[Let's Play] Golden Dragon Fantasy Gamebook 6: Castle of Lost Souls

[JourneymanN00b]

I vote to look in the larder.

[SGamerz]

Human torsos dripping with gore hang on rusted meathooks along the larder walls. You can see maggots crawling on some of them. Slank obviously likes game adventurers. Ranged on wooden shelves you see a number of jars and bottles. You lean closer to read the faded labels; they contain all manner of ingredients. There is a jar of newts' eyes, another of frogs' toes, one contains a pickled dog's tongue and the next holds fillet of fen snake. One bottle has no label, but its contents are unmistakably lizard legs. Among the more normal ingredients, you notice red pepper, parsley and salt. You can take up to three jars if you wish - note them down on your Character Sheet. Feeling your gorge rise at the sight and stench of the demon's awful larder, you continue on your way

Please vote on whether or which 3 of the jars of ingredients you wish to take before we move on.

[JourneymanN00b]

I vote to take newts' eyes, lizard legs, and salt, since they seem to be the most intuitively useful from a fantasy perspective.

[Thaluikhain]

Salt, definitely, no opinion on the others.

[SGamerz]

You enter a long, oak-beamed dining hall with fading portraits high up on the walls. Ignoring two smaller doorways, you make your way along the table towards the double doors at the far end of the room. You pass a wide stone hearth where a raging log fire crackles and spits. Over the hearth hangs a great poleaxe and on the floor in front of it there is a fine, white bearskin rug. You can either go over to the hearth or carry on to the double doors.

Character Sheet:
[spoiler]Name: Johnny
VIGOUR: 21/27
PSI: 4
AGILITY: 7
Equipment: Sword, Lantern, Tinder-box, Dagger, Bow and 2 arrows, Girl's teardrop, Four leaf clover, Luck Charm (can be used up to 32 times to pass any dice roll), Cornelian skull-shaped ring, Crystal ball, Fragment from the armour of a chivalrous knight, Salve of Healing (restores 4 VIGOUR per application, 4/4 applications remaining), Jasper Faze's talisman, Ashes of a Saint, Hair of a nun, Ring of Light, Jar of Salt, Jar of Newts' eyes, Jar of Lizard Legs
Gold: 22 GP
[/spoiler]

[Thaluikhain]

To the hearth, fight the rug.

[JourneymanN00b]

I vote to go over to the hearth.

[Darth Rabbitt]

To the hearth.

[SGamerz]

As you step towards the fireplace, the rug comes to life and rises up, challenging you with an eerie, hissing growl.

BEARSKIN RUG VIGOUR 12

Roll two dice:
score 2 to 5 You are hit; lose 3 VIGOUR
score 6 to 12 The Rug loses 3 VIGOUR

If you FLEE past it to the doors, turn to 276. If you defeat it, turn to 211.

This is more or less what you probably expected.

COMBAT LOG:
Round 1 - We roll a 5. Johnny is at 18 VIGOUR.
Round 2 - We roll a 6. The Rug is at 9 VIGOUR.
Round 3 - We roll a 9. The Rug is at 6 VIGOUR.
Round 4 - We roll a 8. The Rug is at 3 VIGOUR.
Round 5 - We roll a 6. The Rug is defeated.

Before continuing on your way, you could take either the poleaxe or the now-lifeless rug. You cannot take both because they are rather bulky items. If you wish to take one, remember to note it on your Character Sheet. You precede to the double doors at the end of the room.

Do we want to pick up one of these? Please vote on which item to take if you do.

[JourneymanN00b]

I say we get the rug since it is bound to have magical properties that could help us now that we have defeated it.

[Thaluikhain]

We already have a weapon, we don't have a rug, so take it.

