Hero's Quest: Drive the Curser from the Land!

Even though I "won" in my last posting, I want to analyze what I did wrong to leave Baba Yaga threatening the valley and to wind up with such a low score. As I noted at the end of my last posting, I replayed the entire game with a new thief character; the only major difference was that I took a few points in "parry" during character creation so I could try out the weapon master battle. The posting below chronicles the experiences of "Chester 2," culminating in the winning image atop.

The Fox

Chester 2 ran into an encounter that his predecessor did not: A fox in a trap along a forest path. This is one of several encounters that is sometimes present, sometimes not, and I don't know if it's dependent on the time of day or what, but the result is that you have to check each screen several times.

Freeing the fox gave me some information that I didn't need, but it did add 10 points to my score.

The Note in the Tavern

It was only through reading Trickster's first entry that I found this clue: there's a note on the floor by one of the stools in the tavern. Sometimes. Just like the fox, you have to visit the screen several times, and even then, you really have to be looking for it.

To find this, you have to notice a couple of extra white pixels on the floor.

The note itself is inconsequential; just some correspondence between two guys whose names are abbreviated "B." But it leads to the next encounter.

The Clandestine Conversation

The two "Bs" are Bruno and Brutus, apparently brethren in the brigands. I ran into Bruno a few times, lurking around the town gates and offering to sell information for money. His information was questionable (he told me to try the Dragon's Breath at the tavern, which kills you) and usually achievable somewhere else in the game, so I never had much use for him.

You encounter them if, after getting the note above, you visit the archery range south of town by approaching from one of the sides. (The screen is odd in that it's divided into three sections separated by hedges, and you have to leave the screen and return from different directions to visit different parts; now I know why.) They have a conversation about the brigand leader (their references to her as female is another clue that it's Elsa), note that there's a secret door to the base by the "bouncer" (the Antwerp), give the password to the door ("Hiden Goseke") and note that Brutus has the key. After the conversation, Bruno leaves.

You have to wait for Bruno to clear the area, since if he sees you, he'll hurl a poison dagger into you and you die. After that, you can attack Brutus which I did by throwing daggers at him. He returned with throws of his own, but he died first.

Brutus needs to make better use of that practice board.

Technically, getting the key from Brutus wasn't necessary since I could just pick the door lock, but hey, one less bandit in the world.

The Secret Door

If you want to avoid the frontal assault on the base that Chester 1 pulled off, it turns out there's a secret door behind the bouncing Antwerp. You just have to "LOOK AT ROCK," which I didn't before. The Antwerp is easy to circumnavigate and best left undisturbed; if you try to fight him, he bounces into the air and comes back down to crush you.

Anyway, the lock can be picked or unlocked with the key, and after that you have to have a high enough strength to heave it open (but trying to open it exercises your strength, so you just have to try multiple times).

I found the secret door before I found Bruno and Brutus, so when I first entered I found myself face-to-face with a troll--and a much more difficult troll than the typical forest troll. If you give the password, he'll leave, but it took me a while to figure out that you have to say the password while you're still outside the door; there isn't enough time once you enter the cave.

The passage takes you to the front gate of the bandit's fortress, thus bypassing the ambush in the valley. There's a side-passage that goes to the troll's room, but then you end up having to fight him whether you know the password or not, and I never got good enough to defeat him.

The Minotaur and the Gate*

I can't believe there isn't a way for the thief to sneak past Toro the Minotaur, but nothing I did would work. I'd always end up rustling the tree, and combat would begin immediately. Without a way to sneak by him, even the thief needs to grind in combat because there's no way to escape the fight, and no way that a starting thief can beat him.

I suspect the issue was that my sneak score wasn't high enough. I had a lot of trouble developing this score. I'd sneak all over the place for an entire day and not see an increase. Then, suddenly, it would go up three points from just a few seconds on a single screen.

A walkthrough says it's possible to climb the gate, and I guess I just didn't practice the skill enough. My slapstick "smashing" option works, even if it's a bit silly.

*This would be a good name for a British pub.

Elsa's Desk

Finding the fox, the note, the conversation, and the secret door are all necessary for a maximum point score, but I didn't need to do any of them to have a chance to defeat Baba Yaga. I just needed to do the one thing that I didn't do: actually take the magic mirror from Elsa's desk after she disappears with Yorick.

