Session 8

Ok, so I re-load and try a different direction in my explorations. The map makes it look like this cave can't be all THAT big, so I'll just wander about and see if there's anything else useful in here.

This seems to go pretty well for me - lots of lovely little fire flies buzzing around and those weird disco plants.

This time I make sure I DON'T switch on the disco plants since I've a suspicion they bring on the badness - certainly if *I* were a grasping armed monster living in a cave and then for some reason the disco lights got switched on, I think I'd know there was someone edible blundering around.

In the manual it said that having different people as the leader of your party makes a difference in various situations - and I'd previously assumed that was just manual bunkum. The kind of stuff they say to inspire a sort of game-play placebo effect. If they SUGGEST the game is doing cleverer stuff than it is, you tend to imagine you can see it happening. People are always doing this with AI - you make a fairly rubbish AI with a little bit of a random factor built into its decision making processes and people interpret the different behaviours as being simulated personality.

Still, I tried it out on the pile of old debris that I looted earlier to see what happened. And interestingly everyone in my party said exactly the same thing when they looked at it. HOWEVER - it turns out that if you set Dirr (the Iskai who I've been dragging around for ages now without ever asking her name) as your party leader, you can see much better in the darkness of the cave levels! Awesome!

Walking onwards she also pipes up to say "Hmm... this place smells of predators..." - cool! Having her as my party leader means she gives feedback on my environments!

Oops - turns out I'd misunderstood though. She wasn't just randomly commenting on the surroundings. As soon as I clicked to skip the dialogue box, a MASSIVE monster runs out of the dark and attacks me!

I was genuinely startled by this - I'm amazed how easily I'm drawn into this game. I was terrified of the fire-flies at first too! I wonder if it's just because everything's so dark in the caves, so your visibility range is hardly anything.

Combat starts up and I think "I'm having none of this! New weapons I might have, but only the stuff I've taken off the corpses of people who were presumably mangled by this bad-boy!"

It's turn based combat, so to flee I have to select one of my characters on the back row (that's just Hofstedt them) and give them the "flee" instruction. Then I hit "take turn" and wait for my dash for freedom to trigger.

Only it turns out that actually when one of your characters flees, only ONE of your characters flees. Hofstedt scarpers and the big beasty smushes up Tom outright!

Uh-oh! I'd imagined that it'd be like in Etrian Odyssey - when one person successfully escapes they take everyone with them! And the problem is you can only "flee" from the back row of the grid which means Dirr is going to have to spend a turn moving backwards before she's going to be able to try and get out with Hofstedt!

Well there's not much option, so that's what I do. Dirr backs away from the enormous monster, but predictably is gobbled down as soon as it takes its turn!

Combat's over and the game asks me who I want to be team leader - a little redundantly if you ask me since the team is now just one elderly bureaucrat!

Cutting back to first person mode I'm in a (now VERY dark) cave with this hideous monster stood RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME. The game gives you a chance to escape by having the monster just stand idle for a few moments once you're out of combat ("oh, lawks, where's my pocket watch? I must make sure it's not time to take my crumpets out of the oven before I pursue this greying codger...")

Hofstedt bolts. Running wildly through the dark without checking the map even (I'm not sure if the map pauses the game - if I stop to look, the beasty might well just nobble me while I'm stood still). Eventually he glimpses the light at the mouth of the cave. He staggers towards it - all the time listening to the monsters grumbling roar which has now been added to the cave's ambient sound effects.

Darting out into the brilliant sunlight he swerves to avoid some of the two-leddegy "rat" monsters that are lurking outside and dashes east into the unknown!

Only actually a very short distance to the east he finds the side of a road! He's not sure, but he thinks this was the road they followed northwards away from the city earlier - turns out that their trek around the cliff-edged plateaux was a waste of time because the cave was just a couple of steps west of where they'd been anyway.

Thankful to have cobbles under his feet instead of jungle bog-mud, but aware that safety still lies on the other side of a monster infested forest, he keeps going.

Yes, this is the right road! Hofstedt staggers round the "air roots" they'd passed earlier. Then he comes to a bridge he doesn't remember... He's not sure about this now... Is this where I'm meant to be going?

No time to think! Another monster just like the one in the cave is sneaking up on him from out of the trees! Hoftstedt dashes across the bridge - as he does though, planks of wood fall away below him! He loses some health but thankfully "The rest of the party go round the area his leg had gone through". If only the rest of the party wasn't no-one-because-they'd-all-been-chomped-unconscious (I know I SAID they'd been eaten, but this being an RPG they're actually only unconscious and Hofstedt is now dragging their bodies along behind him).

Phew! Survived that! But then OOF! It happens AGAIN!!! Outch!

Thankfully the monster, despite the fact that it's a three for one lunch offer on feeble adventurers, decides it's not worth risking the Bridge Of Rubbish Workmanship and isn't chasing. It looks like Hofstedt's going to make it!

In fact here's the city gates now! AWESOME! Slumping down in the safe area just in front of the guarded entrance he feels it's safe enough to rest and give the others a chance to recuperate! That was all too close for comfort for him and his old man, level 3 scientist legs can't take much more.

