All In, Enderal [Travelogue of Skyrim Total Conversion Mod, Enderal]

[Guile]

This mod got me to come back to Skyrim for the first time in years. This post is of my first couple hours into the game. Mostly without pictures, because I'm terrible at taking screenshots when cool things are happening to me.

Here's one, though: this is the title screen. The game is not quite this pretty 'in person' so to speak, but close.

- Enderal is absolutely beautiful. I'm sure everyone says this, but it's true, and the SureAI guys should be proud. I think it being a tighter narrative arc than Skyrim helps with this; at least in the dream and the opening bit with the tower, it's mostly obvious where to go and that probably helps set up beautiful vistas. This is a picture of the actual game on my mediocre computer:

- The flora is more attractive than in Skyrim, although not good for my obsessive compulsive need to click on all the plants and then eat them, on the grounds that that is what I did in Skyrim. I don't even intend to go into alchemy. I don't get exp from this. I just do this. It's... a thing I do.

- Strong opening. The dream is well done; juxtaposing beautiful visuals with a slow sense of creeping dread. That old childhood terror of coming home one day and everybody being gone. Then, uh... then I wished Dad was gone, because he's scaring me.
Good background hook that's obviously going to be explored later; I apparently murdered my family while in the grip of madness and maybe burned down my house.

- Turns out I'm on a boat. With a buddy, a starry eyed fellow slave or peasant or something. We're going to a new life in Enderal! This will definitely not end poorly.
The boat thing harkens back to Morrowind's opening, which is cool. I'm a little sad I can't mouth off to this pirate captain when she discovers us, or beg for my life like poor what's-his-face. Instead I get bundled up with my dead companion and tossed into the ocean. Screw you too, lady.
Maybe less immediately exciting than Skyrim's 'execution interrupted by dragons' prologue, but it feels more personally engaging, and that's good. Give me a street-level narrative any day.

- The beach and the tower are mostly good.
It introduced all the necessary game mechanics, though it helped that I already half knew what to do from Skyrim in years past. Stab, bow, sneak, magic, watch out for traps.
I couldn't manage to get the troll to trigger the trap like SureAI obviously wanted (I ended up getting stabbed by it same as him).
The room with the gyroscope-looking ruin thing confused me on where to go next, it took me three trips around the room to find the lower exit. I felt like I was playing Myst again.
I get a quest to find 5 pumpkins and 3 mana mushrooms to gain extra health or something. Are the pumpkins around here special? Is my character some kind of pumpkin fiend looking for her next fix like a khajit with moon sugar?

- I meet some alchemists, one who's nice and one who's an asshole that clearly wishes he were a bard. After eyeing me suspiciously, bard-chemist goes to play on a lute while I rap with Finn for a while. I immediately bought the light magic book from him for some 70 gold - then found an identical book sitting on his bedroll I could take for free. That was kind of annoying.
I am sick with fever, and also I have a bad case of Future Vision. It comes with awesome fireworks in strange colors.
Finn's a nice guy, though. Shame the highwaymen around here seem to come packing bombs attached to their arrows, and that they don't like squatters.

- This will now begin the trend of everything in this entire country trying (and often succeeding) to murder me.

- I like... well, let's just call him Dal for now since I can't remember his name. The voice acting in this game is rock solid. He's a cynical fellow, and kind of an anarchist for someone employed by the Big Religion. He makes a nice contrast to the content, life-satisfied alchemist guy immediately before. He saves me from probable-death and has a line on a guy who can heal my fever, but only if I do something for him.
But not, like, a sex thing.
He wants to investigate this Yero fellow. A Big Religion-certified mage-type called a Keeper, who exploded, killing 30 school magelings.

- I have now died to a wild dog (coastal deerstalker), a large-ish spider, a highwayman and a waterfall, before I've even finished getting down from this switchback mountain with Dal. Endaral is much harder than Skyrim, and that's with wearing all the heavy armor I can find.

- Despite me starting down the Keeper path, I can't figure out shield bashing. I'm much more survivable keeping a sword in one hand and the basic fire spell in the other. So I attack a given monster with my bow from stealth. Then I switch back to sword and fire immediately, and burn the monster when it runs up to attack me. I hit it with a power attack (which burns up over half my stamina), then frantically run backwards shooting more fire until it is dead or I am.
I want to use the light magic spell that hurts it to heal myself because Endaral seems to have no health regen, but the damage is too low and enemy damage too high. Better to burn everything despite my desire to be a light mage.

- Finding a merchant first thing after leaving Dal is nice. She has a nice selection of skill books, so I buy up all I can find (2 heavy armor, 2 one handed weapon, 1 light magic). It's kind of weird I find her sleeping on the ground instead of in a sleeping bag or something, but whatever, it's a game. I help her out by murdering something like a satyr crossed with a cave troll, and she gives me some weeds. Thanks.

- I notice either fast travel isn't a thing in this game, or I can't figure out how to do it. This is inconvenient, because I'm running out of bread to heal between fights and I can't warp back to the merchant (really wish I checked her consumables at the time). Dal's campsite and its bedroll is even further away.
Am at the point where I'm more excited to find bread and cheese than potions, since potions contribute to the sword of damocles hanging over my head: 100% arcane fever equals death. Healing magic also worsens the fever, which is the final nail in the coffin of my light mage career.

- I have now found:
1) a cart with highwaymen (my first experience with mobs using shields. Inconvenient, but fire works as it always does).
2) a mine filled with undead, rats and workbenches (I don't know how schematics work, but I upgrade my iron armor to (superior)).
3) a house with an angry mage in it (I actually wandered around and picked up a bunch of things, then got an icicle in the back. Then we ran out into the yard and frantically threw fire and ice at each other until one of us died. For once, it wasn't me!).
4) a circle of stones and four undead with bows (I also died here, then came back and frantically zigzagged around dodging arrows and very occasionally shooting fire or hitting somebody with my new mace I took off a highwayman. It was fun).
5) a mine filled with cave trolls (I also died twice here; that bottom-most troll seems much harder than the other ones, and the reward of three stamina potions for its death was... a little low).

I am not even halfway to my first quest objective, Some Guy Named Alfred. I tried running there without engaging anything, aggroed a cave troll (not sitting in a cave, but rather out in the open; I feel like the victim of false advertising), then 5 highwaymen, then the game crashed. I took that as the game's way of saying 'go to bed idiot, it's 2 am.'


The Takeaway:
Overall, it's a fun experience, even given my constant deaths. A prettier experience than Skyrim, though that game also had some fantastic vistas, and certainly more challenging. What Skyrim did better than Enderal basically boils down to... Riverwood. Somewhere to resupply and take a breath, to engage in a bit of a chat and maybe do some sidequests, to use a workbench that isn't covered in rat corpses and bone dust, to hawk the crap I find off highwaymen. I haven't seen a friendly face in hours, and it's starting to grind on me. Skyrim's main experience was in wandering around and finding trouble to get into, but we always had Riverwood (and shortly after, Whiterun) to come back to, and I find myself missing that starter town way more than I ever expected.

 

[Guile]

- Finally made it to Alfred's place, and have found Enderal's first town. Praise be!

It's nice. Riverville feels like Skyrim's provincial backwater and starter town, Riverwood, but with Whiterun's marketplace. I listen with half an ear to Alfred's story of Yero's tragedy and loss, but what I really want to find is the good old RPG mainstays: shops and sidequests.

- The first building in town appears to contain a bigot who compliments the size of my weapon (I'm currently packing a big spiky mace) and then tells me that I should get the hell out and stop being a filthy foreigner and also a perverse 'coalwoman.'
I consider testing how good the local village guards' ears are with a little light murder, but decide to rob her blind and leave, instead. Nothing like living down to stereotypes, I find.

- I briefly wonder why SureAI would give a family in town the name Gatzidormatalata and then not allow me to ask what the hell their ancestors were smoking.
It is kind of neat that several familes have 2-4 NPCs in town who all have their own jobs. One of the Gatzidormatalatas is a city guard, for example.

- There's a sort of main square near Alfred's house with a handful of shops selling produce, leather goods, the alchemist and the General Store, plus a board with quests. Go here, kill thing, mostly. Good city planning, anyway. The General Store has all the skillbooks I could ever need.
Until I leave and return, in which case his Rhetoric and Handicrafts books disappear forever. Shame, that. Haven't seen another trader selling them. I can still learn how to murder real good and protect my vital bits with sheets of metal, so I guess it's fine? Pretty much everyone and everything outside this one town seems to hate me in this game, and trying to talk down a bear when it's trying to eat my face sounds ill-advised anyway.

- There's a leatherworker type and a tanning ... skin? Booth? Probably not a tanning booth. Whatever, it turns animal skins into leather. Not sure what I'd use that for, in all honesty, unless it turns out heavy armor needs leather straps or something.
I'm not sure, since the town doesn't appear to have a blacksmith. Schematics continue to be mysterious items which I have no practical use for.

- The local herb woman is apparently a powerful wizard, and stocks a variety of potent spells. She also appears to be crazy as a shithouse rat, claiming I have 'bad vibes.' Sometimes, she dances for no discernable reason. She has a quest for me though, so even though 'an invisible trickster spirit stole my beauty potion and the potion told me it's being held in Clearwater Cave' sounds stupid, mama needs money for skillbooks.

- The mayor's wife is having seizures, and that's a bummer. Probably being haunted, possibly by an innocent man she may have framed for treason and/or had sex with. There was a vision and stuff.

- I put that on the backburner though and decide to go find this local highwayman the quest board says is a totally bad dude and I should kill 'im for reasons. He is living in a cellar harmoniously with giant rats the size of the wild dogs. Perhaps he has domesticated them and feasts on ROUS milk and cheese every night. The first rat just about bites my face off, but enough fire sorts things out. Likewise, the bandits.

- I found a spellbook that teaches me to summon a magic ghostwolf somewhere or other, and try it out for the first time. It immediately runs off and solos two highwaymen and two of the giant rats.
Forget light magic and that armor-boosting mentalism spell I found in a bear den on the way here, this is my go-to spell from now on. I get in there and start throwing fire in the hopes of not being upstaged by my own magic wolf, but frankly this thing is a murder machine and I am outclassed. I can only thank the dead gods that he's on my side.
I hear a 'bing!' and discover that my magic wolf has killed the highwayman boss I was here to find. I decide that this was a team effort and will claim all the credit later as the magic wolf disappears into a tidy pile of ectoplasm.

- I swing by this Clearwater Cave the herb woman was talking about, thinking maybe I'll have to clear out a few bandits picking on the poor old herb woman and stealing her stuff. I forgot that this woman is a mighty wizard and she still outsourced this quest to me.
I and my wolf (mostly my wolf) fight our way through dozens of undead and the occasional giant rat, occasionally stepping in bear traps and getting boulders dropped on us along the way. A couple fights into the cave I run into a fellow who still has his skin (more or less; it's red and black and kinda scary) named Belosh the Searcher. Presumably he searches for my death. I almost die for the first time in at least ten minutes when he ignores my wolf gnawing on his ass in order to stab me repeatedly while I do the usual thing (power attack, retreat, fire) until he is dead. Dead-er. Dead again.

- He had a magical fire sword on his bedside table that would have completely turned the tables in our little fight a minute ago. I toss my trusty mace away like the garbage it is and equip the new hotness right away. Watching it light up fleshless skeletons like the fourth of July warms my heart, and I finally feel like I'm contributing to this partnership (me and the ghostwolf, natch).
When I find her innocuous bottle of beauty potion sitting in a dead end, I immediately grab it. I'm given the option to drink the potion and smash the bottle like a savage, but I'm a good little foreign do-gooder and put it in my bag. This causes the invisible trickster spirit (called an 'Aura-thief') to manifest itself. Somehow I didn't expect this even after the last twenty minutes of fighting my way through this undead murder-cave, and stand there staring like an idiot while he lightning bolts my wolf and starts in on me. Then it turns out ghosts catch on fire like everything else when you stick 'em with a magic sword, and after a few seconds of frantic stabbing, all is copacetic.

- On the way back to town I find an abandoned apiary; a bee farm. I go inside because why not?
Why not is because this is Skyrim (sort of), and there's never just a nice, abandoned building with nothing important in it. I am immediately bumrushed by a Vatyr, one of those satyr/cave troll crossbreed fellows. Conveniently this is a narrow hallway, and he can't easily get past my wolf defender. I light up the hallway until he dies. There was far too much frantic clicking to get a screenshot, so have a (overly large) picture scavenged from the web:

Spoiler: This is a Vatyr

On the stairs I find another one of those largeish spiders, clearly upset at the Vatyr's death and looking to take it out on my hide.
That's it; the entire living contents of the honey farm. I can only imagine that these two were like some odd couple, living a peaceful life together where society couldn't judge them, until some jackass bumbles in looking for loot.
Strangely for a honey farm, the place is absolutely plastered with schematics on every bare surface and upstairs is a magical shock axe. Perhaps the beekeeper was planning an insurrection against the local mayor, or always secretly wanted to be a blacksmith or something.


The Takeaway:
Now things are finally rolling. I have a magic sword in one hand and a portal to infinite murderous wolves in the other, and really, what else do you need to succeed in life? I've worked out all my revenge fantasies on the local wildlife, and am ready to pick back up with something a little more main quest-y. I figure I'll head back to town and check up on the mayor's probably-haunted, possibly-evil wife, and then get back to the main quest, which would seem to involve dredging the entire coastline looking for something Yero dropped off a cliff into the water. That sounds... exciting.

 

[Guile]

- Turns out there's a blacksmith after all! Riverville is really quite large.
Still not sure how crafting schematics work. It seems like maybe I just leave them in my inventory and they let me make that stuff at the forge? Of course, I only have schematics to the basic iron stuff I've already covered my body with. People have said that the crafting system in Enderal is kind of crappy, and I sort of see where they're going with that.
I make myself a new bow, because that's the only advanced schematic I have. I haven't used a bow since I got my magic wolf; even with the x1.5 bonus from shooting a guy from stealth/cover, it's not even worth the time it takes to switch weapons. But I want to get SOME use out of this Handicraft skill, so I make a bow.

-Apparently Riverville has a rather curious policy in regards to closing time. If you're still in the shop come nightfall, rather than eject you they lock the doors with you inside. I'm not some kind of fancy rogue that can pick locks, so I'm trapped inside until morning. I worried that the two ladies inside were going to start braiding my hair and talking about cute boys, but their reactions were mostly relegated to complaining about my 'Sublime-like' airs (Sublimes are the top caste in the local hierarchy of Enderal, the nobility) for walking in and sleeping in their bed to pass the time.
Their one bed, for two business ladies. Hey, I don't judge. I'm from Qyran, which includes 9-person harems (4 men, 5 women) - or so I claim to this wide-eyed country yokel manning the counter. Am I lying? I have no idea. I don't think this character has ever been to Qyran.

- No matter. I've had enough of killing things (standing back while my wolf kills things, whatever), time to play detective. I pick back up on the mayor's quest and visit the murdered fisherman's house and meet a ghost. Seriously, ghosts everywhere in this bitch. She lets me inside, I have some spirit visions about a mercenary and the mayor's brother coming by and murdering the shit out of that poor fisherman. Incidentally the vision namedrops a guy named Jaer, a city guard who watched the whole thing go down. I assumed that the mayor's brother and his bloodthirsty hireling would have silenced him; I'd heard that the fisherman had killed a man, so obviously they killed the poor bastard and pinned the blame on the fisherman, right?
No. Because I'm pretty sure I ran into that guy on the way out of town, still wearing his guard uniform. Is he ALSO a ghost? Or did he just never talk about that miscarriage of justice he watched? I'm starting to feel like maybe the brother is less master criminal and more inept stooge.

- The ghost woman points me in the direction of what turns out to be that same mercenary, who was chilling on his own private island off the coast. Why am I doing this quest instead of the ghost woman? I would literally have no idea where to go and what to do without her. I wouldn't have even been able to get inside the house.
Also, while there are at least six boats nearby I have to swim because what am I, a sailor?
The mercenary brought an axe to this wolf fight, and reaped the consequences. Conveniently - since I assume mystic visions don't hold up in court - he was holding onto a journal of his past jobs that included the mayor's wife putting out the hit.

- While I'm on the island, I walk about 6 steps and wander into a cave. I accidentally interrupt three 'glimmerdust smugglers' in the midst of one telling the other that his girlfriend would sooner fuck- what? Fuck what? I'll never know, because they spotted me and stopped their scintillating conversation.
Nevermind. We fight, I steal their stuff, which seems to be mostly made of mushroom; this is not surprising, the Sun Coast seems to have at least 10 varieties of the things and they pop up everywhere. I may have just solved a drug problem I wasn't aware the Sun Coast had.
I tried to alchemize myself some of this product on the grounds that smuggling sounds kind of cool, but have no idea what I'm doing. I fail at making a bunch of compounds and wind up with nothing. I eat a mushroom to console myself and watch the weird colors for a minute.

- On the way back I see another cairn of stones on the beach. I figure, well, I can (have my wolf) kill some undead that usually infest these places. Instead, it turns out to contain two skeletons posed beautifully on the rocks looking like I interrupted them in the midst of a spirited debate. I very carefully put away my wolf and go on my way without disturbing them.
It reminds me of finding two skeletons laying in a bed together in the midst of a ruined room in a bombed out town in Fallout 3. Very atmospheric.

- Conveniently, the guilty brother is walking around the fisherman's house like he's worried I'm going to find evidence of his misdeeds in the beach sand and he's hoping to wipe it clean before I get there. If he was this worried, possibly he should have cleaned up the knocked over furniture and blood splatter in the house sometime in the last few months, but what do I know?
J'accuse! He claims that he's young and in love (also stupid), and things were never supposed to be this way. I kind of feel bad because he is clearly so very stupid, so I allow him to pack his shit and GTFO.
Regrettably for him, I forgot that I'm basically being haunted, and the ghost shows up. He violently explodes into a shower of.. purple.. chunks? Weird.
Then she gives me a 'Tonight, you' look and leaves. This actually worked out very well for me, since I recall the brother is an arcanist and could therefore probably set me on fire if I tried to fight him. I return to the mayor and spin some story about his brother being eaten by wolves. Hopefully he doesn't send anyone to check and finds the very un-wolf-like splatter pattern, plus whatever material his giblets are made of; it looks not of this earth. Also, his wife died while I was gone.
He rewards me for some reason, but who am I to argue with a grieving man? I take my payment and make tracks. I have a main quest to get back to.

- But not before checking in with my favorite crazy person, the alchemist lady. I still have her reward from the last quest, the 'Master Skull.' Apparently if I put it on my head while standing on top of a particular cairn of stones probably containing multiple dead guys I will gain enlightenment or something like that.
Now, this might sound crazy, but she WAS right about her potion being stolen by invisible fairies so whatever. I hike out to the cairn to try out that dashing skull hat, and score a couple of learning points. You need learning points to read those skillbooks you buy from merchants to up your game. I'm a little disappointed the skull didn't actually talk to me like herb lady said it would, but skills are skills. I'll take 'em.

- More importantly, she has a spell for sale that summons a bear. Also an 'ancestor' but why would I want to summon a human when I can summon a goddamn bear? Goodbye wolfie, you've been replaced.
To give you some idea of the relative power levels involved, if I take my magic fire-sword and stab one of the wild dogs that are everywhere around here, it'll take off about 1/10th of its health. Then my bear companion will tear its face off with one casual swipe, killing it the rest of the way.


The Takeaway:
God bless this completely overpowered monster that any hillbilly can buy from an herb woman in the town square. I still get in there and stab things when it's fightin' time, but mostly for something to do and so my self-esteem doesn't completely hit rock bottom.
Between the ghost telling me what to do and the bear doing all my fighting for me, I'm starting to wonder if I'm not the third wheel here.
Next time, I'll get around to actually doing the main quest. Hopefully that's not time sensitive or something. Sure, Jespar (that's Dal's real name, Jespar Dal Something or other) says I might be dying, but it's probably no biggie.

 

[Guile]

- This is Jespar Dal'Whateverthefuck, by the way.

He's dreamy. But kind of a smug asshole.

- The next main quest is to pick up the lockbox Yero threw off a cliff. I actually already grabbed it on the way while doing the fisherman quest. Luckily for me this is a game and not real life so I don't have to dredge the entire coast or have the plot item dragged out to sea by the tide. Just follow the minimap markers. It's about 5 feet off a pier in water about ten feet deep.
Inside the lockbox is Yero's diary. Pristine condition still, natch. Probably magic.
This Yero guy sounds pretty cool. Ambitious, but noble. The only question is whether he had all his dreams crash down around his ears before he exploded and killed thirty people, or if somebody did it to him because he was onto something. Now I'm heading on to Yero's house to meet Jerspar. Jespar.
Dal, I'm going to keep calling him Dal.

- Oh, so it's that first one. There's a book in his house that basically goes, 'You know, entropy magic isn't so bad. Necromancy's super illegal, but there's these bone shamans that do it all the time. They wear bone charms and think they can talk to the dead, what silly savages. A Keeper (like myself) has no need of such trinkets.' Combine that with him being sickeningly in love with his sweetheart from the village, and you can see where the narrative is going with this. Mr. Freezeville.

- Okay, now let's be real, here. It's really impressive that Dal managed to enter Yero's cellar and NOT set off every single trap in the place like I just did. But I have been stabbed by spears and shot by arrows and had a spiky ball on a rope hit me in the face, so I'm not feeling real charitable towards the guy. He made me do two errands to his one, and he couldn't even be bothered to disarm the place by the time I showed up!
Why would you even trap your cellar like this, what if you needed to come down and grab some potatoes for dinner and got stabbed to death by a wall-spear? There's a highwayman corpse hiding the pressure plate for the wall-spear trap, so obviously Yero's death-cellar is working.

