Nice. You are heading, once you get around the tavern and pass the lake on the left, into one of the most stunningly beautiful landscapes I have ever seen. Looking forward to seeing your impression.
Sorry for the long wait, y'all. Updates may or may not continue to be spotty between real life issues, commission work and playing Dominions 4 instead of Enderal with what time I have. Anyway, onward!
---
- The Crystal Forest is absolutely gorgeous, like a snowscape mixed with cherry blossom trees (and cherry blossom shrubs. And clusters of pink glowing crystals).
It would be even nicer without all the monsters, but one can’t have everything.
It houses ‘mighty wisps’ (whose charge attacks would be problematic if I didn’t have Swamp Thing and Jespar to hide behind), giant pink crystal elementals (which soak up tons of damage), and some kind of floating ghost snake (which zooms around enough I need to switch back to the soil elemental, so he can bolt them on the run).
The wisps and elementals are legitimately dangerous, although blocking giant crystal fists is what I have Jespar for. The ghost snakes are mostly just annoying, leading to me flailing away wildly with my sword while it does curves and loop the loops.
- On the way, Jespar decides to drop some more information on me about the Living Temple. Thank you.
Specifically, that it is totally conscious and – Constantine adds later – is probably mad as a hatter since it’s been around since the Pyreans died off and the High Ones destroyed the world.
Now, this is a cool concept, but more importantly Constantine informs me that the Pyreans had a habit of sticking human (well, Pyrean) souls into objects. Rarely, but it happened. This temple is one of those.
So there probably are millennia-old talking swords in this setting.
Why they thought this was a good idea is lost to time, unfortunately.
- I got distracted from the main quest by wandering into a Pyrean ruin called Old Miskamuhr at this point. Some of these ruins are basically one large room with a couple of monsters and some goodies, and some of them are full-blown dungeons, and you can’t really be sure which is which until you dive in. I have a quest from some starling trader group in Ark to check on these whenever I find them and bring them back artifacts in exchange for gold pennies or magic equipment.
Miskamuhr, it turns out, is a full-bore dungeon. It’s pretty hardcore, actually. It’s peopled by ice golems, frost trolls and some of the harder forms of undead (ancestors, and a new type of faintly glowing skeleton called Decaying undead, which sounds like it should be the easiest type of Lost One, not the hardest), plus the occasional wandering ghost snake, and they tend to come in packs of 3-4.
Nice lighting in Miskamuhr, too, if a little rave-y for my tastes.
- Since I got that Bound Bow III spell, I’ve been branching out into archery, and that helps a lot here. So the way stealth works in this game is you crouch down, and there’s a little icon in the middle of your screen that starts as a horizontal line (unseen) and gradually opens into a full eye to indicate you’ve been spotted.
So I shoot way down the hallway and peg something (bow sneak attacks are x1.5 damage), which gets it charging towards me. But, and here’s the important part, the eye is usually only half open. So even though they know where the glowing arrows are coming from, they don’t see me, which means I can rack up 3 or 4 sneak attacks to the face to thin the herd out before they actually get to me. And by then my elemental has positioned itself in front of me, which is a nuisance for aiming but very good for not dying.
It feels good. Since I’ve started picking up bow talents (I’ve already gotten to the top of the entropy (summoning) and heavy armor trees, though I could go back and backfill in talents there or go into one handed weapons if I wanted), I’m hoping there’s one that lets me sneak while moving at normal speed.
But if I get antsy and tired of sneaking around I can still just switch spells and stab things with a sword for a while, so it works out.
- So I get to the end eventually, after a puzzle that involves stripping down to my underpants and running really fast before sawblades pop up and turn me into giblets. Being an adventurer actually involves a lot more strategic nudity than I was anticipating, going into things, but never mind. So I run the gauntlet and I meet… a guy named Miskamuhr.
Old Miskamuhr isn’t the name of the ruin, it’s the name of its master. And he is not happy with me for killing all his trolls and ice elementals. Are these tamed trolls I've been killing? This guy is hanging out in the last room behind a pop-up Pyrean slasher trap, maybe he's been hiding out in here for who knows how long.
I’m guessing that this guy is actually some kind of undead Pyrean, which is weird because we’re looking for something exactly like this but my only option is to shoot him in the face until he dies. Actually, I have a talent from entropy called Entropic Blood that can turn enemies into my obedient slaves. I’ve mostly been using it to make Arps fight to the death in comical bum fights before one of them explodes (if the slave dies, he explodes, it’s pretty great).
So hypothetically I could mind-control this guy and march him all the way from the Crystal Forest back to Ark. I’m not sure what I’d tell Tealor Arantheal when I got there, but presumably ‘hey here’s a Pyrean lich, have fun’ would distract him from my totally bad (also, rad), no-good use of forbidden magicks.
I’m actually not that sad I don’t have the option, because having to walk this guy back to Ark while recasting Entropic Blood every 30 seconds would be a nightmare.
- So I kill this priceless repository of ancient lore by stabbing him in the face, and find he’s wearing three pairs of shoes in addition to his sword and bow. I’m not even sure how that works, but I take all of them. And start wearing one, since these steel boots have been old and busted since level 10 and without the Handicrafts skill I’m totally at the mercy of whatever I can dig out of random ruins.
- That accomplished, I head on to the Living Temple, which looks great. And then it looks even better once I put the thing in the thing.
Wait, we're looking for what? Undertrain?? I thought we were here to stop the invasion or something! Which... wouldn't require us to visit the Temple of Doom, I guess. Huh. Well, it'll all turn out fine in the end, probably.
- Constantine monologues at me for a bit about how the Living Temple is basically Castle Heterodyne and going to kill us, but I forgive him because that’s pretty cool.
Jespar also has a bout of self-consciousness and asks why Constantine keeps paying his exorbitant fees. Constantine reassures him in his own inimical way.
Love that guy.
- There’s also an exchange where Constantine says that he’d run naked through the streets before trusting these Order guys with saving the world, and Jespar says he wouldn’t mind seeing that. And Constantine replies, ‘I bet you would.’
Woah, what? Jespar, buddy. I know it’s been a while for you, but still. Between this and that 'What do you want, a love song?' comment from earlier, I'm wondering if I'm being a little third wheel-y right now. Should I leave you kids alone? I mean, I love Constantine, but I still don’t want to see his old man bits flopping about, y’know?
The Takeaway:
Well, the distractions are over and I'm finally entering the Temple of Doom! Well, following Constantine to make sure the glowy moat is safe to cross, but there is definite forward momentum going on here. Maybe in the next update I'll actually manage to finish this quest! Fingers crossed.
---
- The Crystal Forest is absolutely gorgeous, like a snowscape mixed with cherry blossom trees (and cherry blossom shrubs. And clusters of pink glowing crystals).
It would be even nicer without all the monsters, but one can’t have everything.
It houses ‘mighty wisps’ (whose charge attacks would be problematic if I didn’t have Swamp Thing and Jespar to hide behind), giant pink crystal elementals (which soak up tons of damage), and some kind of floating ghost snake (which zooms around enough I need to switch back to the soil elemental, so he can bolt them on the run).
The wisps and elementals are legitimately dangerous, although blocking giant crystal fists is what I have Jespar for. The ghost snakes are mostly just annoying, leading to me flailing away wildly with my sword while it does curves and loop the loops.
- On the way, Jespar decides to drop some more information on me about the Living Temple. Thank you.
Specifically, that it is totally conscious and – Constantine adds later – is probably mad as a hatter since it’s been around since the Pyreans died off and the High Ones destroyed the world.
Now, this is a cool concept, but more importantly Constantine informs me that the Pyreans had a habit of sticking human (well, Pyrean) souls into objects. Rarely, but it happened. This temple is one of those.
So there probably are millennia-old talking swords in this setting.
Why they thought this was a good idea is lost to time, unfortunately.
- I got distracted from the main quest by wandering into a Pyrean ruin called Old Miskamuhr at this point. Some of these ruins are basically one large room with a couple of monsters and some goodies, and some of them are full-blown dungeons, and you can’t really be sure which is which until you dive in. I have a quest from some starling trader group in Ark to check on these whenever I find them and bring them back artifacts in exchange for gold pennies or magic equipment.
Miskamuhr, it turns out, is a full-bore dungeon. It’s pretty hardcore, actually. It’s peopled by ice golems, frost trolls and some of the harder forms of undead (ancestors, and a new type of faintly glowing skeleton called Decaying undead, which sounds like it should be the easiest type of Lost One, not the hardest), plus the occasional wandering ghost snake, and they tend to come in packs of 3-4.
Nice lighting in Miskamuhr, too, if a little rave-y for my tastes.