The previous Chester was so dumb, he just opened the desk, looked at the mirror, and left.

When you search the desk, the game notes that "a quick but thorough search of the desk discloses two healing potions and a mirror." I figured that my character picked up the items at this point. Generally, in other parts of the game, when the thief SEARCHES something, he automatically receives what he finds. But no, you still have to type TAKE MIRROR here. If you leave the room without it, you go right to the endgame and Baba Yaga remains undefeated.

Does that mean I replayed the entire game when all I needed to do was reload from the fortress and type a single command? Yes, it does. To be fair, I'm not blaming the game (entirely). I should have checked my inventory before leaving the room.

Incidentally, this mimics what I would totally do in real life. I'll be in my house, getting ready to go out, and I'll say, "Oh, I need to take the mail with me." For the next two minutes, while tying my shoes and such, I'll be repeating to myself, "TAKE THE MAIL. TAKE THE MAIL." Pretty soon, I'll have made a little song out of it: "TAKE THE MAIL. TAKE THE MAIL. OH, TAKE THAT BLASTED MAIL. TAKE IT TO THE MAILBOX THIS MOOOOOOORNING. TAKE THE...Oh, wow! It's already December! I need to get a new reflector pole for the mailbox so the plow doesn't hit it. I wonder if I have time to stop at Home Depot on the way...." and I leave the house without taking the mail.

Baba Yaga Redux

Just the way Irene greets me when I come home.

With the mirror, defeating Baba Yaga is easy. You just return to her hut, get it to sit down, enter, and HOLD THE MIRROR so that when she appears and casts her turn-to-frog spell at you, you bounce it off the mirror and turn her into a frog instead.

Oh, she doesn't stay that way. She uses some magic to save herself, but she gets so freaked out that she has the house sprout wings and fly out of the valley forever.

And with this, the prophecy is fulfilled, and we have a consummate hero of Spielburg, with...496 points. Bollocks. I wonder what I missed. At least now, though, I can sail off to Shapeir on the magic carpet with a clear conscience.

And to a new game!

As you can see, there are multiple ways to end Hero's Quest without achieving all 500 points. The prophecy says the "hero from the east" will:

Free the man from in the beast
Bring the child from out the band
Drive the curser from the land

But you only really need to do the second bit, since the quests to drive away Baba Yaga and free Barnard are unrelated to Elsa and the brigands. Even within these three major areas, there are lots of opportunities to end the game at various point levels, since you don't technically need to talk to every NPC (from whom you get one or two points), play and win your class's mini-game, deliver reagents to the healer, and so on. I rather like that there are multiple potential endings. We don't see that in many CRPGs of the era, and it makes Hero's Quest very replayable even irrespective of trying different classes.

I attempted a "speed play" to get from the beginning to the saving-Elsa-only end in less than 30 minutes, but the minotaur kept tripping me up. I couldn't sneak past him no matter what I tried, so the only way I know to solve this area is to defeat him in combat, which requires grinding for a couple hours. Also, the game glitches now and then, which makes a continuous play-through (with no reloading) functionally impossible.

At least their crashes have humorous messages.

So it's on to the GIMLET! I'm really curious how it will work on a hybrid game like this. Before I even begin it, I'll say that if it ends up with a score commensurate with my enjoyment of the game, it'll fall somewhere around Ultima IV and the two Might & Magic games. Let's see.

Hero's Quest: Bring the Child from Out the Band

I need a haircut.

Day 8

I thought it was time to see about this Baba Yaga person (1). I mean, I know I'm not a fighter, but it struck me that if I could . . . you know . . . just kill her, maybe everything would just sort-of fix itself. She lived in the west side of the valley in a house propped on chicken legs and sealed off by a gate with skeletons embedded in it.

The gate was spiky at the top, with some kind of poison slime, so I couldn't climb it. Fortunately, the skull on the front gate turned out to be extremely bribe-able. All he wanted was a glowing gem to serve as his eyes, like all the other skulls. At it happened, I had one (from the giant). The skull gratefully took it and gave me the rhyme to make the hut sit down (2).

When I yelled "Hut of brown, now sit down!" the hut squatted, and I (somewhat stupidly, but after the ogre I was feeling bold) wandered in the front door.

Don't you want to talk first?

