[LP] Fighting Fantasy 46 - Tower of Destruction (Take 2!)

[SGamerz]

You stand in a large, dimly lit basement chamber. There are some light beams here, and nothing else - until, startling you, a tiny creature apparently made of ice pops up out of the floor and grans something you are carrying! The little thing only comes up to your knee and looks like a wizened gnome or gremlin. But the pest has stolen one of your Possessions! You take a swing at the Ice Mite as it scuttles off into the shadows. Roll two dice for each of you and add your SKILL scores to find your Attack Strengths (the Ice Mite has a SKILL of 8). If you have the higher Attack Strength, turn to 211. If the Ice mite has the higher Attack Strength, turn to 109.

Ice Mite 17, Tallpipe 21. Tallpipe wins!

You take a swipe at the Ice Mite and smear the little horror all over the floor. It disintegrates into ice crystals - but, even as you look down at them, they slowly begin to reassemble themselves! You take back the item the Mite stole from you. (However, if you met the Ice Mite earlier and it took something of yours, you do not recover the first item you lost!) This gloomy basement clearly has nothing of interest in it, so will you now enter:

The red beam?
The blue beam?
The beam of pure darkness?
The green beam?

What colour now?

[angelfromanotherpin]

Green, unless it leads to the theft reference again, in which case: Red.

[Omegonthesane]

Agreed.

[SGamerz]

You find yourself standing on what you guess must be the middle floor, since there is a very light ice ceiling above and a dimmer light coming from the floor below. From this small chamber a passageway leads into a series of interconnecting rooms which have some kind of equipment in them. You could search these, or you could enter one of the three teleport beams here. Will you:

Search the rooms you see, unless you have already done so?
Enter the red light beam here?
Enter the yellow light beam here?
Enter the purple light beam here?

No green light here this time....

[Darth Rabbitt]

Purple wasn't available before so go with that.

[SGamerz]

Purple wasn't available before so go with that.

Just to make sure you're aware the option is there....are you sure you wish to skip searching the place?

[angelfromanotherpin]

Search.

[Thaluikhain]

Yeah, second search.

[SGamerz]

The rooms are obviously those of a herbalist and alchemist. His herbs, spices and rare compounds are frozen into uselessness and, bizarrely, his instruments, flasks and retorts appear to be made of ice! The burners he used have rainbow-swirled ice stems, and one of them still crackles with a little feeble Coldfire after all these years. A determined search here takes some time, so you must eat a meal while you are here. You find only one item of real use, a Blue Potion in a translucent ice flask. The liquid is very oily and hasn't frozen; oddly, the flask has a pair of pointed ears etched on it. If you take the Blue Potion, add it to your Possessions. Now, will you:

Enter the red light beam here?
Enter the yellow light beam here?
Enter the purple light bean here?

Taking the potion unless there are objections.

I'm still counting Darth's vote for purple beam next. Any objections to that?

Adventure Sheet:

Name: Jefferson Tallpipe
SKILL 11/12 (12 in combat w/ Magic Sword)
STAMINA 14/24
LUCK 10/12
Honour: 9
Equipment: Sword, Leather Armor, Lantern, Backpack, Blanket, Climbing Gear, Tasrin's Ring, Potion of Stamina x2 (restores 1/2 of Initial STAMINA), Crowbar, Bag of Salt, Crossbow (w/ 6 bolts), Magic Sword (+1 SKILL unless it's already 12), Shield of Warding (deflects missile attacks on roll of 2-8 on 2D6), Blue Potion
Gold: 9
Provisions: 8/10

[angelfromanotherpin]

Purple time.

[Darth Rabbitt]

Would have changed to search before but I'm still up for purple.

[SGamerz]

The beam chills you as you enter it, and it hurts like crazy! Deduct 2 points from your STAMINA for the pain and shock. The beam has dumped you outside the Tower of Airy Light. You can re-enter at ground floor level or find somewhere else to search in the Ice Palace.

