Dark Sun: The Dark Web

In this setting, it's apparently "wrong" to just slaughter giant spiders.

    

The first area south of Gedron has a bunch of mineral springs. As we approach what looks like an elevated bath, some guy pops up from under the sand where he was hiding. He asks if we're the gladiators escaped from Draj. We answer truthfully. "You are of the Veiled Alliance," he says, which I guess maybe is a name that someone came up with for our attempt to unite the slave towns. He warns us that a templar named Theofil is in the area, convinced he can mine copper here.

   

Mere steps away, we meet Theofil and his guards, who demand to know our business. I choose something banal ("we're just travelers"), at which point one of the guards announces we are now slaves to Theofil. 

   

One of these days, I'll have to do a special entry on my general role-playing tendencies, no matter what the game or character. There are times when I try to force myself to go against those tendencies and role-play a particular character, but otherwise I'm going to choose the "good" option 95% of the time. I will almost always be kind to children, generous with my money (this is partly because the economy is so broken in most games that you're grateful for the opportunity to spend it), and protective of the innocent. I will be unmotivated by choices that have to do with loyalty to my own family or clan if they're the ones in the wrong. I almost always take choices that involve speaking truth to power and denying the divinity of gods. Most important for present purposes, I have no patience with or sympathy for slavers. The moment I find out that's what I'm facing, my general tendency is to attack. 

        

While I agree with the sentiment of #2, I wish the game had given me a less cringey way of expressing it.

   

Thus, although the game offers a path of guile here, Theofil and his guards are soon dead at the ends of our swords. Man, you commenters weren't kidding about El's sword. It's terrifying. Not only does it do plenty of damage on its own, it has a "Vampiric Touch" effect that effectively doubles the damage. Violencia can sometimes kill three enemies per round with it. One problem I'm having, though, is that the game "forgets" my strength bonuses in between sessions. I have to have Violencia unequip and re-equip her belt, and Featherweight unequip and re-equip her sword, to get the strength bonuses back again.

   

Theofil has a magic shield that provides protection against fire, which is nice. I give it to Sunstroke.

     

Inventory items remain relatively clear about what they do.

     

Elsewhere on the map, we find a mercenary band heading to Draj to join the army "to smash the slave villages." Again, there's a guile option ("I, too, am a soldier traveling to Draj"), but we don't see any reason to take it. The combat is brief and easy enough that I check out the auto-combat option for the first time. It works well enough. It favors bows more than I would like and doesn't cast spells at all, and I don't think there's a way to enable this (unlike the Gold Box).

   

The only new way to go from here is to the south. The next map has more of the mineral springs, plus large crystals growing out of the sands. We meet a mul who calls himself the Druid of the Steaming Waters, exiled from his oasis by a defiler and his band of guards. The "defiler" turns out to be another Drajan templar, this one named Takan. As before, his guards challenge us as we approach. As before, we decline to lie our way in, and again a bunch of guards and a templar lie dead on the shifting sands. This templar has an obsidian necklace that casts "Disintegrate." For some reason, he didn't use it on us. The grateful druid tells us about a treasure hidden in the badlands to the east; based on his description, it is the very treasure Violencia wears around her waist.

   

Next map south, we find a bunch of geoglyphs on the overhead map, including one of a dragon. I suspect this is where we might collect the "dragon's eye" treasure that the announcer told us about. (I have no idea why I didn't kill him.) Unfortunately, clicking in and around its eye produces nothing, and there's no "search" command in the game. However, I remember that some of the guards two maps ago had tools that I didn't pick up. When I get back to the location of that battle, most of the dropped equipment is gone, but both a shovel and a pick-axe remain. I take both.

     

This all looked pretty cool, but none of it amounted to much. At least not yet.

     

Back at the geoglyph map, before I reach the dragon's eye, I find a lizardman named Ssovan chasing a dust devil around the desert. He says that he's lost his tribe, so he's looking for a totem to gather new people, and he thinks the dust devil will somehow turn in to this totem if he proves his stamina by following it around long enough. He thinks we might be there to help him, or might be there for him to kill to prove his strength. Either way, he's uninterested in our "city wars."

   

I think dust devils are the very antonym of "plan."