Predictably, Baba Yaga appeared in a puff of smoke, froze me with a spell, and turned me into a frog.

Erasmus and I need to have a chat.

The only way I could get her to let me go was to agree to get some mandrake from the cemetery for her.  I won't bore you with the details of this expedition; I forgot to retain any imagery of it anyway. Suffice to say is that I bought an "undead unguent" from the healer and used it to go to the cemetery at midnight without dying, picked the mandrake, and brought it back to Baba Yaga, who turned me into a frog again before realizing that she'd need me in human form to get her mandrake. After turning  me back, she booted me out the door, and I wandered away, wondering what I had really accomplished from the entire episode, other than achieving some sense of a higher cosmic "score."

I redeemed the rest of the night by finding and killing a troll and a cheetaur, thus collecting the last of the ingredients the healer was looking for (3).

Day 9

Well, there was no point in putting it off any more. I needed to free the child from the band, and that meant storming the brigands. The front door seemed awfully dangerous, but I was out of other options. I stocked up on healing and vigor potions and headed south (4).
 

I haven't otherwise shown the inventory screen much.

 
The bandit fortress was at the end of a deep valley. When I arrived, I found--just as before--eight archers arrayed on the rocks, plus a group of three bandits guarding the end of the valley, with collapsed logs blocking the path in front of them.

Stealth was useless. Clutching a healing potion in my hand, I sprinted for the fallen logs and climbed over them, while the archers rained arrows down around me. Thankfully, they were lousy shots.

They needed to join the thieves' guild and play Dag-Nab-It.

On the other side of the logs, I squared off against the three bandits with spears. Dumbly, they came at me one at a time, and although it was difficult, I was able to fell them, thanks to all the practice and exercise I got the other day.

Past them, I found the front gates of the fortress, guarded by a minotaur. By now, my blood was boiling so hot that it didn't even occur to me to try to sneak past him. I chugged a healing potion, leaped at him with my dagger in hand, and won!

Oh, yeah.

But there was no obvious way to get into the fortress. The gate was too slick to climb, and the embankments too steep. In desperation, I threw myself at the gate, and to my astonishment, it opened (5)!

Tell no one of this.

In the first room, I had to navigate past some concealed traps and over a tripwire. No issues for a master thief like me (6)!

What would have happened if there had been issues for a master thief like me.

In the next room, a dining hall, I had to act fast. Man, it was crazy. First, I locked the door I came in, trapping a group of bandits outside. Then I blocked the east entry with a chair. Three bandit thugs charged in the west door, but I shoved a candelabra in their path, and as they went around the other side of the table, I jumped up on it, grabbed the rope to the chandelier, bowled them over, and dropped the chandelier on their heads (7)! Flush with the thrill of success, I bolted into the next room.

There, I at last encountered Yorick, the baron's jester, Elsa's friend, and the "warlock" of legend. He began by taunting and threatening me, but once I mentioned Elsa's name, he changed his tune. He seemed relieved that I was there to help. He related that Elsa didn't remember who she was, and that she planned to move the brigands out of the valley once the snows cleared, which would reduce the chances that she'd ever be disenchanted.

Oh. Yeah. About Toro...

He told me that he'd prepare the escape for me and took off, forgetting to let me know how to navigate through his crazy maze of a room, where every mistep could send me spinning to my doom. I gingerly walked across the planks, going in some openings only to emerge on the other side, opening doors that led to blank walls, before I finally got out (8).

In the room beyond, I at last came face-to-face with the brigand leader, and my, what a face!

She was lithe and stylish and fierce and roguish, and from the moment I saw her, all I wanted to do was join her band and be her bandit king. Or even her bandit consort. But the sword in her hand suggested that she wouldn't give me that option, so I hurled the dispel potion at her...

...and she turned into...a woman. A pretty woman, sure. But just a woman.

She remembered who she was immediately and raced home to her father. I liked her better with a sword in her hand and an attitude on her face. I hope the dispel potion didn't take away the skill she's accumulated over the last 10 years. Maybe she'll become a hero like me!

The what must be returned to who now?

Elsa and Yorick used some magic amulet to return to the castle, leaving me in a room full of treasure! Sure, bandits were beating down the door, but...treasure! Excruciatingly, all I could do was search her desk and run for the exit (9).

