Anyway, after wiping the sweat off their brows from smashing up those effing rats, the gang take time out to chat to some of the people in the south wind clan house. Also, it's a good place to rest as it's free from monsters and it's the only place inside the city (that I've found) where they don't mind you setting up a camp-fire wherever you like.
I had another word with Mandy Bapsout from earlier - but despite having spent weeks looking after me, she's not really interested in what I've been up to since then. Also, I bump into Larina - who is Wrinn the body-snatcher's wife.
"So what's it like being married to someone who's gone through the sebai ritual?" I ask...
"Oh, it's an honour. I was a lot younger than him when we got married, so when he took over the body of my new-born son it made for a nice reversal of roles"
The deeply dubious bedroom implications of this woman being married to a child that is biologically her own son are mercifully not addressed here. I know the Iskai grow up fast and that they have secondary partners they can focus their amorous attentions on while they wait for their proper spouses new body to mature - but still. I'm pretty sure arrests would be made if this was happening on earth...
Out into the city we stroll. I'm pretty sure that I shouldn't ride TOO high on our recent victory - in the grand scheme of things, having slain 5 rats will probably turn out to be a fairly feeble boast. Thus we head over to the Trainer.
As we knock on the door, Dirr mutters "The trainer who lives here is a LEGEND amongst people round here. For real - he's, like, the best fighter EVAH. Seriously hardcore".
We step inside - the house is almost completely empty except for a massive mat on the floor, a breakfast bar and a scraggy old (by their standards) Iskai sat on a chair in the middle of the room.
Some flavour text pops up when you talk to him, describing him as a scraggy old (by their standards) Iskai sitting at a table. Table? He's SO hardcore that he doesn't NEED a table to sit at a table.
"What do you want you useless little IDIOT"
"Please" says Dirr "I've come to be trained!"
"Right then" - the guy gets up and walks to the mat "How many units of training do you want?"
At this point a number-selecting slide-bar appears - I have absolutly no idea what these units of training mean, let alone how many I'm going to be able to afford! Just to see, I slide it all the way to the mad - 18 I think.
"Fine. I'll train you 18 units better at fighting. Fork over 44.5 gold coins" (weirdly the game allows you to pick up fractions of gold coins up to one decimal place - so .5 of a gold coin is not a particularly unreasonable thing for a person to ask you for).
Dirr gets trained in fighting and seems pretty pleased about it. I have no idea how the experience system in the game works so I'm going to have to look it up. Certainly she doesn't level up or anything after all this training - could it be that it was just 18 XP she got for the training? Considering it's 60XP for just killing a rat this seems unlikely...
Anyway, I go through the whole procedure again for Tom and it all goes pretty much exactly the same (although I think the maximum number of units of training I was allowed was different). No obvious change for him either - so I experiment sending him straight back round.
"What do you want you useless little IDIOT"
"Please" says Tom "I've come to be trained!"
"Right then" - the guy gets up and walks to the mat "How many units of training do you want?"
At this point the number slider comes up with a range of 0 to 0. I select 0.
"GET OUT OF MY HOUSE YOU TIME WASTING, HATEFUL IDIOT!!!!"
I'm booted out the door and back into the street. Clearly people take the levelling up system seriously in this town! DEFINITELY need to look it up before I try training again...
Ok. So I'm trained - I've got MASSES of food. I'm broke so I can't buy anything. I think it's time to have another stab at the cave / formers' former guild hall.
The journey back is pretty easy - no trouble at all in fact! The only detour I took was to have a nose at a mysterious eye icon carved into the side of the cliff near the guild hall.
"Oh, these things are all over the place" explain Dirr, clearly not impressed "No one knows what they are or how to use them, but they probably won't turn out to be important later..."
I'll believe you Dirr, but I don't believe you.
So here we are again - in the creepy flowery disco cavern. I head for where I met the big-bad monster before and lo-and-behold, he's still milling about.
"Right then you blighter! This time we're ready for you!" Hack, Slash, Stab! The beasty's pretty tough and does a lot of damage when he hits you. But he's also quite uncoordinated and often misses when he lashes out at you.
Working as a team - the gang lines up in front of him to reduce the likelihood he'll just lay into one person and kill them outright. Plus, this way we can all have a chop at him each turn - so even if Dirr with her hardcore warrior skills +18 misses him, Hofstedt might still scratch him with his crummy old-man science poking.
