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Detail is good but you don't want to get too detailed when writing a novel. Things that are not something the characters or readers should know or should need to know shouldn't be included. You put that poo poo into the rpg books that come later 
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Sep 14, 2021 19:25
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Psion posted:Scale is one of Feist's biggest issues and it's thankfully not relevant here whatsoever, so yeah. We get all the benefits and none of the downsides, basically. I hope those insane grinders found the much cheaper shop for that sword before the grind was over. Full price for a greatsword, smdh. Anyways, I hear the eastern coast of the kingdom is beautiful this time of year.
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Sep 14, 2021 20:28
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Locklear hasn't had a proper vacation in a long time, and Owyn and Gorath could stand to see the sights - never know if a good chance for some tourism is going to pop up again! Indeed, it's Locklear's duty to show off the beauty of the kingdom (and its haunted forests) as a good host, and take the longest possible way around.
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Sep 14, 2021 20:40
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PurpleXVI posted:With no tagged skills, this is a +5% to Melee Accuracy and Defense for everyone, which is actually a pretty nice boost, especially this early on. Now we can leave LaMut behind and not see it again for, probably, several chapters worth of game. quote:Barding XP progresses by some weird method I don't understand, so I just burn all of the charges on Owyn, which puts him at a threadbare 51% barding skill up from his starting 42%. ... Oh, and someone knowledgeable commenting on my guide said that books still have a chance to boost your skills even after you've read them once? Anyway, it's at least once per character, which is different from "one-use".
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Sep 14, 2021 21:03
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Xander77 posted:That should be 7.5% or so with only these two skills tagged. That was with Barding tagged, and, yeah, I know that tagging would improve Sumani's lessons, I just thought I'd write the base rate. Xander77 posted:Oh, and someone knowledgeable commenting on my guide said that books still have a chance to boost your skills even after you've read them once? Anyway, it's at least once per character, which is different from "one-use". I don't quite understand the book thing, it's something like a single-digit percentage chance that a given character can benefit from them more than once to my understanding, which feels off, but is functionally almost the same as "one use per character."
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Sep 14, 2021 21:45
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Guildenstern Mother posted:I hope those insane grinders found the much cheaper shop for that sword before the grind was over. Full price for a greatsword, smdh. not my first time no, but afterwards yeah I figured out the trick
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Sep 14, 2021 23:57
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I just want to say that I am once again entirely in favour of the time-honoured tradition of doing every possible side activity before moving on with the bloody plot. Only way to play.Night10194 posted:I honestly prefer that they don't try to explain the exact mechanics of magic primarily because magic's existence and use in the various political struggles of the setting tends to be more important than the magic itself, especially in Betrayal. It's just a tool, it exists, magicians are an important resource and a part of politics and it takes a fair bit of training and intellectual curiosity to master it (like Owyn wants to), and then they go from there and get on with it. It worked well for the sort of story they're shooting for. I agree with this very much. It's more, well, magical if it's not codified down to the last d8 or what have you. However, there is definitely an element of 'inherent gift'. Milamber/Pug seems to be very much an innate talent originally in the wrong place, and even though his friend Hochopepa is characterised fat and lazy he is still a very dangerous man if he wants to be. Magic is very politicised, though. In Midkemia most magicians are treated with suspicion at best and as total outcasts at worst. On Kelewan, they are literally above the law because of... let's call it a great service in the distant past. A magician can literally walk anywhere and say 'give me that' and it has to be done. When Pug built his home on Kelewan, his method for doing so was to go to a rich moneylender and demand a huge sum of money to build a villa. The moneylender gets the money back from the imperial government, but it was easier for Pug than hiring contracters. Pug also is disbarred from the Assembly on Kelewan for certain extreme actions and, while he is still an insanely powerful mother fucker, he is stripped of his privileges as a Great One for a while. I'm being deliberately vague in these lore posts because I want to get people intrigued enough to read the books, which I consider very good, but I don't want to totally spoil. JustJeff88 fucked around with this message at 02:41 on Sep 15, 2021 |
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Sep 15, 2021 02:38
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PurpleXVI posted:Vote
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Sep 15, 2021 04:14
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I stand by what I said earlier:DGM_2 posted: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 15, 2021 08:19
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Zereth posted:Whichever one is farther away. Seconded at thirded.
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Sep 15, 2021 08:28
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Zereth posted:Whichever one is farther away.  Always take the longest possible route and every available diversion.
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Sep 15, 2021 08:52
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My vote is to show the side things that disappear after chapter 1, but avoid burning through too much else. The later chapters can feel a little empty if you do too much looting and questing at the beginning of the game. The fun thing about grave robbing is you can usually tell what will be buried in a grave based on the epitaph, which can feels bit like the chest riddles at times.
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Sep 15, 2021 14:40
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Roxors posted:The fun thing about grave robbing is you can usually tell what will be buried in a grave based on the epitaph, which can feels bit like the chest riddles at times. Yeah, there's usually some sort of painful pun or homophone indicating what's buried in there, while the grislier/sadder grave names tend to be the dangerous ones.
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Sep 15, 2021 15:03
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Roxors posted:My vote is to show the side things that disappear after chapter 1, but avoid burning through too much else. The later chapters can feel a little empty if you do too much looting and questing at the beginning of the game. Now that you mention this I do remember this being an issue, so I'm also good with the side content being paced out a bit more.