- There's also a book with a Memory Point in it on the table where Dal is hanging out. Obviously a bit of carrot for people to do the main story quests, but it's a little... out of place? Like, it's just a book that... unlocks your old memories? Gives you somebody else's old memories? It's doing something, anyway.
Dal never mentions it. Maybe he didn't leave it there, maybe he didn't even know it was there.

- Dal leads me on a fun little jaunt through Yero's madness. By which I mean, this cellar is big. Dug out into natural caverns or something. There are empty wine bottles on every available surface, but Yero was clearly still smart enough to come up with a fiendish locked door, or steal one from an ancient ruin or something. For a minute I worry that we're going to have to trek across the lands finding the five-to-seven pieces of the key only to learn that the real key was inside you all along or something like that. But no, Dal's got the trick for this lock.
The trick is wooden sticks. He has wooden sticks. Does he just have wooden sticks in case he runs into this one esoteric locked door, or is this the in thing for fancy arcanists to put in their secret dungeon-cellars and I'm going to have to do this multiple times?
I have to run around the room like a madwoman shoving sticks into the locking mechanisms. Something like clicking five locks in ten seconds. Dal, meanwhile, stands on the pressure plate and shouts encouraging things at me like an asshole. The game also recommends I strip out of my armor because it makes me run slower.
So now I'm running back and forth hitting buttons in my undies while this jerk watches. This is my life now.

- After the lock puzzle there's basically a mini-boss: a fire elemental. It's okay, though, I have a bear.
The fire elemental was guarding a little shrine thing with Yero's lover's mummified remains. The head is unwrapped, and watching the rest of the room; extremely creepy.
Dal tells me that cremation is the done thing around here except for the rich and elite who have mausoleums, so maybe Yero wasn't quite clear on how this 'burial' thing is supposed to work. Generally, you box up your loved one and put them in the ground. NOT set the coffin upright and settle your lover's corpse in it to stare at you while you do... whatever you do down here. Wizard things, I guess.

- I was SO sure Yero was going the 'revive girlfriend as undying lich' route, but apparently he just wanted to have her with him. Watching him. Forever.
He planned to kill himself and see where he ends up after, and in a fine show of apathy and selfishness decided to take as many people with him as feasible.

- Dal also has this thing about idealists that goes like this: Don't. He wasn't surprised at all to see Yero's scary bat cave/corpse shrine, figures idealists all tend to fall hard and swan dive into necromancy or whatever.
He didn't like me pointing out that the world needs idealists. Like, not me personally, but it's good to have some rubes out there working to make the world better while I'm over here stealing gold pennies from old grave-crypts, you know?

- Now Dal hands me a teleport scroll. Apparently this is the answer to the game's lack of a fast travel system. After spending a few minutes trying to figure out how to use it like an idiot (and hitting the Z key into the Hero Place where you spend Memory Points a few times), away we go back to Riverville. From here, it's a hop skip and a jump (over a small mountain) to Ark, the capital of Enderal.
My hypothetical healer is there. I was kind of forgetting I was sick with all this distraction about Yero, honestly.


The Takeaway
Yero's arc was handled pretty well. The narrative wasn't unique or anything, but the writing in the diary entries was good. There's more investigation and cutscenes sprinkled in than I remember from Skyrim, and that's probably not to everybody's tastes but I like it.
I do still feel like the starter town was farther away than it needed to be, but it was a solid prologue-type place with all the necessities.
It does make me wonder where the main villain in all this is, though.
Like, was Yero just a red herring? I thought it would turn out that El Protagonist was some kind of test case for the Crazy Shithouse Rat Plague, but now I'm not sure if Red Madness is even a thing or if it's all suicidal idealists like Yero. Usually there's a clue or a hint or something at the end of the first big section to give a taste of what's coming in Act 3, but right now it's just 'head to Ark, Dal knows a guy. Get that magic fever looked at or whatever.'

 

[Guile]

"Hey Manyson. Still racist?"
"Why don't you ask your thousand husbands, coalwoman whore?"
"Shine on, you crazy diamond."

Yeah, I'm done with Riverville.

- I kind of love that Enderal has its own bards and songs in the taverns. Lovely.
The songs and the books go a long way towards selling the world, to making an already expansive world even larger.
No novels about lusty Argonian Maids in Enderal as yet, but Jespar did say he was picking up racy reading material for the long nights on the road ahead when he bought me a few skill books.
I have resolved to ignore any suspicious noises emanating from the man's bedroll henceforth.

- Jespar seems to have better pathing than my bear, but I also can't cast a spell to drop him directly on my enemies either, so I guess they're about even.
Of note is that he refuses to leave the path towards the mission objective, waiting for you to finish your business if you leave the path to tinkle or slay bandits or whatever. I kind of like this, it makes sense even if it does make him seem like a bit of a bastard. You feel like you're holding up your grand quest while you fart around with whatever.

- Speaking of bandits, there's a homey looking inn on the road ahead, I wonder what kind of nice p-
It's bandits, of course. It's always bandits. Presumably the guards don't have far-ranging patrols, so you might as well set up a toll directly on the road to the capital to shake down travelers? Except they don't ask for gold and proceed directly with the murder. S'okay, though. We're better at it.

- Between my bear and Jespar, I feel as safe as if I'd taken a merchant convoy to the capital. It would be nice to actually be able to hop in a wagon and rest the old dogs a bit, but speaking as someone who died at least a dozen times just getting to Riverville, this is definitely a step up.

- We reach what would presumably a scenic vista if it wasn't midnight and snowing. Jespar takes me over and shows me the wondrous (?) sight and drops some background on me, about trade and laws and stuff. We're at a trading post that was abandoned when the nation became much more xenophobic in the wake of some war or other.
I'd make a joke about how Jespar's lucky he's pretty...
But honestly it's really neat and tells me a lot about the kind of place I washed up in.
(Also the trading post is overrun with spiders, why did I go in here, it's always spiders when its not wolves or highwaymen).

- This snowy motif we're suddenly in the midst of as we trek up the mountain IS really nice, although I'm a little uncertain about just how structurally sound these bridges are when they're at least 50% ice instead of wood.

Spoiler

- There's a dead caravaneer and a trio of hungry wolves ahead. The dead man has a journal handily laying next to him. Let's see what...
"I used to be an adventurer, then I took an arrow to the knee."
... You cheeky fuckers.

 

[Guile]

- On the way down from the mountain I run into a fellow watching the road. Given how the last hour has gone, I pull out my sword and my bear, but this one actually wants to talk. He has a particular... vocal performance. I call him Lenny. He tells me he's cold, and that I should get his brother to come relieve him on watch. Well, I guess I have a spare minute.
His brother, who I will call George, tells me in his incongruous but very nice accent to call Lenny a drunk for him and tell him that George is not moving from the fire for love or money.
I go back three or four times, faithfully repeating the invective these two are spewing at each other, until Lenny can't stands it no more. He draws his sword and runs over to George's campfire where he proceeds to very ineptly try to murder his brother. George bashes him in the head with a mace a few times until he settles down into his bedroll for the night.

Jespar briefly indulges in Enderal's most popular pastime, hateful xenophobia, by snorting something derogatory about 'Endraleans' under his breath.
That's it. That's the quest.

- The Ark is that fancy place you see on the title screen, it appears. With the big statue holding up the cliff face. It's nice. SureAI has added a lot of stables, farms, goat herds, stray hay and carts containing vegetables to the outskirts of Ark that makes it feel like a real bustling town.
I already like the place more than Whiterun.
If I was that one youtube critic who always wonders 'But what do they eat?' in games when talking about immersion, I would be well satisfied by this.

- On the road I meet an elvish sort of fellow (the game calls them Starlings) who likes to refer to himself as 'he' and wants me to find bird eggs for purposes unknown. Something about finding a flying city, I don't know.
It seems like a neat little quest where you follow the birds riding the thermals near the town until they land back at their nests, then steal their eggs. Unfortunately it also seems like an enormous waste of my time, so I confidently claim that I'll help him out and then never give him another thought.
Later. I notice the merchants are selling hammerbird eggs, so I'm confident if I ever care enough to come back to this guy the power of money will solve my problem.

- Shortly thereafter, I run into a quest I decide to do immediately. Rather than collecting eggs for a nebulous reward, I'm to go down to the beach and kill a troll, and in return I get a free mount. Well, a donkey. Are donkeys the 'in' animal to ride around here? I choose to believe that they are.
So I wander on down to the beach at midnight looking for some strange grunting troll and find… a normal-ish man grunting down on the seashore. When I ask him what is up with his troll impersonation, he huffily informs me that he is praying, not that he expects me to understand.
If this is all a ploy to get me punked by this guy or to get me to commit to secondhand racism, then bravo, lady.

- But no, then a troll does show up, and I do that thing I do. Then I score my noble steed. Behold my majesty:

Spoiler

Whirlwind, King Among Beasts. That's not a name I picked for him, by the way.

- Five minutes after entering the town's Foreign Quarter, my journal is filling up with quests of varying severity and curiosity.
A snooty accountant wants me to brave ancient ruins for a gewgaw. Some guy is pouting because some other guy stole something or his.
The guy with all the skillbooks wants me to track down his druggie sister and get a key to their shared family vault from her before she drinks away the money stored there. She's apparently located in something called the Undercity, which sounds positively squalid.
This is going to take a while.

- There's also a genuinely massive yard for handicrafts projects. Multiple forges, smelters, tanning racks. The dulcet sounds scraping leather and hissing molten metal and of a blacksmith berating some apprentice for taking a foreigner's filthy money. A dozen NPCs. But... all of them are marked 'Laborer.' There isn't a single merchant in the entire zone after the skillbook guy, as far as I can tell.
Well played, game.

- I head into the Merchant Quarter, thinking I just need silver and steel ingots and I can make a fine new steel breastplate for myself.
Then the second merchant I check is selling steel breastplates for 200 gold pennies. I think it might be superior to the thing I can make myself, since it says 'Fine' in front of it. Mine doesn't say 'Fine.'
... Well played, game.

- Most importantly, I find the best store pertaining to my interests:

Spoiler

That, my friends, is a bakery. It has sweetrolls. It has cakes. It has honey buns. It has pretzels. It has my old standby, Endralean Crusty Bread. Let me tell you, Endralean Crusty Bread saw me through some hard times.
It has Sublime Breead! Which is presumably so delectable it demands an extra 'E.'

Finally. Finally, I have reached civilization. And it smells like sweetrolls.


The Takeaway:
Another long hike between towns, but I'm much better equipped to handle it now Jespar and my bear are much better equipped to handle it now, so it's more of a leisurely stroll through various biomes while trampling the occasional wolf or troll.
And now I'm in the Big City. Lots to do and to see. I do kind of worry that having four zones in the same city will be problematic, even Whiterun with its two zones was kind of annoying in Skyrim. On the upside, the street signs being teleport items should help a lot. Guess we'll see.

 

[Guile]

- Jespar is waiting for me in the marketplace, but while I'm in the area, there's a quest for buying back and/or stealing an item from a merchant that he got off a debtor who wants it back. Conveniently, this is labeled 'Ironford's Lute' in his inventory, or I'd have no idea what the heck I was looking for. I suspect I'm missing some backstory to this quest.
I buy the thing mostly because I'm coasting along on the impetus of this being a quest with map markers and stuff, and find out the lute was Ironford's daughter's. And on the back is 1/3rd of a code to her 'treasure casket' that is almost certainly going to contain friendship or lightness of heart of peace of mind or something like that.
Maybe later.

- I happen to run into a nameless guard sighing wistfully and reflecting that they really do take it too easy on 'the scum.'
Enderal, ladies and gentlemen. I only hope I'm not the scum in question.

- Jespar has dressed me up like he's taking me to my quinceanera. Green gowns (with unfortunate stitiching), 'gallant shoes' and fine hats that are the height of Endaralean fashion. I already like this plan.

Spoiler: I shall wear a pretty dress and dance with all the boys

- What's less fun is the endless jaunt he takes me on through like 4 loading screens, up to the tippy top of the Sun Temple. I make a note to come back here since this seems like a likely place to find spell-sellers to see if there's a more advanced bear summoning. There's arcane enchanter tables, which is the first I've seen in Enderal. Apparently provincial backwaters like Riverville don't get mages.
Jespar spins a line of bullshit with the guard about me being the owner of the greatest perfume chain in foreign lands, and says the archmage is eager to meet me, and boy wouldn't he be upset if some well-meaning guard delayed us, etcetera. The guard acknowledges that does sound like the archmage, and lets us in.
I kind of want to meet the archmage, now.
Also I'm more than half convinced that this was all entirely unnecessary and Jespar just wanted to have some fun, but he apparently is supposed to be a clandestine spy type, so who knows?

- When I meet Constantine Firespark, it is in the midst of his alchemy lab exploding. This seems like it will set the tone for our relationship.
Constantine mistakes me for Jespar's doxy, and berates him for being the worst spy ever and to not bring his whores in here. Jespar always takes me to the nicest places.
I do wonder if that means Jespar sometimes does show women around the Sun Temple to try and impress them.

Spoiler: The man, the myth, the legend

Constantine Firespark is a treasure. He talks like that all the time. This isn't even his best line this conversation, just the only one I screencapped.

- Apparently having arcane fever is basically becoming a mage, and after putting me in a chair and doing some green magic hoodoo, he drops some world lore on me. Or rather, when he tells me to pick up a book like a nerd, Jespar succinctly summarizes the whole mage thing while browsing through the shit on Constantine's desk in the background. Mages can see other realities, and can bring phenomena from those realities into Enderal. Not just bears, but like, there's some world out there where Constantine's beard is on fire (Jespar's example, not mine), and I can take from that world and make it manifest in this one.
The locals spend a year fasting and praying to get it under control. Both Constantine and I think that's stupid, and he advises for me to go meet one of his fellow... Nehrimese mages? I think Nehrimese. Apparently she can pop my chakras open like it ain't no thing, or something like that.
I am all about quick shortcuts, so I'm down.

- He also thinks that Future Vision is me being under a lot of stress, or possibly drunk.

- Jespar leaves the party. I actually meet up with him later at the tavern for one last quest, which involves having a seat with him at the tavern and rapping with him for a while. It gets pretty philosophical, and is honestly more engaging than anything I got out of my poor packmule of a bodyguard Lydia in Skyrim.
Jespar's thinking is that everyone's on this world for the purpose of pursuing happiness. People dress it up in a lot of fancy words, about religion and purpose and honor and all that, but that mostly just ends up letting them get used by some tyrant or god. At the end of it he pretty much says his work is done and he wishes me the best. There's a boat headed for Kile in the morning, and he's going to be on it.
I can respect the game for definitively ending an engaging companion's involvement in the story in a way that makes sense to the character's core values, but my experience with games and the amount of detail SureAI put into this guy makes me think he'll still have a part to play later. Possibly he'll decide I'm too cute to bail out on, which is only the truth. We'll see.

- I do decide to swing by the cave the Ironford girl left 1/3rd of her code in before I head on to ancient ruins and the main quest. There are holes in the roof to let light in, streams are flowing everywhere, and there's a light mist. It's pretty, of course.
It's also filled with spiders, of course. And an Adept-level chest, the first I've ever found. Since I'm not a rogue-type and lockpicking Adept chests are like 4 memory points up the 'bow + lockpicking' tree, I have to leave it be.
I try swinging a fire-sword into it just in case it lets me bash the lock or something. It does not.
Just to be petty about the damn spiders and their tenaciously locked loot, I devour the spider mom's soul. It heals me back up good, no Crusty Endralean Bread necessary. This is what I bought last level instead of lock picking.

- I also head a few steps up the beach and run into some bad customers.
Apparently 'Soil elementals' in Enderal can cast lightning spells. I am swiftly turned into a rather pretty corpse. It's been a while since that's happened! For having no legs, those fellows can really roll out.

Spoiler: Time elapsed between screenshots: 3 seconds

The Takeaway:
I'm really starting to like Jespar and I can't decide if I hope he sticks around or if they have the stones to actually retire him from the story in a way which feels appropriate for his character. Constantine is also a wonderfully acerbic eccentric. I still don't really have any idea where the plot is going but the character writing in this section is really strong so I don't mind the journey getting there.
Now, stocked up on bread and souls and properly chastised for trying to wander off the beaten path, I'm back to working on the main quest.

 

[Guile]

- So I'm going off to get my magic unlocked or whatever. The quest suggests I take a 'Myrad.' I wonder what that is?

Spoiler

I kind of feel like I should be going after this creature with fire and sword, not getting on his back and letting him fly me where I need to go. Who first looked at one of these things and thought, 'Hey, that sure looks comfy. Imma ride it'? The first Myrad tamers must have had balls that clanged when they walked like they were made of the Metal of Ancient Nations.

- Pro tip: I bought the Mark and Recall spells in the Sun Temple. Very handy. Cast the Mark spell in Ark in front of one of the signposts, then Recall there whenever you want.

- I get a little turned around (and then off a cliff) and wind up in a mine instead of the ruin I'm supposed to be going to. I suspect that 'Guarding Cave Trolls' are the next step up the evolutionary chain from regular Cave Trolls, because these guys are hard as iron, particularly the two-troll groups you have to fight once or twice. Generally I can trade a ghost-bear for a troll at a 1-to-1 ratio, but I usually don't have the mana to cast the summon spell twice in one fight. In the two-troll groups I actually have to get up there and fight one mano-a-mano, and that doesn't end well for me a couple times.
The old iron fire-sword is feeling its age; I've switched out for a 'Dagger of Despair', which has a similar level of damage but instead of setting things on fire it swings faster and has a 5% critical bonus. It fits well with my combat style which I call 'frantic wild stabbing in the dark until I hit something'.
Deep in this troll-infested mine, I find a single glimmerdust smuggler. Why? No idea. Is he using the trolls as puppets? Did he feed them some weird potion? Is he their prisoner, forced to make them mushroom-drugs? Have I stumbled onto a troll opium den?
I never find the answer to these questions, sadly.

- The only reason why this little side trip is important is that I find a spellbook to summon a level 16 fire elemental. I am level 10. This seems promising.
The fire elemental doesn't do as much damage in one hit as my old bear, but she shoots little fireballs at enemies from range like cannon shells, and up close she unleashes sprays of flame.
'Guile,' you might say. 'If you love your fire elemental so much, why don't you marry it?'
To which I would tell you, give me time. I'm looking into the local laws on the subject.

- Anyway, after this brief detour (and a few cases of arson-murder among the local bandit population to test out my new pal) (and the reminder that I still suck when I almost die to a pack of wolves again), I do find the ruin I'm looking for.
I meet 'Lashiri' moments after I almost get exploded by a stray 'Qyran dust crystal'. She's a smartly dressed woman in leather rather than... whatever I was expecting. Also, turns out Constantine doesn't have a memory for names.
Lishari explains that she's got some shit going on, which means work for me. Mercenaries popped up, killed Lishari's companions and decided to start burning the magical macguffins they were studying. Turns out her assistant Sveg let them in (I feel like I should thank the mercenary guild for making it a law to always keep all plot-relevant notes on your person), but she doesn't want me to kill him. Presumably she wants the pleasure of squeezing until his head pops off like a grape herself.

- The next segment involves me running around in the dark with a dagger in one hand and a fire extinguishing spell in the other, fighting mediocre mercenaries and putting out fires. I'm not sure if it's a timed puzzle; I suspect it is, since one of the macguffins broke in the middle of the fracas. After that, I left the mercs to my fire elemental and devoted myself to putting out fires just to be on the safe side.
Sveg is actually slowly burning to death when you find him. I'm tempted to let him burn to death if he can't figure out that maybe he should move out of the fire, but remembering Lishari's request I do put him out and then get back to work on the macguffins.
By the time everything is put out and all the mercenaries are dead though, Sveg ran away or teleported or something. Oops.
It's probably fine, what are the odds that decision will come back to haunt me?

- Once all that's taken care of, Lishari does open my mind or settle my magecraft or however that works.

Is... is it working yet?

She claims 'This might tingle a little' as I slowly rise into the air, explode, and slam down onto the ground face first with a sliver of health remaining.
Lishari swears that wasn't supposed to happen.


The Takeaway:
Lishari's okay. Pretty standard badass mage (who dresses in leather because... I don't know, because she looks great in it?) character. She's not the shining brilliance that is the ancient curmudgeon that sent me on this quest, but she's about at Jespar's level. The Taming the Waves quest is a lot of frantic button mashing on a timer while everything is on fire, and was pretty fun. Not something I'd want to do every main quest, but good for a change.
I'm a little disappointed that it's looking like I'm probably going to be the One Last Hope For The World or The Legendary Stabbin'-Summoner or something like that. I was just assuming that turning into a pretty okay warrior a couple of weeks after landing in Enderal was just a game conceit, but apparently it's baked into the storyline.

 

[Guile]

- Archmage Arantheal wants to rap with me when I get back.

Spoiler: The Plot, probably

I haven't even started talking to him, and he's already speaking cryptically in Capital Letters. It's going to be one of those conversations, I can just tell.
We have a bit of a walk and talk.
It looks like everything's getting a little Mass Effect in here. Not only is The End Coming, but the world of Enderal seems to be moving in cycles. Civilizations rise, then there's a big calamity, wizards rise up as gods, get thrown down by plucky heroes, and then shortly thereafter everything just fucking dies? And this has happened hundreds of times? That's rough.
Turns out I was right about having some Grand Destiny (I'm 'Prophet'), but it looks like I'm only one of many. He's one too ('Ruler'). That's cool. Long story short, I'm now in tight with the Big Religion of the land. But he wants to make this all official-like with the other Keepers, and makes me take an initiation test.

- Is it just me or is the Archmage's son probably the protagonist of the last game, the total conversion mod for Oblivion?
He just feels like a protagonist, and it's only partly that he killed the gods.

