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blackmongoose
Mar 31, 2011

DARK INFERNO ROOK!

Ratatozsk posted:

Failures: Root'd to death, despair!'d, swallowed and digested by a Colossus beetle, ate a pig and failed to avert an ecological cataclysm, slave'd and toil'd to death, pulmonary arrownation, stabbed in the eyes and left to "live" off the land, lightly dragon'd, tree'd from a great height x2, Countless Swords of the Westermen'd, gale'd, yardam'd, rack'd

I recommend swallow'd, digest'd, fail'd, and stabb'd to complete the set (other than pulmonary arrownation which I like too much to turn into arrow'd)

Also, we have a 5 star ship, so Cannons

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Ghostwoods
May 9, 2013

Say "Cheese!"
Cannons for sure.

Ratatozsk
Mar 6, 2007

Had we turned left instead, we may have encountered something like this...

Page 341 posted:

The Moon Dog manoeuvres slowly nearer, pushing against the wind. She is taking damage all the time from your cannons, but the wind causes your own ship to heel over slightly, so that most of your shots strike the hull of the enemy rather than the sails. You have not yet crippled the Moon Dog, and now she is turning for a broadside.

You can stand and take it 19), pull astern of the enemy for boarding (38), or move off out of range of the Moon Dog's cannons 57).

: This wind is crazy. It's pushing us all oeuvre the place!

Character Sheet posted:

Jay 'Waterlogged' Sherman the Warlock

Skills: CHARMS, MARKSMANSHIP, SPELLS, and STREETWISE

Life Points: 9/10

Doubloons: 0

Possessions: Magic amulet, pistol, monkey, book of charts, feather shield, obsidian necklace, wooden sword studded with shark's teeth, potion of healing, ship in a bottle, black kite, wand, deed of ownership, parrot, crucifix, weasel, hornpipe, corkscrew, Providence *****

Codewords: Fetish, Scrip, Hora

Kills: Embracer, a guard, an Infernal Machine and the tiny man inside it, a pointy-toothed native

Failures: Root'd to death, despair!'d, swallowed and digested by a Colossus beetle, ate a pig and failed to avert an ecological cataclysm, slave'd and toil'd to death, pulmonary arrownation, stabbed in the eyes and left to "live" off the land, lightly dragon'd, tree'd from a great height x2, Countless Swords of the Westermen'd, gale'd, yardam'd, rack'd

CirclMastr
Jul 4, 2010

Our five-star ship can take the heat.

MysticalMachineGun
Apr 5, 2005

Take the damage

Turns out being a warlock was far more useful then I ever thought possible!

Ratatozsk
Mar 6, 2007

Had we turned left instead, we may have encountered something like this...

Page 19 posted:

Smoke-hazed flashes blister along the gunwales of the Moon Dog, followed by a sound like thunder that rolls across the water. Cannonballs crack against the timbers of your vessel. There is a cry of alarm as the mizzenmast splits, and you have to dodge to one side as the rigging conies crashing down. At least one of your crew is not so fortunate: you see him swept overboard by the broken boom as it falls.

Cross off two of the stars written next to your ship's name on your Adventure Sheet.

If you now have no stars left, turn to 227.
Otherwise you can return fire at point-blank range, crippling the Moon Dog, and then close in for boarding: turn to 6.

We're ok, we've still got three staaaaarrrrrgggghhs!

Page 6 posted:

All the pent-up emotion of your crew explodes in an excited roar as they go leaping onto the deck of the enemy ship with you at their head. The pirates stand ready to meet your boarding party, but the pounding they took from your guns has sapped their morale and the battle seems a foregone conclusion. Gunshots crack deafeningly all around you, and you are half blinded by the thick clouds of smoke and sprays of blood, but you charge right into the thick of the fray with a cry of, 'Have at them, lads!'

A bullet tears into your leg. Lose 1 Life Point. If you survive, you ignore the wound you have taken. The battle rages back and forth across the deck. Pirates come running at you but you dash them aside. Your only thought now is to find your foe and slay him yourself; you do not want him to have the mercy of a stray bullet.

The instant you catch sight of him, you realize your anxiety was misplaced. The bullets go whistling around his ears, but he stands there oblivious of danger, arms spread out and laughing like a fiend from the pit. You begin to wonder if he can be killed - or are his hate and madness stronger than death itself?

His single eye fixes on you through the haze of gunsmoke. 'Ah, matey,' he says. 'Come to see your old cap'n one last time, eh?'



Turn to 89.

: It's time you and I saw eye to eye!

Page 89 posted:

'You've given me a cannon-load o' trouble,' says Skarvench. 'Here's where I pay you back - with my trusty basilisk here.'

You glance down to see that he is standing beside a cannon that is pointing straight at you. Skarvench shows you the lighted taper in his hand.

