Yeah, I know this has been a gap of several hours. What can I say? I take sandwich making very seriously.
Now why is it that Lilarcor speaks perfect, formal English when you’re talking to him here, but when you actually start using him it’s all “Yeah, uh, I was like, A MOONBLADE once. Totally, dude. Cowabunga.” I don’t know. Maybe the “mysterious presence” isn’t actually Lilarcor. We never do find out, really.
Come to think of it, there’s very little explanation for any of this quest at all. Who’s Vallah? How’d he get his hand cut off? What does he have to do with those two skeletons, and why does “The blood of a true friend” enter into the equation? Did someone murder Vallah's friend? Perhaps it was Vallah himself, in a foolish act of betrayal that he came to regret? Moreover, how did Lilarcor or the mysterious presence or whoever’s pulling the strings on this one manage to take possession of Quallo?
It’s a shame, really. It almost seems as though Lilarcor was originally going to be one of those legendary, must-get weapons with an elaborate and interesting background, but for whatever reason the idea was nixed halfway through and they just made it into the annoying, comic relief talking sword that we know and would despise but for that delicious mind shield it offers.
Nevertheless, the mystery behind Lilarcor might be an interesting avenue for the creators of custom BGII content to explore. Hint hint, modders.
We’ve already got three of the components we need, so now we just have to head back and get the staff.
Heading back to an earlier tunnel, we come across another group of kobolds. This one, however, does not immediately start launching arrows at us, and instead their representative on diplomatic matters demands that we leave the sewer because it’s “theirs”. The nice pipe told us that one of these things has a staff we’re looking for, though, so we inquire about it and then offer to buy it for 2000 gold.
The kobold shaman quickly snaps up the offer after but a moment’s hesitation and goes to leave with his newly acquired fortune…upon which all the other kobolds declare him a traitor and execute him, allowing me to leave, unmolested, with both the stick and the gold that I paid.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is exactly why kobolds are incapable of squeezing their way out of the ranks of the downtrodden and improving their miserable lot in life. Not only does it seem that they do not know a good offer when they see it, but they also spit in the face of evolution and its demand for the survival of the fittest by ganging up on and murdering the only one among them with any sense.
If we went back in time, made all kobolds like this kobold shaman and worked from there, then by the time we reached the era in which this game is taking place, kobolds would have reached the status of “Playable race“, without a doubt. What’s more, they’d be the one that everybody picked. Yeah, they’d be able to do crazy stuff like dual-class INTO a multi-class, allowing for such combinations as a Kensai/Mage-Thief.
But no. Instead we have these kobolds, the kobolds who don’t understand that a stick that can create a handful of berries once a day isn’t even close to being worth the 2000 gold we offered for it
Seriously, what the hell is the point of the Goodberry spell? It might be worthwhile if their curative properties actually carried some clout, but 1 hit point each? If you’ve reached a stage at which one hit point will actually make a difference, you’ve obviously made a mess of the battle you’re in and you’re probably going to die anyway, so you might as well not bother. We should have been able to follow the suggestion in the title of this update and make a pie out of them. That would be worth the trouble.
Goodberry Pie. Did I just create a Strawberry Shortcake character?
Yes, I can see that. She'd be one of those "zero tolerance" druids, riding into the countryside on a dire wolf and warning all the other kids to cease their vile desecration of the land with their incessant and disrespectful berry plucking. In retaliation, they'd all band together and try to overcome their difficulties with the power of friendship or mindless optimism or something, and then they'd get their asses kicked when they realised that this method of problem solving tends to fail when one comes up against a real obstacle, like, say, a fire elemental.
I like it. Make it happen.
Still, I suppose that since we’ve now got an item that’ll make them without us having to waste a spell slot, there’s no reason not to keep a supply of goodberries on hand unless we start running low on inventory space.
Yes, that’s right. We’re going to be holding on to the staff for a little while. We don’t want to finish this quest just yet. Why? Because it offers Quest XP.
The thing about Quest XP is that, unlike normal XP, it is not a "portion" of XP that is shared evenly between the party members. You do not get a bigger share if your party is smaller, and conversely, you do not get a smaller share if your party is bigger. In other words, if you don’t have all six slots filled, some of that XP will be going to waste, and I, being the obsessive harvester that I am, do not want this to happen.
We’ll pick Lilarcor up once we recruit Keldorn, which, conveniently, will be exactly when we’ll want to start using it. In the meantime, we’re going to leave this quest unfinished for now and head to the Bridge district to solve the murder “mystery”. Tune in next time, folks.