The next few hours were a confusing whirlwind. I returned to Baron von Spielburg's castle, where everyone was assembled (10), and the baron named me Hero of the Realm!

Before I knew what was happening, Abdulla and the Katta couple whisked me off on Abdulla's magic carpet to Shapeir!

"But what about Baba Yaga!" I screamed, as the valley of Spielburg faded in the distance. I guess Erasmus or someone will have to deal with her.

The valley really was enclosed on all sides by mountains.

Notes and Comments

1. Baba Yaga. As Corey Cole mentioned in a comment, they adapted her from Slavic folklore, including the hut on chicken legs. I've been a lover of Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" for years, but somehow I never connected the ninth movement to Baba Yaga until I read her Wikipedia page. (If you want to hear the movement, click here.)

2. Baba Yaga's Hut. I'm condensing for the sake of the narrative. I originally visited Baba Yaga's hut before I freed the Baronet, but I didn't know the rhyme and it didn't occur to me to just ask the skull for it. I returned later and tried everything--CLIMB FENCE, SMASH GATE, KILL SKULL, THROW DAGGER AT HUT--before I thought to type ASK ABOUT RHYME.

3. Cheetaur. Man, was the cheetaur tough. The only way I defeated it was to ESCAPE in the middle of combat, quickly quaff a healing potion, and then go back into combat again.

Not my most heroic moment.

4. Bandit fortress. At this point, I begin making a lot of mistakes, culminating in ending the game with a less-that-perfect score. I'll cover those mistakes in detail in the next posting, but the first one is that there's a secret door to the bandit fortress that I missed.

5. The front gate. I'm looking forward to reading a walkthrough at the end, because I otherwise have no idea how I was supposed to get through the gate. The way I did it seems too comical to be real.

6. Trap room. There were a lot of issues for a non-master player like me. It took me four tries to get through the room. You have to not walk on the rug, then walk on the right platform over the pit, then JUMP over a tripwire on the other side. Technically, by carefully examining all of the objects in your path, you can intuit what to do, which distinguishes this room from the next one.

7. Dining hall. This was a very odd sequence. As far as I'm concerned, the only way to get through it is by trial-and-error and lots of death. You have to do each of the steps that I related, in order, and at just the right time. What makes this particularly jarring is that there really aren't any other timed action sequences in the game. (There are a few other places where you have to do one action with a time limit, but it's usually obvious what you have to do.) It's like the game suddenly changes the rules for this one room. I guess that because it's only one room, I can find it forgivable, but it would be very frustrating to a player trying to limit his saved games.

One of the many ways you can die in this room. The death notices usually give you a hint about what you did wrong.

8. Yorick's room. I was furious with this room when I first played it, because it was all-too-easy to step on a trap and find yourself rolling along the right-hand walkway--endlessly.

You roll along, drop off the end, and come back through the door at the beginning again.

After swearing and re-loading multiple times, I realized you could just type STAND or STOP while rolling, and you'd stop. After that, it was just experimentation. You have to go through one opening, come out by the chain, pull the chain, go to the left door, open it and get out of the way before it comes crashing down, then open the second door beyond it.

9. Elsa's desk. Here is where I made the second big mistake. I knew from 'Enry the 'Ermit, Erasmus, and even Yorick that I needed a magic mirror to defeat Baba Yaga. I figured I needed to bring it to her hut and use it to bounce her frog-turning spell back at her. But when I left the bandit's fortress, I was immediately taken to the end game, with no opportunity to return to Baba Yaga. In the next posting, I'll describe why.

10. Endgame cut scene. I think they really did assemble all the NPCs in the game on this screen. There are even a few I can't place. Are some of them supposed to be icons of the game's developers? Unfortunately, in the EGA version, the quality of the graphics aren't good enough to see a lot of detail (especially for a colorblind player). But you can definitely see Toro the Minotaur standing in the back, even though I thought I killed him.

So I missed dealing with Baba Yaga and only got 397/500 points. A lesser CRPG addict would have reloaded a save game at this point and messed around a little more until he figured it out. But not me. Instead, I completely started over from the beginning, this time being careful to explore each screen more thoroughly. In my next posting, an abbreviated version of how my second PC managed to achieve almost--but not quite--all 500 points.

 

Hero's Quest: Free the Man from in the Beast

Half the prophecy is fulfilled!