'You despicable cur!' you snarl. 'You've no stomach for facing me at close quarters, I see.'

'Stow your bluster, mate,' he sneers. 'Here's where you retire to a safe distance - thirty fathoms down!'

If you have a weasel, turn to 76.
If not you might use MARKSMANSHIP and a pistol (95), CHARMS and an amulet (114), or just plain AGILITY (133). If you have none of those, turn to 152.

: *snarls about as aggressively as a weasel can, which (let's be honest) is completely drowned out by the surrounding din*

Page 76 posted:

To your own amazement as much as your foe's, the weasel suddenly jumps out of your haversack and leaps across the deck to give him a painful bite on the hand. Scarvench drops the taper with a startled oath: 'Agh! Devil take the animal!'

He seizes the weasel by its neck and casts the creature off over the side, but its attack has bought you the time you needed to close in. Now you are face to face with Skarvench in a battle to the finish.

Turn to 171.

: You'll pay for that, you curr!

Page 177 posted:

'I don't know how you escaped death before,' snarls Skarvench, 'but this time I'm going to make sure of the matter. I'll cut off your head and stick it on the bowsprit of my ship!'

His sword comes slicing down in a lethal arc, barely missing your shoulder as you dodge desperately aside. It splinters a great chunk of wood out of the mast behind you. Skarvench only gives a bellow of insensate fury and draws it back for another swing. He is in a killing rage, and this fight will be every bit as dangerous as you had expected.

If you have SWORDPLAY or MARKSMANSHIP (and the required weapon) lose 2 Life Points; if you have only BRAWLING lose 3 Life Points; if you have no combat skills you must lose 5 Life Points.

Assuming you survive, turn to 361.

Page 361 posted:

Skarvench opens his mouth, but the only sound that issues forth is a stifled croak. Teetering from a mortal wound, he falls to the deck and lies still.

Seeing the death of their leader, the pirates lose heart for the battle and are soon rounded up. As their muskets are confiscated, Oakley comes over and takes you by the arm. 'You all right, skipper?' he asks with a look of concern. 'You look in a bad way.'

'If you think I look bad, Mister Oakley,' you reply with a smile of weary triumph, 'you ought to take a look at the other bloke.'

Turn to 426.

Page 426 posted:

You are taken to Queen Titania's cabin in the aft gallery of the Rose. You are amazed at the sight of such luxury aboard a ship: there is a thick carpet, velvet drapes and even a gilded throne.

The Queen is younger than you expected, slim as a colt and palely pretty, with hair of autumn flame. But there is the ring of purebred royalty in her voice as she greets you. 'You have saved us from a fate that does not bear contemplation,' she says. 'You have our thanks - and not only thanks, but also material reward. Such a valiant mariner should not live a pirate's cruel life. Will you accept a title and a grant of land in Glorianne?'

'And there's a commission in the navy waiting for you, too, if you want it,' puts in Admiral Calidor. He turns and bows to the Queen with his hand to his chest. 'Your pardon, Majesty.'

'Not at all, Calidor.' The Queen smiles - a vivacious radiant smile, quite at odds with the stuffy panoply of courtly etiquette that surrounds her. Turning back to you, she adds: 'Our esteemed admiral is quite right. You would make a welcome addition to our navy. Well?'

You are momentarily lost in a private reverie. The offer is tempting, but you have got used to a life of exhilarating adventure. Did you run up against El Draque? You may not have seen the last of him if so. Did you make other enemies along your way? And are there mysteries still for you to explore on the Carab Sea?

You look up at Queen Titania. She is waiting for your answer. 'If Your Majesty pleases,' you say with a twinkle in your eye, 'let me think about it.'



: Wait, did we even see the first of El Draque?

: *all chatter a raucous congratulations*

We've triumphed, and with a good deal fewer deaths than when tussling with the damned elves. We'll be covering the highlights we missed in the next day or two, and as always please feel free to request bits that caught your interest as we traveled through the book.

Character Sheet posted:

Jay 'Waterlogged' Sherman the Warlock

Skills: CHARMS, MARKSMANSHIP, SPELLS, and STREETWISE

Life Points: 6/10

Doubloons: 0

Possessions: Magic amulet, pistol, monkey, book of charts, feather shield, obsidian necklace, wooden sword studded with shark's teeth, potion of healing, ship in a bottle, black kite, wand, deed of ownership, parrot, crucifix, weasel, hornpipe, corkscrew, Providence *****

Codewords: Fetish, Scrip, Hora

Kills: Embracer, a guard, an Infernal Machine and the tiny man inside it, a pointy-toothed native, Ejada, the Moon Dog, Skarvench

Failures: Root'd to death, despair!'d, swallowed and digested by a Colossus beetle, ate a pig and failed to avert an ecological cataclysm, slave'd and toil'd to death, pulmonary arrownation, stabbed in the eyes and left to "live" off the land, lightly dragon'd, tree'd from a great height x2, Countless Swords of the Westermen'd, gale'd, yardam'd, rack'd

Ratatozsk fucked around with this message at 05:19 on Jul 6, 2015

CirclMastr
Jul 4, 2010

Do any of the animals matter aside the ferret (and the one mention of the monkey as a potential ration)?