This is Lorph Halys, and you’ve been reading Baldur’s Gate: The Zero Reload Saga. Thank you, and goodnight.
Hostile kobolds around the corner…
You have to wonder. How did all this shit get down here in the first place?
(BUT LORPH IT IS A SEWER SO IT IS NOT AT ALL UNUSUAL THAT THERE SHOULD BE SHIT IN IT HAR HAR. You know what I meant. Shut up.)
Do all these monstrous humanoids come down here in the hopes that they can finally make a name for themselves and strike it rich in the refuse conduits of the big city? Why would they want to live in a sewer instead of, say, staying out in the wilderness, where the air is fresh and the land is bountiful, with food that one can eat without having to receive several castings of Cure Disease afterwards?
The Otuygh made sense because Otyughs actually feed exclusively on sewage and filth, but HOW DID IT GET THERE? Perhaps some bright spark put it there on purpose so that it’d help clean the place up a bit, but if they were going to do that, you’d think they’d have had the sense to train it not to attack everyone it comes across.
Presumably the sewer has to undergo maintenance from time to time. How is anyone supposed to do that with all these angry hobgoblins and kobolds running rampant?
Wait. Maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s why they’re down here. Maybe they *are* maintenance workers under the employ of the city, and the only reason they attacked was because we were getting in the way and fouling up their efforts. Maybe the “monsters” that we’ve been mercilessly slaughtering have simply been concerned citizens trying to do their part to keep Athkatla’s streets free of crap.
Of course, either way, they’re still easy experience that nobody complains about us taking, so we don’t really care. It’s just something to consider.
Kobolds are even less of a threat than hobgoblins, so there really wasn’t much of a strategy here. We just charged right in and hoped that we could kill those shamans before they managed to cast Entangle…
Nope. Well, that means we’ve got to wait about an hour for it to disperse so that I can save the game. I’m going to get a sandwich.
Perhaps someone would care to give me a few ideas as to how a pair of smooching skeletons might have ended up embedded upright in the wall of a sewer. My imagination isn’t quite powerful enough to handle this one.
I decided to insert a little roleplaying here and simply spend a few seconds doing nothing when I came across this. You know, to represent everyone staring at it bemusedly, wondering how exactly it happened. See? It’s not all cheap strategies and powergaming, folks. Vespero has a soul too.
Of course, it’s a black and twisted soul, which is why it doesn’t take him long at all to stop pondering the mystery and swipe the pretty ring that practically screams “Sentimental value!” from the corpses. It also screams “I’m important!” since, unlike the severed hand, we receive a direct hint that it would probably be worth holding on to. If nothing else, most shopkeepers would be more inclined to buy a gold ring than a piece of someone’s dead body.
Why can’t I put the ring on the hand? It’d save me some inventory space.
Heading further down, we soon come across Quallo, the man behind the weirdness down here, or at least the man acting as the puppet of the entity behind the weirdness down here, which is just as good. We’re going to do everything he tells us to, of course, rather than making what is probably the more reasonable assumption that this is simply some lunatic in the sewer that we shouldn’t make eye contact with. He’s being cryptic, you see, and speaking in riddles, and he refuses to give a straight, concise answer to anything. In a roleplaying game, this is cruise control for authenticity. If he’d been speaking plainly and frankly then we’d know it was a load of bull.
How has this guy survived down here with all the monsters running around? Why don’t they bother him? OK, the hobgoblins would probably leave him alone since he’s obviously not a threat and they wouldn’t gain anything from killing him, but oozes aren’t so discerning. He’s got his carrion crawler friend, sure, but that’s only going to keep so much away.
I use the present tense erroneously in the previous paragraph, however. I should say “He had his carrion crawler friend," because we just went ahead and killed it now to save ourselves a return trip to collect its blood. Of course, given that we haven’t actually heard any of the riddles for the Lilarcor puzzle yet, we didn’t know that we were supposed to do this, which I suppose means that we just put some of its blood into this vial (that we’ve apparently been carrying around all this time) on a random impulse.
Mind you, given Vespero’s track record, this isn’t really anything out of the ordinary.
Checking the descrption for the blood "item", we are told that we cannot help but feel guilty for having killed Quallo’s true friend. How nice of them to tell us that. Certainly it’s not our prerogative to choose how we may feel afterwards about the act of wiping a disgusting aberration from the face of the world; we need the game to decide this sort of thing for us, and the game’s decided that Vespero is going soft. So there.
Carefully stepping around the carcass of one recently dispatched Otyugh, we come to our second obstacle in this room; the Mustard Jelly. Like the Ogre Mage, these enemies were pretty lethal in the first game, particularly when the magical weapons that you needed to harm them were not readily available, but now, like their friend Otis, all they can really do is annoy you with a long-lasting Slow effect.
