Mr Shine has already answered part of that. It's a monster encounter, and 'Shauca' is apparently the name of the monster, at least according to the local language. When you encounter it in combat, it's listed as just 'Shaggy Shambler'.pragma wrote:How do we get a Shauca claw/scar?
This is what it looks like:
It you stay and fight the Shauca, and manage to kill it, you get its claw. Other than selling it for money, I think the only time it's actually checked is when you meet Al-Bakbuk at the small town. If you have the claw, one of the local strong guys challenge you to test your mettle:
It's not clear whether the Shauca is an established monster who's called by a different name in this book or just a new invention by the author. There are a few monster encounter where the PC isn't told the name of the thing he's fighting, which is to establish the sense that he's in an unfamiliar world full of creatures he doesn't recognize.
The most obvious is this one:
Similarly, this encounter, from the descriptions, seems to be a group of beetle-riding Dark Elves in their underground territory, but they are simply named 'Dweller Below':
Anyway, none of these flavourful monster encounters are essential (and some I'm sure lie on the wrong/doomed paths) and are best avoided.
Again, this was partially answered already:pragma wrote:What's the secret of the ruby ring? (Even though losing it turned out to be a good trade for the Vizier's robe.)
So yes, if you have the ring, you have already lost the possibility of getting to the best ending. As for the 'right person' who helps you find out about its secret...that person actually doesn't show you how to do it. You find out by accident. That is when you want to offer it to Al-Bakbuk as a gift. You will rub it to clean it before giving it away (just like Aladdin's mom did for the magic lamp) and the genie shows up.Mr Shine wrote:The ring you get only if Reinhardt dies in the initial encounter, (by yours or Mencius's hands). If you meet the right person he'll show you how to summon a genie. Since you will never learn to switch this is how you defeat Mencius.
The genie asks you to make your wish. If you wish for him to bring you to Reinhardt (remember, he's in Mencius's body when he died, so the PC probably didn't know he was dead), the genie teleports you back to the place where you killed him/found his corpse and tells you the truth...then attacks you so that you can go to where dead people go to reunite with him.
If you overcome the genie in combat (it has SK 12 and ST 20 though, so it's highly unlikely), you make your way back to the town and find Al-Bakbuk again and give him the (now non-magical but still valuable) ring to exchange for the vizier's robe. If you didn't wish for the genie to bring you to Reinhardt, then you can use it to teach you the language (upgrade from basic kal to kal). You can also tell it to reward Al-Bakbuk for you, in which case the storyteller becomes very rich and will also give you the vizier's robe out of gratitude. In both cases, you get to keep using the ring. But after you reach Kallamehr, the genie will disappear (telling you that it's your last wish without any prior warning) after you make one more wish. The best thing is to save him for the endgame with Mencius, but you can also use it to help you get all the items you want at the market, or let him deal with Mencius' skeleton army (but then you will need something else for Mencius himself!).
The genie isn't powerful enough to beat Mencius, but after Mencius wins the magical duel, he will be sufficiently weakened enough that you can finish him off with a silver bullet. But since, as Mr Shine mentioned, you won't know how to switch bodies if you have the ring, there's no way you can know how to get your body back (not to mention once Reinhardt is dead, you consider the quest to be a failure anyway.) Note that even on this path, you will need to trap Mencius from fleeing his Tower with mirrors to beat him and go back to your world (kiloling him breaks the spell that transported you here). That can't happen at Rangor Tower, so going there guarantees a bad ending where Mencius would escape even if you manage to weaken him via combat/bullet/genie/etc.
The genie isn't the only other to defeat Mencius. The Golden Hex is used very similarly to the genie: in this case, Khasim is summoned by it and helps you fight Mencius, but he isn't powerful enough to win. Note that you only gain this item if you tried to assault Khasim upon meeting him, but didn't kill him (but also didn't get his full help). In this case, you won't learn the language from him, and you won't know his name, and you won't have his amulet for protection, so again, this item means that you have missed the best ending. But after Mencius kills Khasim, you likewise has the chance to hit him with a killing shot with a silver bullet.
There's also a third kind of bullet that can be found in the book, and it's in the form of a diamond. It can be found in the above-mentioned ROC's nest after you survive that encounter. The diamond bullet will auto-kill Mencius, but again, that lies on the path where you can't possibly switch bodies and get your own back. Even if you defeat Mencius, you are forever stuck in his old frail body (without his magic) and have to end your magehunting career.
The ruby ring is actually an artefact that belonged to the Riddling Reaver. There's a chance of you encountering him, and if you speak to him, he will magically teach you the local language like Khasim did. If you still did not know that Mencius is still alive (whether in your own body or in Reinhardt's) he finally clues you in on what really happened. Of course, again, this encounter is only available after Reinhardt is already dead, so no good ending. The Reaver will also take the ring back from you, so you can't use the genie.
It may sound fun, but it's not a good item to have if you want to get the best ending. As already been said, you will find this if you didn't immediately rush at Mencius at Reinhardt to stop his spell right in the beginning. This means only the 2 of them get transported, and you are left behind. You find Mencius' book and try to invoke the same portal spell to follow them a few days later.pragma wrote:The book of craft sounds fun, where is that?
It's actually a dangerous attempt, with only 1/3 chance of success, 1/3 chance of you getting destroyed by the attempt, and 1/3 chance of being discovered by the castle guards and then tried by the locals for performing illegal magic rituals (which is also a game over). Even if you succeed, the process ages you, so while you arrive in Titan and keep your own body (which is how you still carry all your original equipment in this case), you still take a -2 SKILL penalty for the rest of the game due to the aging effect. You will also find Reinhardt already dead (no way to prevent it), probably due to the wound in his stomach without Mencius' magic to keep the body alive. Of course, the PC wouldn't know that it's Reinhardt, so will be spending the rest of the game trying to find his old patron's son until somebody wise him up (like the Reaver). He may also arrive in Kallameher still completely clueless, and Mencius will appear to him in Reinhardt's body and try to trick him with gifts (including a cloak - the magehunting treatise warns against accepting cloaks as gifts from mages). Accepting the gift is a straight gameover.
