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 It's possible that some folks might have realized that Return to Krondor is the sequel to Betrayal at Krondor, but I thought I'd just get that one out of the way right now, before we had any confusion on the subject. It never actually references Betrayal at Krondor, but it's set in the same world and we'll see all of two recurring characters. For now I'll leave it up to everyone's imagination just who they might be. Some of you might also go: "Hm, this isn't made by the same people and... wait a moment, this is was made five years later?" And while the story of that got related in the Betrayal in Antara thread as well, I'll recap it. The thing was that Betrayal at Krondor's original floppy release was a pretty big bust, so Dynamix sold back the Midkemia rights to Feist. Then the CD version hit, and it sold well enough that they wanted more of that action, but didn't want to re-buy the rights, so instead they made Antara, in their own original setting which was intended to be as Krondor-y as possible. This one was originally developed by 7th Level, a developer most known for making some completely garbage loving games, a number of which I've played, but then it got taken over by PyroTechnix, a developer that seems to have only existed to complete Return to Krondor and then vanished so hard they don't even have a Wikipedia page, which is one hell of an accomplishment. If the first release of BaK had done better, then Dynamix had their own sequel lined up, "Thief of Dreams," of which I've only found a vague outline that it involved Jimmy & Co travelling south into Kesh and dealing with a religious cult related to the Crawler, tying up that dangling plot thread. Also apparently the engine for Betrayal at Krondor was originally a flight sim engine, which is kind of amusing. Anyway. Like BaK, Return got a novelization(Krondor: Tear of the Gods) and in between the two, to neaten things up between cosmic-tier events, was Krondor: the Assassins. I, happily, have read both, and so I can tell you when things deviate and what things you're lucky not to be dealing with in the game. [img]https://lpix.org/4257246/2022-03-23 21-40-19.mkv_snapshot_00.51_[2022.03.23_21.42.33].jpg[/img] Also check out these sweet 3D models and super awesome pre-rendered backgrounds. The technology of the late 1990's, baby! Thanks to the wonderful and lovely user Hel, who put up with me being a moron luddite who doesn't understand technology good, these issues have been banished to the nether zone. The game is also no longer a first-person blobber, we can actually see the party now! Interactivity Unlike Betrayal, Return is a comparatively linear game, so I'll be taking all of the limited chances to gently caress around that the game gives me, but there sadly aren't many. This also means there isn't really an awful lot of anything to vote on. PurpleXVI fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Mar 23, 2022 |
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Mar 23, 2022 21:30
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Update Index Update 1: What Goes Between Update 2: Welcome to Krondor Update 3: A Yellow Streak Update 4: The Sewer Chapter Update 5: Mysterious Mysteries, Part 1 Update 6: Mysterious Mysteries, Part 2 Update 7: Road Trip Update 8: Property Damage Update 9: The Spooky Chapter Update 10: Dungeons & Krondors Update 11: Finally Free PurpleXVI fucked around with this message at 01:31 on May 6, 2022 |
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Mar 23, 2022 21:30
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MagusofStars posted:I can’t wait to see how Jimmy The Hand is yet again the greatest person at literally everything ever. Honestly, once we're past the books where Jimmy's a kid/teenager, and he's into his twenties, he becomes a lot more tolerable. He's a lot less annoyingly cocky and perfect at everything. In fact, the Krondor trilogy features Jimmy getting his rear end kicked so much it's hilarious that he's still alive. About the only thing he's really the greatest person at in those three is surviving abuse that would have most strong men making GBS threads out their guts and lamenting their broken bones. Guildenstern Mother posted:He doesn't really do a lot of that in this game iirc. Not sure he did much of it in the last one other than the Silden drug incident, but it was hard to pay attention to James or Locklear when you've got Gorath hanging out being Gorath and Owyn/Patrus taking on the comic relief role. Yeah, if there's anything who was the perfect OC in BaK it was Gorath. His only weakness was the one time he accidentally decked Owyn in Kenting Rush, and otherwise being Delekhan's unwitting pawn. Anyone who goes up against him in a fight gets hacked down by his literal centuries of combat experience. Not that I minded, dude was just cool. Some of that may be leftover from playing the game as a kid and reading the book like a decade ago, but I still think Gorath's cool. Also having recorded the first two hours of gameplay I've already encountered one softlock bug necessitating a reload! Hooray!
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Mar 24, 2022 01:45
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JustJeff88 posted:I don't know why the hate for young Jimmy. The novel 'Jimmy the Hand' was awful to me after how much I enjoyed 'Murder in LaMut' and 'Hono(u)red Enemy', but I liked him as an actual fun, witty character when everyone else around was deadly serious and grim most of the time. For me it's kind of been a personal evolution. When I was in my teens, I would've loved him, because it was all: "ha ha yeah the adults don't expect A KID to be smart and competent, he sure showed them, just like I'll show them  ." But as I've grown older I've just kind of grown to roll my eyes at his smarminess and how he just keeps thinking of, and knowing, things that the adults don't. He's just a bit too perfect, is the thing, like, I can think of all of two situations where Kid Jimmy gets himself into a problem that he needs adults to get himself out of, rather than being the one who gets adults out of trouble.For all that the books insist that Jimmy looks up to and respects Arutha, there's never really any... point where Jimmy actually learns anything from Arutha or takes any lessons from him, except for, off-screen, learning how to use a rapier and play chess. Still, I do earnestly like him in this trilogy of books/duology of games. Part of it is that he's an equal member of whatever team he's in, rather than the hyper-genius who knows everything, other characters occasionally knows things he doesn't and puts him in his place with some superior knowledge or their own clever comments when he underestimates them. The other part is that he still plays it like Young Jimmy, and while those tricks aren't stupid or bad, now the people he's using them against aren't terminally idiotic either, and sometimes they deploy their own counterplays that (almost) get him killed. JustJeff88 posted:Be honest, Purple... are you payed by the LP? Blimey Nah, I'm just a sucker for attention and I hate my own voice, so this is a nice compromise between becoming a vtuber and not getting attention. Also, I'd be curious to hear the suggestions once I'm done with Return to Krondor, because it's either that or getting Birthright to run so I can show that off. PurpleXVI fucked around with this message at 10:08 on Mar 24, 2022 |
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Mar 24, 2022 09:45
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Update 1: What Goes Between It's a bit of an unusual update 1, but there's no real good space for it otherwise, it's time to talk about Krondor: the Assassins. Nothing in the game Return to Krondor references it, but in the book Krondor: Tear of the Gods, it's relevant to a good number of things. It picks up where Betrayal ends, with literally no break, Jimmy and the rest are riding back from the Dimwood to Krondor. In the morning, Locklear is heading back to La-Mut(no mercy from Arutha for having just helped save the world again, he's still banished until summer), while Arutha tasks Jimmy to get back to work immediately on arriving home. Jimmy is all beat to poo poo at this point. Remember how we used restoratives to patch everyone up in Betrayal at Krondor? In the novels it's magic meth, it doesn't heal people, it just makes them feel healed and invincible, and after almost dying on the battlements of Northwarden, Arutha's personal medic juices Jimmy and Locklear up with it, and now they're feeling all the pain and aches of: Fighting and barely surviving a siege, riding for close to a week with no rest, fighting Moredhel through the Dimwood, fighting Moredhel and Tsurani mages through the ruins under Sethanon, and the final furious battle around the Lifestone where Gorath saved them all. That is to say, Jimmy is more bruise than man at this point. But he still salutes when Arutha tells him that he needs to get to work digging up the Crawler and setting up a proper intelligence network in Krondor to prevent them all getting caught with their pants down again. It's a bit odd that the Kingdom prior to this has no intelligence network, not even an amateur one, when Kesh is repeatedly described as having a super-elite intelligence network(we even meet its chief commander, Hazara Khan, a few times). Jimmy is a bit put off in these tasks when it turns out that someone's been hard at work murdering every Mocker in town, something that's also caught the traitor Abbot Graves at Malac's Cross in the crossfire. He expected to skip out of town with his younger girlfriend(ffs Feist) and Limm(hey, another known name!) by sailing to Kesh, but all captains either ran off early or stayed in the docks until the violence ended. Jimmy gets his rear end kicked from every angle for a while as he blunders into ambush after ambush, but manages to survive just barely. In the middle of all this Pug's son, who hasn't been relevant at all until now, has also grown up into William, a member of Arutha's guards who rejects his magic-using heritage(though he has a wild talent that lets him empathically talk to animals and understand them) and just runs around with a big two-handed sword. He gets into a romantic thing with a local barmaid, Talia, at the Rainbow Parrot Inn(something that gets him into a bit of trouble with his commanding officer when he stays up late with her). Talia's dad, Lukas, is also a side character because his inn hosts a back door into the sewers where Jimmy spends a lot of time. The fighting in and under Krondor comes to a head when a bunch of assassins including mages try to murder some visiting nobles. With the help of Abbot Graves, Jimmy learns that they're a band of Keshian assassins, called Izmalis, related to the Nighthawks, who have a fortress in the no man's land near the border between Kesh and the Kingdom. Jimmy and William then travel there as the second wave of scouts to try and find their hideout, with actual troops to kill the assassins some days behind them. What they find is that the first wave of scouts got captured and are being sacrificed to summon a demon because of course the Izmalis are demon-worshipping assassin cultists, rather than just assassin cultists. While attempting to sabotage the defenses and saving the last scout, who's yet to be sacrificed, Jimmy gets himself captured, his rear end kicked, stripped to his underpants and almost gets to be the one sacrificed to the demon, who slips its shackles because he fucks up the last stage of the summoning by not letting himself get stabbed and eaten. At the end, Arutha comes riding in and, with forewarning from William and Jimmy that there's a demon to deal with, manages to kill it. The novel ends as James and Arutha discover from the Izmali documents that the visiting nobles were, in fact, all trying to pay to have each other assassinated. What's relevant to Return to Krondor the game in this? Surprisingly little, frankly. It sets up some of the decisions that start off the book and game, like Arutha recruiting a new court mage(the Izmalis have a hail mary attempt on his life that involves a magical booby trap, and he decides that having a wizard close to hand would be useful), but other than that the main relevant aspects are that William exists and that he's dating Talia.
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Mar 24, 2022 10:04
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disposablewords posted:One of the reasons that Krondor: the Assassins feels so disconnected is actually that it was written and released after RtK. I don't know how (or if) it matters all that much to Feist's novelization of RtK (Tear of the Gods), but a decent part of Assassins was just backfilling that space in the timeline and helping set up a few things that come into play with no real background outside of RtK. The Assassins is kind of necessary to give William any kind of characterization in the books before Tear of the Gods, it also gives some more background for a certain side character we'll meet later(no spoilers on that one, please) and it makes Talia a bit more of a character(again, no spoilers), but outside of that Tear of the Gods can stand pretty well on its own, both as the book and as Return to Krondor. But I'd say they both definitely benefit from having read Assassins first. My main issue with Assassins is that it feels like you've got twenty minor plotlines that don't weave together particularly gracefully and the last third or so feels like it comes a bit out of nowhere and is a bit of an unexpected escalation considering how everything else so far has been comparatively "street level."
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Mar 24, 2022 20:05
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raifield posted:My vote is for Birthright, even if I'm getting way ahead of things. The game is notable for having nothing in it that is depicted on the back of the box at all. The strategy portion is lightweight, the tactical portion is broken and mind-numbing, and the less said about the adventuring portion, the better. Yet I still play now and then, despite it being quite a strange, janky, and disappointing game. Getting slightly off the thread topic, but the thing about Birthright is that it's actually a very true to the books adaptation of the game systems... for the most part. The strategic and tactical layers are lightweight because they're glued on top of 2e AD&D, not their own standalone system, and the dungeoneering... the thing I remember most is that you have, of course, a four-person party. And some members of the party can be wizards, but the thing is that there's no positioning. Either the party is moving as one long line, or they're all charging into melee and whacking away with whatever they have. This means that friendly fire with spells is not just a possibility, it's a guarantee if your mage is not at the front of the party, a place where you never want them to be. I can't count how many times in that game I've accidentally vaporized, incinerated or turned to stone a friendly character. JustJeff88 posted:I actually want Purple to play a game that is fun and enjoyable, to some modest degree. Asking him to play another piece of shite seems somewhat sadistic and risks to burn him out. I do get slightly fuelled by playing bad games if they're energetically bad, like with Wizards and Warriors. It was absolutely a dogshit game, but things were happening and moving. There were colours, there were creative fuckups, there was new dumb stuff to laugh at with every update. It's more the slow grind of low-grade incompetence like Antara that gets to me.
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Mar 25, 2022 08:38
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JustJeff88 posted:I haven't read more than the early stuff, but I consider Magician, both parts, to be my favourite fantasy novel. The Empire trilogy had a tough act to follow. I started to read the third one but what happens in the very first pages was so contrived it turned me off and I have not gone back. Personally, with regards to Magician, I consider most of it mediocre, but the parts with Pug/Milamber on Kelewan are interesting to me. I did want to learn more about the Tsurani, even if they were formidable assholes for a large part.