- While I'm kind of looking forward to seeing what this initiation is all about, I am left wishing the Archmage had a leetle more ultimate power. What's even the point of being in the Special Secret Capital Letter Club with him if he can't just appoint me to some high post? What a gyp.
So he sends me out to the Heartlands border to get this shit done with, but I decide to do a little sidequesting first.

- I've had a quest sitting in my journal for ages to go steal a bank key from a guy's druggie sister that takes me to Undercity. Normally I'm not one for the thief and Dark Brotherhood-like quests I expect to find down there, but I kind of want to check it out anyway.
Why are the thief guilds literally underground in games like this? Little on the nose about the class structure to actually find the deepest darkest hole you possibly could to toss the Pathless down into, don't you think?

Spoiler: I see what you did there, game

- I know I say this a lot, but Enderal is really pretty. Admittedly, it swiftly gets less pretty later on when I get into the slums and the 'fleshmaggot sufferers', which are like beggars but more tragic. This feels like Enderal in a nutshell.
An interesting bit of cultural difference I notice right away; up there with the 'sunchildren', the lady in the Dancing Nymph is called a prostitute. The lads down in Undercity just call them whores.
I think this is indicative of a serious class divide, and- what do you mean 'why is this the first thing I notice?' It just... I...

- Moving on, on the way to the other quest I run into a lady trying to score Red Vynroot to help ease the suffering of the guys with fleshmaggots and y'know what, that sounds like something I could get behind. I shell out 300 gold pennies, turn them in to her with a turnaround time of about 1 minute, and get a whole bunch of exp.
It would be pretty cool if there were fewer of these 'fleshmaggot sufferer' NPCs down here after this little quest, it would make me feel like I made a bit of a difference with my altruism. Well, not really altruism, I was mostly just in it for the exp, but y'know... it'd be nice.

- Anyway, I go work some Rhetoric on the lady, Sila, who instantly folds and tells me the location of the hidden key. In and out, I can dig it.
Unfortunately, the skillbook merchant is gone when I come back topside and a person's worth of blood is splashed everywhere. Only now, without easy access to skillbooks all in one merchant, do I realize my folly. What I had, now that it's gone.
Also when I return to check in with Sila I find a horrifying thing called an Aborted Pus Creature in her house. It's like an armored centipede as wide around as a small man. Is the hideous thing a guard creature? A pet? Do the people of Enderal make a habit of subjugating the most monstrous creatures on the continent? The last time I saw a creature this scary I was paying a man 25 pennies to ride it.
I admit, when I first walk in and get a faceful of green goo I assume someone heard about the bank key and put out a hit on Sila. And is using nightmarish monsters to assassinate people.

- Clues in the house lead me to a small, burned down fishing village. With a pile of burned-black corpses piled up on the pier like macabre driftwood.

Spoiler: Tragic, but also hilarious

Milbert and Sila fled to the city years ago. Why has no one done anything about that. Who even bothers to stack up the corpses of their victims into a funny pile like that?

- Also it appears that while I was traipsing around Ark and fighting her hideous pet pus beetle, Sila managed to abscond with her brother in broad daylight and drag him all the way out here. I took a Myrad, did they take a Myrad? Does the unconscious guy you have slung across your shoulders with a bloody knot on his head count as a passenger or baggage?
I will mention that up until this point Sila seemed bitter but not really dangerous, until she dragged her brother out here and locked him in a man-sized cage. Now, I know that feeling, I have a sibling myself, but I control my urges and so should she.
Does glimmerdust cause violent paranoia? That shit sounds dangerous.
Things... don't end well for Sila, and Milbert sounds a little broken up about it. I actually get to keep the key they were feuding over. Go figure.

- Well, that's enough lazing around I guess. Time to go ... beat up some fellow initiates? I'm not sure how initiation into a religious order works.


The Takeaway:
As far as RPG scenarios go, 'save the world' is an old, old staple, but I admit I'm kind of interested to see where this is going. There being multiple Dragonborn equivalents is a great twist and makes me feel much better about my new pals than, say, the Blades from Skyrim.
The Divide and Conquer quest was a bit of a sour note. The characters feel kind of schizophrenic, and I still don't know what's up with that horror in Sila's room. Does she feed it the souls of door-to-door salesmen? Oh well, they can't all be gems.

 

[Guile]

- I grab a Myrad and hook up with the leader of the initiation and the two initiates further northwest.
The level of snide I'm receiving is impressive even for Enderal, where hateful xenophobia is usually the default expression. Signet Leader Jorek's voice actor in particular does a great job of conveying his opinion of my general worthlessness as a human being.

Spoiler: The actual content of the line really doesn't get the smarm in his voice across

One of the initiates is nice, seems to be impressed at the way I took on an entire mercenary company and saved the day like a big damn hero the other day.
My knowledge of story structure suggests someone is going to die off before this quest is over. They're wearing bright red; they are literal red shirts. I just can't decide if it'll be the mean one (less visually interesting than the girl with the face tattoo) or the nice one (pathos), or even the boss and we have to fight our way out without him. And then the mean one would probably blame everything on me; he's kind of like that.

- It seems that the forest we're going into is home to a particular breed of giant mushroom that makes arcane fever worse.
Why is it always mushrooms around here?

- Now, you might look at the following screenshot and think 'how much wine did you have before setting out, Guile?' but this is what visions look like.

Spoiler: Trippin'

Right, so Arentheal explained what this is. Apparently as the Prophet I'm getting visions from previous cycles, which are basically Future Vision because the cycles are just that similar. Everything is the same. Predestination. Creepy.
Hypothetically the lines said by the mysterious voices will make sense only later in retrospect, but I'm sure I'll forget about them by then.

- Later, we meet a friend! He appears to be suffering from a bad case of pink-eye. He does a lot of chanting about 'She wanted to leave, she wanted to leave, now she'll never leave', and there's a corpse in a pine box he's building for her.

Spoiler: Could probably do with a breath mint

- This is what Red Madness looks like: I'm not sure if it's named for the color of the eyes, the caked blood around the mouth, or the general transformation into murderous psychopath.
Dunwar (mean initiate) blows him away with a lightning bolt, and it's kind of hard to fault him for it.
The bossman faults the hell out of him for it, though, saying some apothecarius would give their left arms for a chance to study a live victim of the disease. You'd think they'd be warier given the way Yero (possibly not a victim of Red Madness, but they don't know that) exploded and killed 30 people.
I almost feel bad for the novice, but I'm sure he'll say something that annoys me the next time he opens his mouth.

- So we get to the sacred spot, and the bossman drops the fact that the gods are all dead. I knew this already, and most of the non-Enderal world believes it too, but this is news to the initiates. Dunwar flips his shit so hard I'm half surprised the ruin doesn't land upside down.
He blames the nice initiate for being a witch, the bossman for being drunk, the order for taking in Pathless like us two assholes (me and the nice one), and the world for being pointless and meaningless now that the gods are dead. Bossman shouts him down in proper drill sergeant style, but I almost have to be impressed by the size and shine of this stupid kid's brass balls.

- There's a kind of suspicious stammer in the bossman's voice when he tells us to drink down our [Strange Potions] that sets off warning bells in my head.
My vague worries are immediately proven prescient when I hit the deck and my vision fuzzes out.

- I wake up in a prison cell. I'm actually kind of surprised this hasn't happened to me before, you know? It's just been that kind of week.
At this point I'm about evenly split between 'Is this a vision quest?' and 'Is the Signet Leader trading in nubile young Keeper initiate flesh?'

- I'm locked in with a new guy named Aixon. At first his ramblings sound like it's the latter and I'm going to have to go it slave gladiator style for a while, but then I add another possibility to the pile: 'Is Aixon one of my past selves, or a past Prophet, or something like that?' because he is talking kind of mystical and like this always happens, in between whimpering about somebody called the Suppressor.
He posits a kind of interesting idea: he says that I died a week ago, sunk to the bottom of the ocean tied to my old peasant buddy. This whole thing has been a fever dream. Magic shit, you know?
I don't think that's actually true, but

- I'm not entirely sure how I get out of the cell. Like, the wall actually changed into a door for me.
Aixon is just as confused as I am, and I'm really impressed with his voice actor right around this part. He absolutely nails a voice half 'stunned like a poleaxed cow' and half 'dare I hope?' with a touch of 'why couldn't I do that?' thrown in for good measure.
Right around when instead of fighting prison guards I'm stabbing ghosts, I'm going with 'Vision quest thanks to a dodgy potion' but I'm not entirely dismissing 'Temporarily dead (will probably get better).'

- I'm reduced to a knife and a hunk of Endralean Crusty Bread (just like old times!) but the prison didn't remove my ability to summon a fire elemental that one-shots the ghosts.
There's corpses and ghosts and hanged people and traps. No Suppressor, though. I die once to a spiked ball trap, but otherwise this segment is a little spooky but not very hard. I find a skull labeled 'Regret' which I have no idea what to do with. I end up dropping it in a minute, when the exit door sends us right back into our prison cell. My knife disappears.

- Aixon starts pouting just because we're probably going to be tortured or whatever for trying to escape, like a baby.
I decide to catch some shut eye while we waited for the Suppressor, but three days later still nothing happened. After rubbing my face against every wall, clicking on everything in the room and sleeping in Aixon's bed, I decide to punch Aixon in the face.

- Apparently, that advances the quest.
Aixon isn't sure if I figured it out or just got pissy, but he drops the act. He's me - somehow. All the little whimpering, scared, stupid feelings I'm keeping deep down inside while I play the big hero outside.
Okay.

- I wake up, and Jespar is waiting for me. That's nice.
Except I swiftly deduce we're entering Inception territory, right around when Jespar's voice changes, other characters start teleporting into the room, everyone turns into beings of pure red air, and the room gets all... like this:

Spoiler: I wonder if Smoke Jespar still has the hots for me

- I'm still dreaming, but it's pretty obvious something's hijacked the dream. And it is not impressed with me.
Which, duh. I walked face first into a spiky ball trap like a minute ago and died. I die to wild animal attacks all the time.

- They namedrop The Cleansing, which is probably just The End of The World in smoke person speak.

- Then I actually wake up! Calia (the nice initiate) greets me.
This has been one hell of a ride, Calia. One hell of a ride.

- You can get into her backstory (she killed the family that took her in too, maybe! We're like murder sisters!), but I'm still processing main quest stuff right now and have no time for Calia.
Also, Dunwar's probably not going to wake up. Ever. Probably bossman's fault for laying that 'the gods are dead' bit on him before making him fight his inner demons.
Bummer, I guess, but mostly at this point I'm just glad it's him and not me.


The Takeaway:
Enderal's weird dream game is strong. No idea where this is going now; there's been a few leads dropped here and there. Peghast, Signet Stone, these new smoke people. Who knows? First things first, probably go meet up with Arantheal again. Maybe yell at him some, for not filling me in on having to fight evil smoke monsters from beyond our reality.
At the moment though, I'm just going to have Calia take me on a tour of the sun temple and try not to think about how my insecurities are apparently a cringing white guy with an emotive voice.

 

[Guile]

- Arantheal also had the weird smoke monster dream, and agrees that they're connected to the Cycle. And also are assholes.
I also get into some of his backstory, what being locked up for years then getting out just in time to dive into this End Of The World nonsense is like. He's of the opinion that 'What would I go do instead? A life as a fisherman?'
He's a rock, this guy.

- Constantine is also still awesome. His mouth speaks the words that are in my heart.

Spoiler

- The Order needs some time to get a fancy ceremony together. Fingers crossed for getting to put on a pretty dress and dance with all the boys, but given what I know of this religious order it's probably going to be a bunch of solemn chanting about how superior they are to the shitty Pathless, and the less said about those foreign dogs the better.
If this ends with me becoming a werewolf, I'm gonna be pissed.

- Jespar also sends a note saying he'd like to see me again, and to meet him at night in a deserted watchtower on the outskirts of Ark for what, I am sure, are perfectly innocent reasons.
It is not night time, and Enderal doesn't let you just fast forward time with 'T', so I wander about on my own for a while. There are a lot of farms and windmills and things around Ark, so I decide to check those out.

- I wander around for a few minutes. A flyer told me I could find fantastical adventure! if I went out to a little island in Ark's bay, but that turned out to be a bust. Highwaymen, you know how it is. Usually a mugging isn't the peak of excitement, but, well. Enderal.
I'm a little sad I didn't get to go on the adventure, though. Whoever wrote that flyer seemed like the type to Talk In All Caps and be Constantly Excited About Everything.

- I wandered into a cute little farming village. Hay everywhere, goats and cows and... farm things.
A particular door declared itself to be 'Lower Haystacks.' I open it up without giving it another thought, thinking it might be a granary or a saloon or something.
It is nothing like that thing I just thought.

- I am immediately beset by a Vatyr and his two 'Mad Rat' companions. I've run into Mad Rats once before, when I wandered into a vault in the sun temple that I'm probably supposed to visit for a quest thing at some point, and they are surprisingly dangerous. With preparation, I can fight two at once; blindsided, and with a Vatyr too? I know what move to make here.
I run, screaming, for the door only to emerge into bright sunlight with the Vatyr on my tail and at a fraction of health. I die.
Then the game reloads, and I die again.
Exiting a building auto-saves the game, natch.
Third time's the charm, though, and I manage to pop a potion and start life-draining the Vatyr until it's him, not me on the ground.

- Well, I figure once my heartrate slows down, might as well investigate since I'm here. The place is absolutely covered in mushrooms. I find 20 of one kind, and a handful of other types. If I was an alchemist type, I would probably be excited right now.
A hidden trapdoor drops me into a fight with two more Vatyr, and some kind of boss Vatyr with heavy armor on. His armor is one of those magical set pieces, boosting two-handed weapons for Vandal types. More potions and life-draining, plus fire elemental backup, pulls me through on this one but it's a close thing. Then a couple more Vatyr, a little wandering around and Vatyr again, before I pop up out of an inauspicious manhole into the Farmer's Coast. More idyllic countryside and scenic farms.
... Did I stumble into a quest halfway through? What the heck is going on here? Why are there a dozen goatman monsters camped out in some random farm? One that's obviously still in use? Are they, like, Vatyr sympathizers? Are the Vatyr noble rebels, unfairly discriminated against by the surface worlders?!
I'd totally join their secret club if they didn't keep trying to violently murder me every time I show up.

- I still have more time to kill until evening when Jespar's quest becomes available, and I see there's a lighthouse and a mine nearby, so I make for them.
The lighthouse is abandoned. And is set on a river, not any kind of ocean, which kind of defeats the purpose? I don't know, who am I to tell people they can't build lighthouses wherever they want to.
There's a trapdoor with a slightly soggy vault beneath it.
Inside is what is apparently the new evolution of the Lost Ones; this zombie guy is a mage. He's throwing fire around everywhere and he's got some serious HP, but he gets into a slugging match with my elemental so I'm free to jab him in the buttocks repeatedly until he dies.

- The mine is covered in highwaymen. There must be at least six to eight of them just hanging around the entrance, shooting the shit.
This is the second or third time this has happened. Are there even any mines still controlled by the government, or non-evil mining consortiums, or anything? Considering this mine is a silver and gold mine, why are these blokes still highwaymen and not wealthy landowners by now?
Maybe they don't want to sell out and are staying real, I don't know. OG highwaymen.

- Putting down an elemental and watching from cover like a pussy, I'm reminded that this game has a neat little mechanic where if a bandit goes down, sometimes their buddies will have a line like, 'That was my friend, you bitch! I'll kill you!' or something like that.
That's cool. I always felt like in Skyrim the bandits weren't properly recognizing me for the blood-stained god of war that I am, even after I turn 15 of their 18 man bandit camp into gently steaming corpses with lightning or whatever.
Aside from my elemental reminding me that her fireball ability has knockback by interacting weirdly with the game physics and launching a highwayman twenty feet across the room and onto a balcony, the other notable thing here is the guy sitting on the gold vein:
A Marauder.
This guy is clearly a next gen bandit. Decked out in steel armor, shield and rune mace, and with his inferior buddy distracting my elemental, he reminds me of the first hour of the game when Enderalean banditos were the stuff of nightmares.
I have to break out my old standby of 'backpedal while power attacking and life-tapping' and he still comes within a hair of taking me out with just a couple swings of that mace.

... I think I'm going to go sell off all this stuff, visit Jespar, and then never go wandering again. If the picturesque farms are this dangerous, what am I going to do when I have to actually fight the End Of The World? The smoke monster guys are probably going to show up on fire-breathing dragons.


The Takeaway:
I must have hit a new plateau in levels or something, because the game is clearly stepping up its, well, game. Sometimes it'll throw weakling highwaymen at me, but sometimes now it's magical skeletons or bandits armed to the teeth and trying to beat me like a pinata.
Possibly the game thinks I was able to buy skill books for the 30+ unused skill points I've accumulated and is strengthening its enemies accordingly, but I don't know how that would be possible. Adept skillbooks (the ones that get you up to 50 in a skill) are expensive as hell. I pick up and sell everything and make gear to sell for extra cash when I find the ingots and spare parts, and I'm still broke as a joke.

 

[Guile]

- Jespar's midnight tower tryst is nice, but marred somewhat by bugginess. There are points where Jespar just stands there staring, and if you autosave and reload in the middle it can bork the chain and he wanders off back towards Ark without another word.
He's a pretty good host if you ignore that. He offers you wine or a smoke, and asks about the trial and something about your past. In exchange he opens up some about a past... conquest? It sounded more like the lady conquered him for a few years until she started getting a little too intense for him and he bailed.
Turns out he's sticking around, and it sounds like Constantine likes the fact that he's not entirely a blithering idiot, so he's probably still got a job.

- Unfortunately, the time still isn't right, so I have to go wandering again. I have a quest taking me out past Farmer's Coast on the trail of someone named Max Niceblood, so I figure, what the hell. I already tracked him to a barn outside Ark but he slipped the net, so now I have to go hiking up into the mountains after him.
About 15 steps past the Myrad post, though, I get shaken down for coin. Bandits, man, they're everywhere in this country. Now, if he'd come up with some sob story about fleshmaggots, sure, but this guy is being way too smug for me to give him 200 pennies.
I reflect that this may have been a mistake when the vagrant sneaking up behind me buries a steel battleaxe in my spine.

- I die an additional two times in various permutations as I work out how the fight goes. The two bandits in front use sword and shield, and naturally draw the eye, while there's an archer off to the side. But honestly, I wish every bandit in the world was an archer, because as long as you keep moving they don't really hurt. It's the battleaxe guy doing all the damage. As long as he dies, the fight is doable.

- Flush with victory and not having any intrusive bits of metal in me, I wander into this cave. It's got more bandits in it of course, but at this point I expect bandit attacks like spring rains. More importantly, there's this glowing crystal sprinkled everywhere, including this pillar of the stuff here. There's also some old ruin-y bits around, carved faces and the like, like this was some old Pyrean worship site or something.

Spoiler: What is this about? I may never know

But sadly, nothing hinting at the history of the place as I'm going through the bandits' personal things after the murder. I know they're bandits, not archeologists, but still. Really inconvenient, guys.

- After that is a distillery with actual non-murdery human people (but no extensive dialogues or quests or anything), and there's also like a barn or something. I wonder what it's-

Spoiler: Pictured: terror

Oh, nohohohoooope. If it's anything like Lower Haystacks, I want no part of it.

- I go up into the mountains a bit and - after fighting more bandits - find another note from Max. He congratulates me on getting him to run away, and notes the jewelry chest near the note is from him, in honor of my achievement. Also, the one who sent me after him is mad because he refused her bed, he wanted me to be clear on that.
He might as well have signed the note, 'See you in the next game, sucker!' but if he wants to give me a few shiny baubles when he was clearly ahead of me every step of the way, sure, I can play along.
I go home, deposit my money in the bank (did I mention? There's a bank in Ark, and it accrues something like 2% interest daily) and sleep it off until Arantheal is ready to see me, which is pretty quickly.

- I am welcomed with the bon homie I've come to expect of the Order.

Spoiler: Pictured: Making new friends

- Arantheal has a speech about tradition and togetherness and living on after the death of the gods and stuff like that. Calia and I do some light chanting. I don't think the dried up old bag of dicks that is the Order's Fourth Sigils are buying what he's selling, but it's a good speech.
And just like that, I'm raised to the First Sigil, something like the sixth highest rank in the land. I make the rounds of the little church, but nobody wants to hear my acceptance speech.

- My old buddy Sigil Leader Jorek from the trial is here, front row center. He's in fine, sarcastic form, too; he has a way of dragging out his vowels (and the 's' on Prophetess') that really makes me feel his disdain, it's kind of great. He wanted to let me know that he likes Calia better. I figured, but thanks for coming out, Jorek.
I also get some backstory on him; he's old initiate-buddies with Tealor Arentheal and the 'Tuchessa', which I guess is a rank like Grandmaster? But he didn't fight in the war like they did and changed the subject really quick on me. So he's stuck at 'Sigil Leader' rank, whatever that may be.
I wonder if this is setting him up for a jealousy character arc, and if imma have to kill him later.

- Some other named Sigil lady in the second row also chews my ass like Kilean tobacco. Do I know the history of the order (no), do I know the hundredth verse of the Chant the initiates need to do every morning (hell no), do I know why only x-y-zed people can enter the chapel (gimme a break, lady), do I know what some moldy war hero said to another after suppressing a riot (lady, I can't even remember the names you just finished telling me. Hell, I can't remember your name!). And so on, and so forth. My boots defile the chapel by standing here, etcetera.
Well... I have Future Vision powers? So... so there. Yeah.
Between Jorek and this lady it's like my disapproving parents are here in person even after I murdered them, it's sweet.

- The armory informs me that even if I'm Arantheal's special boy, I'm still paying normal prices. Swell.
I also get a free set of Keeper armor. It's bog-standard steel stuff but (as far as I can tell) can't be improved at the workbench, and therefore I will never use it.
I wonder if the temple armory would be weird about it if I tried to sell it.


