Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jfdlsjfd" data-source="post: 9636996" data-attributes="member: 42856">This is one of the failings of this book. Despite being fun and evocative, and having lots of cool scenes, it has implemented the weidest way of distilling the lore to the reader: on a path that lead to death.Since we didn't die on our way in, we barely remember Icon and he appears totally out of blue, like madman stalking us after we beat him in a fair contest FIVE YEARS AGO.There were, however, lots of information to be had on him, that we could have accessed by getting to Your Quest Ends Here section that were easily avoidable by taking sensible choices that led to not meeting him, or hearing about him, in this whole book.1. His name isn't Icon. It's Aiken, and he comes from the Far East, and he's incensed that people can't pronounce his name correctly and mistake it for the word Icon, and I guess that's why he lives in a perpetual state of unrest.2. He has a sister, more versed in magic than fighting, called Saike. However, she shares his fate: nobody can be bothered to learn her name and everyone is calling her Psyche. Yes, that same one, Esmeralda's former colleague.3. He felt humiliation 5 years ago and he's now looking to kill those who beat him. He arrived in Outremer recently, and informed his sister about us, saying we're mean, mean persons and that he'll visit her in his quest to clear his honor.4. That's why she summoned a demon to remove us, not because she was just randomly mean.5. Actually, if we had all accepted the suspicious looking potions from the sorceress that everyone warned us against including the common people in the street (if we talked to them instead of spitting at them in order to make them clear the road) (and talked the local language, LANGUAGE MATTERS!), then she'd look at our inconscious corpse and do a villainous exposition before slicing our throats and rejoicing to see soon her little brother coming to visit.6. Aiken is incensed that we killed his sister (apparently he did visit her, after all) and he resolved to avenge her.7. He's in league with the riffraff of the city to track us, so that might explain the lukewarm welcome one gets as a Trickster.If we had known that, I guess his appearance at the end of the book would be less surprising. Except that you can only get all these informations on several runs, since they have the requirement : "be on a dying path". The practice started in book 1, actually: if you fall for his proposal to ally an accept his help in tending your wounds, and you're alone, he actually poisons you and tells you about his name (and pet peeve) so you can at least know who killed you.There are some times where WE are total jerks (I was going to provide examples, but I'll correct my sentence: we're most of the time total jerks, from the slaves we whipped to Prince Sussurien), but man, this Aiken guy seems to have severe psychological problems as well. "You beat me at chutes & ladders 17 years ago, prepare to DIE!"It's even worse than the whole Magian side-quest which you only discover if you renounce getting two wishes from the Genie and made the suboptimal choice of jeopardizing your own quest on top of that: in this case, it could be explained by good roleplaying. Doing something cool, and something that is Right and Just, doesn't necessarily involve getting better loot than being Evil and Selfish, it is its own reward, but at least you get to experience the content without dying...Note: I wasn't surprised that a former academic colleague would summon a demon to kill us. Contrary to the stance taken in<a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/ad-d-gamebook-the-sorcerers-crown-kingdom-of-sorcery-book-2-of-3.711170/" target="_blank">Carr's epic</a>, it is consistent with my experience of actual workplace relations in academia.Yep. All these efforts to outsmart him for nothing. Strong is the railroad train!We'll spend a whole book (#4) trying to get dead. Your method is much more efficient, though, except that there is no resurrection spells in this world. If you die, you roll another character, unless you're a legendary hero (Orpheus) or happen to know a guy (Lazarus).</blockquote>

Verification