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Sep 15, 2021 15:08
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Roxors posted:My vote is to show the side things that disappear after chapter 1, but avoid burning through too much else. The later chapters can feel a little empty if you do too much looting and questing at the beginning of the game. This is a fair point. Alright, my standing vote for the rest of the game is that you must EVENTUALLY do everything - no letting "lost forever" stuff go by - but otherwise you're welcome to do things whenever you think it works best for the LP.
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Sep 15, 2021 20:28
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DGM_2 posted:This is a fair point. Likewise
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Sep 16, 2021 00:46
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DGM_2 posted:This is a fair point. I change my vote to match that of the Shadow Minister for Sensible Gaming
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Sep 16, 2021 00:56
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JustJeff88 posted:I change my vote to match that of the Shadow Minister for Sensible Gaming Heh. Never been called THAT before, but I'll take it!
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Sep 16, 2021 01:08
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The will of the people has been heard... the team will get another serving of greatly unwanted cardio training.
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Sep 16, 2021 01:15
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Hey, I prefer to call it "additional opportunities for gear procurement and skill training!"
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Sep 16, 2021 01:45
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Also, since I'm not putting up the in-game description for EVERY item(sadly they can't all be as unintentionally funny as the pile-of-fruit one), if there's a piece of text you guys really want to see(like, I don't know, maybe you're desperate to know what Locklear thinks about a specific gem or something), let me know and I'll be sure to add it to an update or in between updates.
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Sep 16, 2021 10:29
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Hey Purple, can you put the pictures of the puzzle chest up unsolved and maybe put the solution below in spoiler tags? Or would that be too much work? I do like trying to guess the answers, but no problem if its too much.
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Sep 16, 2021 16:52
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SOLarian posted:Hey Purple, can you put the pictures of the puzzle chest up unsolved and maybe put the solution below in spoiler tags? Or would that be too much work? I do like trying to guess the answers, but no problem if its too much. I could start doing that from now on, I suppose. It wouldn't be too much extra work.
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Sep 16, 2021 17:41
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I think you should leave at least one quest undone per chapter just to drive completionists up a wall. but really though I don't have a preference on how thoroughly you scour Midkemia for quests, it's really what you think works well for pacing the LP, in my opinion.
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Sep 16, 2021 19:33
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This game  So many good memories of beating my head against Chapter 3
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Sep 20, 2021 17:13
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Update 05: [Goblins]  When we last left off, we were about one third along the east/west road running south of the Teeth of the World mountains, which amounts to roughly 1/9th of the total distance if we were going to take the longest possible route from Yabon to Krondor, i.e. going east to Northwarden, south to Silden, and then west to Krondor. The thing is, despite most quests and encounters for this region not being activated until later chapters, there is actually one Chapter 1 exclusive sidequest up here, which we'll be collecting before turning around, just to avoid tapping out the eastern north/south route several chapters early.    For some reason, at a couple of points, you get dialogue prompts to skip onwards along the route, possibly to make it feel longer than it actually is. BaK posted:Gorath stared down the pass.  This little skip nudges us about half of the way from Tyr-Sog to the small town of Eldpoint and...  Also right into another Moredhel patrol.  Up here the gloves are off, there are no more 1 or 2-enemy encounters, we're going to be outnumbered almost every time and winning surprise is important, not to mention that even the basic Moredhel Warriors up here tend to have somewhat better stats as well as usually at least one or two of them fielding crossbows. Since we do win surprise, however, this is basically the ideal use case for Flamecast.     Who needs Stardock when I can just read random pamphlets on how to cast destructive magic?In the novelization, the explanation for why Owyn doesn't know any battle magic is that, quite reasonably, Stardock doesn't want brawls or disagreements to turn into students throwing fireballs and lightning bolts at each other. However, the videogame is absolutely superior to the novel in that just this short bit into an early detour and he's already graduated to becoming a battlemage. So, anyway, Flamecast! It tosses a ball of fire that relies on Accy:Casting for its accuracy(though note that missed projectiles can still hit other targets, so it's best against tight clusters of enemies) and does up to 60 damage to the primary target if Owen sacrifices the maximum 20 Stamina to it. Even late in the game, this is enough to one-shot or cripple(enemies get the same stat penalties as the main characters do when they lose Health) the main target. The AoE effect is ~20% damage to enemies within two squares, which contributes to it being best to cast on round one. Firstly the enemies are likely to be clustered, and secondly they're likely to be far enough away that you won't fry your own party in the process.  For instance, this is how things look a round or two later. Hitting either of the nearly Moredhel with a Flamecast would fry both Owyn and Locklear, and is thus what the wise ancients would call "an absolutely dogshit stupid idea." In any case, except for a brief scary moment where one of the moredhel walk up to Owyn and start swinging at him, the fight passes without anything noteworthy happening.  