The Takeaway:
Boy I sure am glad I get to be in your secret club, Arantheal. I kind of want to go find those occasional unusually racist Endraleans who give me that line about 'my thousand husbands' and call me 'coalwoman', put on my Keeper gear, and see if anything changes.
Regardless, the wait is over and I can get back on the main quest stuff, now. I can either go see a man about a corpse that will somehow or other lead me to a rite that would protect the Order and the Guard from the Red Madness. That 'Sigil Stone' stuff that got namedropped a few quests back. Or I could go do.. something, about a discovery in the Heartland woods? That Sigil Stone stuff seems more immediately pressing, so I decide to go for that first.

 

[Guile]

- So, next step on the road to saving the world: diving into the mind of Enderal's version of a Dwemer to steal his secrets. Sounds legit. How we gonna do it, Archmage?

Spoiler: Pictured: the fashion elite of Enderal

This is the Archmage, by the way. Very snazzy dresser. Not Jespar, we've met Jespar before. The other guy.
Apparently I was confused all this time, thinking Tealor Arantheal was also a peerless mage.

- Archmage Lexil explains that the 'Word of the Dead' is a macguffin in the possession of a recluse called the Aged Man. Me and my old pal Jespar here are going to become guests under his roof, sneak out to borrow his ancient artifact in the dead of night, use it on the caveman- I mean, Pyrean in order to pilfer his thoughts and find the magic words, and then pretend none of that ever happened.
I immediately assume I'm going to end up having to murder the guy, but Arantheal insists that if we're made we should flee immediately. At no point should this come to blows.
The Aged Man is apparently someone even the Lightborn - the old, dead mage-gods of the setting - didn't want to cross. I'm sure this will just go... swimmingly.

- The protagonist wonders what's up with this 'magic words' business, since all the other magic in the setting is chantless. Lexil explains this isn't your garden variety spell, natch, and it has more in common with illegal Entropy.
Like, say, the magic I've been using for ten levels to summon ghost wolves and elementals and stuff? The Entropy magic that has always been chantless, like everything else.
Whatever, I'm not an Archmage, I'm sure he knows what he's talking about.

- Lexil also mentions that the Word of the Dead – or possibly the 'magic words' for the spell, I'm not entirely clear – would take the form of a fancy scroll.
... Is this the local version of an Elder Scroll? If this quest drives me mad, I'm gonna be annoyed with you, Lexil.

- So anyway, I swing by the magic shop and buy a Soil Elemental (my old nemesis) summoning spell from the apothecarius for 200 gold pennies. Score. I do kind of wonder why Frost Elementals and Soil Elementals are basically rocks stacked atop one another, while the Flame Elemental is in the shape of a hot chick. Just Magic Things, I guess.
Then it's off to the Western Cliffs by Myrad.
The whole penninsula is pretty barren, not much of interest except for something marked with a dragon's head atop the nearest sheer mountain cliff face. I assume this means 'dragon', and resolve to not come back for like 20 levels. If I can't manage large-ish spiders, I'm not ready for dragons.

- And speaking of things that are terrible, rain starts up as I get closer to the Aged Man's mansion.
Oh, I think, the game just switched over to the Horror genre with an audible clunk, didn't it?
But it may turn out it was just these little bastards, called Wisps.

Spoiler: a ball o' ghosts

Now unfortunately I didn't get a very good screenshot of them, because as you may notice I'm at least 9/10ths dead and the screen gets all fuzzy when that happens.
Wisps are little glowy things about the size of a cannonball, which is apropros since they like to fly into you faster than the speed of a running man and smash you to death. I pull out a win after only one death and respawn, by going into the fight with my life absorption spell ready.
They do huge damage but aren't especially hearty, although they're also really hard to hit with a sword.

- In any case, on the way Jespar also reminds me that the Aged Man really likes his puppets, when we meet a pair.

Spoiler: I'll never understand art

Look at these sad sacks. They're basically like wooden mannequins, only kinda creepy given the expressiveness of their poses.
I'm wondering if there's such a thing as a wood-medusa. I suspect I shall find out shortly.

 

[Guile]

- Upon reaching the mansion, Jespar suggests we wait until nightfall to angle for spending the night. Unfortunately he can't hear my quiet moan of "Nooooo", and the Prophet agrees.
- After handing over a fancy necklace we 'got off a Keeper' (that being Arantheal himself) to the manservant who was suspiciously quick to arrive (Jespar's words), we're shown inside.
The Aged Man can't come talk because he's doing his music thing right now.

Spoiler: the gargoyles are a nice touch

The giant leering gargoyles in particular are a nice touch; so are the long rows of quietly bowed servant-like puppets. They probably aren't going to leap down and murder me at all.

The servant (and the Aged Man's) love of music and talk of how it transcends barriers and brings out the demons inside us reminds me of the connotations some of Lovecraft's stories had with music. Soon after, the music changes to a piano piece which is the Aged Man's playing. I like it a lot.
Jespar suggests we don't eat the 'slightly charred, but still pretty good' meat, showing himself to be pretty damn genre savvy, because I also immediately said to myself, 'Don't eat that suspicious meat.'

- The Aged Man's mansion is absolutely stunning. Great use of directed lighting in this segment, whether it's outside in the spotty illumination of rusalla mushrooms, inside the guest bedroom, or down in the hidden crypt.

Spoiler: B&B rated 5 out of 5 stars

Did I mention the hidden crypt? There's a hidden crypt. Actually, there's two. For all we know, it's hidden crypts all the way down.

- After a little puzzle involving tugging on books that I'm embarrassed to admit I had to look up on the wiki, I get to visit the first crypt.
A woman is hanging on the wall, trapped in water that constantly cries droplets down the wall like a bug in amber. She's actually pretty okay with it though, and is obviously an old friend or lover of the Aged Man's, kept alive within the watery magic. She can't see me, but she knows I'm there, and we have a nice little chat where she apologizes for being such a bother. Granted, lady.
I feel a lot of similarity in this to Yero's old subplot, where he dug up his old girlfriend and put her on display, and was researching entropy magic. But where Yero was just a Keeper, the Aged Man obviously has orders of magnitude more resources to pursue his goals. Whatever they may be.

Spoiler: why do I have my sword out, you ask? no reason. I'm sure its fine.

- After that we go even deeper, to some sort of old fertility goddess type statue. Where the woman in the water had a lot of pale blue illumination, this thing is more menacing; its dark stone is highlighted red.
Not sure what's up with the statue, but the ritual with the Pyrean goes off without a hitch; cast spell, BAMF, Pyrean appears complete with ice block.

- I read some words and get all up inside him.
I flashback to ancient... Pyrea? Pyre? Whatever it is, it's a nice enough rural area. Farms and such. Turns out everybody is flipping the fuck out in the last days of the Cleansing, and ice-man over there plans to take his sister and/or wife (plus their kid) and leg it to the North. His brother thinks he should stay and fight (and die) like a man, but ice-man is having none of that.
This sequence is a little buggy, particularly if you try to interact with the sleeping girl. There's a line that plays if you try to caress her forehead, but it zips by too quickly for me to read it.
Well anyway, everything changes when Jakal – some human general turncoat – forces attacks. Multiple waves of human warriors, a few archers, and one asshole mage that sneaks around and gets up on a rock where he can zap you with lightning with impunity. The warriors die pretty easily, but the fact that in the later waves you have to kill like 10 of them at once gets dicey.

- Poor lad gets himself killed. No hiding out in a cabin in the great snowy north while the world ends for him and his fam.
Then I wake up and have a chat with the Aged Man. Who was the servant all along, because for an immortal he's fond of the personal touch. He's a bit of an asshole in a Star Trek kind of way (prime directive, y'know), but he does have the best mutton chops I've ever seen on a man so I guess I forgive him.

Spoiler: behold their majesty

He does leave the Word of the Dead behind when he waves his hand and disappears his mansion with me inside it.

Spoiler: Pictured: not a mansion

- Jespar just want to get paid and go get a drink, and I can't blame him for that.
Tealor Arantheal reckons that having a name – the High Ones – to put to our enemy is a good job done, plus I did get the words for the Sigil Stone thing. He tells me to trot over and see how the archmages are doing with that.
Lexil and Constantine (mostly Constantine) are a treat, as always. To hear Constantine, you'd think Lexil was reciting from his book of high school poetry instead of words of ancient power.

Spoiler: just kiss already

Constantine literally takes the scroll away from him and reads it himself. Speaking the words causes the macguffin they're hovering over to explode, which appears to be the intention all along! Everybody gets a chunk of glowing purple stone that protects them from Red Madness. Aces.


The Takeaway:
Word of the Dead is a solid little quest. Excellent art direction, and an interesting character whose deal I would like to know. I do wish Pyrea was a little more.. unique, asset-wise? Like, I wish the flashback had been in the city, rather than out in the countryside. Also, did the Aged Man run off with our Pyrean? Can we summon him back? Can we get him out of the eternal ice? Or did he just disappear from the story, never to be heard from again?

I started a new job, so it's anyone's guess how much this project will slow down, beyond the tentative guess of 'some'? Anyway, next time, I wander around the Noble District for the first time, looking for somebody to buy this fancy jewelry that's been sitting in the bottom of my bag for ages, and probably get sent out on that other errand Tealor Arantheal has planned.

 

[Guile]

All right, let's try picking this thing back up. Even an update a week is better than nothing, right?


- So I'm digging around the Noble quarter, looking for someone to buy the random magical jewelry that has been accumulating in the bottom of my backpack for the last ten hours of game. Spoiler: turns out to sell jewelry, you have to find a tailor type merchant. Go figure.
More importantly, the Noble quarter is pretty great! Noble merchants are by and large more interesting than their Marketplace counterparts, and that place has a blacksmith with the unlikely name of 'Pud Duncan' who has open copies of Enderal's version of 'Baby's First Magic Book' of the forbidden Psionics and Entropy disciplines at the foot of his bed.

- Posters for the 'Perpetuum Theater' are plastered everywhere. Even the Undercity, although I don't think the beggars, ne'er-do-wells and fleshmaggot sufferers take in a lot of theatre. Unfortunately the place is closed. The actress sweeping up out front (starving artists have it rough no matter the world) is just one of those gormless types who ask you about your birthplace. 'Oh, Qyra, I hear they have big ol' baby communes over there.' No information on the theater itself. Maybe it's a night only thing.

- So, first off, I happen to run into a guy out taking the air who is notable only because his name is the greatest name ever: Jerrel Edgepunch. Does Enderal have marriage? He's bald and sporting an unfortunate handlebar moustache, but I'm big-hearted, I can forgive a lot. Can I take his name when we marry? We shall have a small service by the sea, and I will wear a pretty dress, and it will be lovely.

- After that, the theater may be closed down but there's a poet (to use the term loosely) reciting vaguely pornographic poetry out in the open air. His name is Prince Adreyu of Mith. Is Mith a real place, or is this a stage name? You know, Mith. Myth. A poet. I can't gauge his level of serious. Can I call him Prince? These are the important questions.

Spoiler: The Starling Currently Known As Prince

There's a cute little bit where you can spout some nonsense, and he reacts with 100% seriousness as he tries to analyze it like this is English 101. Also he's of the opinion that some local bard sold out to The Man by writing things that all the peasants love. Enderal's first and greatest hipster, Adreyu, first of his name. And you can play along with his nonsense, it's great.

- Right next door to his little podium is the local tavern. Another one. It's called... the Fat Loran? There should be a story behind that, but the bartender isn't talking.
Really, the best part about this place is the bard, a kid named Gerril. It's been a while since I actually stopped in a game, parked myself in front of a minstrel and just listened, but whatever song he was singing when I strolled in was really good. I'm not sure if it's the voice actor or the material, but I'm a little bit transported.

- The local version of The Crazy Herb Woman from Riverville (I guess every city is mandated to have one) speaks in rhyme. Unfortunately she doesn't dispense quests to put funny things on my head in exchange for Learning Points.

- There's also another merchant who is verbally abusing some poor guard when I walk in. Quest started, to go check up on her boy who joined a crazy cult and moved out to some rock in the middle of the ocean. Sounds like a pretty inoffensive hippy commune, but what are the odds I get there to find everyone dead and demons summoned or something like that?

- A bulletin stuck to a pillar directs me to a guy near the bathhouse who has some work he needs done. Well, first, turns out there's a bathhouse. It's pretty cool, although there's nothing actually going on inside.

Spoiler: I could run around stealing everybody's clothes and boots, and nobody would stop me

It looks like you should be able to deliver a pretty righteous cannonball into the pool, but alas not. Pathing issues.

- Next door, the guy I'm here to meet is working on a giant fucking robot. Two stories tall, at least. I stand in awe for approximately 1.5 seconds before the thing shoots lightning bolts from its eyes as the tinkerer takes cover. I'm not sure if I should be less impressed or more, honestly.
He wants me to go find his apprentice, explaining that this sort of thing suits 'my rough hands' better than his. You know, man, I... okay, it's been a hard couple of weeks, I'm not exactly moisturizing. But still. That is pretty mild as far as Endralean racism goes, though; maybe that was the local version of a pick up line?
Also, he's just missing some kind of steering gewgaw before he plans to abandon his frail flesh and transfer his soul into the giant robot. I should probably stay on the good side of the guy planning something like that, just in case.

Spoiler: Pictured: Our soon-to-be glorious bronze god-king

I will say that his workshop is really cool, even aside from mecha-Starling. One corner is covered with busted up mecha-spiders, and the other has one of those dwarven spheres from Skyrim, you know, where the ancient dwarf-elfs thought it was a good idea to give their robot guardians a giant ball to roll around on instead of legs.
Also, this guy is clearly a slumming nobleman or something. His personal room is huge, and covered in art, and then he has something called his Workshop which is a separate zone/room cut deep into some kind of cavern beneath the city. It hisses and gyrates with strange machines and something sized for a man that could be a portal or some Starling torture device.

Spoiler: I wonder if Ark zoning laws allow this

This is going to be a good quest, I can feel it.

- Back on track, Tealor Arantheal sends me out after a machine the Pyreans made (reconstructed) to try and save themselves from the Cleansing. I'm still getting Mass Effect flashbacks, but no matter. I'm going dungeon diving with my buddy from the trial, Callia. The quest is named Deus Ex Machina; the scenario writer seems to be poking fun. Maybe it'll be double fun and there's actually a not-Daedra or something trapped inside it.
Calia tells me to meet her at the North Heartlands Myrad. Well, I hop on a giant crime against nature, and one quick flight later...
Um.

Spoiler: This isn't where I parked my Myrad

This doesn't seem like the right place.


The Takeaway: The main cities in these games are usually bursting with things to see and to do, and I'm happy to say that Ark is no different. I'd definitely place it over Skyrim's Whiterun in the sheer number of things you accidentally stumble into the middle of just walking around. As for being deposited on a tiny piece of island instead of where I'm supposed to be going...clearly either the Myrad Keeper is confused about my order, or I am. I hope I didn't pay for this flight, because your service sucks, man.

 

[Guile]

- As he left, the Myrad Keeper said, 'Watch out for bonerippers!' What even is–

Spoiler: I set it on fire. Did that make things better, or worse?

Oh. Well, that answers that. … Sort of? I mean, are they an animal, or a person, or…? Given they aren't howling about how that other guy was their friend and they'll kill me, you bastard, the way the bandits tend to do, I'm going to go ahead and assume animal.
What they are is about seven feet of meanness, scales and claws that walks like a man.
Strangely, while the 2-3 that greet me on the pier are doable, there's one bone-ripper out on the beach around the side that rips through my armor – and my squishy bits – like knife meeting butter. The second go round works better, when I make sure to drop a soil elemental between us. But it's still a much harder fight for no discernible reason.

- So obviously things went topsy turvy on the poor cultists. It's just a question of if the bone-rippers got them or if something else did first.

- I like the design of the island, by the way. It feels tropical. There are fish drying (rotting) in lattice traps, there are banana trees. The cultists kept chickens until they all got slaughtered in the main square: the coop stands empty, and buzzes with flies.
Of note, my character can apparently differentiate chickens murdered by human hands from anything else: these were killed by the cultists themselves, she says. I didn't realize she was such a connoisseur of chicken-murder.

- So I go around looting huts, you know, like you do. Ostensibly to find the 'letters of Kor' that (optionally) advance the quest, but I think we all know why I'm doing this.
Most of them are empty except for the occasional goodie; most contain a strongbox, most strongboxes contain a piece of magical jewelry. I find one that boosts one handed weapons by 7%, which I replace my lockpicking one with. As all know, RPG characters are only allowed to wear one or, at most, two magical rings; anything else would be gaudy.
And- wait. Wait a fucking minute.

Spoiler: The real treasure is the pornography you find along the way

You mean to tell me that Prince Atreyu of Mith is published. And one of these cultists was a big, big fan. I don't even.
I know there was that whole thing with the Cleansing and the High Ones and whatever, but this? This throws my whole world into question.

- Most of the huts also contain a couple of 'desert rats' which are poor, pitiful cousins of the Mad Rats that gave me trouble earlier. Or possibly I transitioned into a rat-slaying badass when I wasn't looking.
I do wonder why 'desert rats', a bit. Did 'island rats' sound too festive?

- Another thing to mention is that this place is kinda buggy.
For one, after half an hour of wandering around killing rats, I ding three times all at once. I suspect one of the rats dispenses a truly ridiculous amount of exp on death.
For another, upon entering one of the huts I tripped and fell through the world. Enderal righted itself five seconds later, but from thereafter whenever I jumped I began floating instead. It fixed itself upon restarting the game, but I want you to imagine the rest of this entry with me gently floating hither and yon.

Spoiler: Goodbye, world

- This is a bug of the more traditional kind. One of the huts contains a 'Desert Queen Spider', and I, her loyal subject, can only bow in supplication.

Spoiler: You may notice me nestled firmly beneath her foreleg

And then reload trapped in a very small hut with a very large arachnid, whereupon I turn around and leg it for the sandy shores. She deigns not to follow. She is quite frankly a stupidly large fish in the shallow pond that is this quest and there is no way I'm bringing her down, particularly since my soil elemental doesn't like to follow me into huts in this area.
Perhaps my loyal rock monster is a staunch atheist, and the religious paraphernalia in the huts offends it.

- In order to get into the main lodge thingy, I have to go find two AWOL cultists. Women who tried to run when things started getting weird with the rest of the cult. The notes I've been finding are mostly theirs.
For some reason, they're basically Skyrim draugr; glowing eyes, armored, and wielding rune axes. How tough must their abusive husbands be, I asked myself as I furiously stabbed away at their leathery flesh.
I fully expect to find a coven of cave trolls or vatyr or something inside that lodge.

- There's a fancy feast inside, primarily roast horse. Why did they even have those things? The island takes about a minute to cross on foot.
This quest isn't over yet, though! You have to go down into the cellar of the lodge, and then dive into the murky water found there. Then – if you're like me, anyway – you have to spend roughly ten minutes (the water breathing potion nearby only lasts for 5, so this involved a reload) floating around among the fish and corpses until you find the tunnel leading ever deeper down, and then up, into a Lovecraftian sunken temple.
Where is your god now, cultists!

Spoiler: Sup

I'm just kidding, he's right there. I'm getting a few flashbacks to the thing stashed in the depths of the Aged Man's mansion, but that's probably just the similar lighting. This fellow looks like some pagan sea god, leg jauntily crossed in repose, with the corpses of its tricked faithful strewn about.

- I score a 'sword of Kor' that is fancy-looking but honestly not any better than my fiery rune sword, and a teleport scroll to get me back to Ark.
I am totally going to lie to that poor kid's mom when I get back, too. It's nice the game gives me the option when I discover something this deeply fucked up, to just make up some nonsense about how he 'got on a ship and traveled across the ocean.' And she's all, 'Oh no, such a poor fool, I'll pray for him.' Lady, you don't know the half of it.


The Takeaway:
Not too bad, not too great. The plot is fairly interesting and the location a little different from the usual (tropical), but it was dragged down by bugs, my occasional inability to figure out where the heck I was going, and the complete absence of another living soul. Like, how cool would it have been if you got down there and 'Kor' spoke down to the little ant that you are like Sovereign from Mass Effect? He was around before the pitiful 'gods' of mankind, and he would be there after its end. Etcetera. What if you could try to enlist his aid or blessing to deal with the Cleansing, like the local version of one of Skyrim's Daedric Princes?
Anyway, it was fine but I'm eager to get back to the main quest again.

 

[Guile]

- So funny story. Before I got on with the main quest I dropped by the Ark bank. Some of these sidequests (including the last one) give you keys to bank vaults and I've been slacking on picking up my rewards, so I decide to pick them up all in one swoop.
Two of them are just a bunch of random books and potions and a few spare coins, but one of them has over 6000 gold! Holy shit! I snag that and go on a shopping spree. I buy, like, enough Adept skill books for skill points I've accumulated over the last 6 levels, and a new Bound Sword (III) spell.
Then I decide to put the remainder into the bank to gather interest, only to find... my bank account was empty. I'd taken all that money from myself.

- Antics aside, it's time to go spelunking some old ruins. The walk to Old Dothulgrad is very mild. A few wolves, an overgrown church ruin full of Lost Ones, a mine I already wandered into earlier and cleared out. No big deal.
Know what is a big deal, though? Bound Sword (III). Entropy continues to blow raspberries in the face of every other magic in this game. See, I have that talent that makes Bound weapons do 40% more damage. This makes the one hander summoned by Bound Sword III clock in at a whopping 68 damage.
68 damage looks... something like this.

Spoiler: Pictured: 68 damage.

