We’ve just about drunk dry the well of quests that we can finish without leaving the city or having to engage in any combat, so it’s time now for us to hesitantly poke our heads out of our cowardly hidey-holes and start doing the ones with minimal, easy combat.
Our major choices here would be the quest to free Hendak, or the quest to solve the skinner murders. We’re going to opt for the former, since it will also lead nicely into another easy quest; finding Lilarcor.
Let’s start a war.
START A NUCLEAR WAR.
AT THE SLAAAVE BAR
SLAAAVE BAR
SLAVE BAR
That was terrible. I’m sorry.
We’ve already convinced Lehtinan to give us access to the back rooms, so we don’t need to go through that rigmarole now. Instead, we just head straight down the corridor into an off-limits room that is not in any way marked as such and are immediately accosted by a guard, who demands that we take a hike.
We tell him that we’ll leave quietly, which he foolishly seems to take our word for, then leap upon him and rip him apart in frenzied bloodlust while his guard is down.
Of course, such “subterfuge” was hardly necessary since he’s pitifully weak (14 experience points? Whatever animal we killed for dinner last night would have been worth more than that) and the mages in here don’t quite seem to understand what their role within a combat situation is, and therefore spend the entire time casting minor buffs on themselves and trying to dispel magical effects on the party when there aren’t any to dispel.
Also, Korgan appears to be hearing voices, because immediately after the battle ended, he started conversing with some invisible gnome, telling him that his tale was excellent and then insulting him for having an oversized nose.
I suppose he might have been talking to Jan, but Jan didn’t actually say anything, so what was the “tale” that Korgan referred to? Maybe Jan is secretly a telepath. Or maybe we really do have invisible gnomes following us that only Korgan can hear.
In any event, Hendak somehow sees us through his door of solid wood and starts asking us to free him. We agree to do so, of course, since that’s what we came here for…although I suppose we could have told him we weren’t going to and then done it anyway just to confuse him, but we’re not doppelgangers here.
We have two choices here. We can either go back and tell Lehtinan that Hendak is planning an escape and, apparently without regard to the fact that the only way you’d know this is by breaking into the slave chambers and killing his guards, he gives you the key to the cell and requests that you punish Hendak for his insolence.
The other option involves the screaming berserker route of killing the beast master and all his pets, then rummaging through the bloody remains to find the key.
I have to say, from a general, or, dare I say it, “role-playing” standpoint, I much prefer the former option. It’s so much simpler, cleverer and more elegant, and therefore much more befitting of my protagonists who tend to be of the smart persuasion. The problem is that if you do it this way, the beast master abruptly vanishes, robbing you of both the experience you’d get for killing him and his loot, which includes an all-purpose, bag-of-holding-style container that we WANT, because as I have mentioned before, I am an obsessive packrat.
Sadly, therefore, mindless violence wins the day. Let’s go kick some dumb animals’ heads in.
(Yes, I know there aren't any paladins in the party. Shut up.)
As expected, up pops a genie with a wish to offer us.
Just one wish? Yep. Apparently Kalah’s already used the other two wishes. One of them was for the power to influence people, in response to which the genie gave him the Ring of Human influence (a-ha). However, despite being able to boost his Charisma to 18 whenever he wanted, he still somehow managed to make a colossal mess of any and all social interaction and get ridiculed by everyone he came across, so he then made his second wish for the magical power of an ogre mage.
Yeah. Out of everything he could have picked, he opted for an ogre mage. Suddenly “misguided fool” is no longer sufficient; he has now transcended into the realms of “botched lobotomy victim”.
Still, we’ve got ourselves one wish, and that’s better than nothing.
Here’s how this works. You are offered a variety of wishes that are specific to this quest, (some of which are just there to tease you; you can try wishing for Imoen to be returned to you or for Irenicus to die, but it doesn’t work) or, if you don’t want any of those, you can decide to “choose a wish for yourself”, after which it functions exactly as if you had cast Limited Wish.
While taking the Limited Wish route would probably be more profitable overall, we do want to get some closure on the quest and we'll eventually be able to cast that anyway, so let’s take a look at our options.
As I mentioned, the wishes for Imoen’s return and Irenicus’ death don’t work, so those are out of the question. You can also wish to make yourself the new owner of the lamp and get as many wishes as you want; essentially “wishing for more wishes”, as the genie puts it. However, according to some arbitrary genie rule, you’re not allowed to do this. Damn it.
