[LP] The Way of the Tiger. (Complete)

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Starmaker
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Post by Starmaker »

So, just some nameless guy? Yawn.
When you killed Mandrake the assassin, the priests of Nemesis stripped his belt of illusion that helped him mimic those rare few figures beyond his personal talent.
Why didn't we use it?
The imposter produces a glistening swordstick inscribed with your name and the Rune of Everlasting Sleep. You realize with a sense of growing dread that a single strike from that weapon will kill you outright.
Why didn't we destroy it?

IF Shuriken.
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Avarice
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Post by Avarice »

When you killed Mandrake the assassin, the priests of Nemesis stripped his belt of illusion that helped him mimic those rare few figures beyond his personal talent.
Why didn't we use it?
The imposter produces a glistening swordstick inscribed with your name and the Rune of Everlasting Sleep. You realize with a sense of growing dread that a single strike from that weapon will kill you outright.
Why didn't we destroy it?

Better question: WHO/WHY were these items given to Nemesis priests when avenger himself killed mandrake. They are his.
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angelfromanotherpin
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

At a guess, we didn't take the belt because we didn't know about it; I think this is the first time it's been mentioned. It looks like after we kicked him to death in the face, we just let the Yellow Lotus dispose of the body (and they took it to the Nemesis priests). But yeah, poorly set-up.
If you did not use Inner Force, your opponent's mastery of the ninja arts allows him to perform arrow cutting to deflect the thrown shuriken wide. If you used Inner Force, the power of Kwon is behind your throw, making arrow cutting difficult. The ninja has a Defense of 6 against your shuriken. If you hit you may deduct one die from his Endurance of 14 when you come to fight him.

Regardless, the imposter rushes in on you, a jet of acid shooting forth like magic from his swordstick. Your Defense against this is 10 and you may not block unless you have the skill of Acrobatics in which case you flip away unharmed.

• If you are hit...
Otherwise, choose how best to attack the imposter:
• Tiger's Paw Chop?
• Forked Lightning Kick?
• Kwon's Flail?
• Teeth of the Tiger throw?
Our IF shuriken hits with a 10, doing 2 damage. Very disappointing compared to previous IF shuriken results.
The acid spray misses with a 9.
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Avarice
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Post by Avarice »

At a guess, we didn't take the belt because we didn't know about it; I think this is the first time it's been mentioned. It looks like after we kicked him to death in the face, we just let the Yellow Lotus dispose of the body (and they took it to the Nemesis priests).
The vote to disband the yellow lotus order is BEFORE mandrake makes his move, so how does this setup account for that fact? Even if the magical belt somehow escaped detection, then why did the weapon with which regicide was attempted ends up in Nemesis? Who made that call?

I called the acid swordstick.

Kwon flail never fails.
Also we turn our back to the enemy during the move so thats like minor acid spray protection.
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angelfromanotherpin
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Avarice wrote:The vote to disband the yellow lotus order is BEFORE mandrake makes his move, so how does this setup account for that fact?
Just because the organization no longer has an official existence doesn't mean its members immediately stop being a spy ring with secret members at all levels of the city.
Even if the magical belt somehow escaped detection, then why did the weapon with which regicide was attempted ends up in Nemesis? Who made that call?
Whoever disposed of the body. It's not like Avenger is presented as giving the matter a second thought. Sure, it's sloppy to lose track of the magic weapon with his actual name on it, but there was a lot going on and then a funeral to attend, so it's not unrealistic.
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Post by Omegonthesane »

Blue option
Kaelik wrote:Because powerful men get away with terrible shit, and even the public domain ones get ignored, and then, when the floodgates open, it turns out there was a goddam flood behind it.

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Mr Shine
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Post by Mr Shine »

Always Kwon Flail when available. (Guys who started from book 2 are so cheated.)
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angelfromanotherpin
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

You turn and whip your leg up as you spin, delivering a punishing kick towards your enemy's head. If you succeed and you have the skill of Yubi-Jutsu, you may add 1 to the damage, but you may not combine Nerve-Striking with Inner Force.
THE IMPOSTER
Defense against Kwon's Flail: 6
Endurance: 14 12
Damage: *

• If you have killed the imposter...