By contrast, the 'sword of Kor' I found on my last sidequest? 29 damage. I haven't found anything worthy of my blade, but at least the wolves and spiders I've been working my way through are dying in one swing. I'm considering phasing out life-tapping and even my soil elemental just so I can swing two of these babies at once. I'm almost sad there isn't Bound Shields and Bound Armor, but there probably is such a thing as too much winning.
I'll have to try out this 'winning' thing and get back to you.

- Anyway, so me and Calia head down into Dothulgrad and run into Indiana Jones Mage from a few main quests back, Lishari. Apparently this is the 'Peghast' they were referring to. Look, SureAI guys, I like the cadence of a guy like Tealor Arentheal calling one of his subordinates by her last name, but you're asking a lot of us to remember two names for everyone. I think I can currently only name like 4 guys on the main council of the Sun Temple, and I'm one of them now.
We meet up just in time to listen to Lishari prove that having a long acquaintance with Constantine Firespark means that when it's time to tear strips off somebody, her tongue is deadly for more than just spitting fireballs. She is not pleased with her hirelings' progress; I think I'd almost rather get sloppily murdered by bandits rather than face a tongue lashing like that, and apparently some of her hirelings agreed already. Which is what she's taking issue with, so maybe that's not much of a fix to the problem...
Apparently some bandits ran into the deeper bits of the ruins and turned on a deactivated fire trap, making the hallway impassable.
Lashari, I don't want to trouble you, but... didn't something like this happen last time we were in a ruin here? There's only two common denominators for those events, and I don't think I'm the bad luck charm...? I mean, I only got here afterwards, so I don't think I should be blamed for this…

- Calia throws a few barbs out herself when Lishari points out the 'bad drug trip' ritual is kind of dodgy. Which, you know, gotta go with Lishari on this one, that was a right dick move on the Order's part.

Spoiler: Now kiss

These ladies do not like each other. And I'm stuck in the middle. It's just like high school, if high school was held in a decaying crypt filled with traps and bandits.
So, probably better than high school, altogether.

- There's a bell puzzle that, in the stories I'll tell Jespar later, will not involve me whanging randomly on the four bells in every conceivable order before lucking into the right combination.
I do wonder how good Calia is at bell puzzles that she can correct me for hitting them out of tune, and why she can't take a turn with the giant hammer instead of me.
I also wish I'd picked up all the hammers before the floor dropped out from under us, because these things must be solid Metal of an Ancient Nation to be worth this much money.

Spoiler: Pictured: Pyrean hospitality

I do have to wonder what the point of setting up a bell puzzle that drops people into a giant underground lake is. Is this how Pyreans greet visitors? Which ancient Pyrean architect designed that little feature? I think I'm going to punch the next Pyrean I meet in the face, just in case he's the one who set that up.

- Anyway, I work my way through some bandits and a couple of traps. Thanks to my new sword, the bandits present no problem. Unfortunately, flame traps do not succumb to sword stabs very easily, and there's a few reloads over the course of the dungeon dive.
After going through a particular archway, I take a header into the ground, limbs flashing with electricity. I kind of assume I set off one of the traps, until some guy named Karek shows up and starts gloating. Cutscene defeats, how I did not miss you.
He doesn't get very far before Calia arrives on scene, and... well.

Spoiler: About 3 seconds difference between these two screenshots

Have you ever played Left For Dead? This is basically a textbook example of 'startling the Witch.' Calia turns into a being of shadows trapped in the vague impression of a female form and horrible red glowing eyes before bodychecking the bandit to the ground and redecorating the dungeon with his insides.

- The rest of the adventure is pretty much a cakewalk. I imagine all the bandits and traps picked up and ran rather than face my traveling companion, La Nosferatu.
We do run into four heaping bags of gold coins (of which I promptly lighten by 20 pennies each).
Also, a poor sod who was apparently the mastermind of the bandits. The mastermind is a gormless farmer in over his head who just wanted money so his farm wouldn't be repossessed.
Buut he also robbed the Undercity Food Bank and killed three guards, so I decide clemency isn't a good idea. 'Send him away to the tribune!' I declare, pockets bulging with misappropriated Food Bank pennies.

- After discovering a gigantic Pyrean magical construct that had better not be called the Conduit, Lishari decides Calia's pretty okay after all.
Aww, group hug! Group hug? No? Maybe a firm handshake? Okay then.
Also, Lishari can take one look at the plans we found and deduce that this thing is more of a prototype than the finished device, but a win's a win.

- Once we make it back to the Sun Temple to bask in our accolades (Lishari is presumably dealing with breaking down and moving the two-story tall Pyrean gewgaw back to Ark, and she's welcome to it), we see that Tealor Arantheal has circled the wagons and called in all the chiefs of the Sun Temple.

Spoiler: Oh, hi... yyyyou.

I can name, at best, 2.5 of the 5 (not counting Arantheal himself, at the head of the table): There's Constantine Firespark of course, and one of his subordinates in the green robes. The Qyranian one that'll run you through the magic schools for Knowledge checks if you ask. There's Signet Leader Jorek leaning against a cabinet way in the back, looking vaguely pissy like always. There's this lady I don't recognize but who might be the woman who was talking shit about me in the second row during my initiation; I'm going to go ahead and assume this is the Tuchessa.
There's also the Archmage, whose name I am currently blanking on (Laxus? Lexis?) but who in my heart I call 'Luscious', for his fabulous dress sense and devotion to fine foreign perfumes.

- Some of the Keepers present aren't really down with sticking a giant Pyrean gyroscope on top of their Sun Temple, thinks it would look bad to the plebs and lay-folk.
Tealor Arantheal is of the opinion that if it saves us all from the High Ones then the townsfolk can keep quibbling all they want but he's still going to stick the silly thing up there.
I'm with the Grandmaster on this one, of course, but this is the second or third time that 'the lay-folk won't like it' has come up, and I'm seeing a potentially dangerous trend with Tealor Arantheal's choices.
Also, in my head, Jorek looks and sounds a little like Alan Rickman, so hopefully Arantheal isn't going to get Dumbledored later. I hope not; I like the old guy, and not just because he's always happy to sing my praises when I bring back another Pyrean whatsit.

- There's another break while they get that Pyrean dealie hooked up to the Sun Temple, giving me more time to wander around and get into trouble. Before I get on my donkey Whirlwind and pick a direction, though, there's a quest that has just popped up closer to home:
Ask Calia what the fuck. Oh yeah. That happened, right.

- Calia doesn't want to talk about it out in public, which I get, honest. But the place she takes me to is a little...

Spoiler: Does nobody tidy up around here

Dear, you know I support your life choices, right? There's no need to kill me and pretend I exploded by accident, honest!
What even is this place, seriously. It looks like an alchemy lab exploded and killed half a dozen people, and the Keepers didn't even clean up afterwards. Maybe this is the place Yero exploded, but... seriously, guys. I know I've seen brooms around. Mops have been invented in Enderal, right?

- Oh, but Calia's talking again, so I turn back around.
Turns out she prooobably did maybe murder that town by accident. Her witch form sounds a lot like being a Skyrim werewolf, or being possessed. If she gets upset enough, or put in danger, poof! Demon Calia up ins.
Her reasoning for 'why be a militant Keeper when this keeps happening' is pretty much, 'What, would I rather be a clerk copying books all day?'
She's like if Tealor Arantheal was a small, cute 20-something.
Well, I'm down to be besties with the part-time demon paladin if she is, but then I'm probably protected by the narrative and vague prophecy powers. I'm a little more worried for any other NPCs that might join our plucky band.


The Takeaway:
It's an okay quest, I feel like maybe I just got spoiled by some of this mod's previous main scenario content? Like, I feel like it didn't make the most of the NPCs it gave me.
Calia and Lishari vanished on me from the drop into the lake until the end bit with the moral choice.
The moral choice itself was a little weak, too; I don't know this guy or the corrupt landlord, I couldn't point out his farm if you gave me a map and three tries. The closest thing to a stake I have here is that I recognize that robbing the Food Bank is probably a huge dick move, since Undercity is such a shithole to begin with, and I only know that because a sidequest took me down there.
Well, no matter. Time to give this new summoned sword a test run by wandering up the Farmer's Coast.

 

[Guile]

- Before we get anywhere, I just now noticed the Soil Elemental has a face, and wanted to share that with you all. It looks so tortured.

Spoiler: Its life is suffering

- That done...
Traveling up the Farmer's Coast is not for the faint of heart. First thing I run into is a big muscle-y lion and a cave troll living in harmony, just like my old buddies Spider and Vatyr from the Riverwood bee farm. I almost died (I went in maybe a little overly cocky for a fight involving two creatures that outweighed me by a hundred pounds each) but pull out the win in the end.

- The dirt trail takes me to... a new biome, actually.

Spoiler: Pretty lovely, actually

The sunlight looks vaguely yellower. It looks like it's autumn, and the trees are all afire (with, thankfully, metaphorical and not literal fire).
There's a giant statue of – I'm going out on a limb here, Arantheal? A Light-born maybe? It looks like Arantheal. Basically there are these huge, realistically-carved statues out on the roadside in the middle of nowhere, with little donations or obeisances or whatever placed in front of them. Herbs, coins, weapons, books.
I swipe it all, of course. Victimless crimes. Unless they're offerings to the gods, in which case... they're still victimless crimes, because the gods are dead! Excuse prepared but still half-expecting to get struck by lightning, I grab it all and run.

- ... Into a cemetery with a glowing banshee type called a Living Ancestor and her equally glowing skeleton pal, wielding... is that a shovel? What the hell.

Spoiler: I am not feeling very threatened for some reason

Once I kill them (harder than it sounds: the Ancestor is an ice mage type), I get the dubious pleasure of digging up a Suspicious Mound for treasure. Apparently they were digging up their own graves? That's weird.
Maybe they wanted a keepsake before taking off on a cross-country roadtrip, Thelma and Louise style.
And I ruined it. I ruin everything.

- My Bound Sword III superiority didn't last very long; even the wolves around here are meaty enough to eat 3 or 4 swings of the thing, and they come in packs of at least 4.

- The beached longships (and there's a lot of them, wow, it's like an invasion force) all contain groups of hardened killers. The second they spot me, out come the axes of course; nobody wants to talk to the weirdo in the mask.
They're the usual bandit type, but their groups are more Marauder with the occasional Vagrant than groups of lesser bandits led by one Marauder, these days. Rune weaponry is common, and rune bows are apparently enough to even make bandit archers a little dangerous.
Well, there's also the occasional longship of undead. A newer, doughier type with the look of that old midboss Belosh the Searcher.

Spoiler: This guy tho? Looks like he eats babies for breakfast.

Less terrifying out in the light of day than in a dank cave lit by flickering torchlight, but still a great look. I should look into the Reanimation line of entropy summons sometime, see what I pull out.

- I don't even make it to the 'pirate cave' I was warned about. The longship groups are dangerous, sticky affairs that involve as much luck as skill; misplacing one marauder with a rune axe in the melee is a good way to end up with an axe in your spine and down half your health bar.

- And then I run into wild mages. Like, enough wild mages to form a local sportball team.
See, what happens is there's a ramshackle house right in the middle of the dirt path I've been following that has a pair of mages living there; one shoots icicles, and the other lightning bolts. I kill them without much trouble, but they're linked to another two mages, one of which throws Guile-destroying fireballs. I can't even get close; there's no ducking out of the way like you might for a thrown icicle. So I have to man up, hide in the house and periodically throw Soil Elementals, and listen to the gentle patter of fireballs and lightning blasts against the inviolable walls of this ramshackle wood hut until it all falls silent.
Of course, then there's two more wild mages at a nearby lighthouse that are linked to this bunch, and they come out just enough to start throwing their own fireballs.
It's brutal, and my eventual win (some five reloads later) owes more to spite than anything.
That, I think, is quite enough of that.

- A quick trip back through Ark later, I'm thinking maybe I'll go look for a nearer – and hopefully easier – dungeon, like that cemetery. On the way I run into one of these:

Spoiler: I'd own one, sure

Where the Myrad is a horrifying chimera whose only saving grace is the fact that if I stabbed it through the brain during a ride I would fall to my death and know it, this thing manages to look extremely cute. Some kind of... dog-bull? Bulldog? Bulldog.

- Also, I finally run into a drunk who has been faithfully standing in the middle of the Foreign Quarter shouting slurred epithets at passers-by every time I come through Ark. He seems to believe I made a pass at his girl – or possibly him – and demands I fist-fight him right now, to protect his honor and/or virtue.
Immediately, I am terrified.
See, in Skyrim, they have this brawl mechanic too. But it's so buggy that punching the other brawler invariably ends up with me owing the local guards bribe money or time in jail for crimes. Every time. Enderal proves they've ironed out whatever crazy bug Bethesda is still grappling with, though, because I freely beat this poor man's face in and nobody says a thing.
And sure, that's fun, but I have stuff to do, I can't stay here and beat this beggar man into paste forever.


The Takeaway:
Not a terribly interesting episode, just killing time until the main quest starts back up. I had originally planned to work my way up the Farmer's Coast and around to the western side of the continent where I had some quests, but that was beyond me. I did happen to find this place called 'The Crypt' in the Ark Cemetery zone, which I mistook for the actual cemetery dungeon. I think I'll check that out next...

 

[Guile]

- I make it about 15 paces into the crypt before I hear a groan and shuffle, and swiftly pull out my sword and soil elemental. Of course the crypt has a bad case of the restless dead. Of course. Why aren't there guards at the door to tell me these things? Why are these things not coming up at night and eating people, or… whatever the Lost Ones do?
A small handful of skeletons greet me shortly, from iron bar doors on either side of the path. Fleshless Lost Ones: the lowest of the low among hideous undead monsters. I make short work of them, but this is still kind of a bad sign.
It's not like all the dead are hungry for my tender flesh; there's still corpses done up like Incan mummy bundles resting peacefully in alcoves, lit by ever-burning candelabras and sometimes strewn about with art and grave goods.
There's actually a named skeleton in here: not one of the undead, but a regular, unmoving skeleton. Hopefully that's not part of a quest or something, because during the rumble I accidentally exploded it into every corner of the room.
Oops.

- There are pathways deeper into the earth; one path branches into three, all with the rough texture of hewn stone. But hey, I have teleport scrolls, what's the worst that can happen?
Well, obviously the deeper you go, the more dangerous the monsters, that's Adventuring 101. So I hack my way through a few of the next level of Lost One, an armored zombie type, and then it's back to wandering. I settle into a rhythm.
Passageway, small room, kill undead, passageway, small room, kill undead.

- Sometimes there's loose change to snag, or boxes or barrels to plunder for grave goods.
There are some stories buried in the mechanics. This barrel of grave goods contains woodworking tools; that chest, a steel sword and helmet; scattered around this mummy are books and chunks of semi-precious stone. Like that.

- Occasionally there's a hallway with one of the ghostly Ancestors as a sort of mid-boss. Each of these contains more grave goods (and of higher quality) around a central dias, with mummies nodding upright from their wrappings in alcoves along the wall, or skeletons posed hilariously in chairs.

Spoiler: Who poses these skeletons everywhere, seriously

One of the crypt keepers back in the day had a pretty awesome sense of humor.

- There's a room with a brazier, and another three arches to choose from. And a few rats, but those are naught but a speed bump at this point.
There's nothing to differentiate the arches. I pick one at random and go through.

- I think I've uncovered something like a timeline of this crypt, without a word spoken aloud.
There are the wrapped mummies kept in cubby holes carved into the rock; dignified, quiet. None of these have ever risen; you never find empty wrappings the way you might empty tables or coffins.
There are the skeletons and zombies; Lost Ones and Awakened Lost Ones. There are scattered bones and bloody smears. There were crypt keepers here, once, to place and catalogue and honor the dead. Until the dead started turning unquiet in their graves.
Is that one crypt keeper with the wicked sense of humor among the quiet slumbering mummies, I wonder? Or was he one of the hordes of nameless, faceless undead I cut through on my way?
At the end, there is… this.

Spoiler: Let's just throw the corpses down there, Bill. Nothing bad'll ever come of that.

Corpses are thrown in from holes above, to lay in ugly piles of bloody flesh. The ground is thick with the dead, and the area is thick with Awakened Lost Ones. Were they drawn to the dark and the fresh meat? To the light, filtering down from above? Perhaps the unhonored dead, tossed down here to rot, rise more than any other?

- The tunnels blend together. Every 90 seconds, like a metronome, I have to put away my offhand torch to reapply my soil elemental and bound sword. 'Q', the favorites menu, is my friend. The constant repetition is lulling, in its own way. Like a ritual to ward off the endless dead things that share the dark with me.
I enter something like a fugue state.
…
Day 3.
I write this by torch and lantern-light with a firm hand. It has been days since I have seen the sun. The lantern lights burn unaided, their caretakers long gone. I am the only creature down here that requires light. At first, I studied each alcove and art piece with the air of an archeologist. Now, art means nothing; the only thing I pay attention to is space. Hallways are safe, unless they have doors.
The undead cannot work doors, but their arrows and swords and axes can reach through the bars. What madman designed such gates?
What madman designed this place?

Day 4.
The map is useless. For a time I tried to go straight only, reasoning that eventually I would reach whatever end may come this way, or at least return straight. But the side passages beckoned at every turn, and once when I left the path to investigate a statue of some angel or Lightborn, the undead came again and I was turned around.
There is no return. There is only forward.

Day 5.
In one of the halls of Ancestors, I found a note along a long table strung with objets d'art. A brother informing his sister of their father's last will and testament; to come to him, but he will only accept her when he is dead.
Something… something like that.
There are some worthless trinkets atop the table, and a strange scroll. I place it into my bags and move on. It holds no meaning for now.
Later.

Day 6.
I have ceased checking corpses or urns for secret treasures. Money holds no value here.
Some of the doors have locks. My lockpicks break in my hands, but I have more. Didn't I used to be better at this? No matter.
Behind the doors are more undead. One is a conjured being of light in the shape of a skeleton. Some guardian or other, perhaps.
It falls like all the others.

Day 7.
I ran out of endralean crusty bread today. Now there is only to fall upon the very corpses which I fight, and devour the worn souls that hold their aged flesh to this realm.
Their spirit is a delight, and I drink them like wine until I am full, full. When it is done I can only regret the lack. There will be more, ahead. There is always more.

Day 8.
Found a large room. Tables heaped with corpses. Pits of bloody water that presumably serve… some purpose. The workplace of an embalmer; he sounds… unsettled. The dead were rising, and Ark was not sending help.
He did not have a good day. Might be a better day than this one, though.

Day 9.
Starting to doubt memories of the World Above. My only succor is my hideous companion. It ranges far and wide, but always returns. The twisted grimace of its lumpy face is as irreplaceable to me as my left hand from which it spawns.
Aside from it, there is only the flicker of movement in the torchlight, and the hacking and stabbing all creatures large and small, living and dead.
And the occasional stop to… feed.

Day 10.
There are grates, and inside the grates are a new thing. Set deeper into the earth, stone plinths interspersed with a skim of water. I follow, drawn like lodestone.
There are fellow wanderers in the halls, but they fall still and silent as I pass.
There is a door that claims to lead to the outside, but I pass it by. There is no Outside. There are things that crawl and slither in the darkness; I am one of them now.
Through a black curtain I am greeted warmly (fire) by a corpse draped in ragged robes upon a throne, empty wine glasses arranged in a constellation around it. Beyond it is a downward slope. Soon, I promise the new thing.
Soon.
Soon.
Soon.

Day 11.
An ancient King in Purple, crowned, resplendent.

Spoiler: ...

I offer salutations in the words of those that came Before pitiful man. Iä! Iä! Darkhand fhtagn!
And then we fight. Words are between equals. It has none for me.
And in the end, I have none for it.
Its death leaves me calm and cold. The World Below feels empty. There is nothing for me here.
I return to the door, and step through.

Day 11, cont.
There are people on the other side of the door. I greet them in the manner I am accustomed to.

Spoiler: ...

Their desperate screams are vaguely unsettling. No matter.
More come, armed and armored. I slay them as well, but… what manner of monster is this?

Spoiler: ...

I strike them down again and again, but they rise again unharmed. They chitter and squawk and hiss demands, but the World Below recognizes only the strong.
It recognizes only Guile!


The Takeaway:

Spoiler: Why do things that should only happen to bad people happen to me

Um.

Spoiler: It's cool, I know a guy. I'm sure Arantheal will be by aaaaany minute now.

... Guard? Hello? I seem to have... I seem to have misplaced my clothes. And my everything else.
... Been a while since I wore the old potato sack. That boat ride seems so long ago...

 

[Guile]

- Enderal jail is rather dreadfully boring, which I suppose may be the point.
In Skyrim jail you can usually find hidden escape tunnels or sewer grates, or inattentive guards to pickpocket, or lockpicks to escape your jail cell and stealth through the jail to freedom. There are usually a bunch of NPCs with their own stories that hang around in jail that you can talk to.
If I'm remembering my Oblivion correctly, you actually get recruited into the Thieves Guild from jail.
In comparison, you're stuck in the Enderal jail cell with a lockpick but a key-locked door, and a guard much too far away for any shenanigans except for shooting him with a bow, an action that rouses every guard in the jail.
I assume this is a consequence of Enderal having a particular story it wants to tell, and civilian-murdering/thieving Prophets don't really play a part in that narrative. Nothing gets a gamer to not do something like making it boring, and Enderal jail is indeed quite boring.

- Sleeping on the straw mat will fast-forward you to the end of your jail term and cost you a couple of skill points in your top skills. Makes sense; there's no skill in Enderal for 'having nothing to do but work out and get swole.' Enderal skills are all techniques that require tools or finesse.

- Freedom! It tastes so sweet after so long behind bars. After those three minutes or so I spent clicking on everything in that jail cell I've come out a changed woman, probably. I'm not sure how I'm going to make it on the outside anymore.

