Serpent Isle: Toil and Trouble

A long-awaited reunion doesn't go as I'd hoped.

      

Cleaning up some loose ends from last time (thanks to Radiant), I start by returning to the Abandoned Outpost. The place is oddly devoid of enemies, even in places where they respawned before, as if the game has a way of marking a dungeon "cleared."

    

To get past the rubble that I tried to blow up with a powder keg, apparently I just need to attack it with my weapon. I don't think this is a fair solution unless it's clued somewhere that I missed. I don't believe there's any place in the main game at which debris can be destroyed this way. You can't just introduce a new mechanic and not tell the player. In any event, after clearing the rubble, I take the stairs down to a small room where I find a corpse with a rope. The people in Serpent's Fang don't have any rope? Is it that rare an object in this world?

     

What kind of fortress wouldn't have a bunch of this in a storage closet?

     

I worked around the "Fulmination" puzzle by simply casting "Dispel Field" on the force fields. Apparently, the game wanted me to sacrifice a lightning whip (found on a nearby corpse) on the altar. That one's on me. One meaning of "fulminate" is "to flash like lightning." I should have used a dictionary.

   

The rope takes me down the well. The game has me stop in an intermediate area, and when I double-click on the well again, I have to specify up or down. I'm curious exactly how the author thought that "wells" work. The only way this configuration makes sense is if the "real" well is on the bottom floor and the two floors above it have holes in the floor with well-like facades around them. I suppose that would be a way for people on upper floors to get water without having to march down a couple of flights of stairs, but either you'd have to have a separate bucket and rope on each floor, or there would have to be some kind of multi-floor pulley system. Does anyone know if anything like this has existed in the annals of architecture?

        

The Avatar is starting to lose it.

     

The bottom floor branches out to a slightly larger dungeon. To get past a magical barrier (that wouldn't fall to "Dispel"), I have to read a scroll found on a body in the torture room. The scroll references a key, and I complained last time that there was no key with the body, but apparently the scroll itself is the key. Simply opening it up causes the barrier to fall. Half and half on this one. A clever player might interpret the scroll correctly, but again, we're throwing in new mechanics that don't make a lot of sense.

     

(Speaking of which, apparently the proper way to exit the Maze is by walking through an illusory wall--after the game has set up hard rules for when the various walls open and close. That's another unfair solution, in my book.) 

       

I feel like a Belt of Speed and Gauntlets of Strength would make more sense.

     

I fought my way through four ice trolls to a room with a couple of treasure chests and a Belt of Strength. It raises my strength to 30, but to wear it, I can't wear my belt pouch. I've been keeping all my frequently-used stuff in that. Now I either have to go rooting around my backpack every time I want something or I have to hold the pouch in my left hand and thus put away my shield. I suppose the belt is worth it, but just barely.

   

The chests have stacks of gold. Having long ago decided that I'll never need gold in this game again, I leave it behind.

       

What could I possibly need this for?

      

Back in the castle, I'm just about to complete the quest when I realize that I've reached Level 9. I somehow thought Level 8 was the cap. I have 5 training points, and because of the items I've found in this adventure, intelligence is suddenly my lowest statistic. Fortunately, Elissa, the mage in the basement, will train you in intelligence and magic ability. Guess what she wants?

       

Son of a . . .

     

I return to the Abandoned Outpost for, oh, the fiftieth time and grab the gold. Weirdly, even though Elissa only requires 1 training point per session, when I still have one training point left, she insists that I'm not "ready to learn."

   

The end of the Silver Seed requires you to find a hidden button by moving a candelabra. Last time, I said that this game had conditioned me to move everything. I should have qualified that by adding "that looks like it might have something under it." I was not in the practice of moving things that might have something behind them. Again, not exactly a fair puzzle unless I missed a verbal clue.

      

It wouldn't have fooled the Avatar, either, since he doesn't see things from this angle.

      

The button opens a stairway behind the ale keg in Elissa's room. I head downstairs, cross a metal drawbridge spanning a bottomless chasm, and enter a stone room with a locked door and three pedestals. I can see the Silver Seed behind the locked door. The pedestals are clearly meant to hold the four orbs. If there's a way to suss out the order logically, I don't know what it is. But putting the wrong orb on a pedestal causes it to fizzle and putting the right one in place causes it to sparkle (and, mysteriously, darken), so it's easy to figure out. 

          

I didn't mean to kill them.

      

The door opens when I have all four in place. I enter the room and go to grab the Silver Seed. Suddenly, the portrait of the ugly witch who gave me a hint outside the Maze (Drusilla) appears. "Not so fast, deary," she cackles. "Ye don't think that ye kin just dance outta here with that little seed so easily, now do ye." The Avatar responds, "And who will stop me, hag? Thou?" That just makes me cringe. If the game is going to insist on putting words in my PC's mouth, could they not be so stupid?

      

First of all, it's "dearie." Second, isn't anyone in this setting capable of saying the word "you"?