The loss of his eye has clearly affected the ninja's whole fighting balance, and for his counter attack he simply tries to stab you with the swordstick. Your Defense against this is 10 and you may block as normal.

• If you are hit...

If you are still alive, will you perform:
• a Tiger's Paw chop?
• a Forked Lightning kick?
• a Teeth of the Tiger throw?
or another Kwon's Flail (return to the top of the paragraph)?
Well, it may be a one-hit kill, but at least it has very little chance of connecting.
We Flail with a 10+1, dealing 6+2 damage.
He sticks with a 9, missing.
We Flail with a 5+1, missing.
He sticks with a 6, missing.
We Flail with a 9+1, dealing 5+2 damage, enemy over.
The Imposter crumples, your last blow a killing one. The rose-crown of Irsmuncast falls from his head, rolling across the marble floor to rest against your foot. You place it on your own head. You also take the gold woven belt, the source of the imposter's mimicry of you. You stand for a moment in the absolute silence of the Throne Room, coming to terms with the enormity of all you have achieved to be back here.

(Avenger has the skill of ShinRen.)
Your exceptional skills of observation detect something not quite right about the imposter: you snap into a martial stance just as he stops feigning death and leaps up, lunging at you with the swordstick. You are ready, dodging aside and snapping his neck with a vicious chop. You double-check he is dead just to be sure.

You pick up the swordstick and then snap in as well with a sharp cry, shattering the Rune of Everlasting Sleep. Never again will Mandrake's deadly weapon be used against you. At last you have been returned to yout birthright as ruler of Irsmuncast. You are about to go and seek out some Palace guards when you hear a commotion coming from the Vestibule.

(Avenger does not carry a Bloodstained Diary.)

It seems that someone is about to enter the Throne Room.

• Hide the body of the imposter behind the throne?
• Pull on the golden robes of the imposter?
• Simply sit on your throne and await them?
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Darth Rabbitt
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Post by Darth Rabbitt »

Gwyneth said she wasn't getting involved in this struggle, and the rest of our allies are too wounded and/or tired to join in now, so I suspect that our visitor is someone in league with Nemesis and/or the late Imposter (probably Lackland, from Imposter's handy expositional monologue).

So I'd hide the body. While they probably figure that the Imposter would take the Orb and Sceptre from Avenger's body (which would leave behind a one-eyed ninja corpse) they have no reason to assume that he'd strip Avenger naked while he was at it. Also they might be able to tell the differences between Avenger's and Imposter's features if the the two are side by side.
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Post by Omegonthesane »

A one-eyed ninja corpse wearing the Imposter's golden robe.

Play dress-up.
Kaelik wrote:Because powerful men get away with terrible shit, and even the public domain ones get ignored, and then, when the floodgates open, it turns out there was a goddam flood behind it.

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Post by Mr Shine »

Put on his robes.
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angelfromanotherpin
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

The tall gaunt figure of Lackland, High Priest of Nemesis, bursts into the Throne Room with a contingent of human and Orc soldiers of Nemesis. He stumbles to a halt as he spots you standing in golden robes over a corpse face-down on the floor. You can see his gaze shifting to your belt, robes and rose-crown, and then to the broken swordstick beside the corpse. A fight breaks out as a group of shieldmaidens led by Force-Lady Gwyneth, with Csaky and Doré aiding them, assault the soldiers of Nemesis from behind.

Lackland hesitates in attacking you as he seems unsure if you are the imposter or the real Avenger. Make a Fate Roll.

(4+2, Fate turns her back!)

You see him start a spell and you leap in to the attack.
Against your repeated punches, Lackland begins an all-out defense with a steel mace from his robes. If you hit him and you have the skill of Yubi-Jutsu, you may add 1 to the damage, but you may not combine Nerve-Striking with Inner Force.
LACKLAND
Defense against Cobra Strike: 6
Endurance: 13
Damage: *

• If you kill Lackland...

