* Impossible Quest Chain: Kill the Old God.
* Quest: Gather forgotten knowledge on the final floor’s layout. You will die because you will fail. Quest Reward: influence points towards future character selection.
* Side-quest: Keep the information to yourself. Side-quest failed.
* Side-quest: Kill or otherwise destroy all knowledge of the final floor in the next 90 minutes, or be volunteered for sacrifice. Time until death:… Side-quest succeeded! Reward: a safe zone has been created somewhere on the path ahead! Warning: this is a dungeon of difficulty level impossible, and, as such, time in the safe zone will be limited.
You are reaching the end of a quest chain of difficulty level impossible: your next quest, should you survive long enough to receive it will be your final quest in this quest chain. A conniving presence smiles down on you, mockingly. As a reward for having made it this far into the dungeon of [insert dungeon's name], you may now preselect your final quest. Defeat Dolus the Traitor on the next floor for quest activation.
* Legacy Quest I: Rob the Old God, and live to tell the tale! You will fail because you will die. Dormant Entertainment thanks you for playing… Exile! Reward: you’ve cleared the game! Influence points towards future character selection.
* Legacy Quest II: Kill the Old God. You will die because you will fail. Dormant Entertainment thanks you for playing… Exile! Reward: you’ve cleared the game! Influence points towards future character selection.
This was the end-game to end all end-games. No one at Dormant had perceived of a way to get it done. But time had been on Mendal’s side: although he was only 23, he’d already spent longer playing and brainstorming the in-game world than most developers had spent coding the original pre-war game.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
And he had a plan.
Having grabbed a bite to eat and spent a good half-hour analysing and strategising over the hastily scribbled notes from the previous floors, including that alarming tidbit concerning Agent Skeptic. When Mendal did log back in, barely twenty minutes remained on the safe-zone countdown timer.
“So what happened? Agent Skeptic asked acting worried for a change. “The Clerics say they’ve revived me. Last I remember we were going to revive our Soldier of Fortune. That spell has a long cooldown. We’ll be done or dead before we get another chance!”
Having backstabbed said Soldier, there was simply no way Skeptic was doing anything other than making sure his ass was covered.
Mendal gestured for the party to gather round him and stepped up onto the edge of the blue-misted fountain. As he spoke to all gathered beneath him, Mendal paid particular attention, out of the corner of his eye, to a certain rogue…
“Ok, first off, you should know we encountered a Quest Mage on the previous floor.”
Already the Mendal Meddler, Demonologist Extraordinaire, was getting answers to much with little: Agent Skeptic had reacted upon hearing the words “Quest Mage”.
“So that’s where you’re getting your additional buffs for backstabbing” he thought to himself. “A backstabbing Quest Chain spanning multiple dungeons… No matter, but this, this will make things more interesting.”
“Here’s what's coming up…” he began slowly, giving himself the time to make extra, extra sure each of the eight remaining party members was paying undivided attention to what he had to say.