If you are carrying the Book of Crafts, Mencius won't give you back your pistol in the box (since you would still have it), but the box will be empty, as he wants the book back and demands that you return it to him.
Speaking of which, trying to attempt a body switch when he give you the box will succeed....but right before the switch, Mencius will use your sword to kill a random passerby in the centre of the city square, which leads to you getting arrested and tried for murder (Game Over).
So the Book is a way to mark the fact that you are still in your own body instead of Mencius' and Reinhardt's. It's not an item you can actually use. The only point where it works to your advantage is when you confront the skeleton army at the Omnipresent/Rangor tower. Mencius will call off the skeletons because he wants you to bring the book to him.
I can't give a definite answer to that, but it's possible that the author intended there to be some sort of penalty or reunion encounter, but wasn't able to implement it, because the codeword 'missing' was never checked. It might not even be the only one that was introduced and never checked. This book overall gives me the impression that the author got a little overambitious and wasn't able to squeeze in all the things he wanted within the 400 sections.pragma wrote:Why were there no consequences for Reinhardt going missing after our imprisonment?
Another possibility may be that the penalty was what I suggested for the ambiguity involving the silver bullet: maybe we were meant to still have access to Reinhardt's items while we were in Al-Haddar's story, but if Reinhardt were missing we'd have been denied that.
The endgame checks whether Reinhardt is dead (the shackle's key, which you automatically pick up when you find him dead in Mencius's body or kill him yourself at the beginning, or the codeword 'lost' mark this fact), but not whether he's missing. Presumably, he still gets transported back once Mencius dies and his spell is broken, so it doesn't matter if he's with you at the time.
I think most of what has been said above covers most of what I was going to bring up. The magehunting methods given in the book actually do work for the most part, but as most of you already realize, majority of them doesn't allow you to target 1 specific mage, only whoever that is close in proximity. More than one of them actually leads you to Khasim. Training a dog can actually be useful during a few scenario (as you might have guessed, we'd have named him 'Kurt'), but it's not essential to winning and cost quite a bit of money (both to buy the dog and to buy the goat meat to feed him with). It appears that while he's sensitive to the scent of wizard, he isn't aggressive to wizards like Khasim, so a possible explanation is that the training method only makes him aggressive to evil/dark magic practitioners. He'd also be able to help you identify that Saba isn't a real wizard. Speaking of which, here's the last picture I prepared that hasn't been used above. It shows Saba if we encounter him in a different section than we did:
Al-Bakbuk, for all his generosity, can turn out to be spiteful if you didn't give him any parting gift. He won't show any hostility, but instead of Al-Haddar, he directs you to a far more nastier brother, Al-Fakfik, who would then trick you into entering an arena fight, then disappear after you survive the fight.
If we made the wrong choice or lose any battle in Al-Haddar's story (btw, choosing bird over snake wasn't a wrong option, it just led to a different branch in the story, and would in fact give us a clue - the wizard would have turned into a Raven to escape, the same creature we have to choose outside Omnipresent Tower), we'd "wake up" from the story next day. I think we'd be allowed to try the story again the following night, but since we gain 2 crosses from each failure, we wouldn't be able to retry more than once. After gaining the 5th cross, we gain the codeword 'fame', after which it'd be game over, as we'd drawn enough attention to ourself and giving Mencius more than sufficient time to prepare and come after us, leading straight to the ending where he turns us into his new pet rat.
There's one particular path where is actually possible to get back to our own bodies before the endgame, but I don't think that particular path had been properly accounted for by the author (one of the things I mentioned about the author being too overambitious and not managing to incorporate everything he planned). It involves an encounter with what the PC can only recognize as a "Scintillating Globe". I believe that's a Fetch, which the FF monster manual Out of the Pit describes as a ball of living magical energy that feeds on other magical energy. If it wins the combat against you, it doesn't kill you, but sends you straight back to your own world (presumably draining all the magic from the spell that teleported you there). This counts as a failure/Game Over as you can no longer track Mencius down (and also lost Reinhardt...and possibly your own body as well).
Each time you hit the creature, the book checks you for the Book of Crafts. Presumably it can also feed on the magic from the book, but more importantly, having the book means you are already in your own body, so nothing special happens. But without the book, there's a 50/50 chance that it'll dispel (maybe because it drained the body-switch spell from your body) the body switch, and sends you straight to Kallamehr, in the middle of the palace, where Mencius was still in the process of negotiating with Asiah Albudur. Since the Fetch encounter happens on a path where you can't possibly have learnt advanced kal language, you can't communicate with her properly, and she has you thrown out, but you do get your body back (and Mencius is presumably transported into the body that was fighting the Fetch). Like I said, the later part of the book doesn't seem to have made allowance for this particular branch, though. However, I can still see how this particular branch cannot lead to the good ending: Mencius longer carries the original silver bullet on your body (though you still get the pistol back), and the one you recovered from his wound is now lost to you as well, so the game is again doomed.
I think that's it for the stuff I can think of...there are definitely more, since there's so much content on the "wrong" paths. Again, if there's any particular stuff you want to ask about, I will try to answer those. But otherwise, that's it for this thread. Thanks for playing. The next LP, Masks of Mayhem may be up in about a week or so, as I'm rather busy the rest of this week.