Slash! Stab! HACK!
Thunk! The confidence boost from killing rats does the trick! The team's unflinching assault on the monster turns up the goods - i.e. one dead monster! PLUS you automatically get to loot its corpse! And what's this? Some kind of Trii? Oh-ho! That means this poor dead loser was a Krondir! And this Trii organ from its tail is (if the guy who told me this was telling the truth) irrationally valuable as a trinket in town!
ALSO - I get some Krondir meat! It's not added to my party's food stocks, so presumably isn't very nice. In fact, I think I remember the hunter telling me that it was horrible and the only point of killing these guys is for the Trii thing. But I'll hold onto the meat for now since maybe I can sell it to a tramps' soup kitchen.
Just as I'm feeling smug I'm rushed by more monsters! More stupid rats - only they've brought their bigger, paler friend with them. This is a rat level 2 - he does quite a lot more damage than the other rats and certainly slashes people up pretty bad with his claws! Tom and Hofstedt are left unconscious after the fight, but thankfully Dirr feels sleepy so we're able to rest and they get their health back no sweat.
We round the corner at the end of the passage where these frigging monsters were rushing us. There'd better be something good in there... BUT OH GOD! IT'S NOT GOOD! IT'S HORRIBLE!!!
THE ROOF!! THE ROOF IS ALIVE WITH WRITHING TENTACLES!!!!
I do a swift save expecting either instant death or seriously hard combat. Honest, the whole roof for as far as I can see into the room is covered in thrashing pink tentacles - each one the length of a human leg!
I walk towards them, but nothing seems to happen. Right clicking on them, I "inspect" the abominations:
"These wildly thrashing, horrific roof limbs are obviously mobile, but don't seem threatening" says Hofstedt. Seriously? This can't be true... These things are just freaky. But sure enough, I can walk around under them unharmed.
There's actually nothing much in this room after all though. There's a trash heap with a shield in it for Dirr, but basically it's a dead end. I head back into the bulk of the cave feeling a little indolent.
I've killed the worst this cave has thrown at me so far - lets see what switching on all these disco plants does. I'm ready for whatever fight comes looking for me!
I poke all the nasty grey fungi and light them up into strobing magic party plants. Nothing much seems to happen so I just explore as far as I can through the cave.
From here on there's lots of fighting stupid rat beasties. I did get killed a few times and have to re-load, but I don't think it's too interesting to go through each fight in detail. I'll maybe mention some here and there for the rest of the dungeon, but really just keep in mind that most of the time was spent chopping through a sea of beasties.
As I'm exploring I come across a sort of giant chain of beads. It's not doing anything so I walk up to it and look at it
"Now that it's a little more light in here, the grasping arms have become still"
Well for starters, it's no lighter in here at all - the light from the disco fungi hardly reaches any distance at all - but I guess I know what they mean.
So this was the freaky grasping claw thing that killed me before. Now that I look at it, I can't work out where on earth the grasping arms are meant to be. Maybe when the lights weren't on this string of beads was a little more obviously in possession of claws...
Anyway, I can stroll past it now no trouble - and it seems this cave goes on for miles! There are heaps of anti-chambers to be explored - most alive with rat monsters and Krondirs and most containing trash heaps with minor treasures in them.
My characters level up as I fight my way around the place - to the extent that monsters actually start running away from me! Even Krondirs!
Eventually I stumble into a huge empty room - "I... I THINK the floor is lighting up underneath us!" shouts Dirr!
She's right, as I walk around in this chamber I leave a trail of light-up footprints behind me! It's like a Michael Jackson video! These really are the disco caverns! As though to prove it further, there's more rainbow fungi to be lit up in here too...
These caves are full of mad just-for-the-look scenery. Roof tentacles abound all over the place, there's a room with a glowing foot-prints floor - and then I find some crazy looking decorative fountainy type things.
Examining them prompts the following description: "This is a massive plant, the base of which is cupped to collect water dripping from the ceiling".
Well, it's not THAT massive. I mean, sure it's the size of a man, but I'm inside a plant that is also a building/cave. So really it's only a quite-big plant.
Still, it gets weirder - when I "manipulate" the plant, it pokes out hundreds of squiggly rootlets out the bottom and starts wandering slowly about. I follow it for a while and it seems to bounce off the walls and ping-pong around the room very very slowly. But it never seems to DO anything. It seems like it's just a sort of elaborate door - you have to "manipulate it" to get into the next area, but after that it's just a sort of benign wandering object.