[SGamerz]

Johnny packs the bearskin rug away (although wouldn't it be in tatters anyway if he'd just defeated in combat? With a sword, no less.) and moves on:

You descend a flight of stairs into what seems to be a pillared ballroom with- a floor of polished white marble. There is a shadowed archway across on the other side of the room. However, as you walk warily towards this, you make a startling discovery - the floor underfoot is not marble at all, but solid ice. Several inches below you, frozen in the ice, you can see a bizarre demonic mask. As you peer down at this you suddenly realize how cold the room is getting. Your hands are turning blue and your teeth chatter uncontrollably. Do you have a bearskin rug? If so, turn to 18. If not, turn to 268.

Immediate check!

You pull the folds of the rug around you. It is comfortably warm and you are glad you had the foresight to bring it with you. Will you now try to get at the mask, or leave through the archway?

No magical properties mentioned, but a useful practical item to pick up nontheless!

Do we try for the mask?

Character Sheet:
[spoiler]Name: Johnny
VIGOUR: 18/27
PSI: 4
AGILITY: 7
Equipment: Sword, Lantern, Tinder-box, Dagger, Bow and 2 arrows, Girl's teardrop, Four leaf clover, Luck Charm (can be used up to 32 times to pass any dice roll), Cornelian skull-shaped ring, Crystal ball, Fragment from the armour of a chivalrous knight, Salve of Healing (restores 4 VIGOUR per application, 4/4 applications remaining), Jasper Faze's talisman, Ashes of a Saint, Hair of a nun, Ring of Light, Jar of Salt, Jar of Newts' eyes, Jar of Lizard Legs, Bearskin rug
Gold: 22 GP
[/spoiler]

[JourneymanN00b]

Masks are more trouble than they are worth. See The Crimson Tide for an example. I vote to leave through the archway.

[SGamerz]

Johnny leaves the mask behind and leaves through the archway.

You are at the foot of a rough stone stairway that winds up around the walls of a narrow, circular tower. Staring into the gloom, you discern a crimson glow far above. You climb up and up - hundreds of feet, it seems. At last you reach the top of the tower. There is only one door off the landing - a heavy iron portal with a glowing, gloating red face inscribed into it. It swings back as you step towards it, and you pass through into what must be the topmost chamber of the tower. The wind shrieks through the open windows. Outside you can see massive, ponderous storm clouds against the starless night sky. There is a curtained alcove on the other side of the chamber. As you cross over to it, a sibilant voice seems to speak from within you, extolling the virtues of an eternity in service to the demon. Roll two dice. If you score less than or equal to your PSI score, turn to 45. If the dice roll exceeds your PSI score, turn to 206.

Oh dear, a PSI test! That's our weakest stat. Do we want to use the Luck Charm here?

[JourneymanN00b]

I vote to use the Luck Charm, for sure, as a PSI score of 4 is not going to cut it by itself.

[Darth Rabbitt]

Time to eat some Lucky Charms.

[SGamerz]

Johnny uses the Luck Charm to auto-pass the PSI test.

Slank is using his foul magic to try and persuade you to serve him, but no demon will ever corrupt an honourable and undaunting spirit like yours. Grimly, you push the curtain aside. Turn to 46.

There's something irregular about this section sequence, because we're actually going from section 45 to section 46, right next to each other on the same page!

Did you leave either the clover or the teardrop on Slank's mask? If so, turn to 204. If not, turn to 282.

Unfortunately, we did not attempt to gain access to the mask!

It would have made our job so much easier...we even had the salt to melt the ice for easy access! What a waste.

Smiling viciously, Slank steps from the alcove and stands before you, huge and awesome and casting no shadow. You hear the rumble of the approaching storm, drowned out by Slank's laughter. His surcoat and boots and vambraces are as black as the night and trimmed with silver; his pale skin has a translucent gleam. At first glance the face might almost be considered handsome - but then you see the clouded, sightless right eye, the face around it scarred and mutilated by terrible burns. The good eye shines with an awful, corrupt light and the expression twisting those fine features is one of utter and inhuman evil.

Slank holds a lacquered mask in his left hand, and he brings this up now to cover his face. The mask has a quartz lens which shields his good eye, so even if you have the teardrop you cannot use it. Neither is there time to draw your bow - you must fight him. Turn to 257.

