Made my way beyond the nightmare gate

I’ve not posted in the last month, but I’ve not been idle. I played through Beyond the Nightmare Gate, book three of the Grey Star series.

I wanted to like this one. The idea of the Daziarn plane, featured previously in Lone Wolf 10 The Prisoners of Time, appeals to me: Even in the world of Magnamund where the living dead bend to the will of wizards on a daily basis, there’s a world of magic and weirdness beyond that, where demons and gods are the most familiar of the entities. But sadly, the Daziarn plane isn’t like that at all – it’s just a dull greyness with ordinary people in ordinary cities, and one illusion demon. So Magnamund’s version of the Phantom Zone sounds a lot like Kansas, I guess.

And as with the other Grey Star adventures, the map is mostly linear and with very few choices, and most of them don’t change your plot arc much except to trick you into spending a willpower point before you turn to the same page. Simply by following my usual behavior of “be nice, no fighting” I won the book on my first playthrough. So I can’t give it many points for creativity, complexity, or even atmosphere.

Well, except for one chapter: The Singing City. This is by far the most complex chapter of the book, where you can walk in and ask nicely, or sneak and slaughter and steal. That part is pretty cool, that finally here’s a choice that changes the plot!

But yeah, just follow the line one page at a time, and don’t fight the big bad guy. Or fight him and lose. And… the Moonstone is yours.

Yay.