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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Joshua Randall" data-source="post: 9630760" data-attributes="member: 7737">This book was a major slog compared to the first one. Yes, both books have equal amounts of insane moon-logic and nonsensical plots, but in book 1 it always felt like we were making progress towards something. In book 2 there are many numbered sections that don't advance the plot. And there are some EXTREMELY lengthy chains of numbered sections that lead to inevitable death. Meaning that you're reading a whole bunch of words but psyche! None of them matter.To illustrate my point, and I've promised it a few times, I made a map of the paths through this gamebook. I used a program called <a href="https://librogamecreator.wordpress.com/download/" target="_blank">LibroGameCreator 3</a> by Matteo Poropat, well worth the suggested $5 purchase price.Before I show the image, one thing that makes The Sorcerer's Crown odd is that in several places, it inverts the typical gamebook flow. Rather than send us down separate paths that ultimately join together at the end (assuming we don't die along the way), this book features several sections that check where we came from in order to determine where we are allowed to go.While constructing these flows, I realized these special sections are conceptually no different than an inventory-based gamebook that asks if you have Item A or Item B (or neither!) to determine which numbered section you are allowed to visit. In The Sorcerer's Crown, we can think of the answers to the questions "Where did you come from?" and "What do you know?" as analogous to items that we carry in our inventory.Without further ado, here is the complete depiction of all paths through this gamebook.[ATTACH=full]401798[/ATTACH](When you zoom out enough to see the entire tree, the individual nodes are too small to make out, so you may want to save the file locally and then pan and zoom.)---I've also prepared a simplified flowchart to illustrate one of my main complaints about this book.[ATTACH=full]401799[/ATTACH](Apologies that this one is grainy, but I was too cheap to pay for the upgraded version of Miro just to be allowed to export as an .svg)What this simplified flowchart shows is that there is only the illusion of choice. If you decide to go to Seagate Island first, then You Are Already Dead. Any choices you make after that decision, any numbered sections you read, are irrelevant to your eventual fate.And if you decide to go towards Saven, any path that does not redirect you into Yellow Marsh also means that You Are Already Dead. However, it may take literally dozens of numbered sections on this journey to reach an official failure point.---Here's an even more simplified flowchart:[ATTACH=full]401802[/ATTACH]This glosses over how you got to Saven, but what really matters are the two mandatory decisions on the One True Path: you must go through Yellow Marsh and you must learn about the twin adamantite crowns.</blockquote>

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