I’ve often wondered who came up with the name “Mustard Jelly”. Why “mustard“? Because it’s yellow? OK, so why not “Yellow Jelly”? Is there anything wrong with that? You’ve got “Green Slime”, haven’t you? You didn’t call them “Wasabi Slimes”…although if you had I don’t think it would irritate me so much. At least things would have been consistent. Why not just go all the way and call them “Lemon Jellies“?
It’s not just those, either. There’s another type of ooze creature that doesn’t appear in BGII called the Black Pudding, which doesn’t just sound like a type of food; it is a type of food. A black pudding is a sausage made with blood. Seriously, look it up. I’ve eaten them before and they’re delicious. Was Gary Gygax hungry when he came up with these things or something?
It’s still annoying that so much of our arsenal is incapable of damaging the damn thing, but nevertheless, we manage to dispatch it without taking a hit, thereby saving Vespero a shot of his Slow Poison innate ability.
Ooh, look, there’s a grating in the ground that we can click on. Upon doing so, the game suggests that we could reach into the murky, slimy water.
That’s it. It doesn’t tell you that there’s anything down there aside from murky, slimy water or provide even the slightest hint as to why you might wish to take this course of action. All it says is “Hey, you can put your hand down here if you feel like it,” which could be equally true of every grating in the game.
Of course, as the external, controlling force behind the characters’ actions, we know full well that this option would not be available to us if it didn’t serve some purpose, so of course we’re going to have someone feel around in the pool of filth just on the off chance of something useful being down there.
Well, what do you know? We’re in luck. It’s an old, severed hand. Just what I always wanted. Naturally we’re going to keep this in our inventory until we find some use for it, because as the external, controlling force behind the characters’ actions…
Whatever. Let’s just move on.
I never quite realised just how terrible Jan is at hiding until just now. I mean, I knew he had very little skill in it, but I wasn’t expecting it to take TWENTY ATTEMPTS before he managed to conceal himself.
How exactly were you supposed to function as a low-level thief in an actual AD&D game? Even if you pumped all your points into the sneaking skills you’d still be pretty bad at them, and you’d be absolutely hopeless at spotting traps and all the other things that thieves are supposed to be able to do. Furthermore, one would imagine that in a real game, you’d actually have to play out the act of hiding rather than just rolling the dice over and over again until you manage to get into a sort of all-encompassing “stealth mode”, so there’d be nowhere NEAR as much margin for error.
No wonder thieves level up more quickly than everyone else. The first few months of their lives are a desperate race against time, a terrified scrambling to escape from the realms of abysmal feebleness before someone steps on them.
Why are we hiding Jan? Well, there’s an Otyugh just down the corridor to the west, and I’m going to draw it out and soften it up with crossbow bolts and assorted missiles.
At least, that was my plan. Shortly after setting things in motion I discovered an interesting tidbit about Otyughs that I’d somehow managed to miss, even after all this time, and that is that for some reason, they are completely immune to piercing damage.
Well hell.
I’m guessing I didn’t notice this because normally, when a character’s weapon isn’t inflicting any damage, they have the courtesy to alert you to the fact. Alas, for whatever reason, Otyughs appear to be a special case. Perhaps everyone’s afraid to open their mouths, given that Otyughs are basically diseases on legs. Well…appendages, anyway. But why the hell does a throwing axe inflict PIERCING DAMAGE?
It’s not a big deal, of course. The dreaded Otyugh lurgie is far from lethal; it’s just irritating to have to wait for that Slow effect to wear off. In fact, I don’t actually think it does anything aside from a tiny amount of damage, which rather makes one wonder what the point is beyond allowing them to feel like the Cure Disease spell wasn’t a waste of time. It might as well just be poison, but that would mean compounding the status effects and their respective cures so that we’d actually have a single spell that would be kind of useful (Slow Poison) instead of three spells that are fairly worthless (Slow Poison, Cure Disease, Neutralise Poison.) That would be convenient. That would be a favour to you. Do you deserve any favours from BioWare? What have you done for them lately?
With Lehtinan dead and Hendak having become the questionably legitimate owner of the Copper Coronet, it‘s time to head to the sewers. It’s just not a role-playing game unless you go into the sewers at some point. The act of traipsing through putrid pools of other people’s waste is the proverbial cherry atop the proverbial knickerbocker glory (that’s an ice cream sundae to you damned Yanks); you could certainly enjoy it even if it were absent, but the whole thing would feel somehow incomplete.