- Since I got that Bound Bow III spell, I’ve been branching out into archery, and that helps a lot here. So the way stealth works in this game is you crouch down, and there’s a little icon in the middle of your screen that starts as a horizontal line (unseen) and gradually opens into a full eye to indicate you’ve been spotted.
So I shoot way down the hallway and peg something (bow sneak attacks are x1.5 damage), which gets it charging towards me. But, and here’s the important part, the eye is usually only half open. So even though they know where the glowing arrows are coming from, they don’t see me, which means I can rack up 3 or 4 sneak attacks to the face to thin the herd out before they actually get to me. And by then my elemental has positioned itself in front of me, which is a nuisance for aiming but very good for not dying.
It feels good. Since I’ve started picking up bow talents (I’ve already gotten to the top of the entropy (summoning) and heavy armor trees, though I could go back and backfill in talents there or go into one handed weapons if I wanted), I’m hoping there’s one that lets me sneak while moving at normal speed.
But if I get antsy and tired of sneaking around I can still just switch spells and stab things with a sword for a while, so it works out.
- So I get to the end eventually, after a puzzle that involves stripping down to my underpants and running really fast before sawblades pop up and turn me into giblets. Being an adventurer actually involves a lot more strategic nudity than I was anticipating, going into things, but never mind. So I run the gauntlet and I meet… a guy named Miskamuhr.
Old Miskamuhr isn’t the name of the ruin, it’s the name of its master. And he is not happy with me for killing all his trolls and ice elementals. Are these tamed trolls I've been killing? This guy is hanging out in the last room behind a pop-up Pyrean slasher trap, maybe he's been hiding out in here for who knows how long.
I’m guessing that this guy is actually some kind of undead Pyrean, which is weird because we’re looking for something exactly like this but my only option is to shoot him in the face until he dies. Actually, I have a talent from entropy called Entropic Blood that can turn enemies into my obedient slaves. I’ve mostly been using it to make Arps fight to the death in comical bum fights before one of them explodes (if the slave dies, he explodes, it’s pretty great).
So hypothetically I could mind-control this guy and march him all the way from the Crystal Forest back to Ark. I’m not sure what I’d tell Tealor Arantheal when I got there, but presumably ‘hey here’s a Pyrean lich, have fun’ would distract him from my totally bad (also, rad), no-good use of forbidden magicks.
I’m actually not that sad I don’t have the option, because having to walk this guy back to Ark while recasting Entropic Blood every 30 seconds would be a nightmare.
- So I kill this priceless repository of ancient lore by stabbing him in the face, and find he’s wearing three pairs of shoes in addition to his sword and bow. I’m not even sure how that works, but I take all of them. And start wearing one, since these steel boots have been old and busted since level 10 and without the Handicrafts skill I’m totally at the mercy of whatever I can dig out of random ruins.
- That accomplished, I head on to the Living Temple, which looks great. And then it looks even better once I put the thing in the thing.
Wait, we're looking for what? Undertrain?? I thought we were here to stop the invasion or something! Which... wouldn't require us to visit the Temple of Doom, I guess. Huh. Well, it'll all turn out fine in the end, probably.
- Constantine monologues at me for a bit about how the Living Temple is basically Castle Heterodyne and going to kill us, but I forgive him because that’s pretty cool.
Jespar also has a bout of self-consciousness and asks why Constantine keeps paying his exorbitant fees. Constantine reassures him in his own inimical way.
Love that guy.
- There’s also an exchange where Constantine says that he’d run naked through the streets before trusting these Order guys with saving the world, and Jespar says he wouldn’t mind seeing that. And Constantine replies, ‘I bet you would.’
Woah, what? Jespar, buddy. I know it’s been a while for you, but still. Between this and that 'What do you want, a love song?' comment from earlier, I'm wondering if I'm being a little third wheel-y right now. Should I leave you kids alone? I mean, I love Constantine, but I still don’t want to see his old man bits flopping about, y’know?
The Takeaway:
Well, the distractions are over and I'm finally entering the Temple of Doom! Well, following Constantine to make sure the glowy moat is safe to cross, but there is definite forward momentum going on here. Maybe in the next update I'll actually manage to finish this quest! Fingers crossed.
What an awesome update! I hope you have the opportunity to continue your excellent series.
Going to Old Miskamuhr was certainly a hard-core detour. Well done.
Going to Old Miskamuhr was certainly a hard-core detour. Well done.
OMG, so you've been playing Dominions IV for weeks? Isn't that ... click click click ... almost there ... click click click ... just a few more minutes . . . click click click . . . almost ready to attack . . . click click click. . . .
- Once we step inside the door to the Living Temple, we’re greeted by this loading screen.
Well that’s fucking ominous.
- The first room in the Temple is a huge, wide-open space. Vaulted ceilings, all that. Also swarming with Lost Ones, although ‘swarming’ isn’t really the right term. ‘Ambling’, maybe. There’s probably a dozen of them, including a ‘Grotesque Lost One’ that looks like Enderal’s version of a Skyrim giant (possibly I should have expected this when I saw the mammoth parked outside), but the room is so huge we’re basically fighting them one by one.
Constantine and Jespar just walk right on down and start fighting. I replayed this bit in case I missed some dialogue, but apparently they didn’t have anything to say. Felt a little weird.
- We do that thing we do, and move on once everything is dead.
We learn that Pyrean interior decorating leaves something to be desired.
Scowling moai heads everywhere.
So we need to split up to get the three portcullises to different paths open. Now, I want to make a joke about what a good thing it is that we happened to bring exactly the right number of guys, but mostly I just want to know why. Why would you design your temple this way? Did everyone who wanted to make the pilgrimage to the Living Temple have to come in groups of three?
I don’t know, maybe in better times the Living Temple kept all the portcullises open and you could pick your path instead of having to jump through these hoops.
- So there’s wisps and fire elementals to work through, and what’s basically Enderal’s version of platform puzzles!
I kind of applaud them for trying, anyway.
- I really wish this ancient ruin was better lit. I can’t wield a bow and a torch at the same time, so I have to sword-and-torch in some places.
Ask and ye shall receive, I guess.
Why would you build your temple this way.
- There’s this bit where you need to pop open a portcullis to proceed, except the lever is guarded by two of those lightning traps like the one from Fogville, where you have to knock the crystal off its pedestal to disarm it, but these ones are set far out of reach. Also, they only start zapping you when you’re almost to the lever, so you have to try and run back down the passageway to get out of the range, but it never works, and you die. So you have to shoot a ton of arrows and hope you knocked over the crystal, but you can’t be sure because if you get close enough to tell if it’s knocked over it’ll probably lightning bolt you if it isn’t.
I guess my point is, fuck lightning traps.
- I had a trapper-keeper just like this in high school, except there was also a sweet unicorn on it.
At first I thought the Pyreans just liked decorating with glowing crystal, but the random placement suggests this stuff just… grew here.
- So me and Jespar meet up, and we discover Constantine chanting in strange tongues and making obeisances before a Giant Statue™ that all the Pyrean temples seem to come equipped with.
Now on the one hand, that statue looks great. Less overtly menacing than our old pal Kor or the fertility goddess type statues I’ve seen here and there. Staff in one hand, book in the other, good traditional God of Wisdom motif.
On the other hand, don’t you do it, SureAI. Don’t you dare.
- Oh, they did it, all right.
Extremely strong performance by Constantine’s voice actor, here (barring, possibly, the one line that sounded like Andy Serkis voicing Gollum). I mean, it’s overacted, but that’s kind of the point: Constantine is in the midst of a full-blown breakdown/religious mania here.
- So the way this shakes out, the Living Temple got into his head and showed him what drove it mad, back in the day. The Cleansing. Burnt flesh everywhere, Light™, etcetera. Ragnarok stuff.
Constantine has some lines like ‘the sin is US’ which are presumably going to be prophetic at some point, like we brought the High Ones on ourselves or something. More importantly, he recognizes that killing us all won’t fix anything, but maybe it will make the Giant Statue feel better, so that’s what he’s gonna do.
So I holster my sword and meet my death just on the off-chance this is some kind of test, but after dying and reloading, Jespar and I put the old man down like a dog.
After burying him where he fell (nice touch), and bouncing my sword off the statue’s head a few times to express my feelings (bitch), Jespar and I move on.
- Some strong art direction in this part, and a much-needed cooldown from the Constantine thing.
It’s never explained exactly what this is, but I’d hypothesize that these were living quarters for the temple staff and either had some sluice gate or dam that failed over the eons, or the water level rose during the last Cleansing.
- In the little house, Jespar recognizes a smell and goes to investigate.
