Agnod is my favourite location as for now (and I've explored like 90% of the world now). I like Starlings and their magitek.
- Oh hey, so, remember that hideous Oorbaya monster? Which, by the way, I feel like every time I summon it is more horrible than I ever imagined. Note the way it simultaneously has not enough hands and way too many:
Guess where those come from? A loading screen is so helpful as to tell me:
The Oorbaya, or ‘Blue Death’, is what happens when a mage fails to control his arcane fever.
Since mages in this mod make magic by taking phenomena from some other world and expressing it in this one (some world where Constantine’s beard is on fire, remember), the Oorbaya is presumably… trapped between worlds so to speak, constantly expressing this interdimensional magic through its own flesh? Summoning in more and more magic – unable to stop – and expressing it out as phenomena (the hands grasping hands grasping hands and the purple explosions)
- So to take my mind off the horror of my own character’s existence, let’s think about how to get to that spaceship.
The crashed spaceship is up at the ass end of the world. I honestly have no idea how to get through the nearly impassable mountains so I just fly a Myrad as far north as possible, then start heading northwest and hope for the best.
- I work my way through the pink crystal forest, and discover that the Great Snowy North is hardcore.
Just north of the crystal forest I run into a pair of mages and three elemental wolves living harmoniously together. It’s kind of neat that unlike basically everything else in this game, mages run away to their maximum distance to start flicking icicles or fireballs or whatever at you. Combine that with some dangerous in-fighters like elemental wolves, and you’re in for a bad time.
Once I manage to kill them, I unfortunately find mountains in my way, and have to keep going around. So that was pretty much pointless.
- I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out the purpose of the ancient buildings on the plateau, though. Something like a Stonehenge-like plinth with a cyclopean lintel, and then these huge professionally-made arches with regular brick sizes heading up into the hills… half an aqueduct maybe? Some device that in better times helped people make it over the mountain like a dry Panama canal? But then what is up with that pillar with the stone arms holding up a spiky piece of rock?
Spent way too long trying to figure out what’s going on, there.
Enough amateur anthropology, I have stuff to do.
- This picture encompasses what the Great White North is like, for me:
You think, oh, you’re level 32. You’re a tough guy. Right? You can handle the North.
Wrong.
The wolves and the four-tusked mammoths are okay, but pretty much everything else up here will destroy me in one or two hits.
Snow bear: two swipes.
Frost troll: one swing.
Vatyr: three or four punches, but there’s no escaping them, even on brave Whirlwind the donkey.
The giant spiders will reach out and brush you with one hairy leg as you ride by, and instantly kill you right off the back of your horse.
But – and this is the important bit – none of these deadly monsters can see much further than the nose in front of their face.
- It produces an interesting semi-tactical rogue-like element.
“Okay, so this is where the snow bear is. Go around. Work your way up the mountain. Not that way; that’s where the spiders are. There’s a mammoth; you can kill mammoths…”
I feel like my elemental wolf is working with me on this ever since I came to the North, although I think it’s actually part of the AI behavior for near-death fleeing. It’ll get up in some monster’s face, take one hit, and then run the fuck away at full speed. The monster will chase after it, letting me run in the opposite direction or take potshots at it with my bow (and hopefully actually hit it sometimes, but it’s hard to lead the right amount on this thing)
- So basically the map takes you all the way around the northwestern tip of the map to get to the spaceship. I get some vistas that would probably be pretty amazing if it wasn’t constantly overcast and snowing:
I kind of wanted to work my way down to that ship to see if some poor bastard from Nehrim managed to land in this frozen hellhole, but I’m stuck way up on the mountain and that sounded like a pain in the butt.
The music, at least, is very atmospheric. Quiet, almost fragile piano notes disappearing into the quiet snow.
The snow in this metaphor is hiding killer snow bears, but you know, that’s Enderal for you.
- There’s some pretty cool set pieces in the Great North.
- A single, lonely home at the end of the world. A warhammer, a skeleton and a book on Master Rhetorics, half-buried along with their house in an avalanche.
- Two mages and their frost elementals in a tower. The top of the tower is a warm, inviting spot with a stew on the fire and a pair of bedrolls across from one another, beating back the frozen night. I, of course, was welcomed with a rain of icicles.
- Further up the mountain from them, the last Homely House. Well, it actually reads something about Deep Diggers, and a bunch of killer Vatyr are living there now. My strategy here involves opening the door, murdering something really fast with a double power attack using my bound swords, and then closing the door and running away to gnaw on crusty Endralean bread to regenerate health.
- Even further beyond that is the Deep Digger Settlement. A whole town, with water wheels and… stuff. This seems to be the very top of the mountain, and the undead here are commensurately the ‘ardest motherfuckers I’ve ever run across.