I turn round to go back the way I came but at that moment I catch a glimps of something horrible. Just behind me, chomping and gnashing away, is a giant mouth in the floor - purple inside with horrible flapping yellow lips and massive white teeth.
Indeed, the whole of the room I just walked across following the wandering plant is peppered with these things. I must have got across the room this far by total blind fluke! But now I have to pick my way back between these gobbling horrors.
"These creatures! They stink of rotting meat! They're AWEFUL!" Tom says
"Well, as a naturalist I'm bound to say that there's a purpose for all life in the universe. Even these bad boys. However, I do suggest we try not to fall in one" Hofstedt replies
"I... I've never seen anything like them!" says Dirr.
Never seen anything like it? We must be deep in some bad juju! People on this planet have been pretty familiar with all the monsters and lurking nasties so far. For there to be something new is bad enough - but for it to be a giant chomping floor mouth in a haunted magical architects' palace feels like especially unhappy news.
We tip-toe around the gnashing maws but soon find that the way forwards is blocked by one of them.
Ok, obviously there must be something you can do about them. No games designer puts a gnashing maw blocking a passage that you can't do anything about.
Clicking on it reveals that you can use items on it - but I've got a LOT of items and I refuse to play at randomly picking all of them in turn until something works...
I try using a weapon on the thing, thinking I might be able to kill it. But it doesn't do anything...
Ok, what've I got on me - loads of junk. Hmm - so the grasping arms were switched off using the rainbow lamps. So I reckon it's safe to say the answer to these maws will be inside the dungeon. What've I picked up so far - a rubbish shield, some gold coins, monster triis... and meat! Horrible Krondir meat that the game won't let you scoff!
I chuck a chunk of the stuff into this maw and it immediately closes up to chew on it. I dash over it - just in case it's going to open again, but thankfully it doesn't look like it's going to.
I've only harvested 3 Krondir meat chunks so far. So I'm going to have to be careful not to just chuck them willy nilly into these mouths. But what's this? A treasure chest! Get in!
The room is full of dis-armed grasping-arm traps and I have to take out a couple of rats to get to the chest - but when I do I'm rewarded big style!
Rewarded with: A ring of weakening.
Oh bum. Thankfully I'd put it on Hofstedt rather than anyone important for my fighting strategy- but it turns out it's cursed and he can't take it off now. Arg! Plus it turns out this was an ambush! Monsters appear out of no-where as soon as I've looted the chest! Did Doom teach me nothing? How could I have so blindly rushed for such obvious hero-bait!
Arh - the fight goes baddly. Tom and Hofstedt get chomped and Dirr only survives by the skin of her teeth! And then when it's over the game says "No one's really all that tired." so I'm not allowed to rest.
Now that's just stupid. Not allowed to rest because no-one's tired? People are UNCONSCIOUS from being chomped by beasties! How can they not be tired?
At this point I came up with a cunning ploy and went (in real life) to have an Option. I picked raspberry and white chocolate flavour...
Hm. My superior lurker powers don't work on this blog, it seems.
ReplyDelete"Now that it's a little more light in here, the grasping arms have become still"
That's a translation issue. In the German version it tells you the opposite - and sure enough, those things get triggered by (for example) torches. That's why they never got me, I prefer the dark ;)
Also, your trainer sounds even more hardcore than mine. I'm surprised he didn't roundhouse-kick you out of the house!
I'm not sure if the manual explains the training system, but it's not very complicated. If you look at the bottom half of your character sheets you will see skills for close combat and for ranged combat. Those are the main factors in deciding if you can hit your enemies or if you'll slash thin air. The trainer improves those numbers by the amount you select; for that, training points are needed - which are one of the main benefits of level-ups, as you've probably noticed by now.
The resting system is illogical, yes. I guess that's needed to balance the magical healing powers of sitting on your ass for 8 hours. If you're desparate you can just... Ohhh, so that's your cunning ploy :)
Ah - bad translation, or perhaps just my inattentiveness? We'll never know. I guess that they must've not got me because I didn't have torches on this time round...
ReplyDeleteAh - and look! I've actually already talked a little about my thoughts on the resting system in the next post! How handy is that! :D