Bloated, water-logged corpse is apparently a smell he’s familiar with. (Jespar, why do you recognize that smell).
He comes right back out in a minute and asks me for a pass-code, something he and I shared together: that thing with Yero.
Because inside the house, washed up on shore after who knows how long at sea, is our old buddy Sirius.
Also, my own corpse. Still pristine and undamaged by the seawater, presumably so I can be sure to recognize myself.
What the fuck, SureAI.
The Takeaway:
Aixon, all the way back in that dream sequence for Something Momentous II, was apparently right: I’m something dreamed into existence while my body died, strapped to a rock and a dead friend. I am post-living, bought the farm, shuffled off the mortal coil, dearly departed, etcetera. Just like all those sadsack skeletons I’ve been putting down for the last dozen hours.
If I ever see Aixon again I’m going to punch him in the mouth twice as hard for being right.
All this and I haven’t even found the Undertrain yet! This is a long one.
Well that’s fucking ominous.
- The first room in the Temple is a huge, wide-open space. Vaulted ceilings, all that. Also swarming with Lost Ones, although ‘swarming’ isn’t really the right term. ‘Ambling’, maybe. There’s probably a dozen of them, including a ‘Grotesque Lost One’ that looks like Enderal’s version of a Skyrim giant (possibly I should have expected this when I saw the mammoth parked outside), but the room is so huge we’re basically fighting them one by one.
Constantine and Jespar just walk right on down and start fighting. I replayed this bit in case I missed some dialogue, but apparently they didn’t have anything to say. Felt a little weird.
- We do that thing we do, and move on once everything is dead.
We learn that Pyrean interior decorating leaves something to be desired.
Scowling moai heads everywhere.
So we need to split up to get the three portcullises to different paths open. Now, I want to make a joke about what a good thing it is that we happened to bring exactly the right number of guys, but mostly I just want to know why. Why would you design your temple this way? Did everyone who wanted to make the pilgrimage to the Living Temple have to come in groups of three?
I don’t know, maybe in better times the Living Temple kept all the portcullises open and you could pick your path instead of having to jump through these hoops.
- So there’s wisps and fire elementals to work through, and what’s basically Enderal’s version of platform puzzles!
I kind of applaud them for trying, anyway.
- I really wish this ancient ruin was better lit. I can’t wield a bow and a torch at the same time, so I have to sword-and-torch in some places.
Ask and ye shall receive, I guess.
Why would you build your temple this way.
- There’s this bit where you need to pop open a portcullis to proceed, except the lever is guarded by two of those lightning traps like the one from Fogville, where you have to knock the crystal off its pedestal to disarm it, but these ones are set far out of reach. Also, they only start zapping you when you’re almost to the lever, so you have to try and run back down the passageway to get out of the range, but it never works, and you die. So you have to shoot a ton of arrows and hope you knocked over the crystal, but you can’t be sure because if you get close enough to tell if it’s knocked over it’ll probably lightning bolt you if it isn’t.
I guess my point is, fuck lightning traps.
- I had a trapper-keeper just like this in high school, except there was also a sweet unicorn on it.
At first I thought the Pyreans just liked decorating with glowing crystal, but the random placement suggests this stuff just… grew here.
- So me and Jespar meet up, and we discover Constantine chanting in strange tongues and making obeisances before a Giant Statue™ that all the Pyrean temples seem to come equipped with.
Now on the one hand, that statue looks great. Less overtly menacing than our old pal Kor or the fertility goddess type statues I’ve seen here and there. Staff in one hand, book in the other, good traditional God of Wisdom motif.
On the other hand, don’t you do it, SureAI. Don’t you dare.
- Oh, they did it, all right.
Extremely strong performance by Constantine’s voice actor, here (barring, possibly, the one line that sounded like Andy Serkis voicing Gollum). I mean, it’s overacted, but that’s kind of the point: Constantine is in the midst of a full-blown breakdown/religious mania here.
- So the way this shakes out, the Living Temple got into his head and showed him what drove it mad, back in the day. The Cleansing. Burnt flesh everywhere, Light™, etcetera. Ragnarok stuff.
Constantine has some lines like ‘the sin is US’ which are presumably going to be prophetic at some point, like we brought the High Ones on ourselves or something. More importantly, he recognizes that killing us all won’t fix anything, but maybe it will make the Giant Statue feel better, so that’s what he’s gonna do.
So I holster my sword and meet my death just on the off-chance this is some kind of test, but after dying and reloading, Jespar and I put the old man down like a dog.
After burying him where he fell (nice touch), and bouncing my sword off the statue’s head a few times to express my feelings (bitch), Jespar and I move on.
- Some strong art direction in this part, and a much-needed cooldown from the Constantine thing.
It’s never explained exactly what this is, but I’d hypothesize that these were living quarters for the temple staff and either had some sluice gate or dam that failed over the eons, or the water level rose during the last Cleansing.
- In the little house, Jespar recognizes a smell and goes to investigate.
Bloated, water-logged corpse is apparently a smell he’s familiar with. (Jespar, why do you recognize that smell).
He comes right back out in a minute and asks me for a pass-code, something he and I shared together: that thing with Yero.
Because inside the house, washed up on shore after who knows how long at sea, is our old buddy Sirius.
Also, my own corpse. Still pristine and undamaged by the seawater, presumably so I can be sure to recognize myself.
What the fuck, SureAI.
The Takeaway:
Aixon, all the way back in that dream sequence for Something Momentous II, was apparently right: I’m something dreamed into existence while my body died, strapped to a rock and a dead friend. I am post-living, bought the farm, shuffled off the mortal coil, dearly departed, etcetera. Just like all those sadsack skeletons I’ve been putting down for the last dozen hours.
If I ever see Aixon again I’m going to punch him in the mouth twice as hard for being right.
All this and I haven’t even found the Undertrain yet! This is a long one.
Enderal’s version of platform puzzles! . . . I kind of applaud them for trying, anyway.
- I had a trapper-keeper just like this in high school, except there was also a sweet unicorn on it.
This is a long one.
Trapper keepers were a thing back in the 90s, for keeping your school supplies in. For reasons unknown, they all felt like they had the same artist in this trippy style, and they tended to have any of the following on them: unicorns, whales, space, water, rainbows, clouds, basically anything that would look totally sweet under a blacklight.
Here's one:
So now whenever I see glowing crystals or whatever, I think of those old trapper keepers from my middle school days.
Here's one:
So now whenever I see glowing crystals or whatever, I think of those old trapper keepers from my middle school days.
Thanks, I think. I shouldn't have looked at this right before bedtime, I'll probably have nightmares about psychedelic seals staring at me and glowing in the dark. 
I had been anticipating your reaction to the two events in the temple and you caught them, well done, I had missed their significance until much later.
is the perfect reaction.
I mean, if I had thought about it (instead of trying not to die all the time), I questioned whether I was real or not, whether the world was real or not or whether the only thing that was real were the daddy sequences... or not.
What the fuck, SureAI.
I mean, if I had thought about it (instead of trying not to die all the time), I questioned whether I was real or not, whether the world was real or not or whether the only thing that was real were the daddy sequences... or not.
15.08.2017 02:48Buccaneer wrote: I had been anticipating your reaction to the two events in the temple and you caught them, well done, I had missed their significance until much later.
is the perfect reaction.What the fuck, SureAI.
I mean, if I had thought about it (instead of trying not to die all the time), I questioned whether I was real or not, whether the world was real or not or whether the only thing that was real were the daddy sequences... or not.
Although now that I've done the Undertrain bit, I have to wonder: was the Living Temple REALLY necessary? Really, Arantheal? Couldn't we have taken a goddamn boat or something?
If Jespar can pilot an ancient doomtrain that probably requires you to shovel souls into the incinerator or something, he could have sailed a boat where we needed to go.
15.08.2017 21:45dyslexicfaser wrote:
Although now that I've done the Undertrain bit, I have to wonder: was the Living Temple REALLY necessary? Really, Arantheal? Couldn't we have taken a goddamn boat or something?
If Jespar can pilot an ancient doomtrain that probably requires you to shovel souls into the incinerator or something, he could have sailed a boat where we needed to go.
16.08.2017 02:54Buccaneer wrote: I think you had to get to the far east coast stealthily - that is, below ground so you can come upon and spy the enemy from a hiding place. With the swarm of the invasion fleet, no way you could get there and spy on them without being detected.
I do wonder what Constantine's part in the second half of this quest was going to be. Distraction?
- So there we are, down a man (or two, depending on how you’re counting my corpse), still trying to find Arantheal’s damn Undertrain.
You might be forgiven for thinking the hard part is behind us now; you would be mistaken.
The hard part is this next bit here, where you have to fight two Grotesque Lost Ones (basically giants, remember) in close quarters.