- I heroically meet the gatekeeper – a Grotesque Lost One too high-level to enslave with my entropy talent – in honorable battle, while he’s trapped in a narrow passage:
I manage to kill a few more of the beasties, but there’s nothing much to scavenge. I manage to score an Ice Elemental II spell (level 36) from one of the houses, which makes up for the lack of material loot. When going downstairs saw my new towering, majestically-glowing frost elemental pop in one hit from a Lord of Lost Ones like a balloon, I decided I’d had enough and headed back towards Agnod at top speed.
I’d gone right past it because this tip of the mountain stuff was pretty interesting.
The Takeaway:
Wasn’t I supposed to be looking for a spaceship?
Guess where those come from? A loading screen is so helpful as to tell me:
The Oorbaya, or ‘Blue Death’, is what happens when a mage fails to control his arcane fever.
Since mages in this mod make magic by taking phenomena from some other world and expressing it in this one (some world where Constantine’s beard is on fire, remember), the Oorbaya is presumably… trapped between worlds so to speak, constantly expressing this interdimensional magic through its own flesh? Summoning in more and more magic – unable to stop – and expressing it out as phenomena (the hands grasping hands grasping hands and the purple explosions)
- So to take my mind off the horror of my own character’s existence, let’s think about how to get to that spaceship.
The crashed spaceship is up at the ass end of the world. I honestly have no idea how to get through the nearly impassable mountains so I just fly a Myrad as far north as possible, then start heading northwest and hope for the best.
- I work my way through the pink crystal forest, and discover that the Great Snowy North is hardcore.
Just north of the crystal forest I run into a pair of mages and three elemental wolves living harmoniously together. It’s kind of neat that unlike basically everything else in this game, mages run away to their maximum distance to start flicking icicles or fireballs or whatever at you. Combine that with some dangerous in-fighters like elemental wolves, and you’re in for a bad time.
Once I manage to kill them, I unfortunately find mountains in my way, and have to keep going around. So that was pretty much pointless.
- I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out the purpose of the ancient buildings on the plateau, though. Something like a Stonehenge-like plinth with a cyclopean lintel, and then these huge professionally-made arches with regular brick sizes heading up into the hills… half an aqueduct maybe? Some device that in better times helped people make it over the mountain like a dry Panama canal? But then what is up with that pillar with the stone arms holding up a spiky piece of rock?
Spent way too long trying to figure out what’s going on, there.
Enough amateur anthropology, I have stuff to do.
- This picture encompasses what the Great White North is like, for me:
You think, oh, you’re level 32. You’re a tough guy. Right? You can handle the North.
Wrong.
The wolves and the four-tusked mammoths are okay, but pretty much everything else up here will destroy me in one or two hits.
Snow bear: two swipes.
Frost troll: one swing.
Vatyr: three or four punches, but there’s no escaping them, even on brave Whirlwind the donkey.
The giant spiders will reach out and brush you with one hairy leg as you ride by, and instantly kill you right off the back of your horse.
But – and this is the important bit – none of these deadly monsters can see much further than the nose in front of their face.
- It produces an interesting semi-tactical rogue-like element.
“Okay, so this is where the snow bear is. Go around. Work your way up the mountain. Not that way; that’s where the spiders are. There’s a mammoth; you can kill mammoths…”
I feel like my elemental wolf is working with me on this ever since I came to the North, although I think it’s actually part of the AI behavior for near-death fleeing. It’ll get up in some monster’s face, take one hit, and then run the fuck away at full speed. The monster will chase after it, letting me run in the opposite direction or take potshots at it with my bow (and hopefully actually hit it sometimes, but it’s hard to lead the right amount on this thing)
- So basically the map takes you all the way around the northwestern tip of the map to get to the spaceship. I get some vistas that would probably be pretty amazing if it wasn’t constantly overcast and snowing:
I kind of wanted to work my way down to that ship to see if some poor bastard from Nehrim managed to land in this frozen hellhole, but I’m stuck way up on the mountain and that sounded like a pain in the butt.
The music, at least, is very atmospheric. Quiet, almost fragile piano notes disappearing into the quiet snow.
The snow in this metaphor is hiding killer snow bears, but you know, that’s Enderal for you.
- There’s some pretty cool set pieces in the Great North.
- A single, lonely home at the end of the world. A warhammer, a skeleton and a book on Master Rhetorics, half-buried along with their house in an avalanche.
- Two mages and their frost elementals in a tower. The top of the tower is a warm, inviting spot with a stew on the fire and a pair of bedrolls across from one another, beating back the frozen night. I, of course, was welcomed with a rain of icicles.