(Yes, the optimal choices involve us using the clover on the mask so he can't pick it up, and then using the teardrop to blind him and finally using the bow, hair and armour shard for an easy kill. Now we need to fight him the hard way, and all those quest items collected are wasted.)

Since we just encountered the Boss, I'm going to use our healing salve to restore VIGOUR to the max before proceeding.

Slank advances on you with a panther's grace, his robes fluttering in the breeze. There is a cold, damp, earthy smell like a waiting grave. You see
that the talons of his right hand are almost a cubit long; they sparkle like crystal and are obviously razor-sharp.

SLANK

Roll two dice:
score 2 to 8
score 9 to!2
VIGOUR 24
You are struck; lose 3 VIGOUR
The demon loses 3 VIGOUR

If you manage to defeat him, turn to 137.

COMBAT LOG:
Round 1 - We roll a 9. Slank is at 21 VIGOUR.
Round 2 - We roll a 8. Johnny is at 24 VIGOUR.
Round 3 - We roll a 7. Johnny is at 21 VIGOUR.
Round 4 - We roll a 5. Johnny is at 18 VIGOUR.
Round 5 - We roll a 7. Johnny is at 15 VIGOUR.
Round 6 - We roll a 11. Slank is at 18 VIGOUR.
Round 7 - We roll a 9. Slank is at 15 VIGOUR.
Round 8 - We roll a 4. Johnny is at 12 VIGOUR.
Round 9 - We roll a 7. Johnny is at 9 VIGOUR.
Round 10 - We roll a 11. Slank is at 15 VIGOUR.
Round 11 - We roll a 4. Johnny is at 6 VIGOUR.
Round 12 - We roll a 7. Johnny is at 3 VIGOUR.
One more hit to death, so Johnny uses the last charge of the Luck Charm to get an auto-hit on Round 13 - Slank is at 12 VIGOUR
Round 14 - We roll a 8. Johnny is killed!

Sadly we fell at the very last hurdle! What a pity.

I'm surprised that we ultimately failed due to being overly cautious and missing the optimal choice of sabotaging the mask. We must have gone through too many Ian Livingstone and Paul Mason books recently and gotten paranoid as a result. This book really hasn't been too punishing overall. Certainly, there are trap options, like the Giant Cobra earlier, but as you saw, the chances of us getting killed outright was pretty minimal, and we had a very good chance of surviving it (and did). Dave Morris is usually not the kind of author who just kills off the PC outright after a single wrong choice.

There's really not much more left if we'd won this combat - we need to use the ashes of a saint to prevent Slank from resurrecting, but even if we don't have it, we just have fight Slank one more time, at half-life (12 VIGOUR) and with better odds because he's weaker (we can hit him by rolling 7-12). So yeah, even the quest tokens are not 100% mandatory, we just have to be a lot luckier to win.

I will post some of the missing content tomorrow, and as usual, feel free to ask about any specific subject you're interested to know more about this book.

Thanks to everyone for playing!

[JourneymanN00b]

Thank you for running this adventure, SGamerz.

[Thaluikhain]

Thanks for running.

A little googling to see if I could find the artist (turns out to be Leo Hartas), and on Dave Morris's blog it says this is a rehash of an adventure he did for the White Dwarf magazine way back in the day. He also says that Chonchons (which are disembodied head monsters, of course) are in it, but I don't know if we missed them or if they were in the WD version.

[SGamerz]

He also says that Chonchons (which are disembodied head monsters, of course) are in it, but I don't know if we missed them or if they were in the WD version.

They are in the book.

I will post the picture in tomorrow's update.

[Darth Rabbitt]

I would have voted for getting the mask but I missed the chance to vote there.

Anyhow, thanks for running.

[SGamerz]

So, because most of the quest items are not strictly necessary, there are many alternative paths to completing the book, so I won't be able to cover a lot of them. Besides Chonchons that were specifically brought up by Thaluikhain, I will mostly stick to the few things that our path brought us close to.

