Wednesday, January 15, 2020

Game 351: Morton's Fork (1980)

I originally had this as a 1981 game, but a commenter found an ad selling the title in 1980.
        
Morton's Fork
United States
Chameleon Software (developer and original publisher); Adventure International (later publisher)
Released 1980 (or perhaps 1979) for TRS-80 and Apple II
Date Started: 9 January 2020
Date Ended: 9 January 2020
Total Hours: 4
Difficulty: Easy-Moderate (2.5/5)
Final Rating: 17
Ranking at time of posting: 71/360 (20%)
                 
Morton's Fork is the third game in the series generally called Maces & Magic, after Dungeon (1979; later called Balrog or Balrog Sampler) and Stone of Sisyphus (links to my coverage). It's been difficult to reconstruct the history of the company even though I spoke to one of its principals, Richard Bumgarner, back in 2013. Chameleon was the moonlighting gig of three Indianapolis-based medical professionals, including x-ray technician Bumgarner. From what I can figure, they conceived of the series in the late 1970s and may have produced and marketed all three games before they struck a publishing deal with Scott Adams' Adventure International. The first game was originally called Dungeon but later acquired the (nonsensical) Balrog or Balrog Sampler names from AI. Adventure International also seems to be the source of the Maces & Magic series name, although it appears nowhere except on the game packaging. [Edit: Commenter Jason Dyer found an ad for the game from 1980, pre-Adventure International, that uses the "Maces & Magic" series name. Commenter Exploradorrpg found another ad showing that the Balrog Sampler name was used before AI was involved.] AI also gussied up the title screens a bit, removing the jokes that the creators had placed and (of course) adding the AI name and logo.
        
A later version of the main screen, from the Apple II edition.
         
I've spent years trying to find a working version of Morton's Fork--all three games are notoriously unstable--and the one I was finally able to play lacks the AI logo on the title screen. It's possible that all three games were produced and marketed as early as 1979 and that the 1981 date is from when they were re-distributed by AI, but so far I haven't been able to find any magazine evidence of Chameleon selling the second two games directly.
          
A 1981 ad for the Adventure International releases of the three titles.
        
Even if Morton's Fork had a 1981 release date, its technology is essentially the same as the first game in the series. All three games play exactly the same way, just with different scenarios and puzzles. All three are RPG/text adventure hybrids in which the goal is to collect a fixed number of treasures in a large environment and then find your way out of the game. A mutable hero and wandering monsters are blended with fixed landscapes and unchanging puzzles. The hero could theoretically be swapped between games as if they were "modules" in a traditional RPG experience. The games are thus somewhat like Eamon (1980) but without the central "hub" disk.
            
A leaflet in the game encourages the player to buy the other games.

           
All three start the same way. The player creates a character and the game rolls for strength, luck, dexterity, intelligence, constitution, and charisma. The character is assumed to be a warrior, or a warrior/thief, as there is no magic in the game. After creation, the player is given a chance to purchase weapons and armor from a very long list of obscure terms, apparently created by a doctor who had an encyclopedia or something. You are limited in what you buy by gold and encumbrance.

Dungeon and Stone of Sisyphus had the player explore dungeons with pan-cultural themes, including a hippodrome, an Egyptian room, and an Arabian desert. Fork moves the action to a large castle. The box says that it's a "wizard's castle," but in-game there's no hint of a wizard. The goal is simply to loot it of as much treasure as possible.
           
All of the Maces & Magic games feature absurdly detailed weapon and armor lists.
         
Morton's Fork begins a bit differently from the other titles by including a "good luck" screen as the game begins. Although it seems full of cliches, it is in fact full of hints. For instance, the advice to "lift your spirits; you may pry some of the secrets loose" is a hint to drink with an NPC in the castle's cellar. "Keys to hidden riches may take many forms" is a clue to use a hairpin as a lockpick. "You must know when to hide your light and when to let it spring forth" refers to a section of game where you have to light a torch to navigate a dark hallway, but then extinguish it to avoid getting attacked by bats. "Paint a rosy future for yourself and doors may open" is the clue needed for the endgame.
          
A pre-game text screen full of spoilers.
         
The game eases you into its journey with a long path leading to the castle. You find a token, and then on the next screen a pedestal with a slot. This lowers the drawbridge. You find an iron bar and then a rock with a bunch of scratches; prying the bar reveals a passcode that you must give to the butler when you first arrive. Once you reach the castle's entry, the game opens up and you can flexibly explore and acquire treasures.
      
An early puzzle. The number is randomized for each new game.
          