- Further up the mountain from them, the last Homely House. Well, it actually reads something about Deep Diggers, and a bunch of killer Vatyr are living there now. My strategy here involves opening the door, murdering something really fast with a double power attack using my bound swords, and then closing the door and running away to gnaw on crusty Endralean bread to regenerate health.
- Even further beyond that is the Deep Digger Settlement. A whole town, with water wheels and… stuff. This seems to be the very top of the mountain, and the undead here are commensurately the ‘ardest motherfuckers I’ve ever run across.
- I heroically meet the gatekeeper – a Grotesque Lost One too high-level to enslave with my entropy talent – in honorable battle, while he’s trapped in a narrow passage:
I manage to kill a few more of the beasties, but there’s nothing much to scavenge. I manage to score an Ice Elemental II spell (level 36) from one of the houses, which makes up for the lack of material loot. When going downstairs saw my new towering, majestically-glowing frost elemental pop in one hit from a Lord of Lost Ones like a balloon, I decided I’d had enough and headed back towards Agnod at top speed.
I’d gone right past it because this tip of the mountain stuff was pretty interesting.
The Takeaway:
Wasn’t I supposed to be looking for a spaceship?
Last edited by dyslexicfaser on 13.09.2017 02:41, edited 3 times in total.
And they say men are the ones who don't want to stop and ask for directions! 
This exploration thing you have going here is another game within Enderal's main game... and it is fun.
I don't know for sure, but you may be overdue for an armor/gear revamp? Is too under-leveled for your char, perhaps?
Or maybe some new protection spells?
I don't know for sure, but you may be overdue for an armor/gear revamp? Is too under-leveled for your char, perhaps?
Or maybe some new protection spells?
12.09.2017 10:17Ragnarok wrote: This exploration thing you have going here is another game within Enderal's main game... and it is fun.
I don't know for sure, but you may be overdue for an armor/gear revamp? Is too under-leveled for your char, perhaps?
Or maybe some new protection spells?
I am a little worried I'm going to hit Agnod and get my ass kicked like I have been from one end of the North to the other, I admit.
12.09.2017 05:21badgesareus wrote: And they say men are the ones who don't want to stop and ask for directions!
edited by urst:
deleted the content
(just kept the post so the later ones don't look off)
deleted the content
(just kept the post so the later ones don't look off)
I have no personal experience with bound (summoned) weapons, but it may be they just aren't as effective against higher level enemies. Maybe you rely too heavily on them.
P.S. The Deep Digger area has at least 4 dungeons/mines to explore.
P.S. The Deep Digger area has at least 4 dungeons/mines to explore.
Probably better to spoiler them and I'll avoid them, r'Q. Some people prefer these 'in which I play' type things to be done pure.
12.09.2017 04:02dyslexicfaser wrote:
- I work my way through the pink crystal forest, and discover that the Great Snowy North is hardcore.
I feel like my elemental wolf is working with me on this ever since I came to the North, although I think it’s actually part of the AI behavior for near-death fleeing. It’ll get up in some monster’s face, take one hit, and then run the fuck away at full speed. The monster will chase after it, letting me run in the opposite direction or take potshots at it with my bow (and hopefully actually hit it sometimes, but it’s hard to lead the right amount on this thing)
12.09.2017 20:00badgesareus wrote: I have no personal experience with bound (summoned) weapons, but it may be they just aren't as effective against higher level enemies. Maybe you rely too heavily on them.
I feel like the problem is that my defense isn't keeping up with my damage output without a shield, despite the heavy armor (and like 65 heavy armor skill). I've started leveling handicrafts in the hope that a master blacksmith will be able to pile enough armor onto a piece that it would actually be worth setting aside the Fallen set bonus, but that won't reach mastery for like 10 more levels.
Maybe you can craft good armor at the master level, but you also have to raise your enchanting to master to put a good enchantment on it. And even so, you just put 1 enchant on each piece, whereas the set items have multiple enchants on each, plus multiple set bonuses.
I checked one of my older game saves (level 71). I had a handcrafted Aeterna Bow, upgraded to Exquisite, and enchanted with fire damage. With my archery skill at 109, that bow does 97 regular damage + 64 fire damage. On the other hand, if I summon a Mystic Bow IV, it does 77 damage, and as far as I know, there is no elemental or magic damage done by it (I don't use it so I could be wrong about that.)
It also seems from what I've read that the Keeper discipline is oriented toward heavy armor and shield blocking (depending what you pick, of course). In many of your pics I see you have a 1H & torch, no shield. Perhaps a shield & blocking would help; I haven't tried it myself as I'm not into shields & blocking. I want to kill enemies before they are close enough to shield bash.