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Mar 25, 2022 20:27
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Update 2: Welcome to Krondor Welcome back... to Krondor! Unlike Betrayal, this one is more accurately named by having Krondor in the title since I'd say about half of the game's playtime is set in the city, rather than it just being a place we briefly visit for a plot update three or four times over the course of the game. Let's start by watching the animated intro! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3HndS65YSY Short version: There's a ship full of monks, it gets sunk by a ship full of pirates, one of the pirates is very upset and another is very tired.   Check out this swanky main menu. ... I'll be honest it looks completely awful, like the "3D" models from the original Alone in the Dark or something. Let's just start a new game before we have to look at it too much.  Not all of these settings will make sense until we know more about the mechanics, but the "balance" option is definitely the weirdest. Suffice to say that some spellcasting has a failure chance now, and if you swap the balance towards magic, spell failure chances drop while to-hit chances with melee attacks also drop, and if you swap the balance towards fighting, the opposite happens. I would recommend just leaving it at the default "balanced." You'll definitely want to up the combat speed to at least its mid point, fighting has a lot of animations even for just a single swing, and if you leave it at the rock bottom speed it starts at, I predict you'll go insane before you finish the game. Lastly, the "trap lock mode." The demands that the lockpicking/trap disarming make on your reflexes are absolutely minimal, so setting it to "dice roll" just means you'll fail more. Stick with the Reflex setting, trust me.   These chapter intros are voiced in the most laconic and unemotional ways by "Pug," they're exactly short enough that I feel no reason to record them. Do note, however, how loving bad this font is. I hate this font. I loving hate this font. Supposedly it's possible to edit the game files to remove it, but I don't even want to tempt this game to gently caress up harder on me.  And boom, we're live on the scene.  By Ishap, I'm polygonal!Say hello to the new and improved James. I'll leave him here for a moment while I pore over his character sheet.  There's a lot of stuff going on here, it's definitely not as simple as the old Betrayal at Krondor sheet. Some of these stats are completely self-explanatory, like the Attack and Defense values are James' odds of hitting or not being hit, what's less obvious is that some things like better armor will weaken both. He has Aggressive, Balanced and Conservative attack styles, Conservative is better called Defensive. Aggressive has the highest chances of hitting, the biggest damage bonus and doesn't allow parrying. Conservative has the lowest chances of hitting and a bonus to parrying/dodging, while Balanced remains in the middle. "Strike" is how many attacks he gets per round, Health is self-explanatory, no more health/stamina split, and he has zero spellcasting because James is not a nerd. Similarly he has no magic path ratings. Then we get to skills and... whoof. These remind me of Deus Ex because of how easy it is to completely waste your skill points on level-up, yeah, we have levels and get skill points now, rather than skill training. Brawling is just bare-handed fighting, never invest in this with anyone. Bladed is anything that cuts stuff, except for Axes. Blunt is hammers and maces, even the two-handed ones. Axes are axes and bad, do not use. Two-handed isn't every two-handed weapon, it's only staves and two-handed swords, not two-handed axes. Bows... have niche uses. Never found them very handy myself. Defense and Initiative are super relevant, since getting off the first attack and not getting hit in fights are vital. However, Initiative isn't all that rules Initiative! If you look on the left, there are also basic stats, which do not rise with skill point investment, and James' Agility(as well as being a thief) also improve his basic initiative rolls and means he almost always goes first in any case. Analyze is for identifying magic items, potions and jewelry. Do not have James invest in this, you only need one character who knows it. Stealth is... I'm not actually sure where Stealth is ever used. But it's probably used somewhere. I think that sometimes Stealth is what governs whether an enemy gets a retaliatory strike before you hit them, but even the strategy guide doesn't explain this. In fact, even the strategy guide doesn't know what some magic items in the game do. Pick Lock and Disarm Traps slow down the reflex-based parts of picking locks and disarming traps, or just flat increase the random roll odds if you go with the skill-based version. Perception does something I don't know what is. Alchemy is for mixing potions, which is theoretically very useful except you can only mix potions when you can rest, and large swathes of the game do not allow resting. Evaluate lets you get very vague information about enemies, more Evaluate makes it less vague. Shield is for using shields. I don't think I've ever equipped anyone with a shield in this game. Maybe I'll try it this time around!  We're skipping the spellcasting tab since, again, James isn't a wizard. His inventory contains a few healing potions, a repair potion, a spare knife, his lockpicking kit(you can find more of these, but there's no quality difference, they don't get expended or worn down, etc. so as long as you have the one, they are simply vendor trash) and some spare change.  But God, look at what this loving font is doing to our poor item descriptions. Most of them are now also vague about exact item stats and effects, plus they don't really contain any of the fun flavour text that Betrayal at Krondor(and to some extent Antara) had. No more some writer completely losing his poo poo over a pile of grapes or the concept of garlic in meat. Can we please get back to the game? I want to show off my new tricks.Ah, yes, James has one very big new trick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_foDh408vJI Voice Acting I'll be recording most longer exchanges, but also summarizing them below for anyone who doesn't care. I would suggest watching the first time a character speaks, though, just to get their voice, and sometimes there are actually some fun or well-acted exchanges worth listening to! The short version of this one: The guards ask James where he's going, James reminds us that he's going to the north gate to pick up the new court mage, who has arrived in the middle of the loving night.   Also as with most games that have pre-rendered backgrounds, RtK also has pre-set camera angles. The weird thing is you can change these angles while you're in fights, the strategy guide insists they can also be changed out of fights(which would be extremely handy), which seems to be a dirty lie unless the strategy guide is wrong about the keybind, the keybind is different depending on whether you're in or out of combat, or simply because no areas in the intro chapter have alternate camera angles at all.   Wait, James, where are you going? Well I'm a thief, aren't I?Uh oh.  Practically any time there's a door in the pre-rendered Krondor background, it can be entered and will contain a randomly generated room. Some only have empty boxes and rats, some have combat encounters and this one... has a chest. There are no repercussions for kicking down a bunch of citizens' doors, stabbing them and looting their corpses. In fact, doing as much of this as possible in the first three chapters of the game is a really good idea since some of the encounters can put you vastly ahead of the curve in terms of gear/money and killing people means more XP. For now, let's focus on the chest.  Each chest or chest-like object has three sections, the depressions in the wood.  Click one and you're presented with five options which are, from left to right: Lockpick, Lever, Cutter, Ratchet and Probe. The Lockpick is only for the lock itself, but since practically every lock in Return comes with a trap, we want to save that for last. Lever, Cutter and Ratchet are useless for now, so let's bring out the probe.  There's a pendulum connected to the central symbol which will swing left to right once, and then right to left again if you don't stop it the first time by. The goal is to stop it in the "golden" section of the ratchets, which is a success.  Having failed the first one, I don't get to see what's in there, but for the other two I can now see the mechanisms. Now I need to disable all three mechanisms using the Lever, Cutter and Ratchet for each of them as appropriate. Several parts may want the same tool. What's the relevance of the right tool, you might ask? Well, if I'm using the right tool, I get the "broad" golden section like with the probe. If I'm using the wrong one...  Yeah.  That one's a lot tougher. I kind of like the idea, with a couple of caveats. Firstly, just being able to save means you can trial-and-error your way to the right tools with no risk. Secondly, there's no real logic in what tool goes for what part that I can sense. No visual or logical clues.The bar on the left saves trap combos as you come across them, as well as what tool you last sorted a given piece with, so if you hit a familiar trap type, or a trap type made up of one or more familiar components, you can flip back to see how you sorted it last time. Mind you that it saves the best tool you cleared it with, so if you got lucky with a wrong tool, it'll still list that one. There's also a second-best tool for each component type that has a golden area in between the two, size-wise.In any case, I gently caress this one up...  Which gives you a neat little animated sequence of each section triggering in turn.  And then fucks James up. Note that he only has 34 hit points so this is a considerable chunk! It took me a couple of tries to get all the tools right, and this trap can do up to damage in the low twenties, which is loving cruel for literally the first trap you can run into(you can also run into a combat encounter here, in fact, the strategy guide seems unaware that this encounter, like all the "behind a Krondor door"-encounters, are randomized, and insists it always spawns a couple of thieves if it's a fight).  When I do get it open, though, it's just an unaccountable box of sharp objects.  None of them are upgrades, but James hoards them in his bottomless backpack for later selling. While backpacks are still grid-based, the grid is endlessly scrolling to the right and the only true limit is weight. It certainly makes it a lot easier to liberate people of all their property in one go.I somewhat miss the old system because inventories in Return very easily get out of hand and hard to manage, even if this appeals to my RPG pack rat sensibilities. It would suck less if the inventory view window wasn't such a small drat porthole. Once all the swords are in James' pack, it's time to head out. Once we're outside on the streets of Krondor, we can open up the map.  The available places to go are: The Palace, the Poor Quarter, the Ye Bitten Dog tavern, the Rainbow Parrot tavern, the North Gate, the Sea Gate and the Wealthy Quarter. Most of these places are just sources of more doors to kick in(except for the Wealthy Quarter that has no purpose at this point), and heading to the North Gate will advance the plot by letting us meet Jazhara.  None of these sections are pre-marked, you only find them by mouse-overing where they are and the map has plenty of dead space.  Welcome to the North Gate area, notice the lovely camera perspective that shows us what's behind us but not what's ahead of us. The weird monolith is another way to return to the Krondor map in case you've forgotten where the button is on the interface(it's under the Krondor button at the lower left). I also learned that the empty slot to the right of the Krondor button will have an eye in it if there's an alternate view to switch to which, again, I've only experienced in battles so far.   As we step into the area, though, we're grasped in the sinister claws of a cutscene. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzGSX3Slu_E Short version:  We're gonne rob you! That would be a really bad idea. We're too dumb to be warned off! This drops us into the game's first mandatory battle, James vs two thieves.  Which gives us some cool, dynamic angles! James starts out most fights with turn one, as mentioned. Note the green ring around him, for both players and NPC's, this indicates their general health state.  Right-clicking enemies gives a general idea of their abilities, though until we have a higher Evaluate skill, we don't learn much... not that I think we ever learn much. Enemy armor is generally represented on their model, but it's useful to be able to see who's more whackable.   I get impatient and flick James over to Aggressive, then have him cut one of the dudes to ribbons.   In a single turn, because I got cocky, these two dickheads hack off about a third of James' health, dang.  Nothing interesting happens until turn three(except for James hacking down one of the thieves) where you'll note the new text in the upper left, this is the "Fate" system. Each turn, a D100 is rolled(with high rolls bad, low rolls good, -10 is subtracted from the roll if the party's on the ropes) and it generates a random modifier for the fight. Rally(+10% to all rolls to hit), Flurry(+1 action), Evade(+10% dodge and magic resistance), Refreshed(10% health regeneration), Accelerate(initiative bonus) or Press(increases the base critical hit chance from 20% to 35%) for either the Heroes or Villains. If the Villains have a Press, Rally or Flurry, for instance, it might be worth your time to flick characters over to Conservative for the round to not get their asses kicked. It's an interesting system to spice up fights a bit, but I'll say that I often didn't pay attention to it unless it was a pinchy situation already.  While you were narrating I finish them off.  Wait, is your model different? Because I stole their shirts, too.The characters who can equip armor actually have model changes when they equip the armor, too, and their weapons will change with new equipment as well. It's a nice detail.    Because I go the wrong way, I end up at the Temple of Prandur. It can't do anything for us at the moment(because I had James drink a healing potion after the fight), but we can pay the guy here to heal us if we get our asses kicked.  I'm sure that having a pyromaniac cult inside the city walls is a wise decision on Arutha's part.Prandur is one of several poorly-detailed deities of Midkemia, but his titles imply that he seems to look as fondly on burning cities down as he does of warming people up and cooking food. Let's head back and go the other way that I actually completely missed was another way until I went down this dead end.   Along the way I poke into another beggar's hideaway.    Someone's rigged up a flamethrower to protect their single coin and empty bottle. Being a thief in Krondor must be loving rough.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qpS3Z7jgh4 This one's worth giving a watch to hear Jazhara's voice acting. Short version: Wait a moment, aren't you some fancy royal? Where's your entourage? Your caravan? I find that travelling with servants weakens the mind and spirit. What a strange attitude, I find one of the best things about being part of the Prince's court is I can tell someone to fetch things for me any time I feel like it. Perhaps we should debate this after you escort me to the Palace.We've now got Jazhara on our team!  Welcome her on board. She is notably more fragile than James, about half his total health pool. Her skills are also pretty bad, but she has spells and can inspect the items we steal from people or loot from their corpses. Now you're speaking my language. My mystic senses are warning me of danger. It's funny, my old travelling companion Owyn's mystic senses just warned him when there was an easy mark around. For each ten points in one of her paths, Jazhara both gets better at casting the spells and also gets another spell in the path. For now she has: Demonblade: An excellent spell that adds 2d4 fire damage to an ally's weapon for the rest of the fight. Sunray: Blinds an enemy, giving them an unspecified penalty to hitting. Also damages undead. Fire-Eater: Gives a party member fire resistance. Mindblade: Does 1d4+1 damage per level of damage to a target. Contest of Wills: Paralyses both the caster and the target until the target breaks free. Potentially useful to lock down a single tough target. Craftsman's Touch: Repairs everything a character's wearing and wielding. Theoretically useful except that all characters' meaningful gear is rapidly replaced by magical gear without durability and weapons and armor degrade super slowly anyway. Lightning Blade: Conjures up a melee weapon that does 2d4+level damage per swing for the mage to wield. Useful if you want to save spell points, note that if a mage wields a staff or dagger, they can't also cast spells, and equipping/unequipping a weapon in combat takes up a character's entire turn. Nothing anywhere indicates whether Lightning Blade is a guaranteed hit, whether it uses Bladed skill(it's a blade, after all), path of Storms skill, etc. not even the strategy guide. Similarly, mages not being able to equip weapons might seem like an argument in favour of giving them some Brawling but... there's just no info anywhere on whether it's any use!  Speaking of information, trying to read this loving text will give me a headache sooner or later. Goddamn.  She also comes with a full drug lab that we won't be able to use for a while yet, in part because I believe she doesn't actually come with any recipes.   This is the way to the palace, yes? Ha ha, no.I know there's an optional event that's going to happen, but I forget where it's triggered, so I go to all of the(very similar at night) zones to bust into people's houses, stab them and take their stuff.       There's nothing interesting popping up in any of these, but this is what the next hour or so of gameplay looks like as I smash through every door I can find and stab everyone who moves. I've never seen so many dead poor people before.Occasionally one of the fights merits Jazhara busting out the magic.  The main mechanic to keep in mind when casting spells is Slow and Quick casts. Slow casts only go off on the next turn Jazhara's got, but always succeed. Quick casts go off instantly, but have an unspecified failure chance. If there's something I find a bit weak about RtK's combat, it's that to-hit and spell failure percentages are obfuscated, which makes it hard to decide what's a risk you want to take. Let's have a look at what Demonblade does for Jimmy.    With a non-magical rapier, it literally doubles his damage output. Mind, while non-magical gear has different quality levels(usually four different ones), the differences are extremely tiny. From the worst to the best, it's 1d10 to 2d6+1(the game just specifies a 2 to 13 range, but the lack of extreme highs and lows when used suggests it's a bell curve double dice deal). Anyway, the murdering goes on. It's worth noting that Jazhara doesn't passively generate spell points, she only gains it from resting(not currently available) or magic recovery potions(of which I have none), so her magic sees little use for now.     ...and then one of the dogs turned into a campfire! James, no magic could do that. You must have been hallucinating. Saw it with my own two eyes while we were trying to rob graves at Sethanon. You w- wait, someone's coming down the street.  Hand over your valuables and no one gets hurt! What if you hand over your valuables and you all get hurt? I feel like you don't quite grasp the idea. With the villains flurrying, I flip James over to conservative combat and station him in front of Jazhara. It seems undocumented, but when set to Conservative, characters also seem more likely to get a free swing on enemies trying to move past them or attack them.  These guys are not loving around, that's half James' health gone.  James is in fact getting his rear end kicked a bit until Jazhara slaps on Demonblade.    Boom. That's what you get for messing with protagonists.  Part of the busted part of doing this bit of grinding early, even in the attempt to trigger an event I can't recall clearly, is that sometimes you get drops like this which is one of the best pieces of armor we can get in the early game(James and Jazhara can't wear it, but once we get someone who can, they'll really appreciate it).  I'm about to pack it up and accept I won't trigger the event when I go in for one last random fight.  These guys look like just another three random assholes, right?  loving wrong. The dude in the middle loving lifts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItmC5kUmk48 Hmmm, I feel like Lims-Kragma got... hornier since the books. Anyway, the good news is that the game lets you resume from the start of a fight where you got your rear end kicked, just like Betrayal in Antara! Unlike Antara, however, which restarted you just before you entered the fight, giving you a chance to rejigger gear, toss around consumables, perhaps use consumables, Return to Krondor just starts you from turn 1 of the fight again, meaning that if you got your rear end kicked because you forgot to heal everyone up first... you're in the poo poo! I am getting my rear end kicked because James starts at 2/3rds max health... oh and because I'm fighting someone who can stomp him in one blow.  After roughly ten attempts that get me stomped miserably, I find something in Jazhara's inventory that I'm 99% sure I didn't pick up off anyone's body.  Circle of Madness, huh? Let's see what that does. "The target character becomes confused and has a 50 percent chance of doing nothing each round and a 50 percent chance of attacking a target randomly." Neat.   This is the break the team needed.  