So it turns out that we found the exit. But we have the option to enter again as long as we don't leave.

Do we want to go in again?

Going by the ground floor again actually gives us the option to 2 sections that we've already visited:

- Blue beam from ground floor takes us to the middle floor of laboratories.

- Green beam from ground floor takes us to basement (roll for theft by Ice Mite).

- Green beam from basement floor leads to middle floor labs as well

- Red beam from basement floor dumps us out of the tower and does minor damage (this section we just visited)

- Purple beam from middle floor does the same.

- Yellow beam from middle floor takes us to the basement.

We haven't tried:

- Red beam from middle floor

- Blue and dark beams from basement floor (must risk Ice Mite again if we want to try those)

Adventure Sheet:

Name: Jefferson Tallpipe
SKILL 11/12 (12 in combat w/ Magic Sword)
STAMINA 12/24
LUCK 10/12
Honour: 9
Equipment: Sword, Leather Armor, Lantern, Backpack, Blanket, Climbing Gear, Tasrin's Ring, Potion of Stamina x2 (restores 1/2 of Initial STAMINA), Crowbar, Bag of Salt, Crossbow (w/ 6 bolts), Magic Sword (+1 SKILL unless it's already 12), Shield of Warding (deflects missile attacks on roll of 2-8 on 2D6), Blue Potion
Gold: 9
Provisions: 8/10

[angelfromanotherpin]

Try red from middle.

[SGamerz]

Going back to the middle floor.....

You find yourself standing on what you guess must be the middle floor, since there is a very light ice ceiling above and a dimmer light coming from the floor below. From this small chamber a passageway leads into a series of interconnecting rooms which have some kind of equipment in them. You could search these, or you could enter one of the three teleport beams here. Will you:

Search the rooms you see, unless you have already done so?
Enter the red light beam here?
Enter the yellow light beam here?
Enter the purple light beam here?

Entering the red beam takes us to:

You are back at the ground-floor chamber of the Tower of Airy Light. Will you:

Enter the blue beam here?
Enter the green beam here?
Think better of it md search another part of the Ice Palace?

Turns out that it just takes us back to the ground floor. Seems like there's no way to get to the top floor via the middle floor. Looks like we're left with:

- Blue beam from basement floor
- Dark beam from basement floor
- Give up and search elsewhere

Do we want to risk the Ice Mite again to try and get to the top floor?

[angelfromanotherpin]

The sprite seems like a small enough risk. Let's try the black beam.

[Darth Rabbitt]

Black beam for sure.

[Thaluikhain]

Yeah, try the dark beam.

[SGamerz]

You stand in a large, dimly lit basement chamber. There are some light beams here, and nothing else - until, startling you, a tiny creature apparently made of ice pops up out of the floor and grans something you are carrying! The little thing only comes up to your knee and looks like a wizened gnome or gremlin. But the pest has stolen one of your Possessions! You take a swing at the Ice Mite as it scuttles off into the shadows. Roll two dice for each of you and add your SKILL scores to find your Attack Strengths (the Ice Mite has a SKILL of 8). If you have the higher Attack Strength, turn to 211. If the Ice mite has the higher Attack Strength, turn to 109.

Ice Mite 16, Tallpipe 18. Tallpipe wins!

You take a swipe at the Ice Mite and smear the little horror all over the floor. It disintegrates into ice crystals - but, even as you look down at them, they slowly begin to reassemble themselves! You take back the item the Mite stole from you. (However, if you met the Ice Mite earlier and it took something of yours, you do not recover the first item you lost!) This gloomy basement clearly has nothing of interest in it, so will you now enter:

The red beam?
The blue beam?
The beam of pure darkness?
The green beam?

Entering the darkness...

