#stone prophet

[sinmenon]

Dungeons & Dragons - Ravenloft: Stone Prophet (DOS)

[oldschoolfrp]

Ravenloft: Stone Prophet, Clyde Caldwell box art for the 1995 PC game by DreamForge Intertainment and Strategic Simulations (SSI), 1995  (This has been cropped and recolored from the larger cover of AD&D Ravenloft adventure Touch of Death, TSR, 1991)

[vintagerpg]

Touch of Death is the third Ravenloft module, wrapping up the RA-series that would eventually be joined with the RM modules to form the larger Grand Conjunction plot (I should note that the Touch of Death is the first module to mention the Grand Conjunction prophecy, so you can see how they were adjusting on the fly and retconning as needed). It’s got mummies. Mummies don’t exactly fit my preconceived notion of Ravenloft horror/fantasy, but I don’t really care – I like mummies. I think they’re an underused and underappreciated boogeyman that don’t get enough cred. As a mummy module, I find Touch of Death extremely satisfying. It is also worth noting that the desert land of Har’Akir and its dark lord, the mummy Anhktepot, were both featured in SSI’s videogame Stone Prophet.

It is much smaller and much more straight forward than the previous two, both of which get tripped up on their ambitions. It ends, however, as many Ravenloft adventures do: with the party fleeing an evil they can’t hope to combat and realizing they’ve largely been bit players in someone else’s story. Bit of a bummer.

As usual, Stephen Fabian’s art is the highlight. I love the slightly jarring mix of medieval fantasy style adventurers with the region’s ancient Egyptian aesthetics. Touch of Death wasn’t Fabian’s first mummy rodeo. He also did the cover and interior illustrations for The Third Grave, by David Case, published by Arkham House in 1981. I don’t know if I’ll have a better excuse to share it (unless I start an insta just dedicated books, which, no, my wife would kill me), so I’ve included it here.

That’s enough Ravenloft for now – we’ll finish up the Grand Conjunction down the road apiece.

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[sinmenon]

Dungeons & Dragons - Ravenloft: Stone Prophet (DOS)

[sinmenon]

Dungeons & Dragons - Ravenloft: Stone Prophet (DOS)

[lordsothofsithicus]

Lord Soth (Finally) Presents the Stone Prophet, Part 3

Only what, two years late? So as I was saying, the game gives you signposts on where to go but doesn't really force you to go there. Any gating is soft gating using more powerful monsters or requiring a certain spell or special ability to access parts of a dungeon (such as having the Jump spell or a certain character in your party with a Jump ability) or needing to locate an item before you can open the way to a dungeon. Otherwise the overworld is open. Despite the limitations of the era and Har'Akir being a dusty shithole (are we allowed to say that) they did their best to make the domain look forlorn and interesting, with ruins speckling the exterior area interspersed with items, mostly weapons you won't need and water pickups which you might or might not need (see my part 2 post). The only place that I find deadly dull is Muhar, with its identical looking square tents. It's so samey and dull that it's easy to get disoriented in. The monsters roaming the overworld are vultures, desert zombies, and dust devils, which are a kind of minor air elemental. The vultures and dust devils you can see from a mile off, but the desert zombies rise from the sand to attack you. The screaming noise they make when they go active is spooky as hell and can be startling, especially at night. Limited by the engine as they were, the game devs tried to make dungeons that are a maze of same-y rooms and corridors interesting with traps, locks, and a variety of monsters, usually 2-3 different kinds per dungeon, but there are a lot of dungeons in the game. By far the monsters that I found the most frustrating were the manscorpions, who almost always poisoned you on a hit. Swarm of Insects becomes your friend in that dungeon. Unlike in Strahd's Possession, almost every lock in the Stone Prophet can be picked, so having a character who's a Thief (the D&D 2E version of Rogue) is beneficial because they'll save you having to onerously hunt down keys. The game guides recommend bringing an elf or half elf Fighter/Mage/Thief (since multiclassing worked much differently in 2E than it does now) but I find that to be spreading the peanut butter a bit thin. Pyotra the Thief (see below) will do just fine if you put him in your back line with an enchanted staff. One thing that makes Stone Prophet stand out is that the characters who can join you on your journey are surprisingly vibrant and unique. They include: Trajan Khet, a craggy Ranger/Cleric who's obviously meant to be a druid. Pyotra, a Vistani thief, brother of the seer who sets you on your path at the start of the game and who most players will meet first. Min Deir: A benevolent old priestess; her enemy (a treacherous priestess of Set) cut out her tongue and gouged out her eyes, so you need to obtain a magic item to communicate with her and magic items so she can see. Gloriantha: A Revenant paladin and one of the best party members in the game, she also cannot permanently die. Her goal is revenge on the greater mummy Senmet, who killed her adventuring party (this is what I reference when I say this game is a sequel to Touch of Death, and asserts those adventurers died in the undertaking). You can keep her by not destroying Senmet, but destroying him earns you major good karma with the gods, which is necessary to pass the hardest gateway in the game (literally).

