Linguistic Dragon found some time recently to play through a bit more of Savage Empire:

As if to prove my newfound zeal for the game like I mentioned last post, I spent most of a Saturday evening tearing through the Valley of Eodon – buckle up, don the pith helmets and break out the machetes, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover this time!

I could try and summarize all of the things that Linguistic did in the game, but the sheer volume of odd terminology and names I’d have to deploy to do so would be…cumbersome, to say the least. So instead, I’ll suggest you read the entirety of his lengthy post. I will excerpt one part of it, however, because I think these paragraphs highlight not only the whimsical nature of the game, but also the robustness of its crafting system:

Our next task was to find a way over the lava to get to the sacred cave of the Jukari, and at Rafkin’s suggestion I made use of the fire extinguisher from the remains of his lab to do so. For some reason or another it worked, and from there it was a fairly simple matter to navigate our way to the cave and find the hide. It was a much smaller cavern and considerably less… occupied… so it wasn’t long before we were presenting Jumu with the recorded history of his people, and received in exchange his promise to join the alliance of tribes. (As an aside, yes, it’s incredibly silly that the fire extinguisher works to cool lava, but at least despite its nonsensicality the game provides ways of pointing you toward it, whether it’s the letter to the editor in the manual or Rafkin in the game itself. Considerably less adventure-game-logic that way, which is always a good thing.)

With the tribes in the southeast of the valley firmly on the side of a valley-wide alliance, I turned my attentions in the complete opposite direction and turned my sights to the northwest and the Barako. The trek there introduced us to a few new enemies, including a serpent woman and a tiger, but we defended ourselves with alacrity, and before long we’d returned to the ledge where we’d seen the silver backed gorilla that we suspected kidnapped the chieftain’s daughter. The question was how to get up there. Some exploration revealed a cave behind a waterfall, but the falls itself was too forceful to allow us to get by it easily. The solution – a makeshift grenade, made by stuffing a few handfuls of gunpowder in a clay pot and sealing it with a tar-soaked strip of cloth. Lighting the fuse and lobbing it at a large boulder atop the cliff shifted the boulder and blocked off the waterfall, making passage easy. A quick jaunt through the cavern brought us to the very ledge the gorilla called home, and a brief fight later, we stepped past the beast and found a girl who introduced herself as Halisa. Grateful for rescue and relieved that the gorilla had been taken care of, she thanked us heartily and gave us a head start for a race back to the village – which she still managed to win, somehow. We had a victory nonetheless, though, as her safe return ensured her mother’s support in the forming alliance.

Linguistic finished this session ready to head into Tichticatl proper, so look forward to that whenever he posts the next update.