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Post by a moderator on Jul 21, 2014 12:38:27 GMT
There doesn't yet appear to be a thread for these here. Given the lack of activity in the Fantazine threads, I don't think it's worth creating a separate thread for each individual Warlock adventure, but I think it's worth having somewhere to rehost my playthroughs from the old forum that we can discuss them.
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Post by a moderator on Jul 21, 2014 12:52:57 GMT
Since the document in which I'd archived my playthroughs up to Deathmoor includes the Warlock minis, I may as well repost them here. Might even spark some discussion, so I'll spread them out rather than doing them all at once.
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Post by paltogue on Jul 21, 2014 12:58:24 GMT
I see the Twin Sun Desert is located in Khul in the new Beyond the Pit by Andy Wright (who was always a fan of locating it there).
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Post by a moderator on Jul 21, 2014 13:27:41 GMT
So Alasiyan isn't in Allansia? That amuses me.
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Post by paltogue on Jul 21, 2014 13:55:37 GMT
So Alasiyan isn't in Allansia? That amuses me. No, the desert's beside the Wastes of Chaos, as per long time fan theories (to account for the twin suns I presume).
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Post by a moderator on Jul 22, 2014 12:07:21 GMT
It makes sense. But given the similarities between the two names, the fact that the places are completely unrelated to each other just appeals to my sense of humour.
Anyway...
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Post by a moderator on Jul 23, 2014 19:33:26 GMT
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Post by a moderator on Jul 24, 2014 15:40:57 GMT
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Post by a moderator on Jul 25, 2014 23:57:17 GMT
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Post by a moderator on Jul 26, 2014 21:24:17 GMT
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Post by a moderator on Jul 27, 2014 13:45:29 GMT
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Post by a moderator on Jul 28, 2014 13:19:24 GMT
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Post by a moderator on Jul 29, 2014 15:25:25 GMT
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Post by a moderator on Jul 30, 2014 18:12:04 GMT
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Post by vastariner on May 30, 2022 18:21:22 GMT
Quick critique of The Dervish Stone. It's difficult to criticize it fairly because it was a winning competition entry. So the author was probably 11-14 at the time. Plus we were still on 9-10 FF works and the genre was developing. Therefore it/s got some of the non-playtested mistakes; you can restore points before you lose them, for instance, and you could get a major potentially game-breaking item at the start yet are forced into using it at a point where it is not really needed. Plus the right, or best, route looks to be Byzantine and incongruous. Interestingly Warlock 1 suggested a desert adventure for an entry, so we get Star Wars meets Indiana Jones. The ending is particularly derivative. But there are three fun bits that I found intriguing.
One: you get the chance to walk through a pool of light. That was a fun twist on the Deathtrap Dungeon one, it's surely an obvious shoutout.
Two: there is one ending where you Test Your Luck for it. If unlucky, game over. If lucky, then game still over, but it's not that bad an ending, and it's a strong hint that you go back and give it another go, this time with a 5GP bonus.
Three: the aerial combat, though intensely confusing (and with perhaps the most incongruous "winning" option going - you're battling a goblin on the back of a griffin, so you get the chance to nick his boots) is something that could be developed into a terrific game mechanic/sub-quest.
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Post by vastariner on Jun 21, 2022 16:31:42 GMT
Temple of Testing.
Has about the best introduction of any book; great way to bring in the whole potion thing. And I liked the winning para as well, although Crown of Kings being on Titan jars with the Chinese and Tibetan and whatever stuff in the adventure.
The problems with the adventure are...
-it's open door, face problem, bash it, move on;
-it's compulsory to map it because of the unfair "which way did you come from?" questions - heck, I wouldn't be writing it down if I were in there, why should I be forced to now?
-the regen is really there because 200 references is too short for it, and it makes the adventure ludicrously unfair. Bad enough to face (in the ninja) essentially Sk12 St8 and THEN Sk11 St8 with 3 St damage once - but to have to do so again instantly?;
-probably needs a "teleport out" option otherwise they'd kill all their students - maybe with a re-roll option;
-there are too many very dull fights. E.g. 5 Gremlins with max skill 5. Even Sk7 will beat those without much of a problem, but it requires at least (I think) FIFTY-TWO 2d6 rolls to finish them all off;
-the win-or-lose question at the end is STUPID;
-there's no real engagement with the adventure, it really is just going into rooms and bashing.
It's a great idea for an adventure, and there are some fun ideas for opponents/traps. The execution was lacking though, especially the fights.