You now stand in a spacious chamber at the top of the Tower of Airy Light. For a moment as you entered, you thought you were in a huge auditorium, like a theatre; you could see a stage, huge red curtains, the familiar laughing and crying mask-faces to either side...then the apparition is gone. Instead, in this high-roofed and grand chamber stand ice sculptures and busts of Elves, the sculptures animated and expressive, almost lifelike in appearance. There are many more sculptures running round a gallery which you could reach by climbing a balustrade of blue ice, or you could go elsewhere by entering one of the light beams in this chamber. Will you:

Roam around the gallery upstairs, if you haven't already done this?
Enter the red light beam here?
Enter the blue light beam here?
Enter the white light beam here?

After all the trouble we took to get here, I assume you'd want to check the gallery instead of just leaving....

Whoever crafted the sculptures in the gallery was a master of his art, and you linger for a moment, appreciating his work. You stand before the largest, with the name Mealin etched below the noble face, admiring it especially and wondering if this was the craftsman himself.

"I was indeed the craftsman," the bust says to you. You step back startled. "Do not fear, I, who am speaking to you now, am long dead. My spirit will be at peace, although others here will lie uneasy in their cold tombs. They have old sins to pay for or errors which cost them dear. Zeverin's apprentice lies, enlombed in an undying madness, in the Black Tower; bringing him death would be an act of charity. He is just one of the imprisoned souls unhappy in death. Down in Elokinan's catacombs, where only holders of the Ice Keys can enter now, good spirits still dwell; but there are others whose spirits have become twisted into bitter, terrible forms. If you have any pity, stranger, that is where you must look. For myself, I confess that I cared not; I had my own concerns. But I might have something of use to you, something to help you distinguish what is real and what is illusion. If you are intelligent enough to be worthy of it, that is."

I'm assuming the ghost we fought in the Tower of Black Ice is the "apprentice" which he refers to, not the human that we rescued from the sphere. Which explains why we gained Honour from winning the fight.

You suddenly find yourself back on the floor below the gallery; hanging in the air is a small item of jewellery that you can't make out properly from here. Below it is a monolith of ice, which has appeared in the room, on which eight clock-faces are etched. The first seven have a hand chiselled on them, but the eighth is bare. The first seven run in the following sequence:



You have to work out the eighth and final symbol which would complete the sequence correctly. "I do not help those without wits and skill," Mealin s voice echoes one last time.

If you solve the puzzle, you will know which position on the clock-face the hard should be pointing to, and how many arrow-heads there will be on the hand. Multiply these two numbers together, and then tum to the paragraph with that number. If you can't solve the puzzle, and want to give up, turn to 300. If you have a Potion of Flying and want to use that to get to the jewellery, turn to 238.

Okay, the scanned picture's clarity isn't very good, and frankly I need to squint a bit even when I was reading the hardcopy book to make out the number of arrowheads, so for those who have trouble seeing those from the picture:

The first clock (left to right) on the top row has only 1 arrowhead.
The second clock on top has 4.
The third from top has 2.
The 4th from top has 2.
The 1st from bottom row (left to right) has 5 (this is the hardest to make out.
The 2nd from bottom has 3.
The 3rd from bottom has 5.

And this is only the first of many complicated puzzles in this book (thankfully not all of them are graphic-based)! Anyone can solve this one?

[angelfromanotherpin]

Eight o'clock, four arrows. Or more accurately, twenty o'clock and four arrows for a product of eighty. So, four (16) o'clock and five arrows is equally valid.

So the first thing I did was make a little chart to see if any obvious correspondences leapt out...

#	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8
Hour	10	5	3	8	10	8	2	?
Arrows	1	4	2	2	5	3	5	?

...and the first thing that leaps out at me is 1-10-1 and 5-10-5.

I then spent a lot of time wrestling with other possibilities. This included plugging the various sequences into pattern finder apps to confirm that there's no simple progression, which suggests that the variables are chosen arbitrarily to produce desired outputs (which presumably do form a simple progression).