If not, then he will not try to hit you with his mace, but instead seek to release his spell. Every time you do not successfully hit him, he casts a dark incantation that reopens one of your old wounds. The asterisk is to note that he need roll for neither attacks nor damage in this case; you lose 4 Endurance.

If you survive, you may then attempt to hit him again at the top of this paragraph.
Egh, autohits? Rude.
We cobra for 8, a hit, dealing 4 damage. (9 left.)
He spells us for 4. (9 left.)
We cobra for 9, a hit, dealing 3 damage. (6 left.)
He spells us for 4. (5 left.)
I begin to regret not doing math earlier, the margin for error here is way less than I thought. At this rate any miss, or any sub-par damage roll, is going to result in our death. I wanted to save Inner Force in case of an endgame test, but I can no longer afford to.
Inner Force punch! for 5, a miss!
He spells us for 4. (1 left.)
Inner Force punch! for 7, a hit, dealing 3*2 damage. Too close!
Lackland lies dead at your feet: the man who helped the imposter steal your throne and almost brought the city to ruin. Force-Lady Gwyneth's troops win their fight against the remaining soldiers of Nemesis and the Throne Room is at last still, bloodstained as it has been time and time again.

'The army has been stood down from its mobilization,' Gwyneth says, and meets you with a steely gaze. You smile as you realize she is testing to see if you really are Avenger. You explain how the imposter was able to fool everyone. 'The forces of Nemesis are leaderless,' she says, 'their priests confined to their Temple and their soldiers to the barracks. Perhaps now the people will start to turn away from them.'

You ask Doré why he is here, rather than resting.

'I could not sit idly by when evil was afoot,' he says, seeming despite his injuries to have lost none of his fervor. 'We encountered Gwyneth and joined her in purging any soldiers of Nemesis from the Palace itself. Apparently Glaivas is with Antocidas securing the gates and so the enemy has been trapped waiting for us.'

Csaky congratulates you on reclaiming your throne. 'I would be happy to arrange an official visit to Serakub whenever you like.'

You thank all your friends and order Force-Lady Gwyneth to open the Palace to leading citizens as before, returning at once to the normal business of governing.
A new day dawns in your great city, the last one of men before the Rift, but you do not greet it in meetings in Star Chamber or ruling upon your throne. Instead, despite your weariness, you climb the secret stairway of your father, marked with the holy symbols of the Catechism of the Redeemer. You stand on the battlements in the bright sunshine, the gentle breeze bringing with it all the everyday sounds of the city below, soothing away all your recent ordeals.

This is your place and these are your people, and you will watch over them as Kwon has watched over you. You look down to the gold threaded belt around your waist – you are now able to walk amongst your people unnoticed should you wish it, with neither your emerald eye nor known face marking you out.

You look east, towards the rising sun and the Rift. You have redeemed Doré and Glaivas from that dark place, and also your city from the hands of an imposter. You vow that as long as you draw breath, the city of Irsmuncast will stand firm against the evil that infests the world.

Once you have finished your fill of the dawn, you prepare yourself to return to the Palace halls for a victory feast with Doré, Glaivas, Csaky, Gwyneth, and your other friends and allies from across the city. Let the Black Widow have her perfidious minions, for in your friends you have such riches that she will never own. You are home.
And that's The End. I hope you enjoyed it. I'll do a final wrap/analysis post later on, including some of the more interesting missed content, and try to answer any questions you might have.
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Darth Rabbitt
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Post by Darth Rabbitt »

That was actually a really good book. At the very least, it made up for the mistake that was Inferno!