The text quality is good, if not as verbose as Infocom games of the period. Inputs are also much more limited. On any given screen, the game gives you numeric inputs for what you can do and where you can go, so you never waste a lot of time typing verbs and nouns that have no effect. The only exception is that on any screen, you can use an item from your inventory, typing a simple (and usually obvious) keyword to specify what you want to do. Thus, you enter a dark room. In addition to following the game's suggestions to (1) leave or (2) feel your way down the corridor, you can also hit "P" to open your pack, choose the torch, and type LIGHT or IGNITE or any of several synonyms. Most of the game's puzzles are about using the right inventory item in the right place.
           
A typical text screen with numbered choices.
         
There are fixed combats with certain enemies as well as random combats with guards that roam the corridors. Combat is executed automatically, with your attributes and weapon strengths aggregated into a single combat score and then pitted against your enemy's. Opponents lose hit points (constitution) each round until one of them dies. 
         
Combat with some castle guards.
        
It's relatively easy to roll a character too weak to win any of the game's combats, or too poor to afford enough protection to do well. Some of the enemies are, I believe, out of the reach of any first-round character and would have to be fought by a player who escaped a first attempt with a bunch of treasure and used it to buy much better equipment. 

The game follows its predecessors by offering a lot of choices but not being necessarily very logical or "fair" in the execution of those choices. For instance, in a den, you're faced with a fireplace with three levers. One opens a hidden niche and reveals a valuable coin collection. The second causes the fire to roar into the room and kill you. The third releases a "smoke monster" that you have to battle. There really is no way of determining the good from the bad when making your choice.
                
This is funny, but I'm not sure it's a logical outcome of taking a glass of punch at a party.
          
They aren't really "role-playing" choices, either. If you find your way into the torture room, you have options to attack the torture troll and thus free his prisoner or help the torture troll crank the wheel that operates the rack. If you attack the troll, you face a near-impossible battle and if you manage to kill him, the prisoner just gruffly wanders away. If you help torture the prisoner, you get valuable intelligence about how to enter the throne room.

Finally, there are an awful lot of instant death situations that are hardly fair. Just wandering into the wrong room can kill you. I suspect these are in place to artificially bolster the game's replay value. Otherwise, I can't see how any player would take one month to finish it, which the box says is the average.
       
All I did was pull on a rope.
All I did was pull a lever.
All I did was walk into a room.
           
Overall, though, the castle is a fun place to explore. It's a living place, with guards roaming the halls and shooting craps in their off-duty room, a butler guarding the entryway, and guests dancing the night away in a ballroom. The game isn't obvious about it, but I suspect your success or failure as you navigate the halls is based partly on your attributes. For instance, if you visit the ballroom you can try to pickpocket the guests. Not only is success based (I suspect) on dexterity, but your ability to even enter and stay in the room has something to do with your charisma.

Your ultimate goal is to assemble a group of treasures. I didn't find them all, but I found almost all of them:
         
  • A ruby necklace, pickpocketed from the guests in the ballroom.
  • A large gold figure. It's found in its "small gold figure" form in a room with piles of objects and a large purple flame. By looking at the objects, you can figure out that throwing items into the flame makes them bigger, so tossing in the "small gold figure" gives you the large one. You also have the option to jump in the flames yourself for a permanent boost to strength and constitution, although you kill yourself if you try it a second time.
        
The one bit of "character development" in the game.
        
  • A coin collection, found in a hidden niche in the den's fireplace.
  • A silver tea service, found by picking the lock of a cabinet with a hairpin.
  • An emerald orb, found in a dresser that opens when you strike a tuning fork in the room.
  • Gold cookies, looted after you kill a "cookie monster" in the pantry off the kitchen. That's not right.
  • A diamond stickpin, simply found in one of the rooms.
  • A multi-jeweled crown, found in the throne room, which you reach after a long sequence of puzzles. You have to walk over a pit and pass a swarm of bats by strategically lighting and extinguishing a torch, pass a large dragon by pouring "shrinking powder" on him, and get by a guard monster by giving him a password that you got by steaming open an envelope. 
       
One of the more memorable sequences in the game, though I never did find any use for the dragon dung.
        
  • The platinum chameleon, found at the top of a tower that requires a lot of inventory puzzles to successfully climb.
      
The most difficult puzzle of all is getting out of the castle. I wouldn't have solved it if I hadn't figured out that the welcome screen was full of hints. Eventually, you find a couple of rooms that link to a chute. If you climb in the chute, you end up tumbling into a non-descript room with no exits. It's only from that opening screen that you get the hint to use a bucket of paint (found in a "many-colored room") to PAINT DOOR on the wall. This causes your door to swing upon and reveal "the corporate headquarters of Chameleon Software," where "astonished programmers" help you carry your treasures out of the dungeon.
             
