RUNEvember Session 10: Abrus Island

Even for someone who's like 10 Realms in, this Realm was in parts VERY hard, not because of the bosses/uniques but because of the regular enemies. If I didn't have the Osteomancer rune I'd have been in deep, deep shit more than a few times here. The non-negligible enemies have a ton of health (most have 5, and at least one Block move) and hit like a truck: one of them has Pursue 5, which is a great way to stop being alive if you're cornered and you roll poorly, because you can easily take 3-5 Harm. This is offset slightly by having a reliable 2 Movement+poke on your starting weapon but in a lot of cases all that means is that the best you can do is tread water. One encounter had enemies who had 5 Health and Block 1 due to destructible terrain they were on, which would have necessitated either taking several turns to whittle that down while being attacked or just dealing with always dealing 1 less Harm, and thanks to Toxin I was at best dealing 2 -> 1 Harm. It took way too long!

Toxin reducing your highest die is extremely rough given how much health enemies have, how much block they have, and how much Harm they can do. If you're relying on taking things down fast with a 6 or blocking more than 1 Harm, you'd better hope you rolled two or can combine dice. Even with 3 dice to start your chances of getting 2 or more 6's on a roll is extremely low. And rolling low at low Toxin basically always means you're taking Harm.

This Realm has something I've seen in a few, which is a resource gathering -> tinkering aspect. Notably, this one has a lab where you can use flowers you find to do things like create antitoxins, increase your stamina, or give yourself equipment. It's neat but unfortunately most of the really good options require very high Lore, at which point they're largely ways to make the Rune Lord easier, and it mostly doesn't need to be easier.

Regarding equipment, this one's got a bunch. You start with a makeshift spear and driftwood shield, of which the spear is wildly powerful in any other context (aka if you take it outside this Realm). It's basically the playtest spear and the playtest spear was pretty busted! The shield is basically the playtest shield though which sucked. When you beat the unique enemy, you can get the Greatwood Maul, a good 4-5-6 weapon with an Augment 1-2 that adds Move and Bash - I'll use that for sure going forward. Through exploration, you'll also find Flux, a spell that only works on a 5-6 but does a bunch of extremely flexible things. Maybe a few too many things, it's got a lot going on. There's a few pieces of gear too: one that gives you Block 2 when you combine two dice to a 2-3 (absolutely taking that) and a few that I didn't get because I ran out of flowers.

The Rune Lord having a 1 in 6 chance of attacking you seems a lot more threatening until you realize the Rune Lord's Phase 1 has 3 Health. It does advance Toxin even faster though. Its second phase is interesting: it spawns with three minions, and every time it would die a minion dies instead. It wasn't hard, mostly because it rolled poorly and I had enough Harm online at that point to take it down every turn.

Depending on how much Toxin you have, you pick one of two Runes. One is a once per Realm ability to Harm a ton of enemies, the other is a once per Rest ability to gain a lot of Block and then set your dice to whatever you like (as long as they're not all the same value). Interesting stuff in both cases.