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Betrayal at Krondor Man, Betrayal at Krondor. Alongside Albion(1995), it was absolutely one of the first RPG's I played and enjoyed, enough that I still appreciate a lot of things it does. Oh, yeah, and that guy on the cover? That's an elf. Elves in the BaK setting aren't barred from having sweet facial hair. BaK was produced by Dynamix(rest in peace, beautiful angels. If you don't know them, they later brought us Tribes and Tribes 2, they were an odd mix of RPG's, adventure games and sim games) back in 1993, and I want to say it was kind of ahead of its time in having a 3D world(even if the Y axis didn't see much use), digitized photos for characters, tons of animations, a really good soundtrack and probably one of the more intellectually demanding RPG combat systems of the time(for context, this released in the same year as Darkside of Xeen, yet looks generations younger).  Set in the world of Midkemia, it was developed and written in cooperation with the setting's primary author, Raymond E. Feist, and received a proper novelization about five years later(and is, in my opinion, one of the rare few videogame novelizations that aren't rancid dogshit). Midkemia itself is both a bog standard fantasy world(it has elves, dwarves, goblins and wizards) and has its own unique flourishes at points. Since Betrayal at Krondor is a canon installment set after four major novels in the setting, obviously some things will need explaining(but the game is actually quite good at explaining what needs to be explained without the player having read the books, I will, of course, provide huge, poorly-remembered lore dumps anyway.). Not everything about the setting and books have aged equally well(good luck finding a female character with meaningful agency in the first four books. In proper form for late 80's, early 90's fantasy writing by men, their roles are mostly to pine for their missing men and occasionally cry when said men happen to get their dumb asses killed), but at the same time they don't feature anything I recall as being outright gross(no racism, slurs, etc.) with the exception of one book(Jimmy the Hand) which I have opinions about, but since that was a cooperative work with another author, I'm willing to drop most of the blame for that on the other author since it doesn't seem to be Feist's thing in his other books.  I'd also say it was like... one of the first genuinely open-world RPG's, in my opinion. Like, yeah, the Final Fantasies and etc. eventually, grudgingly, let the player have an air ship once they'd exhausted about 80% of the game's content in a linear fashion. But this map? Like 80% of it, you can just wander off the path and go explore from day one. There are very few barriers, though some chapters are a bit less tolerant of loving around since you're meant to be under some sort of time pressure in-world. It's also absolutely possible to run off the path and wander into something that'll flatten you good. So, please, join me, as we find out whether this is another case of having my nostalgia shattered like plate glass being hit with a sledgehammer.  I do genuinely expect this to have held up much better than Albion, though.Main Cast  Gorath is hundreds of years old and has been having a pretty bad decade. He's divorced from two wives, he's got a handful of dead children, his entire civilization has descended into fascism and now he has to ask a bunch of idiot humans for help to stop them getting exterminated.  Locklear is smooth, mildly noble, has a sword, a moustache and a womanizing reputation. Despite looking young and untested, Locklear has seen more atrocities than most soldiers twice his age and spent a brief while as a blood-thirsty berserker after his first girlfriend got stabbed in front of him.  Owyn lives somewhere in the east where he mostly spends his time embezzling his father's money to pay for magic tutors. Now unfortunately stuck travelling with two hardened warriors that are being chased by assassins. Owyn's week could be going better.  Like Locklear, James is actually a canon character and not invented for the game. His specialties are being the canonically sneakiest character, being super good with a sword, super good at dealing with traps, a super smart administrator, generally more intelligent than anyone he's in the room with and full of snarky remarks that sounded a lot better to the author than they do to me. He's much better in this game since this is the first one where he's no longer a teenager, and thus considerably more tolerable. Probably helps that Feist didn't write him this time.  A snappy old wizard, Patrus is responsible for Owyn's early training in magic. It's hard to say if Patrus was a bad influence on him or if Owyn just sought out a teacher who was somewhat like himself. Patrus is perpetually crotchety, has little patience for people younger than himself and enjoys needling people when they're at their lowest. Despite being a bit of a prick, he's thankfully also quite funny and very useful at his job of doing awful magical things to the opposition.  Pug Condoin is the mightiest wizard in Midkemia. Has saved the world like a half dozen times, has helped defeat a kaiju made out of supermonsters that were ready to fight the gods and win, has travelled in time, has put up with Macros the Black several times, is an adopted son of the royal family. In this game he will be played by a doofus who's less competent than a 19-year-old who just happened to bumble into the plot after running out of ways to embezzle his dad's money. Spoilers Obviously, please don't talk about stuff that hasn't happened yet. With regards to the game world, since I'd rather like to be able to waste some time on big lore dumps, also please don't write a 200-page dissertation on elves before I even mention the difference between a Moredhel, Eledhel and Glamredhel. Trust that I'll get around to eventually explaining who all these doofuses(pointy-eared and otherwise) are and why some of them are A Big Deal. And of course, once I've brought something or someone up, its fair game for you all to start arguing about whether Tomas/Ashen-Shugar or Arutha/Murmandamus is the superior fanfiction pairing(no, I haven't looked up the Midkemia books on fanfiction.net, please don't tell me what the pro pairings actually are). Reader Participation Sometimes there will only be one path ahead, but usually there will be several. I'll leave it up to the thread as often as possible whether the party goes raring off after a dumb side quest, takes the long way around or scoots cross-country in a straight line to their goal. Update Schedule Probably a post every week or two weeks? I expect updates to be slightly shorter than they were for the Might and Magic games, and resultingly also more consistent since it'll be rarer that I have to sort through four hours of footage for each post. PurpleXVI fucked around with this message at 22:03 on Dec 13, 2021 |
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Sep 10, 2021 09:37
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PurpleXVI posted:Sometimes there will only be one path ahead, but usually there will be several. I'll leave it up to the thread as often as possible whether the party goes raring off after a dumb side quest, takes the long way around or scoots cross-country in a straight line to their goal. Dude, we're goons. EVERY vote will be to dick around as much as possible before getting to the point and you know it.