No offense, but perhaps you are not being cautious enough. I looked at your pics (just on the 1 page) and it appears in them that you do not sneak. I travel the roads & dungeons in "sneak"; slower, but I rarely get ambushed. Of course, that means dumping more learning points into sneak. However, I go everywhere on foot; I suppose if you ride Whirlwind you cannot sneak.
Re Lord of the Lost Ones,many dungeons have one. Even at higher levels they can often kill you in 1-2 hits, so best to not get close enough for a melee encounter. If I recall correctly (50-50 chance) in the house in Deep Digger-ville, there was a stair or platform you could get on and rain down arrows; their AI doesn't seem too bright.
Good luck in Agnod heh heh heh.
I checked one of my older game saves (level 71). I had a handcrafted Aeterna Bow, upgraded to Exquisite, and enchanted with fire damage. With my archery skill at 109, that bow does 97 regular damage + 64 fire damage. On the other hand, if I summon a Mystic Bow IV, it does 77 damage, and as far as I know, there is no elemental or magic damage done by it (I don't use it so I could be wrong about that.)
It also seems from what I've read that the Keeper discipline is oriented toward heavy armor and shield blocking (depending what you pick, of course). In many of your pics I see you have a 1H & torch, no shield. Perhaps a shield & blocking would help; I haven't tried it myself as I'm not into shields & blocking. I want to kill enemies before they are close enough to shield bash.
No offense, but perhaps you are not being cautious enough. I looked at your pics (just on the 1 page) and it appears in them that you do not sneak. I travel the roads & dungeons in "sneak"; slower, but I rarely get ambushed. Of course, that means dumping more learning points into sneak. However, I go everywhere on foot; I suppose if you ride Whirlwind you cannot sneak.
Re Lord of the Lost Ones,many dungeons have one. Even at higher levels they can often kill you in 1-2 hits, so best to not get close enough for a melee encounter. If I recall correctly (50-50 chance) in the house in Deep Digger-ville, there was a stair or platform you could get on and rain down arrows; their AI doesn't seem too bright.
Good luck in Agnod heh heh heh.
Although I don't want to turn this beautiful thread I am enjoying so much into an advice clinic, I'd just like to suggest investing more on crowd control. You already use the Wolf, which can usually control one target at least, but maybe you need more in the way of stuns and disables. Something that allows you to re-position yourself when startled. Take a good look at spells and also the Memory Trees, especially under the Mage (blue) tree, for example.
Yeah, I mentioned the armor and points in the appropriate trees will help with armor too, but check out for ways in which you can control your opponents more efficiently.
Enderal's combat is far more about how we approach the combat ahead of us than Skyrim was ever able to be. In Skyrim, as long as we were tough enough (level and gear), we could go head on into a swarm of dragons and take them out. In Enderal that will not do. We need position and control and then burst and sustain.
I am enjoying your genuine thread very much, as I am waiting for the DLC to start a new game all over again, and would hate to see you hit a wall when the going REALLY gets tough.
Yeah, I mentioned the armor and points in the appropriate trees will help with armor too, but check out for ways in which you can control your opponents more efficiently.
Enderal's combat is far more about how we approach the combat ahead of us than Skyrim was ever able to be. In Skyrim, as long as we were tough enough (level and gear), we could go head on into a swarm of dragons and take them out. In Enderal that will not do. We need position and control and then burst and sustain.
I am enjoying your genuine thread very much, as I am waiting for the DLC to start a new game all over again, and would hate to see you hit a wall when the going REALLY gets tough.
13.09.2017 09:52badgesareus wrote: Maybe you can craft good armor at the master level, but you also have to raise your enchanting to master to put a good enchantment on it. And even so, you just put 1 enchant on each piece, whereas the set items have multiple enchants on each, plus multiple set bonuses.
I checked one of my older game saves (level 71). I had a handcrafted Aeterna Bow, upgraded to Exquisite, and enchanted with fire damage. With my archery skill at 109, that bow does 97 regular damage + 64 fire damage. On the other hand, if I summon a Mystic Bow IV, it does 77 damage, and as far as I know, there is no elemental or magic damage done by it (I don't use it so I could be wrong about that.)
It also seems from what I've read that the Keeper discipline is oriented toward heavy armor and shield blocking (depending what you pick, of course). In many of your pics I see you have a 1H & torch, no shield. Perhaps a shield & blocking would help; I haven't tried it myself as I'm not into shields & blocking. I want to kill enemies before they are close enough to shield bash.
Good luck in Agnod heh heh heh.