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Post by vastariner on Jul 14, 2022 11:38:28 GMT
Temple of the Pharaoh: OK, it's Indiana Jones, some of the plotting is neat, but it suffers hugely from lack of detail. E.g. you get an option to investigate corpses. One of which has a camera. It asks you if you want to look at corpse 1, 2, or 3. Erm, which is which?
And it seems a bit counter-archaeological that there is a fully functioning Egyptian temple and the purpose of the adventure is to destroy it...
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Post by Peter on Jul 16, 2022 9:21:33 GMT
And it seems a bit counter-archaeological that there is a fully functioning Egyptian temple and the purpose of the adventure is to destroy it... Haha. Good point.
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Post by vastariner on Oct 19, 2022 8:07:52 GMT
Deadline to Destruction notes:
-high Skill makes most of it a piece of cake. If you start with Super Strength, you don't even need the McGuffin to win with ease, which makes this book somewhat unbalanced;
-playing it with ETS was frustrating because a couple of times you do not have an item to help - YET YOU HAVE A STUN GUN WHICH WOULD HELP IN THOSE INSTANCES THE BOOK SAYS YOU HAVE NOTHING. But I put that down to the constraints of having 200 references;
-the route to the McGuffin is random, pure fluke (and indeed unheroic fluke) to get to it, but then again that's like its inspiration. It's far too copy-FEAR for my liking, better to find another route to it;
-I like the idea that the Dynamo is such a pathetic Johnny-no-mates - comes across as some bedroom nerd that nobody thinks is THAT serious a villain but who manages to find something fun.
It's a pretty fun adventure regardless, the writing makes you want to go on, even if it does suffer the FEAR/CYOA thing of branching off in irrelevant ways (e.g. if you don't take the option to go to the swimming pool, you never hear about a villain that has frozen it).
-the cut the blue wire thing is surely a shoutout to Juggernaut?
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Post by vastariner on Nov 18, 2022 10:46:14 GMT
Rogue Mage notes:
-you have to deduct your TYL points in FF rules, but no such restriction in D&D. UNFAIR!
-the provisions rule is INSANE. You get a few to start and the chance to pick up a couple - but there is only ONE chance to eat ONE provision. Someone did not do the check;
-it's more sandboxy than most adventures. For the PC, the five-finger bookmark makes sense in, say Deathtrap Dungeon, because you would have the chance to think, actually, let's go back the other way. This adventure lets you do that in the choices more than most;
-the downside is a lot of choices are useless (in that they are just paragraphs leading to paragraphs), or very signposted (e.g. pushing the dead bandit into a room);
-you pick up a LOT of useless stuff. GPs for instance are a pension fund;
-the entire premise is illogical. In that there is no hint that this is the sort of mission that could not be sorted by sending a battalion in there. Especially given the mages themselves, who would surely be able to deal with the somewhat minuscule magical threat from Galthazzeh, who does not even need a magic sword to defeat him;
-are the pointless fights to build up D&D XP? SIX fights against Sk3 things are a total waste of energy.
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Post by a moderator on Nov 18, 2022 17:14:28 GMT
Rogue Mage notes: -the provisions rule is INSANE. You get a few to start and the chance to pick up a couple - but there is only ONE chance to eat ONE provision. Someone did not do the check; When this was reprinted in the 10th Anniversary Yearbook, they modified the rules to say that you could eat one Provision in any room after clearing it of enemies. If the Slime had been able to learn, so each successive wave of warriors had a slightly higher Skill, there could have been a hint of jeopardy to the encounter. As it is, it's just a load of tedious rolling and flipping back and forth.
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Post by a moderator on Jun 3, 2023 13:47:33 GMT
The Dervish Stone. you get the chance to walk through a pool of light. That was a fun twist on the Deathtrap Dungeon one, it's surely an obvious shoutout.
Given that this occurs during the Raiders of the Lost Ark-inspired sequence, at the point where the film features a spike trap triggered by stepping into a beam of light, I think it more probable that The Dervish Stone's spike trap triggered by stepping into the light is based on the one from the film than being a deliberate subversion of an aspect of Deathtrap Dungeon.