I'm unreasonably amused by the little jerky twitch the victims make when they lose their turn.    Jazhara eats poo poo on the way, but thankfully Return to Krondor is much more merciful than the previous two games and doesn't have the near-death condition. Instead "dead" player characters just revive at 1 hit point and don't get XP for the fight, but these fights give jack poo poo XP anyway. Hm, wonder what that rear end-kicking guy was wielding.  So, to recap. Jimmy's current Rapier: 2d6+1 damage. Woundlord: 2d6+8, +25% to hit, double chance of critical hits. Back in my day we had to adventure for months with a weird elf to get terrifying magic weapons. James, you're in your early 20's. Well, I used to know someone in his 200's, to honour his memory, I say things he'd say. ... If he wasn't dead. ... And an elf. We're absolutely going to the palace now.   Ah yes, safely back at the castle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STDsZqqvk2M Short version:  I sure love being back at the palace and not getting robbed. I, too, enjoy not being robbed. Oh no! I got robbed! We should catch the horrible little goblin who robbed you. Child, James, child. As I said. Child, stealing is wrong. Let's escort you to some nice cultists who'll take care of you. Noooo, I met those cultists already! They fed me worms and rats! What? No. The Shield of Dala wouldn't do that. She blessed me once, you know. ...who? Dala, in exchange for grain, because I was so humble. ... Child, tell us who hurt you so we can go hurt them for you. It's Yusuf in the poor quarter! The short version may have been slightly paraphrased. This encounter is actually canonical, in Tear of the Gods, Jazhara's pouch full of dangerous magic poo poo gets pickpocketed by this girl, who tries to bite off James' fingers when they suggest she go to an orphanage run by the genuinely nice adherents of Dala. She finds out that Yusuf, a clothmaker in the Poor Quarter, has been recruiting children as cheap, abused labour by pretending to be running an orphanage.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnXgM8Bn7T0 Short version:   [Demand Entrance] Let us in or I'll call the cops. Whatever, the boss is inside.If you try to push your way in, you end up aggroing the guard, and then if you walk in, you have to fight everyone(except the children) inside. It's mechanically the superior option, but then you miss out on a lot of fluff, plus the canon way is that James and Jazhara just demand to be let in.     Greetings, I am Yusuf, who was less weird in 1998 but come across as a kind of weird racist stereotype now. Stop being mean to children. I'm not actually mean to children, now what if you stepped outside while I talked to Jazhara. This seems like a great idea, I'll do it. So as you can see, I'm actually a Keshian spy. Admitting this to me seems like a bad idea, Yusuf. Clearly, your loyalty to Kesh must be greater than your loyalty to Arutha whom you've sworn an oath of service to. [Play Along With Yusuf] It's the option that gets you all the low-down on Yusuf's operation because he's a loving idiot. Oh, yes, I'm totally very loyal Kesh and thus to you. You should tell me everything you're up to, like what you're doing to these children. Child abuse and child labour funds my spy operations here. How very ingenious of you, excuse me while I step outside. I am very smart and smooth. I demand to know what's going on. Yusuf is abusing children for money, also a spy. So... Yes, James, we'll kill them all and take their stuff. Just like the good old days. The children will stand in the background cheering us on while we gut Yusuf like a fish. They know what real fun is.   Woundlord absolutely fucks, plus you try to tell me that isn't a metal as poo poo name for a magic sword.  I'm too clever to die! Aiiiieee! Shut up and let me loot you.  Yusuf is carrying this pointlessly incriminating and villainous note. Let's go loot his office to make completely sure we didn't just murder an innocent but very stupid man.   Can you read these papers on his desk in full view of anyone? Yes, James, I'm literate and... son of a whore! What? Yusuf was a double agent! He was playing Keshian intelligence with false intel in the service of someone called... The Crawler. That makes me upset, but I find myself strangely unable to actually act on this.This is a plot thread that just vanishes completely into the aether. It's also worth interacting with the table again after getting that note and the exposition, because the table is also a container.   A container full of loot.   And a wacky document in the middle of a child slavery den. It feels a bit out of place.   Some magic rings.  And this wand! Now, you might wonder: Permanent damage? Like a permanent loss of maximum spell points or health? No. Instead each use drains a point of Mind magic skill. This isn't actually a particularly bad deal, as such things go. It's a guaranteed cast that won't fail and doesn't cost any spell points, and which is likely to take a good number of enemies out of the fight, especially if used in close confines.   Don't forget to go upstairs and actually free the rest of the children, by the way.  With Jazhara still out of spell points, these guys get a mixture of blunt trauma and large cutting wounds to put them down. No clever strategies for intro chapter mooks.  Yusuf's desk had a key for the cage but, er, I forgot how to actually use keys and just ended up picking the lock instead.   Run, my lumpen-headed little ones! Normally, without a trail of dead beggars and homeless people, this would only be a level-up for Jazhara, but even so it would still be worth seeking out to get slightly ahead of the curve. Plus, you know, not leaving children to be kept in cages by a secret agent dickhead.   James gets Bladed, Defense, Initiative, Pick Locks and Disarm Traps for his boosts. Getting 100 points, you might figure that it'd be super fast to max some skills, but skills have escalating costs. Past 50 points, they cost 2 per point, then past 75 they cost 3 per point, and the last 10 points past 90 cost 4 each, this means that getting a skill starting at 0 to 100, it'll actually cost 185 points, and since each point increase gains you the same bonus, you'll want to get the increases to 50 in your important skills first.   Aside from magic boosts, one of my early Jazhara objectives is maxing out her Analyze so I know what I'm picking up. As exemplified by Woundlord, there are some extremely choice things you can pick up, but also some literally cursed items that have stat penalties, poison you, etc. and which are to be avoided, so you can't just assume every odd-looking thing you pick up is a magical toy. New spells for her are... Prandur's Touch: Touch-range only, which sucks, but 2d8+2*level fire damage does not suck. Fire Lance: 1d6+4 damage per level is insane, but Jazhara can only cast this spell two or three times from a full pool of spell points. For when something's just gotta be dead real loving fast. My Enemy, My Friend: A single enemy can't attack the caster. Taint of Madness: Circle of Madness but single-target, proven as a good spell. Cleanse the Mind: Removes a Mind spell's effects from an ally, I do not remember any enemy ever hitting my party with a Mind spell. Know the Hidden: Instantly ID's an item. Largely a waste of spell points. Skin to Steel: Vaguely boosts an ally's armor. Armor is a completely mysterious mechanic that the strategy guide doesn't even really bother to particularly engage with, just insisting that it's "complex." Shield of Winds: Total arrow immunity and +25 defense for an ally. Thunderclap: Stuns everyone in an area for 2d4 rounds but hits allies as well as enemies. Very powerful, but not great in close quarters.  Downstairs, the kids have cleared out.   James and Jazhara insist that the children be taken to the palace because Arutha's going to love having a bunch of children running around and getting his tapestries all grimy. In the book, they just shove the problem off to the real Order of Dala orphanage, after some resistance from the children they eventually believe Jazhara that it's an actual safe place where they'll be fed and given safe beds. ... This is going to be hilarious in an update or two.   Let's get the gently caress out of here before one of these little bastards steals Jazhara's purse again.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzdKZmdfkrk Short version:  Gentlemen, meet Jazhara, the new court mage. Cor blimey, a black person near the Prince? This don't seem right. I swear they're just idiots, not racists. No, it's fine, I'm used to this sort of thing. Assholes.  So, since I've been a perfect gentleman all night. You took me to the slums and made me kill beggars all night. As I said. If you're about to hit on me, I'll turn you into a toad. Harsh, but fair. Welcome to Krondor!With Jazhara back and only mildly traumatized, we skip into the first proper chapter.   In the book, it's a less sudden cut. The book narrates how James spends the daytime showing Jazhara around the city(without killing anyone) and how Jazhara gets formally accepted into the court, swearing fealty to Arutha in a ceremony and such. It turns out she's eager to see William again because she wants to clear the air between them. ... See it's because they had a relationship with a large age gap when William was a teenager at Stardock, and he was her rebound after one of the teachers dumped her. This does not feature at all in the game but is kind of a weird and slightly creepy side plot in the book, mostly because we already had the Arutha/Anita thing that was a weird-rear end, questionable large-age-gap relationship presented as a totally romantic thing. Anyway, let's see how William's doing.    James! Talia's been hurt! Help me out here! Welcome to Krondor. Is it too late to resign my position as court mage?   This is a pretty straightforward fight as we acquire William as a party member. He's our big block of hit points, heavy armor and big weapons. He's got twice Jazhara's HP and if a random drop hadn't gotten James a magic sword, he'd be doing twice James' damage with each swing, too(but only be getting one swing per turn). One of his good uses is as a linebacker since if he stands in a narrow corridor intercepting everyone trying to reach, say, Jazhara, he gets free swings at everyone squeezing past him, while James is better on the offense since he gets more out of spells like Demonblade because they're a flat damage bonus per swing.   As the last raider goes down, William and the gang rush over to poor Talia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrTAigWJmiY Short version:  Don't you die on me! Jazhara, can you do something for her? William, wizards can't cast healing spells, also arbitrarily our fifty healing potions won't do anything for her. William... get revenge on that rear end in a top hat for me, I swear by Kahooli I will see him drown in his own blood. ...oh, yeah, she was raised by Kahooli nuns, as established somewhere not in this game. Blargh, I'm dead. So, I hate to ask the obvious: But what the hell happened here? Well, I was going to get a drink with one of my friends, who's also dead now, when a bunch of armed psychopaths ran out of the inn covered in blood. I'd say you saw James, but he was with me all day. Heh. No, they were lead by some incredibly huge guy. I think they ran towards the jail.After suddenly being dumped into the actual plot, let's have a look at William's character sheet.  As mentioned, he's loving huge. His shoulders won't even fit in his character image window.  Being a Warrior, he's also able to use two-handed weapons(greatswords, axes), platemail(if we find some) and chainmail. Since he's already really good with greatswords, there's no reason to ever invest in axes, since good axes are also insanely rare. He gets the enchanted chainmail we found earlier.   Also holy poo poo, the Rainbow Parrot Inn got absolutely hosed up. We'll hop out on the streets and follow the plot, maybe kill a few more homeless people, next update.
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Mar 26, 2022 22:16
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JustJeff88 posted:I actually rather like the voice videos in this game. Yeah, it makes sense but like... it makes double sense if you read Krondor: the Assassins, when William gets surprised at learning Lukas sent Talia to get raised by Kahooli nuns. So for her it's not just the thing you do when you're really pissed and dying horribly, it's actually her religion. disposablewords posted:Oof, I forgot they thrust you into Dead Girlfriend territory quite that fast. It's a very jarring cut, especially since it just spawns James and Jazhara inside the Rainbow Parrot as soon as the chapter starts! It would have felt moderately less janky if the chapter just started at the palace gates with an objective of "show Jazhara the city" and then after a point she goes: "dang, James, you know where William at? I used to hang out with him," and then you go to the Rainbow Parrot and things look fucky outside, and then you rush in and meet William and such. As much as this is a much better game than Antara, it does still have some holes. kw0134 posted:Who doesn't travel with a full meth lab in their pockets? I'll leave my spare clothes, my extra staff and my potions at the gates, but the meth lab stays on my person at all times.
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Mar 27, 2022 00:33
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Roxors posted:Just for reference, this game came out November 1998. Might and Magic 6 came out April 1998, with the other might and magic games coming out in '99 and '00. The other Sierra game to come out around this game was Quest for Glory 5, which came out December 1998. The game doesn't look great, but I am not sure it was all that bad for the time. In my opinion, RtK and QfG5 were normal for their time, it was more that MM6-8 were using a super outdated engine, presentation and, frankly, gameplay concept.
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Mar 27, 2022 08:37
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Also whoever fit Poshul into the accent generator deserves to be shot. Motherfucker.
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Mar 27, 2022 19:43
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JustJeff88 posted:Unless I am woefully mistaken, Chrono Trigger was on the SNES and Cross on the PS1. They are both regarded widely as classics, but I have never played either. Chrono Cross is a classic videogame in the same sense that the Battles of the Isonzo are historical battles, that is to say people largely know about it because of what an absurd failure it was on every level. It did let you recruit a clown skeleton, though, which ruled. The one good thing about that game.
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Mar 27, 2022 21:09
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For the next update I hope you guys watch the videos, there's some janky animation at points.
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Mar 27, 2022 23:18
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I actually went ahead and used the Steam release instead, because without flicking around some compatability settings, the GOG release turns into crusty glitch art, with a lot of menu borders and such turning into white-purple-cyan poo poo reminiscent of a Cruelty Squad texture. On the bright side, there's comparatively little text that actually needs to be, or can be, read, since it's all voiced without subtitles, those loving hacks, and as aforementioned there are practically no item descriptions that are worth reading or which actually tell you a drat about what precisely an item does.
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Mar 28, 2022 13:26
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Update 3: A Yellow Streak Since we're resuming, I want to point out something confusing about the main menu. Rather than having a "load game" option, each "profile" you make is one of these background books, which then contain their own sub-section of saves. The first time I resumed here I was a bit confused until I figured it out, pondering for a couple of seconds where the hell the option to load a game was.  -why would a beggar even be carrying something like that? Right? This is the sort of thing you find half of in a codeworded chest in the bottom of a cave full of ghosts. Gentlemen? Oh, right. Ahem, James! Jazhara! We have to hurry and catch the bastards who hurt Talia!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXfZOCU7SY0 As soon as we leave the Rainbow Parrot inn, we get a brief explosion animation and then we run right into some guards.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFkF_0qd5kc Short version: What happened here? Some rear end in a top hat hit the jail with naphtha and then charged in hacking everyone up! Who breaks into a jail? I should probably be excited about dead cops, but since I work for the Prince now it seems gauche. Thank you for the consideration. rear end. Now, how about you solve this problem? Oh, sure, we'll just charge in through the shower of arrows and cut them down, right? ... You can't be serious. You should probably leave the lady here, she seems like a fragile thing. I can handle myself, thank you. Suit yourself. Alright, let's go, this'll be easy.Now, you might also be noticing that for some reason William here is wearing the fabled Piss Mail. I have no idea why they decided that the Viox Chain Mail should be this bright lemon/urine colour rather than the pale white colour it has in his inventory. But it's funny and at least it makes him easy to spot in screenshots.   Anyway, let's mosey. Note the overturned cart the guards are using as cover from the arrows. We could run past that and eat a bunch of arrows to the face, like morons. We could also keep going down the road.    Where we come to the hole in the back of the jail that our large, unseen antagonist created.   See, I told you, you just have to be smarter than a cop.In the game, the jail is four rooms and some cells, in the book it's a somewhat bigger deal since it's a major guard HQ and Bear blew two holes in it. One to blow up all the guards on downtime in the mess, and then another charge set to blow up all the ones running to the explosion, leaving an at least double-digit body count and shaking up the city's guard complement for a while. I'm also a bit glad that Anita and Arutha are left to do their in-book stuff in between the cutscenes, because while Feist isn't exactly a legendary feminist author, his presentation of Princess Anita in these three books is as a really kind of vapid generic woman. Like all she cares about is CLOTHES and SHOPPING and PLANTS and FASHION. James rolls his eyes several times while going "gosh women going SHOPPING is so WEIRD and SILLY" and "wow Princess Anita keeps changing the guard uniforms because FASHION. lol."   Bonk. Clonk. Rah Tilt!Turns out Firelance does pretty solid damage when you want something to be dead real fast! As far as I can tell the only types of damage beyond "physical bonkery" are "fire" and "lightning," but through the entire game I can think of all of two situations where there might be elemental resistances in play.  Flames conveniently sprout up to prevent our escape as we finish the enemies off.   I'm clearing out the ground floor first and leaving the first floor for last.  Two-handed enemy weapons(staves excepted) are generally the most threatening things you can come up with, outside of random encounters where someone just happens to be hauling around a rune-covered artifact bullshit weapon, and thus always useful to prioritize.   Scoring a Flurry on the first round lets William drop two enemies and I start feeling like hot business. Then the fat rear end in a top hat in the background gets to act.  ...is that a molotov cocktail? You're not going to throw that at me. I be. Jesus! Enemies tossing fire oil can be really loving dangerous. Jazhara ends up picking like 20 of them off enemies' corpses during this update, and I resolve to make more use of them in the future, because I am very bad with hoarding consumables, but I know perfectly well I can't be relied upon to do that and will forget to do so.    Between William's sword and Jazhara casting Mindblade, which I assume implodes some important part of the target's brain, he gets his just desserts.   I kind of miss enemies in the Betrayals retreating when they got their asses beat. It made them feel a bit more believable as opponents that they didn't want any more of our bullshit after we skewered five of their buddies and set their face on fire.  Thank you, Squire, you've cleared out most of the jail. ...and now you're not going to help us clear out the rest of it. I knew you Squires were clever! We'll be sitting here until you've done all the work. I guess we'll sort out the top floor next.  Oh, someone who isn't trying to kill us right away! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlTP-71Mfnw  Short version: What happened here? I don't know anything! I'm very innocent! Right, and...? I'm going to sit in the corner until you make all the bad men go away!We won't get anything out of this guy until we kill another couple of mercenaries in the adjoining room.   Nothing exciting about it, now let's shake him down for information again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJGaR1yHhBQ Now will you talk? What do you even do here? I'm the pillar of intellect that makes the jail work at all, yet also just a mere clerk, please don't pay attention to me. All we want to know is who's responsible. I think one of the men you hacked in half is a bosun for the pirate Sullen Michael. You should go attack him without warning or mercy!This clerk is, of course, absolutely pulling our leg. I could swear there was a way to stab him right away and rummage through his desk to accelerate the next section of game, and the strategy guide even says there is, but I just found him to be in a conversation loop, myself. So we're doing this the long way. Off to the basement, next.