- Tealor Arantheal is still waiting patiently for that debrief, it seems. I like how whenever I show up they're dealing with matters of state and non-High One related business. Like, right now there's discussion about a Nehrimese guy (that's where Constantine and his green-robed buddies come from, by the by, which automatically predisposes me to like it) who came out on top of a civil war in one of the other countries, and how he's maybe pretty upset with Enderal. I'm sure that won't come up again later.
I also like how I can listen in from the balcony, and then when I drop down onto the table Tealor Arantheal is just like, 'Oh, there you are. Commander, explain to the Prophetess what's going on.'

Spoiler: Hold my beer

I like to imagine the Prophetess does stuff like this all the time, and Arantheal is just used to it.

- It would seem that we're headed to Fogville; Constantine, Jespar and me. This promises to be a fun roadtrip.
Basically, Arantheal's kid (that guy who offed the Lightborn) made the crazy civil war guy a companion, and the guy took exactly the wrong lesson home about killin' Gods. He's some kind of anti-religion terrorist type, now. And he's landed an invasion fleet on our western shores. This is totally different from the northeastern Farmer's Coast area that's also covered in Viking-esque longships, by the way!
Yeah.
I'm starting to hate Arantheal's kid, now. It feels like all kinds of problems from his time are coming home to roost in mine, and it's a pain in the butt.

- While I'm in town, I buy the cheap house in the market square, primarily so I have someplace to crash that isn't the Fat Loron. 1000 gold pennies isn't too much to me at this point, and it's centrally located to a bunch of merchants and a smelter.
There's also a kind of minigame where you can buy blueprints for rugs and furniture and art to make stuff for your house, but honestly that seems like kind of a pain.
I also spend 100 gold pennies on a Winter Cloak spell that deals pretty solid damage to everything around me. Pro-tip: Don't try and combine a summoned critter with the winter cloak spell. It does not end well.

Spoiler: I am your creator, and you will-!

- The area around Fogville is pretty interesting. It's got tons of metal dragon-headed battering rams scattered all over the countryside in various states of disrepair, like there was a huge war on and nobody bothered to pick up their toys, after.

Spoiler: My little siege weaponry can't be this cute

Good background storytelling.

- The area's pretty dangerous, also. Wild Mages, Marauder bandits, and a new thing called Arps. Like, the German vampire Alp, I guess? They look pretty awesome, actually, with wrinkled skin in off-human shades and dreadlocks. Very grunge. Punk rock. I can dig it.
As long as you don't look at their faces.

Spoiler: The one on the right kind of hits 'adorably ugly', though

- And my map marker is showing Constantine and Jespar (and therefore, Fogville) right in Arp central. Of course it is. I was kind of hoping for a Seven Samurai-esque beleaguered village to save from foreign bandits, you know?
Something tells me the Arps aren't going to play along, though.
Oh, but just for funsies:

Spoiler: What a good sport

Now, I know it looks like we're enacting a fun bit of street performance (working title: "Bound By Chains"), but I'm actually stabbing him through the heart with an invisible Bound Sword.


The Takeaway:
I actually got so weighed down with steel and rune armors at this point that I had to set a Mark spell and burn a scroll to get back to Ark to dispose of it all, so now seems like a good enough spot to end this one. Kudos to SureAI on the Arp, they're easily as cool as the Vatyr. I am sad that there's all these cool monsters and I haven't yet met one that doesn't want to tear off my face and wear it like a fashion accessory, though. I was also kind of bummed out that Jespar and Constantine didn't meet me at the Myrad for a proper roadtrip type adventure, but they're around here somewhere. I'm looking forward to it.

 

[Guile]

- Fogville was really only half as filled with Arps as I thought it was. After clearing out half a dozen, the place is empty as my character's birthday party after the house went up like a bonfire.
The only sticky bit is in the town hall where an Arp shaman apparently hooked a common soul gem up to some kind of lightning trap and you have to shoot the crystal with an arrow if you don't want to be fried.
Actually, the place is mostly noteworthy for how incredibly clean it seems for a ruin- usually there's a bunch of clutter and dressers and stuff in the smashed up houses, but not here. Presumably the guard looted this place down to the bone when they left, for all the trouble the Fogvillagers caused.

- I have to call out the background music team here; Fogville has a woodwind sort of sound to it, maybe some flute? I don't know, I'm not a music guy. It's not so much menacing as it is completely uncaring of your shit. Like after the villagers all died and the army left their toys and went home, Fogville is still here on this lonely mountaintop. As before Man, so after; Fogville remains.
Constantine is his usual cantankerous self, but Jespar takes the time to lay some history on me. Fogville apparently is one of those places where the inhabitants all went mad and started sacrificing travelers to strange gods. Enderal has enough of these that I don't even blink, now.
The siege weaponry I've been seeing left out in the elements was apparently from when the army came in and did them proper.

- Jespar cites the Whisperwood as a possible cause, something about how everyone knows the spores drive you mad?
Excuse you Jespar, what? Why did no one tell me about the madness spores? Was that the forest where I took my initiate test?
What the hell, Arantheal.

- Actually, if some random book I found in the town hall is to be believed, a hooded bloke came in and warned them that magic was going screwy nearby thanks to wild mages, and they needed to flee to avoid a terrible fate. But the elders didn't want to leave their homes, wah wah I'm old etcetera. Well, you know what that gets you in this game: chanting strange names in elder tongues long forgotten by Man.
Jespar also mentioned the Butcher of Ark, although I forget his name. I've been finding volumes of his autobiography for a while, which increment a 12 counter. I'm kind of assuming when I find all 12 I'll wake up with old Jack of Smiles at the foot of my bed and have to fight him to the death or something.

- Anyway, the next step is to follow after Constantine to the 'Living Temple', which sounds totally ominous. Sure would be nice to have Jespar explain that one.
Maybe it's got lots of trees and flowers and is really nice?
Probably not, though.

- Speaking of really nice, heading north towards the temple crossed over into a different biome: a little strip of beauty between the Skyrim-normal rocky coast and what looks like a snowy forest ahead.

Spoiler: The prettiest 5 minutes of the last three hours

- There's also one of the Myrad stations and an actual stop on the road called Frostcliff Tavern. These things are rare as hen's teeth out in the wild; I think this is the first roadside tavern I've found so far that didn't involve bandits or something.
Very warm interior, and the tavern minstrel sings very prettily (a named lady NPC is actually the one singing, the minstrel is getting a beer in the back).

Spoiler: Come in out of the cold. We have beds, and drinks, and music. No quests, though

Unfortunately, though there's a few named NPCs inside, nobody really has much to say. Maybe they're recipients of quests from elsewhere?

- The tavern owner can buy and sell anything, which is convenient, and also I bought a spell to summon this thing!

Spoiler: You can almost heard the *splorch. splip. spwatch.* of it breathing

Like the soil elemental's super-depressed old man face, the mud elemental subscribes to the 'ugly cute' paradigm. I know I wouldn't want to fight it, because fighting it would by necessity involve touching it. It's fight sound effects are probably disgusting. I suspect it's not going to be stronger than the lightning-blasting soil elemental (it's only level 10: I'm 24), but who knows?


The Takeaway:
Not much going on here. A little pit stop on the way to the actual meat of the quest. Some backstory, a few hints dropped, some nice scenery. Oh well; onward to the probably horrors of the Living Temple!

 

[Guile]

Sorry for the long wait, y'all. Updates may or may not continue to be spotty between real life issues, commission work and playing Dominions 4 instead of Enderal with what time I have. Anyway, onward!

---

- The Crystal Forest is absolutely gorgeous, like a snowscape mixed with cherry blossom trees (and cherry blossom shrubs. And clusters of pink glowing crystals).
It would be even nicer without all the monsters, but one can't have everything.

Spoiler: This isn't going to give me magical cancer or something, is it?

It houses 'mighty wisps' (whose charge attacks would be problematic if I didn't have Swamp Thing and Jespar to hide behind), giant pink crystal elementals (which soak up tons of damage), and some kind of floating ghost snake (which zooms around enough I need to switch back to the soil elemental, so he can bolt them on the run).
The wisps and elementals are legitimately dangerous, although blocking giant crystal fists is what I have Jespar for. The ghost snakes are mostly just annoying, leading to me flailing away wildly with my sword while it does curves and loop the loops.

- On the way, Jespar decides to drop some more information on me about the Living Temple. Thank you.
Specifically, that it is totally conscious and – Constantine adds later – is probably mad as a hatter since it's been around since the Pyreans died off and the High Ones destroyed the world.
Now, this is a cool concept, but more importantly Constantine informs me that the Pyreans had a habit of sticking human (well, Pyrean) souls into objects. Rarely, but it happened. This temple is one of those.
So there probably are millennia-old talking swords in this setting.
Why they thought this was a good idea is lost to time, unfortunately.

- I got distracted from the main quest by wandering into a Pyrean ruin called Old Miskamuhr at this point. Some of these ruins are basically one large room with a couple of monsters and some goodies, and some of them are full-blown dungeons, and you can't really be sure which is which until you dive in. I have a quest from some starling trader group in Ark to check on these whenever I find them and bring them back artifacts in exchange for gold pennies or magic equipment.
Miskamuhr, it turns out, is a full-bore dungeon. It's pretty hardcore, actually. It's peopled by ice golems, frost trolls and some of the harder forms of undead (ancestors, and a new type of faintly glowing skeleton called Decaying undead, which sounds like it should be the easiest type of Lost One, not the hardest), plus the occasional wandering ghost snake, and they tend to come in packs of 3-4.

Spoiler: Can you hear the UNTZ UNTZ UNTZ UNTZ or is that the brain damage from that ice elemental in the other room?

Nice lighting in Miskamuhr, too, if a little rave-y for my tastes.

- Since I got that Bound Bow III spell, I've been branching out into archery, and that helps a lot here. So the way stealth works in this game is you crouch down, and there's a little icon in the middle of your screen that starts as a horizontal line (unseen) and gradually opens into a full eye to indicate you've been spotted.
So I shoot way down the hallway and peg something (bow sneak attacks are x1.5 damage), which gets it charging towards me. But, and here's the important part, the eye is usually only half open. So even though they know where the glowing arrows are coming from, they don't see me, which means I can rack up 3 or 4 sneak attacks to the face to thin the herd out before they actually get to me. And by then my elemental has positioned itself in front of me, which is a nuisance for aiming but very good for not dying.
It feels good. Since I've started picking up bow talents (I've already gotten to the top of the entropy (summoning) and heavy armor trees, though I could go back and backfill in talents there or go into one handed weapons if I wanted), I'm hoping there's one that lets me sneak while moving at normal speed.
But if I get antsy and tired of sneaking around I can still just switch spells and stab things with a sword for a while, so it works out.

- So I get to the end eventually, after a puzzle that involves stripping down to my underpants and running really fast before sawblades pop up and turn me into giblets. Being an adventurer actually involves a lot more strategic nudity than I was anticipating, going into things, but never mind. So I run the gauntlet and I meet… a guy named Miskamuhr.
Old Miskamuhr isn't the name of the ruin, it's the name of its master. And he is not happy with me for killing all his trolls and ice elementals. Are these tamed trolls I've been killing? This guy is hanging out in the last room behind a pop-up Pyrean slasher trap, maybe he's been hiding out in here for who knows how long.

Spoiler: And that's why my clothes had to come off

I'm guessing that this guy is actually some kind of undead Pyrean, which is weird because we're looking for something exactly like this but my only option is to shoot him in the face until he dies. Actually, I have a talent from entropy called Entropic Blood that can turn enemies into my obedient slaves. I've mostly been using it to make Arps fight to the death in comical bum fights before one of them explodes (if the slave dies, he explodes, it's pretty great).
So hypothetically I could mind-control this guy and march him all the way from the Crystal Forest back to Ark. I'm not sure what I'd tell Tealor Arantheal when I got there, but presumably 'hey here's a Pyrean lich, have fun' would distract him from my totally bad (also, rad), no-good use of forbidden magicks.
I'm actually not that sad I don't have the option, because having to walk this guy back to Ark while recasting Entropic Blood every 30 seconds would be a nightmare.

- So I kill this priceless repository of ancient lore by stabbing him in the face, and find he's wearing three pairs of shoes in addition to his sword and bow. I'm not even sure how that works, but I take all of them. And start wearing one, since these steel boots have been old and busted since level 10 and without the Handicrafts skill I'm totally at the mercy of whatever I can dig out of random ruins.

- That accomplished, I head on to the Living Temple, which looks great. And then it looks even better once I put the thing in the thing.

Spoiler: What would have worked just as well as finding the MacGuffin in Fogville? Chopping down a cherry tree to make a bridge

Wait, we're looking for what? Undertrain?? I thought we were here to stop the invasion or something! Which... wouldn't require us to visit the Temple of Doom, I guess. Huh. Well, it'll all turn out fine in the end, probably.

- Constantine monologues at me for a bit about how the Living Temple is basically Castle Heterodyne and going to kill us, but I forgive him because that's pretty cool.
Jespar also has a bout of self-consciousness and asks why Constantine keeps paying his exorbitant fees. Constantine reassures him in his own inimical way.

Spoiler: Easy on the praise there, Constantine, he'll get a big head

Love that guy.

- There's also an exchange where Constantine says that he'd run naked through the streets before trusting these Order guys with saving the world, and Jespar says he wouldn't mind seeing that. And Constantine replies, 'I bet you would.'
Woah, what? Jespar, buddy. I know it's been a while for you, but still. Between this and that 'What do you want, a love song?' comment from earlier, I'm wondering if I'm being a little third wheel-y right now. Should I leave you kids alone? I mean, I love Constantine, but I still don't want to see his old man bits flopping about, y'know?


The Takeaway:
Well, the distractions are over and I'm finally entering the Temple of Doom! Well, following Constantine to make sure the glowy moat is safe to cross, but there is definite forward momentum going on here. Maybe in the next update I'll actually manage to finish this quest! Fingers crossed.

Spoiler: Right behind you, friend

 

[Guile]

- Once we step inside the door to the Living Temple, we're greeted by this loading screen.

Spoiler: It was meeeeee

Well that's fucking ominous.

- The first room in the Temple is a huge, wide-open space. Vaulted ceilings, all that. Also swarming with Lost Ones, although 'swarming' isn't really the right term. 'Ambling', maybe. There's probably a dozen of them, including a 'Grotesque Lost One' that looks like Enderal's version of a Skyrim giant (possibly I should have expected this when I saw the mammoth parked outside), but the room is so huge we're basically fighting them one by one.
Constantine and Jespar just walk right on down and start fighting. I replayed this bit in case I missed some dialogue, but apparently they didn't have anything to say. Felt a little weird.

- We do that thing we do, and move on once everything is dead.
We learn that Pyrean interior decorating leaves something to be desired.

Spoiler: Scowling moai heads everywhere

So we need to split up to get the three portcullises to different paths open. Now, I want to make a joke about what a good thing it is that we happened to bring exactly the right number of guys, but mostly I just want to know why. Why would you design your temple this way? Did everyone who wanted to make the pilgrimage to the Living Temple have to come in groups of three?
I don't know, maybe in better times the Living Temple kept all the portcullises open and you could pick your path instead of having to jump through these hoops.

- So there's wisps and fire elementals to work through, and what's basically Enderal's version of platform puzzles!

Spoiler: 'first person jumping puzzles' are not words that go together

I kind of applaud them for trying, anyway.

- On the one hand, I really wish this ancient ruin was better lit. I can't wield a bow and a torch at the same time, so I have to sword-and-torch in some places.

Spoiler: A song of... you get the idea

Ask and ye shall receive, I guess.
Why would you build your temple this way.

- There's this bit where you need to pop open a portcullis to proceed, except the lever is guarded by two of those lightning traps like the one from Fogville, where you have to knock the crystal off its pedestal to disarm it, but these ones are set far out of reach. Also, they only start zapping you when you're almost to the lever, so you have to try and run back down the passageway to get out of the range, but it never works, and you die. So you have to shoot a ton of arrows and hope you knocked over the crystal, but you can't be sure because if you get close enough to tell if it's knocked over it'll probably lightning bolt you if it isn't.
I guess my point is, fuck lightning traps.

- I had a trapper-keeper just like this in high school, except there was also a sweet unicorn on it.

Spoiler: whales in space are for girls, this is where it's at

At first I thought the Pyreans just liked decorating with glowing crystal, but the random placement suggests this stuff just… grew here.

- So me and Jespar meet up, and we discover Constantine chanting in strange tongues and making obeisances before a Giant Statue™ that all the Pyrean temples seem to come equipped with.

Spoiler: god damn it

Now on the one hand, that statue looks great. Less overtly menacing than our old pal Kor or the fertility goddess type statues I've seen here and there. Staff in one hand, book in the other, good traditional God of Wisdom motif.
On the other hand, don't you do it, SureAI. Don't you dare.

- Oh, they did it, all right.

Spoiler: you monsters

Extremely strong performance by Constantine's voice actor, here (barring, possibly, the one line that sounded like Andy Serkis voicing Gollum). I mean, it's overacted, but that's kind of the point: Constantine is in the midst of a full-blown breakdown/religious mania here.

- So the way this shakes out, the Living Temple got into his head and showed him what drove it mad, back in the day. The Cleansing. Burnt flesh everywhere, Light™, etcetera. Ragnarok stuff.
Constantine has some lines like 'the sin is US' which are presumably going to be prophetic at some point, like we brought the High Ones on ourselves or something. More importantly, he recognizes that killing us all won't fix anything, but maybe it will make the Giant Statue feel better, so that's what he's gonna do.
So I holster my sword and meet my death just on the off-chance this is some kind of test, but after dying and reloading, Jespar and I put the old man down like a dog.
After burying him where he fell (nice touch), and bouncing my sword off the statue's head a few times to express my feelings (bitch), Jespar and I move on.

- Some strong art direction in this part, and a much-needed cooldown from the Constantine thing.

Spoiler: 'nature reclaimers' would make a good band name

Spoiler: their first hit single would be titled 'Undertrain'

It's never explained exactly what this is, but I'd hypothesize that these were living quarters for the temple staff and either had some sluice gate or dam that failed over the eons, or the water level rose during the last Cleansing.

- In the little house, Jespar recognizes a smell and goes to investigate.
Bloated, water-logged corpse is apparently a smell he's familiar with. (Jespar, why do you recognize that smell).
He comes right back out in a minute and asks me for a pass-code, something he and I shared together: that thing with Yero.
Because inside the house, washed up on shore after who knows how long at sea, is our old buddy Sirius.
Also, my own corpse. Still pristine and undamaged by the seawater, presumably so I can be sure to recognize myself.

What the fuck, SureAI.


The Takeaway:
Aixon, all the way back in that dream sequence for Something Momentous II, was apparently right: I'm something dreamed into existence while my body died, strapped to a rock and a dead friend. I am post-living, bought the farm, shuffled off the mortal coil, dearly departed, etcetera. Just like all those sadsack skeletons I've been putting down for the last dozen hours.
If I ever see Aixon again I'm going to punch him in the mouth twice as hard for being right.
All this and I haven't even found the Undertrain yet! This is a long one.

 

[Guile]

- So there we are, down a man (or two, depending on how you're counting my corpse), still trying to find Arantheal's damn Undertrain.
You might be forgiven for thinking the hard part is behind us now; you would be mistaken.
The hard part is this next bit here, where you have to fight two Grotesque Lost Ones (basically giants, remember) in close quarters.
Well after those last reveals, I'm in the mood to vent my spleen on some undead, so I pull out my sword and dive in- and then watch my broken corpse pinwheel through the air, killed in one swing of a giant's hammer.
Frankly, I don't know how this segment would be possible without Entropic Blood. But since I'm a no-good dirty necromancer, I turn one to my side and watch the giants whang each other with mallets while I pepper one of their backsides with arrows.

- I failed to get a good shot of that, though, so have one of me using Entropic Blood on one of the bits that come after: you can see the Undertrain in the background of the shot. The green smoke is, of course, a crucial part of the technique. Probably.

Spoiler: Also, Jespar was there

- The Undertrain looks like a old-timey locomotive in the style of Bioshock which then had some tron lines stapled all over it.
There's some lever pulling and a few waves of undead, but nothing that causes me to break a sweat, and then I get to pull up a bench while Jespar figures out how to drive an eons-old thing of steam and fell magicks long lost to humankind.

- No worries, apparently! He probably just whispered some sweet nothings into its ear to get the ancient beast purring away.
In fact, he doesn't even need to steer the blasted thing!

Spoiler: Jespar, are you magic

Jespar, are you sure these things are automated? Going to stop on its own when it gets to its destination? Yes? Okay, just checking.

- So apparently it's story time. Nothing like crawling through the belly of a sentient murder-temple to get you to spill out your soul to your companions.
I learn that Jespar has a very rosy and/or sarcastic view of what we just spent an hour doing. In Jespar's view, I wonder if I'm the Lara Croft to his Indiana Jones, or the Robin to his Batman?

Spoiler: Two friends~ Off on adventure~ One's a noble rogue, the other's a corpse~

The Prophetess tells the story of how she lost her family (by fade to black, what the heck, I want to know this story too), and then Jespar reciprocates.
If you've been in his company for any length of time (and we have), you can tell Jespar has a chip on his shoulder about 'noble, righteous' types. Well, that's because in his backstory his dad was an incorruptible judge, and it ended up getting him and his family killed (bar a sister, I'm sure that won't come up again, right lads).

- Now, I'd like to make it clear: I think this is a really good vocal performance by Jespar's voice actor. When Jespar says 'I'm not angry,' but with his voice tight and snappy, it's understood loud and clear that this is Jespar trying to convince us – or himself – that he's being clear and logical when he's really not. And I think the Tragic Backstory is fine, though I get the feeling I was supposed to know Jespar was a noble already? Maybe because his last name is so fancy: Dal'Varek.
It's just Jespar who I think is being wrong-headed about this. People die for standing up for their beliefs, and that's tragic, but the world wouldn't be better if nobody did!
Hopefully Jespar's character arc has more distance to go, yet.
And on that cheerful note, Jespar and I go to sleep on the underground doomtrain hurtling from one Pyrean ruin full of undead to another.

