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Jason David Frank's final film, Legend of the White Dragon, is getting a theatrical release! Labor Day weekend it drops!

←Previous Post -- Next Post→ Week Fifty-Seven -- The Road to the Viscount (Part One) The feasting and revelry would last for weeks at a time. Great stone tables were set with such an abundance of rare delicacies that we would stuff ourselves until the exotic became mundane. When the lavish spread began to spoil, a ravenous gourmand gleefully proposed that we sample from the fetid pile of composting refuse! The notion was dismissed as decidedly unhealthy. But days later, he was found cackling madly atop a heap of rancid comestibles, licking his fingers in delight. This post has been so tough to write because this is another one of those marathon dungeons, where you’re expected to take a break to return to it later, but I was impatient and did more than I did should have. I’ll try to condense it down, but this’ll still be more of a ramble skipping over a bunch of stuff. Three major things happened. The first is a result of what happened at the end of the last run two weeks ago. We gathered all the doctor’s bags in the Weald, which means there’s an event related to doctors ready to show up. This is really convenient since getting most of the adventurers up to Resolve Level 5 has been a bit expensive. We’ve gotten the blacksmith and guild as cheap as they can be and it’s still tens of thousands of gold to get a single person to maximum equipment and skills. We haven’t spent a lot of time managing quirks or diseases. This is a free opportunity to do some of that, and we’re going to take it. The second major thing is, of course, the Viscount fight itself. Here’s the lineup. It’s a pretty standard Crimson Court lineup, I think. The biggest worry our stress healing slot is taken up by CowCow who would much rather be doing damage, and with the unique stress mechanics of the Crimson Court and these adventurers having a slightly elevated stress level, that’s what Cow ends up doing. Is that going to have a knock-on effect where we don’t have enough burst damage to kill the Champion-level enemies of the Crimson Court? Well, yeah. That’s kind of the third major thing that happens this week. It turns out, one of the hardest dungeons in the game… is hard! First, I’m going to post the map for this thing because it’s huge and then I’m going to post some consequences. The further up the difficulty curve you are, the more likely it is that even a random attack will deal stress damage. Anything that does deal stress damage only deals more. Even LordCowCow can’t keep up. Now, the reason I kept going is that this map also introduces a curio that allows you to camp in this dungeon. My rationale was: if I can just get to the first campfire log of the game, I can mop up most if not all of this stress damage, and the team will be functioning again. I’m already hitting every other stress relief curio on the map, and I still have a bunch of Blood to keep these Crimson Curses at bay. This was a fatal mistake, though. An adventurer can only take so much stress after all, and so, after countless rounds of chewing out her teammates, Junia gets a series of heart attacks that kill both her and the week. Recovering from this will be difficult, but not impossible. We still have 60,000 gold in the bank, which isn’t a lot but will be enough here, and though Junia was the primary-est of the primary healers, we do have a number of backup options. At the same time, the process of grinding back involves multiple Champion-level dungeon runs. I feel like the whole run is on a knife’s edge after this week, and these next few weeks are going to determine whether or not we’re actually going to be able to complete the Darkest Dungeon. -r ←Previous Post -- Next Post→