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Post by a moderator on Jun 3, 2023 14:10:21 GMT
I've been able to salvage some of Per Jorner's reviews of Warlock magazine mini-adventures (plus occaasional comments on the magazines themselves) from a no longer extant discussion group, so here they are:
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Post by Per on Oct 16, 2023 21:30:10 GMT
These should be the remaining ones:
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Post by Per on Jan 2, 2024 17:58:41 GMT
Warlock 9: Fortress Throngard
The very brief background mentions that Sir Falfax has been captured by the evil wizard Throngard (or Throngar, if you look at the magazine cover), so you, Falfax's squire, conceal a knife and a picklock in some unmentionable way and set out to allow yourself to be captured as well, since this is the only way to gain entry into the wizard's fortress... which he named after himself, or is he a noble too? Thus begins an adventure with a somewhat unorthodox paragraph count of 172.
Almost the entirety of it is spent navigating Throngard's dungeon and residence in a sort of "left, right or straight ahead" first-person view, which might not have been such a problem in itself - though for my own part I don't see the appeal - had it been consistently applied. As it is, the adventure often railroads you in some specific direction or past some door, offers an incomplete set of options, has you arbitrarily turn to face a certain way, or forgets or conceals the existence of a door or hazard depending on where you came from. You can absurdly end up standing at the top of a staircase that you wish to descend, but have no good idea how to make the adventure give you the option instead of just killing you. On occasion you are told what happens if you've previously been in a room - mostly this just leads to shuffling off in whichever direction the adventure prefers - but often there's no indication you're not simply supposed to play out the exact same encounter again. As an illustration of how bizarre this often gets, one must imagine each new guard entering the pantry to find the corpse of the previous one, sighing, cleaning everything up and then getting on with forever restocking the shelves (hopefully with infinite bat meat rather than guard-and-chef stew).
At first you find yourself in the dungeons, and though there are some early deaths and other bad things you're likely to fall victim to while working out some of the boxes you must check, you should make it up to the ground floor of the fortress before long. Around that point you might feel you've settled confidently into some sort of graphic adventure ready to go all USE METAL POLISH ON SUIT OF ARMOUR, but that's also where the adventure will escalate its attempts to cut your games short: more and truly random instant deaths, enemies showing up with absurdly high Skill and Stamina scores compared to the guards with Skills mostly in the 5-7 range, and the possibility of being re-confined to your dungeon cell, which need not be fatal but will still require you to go through most of the adventure again, and might make things difficult if you had already taken an item that can only be found once, so unless you have a character with great stats there's little reason not to start over. Often it's entirely arbitrary whether the adventure thinks you should be killed or locked up again, or maybe neither for no given reason. A shopping list of items and other conditions keeps on growing until the end as you might expect. A Skill of 12 will help while exploring, potentially allowing you to uncover one more way to die horribly in some games, but you can win with a middling Skill once you've worked out the one true path.
There are a good number of equipment oddities, though most are easily ignored or ultimately inconsequential. The inappropriately copy-pasted instructions shouldn't say once, let alone twice, that you start with a sword, shield and backpack, and no, you don't get a potion either. It might have been a good idea in 104 to spell out that you retain the knife along with the lockpick. It's a little weird that fighting "unarmed" with a "stout stick" gives you a -2 AS penalty, but the "small knife", which would almost certainly have come with a penalty in a book in which it was a replacement weapon, is functionally equivalent to a sword in combat - well, it is against trained guards, but not, for reasons, against chefs. 3 should modify Attack Strength (or "fighting score", as 2 puts it) instead of Skill, as should 31 and 65. 6 assumes you have either a sword or nothing. The guard entering your cell with food has a cudgel if you hide and a sword if you don't. You can carry a sword, a knife, a penknife, a cudgel, a halberd, a bow, a hammer and multiple stakes all at the same time, but in 31 you can't carry a single stake and any other weapon. 39 presumably means that if you had four meals and want to take the bones, you must drop a meal, although this makes little sense given that you may carry many other things in the bag already. 139 absurdly demands you drop an item to make room for a pack of cards - can I drop one of my indeterminate number of stakes, or is that a weapon? (No, I won't try dropping one of my five swords, that would be _cheating_.) I'm not an expert, but I would think halberds are not the most practical weapons for guarding indoor areas. 105 seems to mean to say you may exceed your Initial Skill if it was less than 12. It seems the rule that you can only eat when instructed to should be applied, though it doesn't make a lot of sense; at least half of the times you may eat, it's because you found food, so it's quite rare that you can actually use that which you carry around, and you can abuse repeating encounters to eat for free multiple times anyway. One might think that even if an adventure has been forced by its own design decisions to allow absurdity, it should at least not encourage it.