You can also wish to resurrect Kalah, wish to set the genie free, wish to imprison Kalah’s soul or wish for Jafir to die painfully. All of these ones actually work. However, the latter two would be stooping to Jafir’s level and being an arsehead just for the sake of it.
More importantly, we don’t get any reward for either of them.
Therefore, it seems that the only worthwhile choices consist of giving Kalah a second chance or releasing this genie from its endless wish-granting monotony. Both options give you a reputation boost and a small amount of experience, so it largely comes down to personal preference.
Hmm. Let’s see now. Who was it that tried to kill me and pissed me off by conjuring up a horde of fake werewolves that I had to pointedly ignore?
Yeah. Enjoy your freedom, genie.
For some reason, however, he didn’t seem to want to cast anything. Instead, he just went straight for Vespero and started attacking him physically.
Odd.
In light of this, the battle basically became a matter of “Who’s going to run out of hit points first?” Since Vespero got all of his from levels in Fighter and a constitution of 19, and since he had five party members backing him up by wildly swinging their enchanted weaponry, you can probably hazard a guess as to whom it turned out to be.
Sadly you can’t actually kill Jafir, as he teleports away once his hit points get too low. Luckily, however, he does surrender the command word to you before leaving. God only knows why, though; if he was able to escape so easily then he could have just done so without telling you anything and left you gnashing your teeth in frustration, which appears to be exactly the sort of thing that Rakshasa have to do in order to GET AN ERECTION.
With the command word planted firmly in our heads, we are now advised that we can use the lamp via a quick slot. I think you know what’s next.
And now, the answer to the question that I’m sure has been plaguing your mind for days; what the hell are we doing here?
Well, we’re certainly not here to fight the lich, as you might have expected. At this early stage and with our woeful shortage of magical power, he’d turn us inside-out, wring us like wet flannels and hang us from the walls to spruce up his otherwise drab crypt before we could say “Inappropriately high encounter level.”
(Note: A few minutes after I wrote the paragraph above, the little corner of my brain allocated to “nagging doubts” started insisting that something very similar to it had been done before by Order of the Stick, which incidentally is an excellent D&D based web comic that you should check out. But hell, I’m using it anyway. It felt like I came up with it at the time, and if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery then subconscious imitation is unabashed metaphorical fellatio.)
So what’s the story? Well, I’m going to need to take a step back in time here, as there is an important detail that I forgot to note earlier on.
When we’d killed Kalah and left the circus tent, we were approached by a little girl named Myara who, surprisingly, had not been abused or abandoned or murdered or subjected to any form of mistreatment whatsoever. Vespero, reeling from the shock of this, temporarily forgot his curmudgeonly hatred of children and politely asked what she wanted.
She told us that shortly prior to his becoming a delusional megalomaniac, Kalah had purchased a magical lamp from an extremely shifty merchant by the name of Jafir. Owing to the fact that we are not braindead, we were inclined to suspect that the two events were somehow linked, and since kids have no eye for value, we were easily able to persuade her to hand over the priceless magical item.
However, because things are never simple, merely rubbing the lamp did nothing aside from making it slightly shinier, (it's interesting to note that we were never actually instructed to try rubbing the lamp; seems that this is a cliché even in Faerun) so obviously the kid stiffed us and we were morally obligated wreak bloody vengeance upon her. Unfortunately, she was one of those NPCs that simply disappears forever once their usefulness has been expended, so we were left unfulfilled.
In any event, she told us that Jafir is in the habit of staying in the Crooked Crane inn. Sure enough, here we are now on the first floor of that very building, and here he is before us.
As it turns out, he was indeed behind Kalah’s descent into madness (if this surprises you then I question how you have the mental faculties to read this) and, furthermore, he immediately senses that we have the lamp on our person.
At this point he throws subtlety to the wind and reveals his true identity to us; Jafir is a Rakshasa, a race of mysterious, sinister, shapeshifting beings that seem to take pleasure only in being as much of a malignant arsehead to other people as possible.
In other words, they’re doppelgangers with fur. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if they actually are doppelgangers that are just playing up the whole Rakshasa thing for shits and giggles.
He explains to us his motivations for weaving the web that would lead to Kalah’s downfall, (being an arsehead) and he also explains why the lamp won’t work. Apparently we need to speak a command word, which he is offering to tell us for the bargain price of 500 gold pieces. He has no need for the money, he boasts, but it will please him to know what an arsehead he’s been in making us part with it.