Day 4

I woke up determined to acquire this dispel potion. I needed green fur, "flying water," and fairy dust, with no idea how I was going to get any of them. But by the end of the day, I had them all.

The green fur came from an odd creature called a "meep" living under a rock in the western part of the valley. There was a whole colony of them. At first, I didn't know what to do with them, but I tried just talking to them and one of them happily offered me his fur. I wish I could have learned more about them, but they're skittish little creatures (1).

"Flying water" was a bit of a puzzle, though not a very difficult one: I collected it from a waterfall near 'Enry the 'Hermit's cave.

 
That left fairy dust. I hadn't found any fairies during my explorations of Spielburg Valley, but the healer helped me to understand that Spielburg Valley at night is a very different place than Spielburg Valley during the day. I needed to re-explore all the areas I'd previously explored after the sun went down to see what had changed.

I had previously found the mushroom ring and I brought some of the mushrooms to the healer for silver. More notably, I ate one, and...well, let's not talk about it.

That Italian plumber was a liar.

At night, the mushroom patch came alive with fairies--annoying fairies. They buzzed around my head and chattered incessantly, demanding that I dance for them. Well, I can't dance. All right? I said it. I've tried. But when the music starts, I just can't find a beat and my legs won't cooperate with anything I tell them to do. The fairies weren't having any of that, though. So I lurched around a bit, and it seemed to please them. They gave me the dust (2).

The fairy ring wasn't the only place different at night. Nearby, I found the graveyard alive (ha!) with ghosts and specters. But after a mental "flash-forward" in which I pictured them sucking the life out of my body, I "restored" my mind to the present and ran away fast.

The unspeakable thoughts of torture were actually coming up.

I bedded down in Erana's Peace for a good night's sleep.

Days 5-6

In the morning, I popped into the healer's and got my dispel potion.
 

That last bit turned out to be important.

Now to figure out where to use it. There were three places in the valley I hadn't explored: the bandit camp, Baba Yaga's hut, and a cave guarded by an ogre. The ogre looked fairly tough, and I didn't trust my ability to sneak around him. I decided I needed to take him in melee combat. But I needed to bulk up first (3).

For two days, I exercised and practiced. I climbed trees and fences, picked locks on barred doors, ran through the forest, threw daggers on the archery range, played Dag-Nab-It with the guildmaster, worked at the castle stables, and fought battle after battle with lesser foes (4).

Mantrays were tough opponents who had no treasure, but they certainly helped increase my skills.

I capped off Day 6 with a long night's sleep in the inn and headed off to the cave the next morning.

Day 7

After all that work, the ogre fell distressingly quickly to my dagger. He was all bulk and no skill.
 

Inside the cave, I found a bear chained to the floor. With the part of the prophecy about freeing the man from the beast in mind, I figured that it was Baronet Barnard ensorcelled. But the dispel potion clearly wasn't meant for him.

A bear, there was. A bear! A bear! All black and brown and covered with hair!

It turned out he was being held in place (and in form) by a magic manacle, and as the healer said, the potion doesn't work if the source of the enchantment is an object. So I made friends with the bear by giving him a ration and moved past him into the cave beyond (5).

Note: do not try this in the wild.

The next cave housed the bear's captor, a kobold wizard, wearing the key to the manacle around his neck. I could have sneaked up to him and stolen it right from him--I'm that good--but I decided it would be heroic not to leave an evil kobold wizard loose in the valley (6). At least, not unless I could team up with him, and he didn't seem amenable to that. I sneaked up to him and stabbed him until he was dead.

Exploring the kobold's cave later, I rammed my shin into some object on the floor. But there was nothing there! Feeling around, I discovered an invisible treasure chest, and I was able to pick its lock by feel alone (I'm that good). The treasure was amazing (7).

That's enough for a chainmail and a dozen healing potions.

I was still counting the coins and tossing them to myself when I suddenly remembered the real reason I came to the cave. I returned to the outer cave and unlocked the bear's manacle. That could have been a really bad idea, but instead it did what I'd hoped and turned him back into a man.

"Belle?" he said hopefully, after resuming his human form.

He was a total jackass:

But at least he was honest. When I went back to the castle, Baron Stefan von Spielburg not only invited me in for dinner and a night in the royal chambers (I could get used to both), he gave me a bunch of gold.