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Sep 10, 2021 11:07
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The Betrayal Collection is currently 35% off on steam. However, I never managed to get Betrayal at Antra to play, so maybe GoG is the place to go. Also - activate the voice acting and... post samples, I guess? Pretty sure most people never even suspected this game has voiceovers.
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Sep 10, 2021 11:57
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Pumped for this. Never played as a kid
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Sep 10, 2021 11:57
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I've never played this one, I remeber it being the hot poo poo in the lead up and for a little bit after it's release and then... nothing. Usually when people wax nostalgically about old CRPGs, it's mentioned offhand at best, if at all. I'm curious to see why that might be.
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Sep 10, 2021 14:08
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Well as you can tell from the screenshot, even though they used digitized actors, the props department really cheaped out on wigs and facial hair.
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Sep 10, 2021 14:28
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I've read 10 or so Midkemia books, and I wanted to add that I agree with Purple that Jimmy the Hand was very poor. I was genuinely shocked by how bad it was. Every other Feist book I have read was good to great, including the other two collaborations around the same time, Murder in LaMut and Honoured Enemy.
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Sep 10, 2021 14:40
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So... what's so bad about Jimmy the Hand for someone who doesn't want to hate-read something bad?
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Sep 10, 2021 14:47
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One of the best things about this game is the dumb reasons the heroes invent for going off on sidequests and diversions well away from their actual critical missions. "We're doubling back to throw off pursuit, I swear! It isn't just for Sweet Sweet Loots." E: I mean this sincerely, actually. When I played this as a kid, it blew my mind that they bothered to come up with in-character reasoning for all sorts of things. It adds a lot to the characters. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 15:55 on Sep 10, 2021 |
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Sep 10, 2021 15:52
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Awesome! I played both BaK and BaA, didnt beat either, but bounced off BaA hard. Looking forward to this!
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Sep 10, 2021 16:21
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Having read many of the books as a child and young adult I got to say the nostaglia is strong here
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Sep 10, 2021 16:22
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Man, this brings back so many memories. One thing that can be a little frustrating is how a lot of side stuff is chapter gated and can disappear if you wait too long, so you can miss a lot of stuff if you just go for the main quest. Also the high difficulty curve, man do I remember this game kicking my rear end constantly. I hope you find a good way to show off all of the bullshit this game can throw at you that typically leads to a game over.
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Sep 10, 2021 17:02
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I assume from the lack of a character creation call, we'll be dealing with pre-generated characters with set skill lists?
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Sep 10, 2021 17:21
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I remember reading the first three/four books(Magician through Sethanon) when I was a kid but after those I got confused about which book to read next and stopped reading the series even though I greatly enjoyed what I read of it.
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Sep 10, 2021 17:33
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Yeah, your characters are set and who is in what party actually changes between chapters.
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Sep 10, 2021 17:34
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I started this game many times as a teen, but never got past chapter two. Never got my hands on the related novels, either. The perils of small town living before the age of Amazon. Though I am on a Tolkien kick again lately, and those elf names are rather shamelessly ripped from Sindarin. Which is legit, Tolkien was shamelessly pulling from all kinds of sources and wrote about that model of cultural transmission! They'd be, in order dark elves, star elves, and loud elves (that is, orcs). Not sure if that actually corresponds to any of the lore, but interesting. Also, if that also means similar pronunciation rules then the dh in all of those is a voiced th, as in thee or they.
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Sep 10, 2021 17:39
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Oh man, I played a bit of this game as a kid. Looking forward to this!
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Sep 10, 2021 17:41
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Randalor posted:So... what's so bad about Jimmy the Hand for someone who doesn't want to hate-read something bad? Okay so. Feist is generally pretty "fade to black" if there's some sort of sexual content going on, and in general there's very little horny in what he writes(that I've read, at least). But then Jimmy the Hand just kicks down the door and starts screaming "YEAH JIMMY'S BEEN FUCKIN' SINCE HE COULD BARELY WALK. BANGING ALL THESE OLDER LADIES. HELL YEAH. KNEE DEEP IN GILF VAGINAS. drat, HE'S SUCH A PLAYER." and it just kind of made me recoil at the time, so I've had no temptation whatsoever to re-read it to double-check the details. And aside from that I just recall it as being somewhat poorly written even once you got past that. idhrendur posted:Though I am on a Tolkien kick again lately, and those elf names are rather shamelessly ripped from Sindarin. Which is legit, Tolkien was shamelessly pulling from all kinds of sources and wrote about that model of cultural transmission! They'd be, in order dark elves, star elves, and loud elves (that is, orcs). Not sure if that actually corresponds to any of the lore, but interesting. Also, if that also means similar pronunciation rules then the dh in all of those is a voiced th, as in thee or they. This is actually interesting to me! I kind of figured Feist just did his own half-assed fantasy name work. Would love to hear more of what you spot as things continue.