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gqIc49lyXI Short version:  Stay calm! Stay calm! STAY CALM I TOLD YOU! AAAAAA! Sounds like there's a calm fellow to interrogate down here.  Did you see what happened? See it? I was close enough to get soaked like the front row at a Gallagher show! Please, sir, the fourth wall. Oh, right. Well the guy in the cell over there was Knute. A pirate. He was bragging about how he was safe, untouchable by law or violence... and then the jail got attacked. ...I feel like he was wrong about being untouchable. Just a tad. This big fella comes down the stairs, insist Knute tell him where "It" is, and then when Knute didn't own up, he started stabbing him like a madman! I'll say, either Knute got picked up on a streaking charge or "the big guy" practically stabbed him naked.I'm seriously baffled by the art chosen for Knute's corpse, yeah, it looks... dead, but it looks either like a flayed animal or like someone who died naked and has been dead for weeks. Aside from the size of the damage and the amount of fighting, this sequence is much like it was in the book, with the exception that in the book, James knew the poor fella in the cell here and sets him free so he doesn't have to sit next to a rotting corpse for the next few hours while the surviving guards clean up.  We're not likely to learn anything from him any longer. I guess we're off to have words with Sullen Michael next, though something about it feels off... oh and I suppose we should let the guards know we did their job for them.  Thanks for the help! I don't suppose you'll stick around to clean up the debris, too? I'm here exactly as long as it takes to set the flag and then we're off. Did you hear that? Around the back! There's our cue. We get just a brief glimpse of a big, bald guy who looks suspiciously like one of the men from the intro as the screen fades in, but by the time it's fully loaded, he's practically off the side of it already. Let's give chase!      The pursuit takes us out of the Rainbow Parrot district, where the jail is, and into the North Gate district.  Don't tell us we missed him! Big bastard and his mercenaries hacked their way past us! We've got almost a dozen men wounded! Only wounded? You're better off than the ones at the jail, what happened? Well, Squire, I hate to tell you, but he distracted us by setting fire to the orphanage! ... ... You know, the Shield of Dala orphanage? The one that all the homeless kids get sent to? Um. Where they're told they'll be perfectly safe, and fed, and warm? Oh for Pete's sake.I told you the orphan thing would be funny. For a given value of funny. I'm laughing, anyway, and that's what counts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH1HmwkDIs4 Short version: I'm too big to fit in there. I'm too slow to save all the kids. And I'm too flammable. Oh, I can solve that, I'll make you (mostly) resistant to fire. ...did she just mumble "mostly"? Must be your imagination, Squire.  This bit has a soft time limit, as James explores the building, more and more flames pop up, and while the ambient heat doesn't hurt him, touching the actual fire will. You can still use healing potions, though, and likely have a decent stock of them at this point.   The main challenge is that the kids aren't perfectly outlined and also that you can't interact with them until you're practically standing on top of them and also in the perfect position.    ...something's not right about that one.    The flames don't do massive damage but only need a pixel of contact to do it, and that's still about 1/8th of James' health bar per touch. It largely goes swimmingly, until I get to the last kid(of seven).    I could not for the life of me manage to interact with him, I thought the game was bugged for a while, until I found that in addition to needing to be close and in the right position, there was barely a pixel of the kid that was actually an interactible object.    What sort of absolute rear end in a top hat sets fire to an orphanage as a distraction? Our only lead so far is this Sullen Michael, thankfully there's a designated villain's tavern in Krondor where all the real pieces of work end up. Along the way I knock over a few more beggars and pick this little unusual number off their bodies.  When read, it gives a +5 to a random spell path, which ended up giving Jazhara a free +5 to Storms. I suppose the pro move would be to hoard any of these you find until she's at the 75 mark where upgrades start getting really expensive, for each path, and then blow through them all.     We're off to Ye Bitten Dog. One thing that's interesting about this quarter is that it appears to loop infinitely through any number of back alleys full of doors if you just want to do a lot of grinding rapidly. It's not particularly necessary since most quarters(Wealthy, Sea Gate and Palace excepted) have plenty of doors to poke at and changing camera angle a few times seems to reroll any rooms you've already been in.  One of the unmarked doors here also contains a store and I loving hate the stores in Return.  Firstly, equipped gear is in the general "you can sell this"-pile with everything else, with no marker or warning if you're about to accidentally sell the shirts off your characters' backs, and they're two or three times as expensive buying them back, which might thus not always be viable. Secondly, having so many more low-value items makes the dragging and dumping so much more time-consuming and increases the chance of getting into a rhythm where you sell an artifact sword by accident. Lastly, the stores just... don't really sell anything worthwhile. You get better stuff by murdering homeless people for the most part, in terms of buying things, so really their only use is stocking you up on healing potions and spell point potions, but I think just from all the corpse-looting I've done so far, I probably won't ever need to buy any healing potions.    As we step up to Ye Bitten Dog, a trio of Bear's mercs show up to get themselves killed.    It features the first time I have a spell fail during this playthrough. It's not an exciting experience, you just waste the spell points and Jazhara accidentally drops her spell on the ground.   Nice job, William, they saw us coming because of your Urine Armor. You gave me this! Sure, but you accepted it.   Welcome to the Bitten Dog. The two fancy lads near the door are extremely obviously Nighthawks, because of course we've got Nighthawks, but we can't point out their super-obvious jewelry and murder them. Instead, we'll go talk to the pirates at the middle table. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CR7Y7h-uxyQ Short version:  Are you the villain? Pay me and I'll tell you. I seem to remember attacking Sullen Michael in my previous playthroughs, but that's dumb and also mean, and requires us to murder basically everyone but the barman. And we've killed enough hobos for today. So instead let's play the completely unspecified amount. Yes, we're paying an unspecified amount, and we can't at the same time see how much money we have. Game design! There's [an amount] of money. Now, should we kill you? No, ye jackass, that scribe poured poo poo in your ear. Go beat him up. A pirate wouldn't lie to us, would he? You're really believing him? Do you think someone would do that, Jazhara? Just take our money and then lie? ... Weren't you a thief once, James? Yes? And? Never mind, let's trust the pirate.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMuarDYs1CU Short version: Alright, William, intimidate him, soften him up.  The old "phase through the suspect"-move? That's a classic, establish that your molecular tangibility is superior to his. What's this about? Did you talk to Sullen Michael? Gut him like a fish? We talked to Sullen Michael alright! We paid him to tell us you were lying to us! Please! I'm an innocent victim! I was forced! At swordpoint! Bear has my family hostage! Spaaare meeeeee! Moving on quickly after Talia, William. ... ... ... Too soon? Ha ha, no. I was just surprised you had a sense of humour. I don't think there's any real difference between killing and sparing him, except for your conscience, he ends up on the ground either way.   ...what now? Oh, right, we need some evidence. Let's root through his desk, the forcefield protecting it should be gone now.We couldn't loot it, much less interact with it, before the clerk got dunked on.   Oh gently caress this guy's from Antara. He has an annotated list of his loving crimes.  Someone get Arutha to swap out those lead water pipes.Anyway, it turns out we're going back to the Bitten Dog again.    The horrible goblin-looking barman is hiding out in the back here. Also what are those things on the table on the right there? Does this place serve pizzas? Strange yellow gruel? Nacho platters? Anyway. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxV5DJphxRY Short version:   Get out of here losers. And if we've got money to spend? Stay in here, losers! Let's get this over with: we need to get into Knute's room. I couldn't just let you root through his stuff! He's extremely dead. Ah, well, then, what's the harm. Also I'm going to sexually harass you. Gross, just give us the key.  Despite all the rooms up here, we can only break into one of them, which makes me sad because one of my favourite things about RPG's is breaking into stuff. Like... there's just a fundamental joy in breaking into people's homes/businesses/fortress and stealing all their poo poo, especially if it requires creative skipping past/distracting their security. I've found that I extremely tend to favour games that let me do that, it was most of my fun with the original Divine Divinity, much more so than the supposedly-central Diablo-esque gameplay. Uh, but we were about to break into Knute's room.   How did these people get in here? The door was locked! There's no window! Maybe Lucky Pete let them in just before we arrived and then locked the door... That would be an absurd coincidence. Give it up, Jazhara, next you'll start wondering why every second door we open has a homeless person that attacks us, or why Moredhel ambushes on the road never sleep or move, or how the Kingdom economy supports suddenly being flooded with a large amount of looted gems and high-quality swords and armor.Seriously, in the book there's at least an open window that a guy snuck in through or something, but this is just stupid! It's like those loving wall natives in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull or whatever it's called. God.  For other reasons, this fight loving sucks. The angles in here are loving awful.  I have Jazhara cast Lightning Blade, expecting it to give her a cool lightning laser sword to whack people with. Instead it gives her an orb. The orb just lets her make a lightning attack every turn, so if it's a fight where you don't want her going through tons of mana, but also not just sitting on the back lines or rushing into melee, it's actually not a bad cast. I did want the laser sword, though...   Now the other reason this fight loving sucks is that the geometry is wonky, James and Jazhara, even with her ranged lightning attack, can't attack this guy, despite nothing being in the way. Only William can whack him.  Eventually the three idiots go down, and we get a short cutscene. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmZYpTGu8Oc Short version:  A key! And it's Lukas' key! That must have been what they were looking for. Usually you're not the one to make seemingly random conclusions, how do you figure? I mean, you're right, but how do you figure? It's the only thing in here it's possible to interact with or pick up.Yeah, we can't loot a loving thing in here except for the corpses, boo. What's even the point of breaking into a dead man's room if we can't strip it bare? So where does this key lead? The sewers. ...they couldn't just lift up a manhole? ... I could lift up a manhole. Look, let's go use the door, then you'll understand.  I will admit, this is more impressive than a manhole. See? Now you get it.Next update: The sewer level.
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Mar 29, 2022 11:55
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Dear God I forgot about the difficulty spikes this game has. I was breezing through most fights, and then a wrong dialogue choice dropped me into a battle I smashed my head against for a literal two hours because I didn't have a save immediately prior to it, before finally breaking through. Psion posted:I wish William's portrait used the MtDew GuardFuel (tm) Armor because at least then he'd be distinct from James at a glance, as opposed to having to check who has the world's largest shoulders I hear your complaint, and from the next update onwards, rectification will occur! PurpleXVI fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Mar 29, 2022 |
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Mar 29, 2022 17:51
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disposablewords posted:And now we're to the sewers, which I don't recall outright hating but definitely have Sewer Level Problems. Oh we'll be talking about the loving sewers. But, yes, everything is super fiddly with regards to looting, ID'ing stuff, selling things, etc. and it doesn't help that half the time it takes some sort of psychic power to deduce whether a given item is an upgrade, a downgrade or a useless fluff item.
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Mar 29, 2022 18:59
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William! We've got a problem. Whatever it is, we're not solving it by killing more homeless people. People say they can't tell us apart. Maybe if I turned around... 90 degrees... ... Is it working? Get down from there. Maybe we just need some different colours. I'm vetoing this one. Why do I have to change? Why can't you change? You're right, I should show that I'm the mature one and the capable, self-sacrificing leader. Now look what you did, William. I'm so dreadfully sorry. I'm not! With this new look, we're perfectly distinct and I look cooler than ever.
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Mar 29, 2022 20:06
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ZCKaiser posted:This is the second LP in like a week that has referenced The Slayers. I mean, I'm watching through Slayers NEXT with some friends right now, so it was very much on my mind.
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Mar 29, 2022 20:26
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raifield posted:Purple makes playing this game look easy, but drat the late 90's had no respect for UX at all. What's that? Baby wants camera angles that actually show what's going on? Perhaps ones where all the enemies on the battlefield can be seen at once? lmao check out this nerd who actually wants enemies to be easily targetable Sounds like someone needs to git gud. No for real gently caress the camera angles in this game, both in and out of combat, I wasted half a loving hour because a camera angle obscured a chest with a key item. We'll get to that. Oh we'll loving get to that.
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Mar 30, 2022 22:28
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Guildenstern Mother posted:What is the button to change camera angles They're [ and ], oddly enough.
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Mar 31, 2022 06:27
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Update 04: The Sewer Chapter  James, please take those ridiculous things off. I can't, Jazhara, that would disappoint my fans. I'm sure they'll be even more disappointed when you walk off a ledge in the dark and break your neck. Someone hasn't read the books, I see. I can canonically navigate in the dark with no light at all. I'm just glad I didn't have to be recoloured. What was that? Looked like some kind of monster. Impossible, didn't you see how it moved? It sort of... glid along the ground? It skated, William, and who's ever heard of a skating monster? Then what, James? A very large rat?  I'm sure we'll find that there's a perfectly logical explanation for it.Dialogue aside: welcome to the sewers and gently caress the sewers. Imagine a maze with no map, where it's entirely possible to get stuck looping around on yourself(happened to me several times) and where changing camera angles make even the old stand-bys of "stick to a left-hand wall" unreliable unless you're on your toes.    No monsters, eh, James? This looks like the work of a monster to me. Wrong, Mockers did this. And just left the corpses lying around? Eh, corpses are biodegradeable.  What doesn't help the navigation down here are these intersections which aren't at right angles, thus making them a bit more confusing just for the hell of it.   A couple of places down here, either pre-placed or randomly, I'm not sure, you can run into some squads of mockers. If you pick the wrong dialogue choice, they try to pulp your stupid loving face. One of the differences in the book involves the general atmosphere of the sewers. The guy he let out of jail turns out to have been scoring free drinks at every tavern in town in exchange for his story of the attack... which also happens to include Knute bragging about having made a "big score" that would make him untouchable. Everyone assumes this means a big stash of treasure, and now the sewers are flooded with idiot "treasure hunters" who get into fights with both mockers and sewer monsters. Spoiler: that actually WAS a sewer monster we saw earlier.   The mockers, btw, are dickheads, and KO Jazhara in the first round. Also what really pisses me off is when an area has multiple camera angles in a fight, but then only a single fixed camera angle out of combat. The camera angles are there! Why are you hiding them from me! gently caress you, game devs!!!  This fight almost goes really poorly as the mockers also get in a solid dunkening on James, getting real close to killing him, too.    The first thing you should try to do is to hit the central cistern, you're sort-of hinted at your closeness by the sound of rushing water intensifying as you get closer to it. This is both if you want to do things "properly" or the speedrun way.    Look out, gang, sewer ninjas! Keshian Izmalis, actually. Like I said, sewer ninjas.The Izmali murder cult are the people who kicked the poo poo out of James in The Assassins, tried to summon a demon, etc. were general desert dickheads.  The most interesting thing about this fight is that every single one of these dickheads has a poisoned dagger and... I swear, I have no idea how poison works in this game. For instance, have a look at what it does to James and William.    There's clearly some sort of RNG involved, plus at least two different base intensities of poison, and when I busted out the keshian poisoned daggers(they're lootable, delightfully) in a later battle, they only did 5 to 10 points of poison damage per round. Maybe some/most NPC's have an inherent poison resistance?  At least among all the potions you'll have looted up to this point, you're just about guaranteed to be drowning in poison antidotes.  Jazhara's levelup gets her Phoenix Blades, which is an all-party version of Demonblade, Ride the Lightning which lets the caster teleport around the battlefield and is pretty useless, Lightning Strike which is a really good offensive spell that sometimes stun enemies and Arrows of Disruption which seems to consistently roll way lower than the listed damage. Corpses also get looted.  I keep one of these around for James since they do have some niche uses.  They're also carrying one of these notes about how Jazhara is marked for death by her uncle, Hazara Khan, which the party has no comment on. This is also a lot different in context in the book. The note instead pops up among Yusuf's papers and Jazhara is initially shaken by discovering it, until James recognizes the signature and seal as fake, that it was Yusuf preparing to have her assassinated if she didn't want to play ball. Instead in the book the Izmalis are also hunting for the treasure since they need a bunch of loot to re-establish their murder cult.   In any case, let's go around the cistern clockwise because it's the only reason to poke at this pointless tunnel.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhZ0SFD1880 Short Version:  What's on the other side? A fifteen-foot drop down to filthy water. Well, not a way we'll be going, then. Of course, but what if we assumed that Bear came down here, busted this grate open, and then went this way? I'll agree if it ends this thread of conversation faster.I seriously have no idea why the party makes this assumption, especially since they got their hands on the key that would allow Bear easy access to the sewers in the first place. If I remember right, in the book, Bear busted out of town via one of the gates well before this.   The cistern has four exits, the "gold" tunnel with no purpose, this tunnel with a torch in it and then two more tunnels that lead to the maze of filthy pathways. Let's hit up the torch.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lB8mbGLBFQ4 Short version:   Dare you enter my filthy realm?! I think we'd rather not. Good! Because if you did, we'd gut you like fish! Um, alright. And then laugh at you! What about you let us past for old times' sake even though we have no reason to want to go here? Maybe if you fight a horrible sewer monster for us. It's a deal.You can choose to just attack these nerds to speed things up, it leads you a fight against first three mockers(not noteworthy) and then, as you proceed down the tunnel, six mockers who come at the party from both sides in two groups of three, which can be pretty rough since mockers, being thieves, have a default bonus to initiative that means they might well get the drop on you and get in all their attacks before you even get a move. Technically you can stumble into the monster lair before accepting this quest, but the party will arbitrarily decide they don't want to go in there unless they have a reason to, which is a wild take from a group of idiots who've happily broken into a dozen houses and stabbed everyone in sight prior to this.    