable platform, which may give me access to something
useful, or expose me to new danger, or both. Might as well find out which. I
pull the lever, and nothing happens. Or so it seems. I’d probably have received
a codeword if there were to be consequences at some later point, but maybe Ms
Pratchett doesn’t want to spoil the surprise just yet, and there'll be an 'if you pulled the lever in Krazic's workshop' check later on.
Talking of codewords, I get a
check on one after returning to the room below, and based on where I got that
codeword, along with the avoidance of descriptive text regarding the room, I
get the impression that there may be more than one way of encountering the Captain
and gaining access to Krazic’s workshop. Intriguing, but short of peeking at
sections I’m not supposed to be reading, there’s no way of finding out more
about that on this attempt at the book.
Uh-oh. It would appear that I’ve
hit one of the instances of poor gamebook design that other readers have
complained about. The section that follows leaving the kitchen offers just
three options: check out the flooded hallway if I haven’t already done so (and
I have), go into the kitchen (which, oddly, is not forbidden to readers who’ve
already done so, even though that would put me into a loop), or try the door to
the Great Hall, which I’ve been avoiding because I know there’s a ward on it,
so at best I’ll get nowhere and at worst I’ll suffer harm from the ward.
Where’s the option to return to Vizzig if you’ve found something he needs? Or
the chance to explore somewhere else if you still have to find an item for him?
Checking for errata, I see that the FF
wiki entry for Crystal lists this
section, but only to mention a typo. Okay, so saying ‘you’ when it should say
‘your’ is a mistake, and in other circumstances I might have got picky about it
myself, but sloppy structuring that might render what should be a viable path
through the book unplayable strikes me as being a more serious issue.
Fine, I’ll approach the warded
door because the book leaves me no sensible alternative. And it shocks me for a point of
Stamina damage – but at least this section has no restriction on heading back
towards the library. Sure, I’ll probably have to fight the crocodile and Giant
Scorpion again and take further damage from Vizzig’s traps before I get any
opportunity to go somewhere new in search of the last item I need, but at least
I’m now allowed to head in the general direction of progress again.
On reflection, I’m not going to
replay everything that happens on the way to Vizzig. I’ll go through the
sections, as I’m not going to find the section number for returning to the
bathysphere and checking out other flooded parts of the Citadel unless I do,
but there’s no sense in resurrecting and re-fighting enemies just because the
bathysphere option isn’t available here owing to authorial oversight and
inadequate playtesting. And I shall be adding the omitted option to the
relevant section of my gamebook manager, so if I ever have to play Crystal again, I can avoid the idiotic
runaround that’s about to be forced upon me.
Okay, I needlessly redo over a
dozen sections’ worth of stuff in order to be able to head back to the Barnacle and head for the flooded
passage I previously avoided. While there aren’t as many corpses in it as in
the water-filled halls through which I previously piloted the bathysphere, the
dead bodies I do see have been viciously mutilated.
A sudden attack inflicts
automatic damage on the vessel, and I’m into a fight against the Shark-Kin that
ended my first attempt at this book. I think my Skill is better this time
round, so I hope it’ll suffice to bring me through this fight with a functional
craft.
It doesn’t. Thanks to a series of appalling rolls, the Shark-Kin turns the Barnacle to scrap metal, and I join the shredded dead outside. And the shambles I encountered just after leaving the kitchen has wrought similar destruction on the good will I had previously had towards this book. I think I still prefer it to the preceding FF books only published by Scholastic, but it definitely needed more work done on fixing the bugs.
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