- As a side note, the lighting in the Undertrain is totally sweet: the 'candles' in the chandelier are green and glowing, with a hint of violet. Very ghost light-y.

- I'm a little disappointed that we didn't wake up to find ourselves tossed into the air as the Doomtrain slammed into the next ruin, to be honest.
We're met by a welcoming party of a dozen or two skeletons in the dim light, but it's basically filler murder. And then we're out in the open air.

Spoiler: Not pictured: the panthers descending on us

Not exactly a tropical island paradise, but close. Lush greenery that kind of puts me in mind of the very earliest section of the game, the dream sequence. The island seems to be mostly populated by little harmless ducks and giant angry panthers.
Actually, Jespar is beset by two the second we walk out the door.

- So Jespar and I make our way around the island and he finally explains (again?) that we're here to sneak into the invaders' camp and plant listening devices.
Now, I remember receiving the silver plate listening devices, so apparently I was there when Arantheal told us what we were doing the first time, but I could not have told you the plot of this quest until now if you'd held a gun to my head.

- On the way I run into a lookout mage who has some great lines to his soldier buddy that I listen in on. He says stuff like, 'No idolizer is ever innocent. Religions are ideologies, and an ideology is a decision… Subjects who don't rebel against their tyrants are just as guilty as the tyrants themselves.'
Rhetoric like this is how you make the jump from rebelling against your tyrant god-king to murdering swathes of the population for no crime except believing what their Lightborn and their rulers tells them. This is how you radicalize.
It gives you a pretty good idea of what Nehrim is like these days without anyone having to info dump anything.

- Well, the fort we're supposed to get into is locked up tight, so rather than try and figure that out I keep going into the other nearby ruin. And I see… this.

Spoiler: Who is doing sacrifices to their heathen gods out here?

I just get a sense, you know? This next part is going to suck.

- High Ones. Just hanging out, doing High One things. I suspect these are the eccentric ones they sent to the Moonshine Isles to get them out of the way, since these jokers insist on talking to us in the form of a bear, a wolf and a giant spider. Now, maybe this is some kind of commentary on how they see humans… but I'm more inclined to think these are High One furries.
But who am I to judge? Apparently it's a good thing Jespar has been resistant to my charms, or the poor man would be guilty of necrophilia.

- This is kind of like that bit where you get to talk with Sovereign in Mass Effect, except Sir Bearington here is more of a jocular fellow. You can just tell he's having a good time talking down to the lower life form. You can hear it in his spooky echo voice.
Struggle, futile, we are Gods, you are ants, yadda yadda. He confirms that the Beacon is a weapon that can kill them, congrats! But if you consider the dozens or hundreds of nations that have found the thing, and the fact that the High Ones are still around…
Basically, Bearington doesn't give a shit. The Prophetess being around just makes this slightly interesting for him.

- Actually, Bearington makes a point that although Coarek (that's invasion dude) thinks he's an Emissary (probably the Rebel or the Liberator or some name like that), and Arantheal thinks he's the Ruler, they're wrong. He has a good line about it, here:

Spoiler: Note the wolf's head not being included in their particle effect

But I'm pretty bummed out that it seems like the Dragonborn situation all over again. You, and only you, can save the world. That kind of thing.
On the other hand, if Bearington is claiming that they never appeared to anyone except me… why did Arantheal have the dream about the smoke monsters? When I got back and went 'Holy shit man, smoke monsters', he was all 'I know! What the fuck'
But, you know, in a more genteel ruler-y sort of way.
Maybe Bearington is just a liar. He claims he's not, which is just what a liar would say.

- And then talky time is over, and the Animal Ones vanish into thin air.
And I get coshed in the back of the goddamn head. Pow, facedown on the ground.
It's another cutscene defeat, only this time there's no Calia to handily pop up and go shadow monster on some jerk for picking on me.


The Takeaway:
I hate cutscene defeats. I hate them so, so much. This one's even worse than normal, considering Bearington was just hyping me up as the only significant player in the game.
I sure don't feel very significant right now.
If I'm really lucky, Jespar is going to stage a daring rescue, but considering he went east and I went west to plant the silver plates, and I'm not even in the freakin' fort I'm supposed to be infiltrating, I'm not holding out hope.

 

[Guile]

- I wake to… is that background music Spanish guitar? Nice.

- I come to with an extremely posh accent in my ears. The guys who just got done kicking my ass are Coarek's guys. To be more specific, they're Coarek himself, a guy in a hood who loves him some facial tattoos, and a lady in leather. Armor, not fetishwear. Full coverage. Sometimes you have to specify, in the fantasy genre.
Coarek himself is done up as a Spanish conquistador with a big ol' phoenix coat of arms on his chest.
Also, he has minions. Guard minions, not these lieutenants with names and unique assets. The guards wear these super cute floppy hats.

- And he's captured Jespar, too! Apparently. I don't actually get to see him, but how would Coarek know to throw that at me if he didn't have the guy? Jespar may be even worse at this than I am, if he managed to get captured in the 5 minutes since I left and got into a conversation with the ghostly trio.

- Coarek warns me not to lie to him because he'll just compare it to Jespar's testimony and find out my lies. So of course, I immediately lie to him like it's going out of style. This will come back to bite me in approximately 30 seconds. But until then:
I am Lyra Summerstone, treasure hunter! Or 'scrounger', whatever you like to call it.
Coarek even seems to believe me. Odd place for a treasure hunter, he says. So why did you cosh me on the back of the head, friend?
This isn't Nehrimese land or anything. Nobody's even using these ruins except the ghost animals. Maybe this is just how he likes to meet new people? Tied up and at his mercy? Blindfolded and with a light concussion?
Hey, it's okay Coarek, we all have fetishes. Our weird, unspeakable fetishes. My lips are sealed, really.

- Then his rogue-looking lady who was apparently going through my things – rude – shows him the silver plate. Coarek immediately recognizes the chunk of ancient Pyrean tech and correctly deduces I'm a spy, because why should he only get one freebie from the cutscene gods?
Then he says a line about the stupid lamb lying to the wolf's face, and has Tattoo Dude eat my soul or something. Seriously; Samael starts muttering, magic happens, and then I'm dead.
Now, on the one hand, that's kind of neat. No idle threats, no plot armor, say the wrong thing and you're dead.
On the other hand, I'm reeaally wishing SureAI would let me turn this chump into a mindless puppet with my mind right about now. I can do that, you know. I'm not just a pretty face and a half-competent swordswoman.

- Whatever. Do-over.
Now this is interesting – rather than activate the Silver Plate himself, Coarek asks Samael if he knows how to do it. Is Hoodsy over there a Pyrean expert? Evil vizier type, filling Coarek's head with visions? He's got 'evil cultist' written all over him, whatever he is.

- So Coarek uses the Silver Plate to talk to Arantheal.

Spoiler: I like how sassy they look

They posture about a bit, but the next interesting bit is when Coarek explains his take on the whole 'Cleansing' thing:
He calls it ascendence. The Pyreans are gone, not dead. Perhaps they were like the Ancients from Star Gate, and just turned into floating balls of energy, hm? Did Arantheal ever think of that?
Coarek says he's been getting dreams of it ever since the Light Born died, and it's glorious. Arantheal considers this to be ridiculous, because his dreams of the Cleansing are horrible, and also I guess we have precedent on our side, some kind of chronicle of the Cleansing?
I assume it reads 'Help us, help us, the Light, it is burning us, the Light, it's all our fault, the sin is us' or something like that.
They go back and forth. Arantheal counters with the countless dead rising from their graves, the Red Madness, the general feeling of 'End Times' we've had going on here for weeks.
Coarek considers the Red Madness guys to be those afflicted with 'religiosity', people unwilling to open their minds to Science and Reason. Friend, if you had actually seen the bloody-mouthed, glowing-eyed ghoul motif going on with the Red Madness afflicted, you would know that is some evil shit. Gonna have to go with Arantheal on this one.
Coarek demands Arantheal tell the Enderaleans that their Gods are dead and to stop building the Beacon, or it shall be war.
Arantheal hangs up the phone.

- So it's war, I guess.
Coarek decides he's going to put us (Jespar and I) on a raft and see what Fate has in store for us, rather than kill us. He says he's a man of his word.
Now, statistically I have had very poor luck with boats, but in fairness I might actually be immortal now, some kind of fleshy ghost?
Maybe that's 1-1, so to speak. One for, one against on the whole boat thing.

- So this is interesting, because Bearington said I was the only one they'd appeared to. But Coarek and Arantheal have both been having Cleansing dreams.
So… are the dreams courtesy of someone else? Some Pyrean trying to get the word out, or Coarek's Mystery Pal Samael?
Also he said I was 'the only player of significance', and I'm about to be knocked out and set out at sea on a raft, while Coarek and Arantheal are leading armies and countries and about to have a war to decide the fate of the world.
I have come to the conclusion that Sir Bearington is a liar. Again. Still.

- I wake up on the back of a wagon, but not one bound for the coast with Jespar beside me cracking wise. It's empty, and the place looks a little… familiar. I suspect I'm going to meet Dad again, and historically that has also not ended well for me in the past.
Time to pull up my big girl britches and see what's up back at the old homestead, I guess.


The Takeaway:
Short one this time, I'll try and run through the dream sequence and keep going next time.
I'm pretty ambivalent about this whole segment, really. Coarek has got some good motivation; he really thinks he's doing the right thing and trying to save humanity from us ol' backwards religious folk. That's how I like my evil; cloaked in the mask of good, thank you very much.
I still don't like the way they're building Coarek up at the expense of, well… me, though. For this segment of the adventure I've already apparently forgotten I know Entropic Blood, and I suspect if I'm going to be rafting back home I'll have to forget I know the Recall spell.
Maybe there'll be some fun story time on the raft. Fingers crossed.

 

[Guile]

- The path is familiar by now, and it's that familiarity that helps me get into my character's head. How many times has she walked down this path in her dreams, past the statue of the hooded woman, watched the beautiful sunset, knowing that Ghost Dad is at the end with some new horror?
Along the way are two handsome horses milling about outside a burned out cottage with blood and char speckling the floor. Was this here the last time I went through this dream? I can't remember.
Ghost Dad is in the same place as always, chopping wood outside the family house. His flesh is burned; hairless, scarred. Not as bad as a Bethesda Fallout ghoul, but he won't be winning any beauty contests, that's for sure. He tells me he has a surprise to show me and leads me into the house, giggling like he just told the world's best dad joke. As I go in, I see that the sun has moved. The brilliant sunset has become more of a bloody scarlet. Still beautiful, but… yeah. Symbolism, hurrah.

- On the way in, I note the medical diagram of the human body set above a table piled high with what I'm pretty sure are human bits, given the reference chart. Plus… a garlic clove? Pretty sure I would have noticed if that was there last time.

At the table I see Ghost Dad's surprise.

Spoiler: if this were me, this is when I would flip the table and go for the window

Fuck you, Ghost Dad. Nothing good ever comes from you.
'Mommy' and 'Sis' (that's what the game calls them) parrot fragments of Ghost Dad's speech. 'Play with us, play with us', 'Stay with us, stay with us,' like that. I notice that each of them has a bloody patch on their clothes in the general vicinity of their hearts.
I should probably be grateful for the burlap sacks over their heads.
And then everything catches on fire, because of course. Probably all that hot fire Dad was spitting; the resemblance to Sigil Leader Jorek's disappointment and cynicism is uncanny. Dad, Mommy and Sis go up like torches.
Dad is dreadfully disappointed in me refusing to stay dead like them, and sounding maybe a little jealous?
And then they show me that, no, there's fire, and then there's fire.

Spoiler: lookin' kinda High One-y, Ghost Dad

- I like how Mommy and Sis's 'Stay with us, stay with us' chant segues into Jespar's 'Come on, stay with me' comment upon waking, though I think instead of calmly waking up it would have been more entertaining if my character woke up swinging.
Nevermind. So it looks like my character was out long enough to miss the raft ride entirely! And I was so looking forward to spending torturous days playing 'I Spy' with Jespar…
We were picked up by a Fisherwoman, and we're on our way to a place called Duneville. This feels like it would be a good place to fit in a new NPC. Duneville is on the southwest end of the continent, way beyond anywhere I've ever traveled, and apparently is going to be one of the first to get hit by Nehrim's invasion force.
But nope; her name is Fisherwoman.

- Anyway, we pull into Duneville, Jespar throws a sop to those of us wondering why we couldn't just teleport home (apparently, the teleport runes are just now close enough), and scroll-ports to Ark. He plans to collect his pay, since we didn't die after all. I'm not sure who he's going to collect from, mind you, since his boss is buried back in the Living Temple.
Not me, though. I need to check this place out first!

- Duneville's a pretty great locale. An inlet hidden inside a cave, with a ramshackle palisade built right on the water two, three, four stories high in places, connected by trap doors and ladders and plank bridges. Protected from the elements and anybody looking for them would have to look pretty damn hard. It's got a certain aesthetic of… look, these guys are probably pirates, right? Smugglers? Something like that?
It's just got that feel.
Possibly it might be the hookahs perched everywhere, or how the trio having a loud argument as I step off the boat basically out themselves as treasure hunters, which is apparently a banned occupation in Enderal. Respect for the dead, etcetera.
It's a good bit of quiet worldbuilding that there's tons of chests and barrels stacked everywhere, but all the goods inside are crap. A few gold pennies, iron, miscellaneous clutter. It makes it feel like Duneville is… not a very prosperous place.

- Now this is cute.

Spoiler: adorably retarded dude-bro humor

Some barely-literate scoundrel marked up the warning signs that are common in places like Ark with comments like 'Beware living dead tits' and 'Death by drowning from behind'. It's exactly the kind of retarded humor the people who live here would find hilarious.

- There's some merchants, an inn of sorts, a minstrel. A quest starts up after I wander into somebody's house and read their mail, telling me (not actually me, but imma do it anyway) to head for Old Solsteim (probably misspelling that) before the Order get there. Going by the name, probably another ruin. Well hell, I'm not tired of those already, off to Solsteim it is!
Arantheal probably isn't waiting for a debrief, he probably thinks we're dead! So what's the harm?

- On the way out I run into one of the many 'Watchdogs' who serve the function of guardsmen around here, and he had this to say:

Spoiler: what a great tough guy lean

I still don't know who the heck the Tuchessa (Truchessa?) is or was, but since we know she was/is part of the Order, that suggests Duneville's town of miners, scoundrels, ne'er-do-wells and probably mafia leanings was sanctioned by the Order. Or at least given a hands-off approach. He even references 'who rules this place,' another question I'd like to know the answer to.
What a great throwaway line from an NPC who doesn't even rate a name, to get me wondering about Enderal's history.

- Anyway. Outside Duneville is a wasteland of sand, mysterious towers, rocky cliffs, sand-blasted wood wreckage, and more sand. There's a constant background whistling as wind makes its way through the cliffs.
… Duneville, I get it!
Riding my donkey through the large, mostly-empty desert feels pretty good. Like a spaghetti western hero.

- I appreciate that the first thing I run into is a Nehrimese invasion ship run aground with a bunch of murdered Nehrimese soldiers and a couple of new undead (Sere Lost Ones, with pretty sweet looking armor on) sprawled out across the beach.
It's like Coarek didn't realize what a shitshow the Enderal countryside is. They came expecting to stomp some clerics and instead are learning the kind of pain I've felt for two dozen hours. I kind of imagine this is happening all across Enderal right now, and I love it.
Also, the Duneville area is home to Enderal's version of slaughterfish, some kind of armored red sea serpent thing. Still just as annoying as in Skyrim.

- I also happen to run into a place called the Hidden Hand, a little hole in the wall whose landscaping looks like this.

Spoiler: I know there's only two crosses and they're occupied, by why take the chance?

Nope! I tip my hat and move along.

- A priest's tower has a desert spider outside, like the little guy is standing guard. Now where have I heard… aha. Haha. Hahaha!
I enter the tower, kill a few of the little guys, and then my old nemesis from the Kor quest, the Desert Spider Queen, shows up. It looks like the priest was digging out a cellar and happened upon the nest, or the spiders broke through and found him.
I snipe the Queen from across the room, and it turns out she's actually too big to fit through the tunnel. I can only shrug and fire another three arrows into her general head region until she folds like a cheap card table. I'll take it.
I also take a dozen books, to add to the collection I've got going in the storage room back home.

- Along the way to Solsteim (or whatever that ruin is called), I find ANOTHER ruin, called Old Lyguria. Well, one Pyrean ruin is as good as another, right?
Wrong.
I have some small initial success, although the dead adventurer bodies stacked knee deep is a little worrying.
Dead fire elementals look totally sweet, by the way, and the soil elemental decided on a victory lap of sorts.

Spoiler: I'm the best~ around~

Look at how happy he seems to have killed that frost elemental! He holds that pose for a good ten seconds as he roams the area.
Considering his curmudgeonly old man face and his just-proven elemental elitism, I think my soil elemental is the equivalent of an Enderalean.
Anyway, all goes well until it turns out a lot of these elementals are linked encounters. Four elementals at once is a bit much, turns out.

Spoiler: break for yoga

It's been a while since I've done the ol' corpse pose. So… back to the main quest?
Back to the main quest.


The Takeaway:
The nightmare is actually getting better with repetition, in the sense that when I see that lovely vista I think 'Oh god, this again', but with something closer to dread than annoyance. I think I've said this before, but SureAI's nightmare game is strong.
Duneville's pretty great too, at least in small doses. The town's architecture is inventive without the cave feeling claustrophobic like Undercity (high ceilings), and does a lot with like, 6 named characters with something to say. The desert is empty but that's kind of the point of a desert biome, right? It's pleasant to ride through, and I was serious about the spaghetti western vibe I was getting. SureAI really is trying to make sure every biome is represented somewhere in this game.
The monsters range from pushovers (some kind of armored deer called a Crusher), to slightly dangerous but mostly gross (so this is where the pus monster centipedes come from! The mystery of the pus creature in that one Undercity house deepens), to still pretty dangerous (Desert Spider Queen, last of her name), to 'holy shit that's a lot of X what did I do to deserve this SureAI.' I'll probably come back at some point.

 

[Guile]

- I swing by and pick up the new summons at the Sun Temple magic shop - 'elemental wolf' and 'revive corpse III', those should be fun - before checking in with the rest of the Order.
My first stop is actually the Chroniclum (or however you say that), the digs of the Nehrimese mages and the Order's chroniclers and archivists. I'm a little disappointed none of the NPCs have anything to say about Constantine being gone. Maybe news hasn't trickled down the ranks yet?
On the other hand, Novice Elia (she's part of a super short quest I did earlier, where you have to track her down in the cemetery district) seems to have moved into Constantine's room to keep an eye on things (that is, to keep me from stealing all the shit in that room).
Lexil the Archmage has some interesting (read: depressing) backstory now that I'm actually talking to him outside of quest events. Basically, his life was so shitty (Nehrimese noble says: You and your mom are my slaves now!) that eventually it wrapped around to being awesome, when he was sold to a new master who died of fleshmaggots when they came to Enderal (yeah, gotta watch out for… basically everything, on this fuggin' continent). Since his master was a Sublime (that's the Enderalean noble caste. Do Enderaleans get to own slaves? Why haven't I seen slaves around here?), he basically got shuffled into the Order, distinguished himself, yadda yadda now he's the Archmage. Also his old master probably got killed in the civil war, although his mom went MIA and he'd like to go look for her someday.

- Does anyone have a happy backstory in this game? I'm legitimately trying to think of one.
Maybe the ones with happy backstories don't feel the need to parade them around within 5 minutes of me asking what their deal is.

- Anyway, on to the council room. Looks like Arantheal is keeping the faith, but the others are none too happy about … anything, really. Us going missing for what was apparently a week. Us returning after a week without a word. The invasion. The price of grain, probably.
The Truchessa (it was Disapproving Order Mom after all! Apparently she was the leader of Enderal while Arantheal was in prison for years, bet that won't be a problem ever) is angry about Arantheal diverting resources to the Beacon.
Lishari is furious to the point of drawing her sword over Constantine and shouts threats at the Truchessa, who is coldly furious right back, and Arantheal has to bust out his Disappointed Dad voice to get them to back down.
I wasn't aware she liked Constantine so much, her voice actress is really emoting here; Constantine meanwhile could never even remember her name. In fact, I can't remember her name, because Constantine kept mispronouncing it on me.
I am watching this alliance disintegrate in front of me, and it's kind of amazing in a trainwreck sort of way.
Also, hey. Speaking of being none too happy, I just noticed. Why are Jespar and I at the foot of the table?

Spoiler: Constantine's sacrifice will be remembered- with a better seat at the table

Literally the entire table is closer to Arantheal than we are. I've got a Capital Letter Name too, shouldn't I be up closer to the front?

- Anyway, there's some optional ally maintenance you can do before moving on to the next step (Lishari has some ideas and wants to meet at the Dancing Nymph).
Arantheal will tell you some cool backstory about Qyra: land of intellectuals, mages, colleges and constant - goddamn constant - civil wars. I guess when no thought or philosophy is forbidden, you get some radical ideologies.
So basically, the Truchessa was throwing Arantheal's past mistakes back in his face, y'know, like friends do, and how he accidentally caused one of Qyra's civil wars to blow up. Manipulated into killing a village of enraged, scared farmers that came at them with pitchforks, basically. Arantheal has since sworn that he would never allow fear of his own death get in the way of his decisions again. What a boss.

Spoiler: oh hey, we rebuilt the Beacon over here in Ark, that's cool

Although I have to wonder… shadowsteel swords? Why didn't I get a shadowsteel sword signing bonus? I just got some shitty steel armor. I've never even seen a shadowsteel sword before, is Arantheal holding out on me?

