Quote:
Originally Posted by Kirk
I also liked both for their challenge, clever rooms, and deadliness. Someone posted in another thread about how to make long dungeon crawls in TFT less deadly or more possible, etc. and I cringed a bit. I don't want to play D&D with healing spells and forever characters protected from themselves. I want poor decisions and fighting to end badly for the PCs or the game loses its tension and my interest in it. I don't want my ego stroked by the rules or the GM.
Two rooms that come up immediately are the Gargoyle Statue room, and the choice to cut your losses with a "so sad, too bad" exit from the poor chump who gets jumped by a Gargoyle and the room with Cruel, the battleaxe wielding NPC standing amongst bodies twirling his axe in the air, challenging any member of the Party to a duel.
Another room in Orb Quest became a quote for everyone, though usually slightly misstated, "The Octopus of Cidri is a dangerous and deadly foe, indeed."
It is these type of memorable writings and encounters that I look forward to playing again before age overtakes me and I enter the world of Cidri permanently. ;) I hope Steve is up to the challenge, as well...
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While playing a party-of-four solo, I remember being lured back into the Gargoyle Room (aka Orange Room) after narrowly escaping a horrific combat by the instruction which tells about hearing what sounds like the screams of one of the party members being mauled. Such atmosphere! It gave me the chills when I read that.
SJ's taunting questions, witticisms, and side-ways heckling's which were counter-balanced by those stone-cold, fiat decree's such as: "You're dead." are such a HUGE part of the flavor of those adventures. For me that "Jacksonian-style" imbued thought the instructions, became a sub-script training-manual on:
How-To-Entertain from the omnipotent point-of-view, while refereeing the action on the Melee map below. As there was so much meat in there -besides the adventure itself - I was able to cull so much out of it.
Granted, the Octopus in TFT:ITL is really something very cool. In fact, ITL dedicates about four or more paragraphs to it's description and handling-in-play; however, my cousin was especially insane over the Octopus from
Death Test II. He thought it was the greatest. I think he would have rather BEEN the Octopus as a Player Character than fight it. It took a long time for his TFT Octopus-infatuation to pass! And then when it re-appeared two years later as part of the artwork on page 59 in
Orb Quest, we had to listen to him go on-and-on about how awesome the Octopus is,... all over again. LOL!
JK