Thuryl
Mar 14, 2007

My postillion has been struck by lightning.
What event did we manage to avoid by summoning a storm to delay Skarvench at the start of the book? I remember at one point while we were island-hopping we came across a check for that.

MysticalMachineGun
Apr 5, 2005

Didn't we skip an island or two? Let's see those!

inflatablefish
Oct 24, 2010
I choose to believe that our parrot swooped down into the water and rescued the weasel.

Ratatozsk
Mar 6, 2007

Had we turned left instead, we may have encountered something like this...
Regarding the results of the storm - if we hadn't summoned the storm and attempted to stay on that island, we'd find that Skarvench and his crew landed on the island as well. We can lay low until they leave and then get the same Life Point restoration, or we can try to sneak out/stalk them. If we chose correctly for our skills we can pick up some tidbits on his evil schemes. If we over-extend, then we clash. One particular path to the clash opens up the non-food option for the monkey:

Page 99 posted:

Recognizing its former master, the little animal suddenly slips out of your grasp, bursts from the undergrowth and goes scampering towards him. Skarvench and his men leap up and seize their weapons, instantly alert. Standing rigid with a snarl stamped on his cruel face, he scans the jungle and then his eyes lock on yours despite the cover of foliage. You realize the game is up - he's spotted you. You rise to your feet with a defiant battle-cry as he levels his pistol. Thirty paces separate you - a distance you might cover in six seconds, from a standing start. A bullet can cross it in an instant...

Just as Skarvench squeezes the trigger, the monkey leaps up and gives his wrist a painful nip. He bellows in rage and the shot goes wide, whistling past your ear to embed itself in the bole of a tree. But you have no time to give thanks; within moments the pirates have closed in. The battle is joined, and you and your comrades are fighting for your lives.

If you have both SWORDPLAY and MARKSMANSHIP (and the necessary weapons) lose 7 Life Points. If you have BRAWLING and MARKSMANSHIP, but not SWORDPLAY, lose 8 Life Points. Any other combination of skills is insufficient to save you, and you are quickly slain.

If you are still alive, turn to 23.

Alive is a relative term...

Page 23 posted:

Who can say how long the carnage lasts? Amid explosive gunshots, hoarse yells and the clang of steel blades, your ragged but valiant band struggles to the death against Skarvench and his murderous henchmen.

Eventually the battle shrinks to just you and Skarvench. Crouching behind his cutlass, he weaves and lunges and parries - cocksure and vicious at first, his sneering smile only gradually fading as he realizes you are the better fighter. Then his taunts turn to weary gasps as he struggles desperately to defend himself against you.

You are exhausted too. You gulp at the air like a drowning man, each swing plumbing the last dregs of your strength. But at last the red rage fades. Your enemy lies dying at your feet. Looking up at you as the evil light fades from his eyes, he musters a mad grin and shrieks with laughter. 'So that's your victory, is it, mate? A bitter triumph, I'd say!'

You look around, and now you see what he means. The forest floor is like a scene from a slaughterhouse, your friends lying dead along with the pirates. You stagger, sick at heart. You wanted revenge, but not at this high price.

Skarvench gives a last laugh. 'See you in hell,' he croaks.

He is dead. Your adventure ends here.

The hunger option is as follows:

Page 237 posted:

'Well, Mister Chatter,' says Oakley, settling the little monkey on his knee and producing a pocket-knife, 'it's been an honour to sail with 'ee, but your shipmates are going to have to ask a favour of you now, and it's that most noble sacrifice a bloke can make.'

Rich red light from the sunset glints on the blade, and in a stroke the deed is done. 'Poor little beggar!' sighs Blutz.

'Better than poor us, matey,' says Oakley as he carves you each a hunk of meat. 'Four starving sailors cramped into a jollyboat leaves precious room for sentiment.'

Eat if you wish (you must lose 1 Life Point if you don't) and then turn to 256.

The parrot is just something to lighten your purse. No plot use for it.

