There are subtle implications that the entire Estate is trapped in some form of time-space anomaly starting after the Ancestor committed suicide.With this in mind, the last words of the Heart seem less like a prophecy of inevitable doom and more like the the last spiteful words of a defeated villain who is trying to get one last hit in before expiring. ![]() Furthermore, the presence of Light-aligned characters with divine powers, divine visions of greater beings, and holy shrines indicates that there are benevolent powers defending the world and supporting humanity. ![]() While the ending is suitably dark for the genre, there are hints that the Heart of Darkness was lying: for one thing, the conclusion it was promising to the world when the stars align is out of line with its demonstrated abilities, and when you first reach the Heart, it even admits that it is a lying, manipulative monstrosity that tricked you into coming to the Estate.The final stage is straightforward enough, but, outside of taking certain precautions and sheer luck being on your side, you will lose at least 2 heroes, cementing that no matter what, you were always ultimately sending them on a suicide mission.Heroes must be sent to the Sanitarium, Church, or Tavern in order to "fully" recover from the mental scars accumulated dungeon run after dungeon run these recoveries can be easily undone after one dungeon run, regardless of how much gold was spent. As the blight represents, however, the toll of the dungeons still inflicts scars. The third stage is a Breather Episode, allowing your characters to heal nearly all damage but likely inflicting blight, symbolizing how your hamlet is, at the moment, a safe haven.The Ancestor avatar itself is the "easy path", such as the destruction of the low-health psychological-damaging enemies over the more robust, physically stronger foes, or just the destruction of monsters over solving the long-term issues of the Hamlet beyond monsters, including the abundance of disease and the Hamlet's isolation. In other words, metaphorically speaking, the abyssal pits are the strange things going on in the world you (the heir) never attempt to fix, such as the corruption in the Weald. The three abyssal pits of darkness represent everything you can't easily defeat or understand. The second stage involves a tug-of-war between your characters and the Ancestor avatar and the abyssal pits of darkness allied with him.This fight represents your willingness to murder anything and anyone in your way and butcher that which is outright disgusting, all to deal Scratch Damage to the final boss. The first stage involves defeating clones of the Ancestor, where each kill of a mutated clone will damage the otherwise invincible boss.Specifically, the final boss is a general metaphor for the damage you (the heir) have done to both foe and ally alike to get this far. The final boss is mocking you and your struggle. ![]() Since said monsters are nothing but incomplete skeletons of swordsmen totally embedded in a huge mass of goo, it wouldn't contain anything useful, as any item the heroes could theoretically find after searching through the remains would be too filthy or too damaged to be valuable anymore. Battles against Ectoplasms and/or Large Ectoplasms (only when they are the only monsters involved in the fight) don't grant any loot at all.
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