I attempt to follow the strategy guide's directions for where to find the monster lair and promptly manage to run in circles for roughly half an hour of real time.    On the way, I come across some more mangled corpses.  More victims of the Mockers? Not unless they've started using their teeth.   Oh no! A dramatic ambush!    These things are super chunky, without Woundlord, they would take a lot of whittling down, since James hands out 3x the damage that William does at this point.  And of course they also have an inherent poison effect on their claws. Thankfully they don't do too much damage per whack, though part of that may also be a function of my having found some magic leather(Ironskin) for James. The downside to Ironskin leather armor is that as long as you wear a single unit of it(armor is split into legs, arms, torso), you suffer a big Agility penalty.   These bits also puzzle me. They voice everything else, so why is this text? Is it something they jammed in after the voice actors peaced out? Something they didn't have time to record?    This is about where I realize I'm pretty well off track, because the directions in the strategy guide say I should've hit that wandering monster before even reaching the central cistern, goddammit.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2KGf9QfstU Short version:  Hold up, I sense morons ahead.  So the important thing about this stupid pack of sewer idiots is that they are completely and utterly useless. If you want to, you can annoy them by refusing to believe what they tell you and end up fighting them, but it's one of the most purposeless encounters in the game. They have nothing useful OR interesting to say about anything.  As they leave, these dumb dildos are all "har har, we've totally just sent them to their deaths at the hands of monsters by implying there's treasure in [direction]!" but the thing is that they never gesture in a direction or mention a direction(not that we have a compass or anything to navigate by, but still), so it's completely loving useless. I really should've just pissed them off and stabbed them all.   About 20 minutes later I finally find this one corridor(which you'll totally miss if you stick purely to, say, the left hand, since that just loops you around in a circle) which looks like any other corridor but the dark end is an interactible rather than having a movement icon.  As mentioned, the party will refuse to enter if they don't have the quest from the Mockers. Anyway, let's get chopping.   James makes me proud as he carves up a monster in a single round.   Also something goes wacky here when Jazhara hits one of them with a Fire Lance cast, the normally minor crispy fire .gif that plays bloats up hugely and as a result actually looks somewhat impressive.   This is another place where the game and the book majorly diverge. In the game, the monsters are just random sewer critters. They need killing and their eggs need breaking so the Mockers don't get eaten all the time. In the book... it's a lot loving darker. Someone's been buying up, uh, human infants, and putting them in magic transformation eggs that turn them into horrific monsters. What the party comes across isn't just a neat stack of bland eggs, but instead a pile of throbbing, partially translucent bags through which they can see the victims slowly undergoing the transformation into crazed creatures.   Gross. Let's pop back and tell the Mockers that we did their dirty work.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bodCaoBQ0s0 Short version:  Congratulations! You have completed my mystic quest! Will you let us into your tunnel now? Maybe! Or maybe I'll stiff you on a reward! Not like you'll find anything down here, anyway, if Lukas is down here, we've been completely unable to find him. Just shove over, grandpa.  I love how the Mockers say they haven't been able to track Lukas to his hideout considering that it's a straight line loving tunnel with no side corridors.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON8OvUxDLBw Short version:   Lukas, you jackass, why are you hiding down here? Got me some pirate treasure. Can't leave it alone. Needs to be flipped once an hour or it'll burn. ...how drunk are you? I've been hiding out in the sewers for several days, it was either being so drunk half my senses shut down or being able to smell where I was. So can we see this treasure?  Only thing you'll be seeing is Lims-Kragma's halls! Look, buddy, pal, friend. We've killed like twenty of your buddies, five-hundred homeless people, three sewer monsters and a pack of ninjas within the last 24 hours, do you think you stand a chance? Maybe y'all are real tired? Not tired of seeing what's in your pockets after I kill you.  Thanks, James, you really are a pal. Reminds me, your daughter's dead. Aw hell. Well, at least I've got William. Y'all want to see that treasure now? Please. ...this is no ordinary pirate treasure. I'll say! With this much, I can understand why Knute thought he'd be untouchable. No, what I mean is this was stolen from the Church of Ishap. Son of a bitch! Now there's no way we'll be able to keep this.In the book, the origin and details of Knute's treasure are actually revealed in the prologue. Bear charters him to raid an Ishapian vessel and, just as they've gotten most of the loot back on board, they have to pull free or get dragged down with it. Bear's on board, yelling for something else of interest, but since he's been exceptionally irrational and psychopathic lately, Knute figures he'll just let him go down with the vessel. He then poisons the rest of the crew, stashes the loot and starts getting paranoid about Bear maybe tracking him down. So he gets in bar fights until the guards arrest him, figuring the safest place to be is in the jail, surrounded by guards, and that he'll buy his freedom with a share of the loot and information on where the ship went down, since he assumes what Bear failed to acquire was something really important. Hm, how are we going to get all of this back to the Palace? Funny you should say that, Mr. Highest Strength Score.Next update: we're out of the sewers and back to menacing the homeless population, also solving crimes and swearing at camera angles.
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Mar 31, 2022 18:08
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JustJeff88 posted:I think that the Mocker voice actor pulled what is called a 'Reverse Dick Van Dyke' where, instead of trying to sound cockney he ended up Australian, he sounds like an Australian trying to be cockney. To be fair, I can't do cockney either. My brummie's not bad, but I did grow up near Birmingham. I mean, Antara can just go burn in hell, generally, there's really no reason to even think about it. Now, Return vs Betrayal. Pros for Return: Embryonic "linebacker" abilities for fighters that let them intercept guys running for the mages on occasion, a general absence of "gently caress you, you die now"-spells with no saves or counters, combat settings for fighters give them a bit more detail, the occasional presence of "battle terrain" makes the battlefields a bit more interesting, less fundamentally useless buff items(like the items that exist just to counter a hostile type of weapon booster in Betrayal will NEVER be used by anyone not psychic). Cons for Return: Not being able to equip a bow AND a sword at once makes fighters less flexible, mages needing to be barehanded while casting makes them less flexible, not being able to use weapon greases or buff potions ahead of combat makes them a LOT less worth considering since it's very rare that it's worth wasting an entire turn's worth of actions on using them, quick-cast spell failure chances are fundamentally fine BUT not having the failure chances shown is dogshit, not displaying to-hit chances either is dogshit, having every magic item be super-vague about what it exactly does is dogshit(Betrayal didn't outright state it either, but the effects were generally so simple, +X to a skill, that it was simple to spot by equipping it and having a quick look at the character sheet), the lack of a hex/square grid for combat makes it hard to tell how characters will move, hard to tell where ranged attacks can go and who will block what, hard to tell when a fighter is actually plugging a gap or not.
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Apr 1, 2022 08:56
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Update 5: Mysterious Mysteries, Part 1   So, William has left the party and will not be rejoining the party, though he will be rejoining the story later. This also means that, since William is literally the only character in the game who can use greatswords and axes, any future axes or greatswords we find with anyone else, will be completely useless.  I will miss William, but on the bright side, now you can take those off. I could also keep them on. ...this will be a long day.  So, we're off to find the Wreckers' Guild and hire them to raise a ship containing a Mystery Item of the Church of Ishap. In the game we don't yet know exactly what it is, except that it's very important, but in the book at this point we'd already have been told that it is literally the most vital magical artifact in all of Midkemia, which is a pretty bad thing to lose in the sea. Because I am an extremely predictable creature, though, I go kill a few homeless people first.    And because the game has had enough of my poo poo, they drop a piece of gear that only William would have gotten any use out of. Whomp whomp.Anyway, predictably the Wreckers are at the Sea Gate.    The only two things of interest in this quarter except for the Wrecker's Guild are a single store, an alleyway and a mysterious warehouse. I wonder if it's related to some cut content since it's got a large front door you can interact with only to get a "these doors are super locked!"-message.   The alleyway is one of the most annoying parts of the game. There is a way to get a homeless guy to spawn here which has some plot info but outside of the first time I played the game, I've never managed to make it loving happen again! Even following the strategy guide, it didn't work! I have no idea if it's either bugged or doing one minor thing out of sequence deletes him from reality.  There are people who live like this? It's not so bad once you learn to use the trash to keep the guards and muggers away.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNJW4Az8ae4 Short Version:  Why the long faces? Who are you? The cops? Nice try, but I'm doing the interrogating here. Guildmaster got murdered, Kendaric did it, Jorath knows more, now get off our backs, we're moping.A dead guildmaster at the guild we need help from? That sounds like a problem.   Sir, could you point us towards Jorath? Just down the hallway behind me, only one on the ground floor that doesn't contain sad dudes and boxes.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH-s1RZKfsA Short version:  Sir, we need to have a ship raised. Ah, yes, would that I could help, but the guild master is dead, you see. And no one else here can help us raise a ship? Well, there was one, but he was, you see, both the murderer, and also an inferior minority. ...excuse me? Being Keshian, you see, he has an inferior brain, and also finds himself prone to violence. Thus, he slew the guild master in a rage. Due to being of an inferior race. ... 'scuse me while I put on this asbestos smock. Are you blind as well as a racist prick? I'm both Keshian and the Prince's court mage. Well I apologize if your feelings were hurt, madam, but it's just facts and science. Facts don't care about your feelings. James, I believe we'll be leaving. I can't believe you didn't set him on fire. That absolute prick should be glad he's wrong about Keshians not being able to control their impulses. Maybe we can find a way to solve this and ruin his life. Let's poke around. For some reason everyone on the ground floor is armed. I have no idea if there's a way to aggro them or something, also none of them can be talked to, so let's shuffle up top.   Up top, we'll head to the dead guild master's room first. The party does the same thing in the book, but, hearing someone inside, they kick the door in expecting an ambush of some sort because a lot of people have tried to stab them this week.  Just like in the game, though, it's just the housekeeper, poor lady almost has a heart attack in the book, though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5lejd3yKF0 Short version:  Hello old crone, please explain what's going on, but without any racism. Well Kendaric yelled at the guildmaster, like always. And the guildmaster had a weak heart, like always. And this time the guildmaster died from all the yelling. ...and you saw this happen? I heard the yelling and then I reasoned out the rest. Like a genius. The guards said I was very clever. Please tell us what other very clever things you're thinking. I'm thinking that it's weird Kendaric would yell the guild master to death seeing how they clearly liked each other a lot and the guildmaster said Kendaric was the smartest member of the guild.  So the people who are desperate to tell us Kendaric killed the guildmaster are a senile old lady and the most racist person in Krondor. Yes, I know, this is an open and shut case. Please tell me you're kidding. Of course I am, now watch the hallway while I break into some rooms down here. To look for evidence? ... ...to look for evidence, right? What a sham! I believe this was Journeyman Kendaric's room, what's wrong with it? Someone already broke open this lock. ...and what does this tell you, James? That someone beat me to it. Or perhaps that someone tried to rob Kendaric on the same night the guildmaster was killed?  Kendaric's room has three poorly visible interactibles. Under his bed and then two points on his desk.  As much as I hate to credit Jorath's analysis of anything, financial issues are often a reason to commit murder. True, if he was the next in line to run the guild, it could have helped him pay his debts. Must've been one hell of a snail in here once. This isn't a natural shell, James, it's a magical artifact, intended to improve water magic. Shame there's no water magic in this game, must be a clue, then. Exactly, someone wouldn't get their hands on this without being good friends with a magic shop owner. Good friends enough for them to shelter him, perhaps...  Then in the drawer of Kendaric's desk is the worst puzzle I've encountered in a long drat time.   The goal is to click on the chunks in the bottom section in the right order to assemble an image. If you take too long between clicks, the image starts fading and will eventually reset completely.  As seen, however, there's no penalty for wasted clicks or misclicks, so just spam clicks on everything on the bottom as the image is slowly assembled.  Put together the hull, then the sails and finally the little white bits at the top of the one sail. Then it's solved.  This is the reward for solving this "puzzle."  So now we can raise the vessel on our own and don't need the Wreckers' Guild, right? I'm afraid that's impossible, James. Ah, drat, I guess one of the casters needs to be a powerful water mage which only a Wreckers' Guild member would have? Nothing of the sort, I just refuse to be a scab.The way magic works and the ubiquity of magic feels hilariously inconsistent from each piece of Midkemia media to the next. In the first few, minor mages seem to be everywhere, but unappreciated and unrespected, and outside of a very few no appreciable talents at all outside of cursing someone's cheese. Then by the time of Silverthorn, there are enough with notable talents like telepathy and oracular vision that a community of them can form at Stardock and they can be discriminated against. We're also introduced to the Pantathians who can delete people by pointing at them and, considering the dearth of anyone else having wizards or magical defenses, it's hard to understand why they do weird-rear end schemes with the Moredhel rather than just walking in and wiping out entire Midkemian armies with magic. In Betrayal, every second encounter has someone who can throw fireballs. In The Assassins there are minor mages everywhere, enough to have stores and to hire themselves out as magical assassins. And in Return... we're a bit back to magic being rare, with the exception of there being a literal Wizard Mart in Krondor. We'll get back to that when we get to Kendaric.    So if that other one was Kendaric's room... ...this must be Jorath's! We're so breaking into this one. A shame, he has left no evidence around implicating him in some horrible crime we could use as an excuse to kick his rear end. ...we could just kick his rear end anyway. Please, let's try to at least pretend to be the good guys. Someone as scummy as Jorath must have something incriminating in his private quarters. Jazhara! Look! This drawer! ...this empty drawer? But maybe it's only empty because it's day. Yes, James, I'm sure that the contents will come back here to sleep at night. Seriously, we'll come back here at night, and you'll see.This is only mildly paraphrased, I still find James' logic here somewhat bizarre.   Now, since Jazhara has given us a lead that there might be a wizard trader in town with ties to Kendaric, we should go look for one.   Since magic is clearly one of the most bougie luxuries, we're off to the Wealthy Quarter.  The Wealthy Quarter has a few stores, like the one we start right next to which is the local Sword Mart.    In addition to selling a bunch of armor and heavy weapons we can't use now, it also sells... ...sir, is this a cursed sword? It is! Special sale today on cursed items! Why are you selling a cursed sword? To go with the cursed armor in the next display, of course.Cursed items are... weird in Return to Krondor. Reading the description, it's always some version of: "Throw this horrible garbage away before it explodes you." But it never actually explains the mechanics of how the cursed items work. What they do is that they inevitably ensure all hits against you are criticals(which have some vaguely defined damage boost), but they also tend to have considerable offensive boost of their own. Some of them are potentially quite worth using. Sure would be great if the game gave you enough info to make this sort of decision informedly.   Next door is a jewelry store. Oh yes. No. Aw, please? You can look, but no stealing. Or killing. Fiiiiiiiine. Inside, some poo poo has obviously gone down. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6p4afwR3Ng Short version:  Hm, more holes and less jewels than I expected from a jewelry store. What ho, good merchant? I've been robbed! I suppose that makes sense. Well, nothing here for me to do, then. Waaaaaait! You could un-rob me! They stole my rubies! ...yes, we could follow the robbers and then kill them. And then return the man's rubies, James. And then return (some) of the man's rubies, yes. Let's go!  And we're back in the loving sewers. Still, if you mouse-over the ground below the ladder, there is at least a map the robbers left behind.  I would have loving killed for this an hour of playtime ago.    Oddly enough, I manage to get Jazhara stuck on the ladder as James jogs away and for a while I'm wondering if I've bugged out the game, but eventually she wiggles loose off-screen and follows. It's odd that there's nothing leashing the rest of the party to James whenever the camera changes or something.    Off to the cistern, pick the right turn-off.  Follow the directions until you see these two idiots and then...   You pick Wait and Follow.    I think you either have to go through more hoops to get this fight otherwise or softlock the quest so you can't.    They've got a mage in the background, but thankfully the AI is worse at using mages than it is at figuring out how to bumrush your mages with melee attackers and molotovs.   You'd have to really screw up for this to be a serious challenge. If nothing else you could just pelt them with fire oil until they all die burning and screaming. Now let's peel their corpses.   The mage has a decent amount of payoff, if nothing else, including this staff I will probably never use.  Now, importantly, if you notice that this is one of the rare areas where you can, out-of-combat, adjust the camera, you will find a very important chest!  Now let's see why this is a disappointment for James. No! Don't ruin this for me!Too late.  All the gems are fake. Now in a better game these would still have an interesting use, like you could scam stores with them but then they'd do no further trading with you, or jack their prices afterwards as revenge, so you'd be able to use them for tactical money gains. But there's no use for them in Return.  The note is Gerard ordering a family-sized box of whoop-rear end from J&J Co.  There's also a full suit of enchanted platemail which I'll keep around because I've played the game before. I think this is a random spawn that you might otherwise be tempted to just sell for loot, especially since it's heavy enough to partially collapse James' spine, but don't do this! Keep this poo poo if you get it! You will be thankful!  Well, let's go snap Gerard's neck.  Alright, Gerard, you've got two options. Either I stab you, and rob you. Or Jazhara sets you on fire, and then I rob you. Impossible! It can't have failed! Backup goons assemble!  ...mulligan? Do-over? Nope.The end, no moral. It's a weird little sidequest. You'd figure Gerard would have some sob story about how Bear forced him to do it, or he needed the money to pay for a healer for his sick dog or whatever, but no, some random chubby jeweler dude just decided that he could hire mercenaries and take out the party after digging a huge hole in his own floor. It seems weirdly elaborate compared to just trying to stab the party in a dirty alley again.
