Today’s weekly Foundry run was a mixed bag… some good, some bad, and some we’d done before. We’ve been running these things so long that we’re getting into these foundries and after a couple minutes, feeling almost positive that we’ve played these before. And we have!
It’s actually a kinda sad commentary on just how similar some foundries are. But, we had a couple bright spots… and one really low one.
“The Road South” by echelon31 — Both Kasul and I knew nearly instantly that we’d played this before. An enjoyable prologue in some woods gave way to a fairly linear and plotless dungeon crawl. We gave it three stars. Again.
“The Dreadmines” by reinker — Supposed to be a slightly obfuscated version of the WoW dungeon, we were mostly underwhelmed until we got to the ship. Kasul was wild about the parrots; I loved the nostalgia of one of my first dungeon runs in WoW. The part of the dungeon before the ship was quite generic.
“Arty Boa and the Holy Grail” by mllebean — After playing a truly terrible Star Wars/Monty Python mashup a few weeks back, I was a little gunshy about trying another parody foundry. Just repeating jokes from movies or naming a character some variation of a pop culture figure isn’t really intrinsically funny. Worse was when we entered and realized we had played this very foundry at some point in the past. It was Kasul’s call, and he voted to bail.
“Felling the Forgemaster” by roge3ish — Pictured above. A dwarven smith was given power enough by a reluctant goddess to forge nine swords of power, one of which is promised to any adventurer able enough to get the Forgemaster to return his stolen abilities. The majority of the mission revolves around gathering clues from a dungeon on how to break the mystical seal around the only device which can defeat the Forgemaster. The clues are that kind of word puzzle where Abel is taller than Fred and talks louder than Becky and so on, but written more poetically. Hints — and finally the entire solution — is presented if you get stuck. It was the high point of the night…. but not the last foundry.
Our fourth foundry was “The Messenger Route” by dragoness10. It was a rare non-combat foundry which told the story of a forbidden love between a dragon and a human through the medium of the player passing cryptic messages between the NPCs for reasons which become clear. What might be fun for one person was dull for two, and while Kasul ran the quest, I started trying to think of how to write “Go to Next Map” in as many languages as I could think of.
See, last week we played a foundry which just had “Go to Next Map” on every map transition, including the very first. Really lazy. But after that, I imagined a foundry where the player would take over for perennial foundry giver Guard Frinko and send NPC adventures to get items from all over the world, and every place would be called “Next Map” in some language or other. Neither Kasul nor I were overly impressed, though I appreciated the difficulty and challenge of taking on the writing of a non-combat mission in the first place.
Tonight we got triple astral diamonds from our foundry runs, as both Rhix and Lord Neverember were giving out foundry quests. 12,000 easy astral diamonds.
I’ll see you all on další mapa.
