2) Down Among the Dead Men - Solution

[sylas]

DOWN AMONG THE DEAD MEN
SOLUTION
(no Skills, best ship, Beastmaster build)


Begin with 10 Life Points (LP) and 10 Doubloons. This path will see you through to victory relatively easily. It is the only ‘zero Skills throughout’ path for the adventure.


Look in the sailmaster’s cabin. Take the toolkit and monkey. You don’t have any of those. Steer west for Port Leshand.

You don’t have Wilderness Lore. Lose 4LP. You don’t have Seafaring. You don’t have Charms – record Detrude. You don’t have Folklore. Turn loose the mermaid. Tell her to depart. Stay on your course.

Delete Detrude and record Peccant. Shut Oakley up. Lose 1LP. Call out to the ship. Go aboard. Ask about the treasure. Explore the ship. Take the butcher’s cleaver. You have a toolkit to repair your boat. Delete Peccant. Help yourself to some treasure. You favour items which look magical. Take the conch-shell horn and thundercloud fan. You don’t have Folklore. Use an item. Use the butcher’s cleaver. Lop off a hand! Lose 1LP and Agility. Steer straight ahead.

You don’t have Chancery. Restore 3LP. Visit the chandler’s for supplies. Buy a parrot (you don’t actually need it but I thought it would be funny to have several animals on your person). You have completed your business in Port Leshand. Head for Selenice.

Retore 3LP and gain 5 doubloons. Buy from the peddlar. You don’t have Streetwise. Buy a pocket watch and weasel. Enter the tavern. Help the scholar. Fight with your bare hands. Lose 1LP. Record Horal. Tell him you want to buy a ship. You have a pocket watch. Lose 3LP.

You have a conch-shell horn. Board the coracle. Say you seek a ship. You have an item that might do the trick. Use your monkey. You have the ship Calypso. Record 5 stars beside it.

Restore 2LP. You have none of those. Tilt the whipstaff to starboard. You have Horal and a pocket watch. Use the thundercloud fan. Unlimber your canons. Move out of range. Lose 1LP. You have a weasel. You have no combat skills – lose 5LP. A tough fight but you outlast Skarvench, cleavering him in two and emerging victorious, a pirate that saved the Queen.

[Charles X.It]

One of my favourite parts about this gamebook is the nuances. There is an ending where you can achieve victory, but it costs you everything, and your nemesis is laughing at you as he dies. If you don't act like a good gentlemen, you get the codeword Chancery and you lose. This is for me what makes it one of the better gamebooks in the series and indeed in general, and better than the more linear and bland Green Blood.

[sylas]

Jul 29, 2021 22:06:01 GMT Charles X.It said:

One of my favourite parts about this gamebook is the nuances. There is an ending where you can achieve victory, but it costs you everything, and your nemesis is laughing at you as he dies. If you don't act like a good gentlemen, you get the codeword Chancery and you lose. This is for me what makes it one of the better gamebooks in the series and indeed in general, and better than the more linear and bland Green Blood.

Green Blood isn't bad as the first book in the series but it didn't quite get the balance of storytelling and gameplay right, whereas all the others were far more forgiving and captivating. Down Among the Dead Men, Necklace of Skulls and especially Heart of Ice are as close to perfect as you can get for such a short series.

[a moderator]

Reproducing Per Jorner's review from the no longer extant gamebooks Yahoo! group:

VR2: Down Among the Dead Men

The pirate instalment of the hit-and-miss Virtual Reality series is set in an alternate world where Enya's "Carib Blue" just wasn't such a great hit. Perhaps the reason for this is that when someone managed to translate the Irish lyrics they turned out to be an endless ramble about penguins, but I guess we shall never know for sure. It's also a world where magic wands work alongside pistols and where ghostly apparitions may line the side of a vessel just the same as rum-drunk privateers. I must admit that at first I was slightly doubtful towards the genre mixture of pirates and fantasy; I needn't have worried, though I still find it slightly odd that several names of ancient real-world deities, places and civilizations have been included when the most obvious contemporary ones have been switched out.