13.09.2017 10:39Ragnarok wrote: Although I don't want to turn this beautiful thread I am enjoying so much into an advice clinic, I'd just like to suggest investing more on crowd control. You already use the Wolf, which can usually control one target at least, but maybe you need more in the way of stuns and disables. Something that allows you to re-position yourself when startled. Take a good look at spells and also the Memory Trees, especially under the Mage (blue) tree, for example.
Entropic Blood has saved my butt a lot in Agnod, though.
I am enjoying your genuine thread very much, as I am waiting for the DLC to start a new game all over again, and would hate to see you hit a wall when the going REALLY gets tough.
Oh, I'm "all in" with schadenfreude! Especially with screenshots! (been there, done that!)
14.09.2017 08:52badgesareus wrote: Oh, I'm "all in" with schadenfreude! Especially with screenshots! (been there, done that!)
- Turns out I was still in the wrong location, and I had to get off the mountain entirely before I could find Agnod.
Some of these attempts were better than others.
- Agnod’s design is pretty cool. It’s half buried in the snow at a weird angle, so you have to do a bunch of platforming up pipes (that look suspiciously like the completed Agnod had spider legs) just to get inside.
It was a bit odd that if you stand on Agnod and look at the path it cut into the mountain it seemed to smash in and then turn left. Maybe it was trying to turn around?
It would’ve been pretty neat to be able to look out and see the hole where the great work of seven decades of starling ingenuity had torn through the world on the way down, that’s all I’m saying.
- Inside, the ground is very uneven. The hull is cracked places, burying parts of entire rooms in snow and what’s left is covered in icicles. There’s a mix of gold hull plating, red emergency lighting, light reflecting off snow and ice and even water. Lots of great set design here, lots of variety.
Although it’s also very dark in parts. I’m very glad I finally figured out I could buy a magelight to free up a hand for double swording. It cuts out every two minutes, which is very inconvenient if I’m left trying to battle a horde of mechanical spiders in the dark, but still worthwhile.
There’s even sections where machines still pump and run and a reddish steam hisses and broils out of still-active ship parts. Agnod’s heart still beats.
- The locals are very, very active, thanks for nothing Pahtira. Mechanical spiders, dwarf balls (I mean sphere guardians, yeah) and centurion giants are the order of the day.
It’s actually the dwarf balls that present the most difficulty.
Centurions are lumbering giants that I can kite around pinging arrows off their chassis all day until I dent them enough to fall over.
Mechanical spiders are weak enough to hit with Entropic Blood, which gives me another (debatably) warm body between me and my enemies; plus they naturally explode in purple lightning when they die, which means that they explode twice when I hit them with Entropic Blood. It’s like fireworks.
Dwarf balls are fast, stabby, and too high level to take over with my talent. They hang out in ball form when not angered by intruders, so I found myself walking by them all the time only to get a sword in the back. Then I found myself shooting every vaguely ball-shaped thing just in case; a lot of urns and pots were irreparably damaged in their name.
- I do start to wonder after a while where all the starlings are. Surely this was a crewed spaceship? There’s not even a skeleton to be found, just endless rooms of starling-tech monsters. There’s one up in the cockpit called The Navigator, even.
Then I start to wonder… see, when mechanical spiders explode on death, they spray out chunks of that starling gold metal and burned-looking soul gem bits, but also what looks like chunks of meat.
The dwarf balls splinter into bits without any such gory mess, but the top humanoid half stays mostly intact… and the centurions just fall over, fully intact. Fully humanoid, if gigantic in size.
Was Agnod crewed only by these mechanical horrors to begin with, or did the starlings do this to themselves?
Did it happen before the maiden voyage, a sacrifice of the individual in the name of the glorious starling master race, each starling crew member carefully closing themselves up in shells of unfeeling metal, Cybermen style? Or did it happen after, when their ship was hulled and they were stranded on the roof of the world with a bunch of deadly snow bears outside and no help coming?
Do sphere guardians bleed soylent green?
- I’ll spare you the horrors of the dozens of careful battles, the hundreds of mechanical spiders, dwarf balls and centurions slain, and the dozens of my own gruesome deaths at their hands (and blades, and spider-tips).
It’s a lot, because Agnod is a goddamn labyrinth. Worker’s barracks, engine rooms, cockpit, generator room, etcetera. I actually popped open a couple of master-class doors with my two Ondusi’s Master Scroll of Lockpicking that were supposed to expedite the whole process, but then I got lost and ended up wandering backwards through a bunch of content anyway.
- I almost have to admire how SureAI managed to cram in a spider section behind one of the master-locked doors. It’s like the ship got torn open in the middle and the little blighters get in anywhere there’s a spare space for them.
The pure blue-white is a welcome break in the color palette, at least.