I have a lot of questions:

You said there were callbacks to Ninja! Were there any we missed?
What does the Onyx Spider Token do?
What happens if you pray to Kwon or use the Blood of Nil on the Black Widow at the beginning of the book?
What happens at the beginning if we were pursued by the golem or allied with the Spires of Foreshadowing?
What do you come across if you follow one of the GMPC Trio instead of Eris?
What happens if you refuse the man in gold robes' offer?
What happens if you challenge or garrote Honoric? What does he say if you ask why he's where he is?
How do you get Antiocidas' support?
What happens if you visit the Temple to Nemesis?
What does Flash Powdering Imposter do (and was Poison Needles a trap option like we expected)?
What happens if we tried to hide the body?
What happens if we passed the Fate test with Lackland?
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Avarice
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Post by Avarice »

Just to point out -
he will not try to hit you with his mace, but instead seek to release his spell. Every time you do not successfully hit him , he casts a dark incantation
He cant follow through with his incantations if he is hit in the same round.

You almost got us killed for not reading that part throughly
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angelfromanotherpin
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Oh, huh. That's nicely old-school D&D, there.
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Avarice
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Post by Avarice »

If it were indeed old-school he would also trigger an extra attack for casting when engaged in melee.

Im kinda dissapointed the game did not end with us being deified.
It was said that Kwon wants us in the garden of the gods at the end of Book 1 , and dore confirmed that mortals indeed do get deified, as that is also his aim.

For all that avenger went through, he still doesnt qualify?
Last edited by Avarice on Sun Jun 26, 2016 6:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Dr_Noface
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Post by Dr_Noface »

im disappoint that the entire scorpion clan didnt show up to throw down
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angelfromanotherpin
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

This book has a lot of things to nitpick, obviously. I think the whole return to Irsmuncast arc at the end was pretty weak, for example. The escape from the Rift segment that makes up the majority of the book was tense and epic, and I didn't need another sequence where the city is fucking doomed without your constant attention.

Foxglove's treatment was still very problematic, but at least those problems are only narrative and not horribly sexist. Faced with a relatively large number of possible (and highly distinct) states for her to be in, the solution was clumsy and (as it involved magically undoing death) kind of toxic to the setting as a whole. We missed a fair amount of Foxglove content where you get more context for her situation, but it doesn't get much better and her story gets no closure in any case.

Actually, a lot of people get no closure. Did you notice that Glaivas, whose rescue the whole debacle was about, just kind of ceased to exist after Fate sent you home-ish? There are segments we missed where he shows up in Irsmuncast, but in the playthrough we actually got he's MIA, and the adventuring party is MIA in all playthroughs.

I also felt that while Warbringer! had a very nice level of call-backs to the earlier series, this one wallowed in its self-referentiality to the point where it was distracting rather than enjoyable. Where the forces gathering to defeat a common enemy was nicely organic, the spirit-trap full of dead former enemies just felt like a self-indulgent contrivance.

On the other hand, I thought the mechanical end of the book was very solid, probably the most solid of the series. Wrong choices were mostly punished with damage instead of insta-kills, decent heals were handed out at decent intervals, and that led to a game of managed attrition instead of critical existence failure. Also, there was a lot more playing with the combat mechanics, like Amin's low-accuracy but unblockable attacks, the Nykur's multiple swings, and Lackland's AD&D-style combat casting.

