[Let's Play] Rider of the Black Sun

[Omegonthesane]

So for minimal reverse engineering, if we go back to the fight back here and pretend we just jumped out the window instead of mucking about with mirrors, that'd get us back three (3) vitality between the two hits we took in the fight and the bullshit punishment we took for being unsubtle with the Moon Sickle. Idk if that and 2 Karma takes us to defeating the Riujem instead of, well, not that.

[Darth Rabbitt]

I like that plan.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Better. With (effectively) 4 health and 2 Karma (which effectively becomes +2 health), the enemy kills us in an inflexible 6 rounds.

Even assuming we hit every round (and with the sun hitting every other round), that's 9 damage we do out of the enemy's 10. Mathematical loss. And we're not likely to consistently hit every round even with the spine's bonus stacking.

Dual-wielding makes a win theoretically possible, but the odds are bad. Iterated probability just above 11% according to my fight simulator.
Still, if you're happy bouncing off this guy about eight times like a video game boss before we get a win, I'll go for it.

[pragma]

That seems like the only way forward without rewriting a lot of history.

[Omegonthesane]

Yeah, save scum the overtuned final fight and see if we can survive having eaten the logical consequences of it playing out in our favour.

Is the 11% any higher if we dual wield with the captain's sword as a base, or do we just have no chance of defending at all?

[angelfromanotherpin]

Nope. Our defense mod is baseline +13, requiring an onerous 17+ on two dice to defend against the monster's starting Attack, with the odds improving to a still-impossible 13+ by the end. Getting an extra +1 makes defending possible towards the end, but hurts our hit chances enough to about halve our winrate.

Anyway, I'm not going to write out however many fights it takes to stomp this guy. God, the first boss fight with Calderal was actually really cool, and this is just a pile of inexplicably-big numbers.

F71     Exhausted, you drop down on your knees before the motionless sun-burnt body of the demon and shake your fists at the sky while the wind gnaws at the charred remains of the godless shape, dispersing it over the ocean. Finally, you recognize Calderal's body, completely petrified, as it slowly emerges from the crumbling demon.

You step closer, lifting the body of the Shadow Master to grant him his final honors. You believe you see contentment in his craggy face before he, like the rest of his body, dissolves, sifting through your fingers. A great emptiness opens up in you. A singular aimlessness.

> What remains? <

If Kyrna is dead, turn to F132.
If she is alive, turn to F122.

F122     Overhead, Kyrna is circling with wings spread. She has apparently not let you out of her sight throughout the entire battle.
Check under special notes to see which box you have crossed off for Nephatari.

If you have saved her, turn to F170.
If she has been killed, turn to F167.
If she has sacrificed herself, turn to F31.

Nephatari suicide-bombed our party back in chapter 2, which counts as killed.

F167     Your divine mission is over, and you try to detach your mind from the body of the young man known as the Shadow Child. But his dark burning thoughts will not let you go on your way! He can think only of the pain and death of his beloved Nephatari.

Ungovernable fury is unleashed, driving your mind to the edge of consciousness. The last thing you are aware of before going mad is the echo of voices coming from the restless contenders lurking in the blackness of the underworld. They have found a powerful new ally, a new Riujem that they can use for their goals.

END ‡

Sorry, it turns out we got locked into a bad ending five chapters ago, because Swen Harder is what happens when you boil down Steve Jackson into concentrate, then go back in time and inject it into Steve Jackson as a child.

I particularly like how this insanity-level rage and grief born out of, apparently, love(?) appears out of nowhere. You'd think if we had feelings for Neph, we'd have spent a single thought on her since chapter 2. Or if we had a simmering rage it would have been reflected in our literal rage meter. Or that if we were going to have a mental breakdown about this it would have happened, y'know, closer in time to when she turned her body into shrapnel and drove her bone fragments through our organs as an expression of hatred for the murderer of her father.

Anyway, it's bad, but that's a legit ending. We're given a 1/12 score for our run, which is still a higher score than I'd give this book. It has some cool parts here and there, but overall it is actively dickish and also fumbly. We got a dozen skills/powers, and yet they so rarely get called upon, and when they do it's as likely they do nothing or are actively harmful to use. I think the Rage meter is cold forgotten about after chapter 3. The amount of expository lore-babble it pulls out of nowhere to justify whatever is happening in the moment is astonishing; and I still have no idea what Calderal was trying to accomplish or why (as far as I know, the entirety of our motivation for stopping him is Seren telling us that the gods wanted us to, and Seren was pretty sus). I'm also still completely unclear on the distinctions between the Shadow Child and the Kesra and the body we're attached to and us and all that.

I am still morbidly curious enough to do my own run where I collect all the Fate Points and achieve what the book thinks is the golden ending. Maybe I'll find one or two more cool ideas worth knowing about. I'll post a summary of what I find in this thread.

