The Black Frog, Mission 2

-The Black Frog, Mission 2: The Portrait

            Lord Garivaldi’s estate has a perfect subtropical, humid summer eve atmosphere. Gaetane nailed the atmospheric ambiance throughout. There’s also an ingenious security system that must be disabled, creepy story bits to experience, and an ominous portrait to steal.

            So let’s get going.

           

            There’s a lot of story going on in part 2. Most of it is picked up from readables. One letter, from Lady Garivaldi to her brother-in-law, begins to reveal the key plot for this campaign, foreshadowing what is to come. The story that begins to reveals itself is of the Lord Garivaldi working with a mysterious woman, going on a trip to some island after something called ‘the Black Frog’, and returning from it changed.

This mysterious woman, Emilie Victor, also has an unusually tall servant with her, and has strange powers. Lady Garivaldi notes that, since Emilie’s arrival at the estate, all the clocks began to go very fast. The player would likely have noticed this about the clocks, and wondered at what caused it.

The player reads in a note from Emilie Victor to one of her servants that Lord Garivaldi has locked himself in one his estate’s towers, and no one has heard from him since.

It also comes up, from Lady Garivaldi’s journal, that the portrait Garrett is stealing is one Garivaldi painted of Emilie Victor. Lord Garivaldi’s journal reveals that hidden on this portrait is a map to the island that he had journeyed to. From all this, the story of the campaign begins to reveal itself. This is operating on Thief’s method of revealing most of the story through readables. The backstory to “the Black Frog” is hinted at through several, disparate readables in this mission, and the player puts the pieces together.

 

There are audio themes throughout this campaign that begin to be used in this mission. They’re cleverly used to set ambiance for certain specific areas and what the player may find in them. One ambiance plays in any of Lord Garivaldi’s areas, such as his bedroom or workshop; a creepy, distorted tune plays in areas associated with Emilie Victor, or one of her servants; a sobbing noise accompanies some areas, foreshadowing the Black Frog and its ‘world’.

Speaking of which, a crumpled note, from Emilie Victor to Lord Garivaldi, wards him from returning to the island and entering the world of the Black Frog. Lord Garivaldi’s journal reveals too that he has gone mad since going back to the island and entering the Black Frog’s world. Apparently, the Black Frog is some kind of mirror artifact, through which one can enter another dimension, a world that is a reflection of their soul.

Going to the uppermost room in the tower that Lord Garivaldi had locked himself in, the player discovers the Lord, dead on the floor, with knife in hand; clearly, he had been driven to such an act by his experience with the Black Frog.

Also from readables, the player learns that Lord Garivaldi had set up a grand security system, on the island, to protect Emilie Victor’s castle, and also the Black Frog.

So, as Garrett’s just trying to steal a portrait for a client, a large backstory unfolds, and that will be the basis for the rest of this campaign. Garrett himself will end up going after the Black Frog, and entering its sorrowful world.

(note: in the following video, I did not deactivate the electrical floor protecting the Portrait, and was damaged by it; sloppy of me, I know!)