We’re in the graveyard and it’s night time, so we’re going to talk to the ghost of the murdered halfling kid…
OK, time out.
We’ve seen one kid abandoned in the street by his mother so that she could go and enjoy the circus, one kid kicked out of his village to embark on a gruelling journey into a cold, cruel city, one kid that’s been brutally murdered in his own home and cannot find peace in the afterlife because his teddy bear’s missing, and later on we’re going to encounter Neb, the child-killer, who has with him a group of tormented, weeping wraiths, spawned from the corpses of little boys and girls that have been tortured to death.
Am I the only one seeing a pattern here? What the hell does BioWare have against children?
Regardless, we agree to find this kid’s stuffed bear, twee though the whole idea might be.
(Note: I know that this quest doesn’t boost your reputation, before you tell me about it. This wasn’t the one I was talking about. Still, we might as well pick it up now while we have the opportunity. Eventually, they’ll both lead us to the same spot.)
With that side-quest taken on, we now head into the south-easternmost tomb.
Remember how I said earlier that I liked most of the content in the Quest Pack aside from the voice-acting? Here is where I have to take my headphones off.
Because there is a zombie in here. Not a hostile zombie that we need to kill, but a friendly one that needs us to do something for him. And as is the way with NPCs in this game, the first line of his dialogue is voiced.
It is not voiced well. Presumably the person doing it was trying to put on a sinister, hissing tone in order to sound more like a zombie. Fine. Good idea. But it comes out in this horrible, nasal, strangled mess that tends to conjure the image of someone with a peanut stuck in their throat as opposed to a rotting, undead monstrosity.
As for the quest itself, the short of it is that we need to find this guy’s wife. Apparently the reason he’s not at rest is that he had an argument with her and stormed away without saying goodbye, then rather unfortunately got murdered while he was out on a voyage. So now he wants to give her one last kiss in order to be at peace.
Yeah, I know. But who am I to argue with easy XP?
He’s given us our lead; a woman named Mira in Waukeen’s Promenade. Three guesses as to where we’re headed next.
OK, we’re safe. I realised what the problem was as soon as I brought the game window back up; Vespero got hit with a Silence spell.
He hadn’t taken any actual damage during the fight and the effect doesn’t last that long anyway, so I just Ctrl+R’ed it away and tried again. Sure enough, Viconia asks to join us and our reputation takes an undeserved hit. Phew.
We do a little item shuffling at this point. Korgan gets the dead fanatic’s plate mail and Viconia gets Korgan’s recently shed splint mail. Korgan also gets a medium shield while handing his small shield over to Viccy. Jaheira donates some bullets and a spare sling she’d kept just for this occasion, and we’re all set.
Of course I had the foresight to keep a spare sling around, but not a mace or a hammer. Ah well.
Does anyone else find it odd that Jan wears neon blue? It certainly doesn’t look that way on his portrait. Anyway, we’re going to head inside here so that the Cowled Wizards won’t bother us while we patch Korgan up and make the party safer with a few protection spells.
Now…this is just downright inexcusable. We’re in the council building in the Government district. There are two Cowled Wizards in here, Corneil and Tolgerias, and we’re casting spell after spell RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEIR EYES AND THEY COULDN’T CARE LESS. WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH YOU PEOPLE?
Ugh. Well, given the selective blindness of the law enforcement in this city, we’re still free to act, so we’ll want to get back to the task of doing reputation-boosting quests. There’s a perfect one to start on down in the Graveyard district, so that’s where we’ll be heading next.
I can’t help but think that the developers didn’t really do their research here.
One of the fanatics lets slip that they worship Beshaba. If you’re not a Forgotten Realms buff, Beshaba is a crazy, evil goddess of bad luck and curses; not exactly the type that you’d expect to object to the presence of a drow. Still, I suppose it could be justified with further thought. It just seems a bit odd.
What we do know, however, is that slaughtering a group of crazy evil goddess worshippers is in no way a no-no in the adventuring hero handbook, so we set Viconia free and get ready to crack some cleric skull.
Before we actually start the fight, we position Korgan and Jaheira right next to the archers so that they won’t give us any trouble when they turn hostile. We have Jan fire at the cleric while Vespero blasts him with a wand of frost.
You may feel like I’m wasting wands here, and you may well be right, but I’m fairly confident that once Vespero’s back in action, I’m really not going to need them that often. Besides, wands of frost aren’t really that great anyway, but it’s better than trying to whack someone with a magic stick.
It’s a long battle, but we eventually dispatch the fanatics. I had to pull Korgan back about halfway through, but a healing potion fixed him up enough that it was safe to send him back in. Fanatics dead, corpses looted and…Viconia won’t talk to us.
Uh-oh.
This is, of course, a bug, so it’s OK for me to reload here and try this again. I’ve got my fingers crossed that it was just some fluke glitch and it won’t happen the next time around…but if it does, we could be in trouble.
I’ll keep you all posted.
Just realised I’ve been walking around all this time without the Metaspell Influence Amulet on. Durrr.
Into the Government District, and I’m just going to go ahead and recruit Jan now as well. We’re going to want him at a decent level too since he’s our only thief, and more NPCs means more security. Better safe than sorry.
We finish the conversation and…Vespero levels up? Huh. OK. I never noticed before now that you actually got experience for doing this. Who knew that chatting could be so good for you?
I’m certainly not going to complain, in any event. He gets another proficiency point, and since the game won’t let us put any more in Daggers, it goes into Quarterstaff. I’m sure he’ll find a use for the Staff of the Magi eventually.