I'd like to hear you guys' thoughts; was this as irritating and confusing for you as it was for me? Things you especially liked or disliked?

Character Sheet

Stats:
STRENGTH: 12, DEXTERITY: 9, VITALITY: Dead* (0/5)
KARMA: 0, RAGE 2/5

Weapons (max 3):
1: Moon Sickle of the Keșra +5 (Add 20 to a reference to use its power and reveal yourself. Spend Karma for autohit/+1 damage)
2:
3: Nergal's Spine +2 (special: can be combined with another weapon for combined bonus or a second attack.)

Clothing:
Head: Sun Mask of the Keșra +2 (Spend 1-2 Karma for autodefend/+1 VITALITY)
Body: Empire Uniform +1
Legs: Soldier Boots +1
Disguise: Fisher Coat

Special Items (max 12):
1: Figurine of the Ancients
2: Signet Ring
3: Lump of Gold
4: Captain's Doubloon
5: Pyramid Neckband
6: Kathum's Soul

Utensils (max 6):
1:
2: Damaged Eyepiece

Abilities:
2: Sharpened Senses
3: Free Breath
4: Mental Focus
5: Magical Lore
6: History Knowledge
7: Good Fighter (+2 Melee Attack)
8: Power of the Full Moon
9: Immune to Sunlight
10: Shadow Walk
11: Power of Xorox
12: Keșrani

Money:
13 Shekels

Kyrna
Vitality: Battered (3/4)
Rank: Familiar (3/5)
Saddlebags (Empty)

[Omegonthesane]

I can imagine a world where they actively get points for original world building, but not the way they actually did it.

Vaguely curious if any of that garbage can be blamed on the translation, but I'm honestly not super invested in any of this.

[Darth Rabbitt]

It's confusing, but not sure how much of that is a translation issue, how much of that is a "if we got all the Fate Points it would make more sense" issue, and how much of that is just poor writing. This ending is absolute bullshit though. This character who died really early in the book and whose death did not appear to impact the player in any way (resulting in me literally forgetting about her existence) actually leads to a random bad end.
As for questions, the big one that comes to mind is "how much less bad is the ending if Neph sacrificed herself or survived?" A more minor one is "how does the book vary if you got the different ring from checking player gender as female?"

[angelfromanotherpin]

The ending if she sacrificed herself is very similar, except that except that your madness is based on overwhelming hatred of Calderal instead of losing Neph, and the implication is that your existence as a Riujem is bad because it will be unpleasant and not because you're essentially replacing Calderal. 1/5 stars.

If she lived, you're still operating under a mysterious curse, but your Ugarith host gets a happy reunion with Neph and Kyrna and you're able to safely detach from him and go about your existence. 4/5 stars, and a hint to nudge you towards a better ending which is presumably the 5/5 one.

As far as I can tell, the gender thing makes no actual difference. The occasional player-gender-check references result in implications that the spirit attached to the Ugarith host is masculine or feminine, but it's pure fluff. Not implementing it would have been strictly superior, saving some references and being more inclusive of non-binaries.

[Thaluikhain]

Ok, I've been following this from the beginning and still have no idea of what has happened or why. We are a monster, but secretly learn to be good and fly a dragon and go back in time and...something?

angelfromanotherpin could literally have been lying about this being a book and been making things up as they went along and it'd make no difference to me at all.

Thanks to angelfromanotherpin for running this, but I think this is by far the worst book I've ever been in a let's play of.

[pragma]

I kind of liked this one, which is apparently an unpopular opinion. Comments:

• I thought the writing section-by-section was interesting, and many of the decision points had outcomes that you could anticipate from context. Though, I confess that things made less and less sense as the book went on because lore piled up and the set pieces got tripper.
• I was highly motivated by fate points: there seem to be lots of suboptimal paths through the book, and the presence of better routes kept me curious.
• I agree that the lore was mostly just-in-time nonsense, though it did allow the book to grow from modest to epic scope.
• The mechanics of items required interesting judgment calls.
• The mechanics of combat and skill checks mostly did not. I think the book could have ditched skill checks and weapon statistics entirely and everything would have felt better. Maybe some hidden weapons on other paths would make the choices more interesting, but I think they could have just scattered +1 strength rewards around with similar effect.
• The special abilities were undercooked. Getting to choose your own superpowers was fun, but the execution of using them was remarkably bad.

Bottom line: I liked the treasure hunting, some of the aesthetics of the prose, and many of the individual decision points. They were certainly less arbitrary than Masks of Mayhem.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Replay Report, pt 1

Prologue:
You can actually talk to Nephatari and the text makes it clear that there's immediate chemistry between you! The problem is that this requires you to not do the gamebook thing of acquiring every possible item presented to you, and so is only really possible on a very cognizant replay.