Well after those last reveals, I’m in the mood to vent my spleen on some undead, so I pull out my sword and dive in- and then watch my broken corpse pinwheel through the air, killed in one swing of a giant’s hammer.
Frankly, I don’t know how this segment would be possible without Entropic Blood. But since I’m a no-good dirty necromancer, I turn one to my side and watch the giants whang each other with mallets while I pepper one of their backsides with arrows.
- I failed to get a good shot of that, though, so have one of me using Entropic Blood during one of the bits that come after: you can see the Undertrain in the background of the shot. The green smoke is, of course, a crucial part of the technique. Probably.
- The Undertrain looks like a old-timey locomotive in the style of Bioshock which then had some tron lines stapled all over it.
There’s some lever pulling and a few waves of undead, but nothing that causes me to break a sweat, and then I get to pull up a bench while Jespar figures out how to drive an eons-old thing of steam and fell magicks long lost to humankind.
- No worries, apparently! He probably just whispered some sweet nothings into its ear to get the ancient beast purring away.
In fact, he doesn’t even need to steer the blasted thing!
Jespar, are you sure these things are automated? Going to stop on its own when it gets to its destination? Yes? Okay, just checking.
- So apparently it’s story time. Nothing like crawling through the belly of a sentient murder-temple to get you to spill out your soul to your companions.
I learn that Jespar has a very rosy and/or sarcastic view of what we just spent an hour doing. In Jespar’s view, I wonder if I’m the Lara Croft to his Indiana Jones, or the Robin to his Batman?
The Prophetess tells the story of how she lost her family (by fade to black, what the heck, I want to know this story too), and then Jespar reciprocates.
If you’ve been in his company for any length of time (and we have), you can tell Jespar has a chip on his shoulder about ‘noble, righteous’ types. Well, that’s because in his backstory his dad was an incorruptible judge, and it ended up getting him and his family killed (bar a sister, I’m sure that won’t come up again, right lads).
- Now, I’d like to make it clear: I think this is a really good vocal performance by Jespar’s voice actor. When Jespar says ‘I’m not angry,’ but with his voice tight and snappy, it’s understood loud and clear that this is Jespar trying to convince us – or himself – that he’s being clear and logical when he’s really not. And I think the Tragic Backstory is fine, though I get the feeling I was supposed to know Jespar was a noble already? Maybe because his last name is so fancy: Dal’Varek.
It’s just Jespar who I think is being wrong-headed about this. People die for standing up for their beliefs, and that’s tragic, but the world wouldn’t be better if nobody did!
Hopefully Jespar’s character arc has more distance to go, yet.
And on that cheerful note, Jespar and I go to sleep on the underground doomtrain hurtling from one Pyrean ruin full of undead to another.
- As a side note, the lighting in the Undertrain is totally sweet: the ‘candles’ in the chandelier are green and glowing, with a hint of violet. Very ghost light-y.
- I’m a little disappointed that we didn’t wake up to find ourselves tossed into the air as the Doomtrain slammed into the next ruin, to be honest.
We’re met by a welcoming party of a dozen or two skeletons in the dim light, but it’s basically filler murder. And then we’re out in the open air.
Not exactly a tropical island paradise, but close. Lush greenery that kind of puts me in mind of the very earliest section of the game, the dream sequence. The island seems to be mostly populated by little harmless ducks and giant angry panthers.
Actually, Jespar is beset by two the second we walk out the door.
- So Jespar and I make our way around the island and he finally explains (again?) that we’re here to sneak into the invaders’ camp and plant listening devices.
Now, I remember receiving the silver plate listening devices, so apparently I was there when Arantheal told us what we were doing the first time, but I could not have told you the plot of this quest until now if you’d held a gun to my head.
- On the way I run into a lookout mage who has some great lines to his soldier buddy that I listen in on. He says stuff like, ‘No idolizer is ever innocent. Religions are ideologies, and an ideology is a decision… Subjects who don’t rebel against their tyrants are just as guilty as the tyrants themselves.’
Rhetoric like this is how you make the jump from rebelling against your tyrant god-king to murdering swathes of the population for no crime except believing what their Lightborn and their rulers tells them. This is how you radicalize.
It gives you a pretty good idea of what Nehrim is like these days without anyone having to info dump anything.
- Well, the fort we’re supposed to get into is locked up tight, so rather than try and figure that out I keep going into the other nearby ruin. And I see… this.
I just get a sense, you know? This next part is going to suck.
- High Ones. Just hanging out, doing High One things. I suspect these are the eccentric ones they sent to the Moonshine Isles to get them out of the way, since these jokers insist on talking to us in the form of a bear, a wolf and a giant spider. Now, maybe this is some kind of commentary on how they see humans… but I’m more inclined to think these are High One furries.
But who am I to judge? Apparently it’s a good thing Jespar has been resistant to my charms, or the poor man would be guilty of necrophilia.
- This is kind of like that bit where you get to talk with Sovereign in Mass Effect, except Sir Bearington here is more of a jocular fellow. You can just tell he’s having a good time talking down to the lower life form. You can hear it in his spooky echo voice.
Struggle, futile, we are Gods, you are ants, yadda yadda. He confirms that the Beacon is a weapon that can kill them, congrats! But if you consider the dozens or hundreds of nations that have found the thing, and the fact that the High Ones are still around…
Basically, Bearington doesn’t give a shit. The Prophetess being around just makes this slightly interesting for him.
- Actually, Bearington makes a point that although Coarek (that’s invasion dude) thinks he’s an Emissary (probably the Rebel or the Liberator or some name like that), and Arantheal thinks he’s the Ruler, they’re wrong. He has a good line about it, here:
But I’m pretty bummed out that it seems like the Dragonborn situation all over again. You, and only you, can save the world. That kind of thing.
On the other hand, if Bearington is claiming that they never appeared to anyone except me… why did Arantheal have the dream about the smoke monsters? When I got back and went ‘Holy shit man, smoke monsters’, he was all ‘I know! What the fuck’ but, you know, in a more genteel ruler-y sort of way.
Maybe Bearington is just a liar. He claims he’s not, which is just what a liar would say.
- And then talky time is over, and the Animal Ones vanish into thin air.
And I get coshed in the back of the goddamn head. Pow, facedown on the ground.
It’s another cutscene defeat, only this time there’s no Calia to handily pop up and go shadow monster on some jerk for picking on me.
The Takeaway:
I hate cutscene defeats. I hate them so, so much. This one’s even worse than normal, considering Bearington was just hyping me up as the only significant player in the game.
I sure don’t feel very significant right now.
If I’m really lucky, Jespar is going to stage a daring rescue, but considering he went east and I went west to plant the silver plates, and I’m not even in the freakin’ fort I’m supposed to be infiltrating, I’m not holding out hope.
You might be forgiven for thinking the hard part is behind us now; you would be mistaken.
The hard part is this next bit here, where you have to fight two Grotesque Lost Ones (basically giants, remember) in close quarters.
Well after those last reveals, I’m in the mood to vent my spleen on some undead, so I pull out my sword and dive in- and then watch my broken corpse pinwheel through the air, killed in one swing of a giant’s hammer.
Frankly, I don’t know how this segment would be possible without Entropic Blood. But since I’m a no-good dirty necromancer, I turn one to my side and watch the giants whang each other with mallets while I pepper one of their backsides with arrows.
- I failed to get a good shot of that, though, so have one of me using Entropic Blood during one of the bits that come after: you can see the Undertrain in the background of the shot. The green smoke is, of course, a crucial part of the technique. Probably.
- The Undertrain looks like a old-timey locomotive in the style of Bioshock which then had some tron lines stapled all over it.
There’s some lever pulling and a few waves of undead, but nothing that causes me to break a sweat, and then I get to pull up a bench while Jespar figures out how to drive an eons-old thing of steam and fell magicks long lost to humankind.
- No worries, apparently! He probably just whispered some sweet nothings into its ear to get the ancient beast purring away.
In fact, he doesn’t even need to steer the blasted thing!
Jespar, are you sure these things are automated? Going to stop on its own when it gets to its destination? Yes? Okay, just checking.
- So apparently it’s story time. Nothing like crawling through the belly of a sentient murder-temple to get you to spill out your soul to your companions.
I learn that Jespar has a very rosy and/or sarcastic view of what we just spent an hour doing. In Jespar’s view, I wonder if I’m the Lara Croft to his Indiana Jones, or the Robin to his Batman?
The Prophetess tells the story of how she lost her family (by fade to black, what the heck, I want to know this story too), and then Jespar reciprocates.
