Grey Star the Wizard: 259

259

Inexplicably, the brooding fear that lurks within you is rising uncontrollably. Shan is shaking, his face panic-stricken. Gingerly, you step through the soft mud of the quagmire. The air smells pungently sweet—a cloying odour that is hard to identify. You cannot escape the feeling that there is someone or something else in the cavern, but it is difficult to see in the eerie darkness. The sucking ooze pulls at your feet, and in the distance you see a faint light from another passage on the far side of the cavern.

‘Grey Star!’ shrieks Shan, looking down, his eyes wide with terror. For the muddy cavern floor is comprised of hundreds upon hundreds of corpses, piled high upon each other to form a ghastly mire. Shan is screaming hysterically, but before you can calm him the aura and spirit of this awful place overwhelms your mind, filling it with nightmarish visions.

You are in the Darkling Room of Mother Magri, and you must combat its fear if you are ever to leave. Add together your WILLPOWER and ENDURANCE points and use this total as your mental COMBAT SKILL, to be pitted against the COMBAT SKILL of the Darkling Room.³²

Darkling Room: COMBAT SKILL 28 ENDURANCE 30

If you win the combat, turn to 296.

[32] There are numerous unanswered questions with this combat. The addition of WILLPOWER and ENDURANCE is straightforward, but which attribute do you lower when wounded in this mental combat? A mental combat would suggest that you will lose WILLPOWER as this is the measure of you mental strength. It is possible to have a negative WILLPOWER score which would mean that the combat would only come to an end when the Darkling Room’s ENDURANCE was lowered to 0. Using your true ENDURANCE score is the less paradoxical route.

In either case, if your WILLPOWER or ENDURANCE score is lowered during a round of combat, do you then adjust your combined WILLPOWER and ENDURANCE score which is serving as your COMBAT SKILL for this combat?

There are no easy answers to these questions. It is up to the reader to decide which solution is most appropriate.