Ambermoon: The Plot Thickens

 

Fighting the big boss--of the previous game.

        

During the last session, I had obtained the last of the ingredients necessary for the "Demon Sleep" potion that would allow me to get past the guardian of the Brotherhood of the Temple of Tarbos. As this session began, I took them to the Witch Master's house, where I knew there was a cauldron in the basement. In front of the cauldron, I used the recipe again, and within seconds, I had the potion. I got a tingle watching so many quest items disappear from my inventory at once.

   

I whistled for the eagle, mounted its back, and flew it to the fortress on the island in the lake east of Newlake. I think this is where Twinlake was in the original game. A cratered ground suggested that the fortress was at Ground Zero for the moon impact 70 years ago.

       

I'm not sure that type of crater makes sense on this type of landscape.

       

We walked through the front door and found a crystal wall in front of us. The game had Gryban try to smash it with his axe, but he was unable to cause even a scratch. Moving around the wall, we found a short passageway with a demon at the end of it.

          

You'd like us to not pass. Is that what I'm reading?

        

We tried a regular battle against the demon, but no magic spell would touch him and no physical weapon would "penetrate the magic aura." He, meanwhile, was capable of casting "Iceshower," the most powerful destructive spell in the game. We didn't last long against him.

                  

We had to try.

         

Reloading, we found an alcove off the demon corridor with a food bowl. "That looks like the food bowl of a very, very large guard dog," Gryban remarked. We poured the potion into the bowl and waited. The demon soon visited his bowl, lapped it up, fell asleep, and disappeared.

        

Taking care of the demon.

       

We moved past the demon into the fortress. The fortress's primary enemies were "magical guards." Each had a few hundred hit points. They were resistant (though not immune) to magic, and their physical attacks frequently caused critical hits, which in this game kills the target. I had to resurrect characters a few times and reload a few other times as I fought them. They were reasonably good for experience.

    

A locked door had runes reading "HANGAR," which I found intriguing, but we couldn't get in there for now. We took a staircase down and found ourselves facing another locked door with a "12-pointed recess." This one opened to the Amberstar--I'm glad I grabbed it when I went to wake up Gryban.

                

Using the Amberstar to open a door--just like grandpa.

           

The room beyond the Amberstar door had a huge coffin. As we approached, we "triggered an inaudible mechanism" which caused the ground to shake. The lid opened and a "gigantic demon" emerged:

    

He reaches his full height, looks around with flashing eyes and thunders at you in a voice which almost blasts you away: "Ah, mortals! Be afraid, for Tarbos, the God of Chaos, is free again!" Then he looks down and, with a cry of rage, he howls: "Aaarrghh! Why have I been separated from Tar? It's your fault, you miserable piles of dust! You will die for this, and right now, as true as I am the King of Hell!" He breaks down into an incomprehensible roaring and, in the deafening noise, Sabine shouts to the group: "That is Thornahuun! Our only chance is to attack immediately!"

    

I promise that we'll parse that little speech in a few minutes. For now, combat commenced with a demon that looked exactly like the invincible guard demon that we faced earlier. Thornahuun wasn't invincible, though. He had 792 hit points, a strong attack, and powerful fire-based spells, but he took damage readily enough. He was resistant to magic but not immune, and Nelvin got some lucky "Ice Balls" through his defenses. We had our own buffing spells going (principally, "Magical Attack," "Magical Wall," and "Anti-Magic Sphere") when we encountered him, so we shrugged off a lot of his attacks. Sabine kept up with healing as I whittled him down. He was easier than the magic guardians I had to fight to get to him. On his corpse, he left something called the "TAR Amulet."

             

He didn't do this every time, but he did it enough.

        

While we chewed over what just happened, we took another staircase from the main floor to the "head priest's chambers."  We fought several more parties of magical guardians. In a chest, we found a "hangar key" and a document titled "S'Orel News." The document was long but answered a lot of questions, while raising still others. It was written from S'Orel, the head priest of the temple, to his master, someone named S'Lorwin. The document indicates that the dwarves of Lyramion had been tricked into helping the Brotherhood of Tarbos build some kind of machine. In exchange, the Brotherhood promised to fly the dwarves to a moon that was "one enormous jewel" (recall the dwarf in the last session who had wanted to "go on the big boat to the green jewel"). But the Brotherhood lied; the moon in question was not a jewel but a "contaminated forest moon." The Brotherhood "dumped them there" and left them with no way to return. "Now that there are no more dwarfs here on Lyramion, no one will hear of our plans."