If you’ve been in his company for any length of time (and we have), you can tell Jespar has a chip on his shoulder about ‘noble, righteous’ types. Well, that’s because in his backstory his dad was an incorruptible judge, and it ended up getting him and his family killed (bar a sister, I’m sure that won’t come up again, right lads).
- Now, I’d like to make it clear: I think this is a really good vocal performance by Jespar’s voice actor. When Jespar says ‘I’m not angry,’ but with his voice tight and snappy, it’s understood loud and clear that this is Jespar trying to convince us – or himself – that he’s being clear and logical when he’s really not. And I think the Tragic Backstory is fine, though I get the feeling I was supposed to know Jespar was a noble already? Maybe because his last name is so fancy: Dal’Varek.
It’s just Jespar who I think is being wrong-headed about this. People die for standing up for their beliefs, and that’s tragic, but the world wouldn’t be better if nobody did!
Hopefully Jespar’s character arc has more distance to go, yet.
And on that cheerful note, Jespar and I go to sleep on the underground doomtrain hurtling from one Pyrean ruin full of undead to another.
- As a side note, the lighting in the Undertrain is totally sweet: the ‘candles’ in the chandelier are green and glowing, with a hint of violet. Very ghost light-y.
- I’m a little disappointed that we didn’t wake up to find ourselves tossed into the air as the Doomtrain slammed into the next ruin, to be honest.
We’re met by a welcoming party of a dozen or two skeletons in the dim light, but it’s basically filler murder. And then we’re out in the open air.
Not exactly a tropical island paradise, but close. Lush greenery that kind of puts me in mind of the very earliest section of the game, the dream sequence. The island seems to be mostly populated by little harmless ducks and giant angry panthers.
Actually, Jespar is beset by two the second we walk out the door.
- So Jespar and I make our way around the island and he finally explains (again?) that we’re here to sneak into the invaders’ camp and plant listening devices.
Now, I remember receiving the silver plate listening devices, so apparently I was there when Arantheal told us what we were doing the first time, but I could not have told you the plot of this quest until now if you’d held a gun to my head.
- On the way I run into a lookout mage who has some great lines to his soldier buddy that I listen in on. He says stuff like, ‘No idolizer is ever innocent. Religions are ideologies, and an ideology is a decision… Subjects who don’t rebel against their tyrants are just as guilty as the tyrants themselves.’
Rhetoric like this is how you make the jump from rebelling against your tyrant god-king to murdering swathes of the population for no crime except believing what their Lightborn and their rulers tells them. This is how you radicalize.
It gives you a pretty good idea of what Nehrim is like these days without anyone having to info dump anything.
- Well, the fort we’re supposed to get into is locked up tight, so rather than try and figure that out I keep going into the other nearby ruin. And I see… this.
I just get a sense, you know? This next part is going to suck.
- High Ones. Just hanging out, doing High One things. I suspect these are the eccentric ones they sent to the Moonshine Isles to get them out of the way, since these jokers insist on talking to us in the form of a bear, a wolf and a giant spider. Now, maybe this is some kind of commentary on how they see humans… but I’m more inclined to think these are High One furries.
But who am I to judge? Apparently it’s a good thing Jespar has been resistant to my charms, or the poor man would be guilty of necrophilia.
- This is kind of like that bit where you get to talk with Sovereign in Mass Effect, except Sir Bearington here is more of a jocular fellow. You can just tell he’s having a good time talking down to the lower life form. You can hear it in his spooky echo voice.
Struggle, futile, we are Gods, you are ants, yadda yadda. He confirms that the Beacon is a weapon that can kill them, congrats! But if you consider the dozens or hundreds of nations that have found the thing, and the fact that the High Ones are still around…
Basically, Bearington doesn’t give a shit. The Prophetess being around just makes this slightly interesting for him.
- Actually, Bearington makes a point that although Coarek (that’s invasion dude) thinks he’s an Emissary (probably the Rebel or the Liberator or some name like that), and Arantheal thinks he’s the Ruler, they’re wrong. He has a good line about it, here:
But I’m pretty bummed out that it seems like the Dragonborn situation all over again. You, and only you, can save the world. That kind of thing.
On the other hand, if Bearington is claiming that they never appeared to anyone except me… why did Arantheal have the dream about the smoke monsters? When I got back and went ‘Holy shit man, smoke monsters’, he was all ‘I know! What the fuck’ but, you know, in a more genteel ruler-y sort of way.
Maybe Bearington is just a liar. He claims he’s not, which is just what a liar would say.
- And then talky time is over, and the Animal Ones vanish into thin air.
And I get coshed in the back of the goddamn head. Pow, facedown on the ground.
It’s another cutscene defeat, only this time there’s no Calia to handily pop up and go shadow monster on some jerk for picking on me.
The Takeaway:
I hate cutscene defeats. I hate them so, so much. This one’s even worse than normal, considering Bearington was just hyping me up as the only significant player in the game.
I sure don’t feel very significant right now.
If I’m really lucky, Jespar is going to stage a daring rescue, but considering he went east and I went west to plant the silver plates, and I’m not even in the freakin’ fort I’m supposed to be infiltrating, I’m not holding out hope.
at some point you're told (by someone?) that "Dal" is indeed a nobles title 
don't remember if that's before or after that quest.
don't remember if that's before or after that quest.
- I wake to… is that background music Spanish guitar? Nice.
- I come to with an extremely posh accent in my ears. The guys who just got done kicking my ass are Coarek’s guys. To be more specific, they’re Coarek himself, a guy in a hood who loves him some facial tattoos, and a lady in leather. Armor, not fetishwear. Full coverage. Sometimes you have to specify, in the fantasy genre.
Coarek himself is done up as a Spanish conquistador with a big ol’ phoenix coat of arms on his chest.
Also, he has minions. Guard minions, not these lieutenants with names and unique assets. The guards wear these super cute floppy hats.
- And he’s captured Jespar, too! Apparently. I don’t actually get to see him, but how would Coarek know to throw that at me if he didn’t have the guy? Jespar may be even worse at this than I am, if he managed to get captured in the 5 minutes since I left and got into a conversation with the ghostly trio.
- Coarek warns me not to lie to him because he’ll just compare it to Jespar’s testimony and find out my lies. So of course, I immediately lie to him like it’s going out of style. This will come back to bite me in approximately 30 seconds. But until then:
I am Lyra Summerstone, treasure hunter! Or 'scrounger', whatever you like to call it.
Coarek even seems to believe me. Odd place for a treasure hunter, he says. So why did you cosh me on the back of the head, friend?
This isn’t Nehrimese land or anything. Nobody’s even using these ruins except the ghost animals. Maybe this is just how he likes to meet new people? Tied up and at his mercy? Blindfolded and with a light concussion?
Hey, it’s okay Coarek, we all have fetishes. Our weird, unspeakable fetishes. My lips are sealed, really.
- Then his rogue-looking lady who was apparently going through my things – rude – shows him the silver plate. Coarek immediately recognizes the chunk of ancient Pyrean tech and correctly deduces I’m a spy, because why should he only get one freebie from the cutscene gods?
Then he says a line about the stupid lamb lying to the wolf’s face, and has Tattoo Dude eat my soul or something. Seriously; Samael starts muttering, magic happens, and then I’m dead.
Now, on the one hand, that’s kind of neat. No idle threats, no plot armor, say the wrong thing and you’re dead.
On the other hand, I’m reeaally wishing SureAI would let me turn this chump into a mindless puppet with my mind right about now. I can do that, you know. I’m not just a pretty face and a half-competent swordswoman.
- Whatever. Do-over.
Now this is interesting – rather than activate the Silver Plate himself, Coarek asks Samael if he knows how to do it. Is Hoodsy over there a Pyrean expert? Evil vizier type, filling Coarek’s head with visions? He’s got ‘evil cultist’ written all over him, whatever he is.
- So Coarek uses the Silver Plate to talk to Arantheal.
I like how sassy they both look in this shot.
They posture about a bit, but the next interesting bit is when Coarek explains his take on the whole ‘Cleansing’ thing:
He calls it ascendence. The Pyreans are gone, not dead. Perhaps they were like the Ancients from Star Gate, and just turned into floating balls of energy, hm? Did Arantheal ever think of that?
Coarek says he’s been getting dreams of it ever since the Light Born died, and it’s glorious. Arantheal considers this to be ridiculous, because his dreams of the Cleansing are horrible, and also I guess we have precedent on our side, some kind of chronicle of the Cleansing?
I assume it reads ‘Help us, help us, the Light, it is burning us, the Light, it’s all our fault, the sin is us’ or something like that.
They go back and forth. Arantheal counters with the countless dead rising from their graves, the Red Madness, the general feeling of ‘End Times’ we’ve had going on here for weeks.