Rescuing your son isn't enough?

With my new chainmail, it's time to save the girl! Because the bandit leader seems to have some affection for the townsfolk, I had thought it might be Barnard, but clearly I was wrong about that. Now I'm thinking it's Elsa and her faithful jester, the missing Yorick, is the "warlock" Erasmus disparaged for not having any real magic (8).

Unfortunately, I can't imagine storming the front gates of the stronghold, so I need to find another way in. While I'm pondering it, I think a visit to Baba Yaga is in order first.

Notes and Comments

1. Meeps. I couldn't resist trying "kill meeps." The game has a little animation in which you play whack-a-mole with their rocks, to no effect. But I reloaded just in case it caused them to get meep revenge later on.

It doesn't even increase your strength.

2. Fairies. There are also special endings if you attempt violence on the fairies or eat the mushrooms more than once. I think I'm going to create a video montage of all the funny ways to die.

3. Bulking Up. I've talked before about how skills increase with use. Training works very well in this game. In about an hour (a couple of days in game time), I went from not being able to hold my own against a bandit to absolutely dominating a troll. If the game were larger, it would actually be a bit too easy for this reason, but an hour or so of "grinding" seems reasonable for a game of this size.

The red scores indicate abilities that have changed since the last time I looked.

There are a lot of ways to train skills in Hero's Quest, including simply fighting monster after monster, sparring with the weapon master, cleaning the stables every day, climbing (trees, rocks, the town gate), running everywhere, sneaking everywhere (although I had bad luck with this one), picking locks on doors that are barred on the other side, playing Dag-Nab-It with the thieves' guildmaster, and throwing daggers or rocks at the target board south of town. I haven't played as a mage, but I suspect the "Mage's Maze" mini-game trains you, too. I'm sure I missed a few. Not only do these sessions increase the associated skills, they also increase related attributes like strength, agility, and vitality, plus your maximum stamina, hit points, and magic points.

I created a quick video montage of Hero's Quest training. It's embedded below, and here if you want to go directly to YouTube. [Edit: Alas, I had copyrighted music in the video and it made it unavailable in most countries. I had to remove it.]

4. Combats. In the last posting, I mentioned that I didn't really like the combat system, but I didn't really talk about how they occur. Except for a few fixed combats, most of them occur randomly as you wander through the forest. Certain very difficult creatures--cheetaurs, mantrays, and trolls--only come out at night at the beginning of the game, but you're more likely to see them in the day as the game drags on. For the most part, it's not tough to avoid them, if you really want to, by sneaking or running.

It's not tough to find monsters by just wandering around, but if you really want to find guaranteed combats, I've found one area that spawns endless bandits, and another screen where a group of goblins lurks behind bushes and rocks, occasionally coming out to fight.

Goblins everywhere. I feel like there must be more to do on this screen, but I couldn't find it.

5. Cave. My unreliable narrator glossed over it, but it took me a long time to figure out what to do in the cave. The big problem is that it looks like the cave continues at the top of the screen, when instead the entrance to the next cave is on the right side, past the bear, where it barely looks like you can walk. In fact, the first time I tried to walk right, I got stuck on some obstacle and couldn't move, and I figured there was nowhere to go there.

Oh, by the way: What happens if you kill the bear? Bad stuff.

6. Sneaking up on the kobold. Some oddness here. When I tried to go into sneak mode in the kobold cave, the game told me that the echoes in the cave were too strong to sneak. When I tried to just walk up on the kobold, he killed me with magic. But when I started sneaking in the previous cave, it let me continue sneaking in the kobold cave with no problems.

The combat in this cave is also a little messed up. Instead of going to the regular combat screen, you end up fighting on the main screen (but using the same commands). At first, I didn't realize what was going on and kept typing "FIGHT KOBOLD" while the kobold calmly killed me.

7. The invisible chest. This and the solution to the healer's lost ring were the only two things I clearly remembered from my play of Quest for Glory 14 years ago. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't have wandered around the cave long enough to find it.

8. Elsa, Yorick, and the Brigands. You'd think I would have remembered this from my previous playing, but I didn't. Until close to the end, I thought Elsa was being held by the brigands, not the leader of the brigands. It wasn't until I realized that I still had a dispel potion to use on someone that I remembered that Elsa has magical amnesia. I guess I just spoiled the next posting.