BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

What’s the timing on this? The Secret Passage Map simply specifies where Richardo goes next (which works fine). With this, though, it seems like Richardo moves while he’s in the middle of resolving a room, which means that, e.g., Richardo can get Grievously Injured in one room, but that activates a Glyph in the room to the north and not in the room he’s currently in.

This probably wasn’t intended, and it leads to potential scams in which you can deactivate someone’s Glyph by placing a derandomized chest (Compass group) in the same room.

There’s also some ambiguity about what “current room” means when Richardo encounters a “Richardo is moved to his previous location” effect and a Compass during the same room encounter – we might need a CFJ to work out how those two effects interact with each other, because neither “previous location” nor “current room” has an obvious unambiguous definition in that situation.

This proposal might be worth voting for anyway – the implications are weird but not necessarily bad for gameplay – but I’m concerned that it’ll lead to a lot of non-obvious behaviour, which could lock out people who are going by what the Ruleset seems to say rather than what it actually does say.

…actually, I initially missed that you can derandomize specific Compasses, bypassing the group mechanic entirely.

This proposal would therefore let you place a Glyph next to someone else’s room, and use a Compass pointing at it in order to steal all the Influence they would get from it, which is a very non-obvious side effect of the rule.

(FWIW, I think the idea of using items to derandomize Richardo’s movement is a good one. It’s just that this wording has some really weird implications.)

Actually, I’m wrong – the Glyph in Richardo’s old room would activate even though he’s moved (because it’s that room that gets Pacified.

There’s still a lot of weirdness, though: a Compass moves Richardo into a room without actually activating any of its effects, or any Denizens there, which surely can’t be what Clucky intended. (Among other things, putting a Compass in a room that points towards a dead end would cause Richardo to evaluate the effects of that room twice.)

…and if you nudge Richardo into a Sepulchre it probably doesn’t collapse, although there’s some ambiguity there and it’d probably need to be fixed by CFJ.

These also all check only the North Exit.

CoV