A little bit about losing our wand - if I'm not mistaken, the book makes it all but impossible to regain our wand. While there is a spare wand to be found after defeating Ejada, that can only be done with SPELLS and a wand, with BRAWLING ("lift her over your head for a bodyslam", or with SWORDPLAY with the sharktooth sword. (If you dig back to where we picked that up, the shaman references her ['Matya Ejada niyu'] while gesturing towards her upcoming island and stamping on a sand drawing of her. When attacking her with it, she shares some line about "a sword not forged by a man!" in dismay.) But getting back to the point at hand, the only premade characters with SPELLS (Changeling and Warlock) lack both BRAWLING and SWORDPLAY. On the other hand, perhaps we could mark this up to the writers adding replay value to the book and encouraging you to create your own character to navigate this particular point. I guess it depends how generous you're feeling.

MysticalMachineGun
Apr 5, 2005

I'm not feeling generous. That sounds like horseshit :colbert:

CirclMastr
Jul 4, 2010

Wasn't there a codeword you said you'd have a lot to say about in the post-op?

Ratatozsk
Mar 6, 2007

Had we turned left instead, we may have encountered something like this...

CirclMastr posted:

Wasn't there a codeword you said you'd have a lot to say about in the post-op?

Yup. There's the chance to get caught up with the captain of a cursed ship. The mess gives us the chance to grab a few magical items, but also the chance to attempt to break the curse:

Page 179 posted:

It takes no special skill to murder a man while he sleeps, just a callous disregard for life. As Mandrigard's bright red blood drips down onto the floorboards and scattered jewels, you and your three companions stare at one another in the flickering lamplight. You all know the significance of your dreadful deed. Before you were merry rogues — swashbucklers with one eye for plunder and one eye for thrills. Now you are rank villains.

Cramming your pockets with gold and gems worth a king's ransom (add 10,000 doubloons to your current cash) you hurry away from the scene of the murder, up onto the deck where you at last feel a shudder of remorse.

Oakley recognizes the look on your face; he wears the same expression himself. Nodding, he cries, 'If this fresh breeze could only clean my lungs of the stench of butchery - and this rain wash my hands of Mandrigard's blood!'

'Forget it,' grunts Grimes. 'The deed's done. We can never go back to being as we were before.'

Note the codeword Chancery on your Adventure Sheet.

Then, if you have the CHARMS skill and wish to use it to escape from the ship, turn to 236.
If you think you have an item in your possession that might help, turn to 255.
If you have neither CHARMS nor any item, turn to 388.

Lacking CHARMS, we can use SPELLS to summon he who placed the curse, DIONYSUS HIMSELF which leads to surviving a wine-soaked hurricane and waking up in a bar, with BRAWLING and ROGUERY forced into our skillset (max of 4 skills at a time, so we'd be forced to lose others to accommodate.) Lacking SPELLS, we learn that Mandrigard's not really dead, and that we're trapped to sail with him forever through purgatory!

Anyhow, about that codeword (triggers when we enter Leshand):


Page 406 posted:

You are back in civilization. Now you have time to take stock of your harrowing ordeal. The memory of how you behaved at times gives you little cause for pride, and the dour looks of your companions reflect your inner sense of shame. Nor do you have what it takes to be a leader of men; you know that now. Grimes cannot meet your gaze as he shakes hands with you. 'Best we go our separate ways for a while,' he mutters. 'Maybe we'll meet again.'

Blutz is more forthright. 'None of us has come through this business with flying colours, mate. But if we aren't even masters of our own worse nature, how could we ever hope to overcome Skarvench?'

You are reluctantly forced to agree. Skarvench's soul may be as black as the devil's pitch, but your own is hardly spotlessly pure. Perhaps his baleful influence has made you what you are today: no valiant hero, just a fallible adventurer with a sadly chequered past.

So that's it for Down Among the Dead Men. Upon finishing this book, I was left with the impression of an enormous world that really left things open for a reader to tackle the book again and overlap little to none with their first adventure. It also did a much better job than Green Blood in engaging the reader with the impetus driving the main character. Some of this came from the structure of the tale - choosing a form that employed larger tracts of the narrative at the expense of extra passages to allow for revisiting previous locations. Dave Morris did chose to avoid the quasi-hub page mechanics that Jamie Smith employed in the first book of this series. I really like the idea of allowing recursion, but didn't at all feel that it was lacking from this particular book.

While it was mentioned before at the start of this book, it's available on iOS. It's not the same kind of experience you'll get from the Sorcery or Fighting Fantasy apps, but there's still lots of the story we haven't even begun to dig through in addition to truckloads of magical items and folklore to color the world. I'd highly recommend it for the $0.99 asking price.

I'll be starting up another thread the next book for reasons I alluded to earlier. I'll drop a link in here when it goes up and this thread will probably remain open for a bit just for the heck of it. Thanks for reading along!

CirclMastr
Jul 4, 2010

No Android version, no sale. A pity.

Ghostwoods
May 9, 2013

Say "Cheese!"
Thanks, Ratatozsk. It was fun.

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Ratatozsk
Mar 6, 2007

Had we turned left instead, we may have encountered something like this...
Coils of Hate is up and running!

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