The party rest for eight hours and when they wake up, it's night time. The city is beautifully illuminated to the north but disastrously Hofstedt's troubles aren't over! "The party has too little food to recuperate!"

What??? Well I guess I HAD been wondering how the feeding-your-party system was going to work in this game. I'd initially imagined it was going to be something like the wonderful Dungeon Master / Eye Of The Beholder system where your party starts to ask to be fed, then complains more and more until you feed them - and actually lose health if you ignore their whimpers for long enough.

I loved that system in Dungeon master - it really upped the tension of your explorations. In the early levels of the dungeon there were plenty of edible monsters to fight, so you never really felt stretched for food. But as you went on further and further down into the labyrinth you discovered that beholders and giant rats just weren't good to chow down on. I remember at one point my whole team was starving to death because I'd gone for ages without killing anything you could then chomp and I had to turn round and go back up several floors to hunt supplies!

Only that game, like Oblivion, scaled up the threat level depending on your characters' experience - so going back up was no easy feat. Suddenly all the "screamers" (walking mushrooms that screamed as you stabbed them) and purple worms were super-tough and swarmed you so you really had to work hard!

Anyway, there's Hofstedt. He's escaped the cave of deadly grabbing. Staggered through the jungle of despair (actually it has a spooky name already - but I've forgotten what it was for now) and dropped down in front of the city gates only to find that actually he's still not saved his team-mates yet!

Ok - he's not stuck yet. He knows the South Wind Clan would help him! They saved him and Tom when they crashed on this planet - they'll help him again!

Staggering through town, he charges into the house and goes direct to the kitchen. At the start of the game the cook here had handed over seemingly endless supplies of food as long as you just kept asking him to sample some of the local cuisine. He wouldn't let Hofstedt down now would he...

"Hello. I'd love to try some of your local cuisine!" Hofstedt says - he doesn't mention that Dirr and Tom are basically dead, despite the fact that he's presumably dragging them along by the ankles.

"I'm sorry. I'm out of supplies!"

OH NO! No free food! And I spent all my money earlier...

But wait... there is ONE other place I've seen plenty of supplies of free rations... Children, think of the consequences - I'm headed back to the basement!

Actually - it was pretty easy to find food in the basement. There's heaps and heaps of it in the vases down there. As soon as I'd snagged some I rested and brought Tom and Dirr back to life! Hoorah!

But then I was drawn in by the desire for MORE free basement stuff. I thought "I can just check those heaps of scrap metal over there - it'll be fine..."

And I got lucky! I found a sword for Hofstedt and a clock (which will apparently - accordingly to Tom - come in handy, but I've not worked out how yet).

But then temptation did for me as it did for the cat. The same set of baddies attacks me! This time I actually make the effort to notice where they come from - the roof behind me collapses, closing my escape then they rip through the wall in front of me with their claws!

This actually sets quite an alarming precedent - baddies can come through the walls anywhere!

Anyway, no time to escape again so I set to taking my chances in a fight! The freshly revived Dirr and Tom on the front row using their axe and broadsword respectively (these were the weapons I found on the dead body in the mystery cave that I THINK was the Formers' Guild Hall).

And amazingly, it seems to go pretty well! The first rat monster goes down on the first turn! I'm not sure whose strike took it out, but I've actually finally killed something!

Almost immediately they return the favour. They cut Tom down pretty easily and I get ready to have to send Hofstedt to flee again...

But then I get really lucky! Dirr chops down the last two rats on her own! I don't know if it's her or the axe that does it, but as the combat comes to a close Hofstedt goes up a level! I guess the fact that he did nothing except watch from the back row doesn't matter since he's a scientist and one of the key skills for being a good scientist is observation...

Dirr goes up a level too (a little more deservedly if you ask me) but poor old Tommy dead-face gets no XP at all.

We can't go back the way we came, so we press on into the deeper basement - and what an awesome treasure trove there is! Two different flavours of healing potion! Armour! Gold! More food than Dirr can carry! A pickaxe!

I revive Tom with a potion and we head back to the collapsed wall - stopping to kill a couple more rats on the way! Now that I've done my first fight, I'm incredibly blasé about more rats. Tom goes up a level after this second fight - but his piloting skills improving based on hacking up monstrous rodents seems even LESS reasonable than Hofstedt's furthering himself in the field of science by watching a disembowelling in a dank under-croft....

We use the pickaxe to clear the wall and emerge victorious from the basement where once we had all been killed up horribly!

BOOM! My first dungeon complete! YEAH! It feels good!

And as an epilogue to my wupping of the basement beasties - Wrinn, the body-snatching head of the clan turns up -

"I heard a sort of collapsing-roof-and-ripping-wall sound and came not-quite-immediately to see what was happening!"

"yeah - cheers for the help. You have MONSTERS in your BASEMENT"

"Oh cripes! We only just had that basement built! It must've been accidentally adjacent to a monster nest!"

And then he said the following line which seemed so entertainingly ironic that I thought I'd quote it verbatim for once:

"I'm glad you survived my friends! We didn't nurse you back to health just for you to be eaten by wild animals in our house!"

Why I oughta'...