Anyway! Once upon a time there was a pirate captain called Skarvench who was a mean and crafty old vulture. He particularly delighted in pressing well-adjusted sailors and scoundrels into service alongside his willing crew of black-hearted villains. One day Skarvench hatched the scheme of schemes: to magically assault and abduct none but the Queen of /E/n/g/l/a/n/ d/ Glorianne herself and sell her off to the dastardly King of /S/p/a/i/n/ Sidonia. This plan was to be carried out when next Her Majesty arrived in the colonies, guarded by a fine fleet or warships. What arcane aces might the scurvy sea dog have up his grimy sleeve? Meantime, a group of four stole away in a jollyboat seeking to escape his piratical clutches and maybe avert the impending removal of royalty. One of these would-be heroes was YOU, meaning it makes even less sense to go on with this in the past tense.

The story follows the outline on the back cover: first you make your escape to civilization, then you need to acquire a ship and crew, and finally you go after the villain. The first two thirds at least are impressively constructed to balance freedom and challenge: depending on your choice of routes and actions, different skills will come in handy, different resources can be acquired, and different options will open up. Towards the end of the book you are perhaps less likely to be sunk or skewered than you are to run aground on one of three successive bottlenecks which are navigated using items and/or codewords.

I have two gripes concerning these bottlenecks. The first one is perhaps not a proper gripe, as the bottleneck in question is quite logical: it's just so trivial to get past it if you know the conditions ahead of time that it may feel correspondingly unfair and pointless if you are initially caught off guard. A more culpable case involves either making use of special items even if you should not reasonably be able to anticipate the results, or the natural world responding oddly to your character's knowledge - if you've learned that the coconut dropper tree drops a coconut every day at five o'clock, then it drops a nut on the head of your enemy, while if you don't, apparently either it wasn't a coconut dropper tree, or it wasn't five o'clock, or coconut dropper trees don't actually drop nuts on schedule (as any half-civilized person would know).

DAtDM doesn't have a background and plot quite as compelling as those of Heart of Ice, but it's still way ahead of most gamebooks in these aspects and others. Encounters are inventive and interesting and often connect to some piece of lore. Options are logically presented, the ruleset is put to good use, most things you can possibly complain about would not stick out in any other book. Your companions are entirely believable and grow on you quickly, offering tidbits, tension and banter as appropriate. The system for determining the durability of your ship is well handled (maybe apart from the fact that it may be less likely to be of much relevance) and allows for one of the cleverest applications of choice and consequence I have seen. But the writing alone is really worth the proverbial price of admission. This is a rich and solid gamebook that should be played by everyone, especially those who've been put off by the rushed and flimsy stuff we know is out there.

Leo Hartas' interior art is a mixed bag. He's good with objects - and maps, obviously - but not so good with people: the natives drawn for 41 look fairly ridiculous, and the mermaid in no way improves on the image conjured up by Morris' words. Ejada is in appearance, attire and demeanour the opposite of what she should be like. Mortice however is an exception in this department. The picture for 26 fails to represent "unceasing rain", or any kind of storminess for that matter, whereas the sea in the picture for 172 has far too many waves to make a good "pane of glass". The giant should probably be standing in the water instead of squatting improbably. The Jewel of Heaven is said to be a brigantine, but it is drawn with three masts, three gun decks and a three-storeyed sterncastle, which is at least one too many of each.

* According to the introduction you've been a prisoner of Skarvench's since "your first voyage to the New World", but in the adventure there are references to your daring escapades all over the region, and several people you meet treat you as a respected intermittent visitor rather than a pirate slave (the Streetwise skill will afford you a spy network, no less). Similarly, Oakley is at one point said to have been an "honest merchant" before he was press-ganged by Skarvench, while everywhere else he's characterized as a "swashbuckler with one eye for plunder and one eye for thrills" along with the rest of your band. It's not entirely clear where the book draws the line between "honest scoundrels" and "rank fiends", but it seems to be somewhere between attacking ships and whacking nuns in the backstreets of Port Leshand.

* Many readers will probably have an inkling where the Folklore option in 105 is headed, but once there it reads more like it was written for Cunning.