To hell with that. Let’s kick his ass.
In spite of setbacks upon setbacks, we finally manage to make it to the city gates and the Crooked Crane inn, as intended.
As soon as we set foot inside, some berk starts yelling about a couple of kids breaking up. We’re not given the option to ignore him, so we ask him about the two people he’s referring to. However, unlike most NPCs, who will happily spill their full wealth of knowledge, their life stories and their darkest, innermost secrets provided they are talking to a protagonist, (AS IT SHOULD BE) this one’s decided to go against the grain and stubbornly refuses to cough up the meat no matter how enthusiastically you Heimlich him.
Oh sure, he’ll drop hints and talk about the topic as vaguely as possible if you press him, just to be obnoxious, but it’s nowhere near enough to piece the whole story together, so we aren‘t going to stand for that kind of crap. We tell him we don’t care and he leaves the inn in a huff. Good riddance, you cagey bastard.
You may be aware that this prevents me from going through the Aulava and Tiiro dialogue upstairs, and if you were to assume that I had chosen this set of dialogue options deliberately in order to avoid the encounter, you’d be right.
Why would I want to do that? It’s to do with one of the mods I installed, which restores a small amount of content that was missing from the Crooked Crane. When I played through with this mod installed the first time, I naturally assumed that it provided some closure on the aforementioned encounter, and I was right. Unfortunately, it was closure I could have done without.
You see, as it turned out, Aulava (that sounds like a Pokemon) and Tiiro are a tremendously bad influence on each other, and when they spend time together they invariably seem to find themselves running around town starting fires and mugging people and generally acting like a pair of bellicose twatbaskets. Therefore, in contrast to a certain famous Shakespearian play, their parents are actually right to forbid them to see each other. Unfortunately, my character was left oblivious to this fact thanks to the obstinate tight-lippedness of the man downstairs, and foolishly convinced them to damn the folks and stay together regardless, being the well-meaning Chaotic Good individual that he was.
A few days later, when I next returned to the Crooked Crane to kill the lich lurking within, the same man (Rilmi) was back to give me a thorough tongue-lashing for my actions, telling me that now the two of them had completely lost themselves in a life of reckless, unadulterated criminal madness that would put a GTA protagonist to shame. I was then hit with a reputation drop, of all things.
Well how in the name of Bhaal’s testes was I supposed to know that was going to happen? What kind of side-quest goes and kicks you in the crotch for doing what looks like the right thing and the only way to get a resolution to the story? I was so infuriated by this that I killed everyone in the bar before reloading.
Long story short, I don’t want to get smacked in the face with a needless and cruel reputation drop as a result of this “quest” a second time, so I’m just going to avoid it altogether.
We appear to be back in business. I'm not sure what made the difference, but reloading from a slightly earlier save seemed to do the trick, and the dream sequence is now playing as it should.
My theory is that I've been making fun of the game too much and this was its way of getting back at me for the relentless mockery. I suppose I'll just have to exit the game completely before writing any updates from now on, rather than just switching windows.
That way it won't see them.
Speaking of updates, we're all set for another batch, so watch this space.
Let's cut a long story short here. After I went to the Copper Coronet to do what I had intended to do, I found it necessary for me to rest. I do so, up comes the first dream sequence, no problem.
And then, halfway through the sequence, everything stops. Imoen and I are supposed to walk off and cause the scene to advance, but nothing happens and we just stand there staring slackjawed at each other. Obviously, I can't progress past this point since there's no way to skip the sequence, and no matter how long I wait, Imoen and Vespero refuse to budge or say anything; the only way I can even exit the game is by Alt+F4-ing it.
As you can imagine, this is a bit of a showstopper. There's no way in hell I'm going to be able to get through the game without ever resting, let alone without resting or reloading. (There's one for all you hardcore players out there to try.) Furthermore, if this has happened here, there's a distinct possibility that other such game-breaking bugs will rear their ugly heads in the future even if I do manage to find a way around this one.
I can only assume that this was caused by an obscure mod incompatibility or some form of minor slip-up I made when installing everything. Perhaps I didn't properly restore my clean install. I don't know.
As for the blog, I'll probably just try to retrace my steps as closely as possible and work my way back to where I was from a new game. This is going to take a while, though, not least because I don't think I can handle going through Irenicus' dungeon again so soon after the last time, but also because I'll have to track down which mods (if any) caused the problem in the first place and make sure it won't happen a second time.
Sorry about this, folks. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.