Coarek considers the Red Madness guys to be those afflicted with ‘religiosity’, people unwilling to open their minds to Science and Reason. Friend, if you had actually seen the bloody-mouthed, glowing-eyed ghoul motif going on with the Red Madness afflicted, you would know that is some evil shit. Gonna have to go with Arantheal on this one.
Coarek demands Arantheal tell the Enderaleans that their Gods are dead and to stop building the Beacon, or it shall be war.
Arantheal hangs up the phone.
- So it’s war, I guess.
Coarek decides he’s going to put us (Jespar and I) on a raft and see what Fate has in store for us, rather than kill us. He says he’s a man of his word.
Now, statistically I have had very poor luck with boats, but in fairness I might actually be immortal now, some kind of fleshy ghost?
Maybe that’s 1-1, so to speak. One for, one against on the whole boat thing.
- So this is interesting, because Bearington said I was the only one they’d appeared to. But Coarek and Arantheal have both been having Cleansing dreams.
So… are the dreams courtesy of someone else? Some Pyrean trying to get the word out, or Coarek’s Mystery Pal Samael?
Also he said I was ‘the only player of significance’, and I’m about to be knocked out and set out at sea on a raft, while Coarek and Arantheal are leading armies and countries and about to have a war to decide the fate of the world.
I have come to the conclusion that Sir Bearington is a liar. Again. Still.
- I wake up on the back of a wagon, but not one bound for the coast with Jespar beside me cracking wise. It’s empty, and the place looks a little… familiar. I suspect I’m going to meet Dad again, and historically that has also not ended well for me in the past.
Time to pull up my big girl britches and see what’s up back at the old homestead, I guess.
The Takeaway:
Short one this time, I’ll try and run through the dream sequence and keep going next time.
I’m pretty ambivalent about this whole segment, really. Coarek has got some good motivation; he really thinks he’s doing the right thing and trying to save humanity from us ol’ backwards religious folk. That’s how I like my evil; cloaked in the mask of good, thank you very much.
I still don’t like the way they’re building Coarek up at the expense of, well… me, though. For this segment of the adventure I’ve already apparently forgotten I know Entropic Blood, and I suspect if I’m going to be rafting back home I’ll have to forget I know the Recall spell.
Maybe there’ll be some fun story time on the raft. Fingers crossed.
- I come to with an extremely posh accent in my ears. The guys who just got done kicking my ass are Coarek’s guys. To be more specific, they’re Coarek himself, a guy in a hood who loves him some facial tattoos, and a lady in leather. Armor, not fetishwear. Full coverage. Sometimes you have to specify, in the fantasy genre.
Coarek himself is done up as a Spanish conquistador with a big ol’ phoenix coat of arms on his chest.
Also, he has minions. Guard minions, not these lieutenants with names and unique assets. The guards wear these super cute floppy hats.
- And he’s captured Jespar, too! Apparently. I don’t actually get to see him, but how would Coarek know to throw that at me if he didn’t have the guy? Jespar may be even worse at this than I am, if he managed to get captured in the 5 minutes since I left and got into a conversation with the ghostly trio.
- Coarek warns me not to lie to him because he’ll just compare it to Jespar’s testimony and find out my lies. So of course, I immediately lie to him like it’s going out of style. This will come back to bite me in approximately 30 seconds. But until then:
I am Lyra Summerstone, treasure hunter! Or 'scrounger', whatever you like to call it.
Coarek even seems to believe me. Odd place for a treasure hunter, he says. So why did you cosh me on the back of the head, friend?
This isn’t Nehrimese land or anything. Nobody’s even using these ruins except the ghost animals. Maybe this is just how he likes to meet new people? Tied up and at his mercy? Blindfolded and with a light concussion?
Hey, it’s okay Coarek, we all have fetishes. Our weird, unspeakable fetishes. My lips are sealed, really.
- Then his rogue-looking lady who was apparently going through my things – rude – shows him the silver plate. Coarek immediately recognizes the chunk of ancient Pyrean tech and correctly deduces I’m a spy, because why should he only get one freebie from the cutscene gods?
Then he says a line about the stupid lamb lying to the wolf’s face, and has Tattoo Dude eat my soul or something. Seriously; Samael starts muttering, magic happens, and then I’m dead.
Now, on the one hand, that’s kind of neat. No idle threats, no plot armor, say the wrong thing and you’re dead.
On the other hand, I’m reeaally wishing SureAI would let me turn this chump into a mindless puppet with my mind right about now. I can do that, you know. I’m not just a pretty face and a half-competent swordswoman.
- Whatever. Do-over.
Now this is interesting – rather than activate the Silver Plate himself, Coarek asks Samael if he knows how to do it. Is Hoodsy over there a Pyrean expert? Evil vizier type, filling Coarek’s head with visions? He’s got ‘evil cultist’ written all over him, whatever he is.
- So Coarek uses the Silver Plate to talk to Arantheal.
I like how sassy they both look in this shot.
They posture about a bit, but the next interesting bit is when Coarek explains his take on the whole ‘Cleansing’ thing:
He calls it ascendence. The Pyreans are gone, not dead. Perhaps they were like the Ancients from Star Gate, and just turned into floating balls of energy, hm? Did Arantheal ever think of that?
Coarek says he’s been getting dreams of it ever since the Light Born died, and it’s glorious. Arantheal considers this to be ridiculous, because his dreams of the Cleansing are horrible, and also I guess we have precedent on our side, some kind of chronicle of the Cleansing?
I assume it reads ‘Help us, help us, the Light, it is burning us, the Light, it’s all our fault, the sin is us’ or something like that.
They go back and forth. Arantheal counters with the countless dead rising from their graves, the Red Madness, the general feeling of ‘End Times’ we’ve had going on here for weeks.
Coarek considers the Red Madness guys to be those afflicted with ‘religiosity’, people unwilling to open their minds to Science and Reason. Friend, if you had actually seen the bloody-mouthed, glowing-eyed ghoul motif going on with the Red Madness afflicted, you would know that is some evil shit. Gonna have to go with Arantheal on this one.
Coarek demands Arantheal tell the Enderaleans that their Gods are dead and to stop building the Beacon, or it shall be war.
Arantheal hangs up the phone.
- So it’s war, I guess.
Coarek decides he’s going to put us (Jespar and I) on a raft and see what Fate has in store for us, rather than kill us. He says he’s a man of his word.
Now, statistically I have had very poor luck with boats, but in fairness I might actually be immortal now, some kind of fleshy ghost?
Maybe that’s 1-1, so to speak. One for, one against on the whole boat thing.
- So this is interesting, because Bearington said I was the only one they’d appeared to. But Coarek and Arantheal have both been having Cleansing dreams.
So… are the dreams courtesy of someone else? Some Pyrean trying to get the word out, or Coarek’s Mystery Pal Samael?
Also he said I was ‘the only player of significance’, and I’m about to be knocked out and set out at sea on a raft, while Coarek and Arantheal are leading armies and countries and about to have a war to decide the fate of the world.
I have come to the conclusion that Sir Bearington is a liar. Again. Still.
- I wake up on the back of a wagon, but not one bound for the coast with Jespar beside me cracking wise. It’s empty, and the place looks a little… familiar. I suspect I’m going to meet Dad again, and historically that has also not ended well for me in the past.
Time to pull up my big girl britches and see what’s up back at the old homestead, I guess.
The Takeaway:
Short one this time, I’ll try and run through the dream sequence and keep going next time.
I’m pretty ambivalent about this whole segment, really. Coarek has got some good motivation; he really thinks he’s doing the right thing and trying to save humanity from us ol’ backwards religious folk. That’s how I like my evil; cloaked in the mask of good, thank you very much.
I still don’t like the way they’re building Coarek up at the expense of, well… me, though. For this segment of the adventure I’ve already apparently forgotten I know Entropic Blood, and I suspect if I’m going to be rafting back home I’ll have to forget I know the Recall spell.
Maybe there’ll be some fun story time on the raft. Fingers crossed.
Nicely written and good thoughts and interpretations. Sometimes you just have to go along with it.
- The path is familiar by now, and it’s that familiarity that helps me get into my character’s head. How many times has she walked down this path in her dreams, past the statue of the hooded woman, watched the beautiful sunset, knowing that Ghost Dad is at the end with some new horror?
Along the way are two handsome horses milling about outside a burned out cottage with blood and char speckling the floor. Was this here the last time I went through this dream? I can’t remember.