Chapter 1:
On replay, this chapter actually changes my relationship with the book, because if your goal is to collect all the Fate Points, it quickly becomes clear that this book wants you to do a lot of exploring and replaying to do so. The chapter's flowchart is unusually elaborate by gamebook standards. Many suboptimal paths have decent clues towards optimal ones, which is nice. Also, finding the Fate Points introduces key elements (like Kesra-hood) earlier, providing much-needed setup for the later payoffs.

Chapter 2:
By comparison to chapter 1, this is very short and very linear. The golden path involves foiling Neph's assassination attempt and convincing Calderal to spare her, but the problem is that you don't find out it's her until after a crucial decision point, so you don't have any particular motivation to interfere (since you might well think that enemy agents in the Ningal Tower are a good thing). So again, this is only possible with the benefit of hindsight. Everything to do with Nephatari only makes any sense from the perspective of a replay.

Chapter 3:
At this point it has become clear that Premonition is the MVP ability. It gets called fairly often and provides actual significant benefits. This chapter also has two things to say about Fate Points, both bad. The first is that some Fate Points are hidden behind very poor decisions (like using your full-heal item to treat an NPC's seasickness) so that you will only find them if you're desperately trying every option. The second is that some Fate Points are gated behind other earlier Fate Points, so getting them is a snowball effect.

You probably forgot, but there's a whole mini-chapter of this book you only get to play on a replay. You enter the viewpoint of the hot redhead Keeper who helped us in Leenhaven, and she does a lot of intel-gathering that can generate hints for later in the book. She has cool magic that can make her invisible and erase memories to super-spy it up and is actually a lot more fun to play as than the actual PC. But the book rewards... not using your cool magic so you can spend it at the end of the mini-chapter to buff the PC. The decision that you get the best result by being the least awesome and having the least fun is baffling to me. Smells like Catholicism.

By the way, most of the Fate Points we missed come with Dex buffs, and the paths to a couple of them come with better armor. On the optimal path, fights are easier because you aren't struggling with getting hit nearly so often. Taking the achievement-nerfs of stat penalties, wound penalties, and missile instead of melee skill are basically free. Instead of auto-hitting, you hit on a 3+, but in exchange you also wind up defending on like a 3+.

Oh, the top reward of the mini-chapter is a non-one-use Utensil that trivializes most combat. It seriously just does one auto-damage per round to your enemy. Using it is, so far as I can tell, the only way to get the best victory against Aonus, where he gives you his awesome sword. If you keep it to the end, you can use it to contact his shade in the afterlife and get 'Assistance' in the last fight.

Chapter 4:
This chapter is extremely linear. (Chapter 3 was actually moderately sprawly.) My only new takeaway is that not only is the mirror power a trap, so is everything to do with it. Getting the hand mirror so you cna make profitable use of it later means missing other valuable items. Fighting the Xorox at all is a mistake unless you want the mirror power (and using the mirror power successfully later locks you out of the golden ending). Unfortunately, skipping the Xorox means choosing to spend time groping around in the dark when you're supposed to think there's an enemy nearby; it's another thing that only makes any sense on a replay.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Replay Report, pt 2
Chapter 5:
This chapter's also short and linear, which is a shame because it's one of the most concerned with actual dragon-riding. The book is named Rider of the Black Sun, but the amount of time and business you get on your dragon is actually pretty low.

Chapter 6:
The shortest chapter yet. Almost completely linear, except that you can fuck up and skip about half of it if you're trying for a speedrun.

Chapter 7:
The time travel excursion gets kind of bonkers.
          1. You can encounter Aonus in the past when you both choose the same general location to shadow your past self from.
          2. At one point to avoid boredom, you can harness the pull to return to the future to skip over a couple hours of waiting.
          3. If you use the Fate-Point-provided superior vessel for Kathum's Soul, the Idol we found in the Prologue, his soul becomes a semi-physical external body that fucks off to do its own thing until the finale.
          4. There's a whole thing where you can preserve Kathum's corpse so that his soul can re-enter it at some hypothetical future point. You collude with his embalmer to hide the body in an unused sarcophagus, then substitute your mummy-wrapped self so that there's still a body to be put on his pyre, and the ruse only works because Kathum's successor is an asshole who specifically ordered his remains to be disrespected in private. The substitution is completely unnecessary, because Kathum specifically points out that nobody's experienced the death of an emissary before; the embalmer could say his body evaporated into sparkles mid-procedure and nobody would know that wasn't supposed to happen. And all of it is irrelevant because Kathum's body being intact or not never comes up again.
          5. There's a chance to interact with a figure called the Oracle and for a moment I was convinced we were somehow going to tell them future events so that they could become the predictions of 'The Oracle of Kabeth' that have started all these chapters. But it's an unrelated oracle, and the predictions remain a completely uninteresting device.