So much for your genius plan, Squire. They're still after us, and in bigger numbers. Or they just snuck over the Teeth of the World to hurry on down and intercept us, but we ambushed them rather than the other way around.   I'd say about half the homes and barns near this road are, in this chapter, uninteractible, with their residents either unresponsive or simply not at home.  Taking anoter step here drops us right into an ambush, despite there being no visible enemies in-game. I'm unclear whether this is due to an insufficiently high Scouting skill, or whether some battles are simply pre-coded as being ambushes every time. Not even the huge Krondor FAQ seems to be of any help there.   Unlike the last fight, Owyn can't start it by nuking one of the enemies into the ground thanks to their instantly closing with the tougher boys and giving them two to one odds.  This leads to Gorath actually having all his Stamina worn away, which could have gone really badly. If he'd taken one more hit, it would've severely impacted his ability to hit back and to dodge attacks, and could possibly have lead to him getting his rear end kicked, plus one of the fighters was chasing Owyn around, preventing him from evening the odds with Despair Thy Eyes.   It also leads to the event of one of the Moredhel running for the hills, which is something you desperately want to avoid. Not because he'll return or bring reinforcements or anything, but because the game has a limited number of battles, and thus limited resources, and some of these blue-clad idiots carry things we desperately want to get our hands on for free rather than having to pay for them.    Once we're done tossing the bodies for spare change, we turn a corner in the road and encounter... an incongruous Grecian-style building.   What we've got here, is our first temple. Their main feature is curing hard-to-remove conditions like Near Death in exchange for hard-to-acquire resources like gold, the second thing is blessing your high-tier gear to make it even more high-tier(this is generally not worthwhile for a couple of chapters yet, though, as we're still pretty far from the top of the power curve and blessings are pricey) and the third... let's go poke at that mandala on the wall to our right. BaK posted:The design was odd. This is completely non-canon, by the way. In the canon, the only ones with access to teleportation are the Tsurani Great Ones(and Pug, because Pug has all the magic), and even then they need carefully prepared patterns to memorize and teleport to, or devices keyed to very specific locations. In general the temples feature... relatively little in the canonical stories, despite Midkemia having a fleshed-out pantheon... but I'll rant about the gods in the next lore post. For now, suffice to say that Dala is also known as the "Shield of the Weak" in-setting, a faith not explicitly devoted to fighting, but definitely as ready to crack heads if someone's loving with the defenseless as it is to handing out food to the homeless. All temples also have an option to go harass the head priest for attention. BaK posted:Locklear asked to see the high priestess. Despite being able to pick up this quest in Chapter 1 already, it can't be completed until Chapter 2 due to necessary NPC's not being interactible or encounterable until then, but it has a really good reward, so we absolutely want to keep it in mind. In any case, we don't have the money to bless anything(nor is it worth blessing anything at this point), no one's half dead and we don't have any other temples visited to turn them into teleport locations yet(not to mention the prices are absolute ripoffs.).   So we're going to take a detour to find grain for a temple? Well, no. But if we happen to stumble across a sack of grain anyway... we could probably use all the divine help we could get.  Oooooh, berries! Owyn, your pack is filled to the brim with rations. Aw c'mon, we're sparing like, two weeks for your dumb detour. Can't we spare ten minutes for my berries? Fine, fine, just be careful, some of these look odd...BaK posted:The leaves were dull. Shaded in dull browns and ochres, the bush wasn't much to look at, but it might yield berries that could be eaten. The first flavour text means the bush yields rations, the second means it yields green potions(restoratives!) and the third means it yields poisoned rations. Always remember to read the flavour text, kids, or at least to check what kind of rations you're picking up.  ...why would a wagon be a sign of an ambush? Maybe the moredhel are bringing so many guys for the next one that they need to cart them around. I refuse to believe they need a supply train to ambush us. If you doubt my elven senses, go ahead and take another step forwards.  Son of a bitch.   Mostly what this battle shows off is that battle fields can have different sizes and sometimes even shapes. The game doesn't play a lot with it, which is a shame, some battlefields with actual choke points and obstructions could have been interesting, but it does occasionally change the tactical calculus and, for instance, dungeon/cave battlefields tend to be narrower than overworld battlefields.  Ugh, now why are we going off-road? Since Gorath was right about the ambush, he might be right about the wagon, too, and while I doubt Delekhan's soldiers travel by wagon, stacked like barrels, they might have transported something else in among the cliffs...  Jackpot. Two chests just off the road. Generally overworld containers don't change from chapter to chapter, though the non-code ones, the locked ones, may be simply too difficult to pick early in the game, which is why they're usually our best chance of breaking the power curve in half even more than we already have.  COALS  And oh does this chest ever kick rear end. The Keshian Tapir(that huge scimitar up there), is the fourth most-damaging sword in the game(and third most damaging if you only count non-unique ones) and represents a massive damage boost for Gorath, while the amulet is an Amulet of the Upright Man which gives a +15% Lockpicking boost. Getting that in the first chapter of the game when the scale is 0 to 100, is pretty great!  SECRET  And the second chest contains crossbows good enough that now it's actually worth it to take the occasional potshot at enemies and let them waste the time closing in, rather than sending Locklear and Gorath ahead to brawl. Though I'd like to note that I am officially an idiot for not picking up that bowstring(an item that repairs a damaged crossbow to 100%).  FUTURE  The last chest contains a Medium crossbow which is a sidegrade to the red Tsurani crossbows. It does somewhat less damage, but has better accuracy.   I'm surprised they just left that undefended. Owyn!   