   

The letter goes on to say that no one in the Brotherhood had entered the chamber containing Thornahuun because they didn't have the Amberstar. The Brotherhood believed that the chamber contained "a godlike being by the name of Tarbos," but they didn't actually care. They just adopted the name "Brotherhood of Tarbos" to scare away everyone else on Lyramion. The members of the Brotherhood are, in fact, from another planet, and their "machine," which has already been activated, is doing something to "make [their] world fertile again," at the expense of Lyramion's eventual destruction.

   

The letter finally alerts "Master S'Lorwin" of our party. He knows my name but calls me "he." "Just let him come here!" he finishes. "Even if he should get past the guard demon, which he simply cannot, he still has to deal with me." 

    

Always like to see the character's name reflected in the game.

      

We "dealt" with him in the next chamber--a lizard-like humanoid with several magical guardians. "You are too late to stop the machine below the temple starting its work very soon," he boasted. Sensing our confusion, he added: "Ah, I see wonderment in your faces--perhaps you don't know what is going on? That is not important, anyway, because now you are to die!" He blasted us with a fireball, but most of us managed to avoid it. 

  

The ensuing combat pitted us against S'Orel and two magical guardians. We went all out with damage spells and scrolls and killed them in two rounds. The high priest dropped a "S'Orel Key." 

         

S'Orel and the Magic Golems.

        

Let's pause to consider what we've learned:

   

• Thornahuun appears in the backstory to Amberstar. He was, indeed, the King of Hell, and the father of the evil wizard called both "Tar" and "Tarbos." He and Thornahuun somehow became a single being. He was on the verge of conquering the world when a confederacy of mages banished him to one of Lyramion's moons.

• Amberstar dealt with a plot to return Tarbos/Thornahuun to Lyramion. I thought we were successful in preventing it at the end of Amberstar, but then the fact that the moon crashed into Lyramion, depositing Tarbos anyway, made me think that we had failed and the plot of Ambermoon would involve dealing with him for good. Now, I don't know what to think. Tar or Tarbos somehow got separated from Thornahuun before or after the moon crashed. Was that a result of the Amberstar party's efforts? Or a side-effect of the crash?

• Either way, this party has just killed Thornahuun, something that the combined might of the pre-Amberstar world couldn't accomplish.

       

Fair point to S'Orel: We do not, in fact, know what is going on.

        

• But Thornahuun only woke up in the first place because we brought the Amberstar to the temple. He was never the main threat. The Brotherhood of Tarbos turns out not to be about Tarbos but rather a front for an alien lizard race sucking the life out of Lyramion to restore their own planet. (I have to wonder if this plot wasn't influenced by the V series.) 

• But why did I need the Amberstar to open the door to his room? The backstory of Amberstar says that the Amberstar was needed to open the way to the temple of Godsbane (where I found Gryban). It said nothing about another chamber on the moon where Tarbos was banished.

• If Tar/Tarbos was somehow separated from Thornahuun, what happened to him? (More on this in a minute.)

• The members of the Brotherhood of Tabos are capable of summoning a demon who is more powerful than the literal King of Hell.

        

The main plot of this game now becomes clear: I have to stop the Brotherhood's machine. To do that, I suspect I'll need to consult with the dwarves who built it, who are currently trapped on a forest moon. 

   

Fortunately, I have a way to do this. The "hangar key" opened the door to a large terrace full of crystals and what appears to be an airship.

      

"They all want to see Buck Rogers. And that's us."

       

We boarded the ship. A small map showed that it has three receptacles labeled "MORAG," "FOREST MOON," and "LYRAMION." I suspect "MORAG" is the name of the lizardmen's home planet. The receptacles looked familiar--more on that in a bit.