    

Digging in the dragon's eye with the shovel produces a chest with a "Flame Arrow" and the heart crystal of A'Poss, the cleric from the temple who betrayed Tynan and Tristram.  

     

This is a pretty obvious place to dig, when you think about it.

    

In the northwest, amidst a geoglyph for a sideways "2," we find a man named Maris, a former instructor at the psionic institute in Draj. He is annoyed that we have interrupted his following of "the path." He invites us to follow him by simply walking the contours of the "2" three times. Each time we reach an end, the game notes that we're closer to enlightenment. At the end, we gain some experience. He then offers to sell us some psionic bracelets, but having no psionics in the party, I can't use them. I offload some items, including two previously-looted psionic bracelets, and get up to ¤63,000.

        

I guess I won the game!

       

Nothing else happens at the other glyphs in the area, some of which look like futhark runes. Rather than continue west or south, we decide to head back to Teaquetzl and a couple of other earlier maps. On the way, we find Laussa the lizardwoman in the desert and tell her about the would-be chieftain to the west. She likes what she hears and says she will seek him out. 

   

We also stop by Nokatu in Red Mesa and sell our accumulated sand howler eyes and fire eel tongues, but he otherwise has nothing new for us.

  

Back in Teaquetzl, almost everyone has new dialogue. Everyone, including Chahl, is happy with the new alliance. The Visionary tells us we have one hand clasped in friendship but the other remains empty, suggesting we need at least one more ally. Katura is hanging out in our house. I have Yester (male) speak to her, and indeed there are some flirtation options that lead to Katura giving Yester a ring to remember her by. She expresses some interest in learning about her birth parents, but we don't have any idea who they are, just that Chahl saved her from sacrifice.

   

Down in the ruins below the well, A'Poss's heart crystal does nothing for us. I guess we need Tynan's and/or Tristram's.

   

In the geoglyph area, Ssovan and Laussa have found each other and have started a new tribe. Laussa gives us a magic ring as a reward. This "metal steadfast ring" increases constitution by 3. I give it to Featherweight, who has the lowest at 14. Ssovan still isn't interested in helping us against Draj, but he has designated us "not prey," so I guess that's something.

   

We exit to the west to a new area, where men immediately start screaming at us: "The wyverns! The wyverns! Run for your lives!" Sure enough, a bunch of wyverns land in the area, and their riders jump off and join the battle. The battle is short--there are only three wyverns and guards, and we're way overpowered by now.

   

Fighting a wyvern.

   

Afterwards, it turns out that I'm in Cedrilte Village. The place is the worst-off of any of the three villages I've found so far. The place has been decimated by bandit raids. Their crops are gone, their huts are little more than ruins, the well water is fouled, and game is scarce in the area. They are subsisting on roots and grubs, believing that it is their fate to be destroyed. They're far too busy trying to stay alive than to think about rebelling against Draj. Their leader, Chaya, won't even talk to us until we agree to end the bandit threat. At that point, she softens. She says that they live in the castle on the mountain. It's so steep that we can't climb it, but someone named Kirkor knows a way. We've been carrying four or five sacks of grain since the first map, and we get some experience for giving it to Chaya.

      

The town's designated carpenter isn't much use.

     

The town's loremaster tells us that to get a Terror Bloom, we'll have to get a rampager to chase us, then slay it under the shade of a serpent tree. I'm starting to think this little side quest is going to be too much of a pain, but it turns out there's a serpent tree in the northwest corner of the village, and I can summon a rampager just by blowing on a horn. Rampagers damage your armor, so before we blow the horn, I summon a creature to take the brunt of the rampager's initial attacks. I'm confident that if we delay acting until he exhausts himself against my summoned ally, we can kill him before he acts again. The plan goes as I hoped, and a Terror Bloom grows in the shade of the tree after we've killed the beast. We grab it to return it to Nokatu later. 

     

Fighting the ravager under the shade of a tree.

   

A ladder in the well takes us to the same ruined underground temple that we can access from Teaquetzl. A ghost named Zeefram greets us and tells us to wander no further, but we appease him by telling him we are not here to plunder. We find Tynan's old chambers and his diary, although it tells us nothing new. A couple of ghosts attack as we explore, and we're forced to kill them. We don't find anything else in this section--most of the passages are blocked by rubble--though it occurs to us that we didn't try climbing down the well in Gedron and should perhaps go back.