This trap introduces a few new things, crystals and cannons. Cannons shoot fireballs at anything that moves past their "muzzle," doing 30 damage with each hit. Solid crystals provoke attacks, but also block them, so the solution to this trap is pretty simple.   Move the first-line crystal to the right so we can shuffle the second-line crystal one step forwards and block the second cannon as well. Another important note is that traps have no time limit, so if your characters are wounded at all, a hot pro tip is to wander into a trap and have them "rest" over and over until they're capped out on health and stamina, THEN "solve" the trap.     The next step of the road is quiet. Too quiet! You hold him down, Gorath, and I'll punch him until candy comes out.  Even with the advantage of ambushing the party, four moredhel fighters go down without too much difficulty since they don't immediately tie up Owyn, and he can thus get started on blinding them all while Gorath and Locklear fillet them mercilessly. This encounter is great, though, because one of the dead moredhel has one of the most important items for this stretch of the game. The best thing about it is that you might very well never know that it's important, on account of the game never actually deigning to tell you what its effect is.  Ow! drat! Just stop hitting the drat thing and I promise we won't kick your rear end. This is another place where a noteworthy gear upgrade is just casually stashed in a corner of the geometry.    Head off the road, walk into the hills, skip around the barn and poke at the little bit of disturbed dirt in the corner.  The Goblin Sticker within isn't as damaging as the Keshian Tapir, but is slightly more accurate and also has a +5% accuracy bless. I missed that it was Elven-typed, though, and should have absolutely given it to Gorath instead of the Tapir(which is human-typed).  Between all these magical traps and ambushes, though, I feel rather turned around. Let's go ask for directions at one of the actually inhabited houses in the area. BaK posted:The house was badly in need of repair, but it appeared as though someone might be living in it so Locklear knocked loudly and stood back to wait. You can tell these guys are actual protagonists because they actually respect squatters rather than turning them out for some lame reason like "the law." The chests they mention also exist, but they're both locked beyond Locklear's skill and also contain some surprisingly lame loot compared to all the chests we can effortlessly open at this stage.   Just around the corner we reach Eldpoint, which is largely notable for having one of the worst stores in the game, "Guds," which has an absolutely terrible selection of items AND buys basically none of what we find on any of the enemies, or in any of the stashes around the area. So instead, let's harass some of the other locals, one of them has a present for us.  BaK posted:Locklear knocked on the door. Sadly, we can't dress Gorath in high heels, but if we accept the offer, we get a pair of free Weedwalkers which, you might remember, are a +30% bonus to Stealth. Considering that Weedwalkers have a base price of 150 gold, that's a pretty big score for the early game.  It also, of course, has an inn, though sadly without any unique NPC's. Just the usual barmaid, lute and a few randoms. You'll probably not click on any randoms after the first time you try, since they generally just have very short dialogues that amount to: "And the NPC told Locklear to gently caress off and mind his own business," but there are actually several unique, but rare, and randomly assigned, dialogues for inn patrons which are worth reading. I'll toss in a few of them as the game progresses, like right now! BaK posted:A table was cleaned for them. We will, of course, also take a shot at barding and hope we don't get our asses tossed out again... BaK posted:Fortune smiled. It's the lowest tier of success possible, but it's still a success! This is more or less entirely down to the practice lute that Owyn hammered away at until it broke last update, it brought him just over the minimum requirement to get a reward. Only about a quarter of the maximum possible reward, but I have no idea how you'd get the 82 Barding necessary to get the max reward here in Chapter 1 without abusing one of the game's multiple free money tricks, the simplest of which relies on the fact that anything sold to a store can be bought back any number of times. Thus, if you break a high-quality crossbow entirely, you can buy an infinite amount almost for free, then buy bowstrings to repair them, and sell the repaired crossbows for more than the price of buying the wreck and the string.  At least you're finally earning your keep. You mean aside from the magic? If you two would stop squabbling, there are enemies up ahead. In the middle of Eldpoint? Indeed, it looks like we've arrived in the middle of a raid. Welcome to a new type of enemy: Trolls. They're, uh, nothing like trolls in the books, who are described as looking more like primates than people. These things are just tall people with some bad makeup and large sticks. They tend to be beefier than Moredhel, and hit harder... and almost zero of them carry anything, meaning that if you decide to spend your time hacking them to pieces, they're gonna provide some training, sure, but likely mostly waste your resources and perhaps paste the party. So instead, do the smart thing. Cover your ears, everyone! DINGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG The secret power of the tuning fork is that it makes all trolls in a given battle instantly start fleeing from the battlefield. It's a supremely useful item that makes the game so much easier, sparing you a ton of quite annoying battles, and outside of perhaps one single piece of NPC dialogue somewhere, nothing ever tells you that the drat things actually have a use.  I'm going to be resolving all troll fights with tuning forks when possible, since the forks aren't exactly in short supply(we've got about 60 uses on the one we found) and there's never anything lost in doing so.      From Eldpoint to Highcastle, there's only one battle in our way, which is another pure troll encounter and thus removed with another Tuning Fork use. And thank God we're finally at Highcastle, I've had to pass up tons of mediocre items thanks to not being able to unload jack poo poo at Tyr-Sog or Eldpoint.   