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Sep 10, 2021 17:59
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This game is great but I forget most things about it other than the combat being extremely brutal and unforgiving at times. Looking forward to this. I also seem to recall that despite it being part of the setting the game was actually reasonably low magic in execution, which at the time felt uncommon to me.
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Sep 10, 2021 18:34
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I remember hearing a lot of Midkemia is basically a tabletop RPG scenario written down, I don't know if that's true or if everyone writing scenarios at the time was ripping off Tolkein so people just assume it's true. Whether it came out of TT or not, the Tolkein influence is there and real though it's not as shameless a lift as some others I could name. I fell off the books when they got a little too cyclical, but I've definitely got some nostalgia for the original set (three or four books depending on how you count) flaws and all, but I have a lot more nostalgia for this game than any of the books. anyway my vote is that you turn around and go to the other side of the map. Always. 
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Sep 10, 2021 19:44
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Psion posted:I remember hearing a lot of Midkemia is basically a tabletop RPG scenario written down, I don't know if that's true or if everyone writing scenarios at the time was ripping off Tolkein so people just assume it's true. Whether it came out of TT or not, the Tolkein influence is there and real though it's not as shameless a lift as some others I could name. Pretty sure it's Feist's homebrew high school and university D&D setting, yes. Apparently he stole the asian invaders wholesale from a D&D-contemporary 70s RPG (Empire of the Petal Throne)? Anyhow, Pug and Thomas were reportedly based on his and his best friend's characters which is why they are among the blandest and most generic protagonists in fantasy literature; no mean feat.
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Sep 10, 2021 20:12
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I was going through my dad's old comics I'd set aside to keep after he passed and I discovered an ancient copy of Sierra Interaction magazine with all the marketing hype about this game. I'll try and scan it later for the thread, its gloriously early 90s.
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Sep 10, 2021 20:15
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Now while there`s no voting voting yet and the plot tells you to go south I think therefore purple should explore all avenues of his north and southeast well there might be danger and proper heroes should see to it! Boy was it a surprise having to do with James and Locklear for a while.
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Sep 10, 2021 20:31
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Update 01: Angry About Elves https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utoLvbR5P3U When you fire up the game, this is what scrolls past and, you know, I gotta say? I loving love it. I love the music in this game. Mind, this is from the CD version. I never played the floppy version, but I imagine it had a notably crustier soundtrack. Just try to tell me this doesn't make you feel fired up for some noble fantasy adventuring and goblin-chopping. It really has its own character, too. Mmm. Nostalgia. Afterwards, there's a bare-bones menu with nothing much to do except starting a new game, loading the game or quitting. So obviously I choose to start a new game and we're immediately thrust into the actual introduction for the plot.     Most of the game's dialogue and cutscenes are presented in this faux-parchment style to make it look like a ye anciente tome. It's atmosphere-building, but doesn't get in the way of being able to read or see what's actually going on. I wonder what interrupted Locklear, though?      Ah, yes, BaK wastes no time in establishing that, beyond having sweet facial hair, Gorath is an absolute badass, as the first thing he does is to grab an assassin and snap his neck like it's second nature to him.   And with that, we're thrust straight into the game after a brief glance at the world map showing us where we're starting. This chapter ends when we get to the southernmost white dot, Krondor, with Gorath in tow. Before we start doing anything, perhaps we should take stock of the interface, our available characters and our our available items.  First up, Locklear!  The brave and valiant leader with the team's most fabulous moustache to boot. Go on, tell everyone how great I am.Locklear is a solid all-rounder who isn't bad at anything, and is even the current best at some things, like, for instance, melee accuracy. We'll use him as a template to go through the skills: Defense: Not getting hit. Accy: Different types of Accuracy for Crossbows(no lame-o bows in this game), melee and casting(which Locklear, being a jock, has no access to). Assessment: Spending a turn to decipher the stats of an enemy in battle. Not a very useful skill since it's usually worth more to just bonk said enemy. Armorcraft: Repairing armor, which is pretty vital. Weaponcraft: Likewise for fixing your armor, EVERYTHING in this game deteriorates, pretty much. Barding: Belting our sick tunes to get paid for your trouble in inns. Haggling: Occasionally it's possible to negotiate with merchants for lower prices, but it's risky since they may simply refuse to trade with you if you push your luck. Lockpick: Speaks for itself, though it can be hard at first to tell which locks are pickable at all, and lockpicks are a limited resource. Scouting: Spotting ambushes and preventing enemies from getting the drop on the party. Uses the best party member's rank. Stealth: Once ambushes are spotted, turning the tables on the enemies and getting an initiative advantage. Uses the worst party member's rank. Stamina and health are actually the same pool, except that as you lose stamina, there's no loss of skills, but once stamina is tapped out and health is