Hrak Tur: A wemic (lion centaur) fighter, he's strong, agile, and a pure fighter. Most people's choice for an end game front-liner. He can't wear armor (until you find his special armor). Agnh Krag: A good aligned desert troll (what it says on the tin). Very powerful, doesn't need water and regenerates unless he's hit by a fire attack. He doesn't gain levels but he's durable and he does a ton of damage, and this only improves further when you find his special armor. He cries if you boot him from the party. Poor guy. Sethir Rha: A were-jackal priest of Anubis, last of his kind in Har'Akir. You'll want to put him in jackal-man form because his stats EXPLODE and he becomes harder to hurt. Anyway off you go, dungeon by dungeon, putting together the pieces of what happened to reduce Har'Akir to this state and slowly advancing your way forward. The plot, as it unfolds, is that a deadly disease (a story point, it's no threat to your characters) is sweeping Har'Akir. Most believe it's Ankhtepot, the domain's Darklord, who's behind it (it's actually not). To do this, you need to uncover ancient secrets as you progress through the game bit by bit, working to open Ankhtepot's tomb, Pharaoh's Rest so you can awaken the domain's darklord and defeat him. It's a genuinely fascinating story, full of treachery and tragedy, and part of the fun of this game is that you'll genuinely want to learn more about WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED to bring a prosperous land to such a wretched state. As you go on you'll learn about the players involved, attempts to save the realm that failed, and so on. You'll meet a weeping ghostly mother mourning for a son who's ages dead, and face the judgment of the gods of Har'Akir as they measure your worth. It's actually pretty stirring, though at times you may find the plot a little passive, this stuff happened AGES ago and you're wading through the aftermath trying to get the hell out of there. Anyway, the endgame is a final battle with Ankhtepot. Lol, no. Ankhtepot is unkillable. If you let him get close enough every attack he throws at you will kill one or more members of the party. What you really need to do, in a truly sweat-inducing part of the game, is kite Ankhtepot through the dungeon, staying close enough to aggro him but far enough away he can't party wipe you, until you kite him through a portal and he comes face to face with his enemy... who's also kind of... a good guy, sort of? Except he's working in opposition to you. It turns out the Hierophant, another Greater Mummy who was Ankhtepot's high priest in life (and also his murderer, the Hierophant cut Ankhtepot's throat to protect Har'Akir from him, then mummified him and buried him in honor... it's just Ankhtepot got back up), was responsible for unleashing the Plague to frame Ankhtepot for it in the hopes someone would eventually confront and destroy him. Instead, you force the two nemeses to confront one another (mummy fight, mummy fight!) and while they're duking it out you are able to haul ass and obtain the means to escape the domain, thus bringing your time in Har'Akir to a close. This game also has a bad ending. If you fuck around too long on finding your ticket out of the land of Sand in your Underpants, Ankhtepot will win the fight with the Hierophant and promptly reseal the domain. You'll be free to continue playing but... y'know. You live in Har'Akir now, which is a lose condition if ever there was one. Anyway, in Pt 4, I will wrap up and summarize with a final evaluation of this, one of the last D&D games made before the Baldur's Gate revolution.