Well, there’s a couple dozen corpses in here, though they’re all wearing shit hauberks and iron swords instead of starling tech. Where the heck did they come from? If they’re adventurers that are dying in droves to the defenses and the spiders are dragging them back to their lair, who would brave the Great White North with an iron sword? Just how many hapless fools have Yerai and Pahtira sent here to die because they wanted a trinket?
It’s also possible these are the starlings; in the barracks section there’s a couple of iron cages. It’s possible they were keeping the killer spiders as pets for some ineffable reason, and they got out either immediately before or after the crash. And then dined on succulent starling flesh, because who the hell keeps man-eating spiders as pets.
We’ll never know for sure, probably, because there’s a distinct lack of audio logs or helpful notes about the place.
- After far, far too long, I find Pahtira in the generator room.
I kind of wonder how she managed that feat; at least Jespar is a spy kinda guy, it sort of makes sense that he’d make it through a dungeon and meet me at the end.
Do the defenses not target starlings? Is that it? Am I the victim of racism?
She has a cute little line where I go ‘Why the hell were the defenses still on?!’ and she goes ‘What, I did turn them off! I mean, a lot of them. If you had to go through it with all the defenses on, you’d be dead. You should be grateful.’
Not feeling tremendously grateful, but that’s probably just all the deaths talking.
- She has me open a few valves that honestly feels like busywork. Why am I even here?
Pahtira has me go down and grab the core, when of course the defenses turn back on and fry me like bacon.
I needed to be here to get me out of the way, of course.
Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal, Pahtira! Also, curse cutscene defeats.
Pahtira monologues like a Saturday morning cartoon villain as I haze in and out of consciousness, about how Yerai isn’t using the centurion right and if she gets to be the glorious golden god-king she’ll bring the starlings back to their former glory and so on and so forth.
I wonder if she expects to just show up in a centurion suit and be handed the keys to the kingdom? I dunno, maybe that’s how things work with starlings; the blingiest contender gets the crown.
- Now, on the one hand, I appreciate that she understands that I am a dangerous enemy to make, hence turning on what looked like a tiny contained black hole when I stuck my hand into the engine to get the power core.
On the other hand, you guys and I all know this isn’t going to end well for her, because I am already dead, bitch.
- So there’s what might be a thrilling escape from the ship as the glacier melts and the water levels rise (I’m not sure how that happened with the power core gone, but whatever), except it’s not.
There’s no heart pumping music, and there’s no danger: you just tread water for a few slow minutes until the flood levels rise enough to get in the elevator, and then you head back through the still-dry ship to outside.
This would probably work much better on someone who died when you trick them into sticking their hand into a localized black hole.
- Boy is Pahtira going to be surprised in a minute when I teleport back to Ark.
- I bust in with Yerai shouting, ‘What are you doing Pahtira? This is madness!’ to the Pahtira-centurion. Oh sure, when you want to stick yourself in a giant robot it’s a great idea, but when she wants to do it it’s some kind of madness! Typical man.
No but seriously, you’re both fucking lunatics.
- Actually, she mostly sounds sulky from inside Horst when I burst in. ‘Oh great, I knew I shouldn’t have waited’, that kind of thing.
Yerai notices me and goes, ‘dyslexicfaser, watch out! Pahtira has taken over Horst!’ like I’m some rube who has no idea what’s going on and needs explanations.
That’s some quality sass, Giant Robot Pahtira.
So I lead her around the room in her big stompy centurion body while Yerai goes to hide in a corner. Centurion fights continue to be a joke to anybody with a bow, so there’s no tension at all. Horst is bigger than the average centurion, and he’s got a lot of HP, but that’s all.
Ping ping pingpingpingping repeat until dead.
Pahtira died as she lived; spouting cliched villain dialogue: “No, but that’s– impossible–”
- Actually, turns out Pahtira’s consciousness is ‘inactive’, not ‘offline’ per se. Yerai can transfer it into something else – he jokes about always wanting a talking paperweight.
I’m gonna be honest, The Adventures of Yerai and Pahtira the Talking Paperweight would be pretty awesome.
The Takeaway:
So that quest had some good bits, but the funny talking bits were spread out like butter over too much bread. It took forever to find the place, and then the Agnod section was at least twice as long as it needed to be. There were at least four zones in the bloody thing; it was bigger than the average city!
I think it might have gone better if the generator room served as a kind of hub with Pahtira sending me out to various parts of the ship on retrieval missions, rather than having to work through at least 50 difficult fights only to get hit by the betrayal almost immediately.
I found myself kind of flagging during the quest and the subsequent write-up, too. Next up is more main questing with Callia and Jespar, but I think I’m going to take a week or two off to recharge my batteries with this mod.