lost, every lost point of health weakens all skills, so badly wounding an enemy is actually as important as killing him, since near-dead enemies are a lot less dangerous than fully healthy ones. Characters reduced to 0 Health are out for the fight(and all party members hitting 0 Health is a loss condition), but are restored after the fight in the Near-Death condition that makes them fragile as newborn kittens until they get a healer's attention or spend a lot of time recovering. Speed is how many squares in a fight the party member can move(and is the only stat that never improves), Strength is how hard they hit in melee. All skills and stats are improved with use(though in the case of Health and Stamina, it's by resting rather than getting hit a lot), except for Speed, and there are also trainers around. You can also "mark" skills to give them a boost in gains at the cost of weakening the gains for all other skills. If you're a filthy powergamer(and who isn't, sometimes?) you mark skills before using trainers and skill books, and then unmark them again afterwards.  Owyn is, predictably, poor at most things that aren't casting spells, as is the classic mage, but don't underestimate him entirely. A well-placed staff bonk from a mage can sometimes be just as important as a spell, especially since spells consume stamina(and then if that's out, health) from the casting mage, so they're not for willy-nilly casting all the time.  I don't have anything to do with this quest! I just want to go home! Gorath, lastly, is both elfy and un-elfy. He's the best crossbow archer of the three, but at the same time also the beefiest and probably capable of snapping Owyn in half with one hand. Just look at that Strength.  Thank you for acknowledging the superiority of the Moredhel.Each of them also have a lore blurb describing them.   Locklear is the only pre-BaK canon character of these three and, I think, the only one of them to re-occur in any way. This blurb also sells his background a bit short, and I'll write up a Lore Effortpost after this one to elaborate on him.   Owyn's high Haggling rank is explained by the fact that he's a white-collar criminal with a history of embezzlement. It explains a bit about why he's off in the west of the central Kingdom of the Isles when his father's estates are in the east of the Kingdom.   The book elaborates a good deal on Gorath's backstory, and makes him even more of a badass than he is here. I'll also explain the differences between the book and the game as we come across them(and if I remember them). For now, suffice to say that he's at least a couple of hundred years old and has been doing a good deal of fighting in that time, so I can only assume that the reason Locklear's better at hitting stuff than he is, is because old age is starting to catch up with Gorath.  Lastly let's have a look at the interface and what random junk our brave heroes are hauling around. The interface is from the era where piloting your character around was reminiscent of being a tank commander, a shitload of controls taking up 3/4's of the screen and just a little slot to look out of. Immediately below the view area featuring rolling hills, a path, distant trees and Haseth's corpse is a compass, surrounded by four movement arrows you can use instead of the keyboard, by clicking them with the mouse. The visible buttons in the lower right are Cast Spells, Camp, Map and Menu. Clicking any of our three characters also opens up their inventory.     And everything in Betrayal has descriptive text, complete with the Fantasy-requisite elaborate descriptions of anything edible/potable. Gorath and Locklear start with armor and swords, while all Owyn starts with is his staff, and the party starts with no crossbows. Also of note are the green vials in Locklear's inventory, those are healing potions(slight difference from the book where they're just fantasy meth that gets forcefed to Locklear and Jimmy so they can complete a timed mission), which heal you faster than resting and are the only non-healer way to recover from the Near Death condition. Can we get on the road yet? We have a kingdom to save.Patience, we're almost done.   Then there's the map. The local map is literally just a bird's eye view of the party, though without magical help it doesn't indicate most of the stuff we're actually interested in, i.e. treasure and enemies. The world map is, on the other hand, pretty useful if you don't know the game like the back of your hand. It indicates most major roads and almost every settlement. White dots are major settlements while brown dots are hamlets and villages. The little wedge on the road in the upper left is, of course, the party.  Right, now that we're on the move, we have to attend to something important. Owyn: loot that corpse. Why me?! I'm older than you and Gorath is in manacles. Hurry up now.  Gorath apparently killed Haseth so hard it vaporized his equipment. Goddamn. In any case, always be careful when picking rations out of old graves, chests or moldy holes in the ground. The graphic doesn't change, but if you examine them, they may read as Rations(Spoiled) or Rations(Poisoned), which your characters will happily scarf down if nothing else is available, but which will very efficiently make them sick. Haseth also has some lockpicks, which is nice, we can use those. For picking locks.   Turning around, there's an easy to miss little campground behind where the party starts. Also, the new icon that pops up as the party crosses the path(footpaths are blue lines, proper roads are sandy), is the "follow road"-icon. If selected, the party is locked to on-road movement, which is nice for when you've cleared out an area and just want to zoom through.   I meant it when I said everything short of the loving trees has descriptive text.  This vague brown rectangle is a chest, that's where smart people put their really good, which is why the even smarter people(us) break them open to get at it.   This chest is just free stuff, but other chests can be... locked, trapped or coded. Coded chests are my favourite.   Sometimes the party will interrupt the action to have a little conversation about what's happening. I like it. There's actually a surprising amount of it, and it's good at character-building.  