Might and Magic would draw from this ending years later.
          
You're then given your final experience score (from the monsters that you killed) and your final point total from the treasures that you acquired. After a few runs at the game, I was able to achieve 1,340 out of a possible 1,492 points.
         
I'm going to call this a "win."
          
There were some rooms that I didn't solve that might have held the additional treasures. There's a closet off the top of a staircase with a "closet monster" who was always too powerful for me. If you're unlucky enough to wander your way into the gym, you get picked on by three buff guards. Insulting them causes them to attack you, and I couldn't defeat them. The other options all lead to negative outcomes. Also, I suspect there was something I was supposed to do with a crystal chandelier.
         
None of these options leads to anything good.
        
Theoretically, you're supposed to be able to save the character and then re-enter the game, using the riches from your first adventure to purchase better equipment and try again. Unfortunately, for none of the three games have I managed to get a character to survive the transition from game disk to save disk and back again. It's a miracle when the program runs right at all instead of crashing with vague errors, failing to load the weapon and armor tables, suddenly deciding my character has no inventory, or a host of other problems.

In a GIMLET, Morton's Fork gets a 17 compared to Dungeon's 20. Fork has fewer opportunities for character development, fewer interesting encounters, and a smaller game world than the first game in the series.  
        
My map of the game.
       
Before we go, we should discuss the name of the game. A "Morton's fork" is described by The Oxford Dictionary of Idioms as "a situation in which there are two choices or alternatives whose consequences are equally unpleasant." It is traced back to John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor of England under Henry VII. He is said to have argued that a man living ostentatiously could clearly afford higher taxes while a man living frugally must be saving his money--and could thus afford higher taxes. The "water test" for witches (if you float, you're a witch and you're executed; if you sink and drown, you're innocent) is often given as an example of a Morton's Fork.
       
An in-game Morton's fork. You die in a fire no matter what option you choose.
       
It's a curious title for a game, particularly since the only "fork" in the game is a tuning fork, and it's hardly a centerpiece. But like Stone of Sisyphus, which references a process of doing the same thankless task repeatedly, I think the creators were making a commentary on adventure games and perhaps even "choose your own adventure"-style books, in which multiple options lead to the same outcome. There's one notable moment in the game in which you're given three ways to escape from a fire, and none of them work. 

Were they critiquing themselves? Making fun of their own players, who paid $29.95 for the game only to presumably lose three consecutive characters to the same fire? We can't say. All we know is that the creators chose a title that ostensibly pokes fun at the laziest of adventure game tropes--and then they stocked the game with actual examples.

43 comments:

  1. Hi. Still reading, sorry not posting often. My father died today, less than 2 years after my mother died (who died 4 years after my wife died). Will keep reading as long as I can, tho I can't promise to post more.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. William, I'm so sorry to hear that. I'm dealing with the same situation with my stepdad right now.

      Delete
    2. Very sorry to hear that, William. Every so often I still stop by your blog to see if there are any updates, and I had hoped that no news was good news for you and yours, but I'm saddened to learn of this further loss.

      Delete
    3. My condolences William. Such a challenging time.

      Delete
  2. "There's one notable moment in the game in which you're given three ways to escape from a fire, and none of them work."

    Maybe there is a way. The first and second options look like they are meant for the characters with very high dexterity. Or maybe the fire can be dowsed by something. Like that dragon dung. Or maybe there is something like a sack of sand in the gym, or a bucket of water somewhere. But it just a bunch of random guesses.

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    1. I'll look again when I have a chance to be sure, but I'm pretty sure I made that determination by inspecting the code rather than just trying all the options.

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    2. I thought there might be a solution involving water too, particularly given the bit about how "THE LADDER OF SUCCESS IS NEVER CLIMBED WITHOUT FIRST BUILDING UP A HEAD OF STEAM". I know you already steamed an envelope, but...

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  3. Interestingly, this game has the exact same final puzzle (and resolution) as Leisure Suit Larry 3. I wonder if there's a connection?

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    1. The first Larry came out in 87 though, so this game can't have copied anything from it. So if there is a connection, Al Lowe ripped off the ending from this game, which is unlikely. It's more likely that both developers came up with this silly idea independently.

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    2. If memory serves, it's actually an ending that Sierra used multiple times across both the Space Quest and Leisure Suit Larry franchises.

      It's very reminiscent of 80's programmer "humor." That, and the horrifically unfunny jokes my drafting/woodshop teacher would tell. Maybe technical professions don't lend themselves to a good sense of humor.