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Apr 4, 2022 01:21
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Update 6: Mysterious Mysteries, Part 2   The third interactible location in the Wealthy Sector(which I'll note is the only one aside from the Sea Gate and the Palace sectors to have guards on patrol, makes u think), is the Golden Grimoire at the far end of where you enter, which is the local Ye Olde Wizarde Shoppe.    Moraine here is the proprietor, and has a good deal of dialogue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2mXtOTHCvo Short version:  What a lovely store, miss, do you mind if we ask you a few questions? Sure! I'd be happy to help. Are you familiar with the recent troubles at the Wreckers' Guild? ...very vaguely. There's been a murder, and one of the suspects we're trying to track down was in possession of a Shell of Eortis. What an interesting object that I know nothing about. Curious, considering this is the only place in town he could have gotten one. ... ... I'm not admitting to anything, cop. Ahem, are you familiar with Guildsman Kendaric by any chance? We used to date until my parents broke us up. ...because he's half-Keshian. ...because he's half-Keshian, haven't seen him since. Well, she's extremely suspicious. Let's poke around the stacks for some extremely obvious evidence.  Like this secret door. We should open this at night. Why at night? Then I can pick the front door and loot some of the shelves at the same time.One thing that took me a while to figure out about the Golden Grimoire was how to loving leave the store. I thought you had to use the door at the top of the stairs, but no, it's the door under the stairs that's invisible from practically every camera angle.     In any case, all our various leads now insist on being resolved at night, so let's fast-forward by resting(which we can do at long last) and revisit the Sea Gate and the Wreckers' Guild.    Let's break into Jorath's room (again) first.   That sounds pretty loving incriminating already, I wonder who Jorath could've been planning with.  While we ponder that, let's break into Kendaric's room (again) just for the practice.  Oops all Nighthawks. They made the mistake of bringing a wizard into a phone booth knife fight. This ends poorly for them.    Molotov cocktails and sharp steel to the face resolve the situation. Now let's rob their bodies.   In addition to inexplicably hauling around a full meth lab, the mage also carried yet more incriminating paperwork.  The "item" is clearly the ship raising ritual, and now I guess we have an inkling of who Jorath was planning to meet at the Bitten Dog. I expected that offing these goons would spawn Old Tom the beggar in the alley down below, but sadly it did not. Well, off to a disreputable drinking hole to stab some evidence out of people, then.  It's also worth noting that Jazhara has yet more magic to sling around now. Fire Rain: Hits all enemies, with no chance of hitting friends. Low damage but still nice. Brother to All: No enemies can target the mage. Enslave the Will: Flip a single enemy to the player's side. Thy Foes Enfeebled: All enemies have their strength halved. I am unclear on how much of a damage-dealing reduction this rolls out as since most of James' damage, say, seems tied pretty flatly to his weapon and barely at all to his strength score. Shield of Lightning: The caster turns into a living tazer, enemies attacking them get zapped and they get a zappy attack once per round. Maelstrom: AoE lightning spell that can also hit friendlies. Summon Sky Warrior: Creates an orb that makes a free lightning attack on a random enemy once per round.     Outside the Bitten Dog is an NPC that has no purpose except to spam the same line every time you talk to him. I decided to present it because I thought everyone might enjoy it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmHoSDboHMQ    Let's pop straight over to Pete and see what we can squeeze out of him. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yq3Plya1rn4 Short version:  Ah, great, it's the cop and the cop's sidekick again. So here's the deal, Pete, I want to hire some muscle. This should be good, what kind? The kind that rhymes with... bightbawk. Are you drunk or just a moron? I'm afraid he's always like this. I'll humour you before I tell you to get the hell out. What kind of job do you want them for? I'll need them to bring their person-stabbing swords... for stabbing... a person. I'm going to count to five and when I hit five someone's going to cave your skull in if you aren't out.So apparently you're meant to ask "slyly" and not "indirectly," which seems like two synonyms to me, pretty much. If you get it right, you're let into the back rooms where the Nighthawks are and aren't expecting to get stabbed in their dumb loving faces so they're hanging out in twos and threes. On the other hand, if you gently caress it up, your only way to push the point is to tell Pete to his face he's a dumb son of a bitch, at which point...  They'll be bringing their stabbing swords alright. Have at 'em, lads!  You get five at once! Three out in the main room and there are two around the curve of the bar. Being rogue-classed, but also quite tough, they'll usually start out by cutting Jazhara to ribbons since you're in a pincered situation.    This is how it usually goes. Jazhara gets dunked on, James cuts down two or three then collapses as well.   After a few tries, though, I luck out and get both James and Jazhara acting before the stabbery squad gets up to their bullshit.   Time for the nuclear option: burning a bunch of the scrolls from homeless people, random chests and evil wizards that I've been hoarding.  It's easy to miss, but despite the low damage it actually kills the farthest Nighthawk behind the bar, so now it's a 3v2 fight.   A 2v2 fight.    And a scroll of Chaos Storm(i.e. off-brand Chain Lightning) and Lightning Strike seals it. Now, the important thing to do is to NOT START LOOTING ANYTHING. IMMEDIATELY OPEN SOMEONE'S INVENTORY. DRINK AS MANY HEALING AND SPELLPOWER REGEN POTIONS YOU NEED TO TAP EVERYONE UP. EXPLOIT THIS FROZEN SECOND.  Because the second time has a chance to advance...  You get the loving second wave. I am not prepared for this level of anarchy.Yes, that's a Nighthawk cosplaying as Zorro, and one with a weird-rear end mask, and a face-busted mage and a loving towering demon. This fight beat my face in for the better part of an hour and a half. Motherfucker. Most fights went as follows:  The demon punches James until he explodes.   And then Nighthawks stab Jazhara until she's out. Sometimes she survives the first wave and the demon steps in and sweeps a big fat paw past James' head to knock Jazhara's face into the dirt. Sometimes the mage blinds one of them with Sunray to make them easier prey. Sometimes Jazhara survives a single round to bust out a Chaos Storm scroll, but it's never enough. I struggle through multiple different setups and attempts at surviving, with Fate modifiers both supportive and not so(I keep praying for a Heroes Accelerate so both James and Jazhara will get to act before being stabbed at, but it never comes up).     I see this poo poo a lot.  And then... well, honestly, I get lucky.  I start off by having James poison his weapon.  Not being immediately stabbed to death, Jazhara weathers a couple of punishing sweeps as she moves out of range of the demon's claws and draws out the nuclear option.   She even manages to get the mage, off-screen, but she confuses every last enemy, which I pray will buy me a few safe actions.  James poisons the demon, which is SUPER resistant to physical damage, it takes about half the damage of a generic human does when whacked, so I hope the poison will do some hard work wearing it down.  It's a severe butt-clencher when the demon gets a move and approaches Jazhara, but isn't fast enough to also attack her.    Chaos Storm makes bargain bin Zorro eat poo poo.  Inexplicably the mage wastes his move running across the room and putting himself in the line of fire, rather than blinding James or blasting Jazhara with magic. Nice enough of him, I suppose.   I've got Jazhara purely on scrolls and molotovs for this fight because I just CANNOT afford for her to literally drop the ball and gently caress up a spell, and there's no peace for her to do Slow Casts. The demon gets put down by a Lightning Strike. The demon really was the big worry, since James now has almost 100 max HP and the demon could still whack him for 50+ damage on a lucky hit, that made it a big threat even when it was on the ropes.    I think either it's the Confusion or the enemy AI is severely bugging out, James poisons one of the Nighthawks and he runs off into a corner of the room to die from it.   I cannot explain the relief I experienced when I finally cleared this fight, I hadn't saved for close to 30 minutes prior to pissing off Pete, and I was terrified I'd painted myself into a corner and had to re-do all of that playing. ...so instead I hammered my head against a wall for three times as long. I'm a genius! The Nighthawks obviously have a bunch of money and potions, but no real noteworthy items, no plot notes or anything. Time to poke the party's heads into the back rooms.     The back rooms are cramped as gently caress. The first one here is a bit odd since one of its off-shoot rooms has no purpose.  No camera angles, can't interact with the chest, can't even MOVE.     There'd be all sorts of cool battles here in manageable chunks if we hadn't already had them all at once. Let's go in that ominously glowing door.   Unlike every other room in this loving place, we can change the camera angle here. And I didn't notice it. So I thought I got all my poo poo done here. This got me very confused for the next bits. With things all sorted I decided it was time to head back to the Wreckers' Guild and confront Jorath.     Most of them members have dispersed by now.   The jig is up, Jorath! We know you had the guildmaster killed! Please, sir, associating with this Keshian must have infected you with her vile temper and lack of logic. Step back, James. I'm very tired of this man. ...not even ashes left, I approve. Thank you, I was saving that one.In reality Jorath just goes "ah yes you're very wrong about my guilt, but I can see you're too silly to reason with" and then vanishes in a cloud of farts and James just goes "drat, he got away!" and it's never revealed if that was a ninja smoke bomb or magic or what. Now let's go break into Moiraine's store.    Instead of JUST needing to find the secret door, you also need to pixel hunt to find the tiny interactible book(lower right of the screen, where the cursor is) that's actually a lever that opens it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLZcZZpUjsA Short version:  What the hell? Did you guys break into my store? What the hell? Are you sheltering a murder suspect? I didn't kill the guildmaster! I swear! I'm inclined to believe you, especially since your main detractor was a racist prick. God, loving Jorath. I don't know, I feel like we're just one piece of evidence away from my believing Moraine. Like what? Do you need an alibi? No, the sort of evidence, I feel, that would be in an eerily lit room with an off-brand pentagram, in a chest contained at a weird angle. ...are you kidding me? I'm sorry, dear, I've met these two before, I'm afraid they're not. Excuse us for a moment.  Without the final piece of evidence, no matter how minor it turns out to be, or how much it just confirms what we already know 99%, James will not believe Kendaric enough to continue the story.     Even at the right angle that loving chest is more a suggestion of the shape of a chest.    There. That's it. That's the only bit of loving evidence that was missing. Now back to Moraine's.  Oh, it's you two again. Thanks for not breaking and entering this time. Well this time we're pretty sure Kendaric isn't guilty.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPVzSoPUo5E Short version:  Not again. Relax, dear! They're here to clear your name! Exactly, you're innocent, so now you can do some work for us. Well, of course, I'll pencil you in for next month, I have to rebuild the guild roster, institute the new methods, rebalance the budget... Dear, you're being unthankful. But think of the back taxes. Kendaric. I'll get my things immediately. Wha-pish. Ha ha, I know, maybe we should bring her instead.And then the chapter just ends pretty much instantly.   Alright, gang, here's the plan. Everyone listening? Yes sir! Step one, we wait for the archers to get into position. Step two, we charge in and cut them all down. Everyone get that? Sir, yes, sir!   Before you get control of anything, this chapter launches you straight into a battle with some mercenaries. You've got four visible swordsmen and a pair of archers off screen.   The enemies are snazzily dressed but generally pretty irrelevant except for the fucker in the platemail with the warhammer. I'm not sure if my rolls were just absurdly bad, but I could not get a single point of damage in on him, despite hits, from anything but the archers, who consistently damaged him.   This is about as close as Return to Krondor gets to scripted set-piece battles(...for now) since there's no thought required and I can't imagine how you could possibly lose this fight.   Any of them still breathing? This one's still alive, sir!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1lUIBbTQ1M Short version:   Well, this isn't how I expected my day to go. You could still avoid dying if you tell me where Bear went. Seems fair, gently caress that guy. He's planning to ambush you up the road, but you could turn the tables on him if you rush. Good choice. You get to live. Before you go... which one of my idiot men let you keep that axe? Fella over there. Jackson! Yes sir! Pack yourself up and head back to Krondor with the prisoner. See he gets there safely, and then turn yourself in for a court martial for being a moron. Aw. Alright, this is a good day. Killed a bunch of idiots, none of my men died, only one court martialed and I'll probably get to cut off Bear's kneecaps and carve him a new rear end in a top hat soon enough! Nothing can go wrong. Say, kid, you want to run off and start a new mercenary company with me instead of going to Krondor? Boy do I!Next: Nothing goes wrong. Not a thing. Not at all. Everything goes just as it should.
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Apr 4, 2022 01:22
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disposablewords posted:As I recall, if you don't screw up with the bartender then the fights against the Nighthawks are a bit more manageable, especially since the demon and mage stay waiting in the pentagram room until you come to them. Sure, there's no drat room to maneuver in there... but then again, there's no drat room to maneuver in there, so Jazhara is very safely behind James as long as James stays alive. Still, the demon is an incredibly rude boss for a rogue and wizard to take on, I was sorely missing William at that point. When it's just the mage and the demon it's a lot easier to handle because James can usually survive two to three rounds of getting his face smashed in by the demon, especially if he's set to conservative combat style and gets in a few dodges/parries as a result. So have Jazhara firebomb or spell the wizard out of existence, then hit the demon with either the single-target version of Circle of Madness or with Lightning Bolt which has a chance of stunning it and causing lost actions, and you're usually golden.
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Apr 4, 2022 09:08
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Black Robe posted:Maybe Old Tom couldn't spawn because the party already killed him in one of their bloodthirsty looting sprees, James. If you didn't want me to stab him, you shouldn't have given him a loot table.