Despite being a border strongpoint, Highcastle has the spread of amenities: A shop, a tavern and a local noble to harass. The local interactible background item is the mentioned Cutter's Gap in the background... BaK posted:Rain slanted out of the sky. I'm not sure what Locklear's "reasons" could have been. A boondoggle attempt at travelling north and assassinating Delekhan to shortcircuit the entire plot? It would've been funny if it was an option.There's nothing exciting about the local store, it just has a ton of high-tier armor and weapons at prices sadly much too high for us to pay at the moment. So let's hit up the bar, play some tunes and get another bit of fluff dialogue.  BaK posted:Owyn played. Many of the "rare" inn dialogues seem to be minor game hints, like this one which tells you not to gently caress around in dungeons without rope. Now that everyone's had a chance to get drunk, let's talk to the local noble. BaK posted:A soldier let them in. So the plan is... to not have a plan? Exactly, no one would ever expect someone as brilliant as me to be acting randomly.Anyway, now that the party's inventory is unburdened, we have a change to kick over some things in the environs around Highcastle.    Firstly, and most importantly, we need to pretend roads don't exist and run more or less straight west away from Highcastle until we bump into a cliffside, which should also trigger another magic trap.   Now, this trap I don't quite get. You'll notice we've got all the previous elements here, plus a new one, transparent crystals. Fireball cannons will attempt to shoot at them, but their shots will pass through. If they hit one of the pillars for the lightning lines, they'll disable that entire line, but at the same time they can't shoot through the line itself, as the line will blast the fireball out of the air. Considering that we can't pull crystals, only push them, I'm lost as to how to solve this trap "perfectly." Ultimately, what I did was just having Owyn run past the cannon on the right(it's only 30 damage, he'll be fine!), with the solid crystal, so he could use it to block the top left cannon and walk past it. If the rightmost crystal was a transparent one, the solution would be super obvious, but since it's not... I don't have a drat clue. If someone else can use their tactical megamind to solve this one without frying Owyn halfway to a crisp, go ahead and let me know.   Of course, I also double gently caress it by pushing this crystal a step too far so Owyn has to eat two fireballs. Still, at least there's a reward for this!  While completing battles drops you out where you stood, completing traps always drops you in a fixed location, in this case more or less staring down three coded chests.  BARK  The contents of the chests are a bit... eh, though.  BREATH For instance this one just contains 28 rations. Nice stuff, but not exactly super vital.  YESTERDAY Instead, this one is the big score.  Another good sword, a high-quality emerald(worth about 100 sovereigns) and two bags of seemingly innocuous powder.  Though at least these come with some instructions. They go in Owyn's inventory, and we'll soon see that they're some of the best items in the game for handling battles where the party's outnumbered. Now, let's see about getting in the Baron's good graces. Those goblins he mentioned can't have gone far...   Excuse me, has anyone in here seen any rampaging goblins around?BaK posted:"Wonderful day, don't you think?" said the pleasant woman that came to the door. She's a hint leading us to the chests we just found. But since we already looted those, we'll just keep heading north.   Goblin campfires, do you think? No doubt, you can tell because they never follow proper campfire safety rules. ???? Draken-Smokey says only you can prevent forest fires.  There they are, it's the [goblins]! Prepare to meet your end, miserable [goblins]. Those aren't goblins, they're just guys in green shirts! Shut up, Owyn and eat your goblins.Ahem, so. These are obviously just digitized images of slightly shorter(or downscaled) humans in green clothes which are hilariously completely unlike Midkemia goblins, who are, oddly enough, blue-skinned, always black-haired, much shorter than humans and have black scleras. In some of the books they're also described a bit like smaller trolls, as in being somewhat simian in stature. Stat-wise they're also more or less completely identical to moredhel, which is another oddity since in the stories they tend to be described as generally being much less dangerous than both humans and moredhel, and generally only a threat in large numbers or if they manage an ambush.   These bastards are set up with two archers and also run right into the middle of our formation, so I decide to bust out the big guns and eat the friendly fire involved in Flamecasting the center goblin to reduce how much a threat he is to Owyn.   It mostly goes well, except that Owyn almost gets hacked apart and ends up with only 6 Health left, a goblin all up in his grill and it being able to act before Locklear or Gorath can get to it. So what do we do?  We pop it with one of those powder bags, of course. Nothing explains how they work, but they paralyze an enemy for an undefined number of rounds. It's like a better version of Despair Thy Eyes, especially since it also allows you to see that A) the effect has in fact, taken effect, and B) whether it's still active. As long as Owyn's carting around a few of these bags, we're pretty well guaranteed that he won't be taken to the own zone by personal space invading enemies.  Now let's pick through their carcasses for quest items.  BaK posted:Delekhan: Again, it's funny to have these perfectly literate goblins when most of the time they're portrayed as being hide-bound savages. Let's cart this back to Highcastle and see what Baron Kevin has to say about it.   BaK posted:Kevin met them at the door. 200 Sovereigns for killing 5 goblins is a really good score considering that up to this point, the party has maybe earned about 700 or 800 sovereigns total. With this, though, we've tapped out the Highcastle environs for the time being and it's time to head further east and north until we reach Northwarden.  That's for the next post, though, since Betrayal at Krondor is a surprisingly wordy game(and I am incredibly incapable of shutting up), and thus this post is already at 50k characters.
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Sep 23, 2021 14:17
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Ah, trolls. They are an immense bastard to fight legitimately, too. This whole area is, as you said, a big step up in danger but they're a tough enemy at all points in the game, not just now.
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Sep 23, 2021 14:36
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Definitely didn't remember using consumables like the tuning fork, so I'm sure that made things more difficult! But like you said, since battles are ultimately finite I probably just assumed it was worth the effort to fight trolls just in case.