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    3. There's an easter egg in the AGI version of KQIV where you can get beamed to a space ship and meet the programming team.

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    4. In the TRS-80 adventure game Bedlam (1982), one of the solutions involves getting an NPC to paint a door (and then open it) -- though one does not meet the programmers at end.

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    5. I feel like I've seen this in a hundred cartoons.

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  4. In the game of bridge, a Morton's Fork Coup is one where you give an opponent a choice between immediately winning the trick, but giving you two later, or holding up and never winning the trick at all.
    For example, you have K3 in your hand and Q97 in the dummy. You think the player on your left has the Ace. Lead the 3. If he wins the Ace, the King and Queen are both good. If he holds up, the Queen wins this trick and you then discard your King on a winner in a different suit.
    As with most coups, this is rarely an obvious play. :-) But when it works, you win an extra trick *and* style points.

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    1. Since I don't know the rules of Bridge, I now know what someone who never played an RPG before feels like reading discussions of rulesets. :D

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  5. Oh god, I hate quotes that are attributed to "anonymous." People using "anonymous" quotes 100% made them up, whole cloth, nobody ever actually said them, they just wanted to seem well-read by "quoting" someone. Look, I'll do it right now:

    "RPGs are the premiere medium of our time. Citizen Kane is garbage in comparison to Morton's Fork." -- Anonymous

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    1. There's a February 1980 newspaper here that attributes the "Just when I finally figure out where it's at, somebody moves it" quote to "Chatauga Boulevard Law":

      https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1312&context=pawprint

      That looked to me like a mangled version of "Chautauqua", and this book seems to confirm it:

      https://books.google.com/books?id=D1IuBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA57&lpg=PA57

      The relevant bit being:

      "Chautauqua Boulevard Law. Just when I finally figure out where it's at... somebody moves it. (Sign in window, Chautauqua Boulevard and Coast Highway, Pacific Palisades, California, R.S.)"

      Google Books also yields a result from a 1972 humor book, but with no preview available I can't tell whether it's a phantom or not.

      So I highly doubt the Morton's Fork programmers made it up; it's probably just a one-liner that was circulating at the time. It seems to have been occasionally used since then -- Google offers up a handful of hits -- and I almost wonder if it indirectly inspired Grampa Simpson's famous soliloquy:

      "I used to be with 'it'. Then they changed what 'it' was. Now what I'm with isn't 'it', and what's 'it' seems weird and scary to me. It'll happen to you!"

      Anyway, I share your loathing of anonymous quotes, but what really raises my ire is when contemporary-sounding, feel-good messages are attributed to celebrities and historical figures who demonstrably didn't say those things. (And then it's used as the caption to an image of that celebrity and uploaded to Facebook, whereupon 50,000 people repost it with seeming indifference to the truth, or the irony of dehumanizing a real person by means of "inspirational" quotes...)

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    2. Found a 1977 example from a book called Can I help it if they don't learn? (what a title!), in the context of an anecdote about a youth pastor:

      https://books.google.com/books?id=-F3_f0sYFxQC&q=%22somebody+moves+it%22+%22where+it%27s+at%22

      Exhibit A: The weary youth pastor looked wistfully at his wife after a party with the church kids. He had made it his consuming passion to be "with it."

      "Just when I finally find out where it's at," he sighs, "somebody moves it."

      Delete
  6. Is that Apple II title screen cracked, or was that subtitle/bit of extra text part of the original release?

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  7. My main takeaway from this post is that John Morton was kind of an entitled douche.

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    Replies
    1. To be fair, Wikipedia indicates the story may have been made up by one of his detractors.

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  8. Here's a Chameleon-but-not-Adventure-International ad from Dec. 1980 for Morton's Fork.

    https://archive.org/details/creativecomputing-1980-12/page/n177

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    1. Found the second game in the series mentioned July 1980, same magazine:

      https://archive.org/details/creativecomputing-1980-07/page/n175

      Incidentally, the same page mentions an OSI game called Dungeons which I've never heard of. Aurora has "full" port of original Adventure which is still in existence but this game seems to be lost.

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    2. That ad clears up a lot. It turns out Maces & Magic precedes the AI distribution deal.

      I'm not sure now whether to put this game at 1980 or take the word of the copyright screen and make it 1979.

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    3. I think you've been using date of publication, so probably 1980?

      I've been using date of writing for All the Adventures but I've had a fair number of cases where it made more sense to use the earlier date -- for example, Hezarin was written mainly in 1981 on mainframe, but not published until 1990; Stuga was the first non-English adventure and written in 1977-1978 but not published until 1986. Similar situations with RPGs seem to be more "clones" rather than direct "ports".