Eventually, I got around to thinking about multiples of 10, because dial 1(x10) = 10 (o'clock) x 1 (arrow) and dial 5(x10) = 10 (o'clock) x 5 (arrows). And dial 2(x10) = 5 (o'clock) x 4 (arrows)...

...but 3 o'clock x 2 arrows doesn't equal 30. Except in military time! After that little epiphany, it was easy.

#	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8
Hour	10	5	3(15)	8(20)	10	8(20)	2(14)	8(20)/4(16)
Arrows	1	4	2	2	5	3	5	4/5
Product	10	20	30	40	50	60	70	80

What bothers me is that there isn't any discernible pattern for when the clock is on AM or PM except by deriving it backwards from the solution.

[Thaluikhain]

As soon as I saw that, I knew I'd end up going "Nope, but it'll look easy once someone else does."

And also "How does our character know what a clock is?", didn't expect to add 24hr time to that.

[Darth Rabbitt]

As soon as I saw that, I knew I'd end up going "Nope, but it'll look easy once someone else does."

That's me with 90% of the puzzles in these books.

Go with Angel's solution.

[SGamerz]

What bothers me is that there isn't any discernible pattern for when the clock is on AM or PM except by deriving it backwards from the solution.

Once I thought of using the 24hr clock time (which admittedly took me waaaay longer than it did you....I'm talking weeks), it's actually not too hard to reason that the shorter hands stand for the AM time while the longer hands represent PM.

I will say that the way the text presents the puzzle is misleading, though. It leads one (well, me, certainly) to try and approach it in the wrong sequence because it implies that you need to actually figure out the number of arrowheads and the time first in order to find out which section to turn to. In fact, the player can really only figure out the first 2 numbers by getting the section number through the pattern of the first 7 clocks and then using that section number to reverse-engineer for those figures. And of course, the player really doesn't even need to know the number of arrowheads and the time on the 8th clock, he can get the section number and just turn straight to that:

You etch the correct symbol on to the clock-face and the silver amulet falls into you hand. Gain 1 LUCK point. Add the silver amulet to your Possessions, and make a note of the name of the Elf who, in some sense, has given it to you: Mealin. Now it's time to leave by entering one of the light beams. Will you enter:

The green beam?
The blue beam?
The red beam?

The good news is that this is usually considered the second-most difficult puzzle in the book, and we've solved that.

The blue beam takes us back to the basement while the green one dumps us out of the tower with some minor damage. The red beam leads to a section we haven't yet been to. Do we still want to check the new section? Just leave and take the paltry damage? Or try to get back on the ground floor via the basement (risking another encounter with the annoying Mite) to get out without taking damage?

Adventure Sheet:

Name: Jefferson Tallpipe
SKILL 11/12 (12 in combat w/ Magic Sword)
STAMINA 12/24
LUCK 11/12
Honour: 9
Equipment: Sword, Leather Armor, Lantern, Backpack, Blanket, Climbing Gear, Tasrin's Ring, Potion of Stamina x2 (restores 1/2 of Initial STAMINA), Crowbar, Bag of Salt, Crossbow (w/ 6 bolts), Magic Sword (+1 SKILL unless it's already 12), Shield of Warding (deflects missile attacks on roll of 2-8 on 2D6), Blue Potion, Mealin's Silver Amulet
Gold: 9
Provisions: 8/10

[angelfromanotherpin]

Once I thought of using the 24hr clock time (which admittedly took me waaaay longer than it did you....I'm talking weeks), it's actually not too hard to reason that the shorter hands stand for the AM time while the longer hands represent PM.

My last job used military time (with decimal hours, no less) otherwise I doubt I'd have got it. The length of the hands thing is a nice touch that I obviously missed altogether.

Anyway, try the red beam, exploration is the name of the game.

[Thaluikhain]

My last job used military time (with decimal hours, no less).

Decimal hours?

Also, second red beam.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Decimal hours?

Each hour was divided into 100 36-second minutes.