Since BaK has a shitload of text and I do not have a rip of the dialogue script, I'm gonna be pasting the text in this fashion. Hope it works for everyone.         Locklear's not taking any bullshit, despite his appearance and womanizing background, he's actually a battle-hardened veteran who's seen a ton of death up close, most of it involving the Moredhel. He's clearly not eager for a repeat performance.    While cutscenes, battles and large towns have music, the open world just has ambience, in this case a few tweeting birds.   For now, I'm heading south to show off some game functionality before I start handing the reins over to you dorks so you can ruin my day completely. It's clearly the intended route, in any case, and chock full of tutorial content like, in this case, another chest!    All coded chests are of Moredhel make, so without one along, or some other way to read their language, you aren't getting them open. Wait, this is real? Your people use this to hide valuables? It's an ancient and honourable tradition. ... ... ... Yes alright, one of the reasons we haven't destroyed all humans yet is that we keep getting robbed blind.This one is pretty simple, I do appreciate that these often have some in-world or at least slightly different riddles to the usual Sphinx-brand "what is a man"-bullshit.    It might not seem like a big deal, but it kind of is. Some armor for Owyn(though this suit goes to Locklear, who passes his super-beat suit of armor to the mage) and a sword for selling. Durability for items isn't just a binary fine/broken state, an item at 1% durability will perform considerably worse than one at 99% durability.  We hardly get another step down the road, though, before it's time for another tutorial to ambush us...    Just act natural until he goes away, Owyn.       After the first bit of conversation, we're then provided with an actual dialogue choice screen of shorts.  These are mostly just for deciding what we want to ask about, but there are some actual dialogue choices in the game, even if they're mostly just of a yes/no variety. Sadly, we can't make a party of Steves here, BaK distinctly limits what degree of un-virtuous behavior we can get up to. Asking about the Inns and Nearest Town mostly just make Owyn pretend that the reason and his friends are stumbling around the wilderness is that they've been on an insane bender and have absolutely no idea where they are, which even Phillip things is kind of absurd. However, when asking about the Inns, Phillip also suggests an alternative to paying for a bed...  I thought you were meant to be minor nobles. Locklear, are all human nobles like this? Generally most Kingdom nobles are more title than trust fund and survive on the generosity of the ones with some actual land to their names. It's been a rough few years since my father no longer trusts me near the account books, alright?  Yeah, these two are hardened, absolutely used to scrabbling around in abandoned houses for every last little item of value.  After that, we bid Phillip goodbye and continue on our way. Most "ambush" NPC's will still be around if you come by again, and will occasionally have new dialogue.  Another type of stash are these little lumps of disturbed ground, unlike in some games they require no shovels to unbury(that's strictly for graves. okay, so we can be a LITTLE bit Steve-ish in BaK), and can't be trapped, but tend to contain less excellent stuff than chests. This one just contains a (miraculously unspoiled) pack of rations and some Aventurine, a repair item for crossbows.     My feet are killing me. Are we there yet? Human, we're still weeks north of Krondor.  I think we'd better find a place to kick up our feet before he soaks our packs in tears. Hmmm, let's see...   While the "minor" settlements are in-world polygonal houses, the "major" settlements are all their own game screens, with their functions discovered by the cursor changing shape as you mouse-over the various parts of the painted background. Most also have at least one hidden thing, indicated by a magnifying glass. In this case, if we go fishing around the river...  We make bank! This is a small amount of money overall, but pretty big stuff for the early game.  At the back of LaMut is the local garrison...  And our first mention of the Tsurani(or rather their homeworld, Kelewan. Yeah, the Tsurani are kind of aliens)! While they're part of BaK's plot, we don't learn a lot of them during the game, but suffice to say that I would consider them a sort of mixture of feudal Japan(feuding nobles engaging in political, and sometimes literal, warfare, while paying lip service to a political figurehead they're trying to replace, some things about their architecture) and the Aztecs(some degree of blood sacrifice, a good number of ziggurats, very big on slavery), though I feel that they're nuanced enough to grow beyond their obvious inspirations. They're their own lorepost(or more likely, series of loreposts), but suffice to say that at the end of the first two Midkemia books, a number of Tsurani settled in the northwest of the central Kingdom, generally in the area around LaMut, whose reigning noble is a Tsurani Earl.    LaMut, of course, also features a store but, whoof, everything here is well above what we can pay for. We won't be setting up a firing line of archers for a bit yet.   And what would a town be without an inn? We can annoy everyone on this screen, so let's do so, from left to right... Some NPC's just want us to gently caress off, sadly.  The barmaid is where we can buy rations though, in most cases, you'll find plenty on the road and from looting enemies. Actually needing to stop in and buy food is a rarity. The function of getting drunk is somewhat hidden, while it's a general debuff, it helps characters who are resting heal faster, so getting drunk before going to bed is the intended style of play.   The third character from the left is Dubal An Loch, this suspiciously tall dwarf. I'm not exactly sure where the "Scottish dwarves"-thing started, it sure wasn't Tolkien, but Midkemia definitely rolls with it all the way.    