Chapter Xtra:
This is the chapter you only get to if you made it to the second-highest rider rank. It's basically a rampage where you use your dragon to try to wipe out as much of a military holdout of Calderal's army as you can. You can just rampage through it and have a good time, the descriptions of Kyrna going ham on the redoubt are both entertaining and empowering. But if you want the last rider rank, you have to solve the attack as a logic problem. A very good chapter, I would not have gated it so severely.

Chapter Finale:
So, two things. First, if you're on the golden path, there's a lot more help that shows up. Kathum, Aonus, Nephatari, and Kyrna all help you out in the final battle one way or another. The Calderal-Riujem has some extra stages we didn't see, and is the only enemy that's at all challenging on the Golden Path. Instead of being a punishing slog, the last fight actually feels great, an epic and difficult but very winnable confrontation. You even get to see Calderal freed from his possession, and he seems like a genuinely okay sort.

Second, in order to get best ending, you have to set up a solar eclipse. This sucks. First, you have to set a potentially-significant number of fate points on fire to get to the New Moon, which also gimps your most special weapon. Then you have to actively sandbag in at least one fight in order to set the timing up right. It demands, once again, the kind of absolutely counterintuitive actions that you would only take if you were trying everything Groundhog Day-style.

Oh, third thing, there's a mechanic where you use a mini-flipbook animation in the corner of some pages to resolve something. It's a very cool use of the physical gamebook medium.

Chapter Epilogue:
This is a bizarre wtf moment. It goes back to the Rigem group we saved from the sandworm, and someone kills them all except for the boy we brought back from the dead, and then abducts that boy. It's interspersed with a bunch of poorly-explained lore, and is plainly a setup for some sort of a sequel rather than wrapping up any of the many dangling threads from the actual plot. As a follow-up to the happily-ever-after mood of the finale's ending, it's upsetting and I wish I hadn't read it.


This book gets more points for having cool ideas in it than I thought. And I remove some of my scorn because Chapter 1 teaches you that the book expects and rewards exploration. But it's still not good. Many of the ideas are badly implemented, and 'encourages exploration' shouldn't go as far as 'requires you to do actively stupid things.'

[Darth Rabbitt]

At this point it has become clear that Premonition is the MVP ability. It gets called fairly often and provides actual significant benefits.

I assume that Sharpened Senses is the least useful given that it never really helped us despite several moments it seemed like it should. Of the others which would you say are the best choices?
Same goes for like History, Warfare, Magical Lore, etc.

There's a whole thing where you can preserve Kathum's corpse so that his soul can re-enter it at some hypothetical future point. You collude with his embalmer to hide the body in an unused sarcophagus, then substitute your mummy-wrapped self so that there's still a body to be put on his pyre, and the ruse only works because Kathum's successor is an asshole who specifically ordered his remains to be disrespected in private. The substitution is completely unnecessary, because Kathum specifically points out that nobody's experienced the death of an emissary before; the embalmer could say his body evaporated into sparkles mid-procedure and nobody would know that wasn't supposed to happen. And all of it is irrelevant because Kathum's body being intact or not never comes up again.

This is kind of amazing in its irrelevance.

This is a bizarre wtf moment. It goes back to the Rigem group we saved from the sandworm, and someone kills them all except for the boy we brought back from the dead, and then abducts that boy. It's interspersed with a bunch of poorly-explained lore, and is plainly a setup for some sort of a sequel rather than wrapping up any of the many dangling threads from the actual plot. As a follow-up to the happily-ever-after mood of the finale's ending, it's upsetting and I wish I hadn't read it.

Secret Lorcan and/or "man in the shroud" origin story? Probably not because it's two unrelated authors but I'm going to say it is until/unless one of them does more than sequel bait.

Speaking of DestinyQuest, how would you rate this compared to Legion of Shadow?

[angelfromanotherpin]

The trained powers I would rank as follows:
1) Premonition: Gets called a fair amount, actually does valuable things.
2) Mental Focus: Gets called a fair amount, actually does semi-valuable things.
3) Free Breath: Rarely called, actually does valuable things.
4) Sharpened Senses: Rarely called, does almost nothing.
5) Mind Over Body: Called once for good value, otherwise actively tries to kill you.

The skills I would rank as follows:
1) History Knowledge: Doesn't really do anything, but it's also free in that if you take it first you get another skill as well.
2) Warfare: Minor benefits.
3) Magical Lore: Does nothing.
4) Diplomacy: Minor benefits you can miss and should miss because finding them means you can't get best ending.

Comparing to Legion of Shadow: I prefer Legion, it's more fun, it deeply explores what mechanics it has (instead of half-assing most of them), it encourages exploration better, and the narrative is more solid (until the post-credits content). Rider has more interesting ideas, but the implementation of those ideas is crap, so it doesn't get a lot of value out of them.