While we’re at it, we go ahead and talk to Delon just to add the Umar Hills to our world map.
Now this is yet another kid in seriously messed up circumstances. This boy’s been sent here all the way from Imnesvale to find someone that would be willing to investigate the murders that have been taken place there.
Look at the world map. How long is the journey from here to the Umar Hills? 20 hours. Right.
What kind of person do you have to be to send a little boy on a 20-hour journey through dangerous wilderness, all by himself, only to reach a huge, unfamiliar city where muggers and vampires run rampant and unchecked through the streets, all in the hopes of finding some random dudes to send back to your village in order to solve all its problems?
That’s friggin’ ruthless. That is straight-up stone cold.
Vespero is intrigued, and inquires as to how to go about meeting this person, and once Korgan is done complaining about it, we’ve got ourselves a shiny new map marker to visit.
And now, onward to rile up an angry mob.
Let me just show you the portrait I’m using again.
I have to give Amalas credit; he’s got some serious balls calling Vespero "dolly boy".
Into the ring we go. First of all we draw our Wand of Monster Summoning and aim it at the centre of the floor, directly between Amalas and Vespero.
And…wow. Five Gnoll Elites. I was kind of expecting to have to help whatever got conjured up by continuing to blast Amalas with more wands, but the snarling hyena men just get stuck right in and gib him without me having to lift a finger, thereby proving that I am a real man and a true hardass because I can summon other creatures to fight my battles for me.
Jaheira levels up from this, which she DOESN’T DESERVE. I’m the one who killed him, damn it. I should be levelling up.
Well…actually, the gnolls are the ones that killed him, but shut up. I made the gnolls.
One extra spell slot for levels 4 and 5, to which we’ll assign Defensive Harmony and…oh, let’s say Insect Plague.
With that out of the way, we can finally do what we came here to do; recruit Korgan. We saunter up and talk to him, and after being seated around his table, he tells us he’s going to…“Flail the bladder for a spell."
To this day, I still have no idea what the hell this is supposed to mean, but it sounds absolutely disgusting. You keep your bladder to yourself, you bearded little freak.
We agree to find his damn book, but of course we’re going to stall on this for as long as we can, because the undead in that crypt are pretty tough, and at this point in time, Vespero is not.
Going to rest for now to memorise my meagre spell selection, then it’s off to add Viconia to our sorry troupe.
Into the tavern we go, carefully avoiding the two thugs outside…and the three thugs inside. Normally I wouldn’t hesitate to show Amalas who the boss man is in these parts, but as a 5th-level mage with no spells memorised, I don’t think the battle would go too well for me right now. We’ll tear him a new one later.
That reminds me. I should really get some rest once I’m done here.
Unfortunately, to avoid the thugs, we’re going to have to take the long way around, which means bumping into Anomen. We lie through our teeth here by telling him that we’re courageous do-gooders, and then do a U-turn and speak the absolute truth when we tell him we do not want him to join us.
I don’t ever want Anomen to join me, ever again. But I have to complete his quest, so it’s going to have to happen at some point. Not now, though. I can’t handle him so soon after losing those scrolls.
We also get intercepted by Nalia and subject her to the same process. Yes, we’ll come and save your keep, but no we don’t want you with us right now. Jaheira approves.
Of course, we won’t actually be going to the keep for quite some time, since I don’t think we’re up to taking on trolls and umber hulks just yet. That, however, will not be a problem, since apparently all the hostiles overrunning the place are quite content to sit there and wait forever until you come along to massacre them. No hurry, then.
Besides, she deserves to be kept waiting, giving you that crap about there being “no time” to tell you what you’d be up against if you agreed to help her. No time? How long is it that you’re willing to follow me around before you start complaining that we need to get a move on, again? And how long is the journey to the keep? Eight hours? DO YOU THINK EIGHT HOURS MIGHT BE ENOUGH TIME FOR A BRIEF SUMMARY, AT LEAST?
Interruptions, interruptions. That’s the last of them, thankfully, so we’ve got a clear run to Korgan now. Almost there, almost there…damn it. All that and they still spotted us.
Well, we’re certainly not going to back down from this moron, so it looks like Vespero’s in for a fight. Not to worry, though. He may be devoid of spells and anything resembling prowess in combat, but I’ve still got one thing to fall back on.
Wands.
This game has a sense of humour.
Don’t get me wrong. That’s not to say I find what just happened here to be amusing. But it definitely has a sense of humour.
With Vespero’s intelligence boosted to 23, he was able to neatly and efficiently transcribe every single scroll he had in his inventory.
With two exceptions.
Stoneskin. And Haste.
I realise I seem very calm and collected about this, but understand that most of the words that I want to type here would be highly, highly inappropriate for my younger audience, should I happen to have one. With that in mind, I will have to settle for the following paragraph:
**** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** *********************************
In rather more welcome news, this process has caused Vespero to leap from level 1 to level 5, and he's well on his way to 6. Plus, he can't actually cast level 4 spells yet, so he wouldn't have been able to use Stoneskin anyway. So that's good. It's cool. I'm cool. There are other scrolls of Stoneskin in the game. No problem. I don't need to let this upset me. Deep breaths.
OK. In light of this development, we really can't afford to screw around here. We need some meatshields and we need them now, so it's back to the slums to pick up Korgan. Hopefully he won't start badgering us about his quest too soon.