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Sep 23, 2021 15:01
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Update 06: An Intentional Bug? When I last punched through the character limit, we were leaving Highcastle after several lore-breaking encounters. Let's get on with it.   Much like Tyr-Sog, Highcastle has an "are you sure about this, dude?"-dialogue east of it. BaK posted:Locklear fretted. : We've probably come far enough east to have thrown any other assassins off the track. You have a better idea of what Delekhan would throw at us, Gorath. What do you think?: I think that if I were he, I would hunt us in the same way that one hounds a fox. You chase him and snap at his heels, all the while driving him out of fear into his hole.: And in this instance, the hole is Krondor. If he doesn't already suspect our destination, he can't stay unaware of it too long. But he couldn't lay his trap for us in Krondor itself. Even a large contingent of elves there is enough to stir up a ruckus.: I suspect a trap immediately to the north of our objective. That would be most prudent.: I think I'd have to agree. Slipping in at night from the southeast would probably be the best way in... I'll at least keep it in mind as we travel.     There are a few signs of habitation and, yes, the hollow tree stumps that are blatant sprites four times as wide as the trunks of actual trees in the game are interactible containers hiding items. This one has a small piece of vendor trash, another of those blue shells, and little else, but they're worth keeping an eye out for.    Between Highcastle and Wolfram there are no encounters, so this next leg of the journey is relatively calm, and Wolfram has little of interest at this point.   Though the local store, the Arms of Dala, is somewhat interesting.  In that it sells everything up to top-tier weapons and armor, but all of it at 50% durability, like a used armor store. One way of making lots of money is, with sufficient weapon/armorcrafting skill, buying a bunch of weapons here, fixing them up, and then carting them over to a higher-priced store and selling them there.    Past that, we have the Temple of Tith-Onanka, the god of generalized warfare as opposed to Dala's warfare in the defense of others. They offer the same services as the temple of Dala, but maybe the high priest has some interesting dialogue? BaK posted:Battle standards floated over their heads. The presentation of the high priest as being more concerned with war as sort of a... spectator sport, with bets and intellectual interest rather than caring about what the various sides are trying to accomplish, is pretty interesting. It's probably more detail than the priests of Tith ever get in the books, and also not exactly flattering. Now that we have two temples visited, however... we can also finally see what they charge for teleportation services.  Just a smooth 10% of our funds to avoid having to spend a couple of days' worth of rations(maybe 1% of our funds) to walk down a road we already cleared of moredhel dickheads. If you were trying to speedrun BaK, you'd absolutely attempt to mark temples in the early game when the way to them is easy, and then use them to skip around time-consuming encounters in the later game, but for a casual playthrough, they're actually not really worth engaging with.     It's nice that we're finally somewhere peaceful, we haven't been attacked in days now. Maybe we should stop at that idyllic farm to ask for directions and get some fresh food!BaK posted:The front door was scratched heavily, as though by swords. His own sword drawn, Gorath cautiously ventured inside. The weather beaten exterior of the house was in better shape than the ransacked interior. What was left of a small wooden table and two chairs, rested at odd splintered angles throughout the house. So, two oddities in this text, firstly there's the bit of casual sexual menace which is as far as I recall never a feature of Feist's books, neither sexual violence or its implications are things I remember seeing used for cheap shots in any of the books I read. Part of it is probably the dearth of female characters, but I think a good part of it is also just that Feist isn't the sort of rear end in a top hat who makes use of it for emotional weight. Good on you, Feist. The other one is Gorath "praying to Ishap." Now, Ishap is confirmedly one of the world's gods, but generally it's implied that the elves(of any flavour) have no organized worship and have their own cosmological beliefs(which may or may not be right, considering that they believe they don't go to Lims-Kragma's halls of the dead, but that said halls do confirmedly exist, even if their population seems to be purely human).   Still, we manage to get to Dencamp-on-the-Teeth without any further violence despite the implications of there being angry trolls in the area, and Dencamp actually has something very interesting for us to investigate. That's right, something more interesting than high-heeled shoes and free slippers.  We want to interact with this house... BaK posted:Locklear knocked.   Then we head down this side path to this house and... BaK posted:Locklear knocked on the scarred wooden door. And then the situation softlocks. See, in version 1.01 of BaK, you're meant to be able to go back to the first password house and get the right password, then come back here and get the Mind Melt spell, a single-target, no-projectile spell that does double damage against goblins and boosted damage against a few other enemy types, too. But for some inscrutable reason, between versions 1.01 and 1.02(which is the version on GoG and I think the only version that you can get your hands on these days EXCEPT, I think, the German version which for some reason never got patched?), they removed your only way to get the spell, which seems to suggest that it's an intentional "bug." Now, when you go back to the first house, the party just refuses to interact with it. I've had no luck finding the definitive patch notes, but it's odd because everything else the patch does is absolutely about removing actual crashes and lockups and chances for items to go missing, but this one is just very much a "no, gently caress you, you don't get this spell"-situation.  On the way out, we can also harass some more people. BaK posted:A lady with tear stained eyes opened the door in response to Locklear's knock. And it's like, sorry for your loss ma'am, but we'll absolutely be taking a backpack full of pies. It's like three full stacks of rations, which is great. We'll be well set for food for a while.   Your civilization may be inferior, but your human pies almost makes me want to spare you all. Hey, is that a corpse in the ditch up ahead? Grave-robbing, the perfect dessert. The corpse only contains one thing, Coltari Poison, the only use of which is poisoning rations. I'm honestly not sure why it's in the game as an item with discrete uses as it has all of two actual applications in the game(one side quest, one main quest), and could just as well have been an essential item of some sort.     