Still, at least we’re avoiding the cliché associated with this cliché; there aren’t any oversized rats down here that we have to fight. In fact, I don’t think there are any rats at all. Not a single one. Come on, BioWare. I understand the desire to do things differently, but a sewer without rats is like a sewer without sewage; it’s not really a sewer at all, just a series of tunnels.
In lieu of rodents, we mostly just have hobgoblins. Yeah, remember hobgoblins? They were such a nightmare to fight in the first game. Sure, they were only a couple of rungs above gibberlings on the “Sword Fodder” ladder, but they had those damned poison arrows, and no matter how efficiently you were able to dispatch them, they always managed to tag someone in your party with at least one of them, and you always seemed to be fresh out of antidotes. And of course the friggin’ arrows aren’t poisoned when you use them. Oh no. This poison only works for the cool kids. Are you one of the cool kids? No? Then they’re just arrows. Deal with it. Loser.
Of course, eventually you’d get access to Slow Poison and you didn’t have to worry about antidotes anymore, but the hobgoblins would always seem to end up hitting the people that had it memorised. I don’t know if this was intentionally programmed behaviour or just random chance, but it happened with suspicious regularity. As a result, you were stuck. Nobody could cast the spell because they kept getting “hit” by the poison and interrupted half way through.
I've never been poisoned and I've never met anyone who's been poisoned. I'm not an expert on the matter, so I have to ask; Is that how it happens? Because, you know, I always assumed that it inflicted a continuous state of debilitation, like an illness. You get a nasty swelling at the point of entry or become very sick or, if you’re unlucky, you die. I’m fairly sure that nobody suffering from poison has stood in place going “Ugh! Ugh! Ugh!” and repeatedly recoiling as if having been struck.
I like how it just goes away if you rest, though. That’s convenient. The first game didn’t screw around like that. If you were poisoned and you tried to rest, you woke up dead. The more likely outcome, perhaps, but it was still annoying as hell to have to lug all those antidotes around just to make sure it didn’t happen.
Yes, poison is much less of a menace in this game, which means that in terms of spells that are useful, “Neutralise Poison” is now sitting somewhere at the level of “Infravision.” Seriously, if anyone has come across a poison that was potent enough to actually only be slowed by “Slow Poison” (which is ostensibly what the spell is supposed to do) and required Neutralise Poison to get rid of entirely, please do tell me, because I have never, ever seen one. I’d like to discover that I hadn’t simply been wasting a spell slot all those times I kept it memorised just in case.
As for these hobgoblins, they aren’t a problem. They’re only really a threat if their shamans manage to nail you with Hold Person…which is precisely why we engage Korgan’s Enrage engines first. With this active, he’s immune to paralysis, and he is able to use his throwing axes to draw the hobgoblins over in metaphorical bite-size chunks, whereupon they are reduced into very literal bite-size chunks.
I know it’s been a while since the last update. Let me shed a little light on this matter.
First of all, I spent the last few days lying in bed, in pain, cursing the world at large in the manner of a grouchy old man for refusing to let me sleep. Insomnia is a bitch of a thing, and combined with illness it becomes all but intolerable. Unfortunately, I’m not one of those weirdoes that somehow manages to become more active and alert during bouts of sleep deprivation; all that happens to me is I get a mild headache and become extremely lethargic.
Secondly, I’m going to start winding the update schedule down a bit. As much as I’d like to, I simply don’t have the time to write an update batch every single day; it takes longer than you might think. Unless, through the direct and awe-inspiring intervention of a deity, I actually start getting paid (money) to write this crap, we’ll probably be working our way down to about one or two updates a week, with any additional ones being bonuses. This will also give me ample opportunity to start building up a backlog, so that if anything unfortunate happens again, I’ll have a pool of already written material to draw from.
Giving specific update days is not something I’m inclined to do, however. I realise it’s nice to know exactly when you should check back for new content, but I am a fickle creature with a chaotic schedule, and this is the Internet. Saying I will update every Saturday would practically be an invitation for people to start screaming “ITS SATURRDAY WHEN ARE U GOIN TO UPDATE U SUCK” when I inevitably miss one for whatever reason. And I do mean for whatever reason. Be it the sudden loss of my Internet connection, the sudden loss of my only child or the sudden loss of a major internal organ, you know someone would find it in their heart to complain.
In closing, this update has been fairly serious so far, so I leave you with this final note:
WHAT THE HELL WAS A MENTALLY IMPAIRED 14 XP BOUNCER DOING WITH A SCROLL OF SUMMON EFREET ON HIS PERSON GRAAAAH