Several paragraphs, including 1, point to the following one. 5 should point to 23, not 21. 129 should be clearer that you haven't approached the door yet, as what happens if you turn to 29 makes little sense if you had assumed you just couldn't see into the room because it was dark or something. The transition from 130 to 117 forgets to mention you ran down the entire corridor (and how this gets you past the guards is mostly handwaved). In 83 if you're hit hard enough with a thrown candlestick to knock you out, you suffer no damage, but if it "merely grazes" you, you lose 2 Stamina points. 159 doesn't list a Skill for the Armour, but it doesn't matter much, since you end up re-captured in any case. 169 should say Stamina instead of Skill. It's possible to acquire a huge following of fellow prisoners, then tiptoe about in the fortress as normal, or you can have them killed, then return to collect new ones, or you can acquire multiple sets. It's not obvious why the "off duty room" should be understood to be a deathtrap but the "guard watch room" isn't, or why the off duty people should be perfectly ready to instantly massacre you even though they cannot in 130. It's possible to incapacitate the villain to his "horror", then reach an instant death where he claims to have orchestrated everything that happened (including the loss of his pet dragon, maybe it was a fake or something). Though the art is perfectly OK, fairly normal for the magazine, some large illustrations aren't placed where you might expect them to be.
With its cumbersome movement interface and somewhat vicious and capricious attitude, Fortress Throngard didn't end up being one of my favourite Warlock adventures, although that also had me wondering which ones _are_, and not coming up with any clear answer unless you count House of Hell. Though there are two or three titles I haven't had very harsh things to say about, Ruth Pracy's two offerings just may be the most memorable non-book adventures from the magazine, for their idiosyncratic flavour if not for their technical and structural cohesion.
The rest of the issue: Reviewer Paul Cockburn thinks Rebel Planet is "a bit too complex (too many planets) and lacking in really inventive ideas", but rates it above two Middle-earth Quest books (too many rules, not enough descriptions), a 1-on-1 Adventure Gamebook (unclear rules), and the four Magic Voyage books (short, no rules, continuity errors). Someone in the letters column suggests colouring in FF illustrations with watercolours. Haha, who would do that? Another reader complains about the lack of dungeon crawls after the early titles, yet suggests that books 7 and 8 deserve sequels. Graeme Davis writes an article on magic items in FF, starting with weapons and armour which "both have the same effect – that of modifying your Skill score". Shouldn't that be Attack Strength, or is that how it works in the RPG? Davis also writes up the multiplayer adventure where almost all characters can end up being excluded from most of it if you play it as written (and yet this may not actually change much - the tomb should perhaps not be opened if nobody "survived" to the end of the trials), and then again in the final battle there is limited room to participate. At least Trevor Hammond supplies images of several undead or demonic creatures. "Arkenor & Max" continues to not be very good.
The PDF version has more OCR errors than I remember usually being the case (and just possibly some error listed above is due to this, it probably didn't affect the comic strips though), although it adds a missing reference reported in Warlock 10, just like a partially missing paragraph in Warlock 7 was addressed in this issue's letter pages and has been inserted into that PDF. One paragraph says you "carry on clown", which _is_ in line with what the adventure seems to want to make you feel like at times.
I already reviewed the Yearbook version of Rogue Mage, so there's probably no point in revisiting the magazine version in Warlock 10. Reviewer Paul Cockburn thinks Sword of the Samurai is "not a good gamebook", but is a lot happier with Trial of Champions, even though he doesn't end up talking about the dungeon part of the book at all, just the gladiatorial intro. "Arkenor & Max" ends, but will be replaced in issue 12 by something roughly as questionable. Out of the Pit has a monster beginning with "Grem". The art for Rogue Mage is pretty nice, though there are only three large illustrations.
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Post by Per on Jan 2, 2024 18:18:55 GMT
Actually I may as well repost the Rogue Mage review here even though it's not the magazine version:
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Post by a moderator on Jan 2, 2024 21:44:38 GMT
I'm going to assume the adventure hasn't been altered from its original state (although a cursory comparison reveals that one case of adjacent linkage has been fixed, and the D&D rules have been omitted). Another change is that the potion found on Galthazzeth's corpse in section 114 has been changed. In Warlock 10 it was a Potion of Skill, but in the Yearbook it's become a Potion of Stamina. Cynical types might wonder why the grievously wounded Galthazzeth wouldn't take the opportunity to drink the Potion of Stamina and restore some of his lost health when the hero was distracted fighting the Clone Slime, while the more pedantic readers would perhaps focus on the fact that the Stamina-restoring potion mentioned in the rules is called a Potion of Strength, leaving the precise effect of Galthazzeth's potion in some doubt.