A whole day of travelling later and we still haven't encountered any enemies, but we find a house out on a side path in the wilderness. May as well check if the owner will put us up for the night. BaK posted:Locklear sniffed the air. The smells coming from the house were heavenly and they made his stomach grumble hungrily as he knocked on the door. The reward is a mostly-intact Medium Crossbow which is vendor fodder at this point, but every little bit helps, but if we keep going down the road...  We stumble upon a minidungeon called "The Diviner's Halls," which we aren't supposed to visit until chapter 5. But certainly the boys can have a little bit of sequence breaking, as a treat.  As soon as they disarm the trap outside, that is. This one is deceptively simple, though.   You just shove the single transparent crystal forwards, the cannon blows up the rod, and then whoever wants to can just saunter up the field in the now-safe gap.   Despite the lack of variation in the overworld, at least in the underworld areas they sprung for some slightly different wall textures.   Oh and pit traps. These are instant TPK if the party walks into them, and can only be crossed by expending a "charge" from a rope, and there are absolutely some chasms that need crossing to complete the game, thus meaning they technically provide a way for the player to softlock themselves or lock themselves into a corner if they spend their last rope crossing a chasm they can't get back over. Ropes are, thankfully, relatively plentiful compared to the number of chasms, but if you're playing the game without a FAQ and have a poor sense of direction, you could well get a little bit lost at points and spend more charges than you intend. BaK posted:The cavernous pit stretched across the narrow corridor. Standing close to the edge, Locklear quickly determined that it was far too wide to jump across, and far too deep to try climbing down.   Being intended for a later chapter, the Diviner's Halls are only sparsely populated for now, with only a couple of troll encounters hanging around and little we can access in the way of loot, but it's the principle of the matter.    It does hold a few chests, though.  JACKET  Now, what's extra odd about this is that if you come here in chapter 5, as intended, then that egg is completely useless. It's a wyvern egg, a material component(two whole spells in the game use them), for a spell that makes wyverns gently caress off, but wyverns are only present in chapter 6, and the characters you control in chapter 5(yes, spoiler, the party make-up does change a bit from chapter to chapter!) aren't in the same party as any of the characters in chapter 6 for the rest of the game, and travel restrictions prevent them from dumping the eggs in a chest that the chapter 6 party can access. So clearly, clearly I was meant to come here and loot this in chapter 1, like a genius.   This one baffled me as a kid, how is this even a puzzle?! SAWDUST I will maintain to my dying breath that this is absolutely the dumbest moredhel wordlock in the game.  But since it contains the equivalent of 200 to 300 sovereigns, I will forgive the developers.  There's also a room full of human and moredhel corpses containing spoiled rations and a few more wyvern eggs, assuming I ever bother to use them and don't instead desperately hunt for a shop that'll buy the loving things.    Now we can get back on the road, and we're almost at Northwarden!     Along the way is a single ambush from three goblins which, seeing as how they're relatively close to moredhel in strength, doesn't even approach being a challenge. Boring bored because they haven't looted anything in five minutes, the party wanders off-road right into yet another trap.    Yet another straightforward trap, just use the cannon to blow up the rod and walk to the finish line. But I'm greatly amused by how it uses the game's "terrain" by populating the battle map with chests big enough to fold up Owyn and shove him into.  Our reward is yet another three wordlock chests. Dare we enter this magical realm?  DOOR  A bit disappointing, but still useful.  OUTSIDE  Yet more unexciting but fundamentally useful adventuring supplies.  ONION  We get it already, rations are important!     Suddenly, as we're marching up the road towards Northwarden... BaK posted:Music drifted on the wind.  I've just come from Northwarden and I don't feel like playing for him anymore today. My fingers are numb, my mind empty, and my stomach grumbling. Calm yourself. We haven't come from the castle. We're just travellers wandering through who heard your music and thought we would see who was responsible. So, what is a songbird doing among the falcons? Why do you stay here then? I haven't the choice! While sharing a cask of ale with a friend, he told me of a small village where the wine was exceptionally strong and the ladies exceptionally thin. Once sobered, I resolved to take myself to this wondrous place and avail myself of its pleasures. To my horror, I found that my friend had mixed his metaphors and I was laid upon by a lady who could tear the teeth from a bull bare-handed. Before I could extricate myself from such humiliable circumstances, her father, a Baronet of some note, exiled me here to entertain for the Baron Gabot or else sacrifice my head. I'm surprised he didn't have you beheaded... Well, his daughter was less than maidenly and secondly, he hadn't his fealty to pay for the year. As the Baron Gabot is fond of music, they settled that I should make even the debt... I see that you are a noble of some note. If you could do me a favor, perhaps you could ease the stress of a minstrel's life. Perhaps. What can you want? A length of light bowstring. While it is not immediately useable to me, I have found a resin that can be applied to it that will allow me to restring my lute. I have a feeling that I may need new strings soon.Now, since I forgot to bring that light crossbow string with me, and of course Northwarden isn't selling any, I can't get the reward right now, but if I could... BaK posted:A favor for a favor then! Over the past few weeks there have been several sows stolen from Northwarden, so I wrote this little song to commemorate the event. It's silly and short, but I hope you like it. It's called Northwarden Pigs. Thank you, Tamney. That was most enjoyable, but I am afraid that my companions and I must be off again. Things to do. I bid you farewell then. Come and see me again. If ever I come to Northwarden again, you can be assured of it. Good day.This also rewards the entire party with a +5 Barding skill, which isn't a gain to be sneezed at.     The final approach to Northwarden itself is a bit odd as the roadside is littered with corpses, but there are no ambushes and Northwarden itself is perfectly safe to enter.  As a fortification, however, Northwarden is less hospitable than, say, Highcastle. It only has a shop, a noble to harass(and he won't even be here until chapter 2!) and a small stash in the woods containing two sovereigns(which is, frankly, a pitiful amount of money at any stage of the game).  If Baron Gabot was in, we'd absolutely know, he fills almost half the screen.  And now, we're going to do all that in reverse. What?! It's absolutely the very last thing the Moredhel would expect.