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Apr 4, 2022 14:02
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Update 7: Road Trip  Possibly to the surprise of some, that was all the William we get for now, one single fight and then we're off to rejoin the rest of the fellas again, and this time the team has grown! This is also where, in the book, we're explained why the Tear of the Gods matters so much. Firstly, it's a huge-rear end gemstone. That by itself is super important, about as big as a man's thigh, but the really important thing about it is that it's somehow the mystic conduit that permits for prayers to be answered and for divine magic to be cast. It's proposed as a huge issue if this ceases working because dickheads gank it, even though divine magic has, in the books, been of negligible importance so far. In the original two books, priests cast one spell. In the Silverthorn/Sethanon set of books, there's a single Ishapian amulet used to bless Arutha's sword and one divine security system. But even if we pretend that's kind of a minor thing, we're told that The Bad Guys, whoever they are, could corrupt the Tear to phone up the local equivalent of Cthulhu instead of Ishap & Co. This would admittedly be pretty bad, no one likes having a Cthulhu in their back yard.  Our two new party members are Kendaric and Solon. Let's have a look at their sheets.  Kendaric is Jazhara But Worse, which is serviceable. He'll want a few levels before he'll be reliable at any wizardry, but until then he can burn scrolls and toss molotovs. It's worth noting that this is a huge departure from the book where he's... just some guy. He's not spent his life studying at Stardock, he's not some fated Greater Path mage, he's just a dude who's spent his entire life being discriminated against and learning one spell. This means that while the rest of the party is pretty handy in a fight, in the book, Kendaric just runs around in the background wailing because he doesn't know how to fight and is just generally a constant liability. Throughout the entire book I don't believe he ever kills anything and the only time he contributes positively to a fight is when he curls up into a ball defensively and an opponent trips over him.  Solon, meanwhile, is kind of a repeat of William. He can wear chain and plate, he can use hammers and maces(but not swords and axes because Midkemia is inexplicably D&D in that regard) and he can cast divine spells. If he's not carrying a weapon. Most of his spells are pretty eh, so just give him the biggest armor and biggest hammer you can find and send him in to break faces. He excels at that more than anything. While I don't have a magic hammer for him, he promptly gets the suit of enchanted plate I found in the sewers which makes him more or less immune to any kind of damage that isn't magic.  The divine magic selection isn't particularly varied or interesting. It either does melee range damage, heals(better to spend your turn doing damage, in most cases), blows up undead(which have been pretty rare on the ground so far) or buffs friendly combat abilities(which, if Solon was casting spells, would be just James).    Arutha also splurged on some low-tier gear just in case someone lost their socks while running around the city. I don't know if this is randomized, but if you haven't found something nice for Solon so far, a suit of magic elf armor popped up in here for me(chain mail), but other than that I just snagged the bottles of healing Mt. Dew and skedaddled.   This dumps is in front of the gates with no option but to interact with them and get warped to the world map which we will only see in this chapter.   Clicking on an adjacent sphere warps us to a little section of the world where we're free to move around, though all but... five locations are just empty shells where a random group of NPC's might randomly charge at us and try to cut us open. Among the non-random locations, however, is the very first one we enter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVNH9S26PgI Short version:  Hand over your gold, your gems, your weapons, any deeds to property you're carrying, any gold teeth, valuable spices and- Are you people daft? We're on a holy quest! Sorry, you're obviously holy, but the rest will have to pay up. What if I pay you by slapping your poo poo until you can't move without help? ...seems holy enough to me. Let's get outta here.Only real difference is that in the book Solon seals the argument by actually laying one of the bandits out with a single punch. Come to think of it, I don't remember him casting any spells in the book either, there he just beats the poo poo out of people and monsters.   Heading northwards, the party runs into some mangled corpses. I think these are supposed to be a hint that there's a potential random encounter with some flying enemies in the region, but I never got that one to pop.     Another possible random encounter is this woman and her kids wandering around the same woods where random goblins and wizards are waiting to jump out at people.    The guide says that whatever you ask her doesn't matter but saying she's a housewife is the "funniest" response.  Where we're headed is here, just one point north of the Wayfarer Inn.  Short version:  Greetings, farmer, we're kind of lost so- My daughter! Goblins stole my daughter! A shame we already have a qu- These goblins, did they seem rich to you? ...maybe? For shame, Kendaric! Not wanting to help this poor man, clearly I'll have to show you how a Real Hero does this.Goblins stole this poor guy's kid, and we have the option of going hunting for her before she gets sacrificed in a horrible goblin ritual. In the book, James and Kendaric kind of don't want to go take care of it, but Jazhara eventually shames them into doing it.  I poke around the mountains looking for the goblin lair when I run into some unusual enemies that can only be encountered on the road.   Trolls! One of them wielding a magic warhammer!   In the books, trolls are just kind of like chimpanzees that like to eat people(so chimpanzees), with mountain trolls being chimpanzees with swords and armor. In D&D, trolls regenerate, but not in Midkemia's lore, but that appears to have cross-pollinated here. Their regeneration generally isn't enough to make them invincible, but it's pretty much a free healing potion per round which can make them a good deal harder to put down for good. In the first round, I also have Jazhara slow-cast "Conjure Sky Warrior" so it'll cast some free lightning attacks for her, expecting it to do like 16 damage, like Lightning Blade does.    What the gently caress. That is insanely busted. Turns out it regularly does 70 to 120 points of damage. It's hard to quick-cast because it's almost the apex Storm spell, but that's worth slow-casting.  This means I just saunter Jazhara up the side of the field on her next turn and it roasts the second troll for me. Now let's pick them over and see what cool poo poo they dropped.   One of them drops a cursed warhammer, that's not what I wanted. But might explain why it ate that insane amount of lightning damage, the game never really deigns to explain how crits work.   This is what I wanted. In addition to doing about 50% more damage than a standard warhammer, it also has a huge to-hit bonus and anyone who gets whacked by it has a chance to get "stunned"(i.e. have a chance to lose actions) for 1d4 rounds.   Eventually the party reaches the goblin part of the map, consisting of two map nodes. The first one, here, is a short piece of wall blocking the way to their camp.   Jazhara gets off Speed of Thought which doubles attacks-per-round and movement speed, allowing James and Solon to blender through the defenders with negligible difficulty.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ad8B6za14Y Short version:  Those are an awful lot of goblins. The fury of the unrighteous is no threat to those under the aegis of Ishap. Easily said by someone who's covered in metal. Perhaps we could simply return to Krondor and tell the guards where we found the goblins... Or I could sneak in there, recover the children, strike a cool pose, and sneak my way out. I'm surprised, James, you actually came up with a plan that doesn't risk our lives and doesn't leave children to die. Attacking the goblins or calling out to the goblins gets you the same result: the full party lines up and aggros all the goblins.   If, on the other hand, you try to use James to sneak around... you probably get spotted and aggro all the goblins anyway, but this time James is right next to them while the rest of the party is back at the area entrance. James sneaking in and rescuing the babies on his own is the canon solution, but I could not for the life of me figure out how to make it work without him getting spotted. Another annoying issue with this is that you can't load saves in combat, all you can do is quit, so every time he got spotted or the fight went south, I had to either quit and restart the game OR wait for everyone to die.  So in the end I went for a fight. What you're seeing here, by the way, is the successful fight after four failures. The failures weren't failures due to party wipes, but because someone(Kendaric! You useless goon!) ate an arrow to the face and died, and I can't afford to have him not get the XP from the fight to help lift him out of being a waste of meat and bad facial hair.    So, the goblin mob ahead is made up of four types of enemies. On the left, you've got a pack of four archers with flaming arrows. Against, say, Solon, they do literally nothing, 1 damage at most. Against Kendaric or Jazhara they can one or two-shot them with relative ease.  Hence James and Solon get moved up to stand in the way of the arrows. Then there are two mages, though NPC mages tend to always slow-cast, which opens them up to being interrupted, but like the archers they have the potential to one or two-shot our own mages.  The main mob of enemies are just generic goblins with swords and shields, or daggers and shields, who are absolutely no threat. But mixed in with them are two goblins with greatswords and platemail that are almost impossible to injure, even Solon struggles to do even ten points of damage to them per whack. Having tried several things and failed, I just failed a run where I tried the strategy guide's suggestion of whacking the goblins with Thunderclap. Thunderclap stuns, but does no damage, and has the advantage of being a low-tier spell that's likely to succeed as a quick cast. Instead, I take a risk and have Jazhara crank out a Maelstrom which is like dropping a Lightning Strike on every target in the AoE while the enemies are still at range. And yeah, that super vague cloud with no indicator of exactly who will be affected is all you get for AoE spells and why I hate using AoE spells when there's a chance of hitting allies since it's so hard to tell who you're about to blow up.   It's a success! The enemies with glowing orbs on their heads are the ones that may randomly lose actions to being "stunned," and additionally they're all now somewhat damaged and a couple of weak bottom-tier goblins are outright killed.  Kendaric still can't be relied on to cast anything important without scrolls, so I have him burn a couple to hurl a Chaos Storm into the enemy formation. Oddly enough he can't hit anyone because James and Solon are in the way... except when I realize he can just blast the bouncing projectile right through these big boulders in the middle of the battlefield.  Despite being the top-tier Storm spell, Chaos Storm actually does kind of negligible damage. Its main advantage is that unlike Maelstrom it can't wipe out your own dudes, and any amount of damage is enough to interrupt the goblin wizards.    While the goblins advantage to melee range, Jazhara drops a second successful Maelstrom which finally clears out those loving goblin archers. Except for one fight where a cast from one of the mages wipes out Kendaric, sniping goblin archers were the result of all the others going to hell, so it's very satisfying to murder them all.  Now the main issue is clearing out the melee survivors, which is mostly a matter of patience. If nothing else, Solon will eventually whittle them down, but God, it takes forever to kill these useless assholes.   While Jazhara supports the melee goons, Kendaric gets into a duel with the back-of-field goblin mage, who doesn't get to cast any spells because he persists in slow casting despite eating a scroll-based Lightning Strike every turn.   Eventually the field is covered in corpses and, thank God, Kendaric gets a level-up out of it. This is, numbers-wise, the biggest fight you can find in all of Return to Krondor, but even so it doesn't actually yield an excessive amount of XP. Yeah, it's a lot but... not excessive, especially considering that, say, Solon, starts this chapter needing over 10k XP to level up.   The tent contains a few things. Firstly there's that chest. It's poo poo, contains nothing worthwhile.   If you've read The Assassins, then the name Sidi might be familiar. While out doing his soldiery job, William runs into the guy at an inn where he seems a bit shady(he trades with goblins, but insists he just trades jewels and medicine, not weapons and magical items), but otherwise not notable. He is, however, super-shady.   Interacting with the cage glues the kids to James' back until we return them to Farmer Toth. Those kids look creepy as gently caress, like James is hauling around a pair of Alien Greys.     Toth thanks us(and gives us a negligible XP reward) and we're good to continue on to the Wayfarer Inn... except there's one last unique location I want to show off.   Way up at the north of the map, but west of the goblin zone, there's a little valley that looks different from everything else.   It contains a fight with three trolls, one of them armored.  They're guarding five backpacks and two chests, something that could theoretically yield a shitload of super wild loot. Theoretically.    The fight has some weirdness, when I send James to attack the troll on the left, he runs around the whole formation to attack it from behind, opening Jazhara up to getting her face smashed apart by a troll's axe.  I also drop the upgraded "Deadly" poison on his sword which would normally be big news, except here it barely keeps pace with the trolls' regeneration.   Stunned and blinded, the troll doesn't get any more actions, and being blinded also makes it easier to hit, guaranteeing that Solon actually lands his whacks, allowing him and James to slowly whittle the survivor down to nothing. So what'd we get? All of one item of relevance.   The Draken Plate is, as far as I can tell, as defensively capable as Solon's enchanted plate, but it makes all hits on him crits and makes him 85% immune to fire. I think so far the only fire damage the party's suffered has been the occasional molotov and one of the goblin wizards at the goblin camp blasted Jazhara for 20 fire damage with a spell, so it doesn't seem worth the effort.   Off to the Wayfarer Inn at long last. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POIHhZD1b1g Short Version:   Everyone who doesn't want to sleep in the mud for another night, raise your hands. It builds character. It saves me money. I can't count how many ticks I've had to pick off during this road trip. I vote for the warm beds. Sounds like it's a tie, then. Since I'm able to set you on fire with my mind, that counts as a tie breaker. Well played. Now, you might go: "Dang, Purple, that was a short update, how come you didn't play more?" And I'll retort with this low amount of content taking two hours of play. Not so much because I got stuck on the goblin camp fight, it took me less tries than the loving Nighthawk fight at the Bitten Dog, but more because every second map node contained a bunch of bandits, goblins, goblins and bandits, trolls or goblins and wizards attacking the party and needing to be dunked on. None of them, aside from the trolls that dropped the very OP warhammer, dropped any interesting loot, meaningful amounts of XP or provided any sort of interesting challenge. About the only noteworthy part is that some of the fights occurred at ranges long enough that bows would have a very, very brief window of usefulness. Next time: Everyone gets a nice, uninterrupted rest at the Wayfarer and then we continue the plot.
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Apr 9, 2022 08:37
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This is probably entirely true with relation to bigger metaplot stuff, but as far as they present it both in the book and in the game it'll just prevent the use of divine magic and possibly help someone phone up Cthulhu("The Nameless One"). I'm thinking back to divine healing in the books and... Krondor: the Betrayal, is the only one where I recall any use of magical healing. Even in The Assassins, when a priest is summoned to heal a wound, all he does is basically purge it with fire to remove the infection/poison and then allow natural healing to take its course. Even in Silverthorn, the priests can't actually cure Anita, the best they can do is put her on ice until some perfectly normal adventure hobos slog it out into the wilds, grab the cure and bring it back. Obviously if magical healing was as omnipresent and powerful as in, say, D&D, then it would wildly change the setting, but for its loss to be majorly felt, then it would pretty much have to be. At least up to and including Tear of the Gods, priests in Midkemia don't particularly pull off any healing stunts that a perfectly mundane doctor couldn't. From what I know of the later books, yeah, demons and gods and etc. start becoming very important, but up to this point they've been very minor force compared to wizards and even mundane politics and armies.
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Apr 9, 2022 10:28
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Well, at least for humans on Midkemia it's a wheel of reincarnation instead, though ostensibly if someone has been an immense shithead in life, Lims-Kragma just dissolves their soul instead, and if they've been hyper-good they're elevated to some sort of one-ness with the cosmos that I don't believe is ever expanded upon. But yes, if healing and resurrection are entirely free and cost-less, it opens some questions, at least the few times its performed in Midkemia "on stage," divine magic seems to be very draining for the caster, even if it's a "minor" miracle of some sort. Like, after healing Locklear, Owyn and Gorath, the priest in Krondor: the Betrayal is just about dead on his feet, and when Father Belson in Krondor: the Assassins conjures a fire elemental, he pretty much passes out afterwards.
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Apr 9, 2022 20:02
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Torrannor posted:Which Avatar series? Google apparently only knows Avatar: The Last Airbender. It's a series of books/modules for the Forgotten Realms. The books I haven't read, and they're supposedly pretty decent as far as D&D novels go, but the modules are absolute dogshit. 2/3rds of them are literally just cutscenes.
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Apr 9, 2022 22:23
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Unironically everything I hear about the later Midkemia books gives me the same reactions that I have to Brian Herbert's final Dune books finishing off his dad's series, which is that it sounds like a fanfiction parody of itself.
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Apr 11, 2022 21:53
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disposablewords posted:Brian Herbert's Dune books hurt so much to read about that I can't bring myself to actually try reading them. It would take a far better author than Frank Herbert himself to turn something that apparently so completely misses the point of Dune into something readable. If there's one thing I will say for Brian Herbert, it's that I enjoyed his Dune prequels more than some of the actual Dune books because Brian actually understands the concept of writing dialogue that human beings might actually speak and which a human reader can understand. Reading Dune Messiah and Children of Dune feels very strongly like a fever dream nine times out of ten when two characters are talking and one of them isn't Stilgar. I greatly appreciate Stilgar for being the one person who in those two books who can speak without having it be some bizarre metaphor or riddle that made sense only to Frank Herbert's LSD-riddled brain. disposablewords posted:This chapter is one of my favorite parts of this game and I do not comprehend why. It is a very weird departure from the rest of the game, wandering a tiny stretch of the countryside near Krondor (seriously, I think it's a shorter distance to cover than you go between Krondor and Sarth in BAK) and just having dumb random encounters where you'll rapidly start ignoring the loot because it turns out whoops that's right the game has encumbrance rules. If there's one thing this chapter does right it's having battles that aren't fought in the metaphorical equivalent of a phone booth, where distance and positioning actually get a chance to have some play and where Slow Casts are actually viable because your mages aren't immediately in melee range and will instantly get interrupted every time they try to wind up a spell.
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Apr 11, 2022 23:50
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I've never heard of the Dossadi Experiment before. Is it entertainingly bad or just bad? Also apologies for a slower pace of updates, it has certainly been a week and the state of the world in general has not been conducive to feeling happy and productive. But updates will still occur! malkav11 posted:This game doesn't seem totally awful and some of the ideas seem like they'd be an improvement over Betrayal if competently implemented (though they mostly seem actively sabotaged by other elements of the design), but...man, there sure seems to be a lot less narrative and damned if I am retaining almost any of what's there. I definitely see why it's not nearly as well regarded. Hmmm... I feel this is largely an incorrect statement. The things I would "back-port" to Betrayal are: making it more clear which enemies are archers and which are not, having more terrain on the battlefield, having more "mixed" enemy groups, the idea of having a defensive/offensive/balanced combat stance and melee characters whacking at enemies trying to move past them(though since it's a single attack that also doesn't stop the enemy, and usually only mildly inconveniences them, it's not that supremely useful in most cases). Most of the changes otherwise are objectively pretty bad, aside from standard advancement-of-time upgrades like 3D models(even if they don't look as funny as the old Ren Faire sprites) and terrain in more than two colours. Don't worry, though, we're about to get to the part of the game where they remembered to tell a story again.