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Post by Per on Jan 5, 2024 22:12:27 GMT
Warlock 12: Deadline to Destruction
This is the official sequel to Appointment with F.E.A.R., from which it inherits the setting, cheesiness, fourfold hint-combining solution, power rules, and related issues, scaled down where applicable and necessary. I'm guessing this isn't what most readers at the time would have expected - at least not before reading the note on page 45 of Warlock 11 - and that the prevailing opinion now is that in most aspects it's a bit less successful than the book it follows up.
At about 40% the size in terms of paragraphs (if you take some redundancies into account), it's to be expected the puzzles shouldn't be quite as convoluted. Where AWF had you chasing three unique clues for each power and additional stepping stones, DtD reduces the number of critical stops and also isn't so wildly branching that you're likely to lose track of how to reach a certain encounter from another. The difficulty is somewhat maintained using other means as the Silver Crusader has many new ways to prove utterly and sometimes hilariously inept. If for instance you thought that the flying brick would be able to hold aloft a car door without taking damage from its "cumbersome weight", you're in for re-education. Nearly all of the villains you fight have double-digit Stamina scores, whereas in AWF this was reserved for mighty enemies like the Fountain Creature or the Creature of Carnage.
There's a bunch of issues with the powers ranging from minor to major. For Super Strength, the instruction to set your Skill to 13 has been lost, so only the instruction to "always fight with a Skill of 13" remains; this may be a deliberate change to address the issue of a strong hero also necessarily being an expert bomb disarmer, or just careless editing. ETS lacks the line about not using weaponry, and in fact you do use a bunch of things that could be characterized as such. Failures to use your power properly or at all crop up with some regularity; ETS seems especially lazily handled, as all too often you're told you have nothing useful and then you are forced to do something stupid or shamble off, even though it should have been possible to think of some halfway applicable gadget, or maybe in some other situation you turn out to have one anyway. (198 seems like it could have been written to forestall this point: "Oh, so _this_ is how useless you prefer to look?") With Energy Blasts and Psi-Powers it's sometimes hard to say when you're supposed to deduct Stamina: In 11 have you begun to use the ability or not? In 100 should you deduct 2 Stamina, given that it lacks the word "additional", or a total of 4, as spelled out explicitly in similar situations in AWF? It's possible to lose the game at character creation, and in fact one character has a 67% chance of being doomed from a blind selection of starting clues. There's no power that doesn't require multiple successful rolls against Skill and Luck in order to win, but one needs several more than the others.
More bugs and oddities, a few of which may be caused by OCR errors: 13 points to 12. 100 should point to 121 and 196, not 21 and 96. 60 probably shouldn't potentially heal your enemy. 130 should point to 61, not 81, but it could have been anything, as it's unreachable. 76 has you weirdly rolling against Skill to avoid taking extra damage from poison. The clue for the Spider in no way explains why it allows you to safely go look for him, and there are other instances where acting in the "correct" way avoids danger for no obvious reason, or conversely doing the "wrong" thing leaves you at some villain's idea of mercy. If you fight the Cuttlefish with Energy Blasts it loses its combat ability (which is unlikely to trigger against Super Strength, so Psi-Powers gets the shaft here). 178 uses extra sections and flipping for something which could easily already have been handled; disarming the bomb is also done in redundant branches; and there seems to be no reason why 74, 91 and 172 shouldn't all be one paragraph. Why is one of the small illustrations seemingly showing you Energy Blasting some pebbles on the ground? Is there a Greek word for the fear of spell components?
Deadline to Destruction is playable, with the baseline functionality of a condensed retread of FF17. If there's a right time to use phrases like "learn zip all" or "hurts like heck" in a gamebook, I guess it could be here. It's just that, like many adventures before and after, DtD more than just the once or twice forgets that it's a good idea to have a consistent underlying narrative, to have some notion of the protagonist's role in it, and to simply make sense. And so we get nonsensical choices, logical headscratchers and inexplicable plot turns. One encounter repeats a scenario from AWF, in which two people were in deadly peril yet even if you failed they weren't said to perish; here, mirroring the darker turn of comics during the 80s, you walk into the scene of a disturbing mass murder, but if you don't immediately become the next victim, it's right back to the usual bumbling antics.
I already reviewed the adventure in Warlock 13, where Cull the Troll notwithstanding someone who I assume is Marc Gascoigne wins the issue with the words "Darren Chandler reveals nothing".
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