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Sep 23, 2021 17:08
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Update 07: Lore Dump 3 Temples  Midkemia has a number of poorly detailed deities, only a few of which and whose divine orders contribute in any way to the stories. Astalon, Guis-Wa, Killian and Silban are probably the four most irrelevant, who basically never feature in the stories, and all that we know is what we can glean from their titles. Astalon: A god of justice/law and engineering. Guis-Wa: A god of the hunt of some form Killian: A nature goddess Silban: Another nature goddess. Then there's the selection of gods who actually participate in the world or are at least occasionally mentioned. Banath: The god of thieves, Jimmy the Hand invokes them pretty often. Dala: The Shield of the Weak, her order is part of a sideplot in Return to Krondor and thus actually somewhat relevant. Her faithful orphanages and helps the poor and downtrodden. Kahooli: The god of vengeance, features in some way in both Betrayal and Return. They're a mixture of detectives helping local constables and bloody-handed vigilantes. Ishap: The big metaplot god whose order is everywhere, mildly mysterious, refuses to tell anyone what's up, but probably relevant to preventing reality from collapsing. They do important things in Silverthorn and Return to Krondor and probably feature importantly in the later books, considering they get all apocalyptic and poo poo. Lims-Kragma: The goddess of death, and basically the judge of who gets another roll on the wheel of reincarnation, tossed into oblivion or uplifted to some sort of divine but unspecified state after death. Her order is a notable part of Silverthorn, where Arutha gets their assistance in dealing with the Nighthawks because of the Black Slayers(Nighthawks who rise to fight again after death, an abomination in Lims-Kragma's eyes), but discover that even Lims-Kragma's faithful are daunted by the dark powers that animate the Black Slayers. Prandur: A god of fire, one of his priests has a minor but important role in the novel between Betrayal and Return, The Assassins, which has no videogame based on it and isn't based on one either. Ruthia: Goddess of luck, once again regularly invoked by Jimmy, especially when things go gently caress-shaped. Sung: If a priest is healing someone in a Midkemia story, it's almost always a priest of Sung. A generic icon of purity and healing. His faith has a role in Return. Tith-Onanka: The generic, jock-y war god. Soldiers have a minor belief that they get a night or two of feasting in his halls before they're off to Lims-Kragma's judgment. May or may not be true. On top of that, there are several dead gods, some of which are actually more important to the setting than the living ones. Drusala: The healing goddess before Sung Eortis: The dead god of the sea, Killian keeps a hold of her portfolio for now. Onanka-Tith: The other half of Tith-Onanka Sarig: The dead god of magic, theorized as being why Midkemia has no Greater Path mages naturally. How and why there are dead gods is a deeper lore question but, like most things in Midkemia lore that involve lots of damage being done to reality, you can blame the Valheru. PurpleXVI fucked around with this message at 09:02 on Sep 29, 2021 |
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Sep 23, 2021 17:29
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Ishap gets more detail later in the books. It doesn't precisely end up being plot relevant but there's some worldbuilding and a side story there, mostly involving Nakor for a while. I'm being vague because of spoilers. also hi Kevin! Wasn't really expecting him. He's a fairly major character in the second trilogy of the books, the ones set on Kelewan and describing their side of the war; that's what he's referring to when he talks about his time with Lady Mara of the Acoma. (Probably the best of the books, as well. With a female protagonist, and a pretty well written one at that. Feist had a co author, and it shows.)
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Sep 23, 2021 17:34
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quote:If someone else can use their tactical megamind to solve this one without frying Owyn halfway to a crisp, go ahead and let me know. OK, let’s do this. First, push the left crystal one square forward. The cannon will fire at it and short out the green line trap. Next, push the solid crystal forward to block that same cannon. Last, push the center crystal to the left, so that the cannon at the back edge fires at the red line trap. Now you can walk through safely.
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Sep 23, 2021 18:18
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Quackles posted:Now you can walk through safely. Hm, personally I wouldn't imagine the cannon would fire if there was a rod in the way, but I admit I haven't tried it.
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Sep 23, 2021 18:26
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Logic is your enemy in 90' games.
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Sep 23, 2021 19:13
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Quackles posted:OK, let’s do this. Yeah, that was my thought too. Fairly similar to the "two interlocking keys to pull so you get the treasure instead of it getting dumped into lava" fake game ads you see sometimes. Just projected isometrically so it's more difficult to read.
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Sep 23, 2021 20:37
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Catching up a little. The tuning fork I don't know if that's new to me or if I'd forgotten it. I think it's new. Learn something every day! e: beaten to the puzzle situation but yes you use the cannons to blast the rods
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Sep 23, 2021 20:38
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Tortolia posted:Definitely didn't remember using consumables like the tuning fork, so I'm sure that made things more difficult! But like you said, since battles are ultimately finite I probably just assumed it was worth the effort to fight trolls just in case. The thing about trolls is they never carry loot
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Sep 23, 2021 21:47
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When Purple mentioned finding a blue shell, I immediately thought 'Is that used to stun the most powerful enemy in a battle'? Speaking of Draken-Smokey, does this game remind anyone else of Drakkhen, that French RPG that came out around the same time?
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Sep 24, 2021 02:28
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The overworld travel reminds me a whole lot of Drakkhen.
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Sep 24, 2021 03:03
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Guildenstern Mother posted:The thing about trolls is they never carry loot In fairness I was probably playing this when I was 13 or so, and there are definitely other games in that era I came back to later and realized that I was approaching them extremely incorrectly.
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Sep 24, 2021 04:30
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