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Apr 16, 2022 23:46
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Update 8: Property Damage When we last left off, the party had just reached the warmth and safety of the Wayfarer Inn, something that would have been a more memorable moment if, say, the trip there had been dangerous and pressured the party's resources(but since the entire food-gold-consumables economy no longer exists, that's not an option) or even if they had just deployed some extremely basic mood-setting tricks like having a rainy and windy day drive the party towards the inn. Let's pretend they did any of those smart things and immediately set out to ruin it all.    The inn isn't heavily populated, there's the innkeeper, Royos, and his daughter, and two travellers. As a reminder, we've been informed that Arutha's agent, Alan, should be hanging around here getting drunk on Arutha's dime and should respond to the keyword "citadel." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGGO6pRMC0E Short version:   Are you a secret agent by any chance? Uhhhhhh, yeah, that's me, secret agent man. Oh thank goodness, Alan, please tell James that he has to leave me because I'm too important to risk. And perhaps he should tell me the exact route he plans to take afterwards, so I can send you to him with a big escort keeping you safe? Finally, a reasonable person! James, maybe you should stop him. This man is clearly a bandit or other miscreant. Oh fine, I was really curious to see how much Kendaric could embarrass himself.  ...don't you know how to resolve anything without violence? But if I don't use violence, how will I get to loot their bodies? Sorry about the property damage, innkeep. It's what happens, but if you break any furniture, you're paying for it. Now watch, this is how you really do it. This should be good. Greetings, good sir! Are you enjoying a nice mug of... Citadel? ... ... You're definitely the ones "Arthur" told me to watch out for. So, here's the scoop: you're heading up towards a village that's cursed as hell, half the place is dead or has run for the hills, there's also a witch. Sounds like a place that needs the grace of Ishap.Just about every time THE WITCH gets brought up, Jazhara replies with how there's no such thing as witches, just either natural mages who happen to be female or old women who know how to work with herbs. It's one of the things that feels slightly out of place in the book and in the game. In part because Midkemia's never really had the proscription against female spellcasters that Tsuranuanni had(though of course every Midkemian mage other than Jazhara is male, because being a spellcaster would mean having agency and Feist isn't going to give any of that to a woman without a fight), and in part because it feels like a very modern perspective. Like, we know there's no such thing as witches(in the sense of being able to cast spells, there are plenty of self-identifying witches on the internet), just women who made themselves unpopular in some way and ended up having a rough time of it as a result which sometimes terminated in an accusation of witchcraft. But firstly this is A) a world where magic is real. An old women could very possibly be able to curse you to piss centipedes or something, there's no reason to be skeptical about the supernatural(I mean seriously, these idiots fought a demon like a week ago) and B) scholarly skepsis of superstition just feels somewhat out of place in a medieval setting. In any case, Alan has no useful or actionable information at all. Just that Haldon Head is real cursed and that's bad and also William is still chasing Bear.  So let's send the gang to bed, something that will be totally uneventful.   Joke's on you, there's goblins and fire. In the book, the party reaches the inn first, then hears about Farmer Toth and saves the baby. This alternate sequence I've set up is a bit weird because you'd think that with all the goblins in the region cut into little pieces, there wouldn't be a bunch left to raid the inn.   A Maelstrom from Jazhara and a Fire Rain from Kendaric wipe out most of them. Note that Solon doesn't participate in this fight because he's literally too loving slow to reach the goblins in a single round of movement. Unless Jazhara gets off a Speed of Thought or enemies close in on him, he doesn't get to participate in most fights.  James, of course, stabs the survivor. Here I find that the strategy guide happens to be wrong, by the way, it insists that if you stop to loot the goblins, the inn collapses on the party, but no such thing happened to me(slightly sad, I was hoping it might have had some funny text or dialogue I could snap), so I'm not sure if it's a consequence of the fight going long or a random chance with each corpse you loot or what.   I swear, travelling with you people is the most dangerous thing I've ever done! I've never been almost stabbed so many times before! What's the matter, Kendaric? I thought you wanted a warm bed. ... Slightly funnier if my inn hadn't just burned down, rear end in a top hat.Anyway, time to continue up the coast.   The only "set" encounter along the way is that ninjas attempt to stab us. Again.  At least we're at Widow's Point, so I can raise the ship and get back to Krondor where the guards will keep me safe as long as I live somewhere sufficiently bougie.  Well, here we are... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elMoNHb31_U Short version:  ...anyone else smell something funny? I don't need to, you daft wimp, I see something funny. ...do you think maybe we should draw our weapons? Shhhhh, I'm hoping that if I glare at them enough, they'll go away. They can't see your glare through the shades, James. So, the air elementals hit pretty hard and stun pretty much guaranteed on every hit. If they take someone down, this can get pretty bad because as it is they can only stun half the party(because they get a bit of tunnel vision rather than spreading their attacks around) while everyone's alive. This is also somewhat different in the story, for one thing they attacked Stardock and not Sarth. Secondly, they're made out of electricity, and contact with "other elements," like swords, earth, fire, people, water, etc. will gently caress them up. When they attack Stardock in Darkness At Sethanon, Gardan takes out one of them in a pretty metal way by just tackling it into the ground, even though these things catch fire when they touch non-air things so it more or less explodes when he wraps his arms around it. In the book they also summon reinforcements.  "Thankfully"(in quotes because while it would be rough, it would also actually make the fight interesting), they don't have anything like that in this game, and they just show up and smash away at the party.  And then rather than actually getting killed like in the book, here they just loving run away after taking sufficient damage. It's honestly kinda weird.  That's it, I'm not raising a drat thing. What, why? Clearly some supernatural bullshit is going to try and kill me every time. I'm not raising a drat thing, until every evil ghost and ghoulie in the area has been smitten. Smote. Thank you, Solon. Well, fine! I wanted to kill another demon anyway. Now let's stride away in a cool way like we totally owned this.The chapter then promptly ends and we get...  Another William chapter.  What an exciting off-screen series of events that brought us here! Brought us here and killed off everyone on the team except for us. Let's not dwell on that. Attack! Rar! Congrats, we're now fighting Bear. Yes, it's literally this sudden.   I scored the enchanted plate off the almost-unkillable guy in the last fight and slapped it on William who now ignores almost all damage about as well as Solon while slowly smashing his way through Bear's goons. I don't attack Bear himself for... reasons.  That reason is that we can't kill him yet. William! Swords don't hurt him! It's some sort of magic! Impossible, he must just be buff enough that our swords bounce off him. ... ... Of course it's loving magic! Run for it! Jump into the river!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkGoLwhGHzU The soldiers wisely tell William that jumping into the river to save themselves is an idiotic choice, but William does it anyway, jumping off a cliff into a raging river while wearnig full platemail. A smart boy he ain't. And then the chapter ends! This is probably the shortest "chapter" I've ever seen in any videogame.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRAVbm_mfOI Short version: I bet a witch did this. Alton, you said that when you dropped a hammer on your foot, too. You never proved it wasn't her fault! You'll see, you'll all see! Greetings, good citizens. Any weird, evil things going on here? We've got a witch. You should burn her. Don't listen to Alton, don't burn the old lady, please get the hell out of Haldon Head before you die. ...care to elaborate on that? Only if you come inside and get drunk with me. I'm warming to this place already. ...could you repeat that part about a witch?  So, lots of folks have been dying around here. Horribly, at that. Wolves did it. Wolves. Yeah, you know, wolves. The kind that batter down people's doors, drag them out into the night and tear them apart. As wolves are known to do. My magic Jimmy Senses are telling me that we should have a look around Haldon Head. Do your "Jimmy Senses" say why I can't just stay at the inn while you do this? Because if you do, we'll tell your girlfriend and she'll beat you up. Come on, Kendaric, don't you feel a virtuous urge to assist the poor citizens of Haldon Head? To liberate them from the darkness choking their village? Hmmm. No.   Alright, so, the thing about Haldon Head is that it's super cursed, but it's largely only cursed at night, so now the day-night cycle actually matters somewhat beyond whether or not we can break into shops and people's rooms while they're asleep. As long as the sun is up, there are only three set combats we can get into(and one of those not quite yet). From the upper left, in a sort of clockwise pattern we have: Widow's Point, this is where we go if we think we've uncursed Haldon Head and can now raise the ship. The Witch's Hut, I'm sure she'll just be a very normal old lady. The Inn and Alton's farm, I believe the only place we can rest is the inn. The Priest's Pulpit, there's a priest of Sung in town who's sometimes preaching here. The Town Center, contains a shop and two homes. The Woodcutter's Shack, it's... a place. We shall see. The Graveyard, I'm sure that mysterious beings eating people at night and a large, looming mausoleum are in no way connected. We can easily spend a couple of in-game weeks dealing with this place because as I recall it, solving Haldon Head "right" requires hitting some triggers that I could never get right as a kid. In the book, on the other hand, they solve the place in less than a day, in part because there's a more looming and aggressive kind of cursery going on. See, in the book, there's evil magic that's literally shortening the hours of sunlight, so there are only a few hours in the middle of the day where Night Spooks(tm) can't eat your heart.  As mentioned, the pulpit is empty for now. Let's move on to the town center.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55G2yfDJhxs This guy has a lot to say. Short Version:  Ah, some new folks. Want to help me liquidate my stock so I can get the gently caress out of here? Come on, man, is there no one in this town who isn't lamenting their impending destruction at the hands of dark creatures spawned by the womb of night? Well, no. Ah, fair enough. Now who do we need to smite to stop this? If I knew that, I'd probably not be lamenting quite as hard. This whole mess started when the woodcutter and his wife disappeared, then the folks who went to check on them got mangled, and since then it's just gotten worse and worse. ...how do you know they got killed? Did any of them survive? Wow, a pertinent question rather than whining! Two, but one of them just got killed the other night, and the last one is boarded up in his house. Thanks for the help, now let's unload these cursed Valheru artifacts on you. loving adventurers.   This is the survivor's house. He doesn't want anything to do with us for the time being, he'll just tell at us to gently caress off and stop being evil monsters. Let's come back at night and TP his house to gently caress with him.    This house is easy to miss, the fella inside is one of the rare NPC's who doesn't want us to just stomp all over his loving house. His daughter's dying to death of deadliness, you see, and he's convinced the Witch is responsible, but he won't let us see her unless we can get the local priest or the mayor to say we aren't a bunch of psychopathic murder hobos. We should probably let Jazhara or Solon lead the speaking when it's time for that.    The witch has a little hut here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9kc1mywkDk The music here is kind of odd, it makes me think of like a quirky adventure game more than an RPG. We can't get into the Witch's hut for now(or possibly we can, her front door is kind of finicky since it's both a very small active area AND requires you to be very close to it, unlike 90% of the doors in the game.).  We'll be back here later.    If we visit Widow's Point, since we're in the area anyway, we can also wander around the beach below the Point itself. There's nothing of interest here for now. I have a faint memory that random combat encounters can spawn here, but I think that may be a false memory.   The graveyard is surprisingly safe(for now), and we can actually read gravestones here!      They're relatively serious and lore-friendly.   And for now we can't do anything to the mausoleum, though Kendaric comments that it's very old for the region. I don't know why Kendaric is the mausoleum loremaster, it feels like it would be more appropriate for Solon or Jazhara, or even James. But I guess they wanted to make sure he had some more dialogue. Now, let's visit the Woodcutter's Shack, where the evil began.  Wow that really is not subtle at all.  As we approach the shack, an NPC comes running in behind us and the game switches to combat mode!   Looks like we're fighting a vampire. Psh, how tough can he be?   Vampires in Krondor do not gently caress around, they hit super hard and they lifesteal which means that if they land some hits, they take longer to wear down.  Thankfully they're not immune to having their heads caved in, but I believe that the Lifedrain segment of their damage ignores armor, which means that even the chunky Brother Solon is vulnerable to their shenanigans.    Ah, good, we've all squeezed into the tiny Cursed Shack, I'm sure this will work out well. If you like, we could leave you outside alone to greet the next vampire. Would you pipe down? I'm pondering this cursed artifact.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqVDkzvLGVs  ...well? What is it? Seems like it turns off the sun in a small radius. So not a thing we want vampires to have. Good job, us, for foiling whatever their plan was.  I'm not sure why turning off the sun is supposed to be useful against the undead, it feels more like something the undead would generally employ against others. Now, full disclosure, we will end up using it against the undead, but in a very niche way that I can't really imagine being a common use case for mystic darkness.  Right, whatever happened there was an unholy travesty. I say we go interrogate the witch. You're thinking about burning her, aren't you? ...perhaps a little bit.   Oh thank goodness, she isn't home, she won't turn us into frogs.  There are two interactibles in the Witch's hut, the small table in the upper right and the cauldron. The table makes Jazhara exclaim what a wonderful herbalist the witch is, and the cauldron...  If you taste it, it turns out to be good soup and gives everyone 100 XP. In the game, Kendaric tastes it, in the book he cowers in a corner, terrified that it's some sort of horrible witch's curse brew. In any case, once it's been tasted...  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEeStnmT8to If anyone is inscrutably skipping the videos for my recaps, don't skip this one. The witch's voice acting is pretty funny, though I worry that some of her dialogue might be hard to hear due to the background music. Short version:   Alright you little shits, you better be here to set me on fire or listen to my exposition. We'll take the exposition. ...are you sure? I just got done drying out the firewood and collecting some oil. James, this woman is insane, we should leave. Old and daft I may be, but insane I ain't! What about you, priesty lad? I'd be lying if I said I wasn't tempted. I knew it! Stop trying to make us set you on fire and just exposit. Please. Fine, fine. So as you might all have noticed, Haldon Head's got itself a bit of a curse problem. That's an understatement! I suppose you know something about it? Aye, they built the town on top of Cthulhu's summer cottage. Hey! Only I'm allowed to break the fourth wall. Oh fine, fine. Mysterious things what mankind shouldn't know of and what've been here since the dawn of time. Better? Much. So will you actually tell us how to resolve anything here? Not yet! Gotta set some more flags first. Before we go... why are the villagers so intent on seeing you burned? Damned if I know, they used to come here for cures and poultices when things were less cursed. Maybe you should be asking them rather than me. That was a waste of our time. What are we going to do now? We could always smash some vampires. Why does it always end in fighting? Because the authors astutely realize that evil things don't go away from polite conversation, you have to smack them upside the head.Next: The team goes out at night during a vampire plague, like the geniuses they are.
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Apr 19, 2022 11:42
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dervinosdoom posted:I've read a good bit of Feist's books, but I didn't remember the vampires! What's next? Werewolves? Vampires, and in general the undead, have been very rare(Black Slayers only, really) or non-existent(in the case of vampires) in Feist's previous books. The Assassins introduces the first vampire, and now in Return/Tear of the Gods there's an entire plague of them. The writing does imply that the undead generally exist, though, since the faithful of Lims-Kragma are noted as really hating them. So it's possible that the undead were previously a regular issue until a bunch of angry death cultists went out and made them just plain dead. EDIT: Oh, and The Assassins doesn't have a werewolf... but it does have a werepanther when an evil wizard assassin turns himself into one.
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Apr 19, 2022 15:41
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dervinosdoom posted:Interesting to see a death cult hate the undead, it makes sense really, but I rarely see it. You have the same thing in Warhammer Fantasy with the Cult of Morr, their worship of Death is Death as a natural thing that happens, not as a wonderful thing to be encouraged or caused everywhere, or something to be gloried in. But something to prevent the perversion of(via Undeath, for instance), something to ease the passing of and something to see a quiet beauty in. With Lims-Kragma in particular, seeing as how she's the bureaucrat who oversees the wheel of reincarnation, it makes a lot of sense for her cult to hate someone who tries to skip their turn to ride.
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Apr 19, 2022 16:22
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Evil Fluffy posted:I think the number of women with any sort of agency in the series is... 4? Maybe 5? And that's being very generous. I can only imagine his initial thoughts about Mara of the Acoma when Wurst wrote her books. I honestly don't even think Feist is coming from a "bad" place in the way he writes women, more an ignorant place. Like, yeah, they have sort of stereotypical, superficial female interests but at the same time none of them are evil, treacherous or manipulative. So it just feels like a subconscious bias rather than actively thinking "women can't do these things" or "women don't care about these things."
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Apr 19, 2022 16:53
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 22:52 |
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It's kind of sad they spent so much time on the currency without, uh, giving you anything really worth buying. Ostensibly there's a way to seed the shops with worthwhile items because supposedly whatever you sell on the first time around pops up for purchase in the shops you sold it in if you do a second playthrough(why would you ever?), but otherwise the stores tend to sell unworthwhile things, as I feel I've already mentioned.
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Apr 22, 2022 08:16
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