- Arantheal also posits that if Coarek is the Messias (presumably that should be 'Messiah'), then some of the Emissaries will be fighting on the High Ones' side, and whatever is granting us our powers isn't an enemy of the High Ones, but some neutral party. Possibly that mystery woman that stopped time to talk some cryptic nonsense right before I got tied to a rock and drowned near the start of the game.
I have the option to tell him that the Highbear said he wasn't a real Emissary, but I decide not to do that. It just seems like it wouldn't help, you know? Call it paranoia over the time Coarek had me murdered for mouthing off.

- Calia also wants to complain about the state of the world and stuff.
And hey, since Jespar has been dodging my attempts to nail him down on the 'him and me' angle, when given the option I figure… why not? And start sending some compliments Calia's way. To her credit, she picks up on it immediately, and I'm given the choice of playing it off as a joke, admitting I like her, or pull some dodge about me being a woman. Girls can't love girls, you know.
Although since she literally turns into a shadowy demon when in the grip of strong emotion she's kiiiind of not looking for anything right now.
Which, y'know, that's fair. She asks me to respect those boundaries, and I do! I totally do. I watched her kill a man until he was dead and then mutilate the corpse for a good 7 seconds afterwards. I don't want to see Demon Calia again if I forget an anniversary, either.

- And Jespar has a new story about being hired to steal a tribal idol, making the poor decision to accept the advances of a pair of Amazonian native sisters, and waking up sans idol, money and clothes.
He actually appreciates it if I laugh at him about it, the masochist.
I'm kind of surprised he didn't have a quest for me, considering he mentioned his sister the noble-turned-Apothecary went MIA and he wants to search for her.

- Well, now it's time to head up to her room at the Dancing Nymph to see what Lishari has to say. She's pretty sharp, and-

Spoiler: not the kind of woman waiting in bed for me that I prefer

Ooh boy. So that's Lishari, in bed, as naked as Skyrim ladies ever get. The sword that presumably killed her is stabbed through the mattress, and the blood is everywhere.
I'm not sure which answer would be more unsettling, so I'm not even going to ask 'Was she stripped down to her underpants before she died, or after?'
And then Yuslan Sha'rim, Nehrimese of the same Order, expert mage and possibly some kind of ghost-whisperer (he spends at least half of every conversation talking to someone named Naea, and plays coy when you ask who Naea is), walks in the door behind me. Because fucking of course.

Yuslan gets way more pissed than when he heard Constantine died (I get the feeling they were an item at some point, he and Lishari), and throws some accusations around. I throw accusations back about his convenient timing, and then claim I was there for a lesbian rendezvous. I panicked, okay?
He seems to buy it, anyway.
So we dig around the room a bit and come up with a bottle of drugs that honestly seems like pretty weak evidence to me, but Yuslan latches onto it.
I also carefully do not point out that Lishari was probably murdered by someone in the Order (she said she had some evidence she wanted me to take a look at), because at this point, with two of the three heads of the Nehrimese mages coming down with a bad case of dead, I'm kind of worried Yuslan would murder somebody and/or leave if I did. And I like them a lot more than the Order, who still only barely (and snidely) tolerate me.
I'll just have to burn some midnight oil and figure things out solo, like a proper protagonist!

- Before heading back to tell Arantheal the news, I decide head out to Fortress Fogwatch to give my new summons a shakedown run. I have a quest from way back when I first got to Ark, you see: an alchemist named Bal had a grandfather who fucked up and bred some plague mushrooms (just what Enderal needed, more evil mushrooms!), and Bal needs his notes and mushroom samples to try and figure out a cure and redeem the family name.
So yes, this guy wants me to grab a bunch of plague mushrooms, put them in my bag, and bring them back to him in Ark. Whatever, money's money, and I'm already dead, so I'm probably fine!

- On the way I run into a pretty neat little village full of entropy mages (that's the evil forbidden magics, remember) and 'runaway convicts' being kept chopping wood at all hours. Not sure what's up with all the wood chopping, to be honest, but the village is basically like the mages just came in and took over some little shithole village in the name of religious/magical freedom and made the villagers their slaves, which is a pretty cool narrative.
They planted explosive runes everywhere around the village, and I learn this by riding right over one and exploding. But it only knocks about half off my health bar, so who cares?
Revive III works pretty well, but not quite well enough: kill a mage and use it on the corpse, and she revives into a kinda-sparkly blue mage-wight and runs off to go blast the shit out of the rest of the town for me. The problem is that after being revived once, the NPC turns into a cloud of dust that can't be revived again.
Compare this to my new wolf – made entirely of flame – who can be resummoned eternally and who can, I learn shortly, take on three ghost-mages solo. Just doesn't quite measure up, you know?

- So anyway, I work my way up to Fortress Fogwatch through an extremely evil-looking forest (this looks familiar; did I take my trial here? You know, the crazy dream sequence one. All these evil mushroom forests start to blur together after a while), and then kill roughly 50 undead, including a lot of ghost alchemists who hit hard with their silver swords and also throw magic in a pinch.
Here's a neat thing, by the way:
Is this Mary Seacole, do you think? The legendary Jamaican herb woman, hotel owner and war nurse?

Spoiler: Enderal's got some pretty good art pieces

What with it being put up in an alchemist's laboratory and all.

- I settle into a plan of attack I like to call 'Aggro room of monsters, run away while wolfie deals with them', since 3-4 of these alchemists kick my ass but my wolfbro must have an enormous health bar because he's totally fine.
If I didn't have the wolf, I'd be doomed. The difficulty of this quest is not in any way worth the 150 gold pennies the alchemist will give me for completing it, although these piles of silver swords being worth around 75 pennies apiece makes up for it.
I decide to turn in the mushroom samples to the Apothecarius in Sun Temple instead of the guy who hired me, partly because the last thing Undercity needs is another plague, and partly to punish Bal for making me do this and then paying me a pittance for it.


The Takeaway:
I wonder if we're shifting into the endgame here? There's a war on, and narratively important NPCs are suddenly dropping like flies. I would say I'm less invested in Lishari's death than Constantine's (or my own!), or if, say, Jespar bought the farm, but she's still a solid secondary NPC who got killed offscreen just to raise the stakes. And I'm at least half convinced that Jorek or the Truchessa will turn out to be the hand holding the knife.
I also appreciate the game giving me the choice of whether to go the inflammatory route or not. Sure it's probably not going to matter either way, but it feels like I have the choice to hold back some information for the sake of politics or hurt feelings, or just throw caution to the wind and go full disclosure, and that's a good feeling.
Fogwatch Fortress turned out to be a fairly mediocre quest. One man's quest to redeem his family name isn't a bad narrative, but it's not as visceral as say, Kor's priesthood purging their undesirables. Where the letters prime us to care about the wives who didn't make it, which in turn keeps us going until we find the sunken temple and the rest of the bodies. Having more journals from the researchers might have done the trick here, but all we got was the grandfather's regrets which was a little insufficient and late.

 

[Guile]

- It's a little odd, but according to my map marker I'm supposed to report Lishari's death to Lexil the Archmage. He's posed pretty fabulously when I find him, leafing through an ancient tome. #JustArchmageThings.

He has a few kind words for Lishari, but honestly the whole thing feels weirdly understated. They're kicking the investigation over to 'Commander Eren', who I don't think I've ever met or heard of. Not exactly bringing their A-game to the investigation, is what I'm saying.
Lexil and Tealor Arantheal have much more to say about the Beacon than about their ally found stabbed to death in her room. See, it's got three spots for power to be plugged in. I just knew I was going to have to Legend of Zelda this shit up at some point. I could feel it.
Hey Prophetess, you ever heard of the 'black stones'?

Spoiler: "Go find three Hope Diamonds, Guile"

What kind of undesirable side-effects? Wait, don't tell me, I can guess.

Spoiler: I could dance like that if I wanted to

I said I can guess!
Always, it comes back to insanity and death.
On the upside, good thematic callback to me burning my house down and murdering the fam in a fit of insanity. If I have to go back to my home in Nehrim to get one of your Beacon gizmos, Lexil …
Well honestly, that would be pretty cool. Yeah. I'm down. Who wouldn't want to sift through the destroyed remnants of their childhood home looking for a shiny ball that'll probably drive them mad with power, and might have done once already?

- Also:

Spoiler: interrupting NPC says what?

Elia. Elia, can I … help you?
… No? Not gonna say a word. Just gonna … chill? Okay, cool. You do you, girl.

- Unfortunately, I prooobably shouldn't have put this meeting off to do Fortress Fogwatch, because Lexil tells me he's got some things to get together, and to come back tomorrow. So I'm stuck cooling my heels.

- Well, I've got a quest from the 'A GOD AM I' inventor guy, to go find his wayward apprentice, anyway. So I'm off to a new area called 'Wellwatch'.

Spoiler: pretty

Why is this game so beautiful, holy shit. I mean, I'm not sure how the seasons work in Enderal, but SureAI sure can make some evocative scenery.

- On the way to the campsite where what's-her-face was dragged off, I run into a bandit camp-slash-quarry that got murdered but good by some… wood elementals or something? Spriggans? Very large dryad type things surrounded by a cloud of stinging flies, named <Goldenforst Matriarchs>.
Whatever, they're not 'ard enough to deal with flame-wolf. Bit of a mismatch, there. Right? Fire, meet tree. You already have so much in common; like being on fire.
… Is that supposed to be 'Goldenforest', by the way? Just asking.
More importantly, I wander into an innocuous cave attached to the quarry called 'Cliff Diving Grotto', and run into a new type of undead. Lost Ones, clad in black and silver armor and wielding bows of similar make.
This is gonna be one of those dungeons.

- Or it would be, except the pathing is REALLY bad, in here. As long as I cower behind this rock and fire about 50 arrows downrange, the two Lost Ones at the entrance just run back and forth and I can take my time and bring them down like one of those carnival shooting gallery games with the cork guns.
The next, a batch of four, are likewise not much of a challenge. I'm not sure if it's the speed they run at or more bad pathing, but none of them even get close. My wolf doesn't even deploy, just hangs around doing his best to foul my shots.
Down, then up, and then… Markul Darkhand, kin to my friend from the Madness Time beneath Ark. This one has a pretty nasty fire and ice combination attack: an AOE freezing mist that keeps the enemy from moving at more than a crawl, and then a fireball as a finisher.
That just means my wolf runs in ahead of me as I cower like the coward I am, and tears the poor lich open like a turkey.
This wolf, man. Somebody was talking earlier about who I might be romancing, Jespar or Calia? I'm mostly wondering at this point just how restrictive the local laws are. I mean, what a hero and her elemental wolf get up to behind closed doors is nobody's business but theirs, right?

- There's a few more Lost Ones between me and the exit, but I sail right on through to find this guy:

Spoiler: sup

Am I weird for finding him adorable? With his little lantern and sword and skeleton grin?
Just me? Okay then.

- Off to find Pathira, then. There's a mysterious blood splatter at her camp, so… I'm guessing she's not off picking flowers. The minimap marker clicks off; it's time to do some detective work.
Except we appear to be close enough to aggro a Goldenforst Matriarch. No sweat, right? Except during the fight, something goes wrong.
Something about the mob (charm spells?), or a bug, or something... I am beset by base treachery.

Spoiler: Et tu, wulfae

]

Elemental wolf bites hurt a lot.

- That happens twice, actually, and I just barely manage to kill the Matriarch and wolfie with a sliver of health left on the second go-round. I see how it is.
Well, y'know what, wolfie? I don't even NEED you! I have this hideous thing!

Spoiler: behold the Oorbaya

I can barely stand to look at it, but it's level 30 to your 26, and it's probably got like, magic and shit. I'm gonna take it on magical adventures in the Goldenforst, and learn valuable lessons and maybe doom all humanity to living under the mighty bootheel of a new Centurion God-king! And it'll be awesome!
So there. *sniff*


The Takeaway:
I have to say, the Order's response to Constantine and Lishari's death is not comforting in the least. After all, I'm a suspicious foreigner, too, y'know? If I died on one of these little jaunts (y'know, for real) (like, permanently) I wonder if the Keepers clustered around that table in the Sun Temple would shake their heads and murmur 'sad' before moving on to other business?
Luckily, they can't get rid of me that easily.

 

[Guile]

- So there we are, following a blood trail for a couple hundred feet that obviously contains more blood than anybody should have inside them.
I'm thinking to myself there's no way this lady is still alive.
The trail takes us up some wooden palisade type structure, with cannons on it. With bandits in it, of course! I hope the bandits will resist the invading Nehrimese for us, since they control all of Enderal's mines and quarries and, apparently, our defensive structures too.
Well, maybe they would have if I hadn't just filled them full of magic arrows.

Spoiler: hey man, you've got a little something right- eh, you're fine

- I'm not sure why entering some dungeons alerts everyone in the first room, leading to my swift beatdown when my summoned critter doesn't come through the door with me, and sometimes lets me get the drop on them instead. Maybe that's intentional?
This is one of the former, so I immediately run outside and begin a fighting retreat back down the structure until the bandits are dead. The first room is actually a huge cavern-type room built into what must be the mountain, with bedrolls and tables filled with clutter and huge kegs of what I assume are alcohol. Aside from a watchtower type structure inside the cavern which doesn't make any goddamn sense, it's pretty homey. At least up here, anyway; downstairs is a supply room, and a whole lotta jail cells and bear traps everywhere.

- The Oorbaya does a pitiful fraction of the physical damage my wolf does (which is odd given it's like 8 feet tall with arms like bloody tree trunks), but it's pretty sturdy and periodically explodes in a huge purple wave of energy that looks like it hits the entire room. Including myself, although thankfully there's no damage to go along with the nausea-inducing energy backwash.
It also sounds like a cannon going off, which turns out to be a downside when it aggros every bandit in the place down on our heads.
I'm probably going to be forgiving the elemental wolf pretty quickly if the alternative is 'fight the entire dungeon simultaneously.'

- Also, the starling lady I came here to find, Pahtira, is actually fine! In a cage, but fine.
She tells me she's hurt, but she's not, you know, covered in blood or anything.
It sure is convenient that the blood trail which didn't actually come from my quarry still led me right to her, but whatever. Maybe the bandits regularly drag prey (human or animal) back to the fort…? I don't know.

- Pahtira sends me on another fetch quest to get that steering unit to complete the Centurion. It's apparently located inside yet another old fortress for some reason (that's been taken over by bandits, of course). Are these bandits raiding Pyrean ruins and making off with the goods?
… It would be pretty cool to see a bandit faction in Dwemer-type gear.

- There are three Vatyr roaming around outside the fort. Been a while since I met any of those, but I definitely don't remember them moving this quick! It takes these guys about two or three seconds to run from bow range into face-stabbing range.
Then I reload and make sure to put my minion between us properly this time.
I found the Vatyr to be much more dangerous than the bandits inside the fort, leading me to assume that the bandits have been trapped in there for days while the Vatyr prowl around below.
I mean, this guy had his own name, so presumably he was supposed to be some kind of bandit king...

Spoiler: this works much better when I'm not the one on fire

But mostly I'm just impressed with how prettily he burns.

- So I grab the macguffin and head back to Ark, where of course I find the 'heavily injured' Pahtira beat me home. I bet she just didn't want to assault a fortress manned by bandits after wading through Vatyr, the wimp.
I'm not sure what's going on between Pahtira and Yerai (that's the inventor guy), except that Yerai is his passive-aggressive self while Pahtira is coming off very snippy. They do not have a good working relationship, these two.

Spoiler: oh no you din't

Look at how sassy she looks! It's all hands-on-hips and crossed-arms, with her.
I also really like her outfit, with the big stompy Dwemer-type boots and gauntlets. This feels like a lady who does a lot of tromping around and sticking her hands into dangerous places, and needs protection to make sure she's not pulling back a bloody stump.

- Speaking of dangerous things likely to result in dismemberment, they want me to go a starling spaceship that apparently crash landed here in Enderal, in a glacier. Now that the robot's chassis is finished they still need a power source to run it.
Pahtira's tagging along to help with… something or other, but she mentions casually that there's likely to be an array of traps to turn intruders into dust, bones, or puddles of flesh.
Starling traps apparently come in 'death', 'vaporization' and 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' varieties.


The Takeaway:
Now, that's pretty cool (spaceship!), but at this point I kind of want to apotheosize into the golden robot if they're gonna make me save their lives, finish the chassis and find a power core.
Well, the main quest has ticked over to a new day now, but I figure I might as well finish up this quest line first.
Onward to Agnod!

 

[Guile]

- Oh hey, so, remember that hideous Oorbaya monster? Which, by the way, I feel like every time I summon it is more horrible than I ever imagined. Note the way it simultaneously has not enough hands and way too many:

Spoiler: bleeaagh

Guess where those come from? A loading screen is so helpful as to tell me:
The Oorbaya, or 'Blue Death', is what happens when a mage fails to control his arcane fever.
Since mages in this mod make magic by taking phenomena from some other world and expressing it in this one (some world where Constantine's beard is on fire, remember), the Oorbaya is presumably… trapped between worlds so to speak, constantly expressing this interdimensional magic through its own flesh? Summoning in more and more magic – unable to stop – and expressing it out as phenomena (the hands grasping hands grasping hands and the purple explosions)

- So to take my mind off the horror of my own character's existence, let's think about how to get to that spaceship.
The crashed spaceship is up at the ass end of the world. I honestly have no idea how to get through the nearly impassable mountains so I just fly a Myrad as far north as possible, then start heading northwest and hope for the best.

- I work my way through the pink crystal forest, and discover that the Great Snowy North is hardcore.
Just north of the crystal forest I run into a pair of mages and three elemental wolves living harmoniously together. It's kind of neat that unlike basically everything else in this game, mages run away to their maximum distance to start flicking icicles or fireballs or whatever at you. Combine that with some dangerous in-fighters like elemental wolves, and you're in for a bad time.
Once I manage to kill them, I unfortunately find mountains in my way, and have to keep going around. So that was pretty much pointless.

- I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out the purpose of the ancient buildings on the plateau, though. Something like a Stonehenge-like plinth with a cyclopean lintel, and then these huge professionally-made arches with regular brick sizes heading up into the hills… half an aqueduct maybe? Some device that in better times helped people make it over the mountain like a dry Panama canal? But then what is up with that pillar with the stone arms holding up a spiky piece of rock?

Spoiler: spent way too long trying to figure out the purpose of this thing

Enough amateur anthropology, I have stuff to do.

- This picture encompasses what the Great White North is like, for me:

Spoiler: pictured: life on enderal

You think, oh, you're level 32. You're a tough guy. Right? You can handle the North.
Wrong.
The wolves and the four-tusked mammoths are okay, but pretty much everything else up here will destroy me in one or two hits.
Snow bear: two swipes.
Frost troll: one swing.
Vatyr: three or four punches, but there's no escaping them, even on brave Whirlwind the donkey.
The giant spiders will reach out and brush you with one hairy leg as you ride by, and instantly kill you right off the back of your horse.
But – and this is the important bit – none of these deadly monsters can see much further than the nose in front of their face.

- It produces an interesting semi-tactical rogue-like element.
"Okay, so this is where the snow bear is. Go around. Work your way up the mountain. Not that way; that's where the spiders are. There's a mammoth; you can kill mammoths…"
I feel like my elemental wolf is working with me on this ever since I came to the North, although I think it's actually part of the AI behavior for near-death fleeing. It'll get up in some monster's face, take one hit, and then run the fuck away at full speed. The monster will chase after it, letting me run in the opposite direction or take potshots at it with my bow (and hopefully actually hit it sometimes, but it's hard to lead the right amount on this thing)

- So basically the map takes you all the way around the northwestern tip of the map to get to the spaceship. I get some vistas that would probably be pretty amazing if it wasn't constantly overcast and snowing:

Spoiler: up on the mountain, I see down below

I kind of wanted to work my way down to that ship to see if some poor bastard from Nehrim managed to land in this frozen hellhole, but I'm stuck way up on the mountain and that sounded like a pain in the butt.
The music, at least, is very atmospheric. Quiet, almost fragile piano notes disappearing into the quiet snow.
The snow in this metaphor is hiding killer snow bears, but you know, that's Enderal for you.

- There's some pretty cool set pieces in the Great North.
- A single, lonely home at the end of the world. A warhammer, a skeleton and a book on Master Rhetorics, half-buried along with their house in an avalanche.
- Two mages and their frost elementals in a tower. The top of the tower is a warm, inviting spot with a stew on the fire and a pair of bedrolls across from one another, beating back the frozen night. I, of course, was welcomed with a rain of icicles.
- Further up the mountain from them, the last Homely House. Well, it actually reads something about Deep Diggers, and a bunch of killer Vatyr are living there now. My strategy here involves opening the door, murdering something really fast with a double power attack using my bound swords, and then closing the door and running away to gnaw on crusty Endralean bread to regenerate health.
- Even further beyond that is the Deep Digger Settlement. A whole town, with water wheels and… stuff. This seems to be the very top of the mountain, and the undead here are commensurately the 'ardest motherfuckers I've ever run across.

- I heroically meet the gatekeeper – a Grotesque Lost One too high-level to enslave with my entropy talent – in honorable battle, while he's trapped in a narrow passage:

Spoiler: pictured: heroics

I manage to kill a few more of the beasties, but there's nothing much to scavenge. I manage to score an Ice Elemental II spell (level 36) from one of the houses, which makes up for the lack of material loot. When going downstairs saw my new towering, majestically-glowing frost elemental pop in one hit from a Lord of Lost Ones like a balloon, I decided I'd had enough and headed back towards Agnod at top speed.
I'd gone right past it because this tip of the mountain stuff was pretty interesting.


The Takeaway:
Wasn't I supposed to be looking for a spaceship?