- So I meet up with Jespar in Duneville.
Look at that poor bastard. Like his world is ending.
- The music is, as ever, on point. Arabian Nights-esque violin and some kind of wind instrument, like wind across the sands, a mournful piano creeping in… and here and there, a strain of pure, slithering menace.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXF5Pg6 ... uGiATi_tYY
- So I head out into the desert with Jespar at my heels… and immediately get distracted by a ruin called Old Ishmartep.
That resolution to ignore the side stuff and finish the main quests lasted long.
- The Tomb Guardians inside are using the models of Skyrim’s mid-level Falmer: needle teeth, nonexistent nose, pointed ears, near-blind pink eyes, blue-green veins shining through translucent skin. Loincloth, greaves, gauntlets, the multi-eyed masks. Creepy as shit, in a phrase.
It’s a much different feel than exploring a Falmer-infested ruin, though. Fighting the Falmer always felt like putting down some piteous creatures. Fighting the Tomb Guardians feel like fighting a small army.
Part of it’s the lighting;
The tomb isn’t
well-lit exactly but there are cracks in the walls here and there letting in natural light. There are lit fire braziers. No bioluminescent green glowing fungus to be found.
Part of it’s in the fighting itself;
Falmer tend to chitinous equipment and armor and domesticate chaurus bugs; the Tomb Guardians are dressed in simple cloth, but well-equipped with silver-steel swords, shields of bone and bows of wood and horn. It’s not like hideous pus beetle animal husbandry would be easy, probably! But fighting with well-forged swords and shields makes the Tomb Guardians
feel more civilized.
- Most of it is in the wordless storytelling you get from exploring the tomb, though.
You can find bags of gunpowder. Mining equipment.
Maps.
I don’t know if Old Ishmartep wants to conquer the surface world the way the Falmer do, but they already feel like they’ll have a better shot at it than the Falmer.
There’s a zone in the dungeon called the Nest, and I figure, “Oh, here’s the spider section.” There’s usually a spider section.
Agnod, ancient crashed spaceship, had a spider section.
Well, not exactly; this zone involves the Tomb Guardians fighting off an encroaching sand spider nest. Within a minute the spiders are dead and the Tomb Guardians haven’t lost a fighter.
I have to murder spiders all the time too, they get everywhere! It feels like we have so much in common!
- After completing the simple fetch quest to unlock the door to his ornate tomb, Ishmartep himself emerges from his coffin in beams of light, a shriveled king complete with a golden crown upon his head.
Given the way he one-shotted my ice elemental, I assume he’s probably at the level of one of the Lost One Lords, but popping the timestop power and double power attacking him a couple times meant I didn’t have to find out.
That power is honestly the most ridiculous so far; I leveled twice in this dusty dungeon, and put both points into taking it to Level 3 (12 seconds, Dio Brando ain’t shit in comparison)
- Well, a quick teleport back to Duneville to sell an armory’s worth of silver-steel later:
Surmak Saltblow looks ridiculous with his mouth hanging open, you’d think no one had ever jumped up on his counter to talk to him before.
Actually, he just tends to leave his gob open in general, giving him this constant look of gormless surprise, it’s kind of funny.
It’s also pretty nice that everything in Duneville (except the jail) is in one zone, so you can hear the bard from the tavern as you shop.
Anyway, that over with, I can get back on the road to Jespar’s meetup with his sister.
- The old Dal’Varek estate is in the midst of an oasis in the desert, more of a jungle biome than anything. Not what I was expecting.
Aside from being attacked by panthers and lions, I also have to fight some Marauder-type bandits. One of them steps up the usual Enderalean insult game by calling me a ‘fucking bitch.’
Welp.
Jespar also has this line when he watches me tear the soul out of a bandit and eat it to refresh myself. His reaction is:
“Who needs potions when he knows Entropy?”
Jespar’s good people. I mean, for an undead ghost-summoning swordswoman such as myself. It’s probably for the best that the game doesn’t have
Calia react to the Entropy thing, although that would be pretty interesting in its own way.
- Jespar and Adila’s meetup spot is in their old kids’ hidey-hole, which turns out to be an abandoned shadowsteel mine.
Well, ‘abandoned.’
Miners moved in at some point, and were then massacred by Lost Ones when the, you know, Red Madness and everything happened.
Jespar’s childhood hideout was built on top of a mine, which was built on top of a crypt.
Welcome to Enderal.
- In fairness, it looks totally sweet, and I'd want to explore it if I were some stupid kid, too.
- So the plan is for Jespar to take the lift down to meet her, and I’m going to have to fight my way through the crypt to come out in the bushes and spy on them.
I’m not even surprised.
Gives me a chance to try out the new Za Warudo power, and wow. Timestop, where have you been all my life?
It was pretty neat when the Lost Ones heard me walking around, opened the door and waltzed out of the crypt and into the mine area. But otherwise the crypt is surprisingly small and easy to get through, which I appreciate.
- Anyway! Adila has a new victim – because of course she was the one murderin’ dudes, nobody except Jespar believed otherwise for a second – and this one’s a little special. One of the guys who killed their parents and burned their house to the ground.
Now, I’m not entirely sure if that means he’s from the Relata – the mob – or one of the corrupt judges that Jespar’s dad tried to bring down, or what. It doesn’t really matter in the end, I guess. He’s just a prop in this tale of sibling… whatever.
He tries to talk her down for a few minutes, while I wonder when exactly I’m supposed to pop out of the bushes and shank her in the back.
- Jespar tries to get her to give him the Stone and then leave free, but anyone who’s ever seen Gollum and that ring knows that wasn’t going to end well, either.
Adila summons up a blast of flame that sets both the victim and Jespar on fire.
Welp.
Adila’s pretty good, but she’s no… well, me.
The Takeaway:
It’s kind of shocking, how quickly that was over. Constantine's death I saw coming, with the chanting in elder tongues and madman ramblings; Jespar's I didn't. Which I guess is the point, right? Jespar isn’t a Capital Letter Emissary, he’s just a guy. And when you play with fire, when you involve yourself in big events… sometimes you get burnt. Luck runs out.
I don’t
think there was any way to avoid that; that would be a pretty enormous story beat going completely differently if I could walk up and shank Adila in the back while they were talking.
But I think it says something that I kind of want to reload and try it anyway.