          

The receptacle that takes us to the Forest Moon. I'm glad the lizardmen use Lyramionic runes.

        

At the end of one corridor was the skeleton of a dwarf. He had a Chest Key, a piece of amber, and a note. The note indicated that the corpse belonged to Brom, who at the orders of his leader, Kire (of the "Palace of Kire" in Gemstone), had sneaked aboard one of the lizardmen's airships so that he could return to Lyramion and get help. The note mentions that Kire stole one of the Navigation Stones needed to fly the airship and hid it in the Old Dwarf Mine. The note mentions a sequence of gems that must be placed into receptacles in the mine to get to the chest containing the Navigation Stone. It is unclear how Brom died or why the lizardmen just left his body in their ship.

        

It's a good thing I've been holding on to these.

      

A couple of other chests in the ship contain a Morag Robe and a Morag Dart, both powerful items usable by mages.

    

It then clicked where I'd seen those receptacles before--there was one in the Old Dwarf Mine, and I couldn't figure out what to do with it. I returned to the mine and placed a topaz in it, and it opened a secret door to another receptacle. That one required a ruby. The third required an emerald, which I didn't have, but I remembered that merchants sold gems, and I found one in the first shop I checked, in Spannenberg. I had all the others: earth stone, quartz crystal, rainbow stone, diamond, and amber.

       

It would have been nice if I could have put all of them in a single container.

      

Behind the last secret door, I found the Navigation Stone, which I can presumably use to rescue the dwarves or take the fight directly to the lizardmen on their homeworld.

    

Even though this entry was pretty short, it seemed like a good stopping point, so I started to type it up. I had just finished typing, "If Tar/Tarbos was somehow separated from Thornahuun, what happened to him?" when it hit me: He's the "mad mage" that the healers have in a cage beneath Spannenberg! I would have completely forgotten about him except that I've been keeping a good Ambermoon notes file, and figuring out his issue is the only outstanding quest in it. Clementine, the healer, said that he arrived "shortly after the great disaster," was clearly a powerful mage, and had "half of a strange amulet." 

        

If this guy isn't Tarbos, he's someone important.

       

We returned to the basement. The madman just ranted and threatened us, although he showed a "flash of recognition" when we showed him the amulet. We went to the chest containing his amulet in a nearby room. Selene picked the lock. It had a "BOS" amulet, an old robe (broken), and a cell key. Unfortunately, this didn't help us at all. There doesn't seem to be any way to reunite the amulets, and showing the pieces to him individually just prompts that flash of recognition. If we open the cell door with the key, he attacks.

        

Oh, no! Not a "magic flash of light!"

        

So I leave off here, believing that the "madman" is probably Tar, but not sure what to do about it--if, indeed, there is anything to do about it. Whether I'm right or wrong, the game offered a pretty solid plot twist during this act. Frankly, if commenters hadn't spoiled it, I would have assumed that the final battle would be in the Temple of the Brotherhood of Tarbos, and that it would involve Tarbos. The "real" plot had been hinted at with the material about the disappearance of the dwarves, the visions of the dwarves on an alien moon, and an NPC in Newlake who talked about the members of the Brotherhood having scaly skin. I still wasn't prepared for such an interesting pivot.

     

You may ask why I'm so delighted at Ambermoon opening up a new chapter at the 60-hour mark when I've complained about Serpent Isle doing essentially the same thing, particularly when the quality of storytelling is not vastly different between the two games. (There are other vague similarities to the games, including the availability of fast travel via a central hub.) I think it comes down to Ambermoon offering far better RPG mechanics. Combat, equipment, and character development became afterthoughts in Serpent Isle many hours ago--and frankly, they were hardly ever forethoughts. Ambermoon, on the other hand, has maintained a certain consistency in combat challenge, character progression, equipment progression, and spell acquisition. I find myself looking forward to many of the combats, particularly with bosses. I still don't want Ambermoon to last many more than, say, 80 hours, but regardless of how long it lasts, I don't think I'll ever get as exasperated with it as I've been with Serpent Isle.

       

For the next entry, look for my party to take to the stars!

      

Time so far: 63 hours