Maybe do some story writing, or try out Witcher 3 or something.
Some of these attempts were better than others.
- Agnod’s design is pretty cool. It’s half buried in the snow at a weird angle, so you have to do a bunch of platforming up pipes (that look suspiciously like the completed Agnod had spider legs) just to get inside.
It was a bit odd that if you stand on Agnod and look at the path it cut into the mountain it seemed to smash in and then turn left. Maybe it was trying to turn around?
It would’ve been pretty neat to be able to look out and see the hole where the great work of seven decades of starling ingenuity had torn through the world on the way down, that’s all I’m saying.
- Inside, the ground is very uneven. The hull is cracked places, burying parts of entire rooms in snow and what’s left is covered in icicles. There’s a mix of gold hull plating, red emergency lighting, light reflecting off snow and ice and even water. Lots of great set design here, lots of variety.
Although it’s also very dark in parts. I’m very glad I finally figured out I could buy a magelight to free up a hand for double swording. It cuts out every two minutes, which is very inconvenient if I’m left trying to battle a horde of mechanical spiders in the dark, but still worthwhile.
There’s even sections where machines still pump and run and a reddish steam hisses and broils out of still-active ship parts. Agnod’s heart still beats.
- The locals are very, very active, thanks for nothing Pahtira. Mechanical spiders, dwarf balls (I mean sphere guardians, yeah) and centurion giants are the order of the day.
It’s actually the dwarf balls that present the most difficulty.
Centurions are lumbering giants that I can kite around pinging arrows off their chassis all day until I dent them enough to fall over.
Mechanical spiders are weak enough to hit with Entropic Blood, which gives me another (debatably) warm body between me and my enemies; plus they naturally explode in purple lightning when they die, which means that they explode twice when I hit them with Entropic Blood. It’s like fireworks.
Dwarf balls are fast, stabby, and too high level to take over with my talent. They hang out in ball form when not angered by intruders, so I found myself walking by them all the time only to get a sword in the back. Then I found myself shooting every vaguely ball-shaped thing just in case; a lot of urns and pots were irreparably damaged in their name.
- I do start to wonder after a while where all the starlings are. Surely this was a crewed spaceship? There’s not even a skeleton to be found, just endless rooms of starling-tech monsters. There’s one up in the cockpit called The Navigator, even.
Then I start to wonder… see, when mechanical spiders explode on death, they spray out chunks of that starling gold metal and burned-looking soul gem bits, but also what looks like chunks of meat.
The dwarf balls splinter into bits without any such gory mess, but the top humanoid half stays mostly intact… and the centurions just fall over, fully intact. Fully humanoid, if gigantic in size.
Was Agnod crewed only by these mechanical horrors to begin with, or did the starlings do this to themselves?
Did it happen before the maiden voyage, a sacrifice of the individual in the name of the glorious starling master race, each starling crew member carefully closing themselves up in shells of unfeeling metal, Cybermen style? Or did it happen after, when their ship was hulled and they were stranded on the roof of the world with a bunch of deadly snow bears outside and no help coming?
Do sphere guardians bleed soylent green?
- I’ll spare you the horrors of the dozens of careful battles, the hundreds of mechanical spiders, dwarf balls and centurions slain, and the dozens of my own gruesome deaths at their hands (and blades, and spider-tips).
It’s a lot, because Agnod is a goddamn labyrinth. Worker’s barracks, engine rooms, cockpit, generator room, etcetera. I actually popped open a couple of master-class doors with my two Ondusi’s Master Scroll of Lockpicking that were supposed to expedite the whole process, but then I got lost and ended up wandering backwards through a bunch of content anyway.
- I almost have to admire how SureAI managed to cram in a spider section behind one of the master-locked doors. It’s like the ship got torn open in the middle and the little blighters get in anywhere there’s a spare space for them.
The pure blue-white is a welcome break in the color palette, at least.
Well, there’s a couple dozen corpses in here, though they’re all wearing shit hauberks and iron swords instead of starling tech. Where the heck did they come from? If they’re adventurers that are dying in droves to the defenses and the spiders are dragging them back to their lair, who would brave the Great White North with an iron sword? Just how many hapless fools have Yerai and Pahtira sent here to die because they wanted a trinket?
It’s also possible these are the starlings; in the barracks section there’s a couple of iron cages. It’s possible they were keeping the killer spiders as pets for some ineffable reason, and they got out either immediately before or after the crash. And then dined on succulent starling flesh, because who the hell keeps man-eating spiders as pets.
We’ll never know for sure, probably, because there’s a distinct lack of audio logs or helpful notes about the place.
- After far, far too long, I find Pahtira in the generator room.
