Guestbook

30
"from it hang a vast, grotesque carpet"

81
"and you several of them are close enough"

87
"but without any really malice" + "wild out West, child" + " would want to be out in this weather" + "After a few hour's walk,"

89
"soothing the aches of your cuts and bruised."

93

"introducing you as a childhood friend comes to help." (who came to?) + "It was terrible" + "nowhere near enough to stop Tiemuraz's dastardly legions" + "although he's returned since then" + "a strong destiny ahead of you" (period.) + "bids you close your eyes." (to?)

95
"before starting awake" (startling?) + "are the Sun and the Moon" + "and you cannot fail" (period.) + " a small sharp edged" (sharp-edged?)


138
"Gioan the jovial fisherman's sun" + " For all you know his hoards may be nearby already."

143
" "You haven't changed" is his response." + "but we fear that the hoards are attacking" + "with an ebony black hilt" + "There are few houses which are still safe" + "a place to rest for the night" + "Agreeing that this sounds (like?) the best course of action"


148
"After an only an hour of travel," + "through the blasting rain as best you can,"

150
"Peacefully" is A BIT of a misnomer for that option. + "into the things needle-toothed mouth."

152 - weird paragraph break in the middle of a sentence?

161
"A long, whip thin shadow"

186
"You have lost your weapons.As you climb" + "I'm Grimoald" (punctuation).

218

"by the look of you" (punctuation) "And an able one by the look of it." (perhaps looks, in both cases?) + I can't offer it" + "damned be honest contract" (punctuation)

222
"Do you not understand? (missing quotation mark.)

233
"signs of a reason rockfall"

237
"Wedged into a lose space"

245

"The town Electors are beside themselves" (town's?)

"my companion, Yvet" (period.)

251
"will enter its final stage" + "be put to its purpose" + "to continue" + " and you see that, rather than pupils and irises, tiny starscapes peering at you from beneath his brows." (either "that" is unnecessary, or there's a word missing.) + "would be sad" + "to know"

253

" You affirm your determination to go (to?) the Shadnezzar ruins"

"does not commune with her worshippers lightly" + "must know you have a chance" + "get you out at dawn tomorrow" (periods.)

254
"you meet the things gaze" + "it lungs forward"

275

"his whip coiled around his waste,"

295 - another weird paragraph break.

320

"but their flesh... and its head"

353

"committed such an Evil," (is "an" necessary?)

+ "will know of the Sword of Dusk's location," (shouldn't it be present tense?) + although you must chose it" (period, and tense.)

""I am sorry, young warrior" + "I am sure he would be proud of you" + "a message I must carry to you" + "draw the evil-hearted to his side" + "none would come to dominate the world" + "the Sword of Night" + "tortured and barren" + "if Tiemuraz reunites all three blades" + is at stake" + "and he, too, will seek it out" (punctuation.)

366

"a large, cathedral like building." + "And the other, he is here?" (is he here?) + "Is this some sort of trap?" (a trap?) +"Now, chose a door" (choose?) + "The one you seek to destroy"

395

"a large hole turn out of its hull" (?)

425
Perhaps he will prove right in time. (be proven right?)

460
"you wipe their slimy grey blood of your sword" (besides the typo, there's also the matter of you potentially fighting this with a mace.

"she bid you follow a different Master"

If the three swords are meant to have similar power, how come the Sword of Night can draw thousands of followers to it, yet the Sword of Day didn't do much of anything until Tiemuraz took it? How come you fail to wake up when trying to enter the door of a wrong alignment, yet it's fine for Tiemuraz to wield blades of opposite alignments? Similarly, how come it drains you to have the Sword of Dusk, yet Tiemuraz has two swords at once, and suffers few consequences?

Weird that finding a coil of rope (probably the most powerful mundane item in the gamebook) is as uneventful as simply entering a random cave and finding it unattended with no real choice involved besides going on the right route.

Even the stealth skill does not actually allow you to sneak up on the two raiders, or bypass the sleeping one? It does not protect you at 81 either?

Hector comes across somewhat less grateful than one is likely to be after having been rescued from their likely fate.

In 353, the goddess is on a balcony, and presumably stands a floor above you, yet still manages to touch your chin from that position? Does she have freakishly long arms?

336 and 267 doesn't change if you had already learnt from the Tinker that Varna is under siege?

If you get killed fighting the Marluk Queen, you may not get "you have been killed in combat" message, just nothing at all between the dice rolls and the comment box. She also appears immune to the Pike's impalement: while that could be intentional, I don't see any ref explicitly mentioning that?

I was also hoping Woodsman could allow you to fix the Lantern.

317 is such an anticlimactic instakill, it balances somewhere between awful and brilliant.

