Best ff ever 1-10 round 4

[tyrion]

Last round warlock of firetop mountain was eliminated. Or, as autocorrect would have it, Warnock of Firefox mountain.

[kieran]

And so my trilemma becomes a dilemma: the more engaging Island of the Lizard King or the more creative Scorpion Swamp?

I think I'm going to vote for Island by the thinnest of whiskers.

[Wilf]

And I shall keep voting for Scorpion Swamp by the widest of chasms.

[a moderator]

Island of the Regrettable Ethnic Stereotypes gets my vote.

[stevendoig]

Voted for Lizard King again. Nothing much wrong with it, but I reckon it's the least interesting one.

[tyrion]

I think island of the lizard king as well. The only other contender is scorpion swamp, I could play that all day long though.

[schlendrian]

Same dilemma as Kieran, and I know to many this may not be much of an argument, but Island has dinosaurs, therefore Scorpion swamp has to go

[The Count]

The presence of the Bold Brave Beautiful Buxom Bikini Babe, blatantly and brazenly based off Raquel Welsh, is not enough to make me want to revisit  a bland and boring Fire Island 

[vastariner]

Biased in favour of Lizard King as it was the first I read. It's also well-written, Livingstone can do a good prose.

So was thinking it has to be Scorpion Swamp, which is somewhat bitty. But it is clever in that you can revisit locations and have a different text.

Ergo going for Citadel of Chaos, which is, really, a bit of a mad concept. Were I Dire I think I'd be a bit fed up with all that ludicrous activity going on under my penthouse. And him turning out to be a vampire is a bit deus ex.

[Wilf]

Jul 8, 2020 11:18:29 GMT vastariner said:

Biased in favour of Lizard King as it was the first I read. It's also well-written, Livingstone can do a good prose.

So was thinking it has to be Scorpion Swamp, which is somewhat bitty. But it is clever in that you can revisit locations and have a different text.

Ergo going for Citadel of Chaos, which is, really, a bit of a mad concept. Were I Dire I think I'd be a bit fed up with all that ludicrous activity going on under my penthouse. And him turning out to be a vampire is a bit deus ex.

Except he's not a vampire, and the bit about sunlight being a poison to him is information you can pick up in the library, right after you've learned about the combination lock, so it's not technically a deus ex machina either.

[kieran]

Jul 9, 2020 8:21:28 GMT Wilf said:

Except he's not a vampire

As an aside, sunlight being fatal to vampires was never part of the tradition or even early vampire fiction (Dracula for instance has the Count as being at the height of his power at midday). It was invented for the 1922 movie Nosferatu and then passed into popular culture.

For that reason, I always thought Twilight got a bit of an unfair bashing for its sparkly vampires. Seems a perfectly valid interpretation of the mythos to me.

[vastariner]

Not quite - Stoker's Dracula was much more powerful at night. Indeed he was limited in his shapeshifting during the day.

Jul 9, 2020 8:21:28 GMT Wilf said:

the bit about sunlight being a poison to him is information you can pick up in the library, right after you've learned about the combination lock, so it's not technically a deus ex machina either.

But if I recall, the pulling-the-curtains-off is a bit of improvisation, rather than a tactic.

[kieran]

Jul 10, 2020 20:39:39 GMT vastariner said:

Not quite - Stoker's Dracula was much more powerful at night. Indeed he was limited in his shapeshifting during the day

True (apart from at midday) but definitely the idea of sunlight being fatal was not in Dracula or any other vampire story before Nosferatu.
Actually the whole final confrontation with Dracula in the original novel is very underwhelming.

As regards Balthus, you can of course discover his weakness by accident in trying to throw his curtains over him, but someone who has read the book in the library would probably recognise the option as an opportunity to make use of his weakness.