[lordsothofsithicus]

Lord Soth Reviews: The Stone Prophet, Pt. One

Good evening ghosts and goblins, I have decided to follow up on the revew of the AD&D adventure Touch of Death that I posted some time ago with its de facto sequel, Ravenloft computer game The Stone Prophet.

The Stone Prophet is a computer game that came out at the end of what I call the forgotten age of Dungeons & Dragons computer games - the games that debuted before the original Baldur's Gate.

Now, for you youngsters out there, Baldur's Gate was one of the games that marked the big computer graphics revolution; its intricate backgrounds, isometric 3D views and detailed sprites were a MASSIVE leap forward from the games that preceded it, and from Baldur's Gate onward all of the D&D games that came before it just kind of... faded into obscurity.

This is a shame, because many of them were quite good.

The Stone Prophet was the second of the first-person Ravenloft computer games, the first being Strahd's Possession. Menzoberranzan came out between the two and used the same engine, but was set in the Forgotten Realms. These games were marked by having a party of four adventurers in a first-person view using a heavily modified version of the Doom 2 engine. Access to menus and movement were controlled by a point-and-click interface. This combined with the narrow field of view actually contributed to the game's spooky atmosphere - you had no peripheral vision and when in wide open rooms monsters could come at you from any direction; a monster's signature noise and a sudden shift to the combat music were your indicators that you were being attacked. While not immediately obvious, the arrangement of your party affected how they operated in combat. The leftmost and rightmost party member slots were effectively in the rear; they were vulnerable to attack if you were attacked from the sides or behind, until you turned to face whatever was attacking you. They were also limited in combat; the characters in these two slots could only make ranged attacks or use spells, unless you equipped them with a "long" weapon, those being a two-handed sword or a staff. The general combat order was tanky warriors and clerics in the front, squishy thieves and wizards in the back.

Many of the game's weapons were made challenging to use by design decisions and quirks of the engine. Ranged weapons such as arrows could be retrieved, but you had to do so manually by picking them up and putting them back in a character's quiver. This made bows time-consuming to use, and some weapons, like spears, all but worthless. During the game it was possible to find an enchanted throwing dagger, but this wasn't the almost game-busting weapon it was in Strahd's Possession; a tweak they made to the ranged weapon physics in Stone Prophet meant that if the throwing dagger hit a wall corner or really any other object the game engine construed as physically present between the dagger's return arc and you, it would stop and hit the floor, making you retrieve it. Eventually you would almost certainly give up on ranged weapons and just stick to melee weapons and spells.

An attempt was made to faithfully import as many of the old-school AD&D rules into the engine as possible, to mixed results. For instance, bringing a dwarf with you to spot illusionary walls is a great idea. Elves can point you toward secret doors but don't reveal illusionary walls on your mini-map. It's also possible to find a magic item that makes these abilities moot but if you were to miss it... Many of the abilities of the Thief class were clumsily implemented and effectively non-functional, leading most people to simply say "Don't take a Thief" HOWEVER what most reviewers of and after the time failed to catch was twofold - unlike the more linear dungeons of Strahd's possession, almost every locked door in The Stone Prophet can be picked, and the Thief had one ability people tended to overlook - they can use every magical item in the game, including magical wands and scrolls. There was no NPC wizard in The Stone Prophet available to join your party. So if you didn't know better and rolled in with no wizard, the only character who could use a bunch of the most useful magic items in the game was the Thief.

Honestly, having a Thief along just to not have to engage in the brain-numbing activity of hunting for keys was kind of a boon. Also, they gain levels fast and having one along gave you an extra set of hands for magic items. Always a plus.

More later. Time for sleep.

[afragmentcastadrift]

Waxing nostalgic