I wonder if there's a use for things like the Wolf Pelt, Frying Pan, Fish Hook or the Pewter Statue? Perhaps I might have seen those if I tried taking more routes in the final stretch, but as it was, I found the acceptable one quite quickly. (I also briefly wondered if a Fish Hook + a Rope would let you pull away Tiemuraz's Sword of Day, but once the LOTR twist emerged, that appeared irrelevant.)

when the INFIRMARY: 4 scene and the sudden speech is quite reminiscent of the Defender's philosophy scenes in and around that tomb in Outsider!

* How come Drago's secretary immediately detects your weapons, even if it's just Glocks, but the crowd in the library does not mind them? How come you have the option to avoid surrendering the weapon in the nightclub, but not in VORTEX: 1, which doesn't seem to mention any security nearby (and one of the failure refs suggests more of them only got added later on.) Then again, they also don't bother to steal your completely unique weapons in spite of having every reason to, so there's that.

* How come you cannot just head back to the Doc right after you discovered that map under the table? It's such a frustrating thing, and for some time, I really thought some combination of starting stats/equipment had to allow you to protect the map, and this is what you would need to win.

* Machine gun fire from Ned Healy does not alert any guards in the library?

* KERNEL: 1 - Van Clank himself came up with those weapons, so why didn't he make one for himself?

* For HUNTED: 2, even max Awareness doesn't protect from failing to notice riders' approach? (Not that it seems to matter.) Plus it says riders have sunglasses, but then we can see the Leader's dark, impassive eyes?

* In REVIVAL: 1, it's funny that our Mark, who had fought SNs many times, and just recounted everything the doctor had done for him in JOY: 3, including having designed these hyper-advanced weapons, TWO OF WHICH ARE BASICALLY SUITCASE WMDs now rudely dismisses a different supernatural concept as "just speculation."

* It's also funny that he still considers it safe to return to his own home in spite of the little matter of the city's most powerful politician already after him.

* In INFIRMARY: 2, would the attendant's job really be boring after the events of the previous day? Also, interesting that according to REGENERATION: 1, Teneto has well-functioning universal healthcare?

* In INTERN: 3, why would mark be surprised that a rod which is as hard as metal is cool to the touch...exactly like any metal?

* YEARN: 1 "changes in the wave particles " ... even when taking quantum mechanics into account, that sentence seems rather dubious?

* "Centrenium is one of the oldest elements in the universe. Most scientists believe it is formed by a rare but naturally occurring process here on earth." - these two are mutually exclusive, since lots and lots of elements are billions of years older than the Earth. For that matter, nearly all heavy elements are predominantly of extraterrestrial origin as well?

* I am disappointed that plant killer doesn't seem to be usable on Rhodendra Azula?

* I am even more disappointed that the supposed ability of the Thompson to melt a wide path never appears to be used for anything, and that it doesn't rescue you in "QUIXOTIC: 3" , when that seemed obvious.

* For a while, I assumed that blowing up the lab would matter a lot more than it actually does. I even considered that blowing it up would draw away more of the guards from campaign headquarters, and so allow you to gun down the steed right there and still have a chance. It seemed more immediately logical than the true paths. Oh well.

I.e. in Outsider!, you had to assume that Black Aria, the jaded, violent, yet still intensely principled assassin protagonist, is actually the type of guy who would let a necromancer who had slaughtered dozens, if not hundreds of people, live and keep doing that indefinitely, and also learn from him, even after finding out that he was lying about being your father. Then, you also had to assume that the option to summon ghosts you are explicitly warned about would not be an immediate insta-kill, contrary to pretty much every other option like this in that gamebook.

Here, what you actually need is to obtain two rods of this setting's unobtainium, not one, but there is effectively no way to find out that this is even POSSIBLE to do, or that this is the thing which was actually holding your trio from succeeding when you get DESTRUCTION: 3. The game is really good at making dead end pathways look just as viable as the successful ones (making the player think they were smart by picking the obviously correct item past five wrong ones, only for that entire pathway with Pieno (?) to be a trap was a particularly strong move). There is at least some logic in picking up an ID card from a corpse -even if there is no way to know that guy in particular would drop it, or that not having an ID card was a big obstacle when you show up to that stadium and find that a Coordination check seems to work as well.

There is no real internal logic in which pathway at Lochton Heath would actually allow you to win. In order to understand that in the first place, you have to assume that the choice of how to split up would actually lead you in radically different directions. The only "hint" is external, that being one's understanding that the narrative obviously wants Mark and Angela to be together, rather than anything about the location or their situation specifically. I kept assuming that the responsible thing to do would be to go alone and let the two less combat-experienced allies cover each other with gunfire, so as to avoid losing either of them when choosing to go with one and letting the other travel alone.

"You and your crew have shared many dangers and celebrations for you to leave them now. They also owe you a lot of money. Determined to save your shipmates, you set out to the governor's large decadent residence. The gaol is beneath it. You and your men head to the governor's residence." - Which men? I thought that unlike the Corbett path, here you just talked to one sailor, and then left towards the jail on your own? The refs stemming from the immediately subsequent decisions seem to confirm that.

