I have the benefit of having read other books in the series before reading The Unwilling Warlord, but even in Warlord Watt-Evans makes the reason for Vond's undoing explicit early on (the time when Sterren queries Vond about "nightmare's" when hiring him). If you missed this, you skimmed too much or just plain forgot it. The only "mystery" about Vond succumbing to it is that Vond's too high on his new-found power to put two and two together.
There're actually about 9 paragraphs towards the middle of chapter 15 (less than half way throu...
Re: Dice game
Two reasons why someone would choose sequence 2 over sequence 1, one of them rational:
1) Initially I skimmed the sequences for Gs, assumed a non-fixed type font, and thought all the sequences were equal length. On a slightly longer inspection, this was obviously wrong.
2) The directions state: " you will win $25 if the sequence you chose appears on successive rolls of the die." A person could take this to mean that they will successively win $25 for each roll which is a member of a complete version of the sequence. It seems likely t... (read more)