[Let's Play] Fighting Fantasy 48 - Moonrunner

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SGamerz
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Post by SGamerz »

Silent Wayfarer wrote:The Blood of Baron Milescu protects you from losing all your Special Skills when Gruul magics you, but the impact of actually losing all those skills can be completely avoided by the right choices. I mean, pretty much none of the choices leading to the good end require special skills at all, just Stamina checks, and the blood doesn't help with that.

The Hand and the Skull are the most important, but the Skull is a huge pain in the ass when sneaking or stealing. The Hand is quite crucial because it blocks the Rennur keyword, which turns you back into a Moonrunner and Gruul's loyal slave.
Exactly, by that point only the skull and the Hand are really important, because none of the other 4 penalties are anything more than minor inconvenience. You don't need to go through anymore combat or Special Skill checks if you make the right choices (the other 3 penalties are just minor losses in Skill, Stamina or Luck), so none of this are likely to kill us off. Also, since we have the Mask, we could have used it to survive a Special Skill check even after suffering from Gruul's Skill-stealing spell. Added to the fact that the Chain, the Shroud and the Mask all bring extra benefits, the Blood was the obvious one to skip if you know what to expect.

I did consider leaving the Skull till the last due to the hindrance in stealing/stealth......but then I remember that we didn't pick Sneak or Sleight of Hand at the beginning, so we're unlikely to vote for those kind of options anyway. With our skillset, we're fairly safe from the skull.

Oh yeah, and that "secret meeting" side-track during the Mask quest....that was totally a trap, but I was almost tempted to go for it, because that resulting encounter was one of the coolest ever in FF. We meet some killer machine that impervious to physical damage, and the only way to kill it is to lure it to somewhere high where it's metallic body will attract lightning bolts that blast it oblivion. But it wastes more time, and we'll lose the chance to get the mask, which I figured we might need if we run into a skill check that we don't have.
Last edited by SGamerz on Wed Jul 02, 2014 2:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Darth Rabbitt
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Post by Darth Rabbitt »

OK, that secret meeting was the next thing I was going to ask about.

Is it damning of this book that the side quests/diversions sound more awesome than the main quest? Fighting Jason Voorhees Conrad Zaar and invincible death machines sounds like the most metal thing ever.

And now I'm curious if there's a list of the different kinds of spellcasting in FF. I'm not listing magic items or magic weaknesses because that would literally take forever. There are at least Magic Spells (this appears to be the standard form of spellcasting, basically Wizard casting,) Spell Gems, Scrolls, Black Pearls, Marrangha, Elven Magic, and now Notura. If we count Sorcery then there's also the Winds of Magic.
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SGamerz
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Post by SGamerz »

Vault of the Vampire (Book 38) has a path where the main character has the chance to obtain a dead wizard girl's ring which enables him to cast 3 1-shot spells (randomly out of 6 possible spells).

In Phantoms of Fear (Book 28) you play a Wood Elf who casts spells via a Power stat. This book also involves a lot of segments where the character spends time in dreams and gets engaged in "dream combats" where the Power stat also acts as Stamina.

In Legend of Zagor (Book 54) you get to pick from 4 different starting characters. All 4 of them start with a Magic point stat, but only one of the is a Wizard. The non-wizard characters can only cast spells when they find magic scrolls containing the appropriate spells, but they will spend the same amount of Magic points the Wizrd will use when they cast the corresponding spells (all listed in a "Grimoire" at the beginning of the book). The wizard gets to cast spells witout scrolls.

Keith Martin has written several FF books where the main character encounters something late in the adventure that allows them to pick 3-4 out of a list of spells which they only get to use once. Vault of the Vampire and the aforementioned ring was one of them. In Stealer of Souls (Book 34) and Tower of Destruction, the adventurer meets a powerful wizard/ High Elf who teach them the one-shot spells (with the excuse that the adventurer isn't really a wizard and it takes years to master non-one-shot spells. The one-shot spells are "forgotten" after used).
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angelfromanotherpin
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

In The Riddling Reaver, (fuck, I should LP that at some point) one player has the option to be a caster, taking stat penalties in exchange for a 2d6+6 MAGIC stat, which is both the number of spells they can cast per adventure, and what they test against on 3d6 to see if their spell works or goes wrong in a humorous way. They prep spells from what I think is the Citadel of Chaos list.
Silent Wayfarer
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Post by Silent Wayfarer »

Darth Rabbitt wrote:OK, that secret meeting was the next thing I was going to ask about.

Is it damning of this book that the side quests/diversions sound more awesome than the main quest? Fighting Jason Voorhees Conrad Zaar and invincible death machines sounds like the most metal thing ever.
The secret meeting is a trap - it takes you to an encounter with an Obisian Predator, which is a metal-skinned killing machine which is completely invincible (it doesn't even have a Stamina score) aside from plot devices. It's also a reference to the Predator, I believe; wristblades were prominently mentioned.

And yeah, the parts we missed were pretty metal. Though the plague village section had a plague-infested Jewish moneylender front and center, and he tries to kill you by infecting you with his disease.
If your religion is worth killing for, please start with yourself.
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