" your men throw two soldiers off the jetty" even if you had already fought and killed them both. I suppose replacement guards could have been assigned, sure, but some acknowledgement of that past combat would be nice.

If the Fangthane sword was wielded by the head of the poor family who died trying to protect them from the soldiers, then why doesn't it get looted by said soldiers? It's also not clear why your character has to blurt it out to wizard's face that his rival doesn't want us to trust him, rather than having the choice to conceal that. It's even less clear why we can't just kill Caius on the spot. Or indeed, why we can't try and persuade Bartolo to follow us at least to Caius' house, if not closer to Zimorax. And it's a little too convenient for the narrative that apparently the one dead body which can talk in that world happened to be that Minstrel, for reasons unclear.

That being the lack of imagination about the whole assassination business. If Lot has no companions, he cannot think of anything more refined than simply charging through the front door in broad daylight to meet a predictable end, and even the companions' approaches aren't exactly all that well-planned, succeeding more on chance. (For Elena, the lack of a follow-up on her fate suggests that for her, it ended up a suicide mission either way?) Was there really no way to wait for night-time, to set the place on fire to get him out, etc.? If anything, you are told at the very start he intends to travel away from Rome once his house arrest is lifted: why not try to ambush him on the road?

"all of you have to then load the ship with corn bound for Athens." This is 1,500 years before the Columbian Exchange. Where did this corn come from?

Ref 12 has Lot's internal monologue mention "God's will" and 52 also has "the one true God!". I thought devout Jews would always write it as G-d? Or did this custom only arise in the more recent years? Or is the idea that it would not apply because this is spoken word in the story, not written?

trying to follow the cave route, but neglecting spare lamp oil, which is the only route where its presence matters.

Unless cooking that rabbit is the difference between whether you still have to fight some vagabonds after killing Eli as an Archer or not? Not sure how that worked. I'll also note that if you have the flint, you should probably find and cook that rabbit even if you slit Lukas' throat.

Halberd's penalty doesn't seem to activate after the third round in the Vagabond fight? (But it does for the Lynch Mob and other infantry encounters.)

How the hell are Vagabonds armoured if you manage to snipe their crossbowman as an archer, but unarmoured if you fail, or fight them as a different background?

Does Spiked Gauntlet ever do anything, or do you have to have a non-Halberd/non-two-handed weapon?

Are the brigands who attack you at the sacred tomb mounted (even though the text says nothing like it), since you get a bonus when fighting them with the halberd? I also wonder if the dogs/hawk should have spotted them tracking you.

I am talking, of course, about going to the Raven's camp and getting killed there. I see someone else complained about it before as well, and with all due respect to Robert Douglas, his response "Even the best agent/professional can make mistakes which actually creates some edge-of-the-seat twists and turns in a plot... EVERY real-life spec ops soldier worth their salt will tell you - that nobody, including themselves, is infallible. Everybody takes wrong turns in life." is completely ridiculous when throughout the story, you can get not one, not two, but SEVEN or EIGHT separate "hints" (some of them are like flashing neon signs, really) that the Raven is evil, yet only one of them actually stops you from going to the camp.

0: In his rantings, Brother Jacob somehow makes the conclusion that the Raven would necessarily be implicated in the scheme if you are telling the truth. I do not like this part, because it appears to come out of nowhere (same as the whole scene with his unchallenged accusations, really), and would like to see it removed, but while it's here, it's certainly a hint.

1: Prior explicitly tells you he doesn't trust the Raven and it's pretty clear he is suspicious of his involvement.

2: If you go talk to Pilgrim Seb, the protagonist's OWN THOUGHTS say that Raven must be playing some game. That choice ALONE should prevent you from going to the camp, regardless of anything else.

3: Visiting Tobias (necessary to reach Sheinton in the first place and avoid the caravan ending) tells you about the Raven's behaviour towards Annabel. Not directly related to theft itself, but certainly not good.

4: If you rescue Mary, she proves beyond doubt that the Raven is evil.

5: Lukas accuses the Raven if you beat him, regardless of what happens next. Yet, sparing him is the only thing which stops you from going to camp, and not anything else.

6: Mary's brothers tell you what happens once you reach Sheinton, and it is completely impossible to avoid that if you have made it that far. Even the Priest will tell you the Raven's soul is like that of Satan himself.

7: If you get healed by the Priest, he'll also tell you to beware.

In the light of all this, just the unavoidable hints (1, 3 and 6) should make going to the camp a choice rather than a necessity, even if the player simply gets a different gameover as the result. Getting 4 or 2 should prevent you from going to the camp same as 5, even if it won't let you win without doing everything else actually required by the narrative.