      

Some woman I've never seen appears--I guess they're showing up south of me, off-screen--and intimates that the witches should turn me into a candlestick. Then the woman who gave me hints about Aram-Dol's lair (Solaria, apparently) appears and drops that they all serve the Guardian--who Drusilla previously referred to as "the Guide." The unnamed woman hisses at her: "Solaria! Thou shouldst not speak of the Guide to outsiders! Now thou hast sealed his fate!" As if I didn't know about the Guardian, and as if they weren't planning to kill me anyway.

       

"Pawn of prophecy," on the other hand . . . yeah, that's a fair hit. That pretty well describes my entire life.

     

They try something. I can't see what because I'm still off-screen. Whatever it is makes Drusilla say, "Blast! The Amulet seems to be protecting him! This shall not be as easy as we were led to believe!" They resolve to work together to kill me. The unnamed woman says that "once this pathetic pawn is dead, we can cross into the new world, and let this decaying husk die as it was meant to!" I wonder what world the Guardian promised them.

   

For all that setup, the denouement is anti-climactic. I wander out of the room and swing my axe three times, and there are three witch bodies on the floor. I don't even need to pull out Magebane. Oh, one of them gets off a spell that summons a specter before she dies, but it doesn't last any longer than they do.

      

The final battle of the expansion.

     

The witches trouble me:

    

• Where did they come from?
  

• Why haven't I met one before? I look her up. Apparently, her name is Rieya and she was supposed to pop up outside the Abandoned Outpost and help me with a puzzle that I didn't need help with. I don't know why her encounter didn't trigger when I visited.

   

I never met this one.

     

• As far as I can tell, the clues these women give are accurate and helpful. If they're trying to impede my progress, why do that? I killed them with the artifacts they helped me acquire!
  

• What time are these women from? Was the Guardian interfering with Serpent Isle hundreds of years ago? Did he have a hand in the wars? Or are they from my time, sent back like me? If so, how? It's not like any of them have an Amulet of Balance.

     

Suspecting I won't get any answers to these questions, I search their bodies and find three keys. The first opens the door to the chamber adjacent to the Silver Seed, the second two open doors at the top of the stairway. That's convenient. Where did they get these keys?

  

The stairway leads up to a dirt cavern. I walk between two serpent statues and exit in a little glen surrounded by mountains. A waterfall creates a pool of water on the north side of the glade. Karnax suddenly appears and instructs me to plant the Silver Seed in the ground before the waterfall. He says that when the Forest Master first appeared, the monks thought that he was the Hero from Another World, but his seed was somehow "warped by his passage through the Void." 

    

How did you even get here?

    

I plant the seed where he instructs. A little sapling appears. It gets struck by lightning a couple of times, and suddenly it's a huge tree. You'd think lightning would do the opposite. Even Karnax is surprised. "I had not expected anything this momentous." He goes on to say that the roots of the tree will begin healing the land. "Once thou hast restored Balance to our world," he says, "who knows what miracles may occur? I have even heard it said that the souls of the dead shall be returned to life once Balance is restored." Didn't I just restore Balance? I thought that was the point of all of this.

         

That would be more impressive if you weren't capable of restoring the souls of the dead any time you feel like it.

        

I head back to Serpent's Fang. The denizens have a little new dialogue to recognize the fact that I was successful in the quest, but most of their speech doesn't change. Isstanar, for instance, still expresses doubt that I'm really the Champion of Balance. Amusingly, the keyword that triggers his new dialogue and grudging admittance is "apologize."

   

I'm not sure I've been here a week, but the Amulet gives me no grief when I use it on the Serpent Gate, and there's no flashy fanfare this time. I just appear back in Moonshade as if I'd never left. Maybe it was all a dream.

        

Back in the present.

         

It's time to get back on track for the main quest. While I'm trying to figure out how best to do that, I realize that I have some teeth whose destinations I never explored. I teleport to the Serpent Gate hub, check the map, choose an unlabeled destination, and end up in . . . the Inn of the Sleeping Bull. I'm confused. I already had that one. I must have forgotten to label it.

   

For reasons I don't remember, instead of just jumping right back to the hub, I exit the inn, go south, and end up screwing around in Furnace for a while. This requires casting the "Chill" spell to avoid taking damage from the heat even though I never had to do that when entering from this direction before. I check out the locked door with the Serpent Staff behind it, and I definitely don't have that key. Where was I supposed to get it? I spend some time looking around the area, moving objects, and so forth, to no avail. 

       

By the way, hitting this debris with your weapon does #$@%-all.

      

I unlock some magically-locked doors but don't have the keys to some metal doors at the north end of the complex. I do find an Everlasting Goblet on a table, which apparently removes the need to keep food. That wasn't much of a problem with the "Create Food" spell anyway, but this is still handy. 

         

Gastronomically boring, but economical.

      

While I'm fiddling with keys, I remember the Key of Fire and Key of Ice that I found in Furnace, and how they wouldn't go on the key ring. I suspect this is because they need to be merged into a single key, but I don't know how I know that. Either someone told me in an earlier entry--I've been playing this game so long that I'm forgetting parts of it in real time--or I'm remembering something from decades ago. Either way, I have this idea that the solution is to put the two keys on an altar. I try it with altars in front of two pillars to fire and ice, but that doesn't work. Later, I find an altar in a single complex, and that does the trick. It makes a Blackrock Key--which doesn't open any of the doors that I find, so the whole exercise was really a waste of time. I can't even find my way to the Serpent Gate that I know is in here somewhere. I finally exit by going through the tunnels back to Moonshade.