Ghost Dad is in the same place as always, chopping wood outside the family house. His flesh is burned; hairless, scarred. Not as bad as a Bethesda Fallout ghoul, but he won’t be winning any beauty contests, that’s for sure. He tells me he has a surprise to show me and leads me into the house, giggling like he just told the world’s best dad joke. As I go in, I see that the sun has moved. The brilliant sunset has become more of a bloody scarlet. Still beautiful, but… yeah. Symbolism, hurrah.
- On the way in, I note the medical diagram of the human body set above a table piled high with what I’m pretty sure are human bits, given the reference chart. Plus… a garlic clove? Pretty sure I would have noticed if that was there last time.
At the table I see Ghost Dad’s surprise.
Fuck you, Ghost Dad. Nothing good ever comes from you.
‘Mommy’ and ‘Sis’ (that’s what the game calls them) parrot fragments of Ghost Dad’s speech. ‘Play with us, play with us’, ‘Stay with us, stay with us,’ like that. I notice that each of them has a bloody patch on their clothes in the general vicinity of their hearts.
I should probably be grateful for the burlap sacks over their heads.
And then everything catches on fire, because of course. Probably all that hot fire Dad was spitting; the resemblance to Sigil Leader Jorek’s disappointment and cynicism is uncanny. Dad, Mommy and Sis go up like torches.
Dad is dreadfully disappointed in me refusing to stay dead like them, and sounding maybe a little jealous?
And then they show me that, no, there’s fire, and then there’s fire.
- I like how Mommy and Sis’s ‘Stay with us, stay with us’ chant segues into Jespar’s ‘Come on, stay with me’ comment upon waking, though I think instead of calmly waking up it would have been more entertaining if my character woke up swinging.
Nevermind. So it looks like my character was out long enough to miss the raft ride entirely! And I was so looking forward to spending torturous days playing ‘I Spy’ with Jespar…
We were picked up by a Fisherwoman, and we’re on our way to a place called Duneville. This feels like it would be a good place to fit in a new NPC. Duneville is on the southwest end of the continent, way beyond anywhere I’ve ever traveled, and apparently is going to be one of the first to get hit by Nehrim’s invasion force.
But nope; her name is Fisherwoman.
- Anyway, we pull into Duneville, Jespar throws a sop to those of us wondering why we couldn’t just teleport home (apparently, the teleport runes are just now close enough), and scroll-ports to Ark. He plans to collect his pay, since we didn’t die after all. I’m not sure who he’s going to collect from, mind you, since his boss is buried back in the Living Temple.
Not me, though. I need to check this place out first!
- Duneville’s a pretty great locale. An inlet hidden inside a cave, with a ramshackle palisade built right on the water two, three, four stories high in places, connected by trap doors and ladders and plank bridges. Protected from the elements and anybody looking for them would have to look pretty damn hard. It’s got a certain aesthetic of… look, these guys are probably pirates, right? Smugglers? Something like that?
It’s just got that feel.
Possibly it might be the hookahs perched everywhere, or how the trio having a loud argument as I step off the boat basically out themselves as treasure hunters, which is apparently a banned occupation in Enderal. Respect for the dead, etcetera.
It’s a good bit of quiet worldbuilding that there’s tons of chests and barrels stacked everywhere, but all the goods inside are crap. A few gold pennies, iron, miscellaneous clutter. It makes it feel like Duneville is… not a very prosperous place.
- Now this is cute.
Some barely-literate scoundrel marked up the warning signs that are common in places like Ark with comments like ‘Beware livingdead tits’ and ‘Death by drowning from behind’. It’s exactly the kind of retarded humor the people who live here would find hilarious.
- There’s some merchants, an inn of sorts, a minstrel. A quest starts up after I wander into somebody’s house and read their mail, telling me (not actually me, but imma do it anyway) to head for Old Solsteim (probably misspelling that) before the Order get there. Going by the name, probably another ruin. Well hell, I’m not tired of those already, off to Solsteim it is!
Arantheal probably isn’t waiting for a debrief, he probably thinks we’re dead! So what’s the harm?
- On the way out I run into one of the many ‘Watchdogs’ who serve the function of guardsmen around here, and he had this to say:
I still don’t know who the heck the Tuchessa (Truchessa?) is or was, but since we know she was/is part of the Order, that suggests Duneville’s town of miners, scoundrels, ne’er-do-wells and probably mafia leanings was sanctioned by the Order. Or at least given a hands-off approach. He even references ‘who rules this place,’ another question I’d like to know the answer to.
What a great throwaway line from an NPC who doesn’t even rate a name, to get me wondering about Enderal’s history.
- Anyway. Outside Duneville is a wasteland of sand, mysterious towers, rocky cliffs, sand-blasted wood wreckage, and more sand. There’s a constant background whistling as wind makes its way through the cliffs.
… Duneville, I get it!
Riding my donkey through the large, mostly-empty desert feels pretty good. Like a spaghetti western hero.
- I appreciate that the first thing I run into is a Nehrimese invasion ship run aground with a bunch of murdered Nehrimese soldiers and a couple of new undead (Sere Lost Ones, with pretty sweet looking armor on) sprawled out across the beach.
It’s like Coarek didn’t realize what a shitshow the Enderal countryside is. They came expecting to stomp some clerics and instead are learning the kind of pain I’ve felt for two dozen hours. I kind of imagine this is happening all across Enderal right now, and I love it.
Also, the Duneville area is home to Enderal’s version of slaughterfish, some kind of armored red sea serpent thing. Still just as annoying as in Skyrim.
- I also happen to run into a place called the Hollow Hand, a little hole in the wall whose landscaping looks like this.
Nope! I tip my hat and move along.
- A priest’s tower has a desert spider outside, like the lil' guy is standing guard. Now where have I heard… aha. Haha. Hahaha!
I enter the tower, kill a few of the little guys, and then my old nemesis from the Kor quest, the Desert Spider Queen, shows up. It looks like the priest was digging out a cellar and happened upon the nest, or the spiders broke through and found him.
I snipe the Queen from across the room, and it turns out she’s actually too big to fit through the tunnel. I can only shrug and fire another three arrows into her general head region until she folds like a cheap card table. I’ll take it.
I also take a dozen books, to add to the collection I’ve got going in the storage room back home.
- Along the way to Solsteim (or whatever that ruin is called), I find ANOTHER ruin, called Old Lyguria. Well, one Pyrean ruin is as good as another, right?
Wrong.
I have some small initial success, although the dead adventurer bodies stacked knee deep is a little worrying.
Dead fire elementals look totally sweet, by the way, and the soil elemental decided on a victory lap of sorts.
Look at how happy he seems to have killed that frost elemental! He holds that pose for a good ten seconds as he roams the area.
Considering his curmudgeonly old man face and his just-proven elemental elitism, I think my soil elemental is the equivalent of an Enderalean.
Anyway, all goes well until it turns out a lot of these elementals are linked encounters. Four elementals at once is a bit much, turns out.
It’s been a while since I’ve done the ol’ corpse pose. So… back to the main quest?
Back to the main quest.
The Takeaway:
The nightmare is actually getting better with repetition, in the sense that when I see that lovely vista I think ‘Oh god, this again’, but with something closer to dread than annoyance. I think I’ve said this before, but SureAI’s nightmare game is strong.
Duneville’s pretty great too, at least in small doses. The town’s architecture is inventive without the cave feeling claustrophobic like Undercity (high ceilings), and does a lot with like, 6 named characters with something to say. The desert is empty but that’s kind of the point of a desert biome, right? It’s pleasant to ride through, and I was serious about the spaghetti western vibe I was getting. SureAI really is trying to make sure every biome is represented somewhere in this game.
The monsters range from pushovers (some kind of armored deer called a Crusher), to slightly dangerous but mostly gross (so this is where the pus monster centipedes come from! The mystery of the pus creature in that one Undercity house deepens), to still pretty dangerous (Desert Spider Queen, last of her name), to ‘holy shit that’s a lot of X what did I do to deserve this SureAI.’ I’ll probably come back at some point.
Along the way are two handsome horses milling about outside a burned out cottage with blood and char speckling the floor. Was this here the last time I went through this dream? I can’t remember.
Ghost Dad is in the same place as always, chopping wood outside the family house. His flesh is burned; hairless, scarred. Not as bad as a Bethesda Fallout ghoul, but he won’t be winning any beauty contests, that’s for sure. He tells me he has a surprise to show me and leads me into the house, giggling like he just told the world’s best dad joke. As I go in, I see that the sun has moved. The brilliant sunset has become more of a bloody scarlet. Still beautiful, but… yeah. Symbolism, hurrah.
- On the way in, I note the medical diagram of the human body set above a table piled high with what I’m pretty sure are human bits, given the reference chart. Plus… a garlic clove? Pretty sure I would have noticed if that was there last time.
