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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Joshua Randall" data-source="post: 9590863" data-attributes="member: 7737">Correct. And I did not remember that aspect of this book when I sat down to replay it in 2025 (at I write this). I probably last played these books a couple of years after their publication, so 1987-1988 timeframe. Then I held onto them for the intervening decades because of my packrat tendencies.I vaguely remembered this book as the one in which Arno re-appears, we have the introduction of [redacted] into the plot, and there are the gnolls and paladins. I did not remember that the Seagate Island paths always end in death (or nonlethal failure)... at least, the way we have traversed them thus far. (Hint: the incoming / outgoing nodes to which I called attention previously. Hmm....)So yes, the minute you choose (137) Seagate Island from the gear-up scene, you're dead: you just don't know it yet. We'll see if the other choice, to go directly to Saven, fares any better....As I've written a few times, The Sorcerer's Crown has what I believe to be a VERY strange flowchart compared to the stereotypical gamebook. I've downloaded a program that helps you draw flowcharts for gamebooks so I don't have to do it by hand in a mind-map program. I want to compare book 2 to book 1, at the least.Indeed. This book is super frustrating because alongside the unreliable drunken narrator, we also get so much wishy-washy language that we can never be sure whether a fact that is given to us is (1) true in a Platonic sense; (2) believed to be true by one of the NPCs, but not actually true; (3) potentially true, but not solidified until we choose a path (like whether Landor was murdered by Beldon in book 1 vs. gave up his own life willingly). And then we add in (4) insane gamebook moon-logic where things are true, not-true, and kumquat-fish-octagon all at the same time.So how can you as gamebook player decide what to do? You can't decide based on normal deductive nor inductive reasoning because the gamebook's insane moon-logic is immune to that approach. Instead you must blindly grope through the paths; you must seek knowledge knowing in the back of your mind that your initial paths will inevitably lead to failure and death. As I put it in [USER=42856]@Jfdlsjfd[/USER] 's thread, <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/lets-play-bloodsword-book-3-5.711603/post-9588744" target="_blank">Gamebooks do illustrate a quite esoteric occult belief system in which true and complete knowledge is only possible after one’s own death!</a>Oh, I have not forgotten that I need to rant about how slow out of the blocks Team Good Guys is. A good portion of the badness in this book could've been prevented with timely action A YEAR AGO.But now that a year has gone by, why the sudden rush? As far as we know, there is no imminent danger that is any worse today than it was a year ago. Unless this book is going to reveal that Arno is on the cusp of getting past the Door of Doom equivalent? Which is possible. My memory is clearly quite bad when it comes to The Sorcerer's Crown.insert <corporate wants you to find the difference - they're the same picture> meme hereAt least, that seems to be how the gamebook would respond.We should clearly avoid the barren swamp wasteland marsh, because it is a location with a Capitalized Nouns name, and as we all know, such places are of no importance whatsoever, especially when your magical sidekick tells you to stay far away from them.(So yeah, I'm making a sub-optimal choice to avoid Yellow Marsh, but (1) it's the choice I really did make a few weeks ago when I started this gamebook; and (2) in the end it'll lead to a more entertaining thread.)Especially when you were born in a coastal town and then moved to a nearby island.</blockquote>

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