One of Locklear's more character-defining actions is that when he was almost at ground zero of the world ending, he got himself locked in a basement with several women. He didn't have anything crude in mind when it happened(quite the opposite), but from there on out, he seems to have had his character pretty well-defined.     In the novelization, Locklear and company drop by LaMut and have much the same conversations as they do in the game, with the exception that Locklear states in no unclear terms that they are not going to do any monster-slaying sidequesting. Of course, in the game, we're perfectly free to go fight a bunch of sentient rocks underground. Next, there's the lute lurking ominously in the lower right, let's just-  Now, I know you can't actually get anyone lynched by playing too poorly, but the text certainly seems to imply it. You also literally get booted back to the main town screen for this, which is amusing to me. Still, we gotta duck in, because we're missing the fella behind the bar.    This line always puzzled me a bit. Like, what tipped you off, Locklear? The barmaid trying to sell you mugs of ale and brandy?   I'm not sure if "Chocha" is meant to be coffee or cocoa, since the descriptions in the books seem to combine a bit of both, but it helps add to that Aztec flavour for the Tsurani by tying them to some "new world" plants.    And the ritual suicide feels like a very "inspired by surface reading of feudal Japan"-thing.   "Rift Gates" and "Grey Warriors" are lore options while "Combat" allows us to ask Sumani for some training in hitting stuff, it's pretty decent training, but also pretty expensive, at 75 gold, which is almost three times what the party actually has, and thus not even an option. So let's just milk Sumani for info before we leave LaMut. Asking about the Grey Warriors wouldn't be an option if we hadn't visited the garrison first, either.           Why would he assume we'd pursue this theft? It has nothing to do with us. Just think of all those poor gems, Gorath, suffering in some thief's pocket.In the books, Locklear does, in fact, pursue this mystery, simply because he figures that even if Gorath is a red herring, returning Makala's gems will prevent Prince Arutha from throwing him in the dungeons for abandoning his post. Also, the garrison is out on maneuvers and can't spare them troops for an escort, but a few garrison regulars help them try to throw the Moredhel off their track(though it doesn't help much). In any case, that's all of LaMut's content tapped for now, unless we need to pick up some high-caliber crossbows, so we can head back to the road.    If you can see that little clump of blue pixels among the trees, then good job! You can play Betrayal at Krondor! That there's our very first ambusher, and if he had friends, we'd be able to see those, too, as we got closer, but this brave fellow has decided to walk out on to the pitch and challenge us on his own. Now, the trick is, which the game tells you in the manual but not in-game, to examine this guy like you would anything else in the gameworld.   Now we've triggered AMBUSH MODE, which means that if our Stealth rating wins out, we'll get a first-round advantage against this guy.    Just as planned.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfgDeyjb4os I recorded the fight as a short video just so you can hear the music, since there certainly isn't any particularly tactical content in this and like half of it is me trying to remember what the three spells Owyn has do. Back in the image dimension... Owyn is up first, and early on, Owyn has one job, and one job only.  Despair Thy Eyes is a spell that always hits(but under rare situations seems able to fail or get resisted), and which causes the opponent to lose the next couple of turns while they're blinded. Owyn's other two combat spells at this stage are Invitation(pull an enemy closer to him, good for getting enemy casters or archers out of their back rows. enemies pulled adjacent to a player character can only move and melee attack, they cannot cast spells or fire crossbows) and Gift of Sung(sacrifices some of Owyn's Stamina/Health to replenish an ally's).  The screen(and the enemy) flash and that's how you know it's stuck. Now this guy is gonna wobble in place for two rounds, even if, say, someone walks over and starts hitting him with a sword. The other options down on the bar are to retreat(must be in the backmost row with no dead allies), defend(increases chance of not getting hit), assessing an enemy(try to figure out their stats), resting(passes the round recovering stamina) or setting the team to auto-battle. You'll rarely want to set fights to auto-battle.   Melee attacks can't be done horizontally, and if you're already in position, i.e. don't need to move to make the attack, you also get access to a Swing. In general the Swing is less accurate but does more damage, but the exact details vary a bit from weapon to weapon.   Gorath and Locklear make short work of him, though. Individual blue-cloaked Moredhel are just about the weakest enemy in the game.    Dead enemies roughly have the same positions in the overworld as they had on the battlefield, which can sometimes make searching them annoying if they died on the same tile, this guy just carried some spare change, another sword and another suit of armor, which is what most humanoid enemies will have. They'll generally drop the same stuff they use in combat if it's of a category that player characters can use(monstrous enemies will not, for instance, drop their clubs).  This is crazy! We're going to end up being killed before we get to Krondor! Cowardly as he is, the boy has a point. Going directly south to Krondor will be the path of most opposition. Hmmm... perhaps there's a smarter way.VOTE Which path will the crew attempt to take to Krondor? If you refer back to the OP post, the only blocked paths are across the Grey Towers, the Teeth of the World and the Grey Range. Making Tyr-Sog, Northwarden and Highcastle the northern most areas the party can reach for the time being. Alternately, if the party doesn't actually head for Krondor right away, should they... Investigate the Brak-Nurr or look into the gem-smuggling?
