Apeomancer's Treasure Hunt Review

An exceptionally fun and enjoyable event, this turned out to be. It began normally enough, but took a turn for the decidedly odd towards the end, at least from perspective. Treasure hunt rules applied as before - no personae over 80k, no player killing and no aggressive play. The TSV command was in place to allow us to see how we were doing. Plus there were a few free one-week subscriptions lying around The Land for some lucky folk! I didn't get any of these though, darn it - clearly I was far too busy rescuing the treasure hunt - see later (stops blowing own trumpet for time being).

It began pretty much as you'd expect - the usual easy treasure whirl of Il Castellare, monastery, attic, inn, etc. A lot like most of my easy treasure sets - only difference being the negative valued treasure had to be got rid of too this time. Next, I went off to do alpine cottage, only to get to the blizzard and realise that Zalagar was already in there.

I then pottered about for a while, not finding anything else left undone. Eventually I had bright idea of doing blue room ... went and did goblin treasure too while waiting for Ralph to show up. Playing with my friends the apes in the pagoda then yielded a few more items, but most had again been dealt with already. Poor Zalagar also managed to get herself eaten by a tiger at this point ... unlucky!

Then I went and helped Vulnax get into sancum to do the golem, and finished off the man so that his watch could be got rid of. At this point, the first of the evening's interesting problems was presented to me. Seems that the chalice stays around after the druids have been done, which makes getting rid of it hard. After a little lateral thinking, borrowing some kit from Noodles, and being temporarily lent a treasure item, the chalice was disposed of, without anything useful getting knackered. Good job, too, as all the useful stuff turned out to be vital later on.

After dealing with the zinc (wonder if anyone else remembered this one?), I was presented with another big difficulty. Some nonce (probably Dirk or Art the post-mortem conversation was to reveal) had stuck one of the gargoyles in the west alcove in the keep. Furthermore, another item that would've been handy for dealing with it had also gone. Undaunted, I thought up Plan B, which required a nice lowlife persona to go along with my orders. Enter Soprano the protector, who showed an awful lot of patience with my madcap schemes.

After waiting aaaaaaaaaaaaages for Noodles to get round to chucking me some kit (excuses to do with playing with the phoenix and the mongoose in a darkened room only disturbed me further ...), Soprano and I set off for the Keep. Despite one rather bad mistake on Soprano's part (which would ultimately have cost us the treasure hunt had Karya not very kindly replaced the item that was lost), and me using the wrong verb for a bit, causing me to get quite confused, the gargoyle was extracted from the alcove successfully. But a worse problem was just around the corner ...

The cowl had been wrecked by the hunchback whilst using it in a fight. But the CBC treasure was still there! This called for some more trickery, not a million miles removed from what was done to get the gargoyle out - although I'd never tested it in this situation and didn't think it had a cat's chance in hell of working. It was a little more involved this time too, and Soprano had to lead me to the tunnel in the scriptorium, but to cut a long story short, it worked - I shouted 'I RULE' rather loudly (in RL as well as MUD ...), because I hadn't expected it to at all. Kudos must go to Soprano, who went along with what I thought might well kill him (albeit a only a silly death, but still!).

Shortly after the CBC was emptied, the latest spawning of the grandfather clock was found and swamped - 2,230 points all round! Nice! All that remained was to go back to the tearoom and bitch loudly about whichever imbecile it was that got the gargoyle stuck in the first place. Ah, such fun.

Have fun!

Apeomancer/Maxmage

P.S. According to my log, the free weekly subscriptions went to: Indigo, Laura, Ralph (two of 'em), Noodles (also two of 'em), and Art. Lucky devils.