      I'll keep digging for an ad for Maces and Magic #1 when I have time.

      (Incidentally, I'm going to be hitting a game soon after Hezarin you [correctly] skipped for non-RPG-ness -- Kaves of Karkhan.)

      Also also, that game called Dungeon seems to be identically described in a later Aurora catalog as The Wizard's City -- it also gets a lot more google hits for that.

      http://www.osiweb.org/catalogs/AuroraCatalog.pdf

      Still seems to be lost, though -- only had an OSI port as far as I can tell.

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    4. It's not lost, only hidden:

      https://exploradorrpg.wordpress.com/juegos/the-wizards-city/

      Delete
  9. What on Earth does "Don't forget the chipper!" on the title screen mean?

    -Alex from The Adventure Gamer

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    1. The Chipper is the one who did the Apple II crack.

      Apple II cracker screens are almost an art genre until themselves.

      http://artscene.textfiles.com/intros/APPLEII/

      (Another one by The Chipper is on there.)

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    2. I figured that he just added the text rather than creating the entire castle image, but I could be wrong.

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    3. Thanks Jason I love this part of computerhistory.

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  10. Another example of "lampshading your problematic elements does not excuse them". Also "lampshading is not the same as critique or deconstruction".

    See also a long list of videogames that poke fun at lazy or annoying game design decisions, while still actually being bad or flawed games because of implementing those exact decisions. (Matt Hazard, Deathspank, and Bard's Tale 2004, although Bard's Tale 2004 is more a case of a reasonably enjoyable game that could still have been a lot better.)

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    1. Oh gosh... Deathspank. Possibly one of the most incessantly boring games ever made.

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    2. Thank you ! I thought I was alone in thinking that ! Boring and obnoxious...

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    3. Ron Gilbert made one of the best games of all time (the Secret of Monkey Island).

      He then wrote an enormously influential and insightful essay about *why* it was such a good game, and how games generally should work.

      Then he had a drink, took a deep breath, and knuckled down to a career of doing the opposite of everything he just said.

      Delete
    4. Witcher 3 has a bit where Geralt has to escort a goat back to its owner, all the while bitterly complaining about how silly it is. It's pretty quick and actually fairly amusing, I thought.

      Delete
    5. Reminds me of Saint's Row: Gat out of Hell. When Gat first picks up a glowing orb he remarks something along the lines of "I'm going to have to find like a hundred of these, aren't I?"

      You have to find *over 900* of them. Their own mocking of the genre *fell short*.

      (I think I got them all, but it was a long time ago I played those games, and I'm still in the process of buying a new PC that can play the new one)

      Delete
  11. It's always interesting seeing these old games that were trying to approximate a D&D playing session before CRPGs branched off and became their own thing.

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  12. "The first game was originally called Dungeon but later acquired the (nonsensical) Balrog or Balrog Sampler names from AI."

    There is a 1980's ad in Softside magazine before AI with the name Balrog Sampler, before the third game was published (it was later that year).

    https://archive.org/details/softside-magazine-25/page/n101/mode/2up?q=%22Balrog+sampler%22

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    1. In fact, the first game is announced as Dungeon#1 in a November'79 Infoworld magazine as a Dungeons & Dragons game. Then in an April'80 Infoworld magazine is announced The Stone of Sisyphus as the second game of Maces & Magic series and names the first as The Balrog Sampler...

      I think TSR had something to do with the change of the name.

      https://books.google.es/books?id=LD4EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA19&dq=%22chameleon+software%22&hl=es&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi8zO_-gNvzAhVi8OAKHfZeDDwQ6AF6BAgIEAI#v=onepage&q=%22chameleon%20software%22&f=false

      https://books.google.es/books?id=WT4EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PT9&dq=%22chameleon+software%22&hl=es&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi8zO_-gNvzAhVi8OAKHfZeDDwQ6AF6BAgKEAI#v=onepage&q=%22chameleon%20software%22&f=false

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  13. You missed two treasures:

    - Diamond prism: use the lumber to build a "LADDER", then "CLIMB" the ladder to reach the chandelier.

    - Silk cloth: wade the subterranean river without equipment or only a light weapon and fight a slime worm (CR 25).

    And there are 70 optional points in the basement:

    - 10 for reading the leaflets.
    - 10 for helping the torture troll.
    - 25 for getting the cell keys.
    - 25 for getting the guard uniform.

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    Replies
    1. Thanks for clearing up those specifics. I guess I missed that entire area.

      Delete

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