At the table I see Ghost Dad’s surprise.
Fuck you, Ghost Dad. Nothing good ever comes from you.
‘Mommy’ and ‘Sis’ (that’s what the game calls them) parrot fragments of Ghost Dad’s speech. ‘Play with us, play with us’, ‘Stay with us, stay with us,’ like that. I notice that each of them has a bloody patch on their clothes in the general vicinity of their hearts.
I should probably be grateful for the burlap sacks over their heads.
And then everything catches on fire, because of course. Probably all that hot fire Dad was spitting; the resemblance to Sigil Leader Jorek’s disappointment and cynicism is uncanny. Dad, Mommy and Sis go up like torches.
Dad is dreadfully disappointed in me refusing to stay dead like them, and sounding maybe a little jealous?
And then they show me that, no, there’s fire, and then there’s fire.
- I like how Mommy and Sis’s ‘Stay with us, stay with us’ chant segues into Jespar’s ‘Come on, stay with me’ comment upon waking, though I think instead of calmly waking up it would have been more entertaining if my character woke up swinging.
Nevermind. So it looks like my character was out long enough to miss the raft ride entirely! And I was so looking forward to spending torturous days playing ‘I Spy’ with Jespar…
We were picked up by a Fisherwoman, and we’re on our way to a place called Duneville. This feels like it would be a good place to fit in a new NPC. Duneville is on the southwest end of the continent, way beyond anywhere I’ve ever traveled, and apparently is going to be one of the first to get hit by Nehrim’s invasion force.
But nope; her name is Fisherwoman.
- Anyway, we pull into Duneville, Jespar throws a sop to those of us wondering why we couldn’t just teleport home (apparently, the teleport runes are just now close enough), and scroll-ports to Ark. He plans to collect his pay, since we didn’t die after all. I’m not sure who he’s going to collect from, mind you, since his boss is buried back in the Living Temple.
Not me, though. I need to check this place out first!
- Duneville’s a pretty great locale. An inlet hidden inside a cave, with a ramshackle palisade built right on the water two, three, four stories high in places, connected by trap doors and ladders and plank bridges. Protected from the elements and anybody looking for them would have to look pretty damn hard. It’s got a certain aesthetic of… look, these guys are probably pirates, right? Smugglers? Something like that?
It’s just got that feel.
Possibly it might be the hookahs perched everywhere, or how the trio having a loud argument as I step off the boat basically out themselves as treasure hunters, which is apparently a banned occupation in Enderal. Respect for the dead, etcetera.
It’s a good bit of quiet worldbuilding that there’s tons of chests and barrels stacked everywhere, but all the goods inside are crap. A few gold pennies, iron, miscellaneous clutter. It makes it feel like Duneville is… not a very prosperous place.
- Now this is cute.
Some barely-literate scoundrel marked up the warning signs that are common in places like Ark with comments like ‘Beware living
- There’s some merchants, an inn of sorts, a minstrel. A quest starts up after I wander into somebody’s house and read their mail, telling me (not actually me, but imma do it anyway) to head for Old Solsteim (probably misspelling that) before the Order get there. Going by the name, probably another ruin. Well hell, I’m not tired of those already, off to Solsteim it is!
Arantheal probably isn’t waiting for a debrief, he probably thinks we’re dead! So what’s the harm?
- On the way out I run into one of the many ‘Watchdogs’ who serve the function of guardsmen around here, and he had this to say:
I still don’t know who the heck the Tuchessa (Truchessa?) is or was, but since we know she was/is part of the Order, that suggests Duneville’s town of miners, scoundrels, ne’er-do-wells and probably mafia leanings was sanctioned by the Order. Or at least given a hands-off approach. He even references ‘who rules this place,’ another question I’d like to know the answer to.
What a great throwaway line from an NPC who doesn’t even rate a name, to get me wondering about Enderal’s history.
- Anyway. Outside Duneville is a wasteland of sand, mysterious towers, rocky cliffs, sand-blasted wood wreckage, and more sand. There’s a constant background whistling as wind makes its way through the cliffs.
… Duneville, I get it!
Riding my donkey through the large, mostly-empty desert feels pretty good. Like a spaghetti western hero.
- I appreciate that the first thing I run into is a Nehrimese invasion ship run aground with a bunch of murdered Nehrimese soldiers and a couple of new undead (Sere Lost Ones, with pretty sweet looking armor on) sprawled out across the beach.
It’s like Coarek didn’t realize what a shitshow the Enderal countryside is. They came expecting to stomp some clerics and instead are learning the kind of pain I’ve felt for two dozen hours. I kind of imagine this is happening all across Enderal right now, and I love it.
Also, the Duneville area is home to Enderal’s version of slaughterfish, some kind of armored red sea serpent thing. Still just as annoying as in Skyrim.
- I also happen to run into a place called the Hollow Hand, a little hole in the wall whose landscaping looks like this.
Nope! I tip my hat and move along.
- A priest’s tower has a desert spider outside, like the lil' guy is standing guard. Now where have I heard… aha. Haha. Hahaha!
I enter the tower, kill a few of the little guys, and then my old nemesis from the Kor quest, the Desert Spider Queen, shows up. It looks like the priest was digging out a cellar and happened upon the nest, or the spiders broke through and found him.
I snipe the Queen from across the room, and it turns out she’s actually too big to fit through the tunnel. I can only shrug and fire another three arrows into her general head region until she folds like a cheap card table. I’ll take it.
I also take a dozen books, to add to the collection I’ve got going in the storage room back home.
- Along the way to Solsteim (or whatever that ruin is called), I find ANOTHER ruin, called Old Lyguria. Well, one Pyrean ruin is as good as another, right?
Wrong.
I have some small initial success, although the dead adventurer bodies stacked knee deep is a little worrying.
Dead fire elementals look totally sweet, by the way, and the soil elemental decided on a victory lap of sorts.
Look at how happy he seems to have killed that frost elemental! He holds that pose for a good ten seconds as he roams the area.
Considering his curmudgeonly old man face and his just-proven elemental elitism, I think my soil elemental is the equivalent of an Enderalean.
Anyway, all goes well until it turns out a lot of these elementals are linked encounters. Four elementals at once is a bit much, turns out.
It’s been a while since I’ve done the ol’ corpse pose. So… back to the main quest?
Back to the main quest.
The Takeaway:
The nightmare is actually getting better with repetition, in the sense that when I see that lovely vista I think ‘Oh god, this again’, but with something closer to dread than annoyance. I think I’ve said this before, but SureAI’s nightmare game is strong.
Duneville’s pretty great too, at least in small doses. The town’s architecture is inventive without the cave feeling claustrophobic like Undercity (high ceilings), and does a lot with like, 6 named characters with something to say. The desert is empty but that’s kind of the point of a desert biome, right? It’s pleasant to ride through, and I was serious about the spaghetti western vibe I was getting. SureAI really is trying to make sure every biome is represented somewhere in this game.
The monsters range from pushovers (some kind of armored deer called a Crusher), to slightly dangerous but mostly gross (so this is where the pus monster centipedes come from! The mystery of the pus creature in that one Undercity house deepens), to still pretty dangerous (Desert Spider Queen, last of her name), to ‘holy shit that’s a lot of X what did I do to deserve this SureAI.’ I’ll probably come back at some point.
First of all thank you for this narrative. I have played Enderal once, completing all quests I could find and discovering all locations on the map. I have been waiting for the DLC to begin a new game, to relive it all afresh. Your write up helps my waiting.
I just have one question, that will be significant further on in the story. In this scene below,
did you look to the right? Did you see the painting on the wall?
If not, do so
I just have one question, that will be significant further on in the story. In this scene below,
27.08.2017 10:37dyslexicfaser wrote:
If not, do so
Looks like I don't have any saves during the dream sequence! I usually just rely on quicksave and autosave.
The only painting coming to mind is of the lady doing the weird prayer that looks like that thing they do in Steven Universe. I assumed that wasn't very rare or important since my house has that art piece too, once I paid 300 pennies for the laborer's set.
You guys will have to tell me what I missed when we get to that point in the story.
The only painting coming to mind is of the lady doing the weird prayer that looks like that thing they do in Steven Universe. I assumed that wasn't very rare or important since my house has that art piece too, once I paid 300 pennies for the laborer's set.
You guys will have to tell me what I missed when we get to that point in the story.
there's also this nice, light-hearted painting "Saturn Devouring His Son" on the wall.
on top of my head I can't quite remember the specific significance it has.
other that beeing generally fitting.
shame on me, I'm sure i'm missing something...
on top of my head I can't quite remember the specific significance it has.
other that beeing generally fitting.
shame on me, I'm sure i'm missing something...
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