I kind of wonder how she managed that feat; at least Jespar is a spy kinda guy, it sort of makes sense that he’d make it through a dungeon and meet me at the end.
Do the defenses not target starlings? Is that it? Am I the victim of racism?
She has a cute little line where I go ‘Why the hell were the defenses still on?!’ and she goes ‘What, I did turn them off! I mean, a lot of them. If you had to go through it with all the defenses on, you’d be dead. You should be grateful.’
Not feeling tremendously grateful, but that’s probably just all the deaths talking.
- She has me open a few valves that honestly feels like busywork. Why am I even here?
Pahtira has me go down and grab the core, when of course the defenses turn back on and fry me like bacon.
I needed to be here to get me out of the way, of course.
Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal, Pahtira! Also, curse cutscene defeats.
Pahtira monologues like a Saturday morning cartoon villain as I haze in and out of consciousness, about how Yerai isn’t using the centurion right and if she gets to be the glorious golden god-king she’ll bring the starlings back to their former glory and so on and so forth.
I wonder if she expects to just show up in a centurion suit and be handed the keys to the kingdom? I dunno, maybe that’s how things work with starlings; the blingiest contender gets the crown.
- Now, on the one hand, I appreciate that she understands that I am a dangerous enemy to make, hence turning on what looked like a tiny contained black hole when I stuck my hand into the engine to get the power core.
On the other hand, you guys and I all know this isn’t going to end well for her, because I am already dead, bitch.
- So there’s what might be a thrilling escape from the ship as the glacier melts and the water levels rise (I’m not sure how that happened with the power core gone, but whatever), except it’s not.
There’s no heart pumping music, and there’s no danger: you just tread water for a few slow minutes until the flood levels rise enough to get in the elevator, and then you head back through the still-dry ship to outside.
This would probably work much better on someone who died when you trick them into sticking their hand into a localized black hole.
- Boy is Pahtira going to be surprised in a minute when I teleport back to Ark.
- I bust in with Yerai shouting, ‘What are you doing Pahtira? This is madness!’ to the Pahtira-centurion. Oh sure, when you want to stick yourself in a giant robot it’s a great idea, but when she wants to do it it’s some kind of madness! Typical man.
No but seriously, you’re both fucking lunatics.
- Actually, she mostly sounds sulky from inside Horst when I burst in. ‘Oh great, I knew I shouldn’t have waited’, that kind of thing.
Yerai notices me and goes, ‘dyslexicfaser, watch out! Pahtira has taken over Horst!’ like I’m some rube who has no idea what’s going on and needs explanations.
That’s some quality sass, Giant Robot Pahtira.
So I lead her around the room in her big stompy centurion body while Yerai goes to hide in a corner. Centurion fights continue to be a joke to anybody with a bow, so there’s no tension at all. Horst is bigger than the average centurion, and he’s got a lot of HP, but that’s all.
Ping ping pingpingpingping repeat until dead.
Pahtira died as she lived; spouting cliched villain dialogue: “No, but that’s– impossible–”
- Actually, turns out Pahtira’s consciousness is ‘inactive’, not ‘offline’ per se. Yerai can transfer it into something else – he jokes about always wanting a talking paperweight.
I’m gonna be honest, The Adventures of Yerai and Pahtira the Talking Paperweight would be pretty awesome.
The Takeaway:
So that quest had some good bits, but the funny talking bits were spread out like butter over too much bread. It took forever to find the place, and then the Agnod section was at least twice as long as it needed to be. There were at least four zones in the bloody thing; it was bigger than the average city!
I think it might have gone better if the generator room served as a kind of hub with Pahtira sending me out to various parts of the ship on retrieval missions, rather than having to work through at least 50 difficult fights only to get hit by the betrayal almost immediately.
I found myself kind of flagging during the quest and the subsequent write-up, too. Next up is more main questing with Callia and Jespar, but I think I’m going to take a week or two off to recharge my batteries with this mod.
Maybe do some story writing, or try out Witcher 3 or something.
I found myself kind of flagging during the quest and the subsequent write-up, too. Next up is more main questing with Callia and Jespar,
Maybe . . . try out Witcher 3
Real fun to read your thoughts as you play. Ever thought of a video version with voice? 
Awesome writeup on a place I had not been into.
I know the feeling of wanting to take a break after a quest/place, there are several like that and it can be draining. But please do not go play Witcher. Do something unrelated and then come back to Enderal.
I know the feeling of wanting to take a break after a quest/place, there are several like that and it can be draining. But please do not go play Witcher. Do something unrelated and then come back to Enderal.
16.09.2017 11:47Ragnarok wrote: Real fun to read your thoughts as you play. Ever thought of a video version with voice?
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