* 215 is pretty silly if you go there from 154. Why are you suddenly cut off from your boat in 253? Why are you suddenly _not_ cut off from your boat in 41?

* Why can you be forced out of hiding due to starvation in spite of having and keeping provisions, when lack of food on the sea "only" costs you one or two Life Points?

* The explanation in 333 is off as icebergs are made of compressed snow, not frozen sea water. Also, in 389 Grimes suggests you go look for icebergs for fresh water ("Penguins too, if luck's with us"), but in 352 he is the one who claims icebergs are made of salt water.

* In 403 the Queen's visit is a big secret, but when you arrive in Leshand shortly thereafter it is common knowledge. 202 says the Queen plans to bide in Stamboul during the hurricane season, but according to the map that town is controlled by the Sidonians, who "would dearly love to capture her" as the very next sentence reminds us. I don't think it's ever explained just why the Queen is "touring the colonies" in the first place. Couldn't they send her a bottle of rum and a postcard?

* 209 is funny if you misread "plants" as "pants". Maybe everything is funny if you misread something as "pants".

* 136 points to 135. What the heck, Dave.

* There's an issue with sets of mutually exclusive resources, the upshot of which is that 263, 282 and 315 are unreachable and that if you arrive at 110, 167 or 203 you lose since none of the options could be open to you; 167 especially indicates this was not merely done in order to avoid spoilers.

* 137 should probably say to note Peccant if you already have Detrude.

* A shark and a dolphin are at one point referred to as "the two great fish".

He subsequently added the following:

A couple of additional bug notes for Down Among the Dead Men: Firstly, the basilisk is said to be a long-range cannon, but when it makes an appearance it is some sort of deck cannon. Secondly, the Roguery skill has five uses in the book, which is not a lot even before you consider that most of them are obscure or not terribly useful (although something similar is probably true for Streetwise). There's one thing that's particularly absurd, though. In one location you can either gain or lose the Roguery skill, but there is only one use for the skill after this point (and, as an aside, only one use you could have had before that). This means the only result of losing your ability to move stealthily is being unable to forge a document, while the only Roguery-related consequence of being infused with "exuberant madness" is that you become a master forger. Apparently no Gloriannic captain will suspect that your "p1r4T3 l33t3r oF h4XX0rz m4rQu3" is actually an enthusiastic counterfeit.

[CharlesX]

  Although I like Down Among The Dead Men I think the Skills system is rather imperfect. The skills are too similar to each other, with Roguery, Cunning and Streetwise covering similar areas, while Folklore and Wilderness Lore suffer from a common problem in gamebooks that as Lore skills they are neither as exciting\interesting nor as helpful as other Skills. I suspect though a more sophisticated system would not only have been less fitting for the series but perhaps wouldn't have been as smooth.

  

The Roguery skill has five uses in the book, which is not a lot even before you consider that most of them are obscure or not terribly useful (although something similar is probably true for Streetwise). There's one thing that's particularly absurd, though. In one location you can either gain or lose the Roguery skill, but there is only one use for the skill after this point (and, as an aside, only one use you could have had before that). This means the only result of losing your ability to move stealthily is being unable to forge a document, while the only Roguery-related consequence of being infused with "exuberant madness" is that you become a master forger. Apparently no Gloriannic captain will suspect that your "p1r4T3 l33t3r oF h4XX0rz m4rQu3" is actually an enthusiastic counterfeit.

My understanding is successful forgery is 90% bluff (getting people to give your 'work' passage without bothering to check) with some of the most notable\'best' forgers being below-average students. The most famous one the Hitler Diary had terrible writing and even got the initials of AH mixed up with FH on the binding. I agree technically it should be applicable to Cunning and Streetwise as well but just defending the way its written (for gameplay, that is).

   Perhaps having pieces of wood nailed to your feet means you cannot do a sketchy run-away if your rogue scheme backfires?   

[vastariner]

Jun 5, 2023 19:36:23 GMT CharlesX said:

  Perhaps having pieces of wood nailed to your feet means you cannot do a sketchy run-away if your rogue scheme backfires?   

Didn't bother Jesus, he just levitated.