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Sep 10, 2021 22:41
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Update 02: Lore Dump 1 I'm trying to keep each of the lore dump subheadings somewhat concise because... goddamn, nothing in the Midkemia books is ever simple and concise. Thanks to time travel there's rarely ever just "a beginning" and the chronological start of things is often explained midway through the second book in a two-book sub-series. Let me know if you want me to ramble more about a particular subject, because Christ will I not run out of material any time soon. Locklear Locklear first appears in the third book, Silverthorn, where he and a young Jimmy the Hand have ended up as squires at Prince Arutha's court. They end up fast friends as Locklear is, himself, not the son of anyone important enough to put him high on the pecking order and he's impressed with Jimmy's street wits and the fact that he doesn't take poo poo from any bullies among the other squires. When Prince Arutha and his friends end up setting off on a top secret mission to save Prince Arutha's wife(who got hit in the back by a poisoned crossbow bolt during the wedding), Jimmy and Locklear figure out something's up and invite themselves along, almost getting killed along the way several times. After Princess Anita's life is saved, life goes back to normal until the fourth book, A Darkness At Sethanon. Once again, Locklear and Jimmy end up accompanying Prince Arutha on a dangerous expedition, this time into the Northlands, the heart of Moredhel power, where they end up in the besieged, militaristic city of Armengar. When the city is overrun, a girl that Locklear struck up a relationship with is killed by the invaders and he turns out to be a pretty dangerous fighter when he's sufficiently pissed off by an event like that. He ends up surviving the siege along with the other main characters, joining them in their rush to Sethanon where he ends up protecting more women in a besieged city when the walls come down. This time he succeeds, however, and most of his reputation as a ladies' man is from when the partially collapsed basement is excavated by the relief troops. The Tsurani The Tsurani are the Aztec/Japanese melange culture which are the apparent antagonists of the first two Midkemia books(Magician: Apprentice and Magician: Master). They appear out of nowhere and lay siege to the Kingdom from within its borders, displacing Moredhel, threatening Elvandar and having no apparent end to their troops. The protagonists later realize that the Tsurani are being teleported in from their own world, Kelewan, which mainly differs from Midkemia in being much hotter and being much more poor in metals. The invasion of Midkemia is pushed by two things: the hunger for Midkemia's metals(which are insanely valuable on Kelewan) and political pressures(the Tsurani warlord has been backed into a corner by being unable to find anyone to persecute a war against for a while), and to maintain his political power he latches on to the idea of invading the Kingdom of the Isles. Most information about Tsurani history and culture are related when Pug, the main protagonist of the Magician novels, is captured at the end of Apprentice and spends several years as a Tsurani slave in Master until the Tsurani discover he has magical talent and elevate him to the role of one of their Great Ones(unlike in the Kingdom, there's no such thing as a wizard of low station among the Tsurani). A lot of magical bullshit later, the rift between Kelewan and Midkemia is collapsed, and the surviving Tsurani on the Midkemia side are made freemen of the Kingdom. Eventually, during A Darkness At Sethanon, the Rift is re-established, and from then on, Kelewan and Midkemia enjoy largely peaceful trade relations as the Tsurani Emperor, Ichindar, has no desire for war. If you dig more into the DEEP LORE, the Tsurani are humans, just like the humans of Midkemia are(aside from whatever genetic drift happens over thousands of years of interstellar separation), due to an ancient disaster that destroyed whatever was humanity's ancestral home. But explaining that, or why the Rift had to be blown up once, and during a peace conference at that, would require explaining the Valheru and Macros the Black and... hoo boy, we're not even a quarter of the way there yet. Suffice to say it involves multiples of time travel. The Tsurani are largely respectfully handled, with perhaps a bit of exoticism, and the occasional bit of heavy-handed "the Kingdom's pseudo-European meritocracy is a superior system of governance to the Tsurani's largely clannish, fundamentally primitive system of government. " but the Kingdom is also shown to have its weaknesses, with insane kings, internal politicking and so forth.The Moredhel Possibly unique among fantasy dark elves, the moredhel are almost physically identical to their non-dark brethren(the Eledhel, who live in the Green Heart), and their differences are instead largely ideological. When the Valheru empire collapsed, their slaves, the elves, split into two* factions, the Eledhel, who realized the Valheru were dangerous psychos and just wanted to live in peace, and the Moredhel, who thought the Valheru were on to something and wanted to reclaim all their ancient magic WMD's and rule the world. This also informed their reactions to humans, the Eledhel see them as fellow sapients, while the Moredhel see them as usurpers of Midkemia's lands and resources. During the Magician books, the Moredhel are largely a secondary danger, since they primarily raid around the edges of the action and are as threatened by the Tsurani as everyone else on Midkemia. During Silverthorn, however, they've gotten themselves a prophet, Murmandamus, who uses force and manipulation to unite the Moredhel factions into a single unified army that he leads against the Kingdom with blatant disregard for the lives of the soldiers under his command, slinging around ridiculous magical powers with little effort and largely seeming invincible all throughout Silverthorn and A Darkness At Sethanon, two books during which the moredhel largely seem to be completely insane beings composed of nothing but anger, murderousness and political jockeying. Betrayal at Krondor represents the first time we see one of them displaying positive emotions, making jokes, cooperating with humans that aren't greedy weapon-runners or mercenaries, etc. Of course, Murmandamus turns out to be a fraud(a shapeshifted lizard alien, literally, I'm not even joking) and he almost manages to end the world by loving with stuff he finds underneath Sethanon, but he gets stabbed at the last moment, which collapses the Moredhel war machine entirely. The Moredhel in Betrayal at Krondor have suffered insane losses in recent history, literally entire generations of Moredhel have ended up dead or maimed and they are distinctly on the back foot, they absolutely should not be a threat any longer. *Or so we're told during the Magician books. Of course there aren't just two kinds of elves, no author who starts introducing multiple brands of elves ever stops at two. You fool, you absolute rube, you will drown in elves of every kind.