First, we ought to start with this picture, which you guys should have seen, but I actually forgot to insert earlier. This is the picture of Luther Faze, whom we met the library:



Regarding the Chonchons, we came fairly close to meeting those. If we'd used the wrong item (anything but the crystal ball) to help us deal with the illusion mirage of the castle on the moors, we encounter 4 of the things.



3 of them attack while the leader stays out of it, and will try to escape if we start winning against the others. If we win quick and succeed in bringing it down with our bow, we find that's its wearing a Wristband of Lightning as a earring, which we can loot.

The pine torch which you guys avoid picking up is indeed a sort of trap, but not a lethal one - it opens a pit that drops you down into the dungeon levels.

The first thing we see the dungeons is this:



The old man will claim to be Luther Faze and beg you to free him, but is in fact Slank in disguise. There's in fact more than one occasion of such a trap occuring:



In each of these cases, there's a clear hint: the prisoner is always shown to be missing a right eye, and we know that Slank was blinded in that eye by the teardrop. These are actually among the rare outright lethal traps in the book: if we choose to "free" the fake Luther in any of these situation, it's an immediate Game Over.

There is only one prisoner that, should we find her, we should free:



She was apparently a witch who "sold her soul to the demon in exchange for occult power". When we free her, she will give us a pouch that will boost our PSI by 2 points, and also give us the 3 silver coins that we were missing. If we'd used the coins before the 3 doors with metal plaques, it will turn up 1 unicorn head and 2 serpent heads (presumably means 1 truth, 2 lies, so the Bronze plaque, as we now know, is the right door, since gave us access to the salt, the rug and the mask). The lead plaque door does, however, give us an opportunity to free a Genie, who can give us a 1-point boost in any stat:



The copper plaque is outright lethal - it leads to a Gorgon.

Being dropped into the dungeon levels will also leave us in a random direction maze (navigated by compass direction), which will probably take us a while to get out. We will still eventually reach the 3 plaque doors, but before that we will also go through this trap encounter:



The trap is to fool the players into thinking that there's someone hidden behind the curtains, when in fact there are only 2 shoes deliberately left there to fool the PC while the real enemy (a crazed dwarf) is hidden in another alcove and waiting to ambush him.

The big fishing guy who gave us the Ring of Light: some players may wonder what he meant when he said he will be dining on fish that day to return us the favour. In fact, he's actually a man-eating ogre. We may come upon his home in an alternative path during the night, and seek refuge there, and in that case he'd actually attempt to kill and eat us after pretending to offer us shelter for the night.

The toll collector at the bridge can be fought and killed, although it's certainly not the optimal decision. As I posted in hidden text earlier, killing him results in us looting an amulet off him, and that same amulet will later be identified by the captain of the patrolling soldiers we met at the chapel, who will promptly execute us in the name of justice (which is a fitting punishment, although the text suggests that the captain a sort of over-zealous and sadistic maniac anyway).

Without the Ring of Light, we could have gotten rid of the Marshons by throwing our sword away to draw them away, but that gives us a combat penalty until we find a replacement (our dagger isn't good enough). Lighting our lantern is a death option, and we get smothered by the creatures.

As the scene where we got the ashes of the saint indicated, there are pretty much painless way to get pretty much all of the quest items against Slank. The crystal ball can be gained without even losing that 1 VIGOUR point if we asked the fortune teller out to enjoy the fete with us. Curiously, even though asking her to tell her own fortune also reveals to her our (possible) intention to steal the crystal ball from her, her reaction is completely different and way more hostile compared to her finding out by reading our own fortunate, and in this case she actually summons other gypsies to attack us. The shard of armour can actually also be found at the collector's museum, and in this case we shave off a shard from the armour while he was fetching us refreshment without having to roll for any test. Curiously, the book also isn't very clear whether the Sign of the Four Leaf Clover Inn is an acceptable replacement for the actual plant - we're allowed to steal it (although we may have to get through a very tough combat against multiple opponents if caught), and apparently will move on to the next item after we succeed. The book never makes a point of checking whether we're using the sign or the plant. But the plant is actually much easier to get, as we saw.