   

A dwarf named Kirkor is highly annoyed that we're bothering him, but he grudgingly shows us a stone concealing the entrance to a cave--the only exit from the village other than the way we came in. We move the stone and enter. The cave opens into a maze of tunnels.

    

It is a legitimate criticism that the overhead maps give away too much. The player should have to actually explore to uncover these areas.

     

Other than bugs, the tunnels are inhabited by little blue creatures that the game labels "first folk." They are telepaths, and they live connected to other first folk, sharing all thoughts and experiences. They call their cave dwellings "mindhomes."

      

One of the "first folk" describes the issues with the spiders.

    

Recently, the intelligent spiders who inhabit the upper parts of the caverns (the "Darkhold") have become inexplicably hostile. The first folk were of two minds as to what to do about it--attack or maintain the peace--and thus the hive mind was split into two groups, the peaceful ones living in the east caverns and the warlike ones moving to the west. Unaligned with either is the "Outsider," who nonetheless wants peace and peaceful trade with the spiders. Each faction asks me to help. I agree to help the Outsider.

   

After we scale the walls to the upper caverns with the Outsider's silk rope, we meet the spiders. They have a prince and a queen with absurd names that I'm not even going to try to recount. Anyway, they're also mystified as to the sudden violence shown by some of their species. There's talk that it has something to do with a "curse" localized in a northwest chamber or an "entity" occupying the south fungus grove. She wants me to destroy this entity. As we leave her chambers, her son stops us and says that his mother is devious and evil. She will kill us after we've done her bidding and will never re-establish trade with the first folk. He asks us to help him overthrow her after we've lifted the curse.

    

Negotiating with the spider queen.

   

We find the supposed "cursed" room, marked by a floor glyph. We have to break down a wall to get into an inner chamber (this summons some red slaad for a brief battle). The inner chamber has three skeletons chained to the wall. A chest contains a journal written by someone named "Nagi," presumably one of the ancient people to inhabit the castle above us. Nagi writes that he wanted to lead a society called the Inner Eye, but someone named Tara usurped his place. It was Tara's evil that summoned the entity that took over the fungus grove. She then imprisoned Nagi in the chamber we broke into. He used his time in prison to fashion several necklaces to protect against fungoids, and one that will somehow destroy the entity. We scoop them up.

 

On the east side of the dungeon, we find the fungus chamber protected by "evil" spiders and have to kill them. They've apparently been guarding a hole from which a sense of evil emanates. I fiddle around for a while before discovering that the way to lift the curse is just to hurl Nagi's golden pendant into the hole. This lifts the evil miasma and releases the spiders.

      

Killing the last spider before the evil hole.

   

On the way back, a group of spiders tries to kill us ("the queen promises great rewards!"), but we make short work of them. The prince intercepts us on our way to the queen's throne room and assures us that he's right behind us. When we reach the queen, she assures us that she's thankful for our service, but then she orders her spiders to attack. The ensuing battle has a few spider mages who cast "Lightning Bolt," but they're otherwise not very hard. We have to kill eight of them.

     

He was not "right behind us."

 

Afterwards, though, I find no sign of the prince. The other spiders in the area are non-hostile and thank us, but back in the lower caverns, the Outsider yells at us for killing his spider friends and refuses to help us any further. So I'm not sure what I did wrong. Maybe I accidentally killed the prince in the battle, not realizing that he was an ally. But do I have to handle the upper caverns without killing any spiders? I'm not sure that's possible.

      

I object to the characterization of what I did as "slaughter."

     

My last save is from the village, so I'll contemplate replaying the area. I'm starting to get a bit impatient, though, and it's all tied to the game's level caps. I have no problem running around doing side quests if the experience is going to do me some good, but in this case only Sunstroke and Featherweight have any levels left to gain, and in both cases the experience points necessary are so high that I doubt I'll make it. I'm slightly mollified by the knowledge that there's a sequel, so presumably the extra experience isn't completely wasted.

I otherwise continue to enjoy the encounter design, and I'm finding the NPCs relatively interesting and memorable--not late-1990s quality, of course, but definitely in comparison to other games of this era.

   

Time so far: 27 hours