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Sep 10, 2021 23:11
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Go after the smugglers,seems like a good start. Also is this the game where someone gets really into berries in one of the item descriptions?
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Sep 10, 2021 23:12
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Go after the Brakk Nurr What could possibly go wrong. Also, obviously you should double back to throw off pursuit and explore the north. E: Also drowning in elves because there are multiple elven nations with different ideologies is a better reason than usual to be drowning in elves. Also note Gorath is loving huge and he's much beefier than any other PC you get all game, so not only can elves have sweet facial hair in this game but they can be buff as heck. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 23:21 on Sep 10, 2021 |
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Sep 10, 2021 23:18
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Head to Yabon to get a Whetstone and Armorer's hammer. You can use Capture2Text to transcribe text. Or copy-paste directly from Snugglecake's LP
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Sep 10, 2021 23:30
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I so want to spoil so many things. But I will wait, for Jimmy Jimmy the hand That dude is the man.
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Sep 10, 2021 23:38
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I vote for gem-smuggling. And for going north and all the way around to the east and basically taking the longest way possible and visiting everywhere before going to Krondor. 
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Sep 10, 2021 23:50
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I have no real preference other than maximizing the amount of time Locklear has to deal with Owyn being loose lipped about their actual destination.
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Sep 10, 2021 23:52
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Go after the rocks! No, the other rocks.
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Sep 11, 2021 00:45
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I was always amused by this. It's THEIR campsite and they just spent the night there. Man, Dubal wasn't kidding when he said humans have short memories.
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Sep 11, 2021 00:49
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Brak Nur, and we need to explore a bit before going to Krondor. I also hope you will give the thread a crack at some of the harder riddles. In case it isn't obvious, everything you want to buy is crazy expensive. The equipment we are picking up doesn't sell for much, maybe 20ish gold per looted corpse, and everything good costs a few hundred gold. Healing is also pretty pricey. This is a game where you loot literally everything that can be sold and schlep it back to a shop for cash, and save scum haggling. We are very poor for most of the game.
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Sep 11, 2021 00:50
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Bookmarked! Wish you better luck then I had, as the LP curse hit me hard in trying to LP this game. Although the original BaK help web is now gone, some kind soul has re-hosted it and it contains an amazing amount of information including text conversations I think for all major NPCs. (https://vga256.com/krondor/krondor.html)
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Sep 11, 2021 01:21
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PurpleXVI posted:Okay so. Feist is generally pretty "fade to black" if there's some sort of sexual content going on, and in general there's very little horny in what he writes(that I've read, at least). But then Jimmy the Hand just kicks down the door and starts screaming "YEAH JIMMY'S BEEN FUCKIN' SINCE HE COULD BARELY WALK. BANGING ALL THESE OLDER LADIES. HELL YEAH. KNEE DEEP IN GILF VAGINAS. drat, HE'S SUCH A PLAYER." and it just kind of made me recoil at the time, so I've had no temptation whatsoever to re-read it to double-check the details. I don't really remember the... explicit parts. I remember a few sex scenes, but it was with a young girl who was a prostitute while Jimmy was a thief and who was integral to the plot. Like you, though, I just found it badly written and amateurish. Again, don't let that put you off any of his other novels, especially the early ones. Even the two other side-story novels are very good. Xerophyte posted:Pretty sure it's Feist's homebrew high school and university D&D setting, yes. Apparently he stole the asian invaders wholesale from a D&D-contemporary 70s RPG (Empire of the Petal Throne)? Anyhow, Pug and Thomas were reportedly based on his and his best friend's characters which is why they are among the blandest and most generic protagonists in fantasy literature; no mean feat. I was aware that it was based on his personal RPG experiences and I assumed that the other main antagonist civilisation was based off of something that iI have not heard of, but that remark about Pug and Thomas is one of the dumbest opinions I've heard on the Internet - no mean feat. JustJeff88 fucked around with this message at 02:48 on Sep 11, 2021 |
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Sep 11, 2021 02:46
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Technical note, DOS games running in 320x200 aren't intended to be displayed with square pixels like this. All your screenshots are squashed. For instance, this Should look something like  The circles in the UI are now actual circles, etc. For minimum distortion you want to point resize the 320x200 source to either 640x400 or 960x600, then do a filtered resize to 640x480 or 960x720, respectively. I used the latter since it was closer to your 900 width. You could do a filtered resize from 960x600 to 900x675 instead to be directly archivable. Doing a horizontal resize will distort the pixels more, but it's not like this is a pixel art game. Your colors are also different from the screenshots I could find on mobygames and elsewhere. I have no idea why that is. If this is the GOG version I suspect it may be doing something weird, since the screenshots on GOG.com seem to likewise be all squashed and saturated. Also, as someone who has only ever played the floppy version, hearing the CD audio just seems wrong.
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Sep 11, 2021 03:01
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The CD audio is great though. BaK has a fantastic soundtrack, especially for the time.
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Sep 11, 2021 03:49
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I've heard some interesting things about the Riftwar books, and so far this looks like a pretty good translation to another medium. Haven't actually read any of them yet because of how many other fantasy books have caught my interest over the years, though.
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Sep 11, 2021 03:49
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