Overall, I would say that the book's strengths are greater than its weaknesses, but it still suffers from the dreadful setup it got in Inferno!
You said there were callbacks to Ninja! Were there any we missed?
Yes, in the Fate-passage-trap thing where you fight all the ghosts of boss enemies past, it's possible to run into the spirit of Manse, and if you do and have played Book 0, the spirit of Aiko shows up and garrotes him. It's very satisfying.
What does the Onyx Spider Token do?
You get the OST in the opening if you managed to keep Foxglove with you until the end of Book 6. You can use it to melt the Black Widow's web in the later showdown with Foxglove, without having to take a chance on Eris' unreliable spellslinging. It is, however, easy to lose the OST early by trying to use it on other random things.
What happens if you pray to Kwon or use the Blood of Nil on the Black Widow at the beginning of the book?
Prayer gets you a mangled arm instead of a mangled leg: 4 damage, no punches, no whirlpool throw, no Climbing skill. In the same vein, using the Blood of Nil gets you a mangled face: 6 damage, no Arrow Cutting.
What happens at the beginning if we were pursued by the golem or allied with the Spires of Foreshadowing?
Both of those events establish that the golem Everyman is on some kind of a rampage, which you may or may not have discovered is the result of a dark god hijacking the guy onto a murder mission to target you. With that set up, he shows up to murder you. But since the Black Widow is kind of in the way, he attempts to murder his way through her to get to you, which doesn't go well for him, but does a pretty good job of distracting her.
What do you come across if you follow one of the GMPC Trio instead of Eris?
Following Tyutchev and Thaum is an insta-death. Following Cassandra leads to a tense quasi-alliance that's an alternate path through that chunk of the book.
What happens if you refuse the man in gold robes' offer?
You die. There's no other way out of that trap. The only upside is that the dying mage gives you some cryptic info on what the gods are up to in that moment, which is a little interesting.
What happens if you challenge or garrote Honoric? What does he say if you ask why he's where he is?
He's there because it's the site of his greatest defeat and he can't get over it. If you either garrote or challenge him, he lets you kill him - it seems to be what he wants.
How do you get Antiocidas' support?
You have to offer him money (obvs) and then prove your identity with ninja honesty.
What happens if you visit the Temple to Nemesis?
It's a pretty cool mini-adventure with a number of possible routes and outcomes; it's even possible to kill Lackland there so he can't show up at the end.
What does Flash Powdering Imposter do (and was Poison Needles a trap option like we expected)?
Poison Needles isn't exactly a trap because there's no real downside to it, but he is immune. Flash powder is the super effective option, it makes his acid spray auto-miss and also gives you a bonus on your first attack.
What happens if we tried to hide the body?
That's the best option, it let's you close with Lackland and sucker-punch him before the fight begins.
What happens if we passed the Fate test with Lackland?
The same sucker-punch.

Darths questions covered a lot of the missed material I wanted to, but there are a few left over.
• If you're less smooth in the Temple to Time, you leave with an omega mark, and the result is that after you defeat the Nykur you get sent back in time to fight it a second time. You do get a combat bonus against the critter because you know what to expect the second time around, but it's still a rude surprise.
• You can actually face Mandrake's insta-kill swordstick twice in this book, as his unquiet spirit is in the ghost-trap and has a spirit-copy of it.
• And for the bad ending afficionados, here's what happens if Yaemon gets his revenge on you from beyond the grave:
You feel yourself start to disassemble as though your mind and body were collapsing into pieces. Yaemon grabs hold of you in an iron grip despite this, a feeling of dread certainty amid the chaos. Then all you know is a sensation of falling, then another of searing pain. You have been dragged down with Yaemon to spend an eternity boiling in a lake of blood in Inferno.
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Post by Mr Shine »

Question I didn't ask about Ninja! as I figured it might come up in Redeemer!: What happened to the guy who didn't help Singing Wind?

Also, other than the side benefit of extra heals for us at the same time, was rescuing Hengrist useful in some way?
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angelfromanotherpin
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Mr Shine wrote:Question I didn't ask about Ninja! as I figured it might come up in Redeemer!: What happened to the guy who didn't help Singing Wind?
If you don't follow him, he's beaten to death by the Scarlet Mantis. If you do, he's murdered by a spider-demoness.
Also, other than the side benefit of extra heals for us at the same time, was rescuing Hengrist useful in some way?
Yes, the Golden Hourglass he gives you grants a legitimate death-rewind if the imposter magic-murder-sticks you after feigning death.
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Post by Avarice »

Is the feign death without shin ren an instant kill without the hourglass?
In that line of thought - So Solstice was , in the entirety of the series, about as useful as a hole in a bridge and will continue to be an eyesore for the full duration of his life.

My only solace is that dump i voted we take on his desk.
Last edited by Avarice on Tue Jun 28, 2016 11:15 am, edited 2 times in total.
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angelfromanotherpin
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Avarice wrote:Is the feign death without shin ren an instant kill without the hourglass?
No, you get a chance to stop him, then he makes an attack you can block, and the iterated odds you'll actually die are very low.
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