   

Back to the gate hub. I try another new direction and end up at a temple somewhere in the frozen north. I open a door, and who's there but Mortegro, wandering around a little island in the middle of a building. He wants me to free him by finding some way to lower a drawbridge, but it looks to me like he could just jump over the water. It's inside a building, after all. He's not in a lake.

     

How about your limbs?

          

It takes me a little while to figure it out. The drawbridge is lowered by a winch, which is behind a locked door. A key in a nearby room doesn't open the locked door. There are stairs down to the basement, where a number of creatures are locked inside cells, including a wildman, a naga, a rat-man, and a follower of Chaos named Sethys. Keep in mind that this place has been abandoned for hundreds of years, so what in the world has kept these people alive?

      

This guy is going to have a lonely rest of his life.

        

Sethys doesn't even seem to know that he's been here for centuries. He thinks that I follow Order and refuses to give me the key--until I ask him about KEY, at which point he completely changes his tune and thinks that the Chaos Hierophant sent me. He relates that some rat stole the key and ran off through a rat hole. I can see a little rat maze to the west of his cell, too small for a human to fit.

   

Fortunately, I picked up the solution in a previous room: the "Serpent Bond" spell turns you into a little snake. I accidentally cast it from the scroll and had to reload so I could use "Transcribe" to put it into my spellbook. So transformed, I'm able to enter the little maze, kill a couple of rats with my fangs, and exit into a treasure room. Oddly, the game doesn't stop me from accessing my inventory as a snake.

       

As snakes go, I'm pretty deadly.

      

The room is full of gold, nuggets, and gold bars. I don't bother to take any of them, figuring that if I need them later, I know where they are. There's so many of them, though, that this room can't serve any purpose except to taunt the player with the fact that money no longer has any value. I grab the key and use the lever to open the door.

     

I make the mistake of trying to go upstairs in snake form. The game completely glitches and I have to reload and do the whole thing for a third time. I'm trying to think of previous points in the game in which turning into a snake might have been helpful. I'll have to watch for little holes.

        

What do you suppose happened here?

        

The winch room has another new scroll, "Invoke Snow Serpent," which I memorize. I lower the drawbridge and go to meet Mortegro. In gratitude, he gives me the "Summon Shade" spell, which will let me talk to the undead, and he offers to teach me spells at half-price. This is great because Mortegro is the only mage whose spells I never learned; he disappeared on my original trip to Moonshade, before I could pay for them. Then he tells me that he'll only accept guilders, and of course I don't have any. I can't imagine where I could even get any at this point. Then he has the gall to ask to accompany me out of here, to which I reluctantly say yes. No sooner are we out of the temple than he's struck by lightning and teleports away again. That guy just has the worst luck. Maybe I'll find him again in Moonshade.

       

I can't catch a break.

         

Also in this temple is a magical shimmering wall. It acts like a crystal ball. When I double-click on it,  I get visions of Dupre, Shamino, and Iolo in some kind of castle hall. They're delivering exposition to each other. I wouldn't have any idea where they were except Shamino says something like, "He'll never think to look for us in the Castle of the White Dragon!" They announce to each other their plans to destroy me as the vision fades.

       

There's quite a lot of this.

     

The last new tooth takes me to yet another temple. From the scrolls I find, I suspect this one is the Temple of Ethicality. I realize something that all of you probably knew. I had assumed that the temples in which the Banes were trapped were the little antechambers in the city of Order. Now I think that all these far-flung ruins that I've been exploring are the actual, capital-T Temples and those little rooms were just minor temples for people who wanted to meditate or whatever without trekking all the way to the main ones. That makes more sense.

     

Iolo is still a poet.

     

I figure there's no reason not to grab the Gwani Horn and see what I can do about Gwenno. I take the Serpent Gate to the city of Order in Skullcrusher and find myself in a little room with a double metal door on the north wall. I apparently don't have the key, and I can't find any way out of the room. I thus take the gate back to the hub, take the gate to the North Forest, and make my way back to the city the long way, through the dungeon full of traps and goblins. The Avatar grouses a little about the cold but never takes damage the way he did before, so I never end up changing back into my fur boots and hat. I wonder why.

    

Once back in Vasculio's house--his body still lies on the floor--I cast "Dispel Field" on the field containing the horn, then grab the horn. The Great Earth Serpent appears and tells me to "free Gwenno . . . free her from the ice!" This game is really big on providing hints when you don't need any and none when you do.

     

I still think it's hilarious that the Gwani "horn" is a brass instrument with valves.

    

On the way back to wherever the hell I left the ice floe--what I wouldn't give for Ambermoon's broom or my old magic carpet right now--I visit the Gwani. They're no better off than the townsfolk. Only three of them are still alive. They were killed by the Trapper, though, not the Banes. The Gwani don't seem as upset about it as they should be.

   

I find the floe and take it to the Gwani burial grounds. The Gwani Horn destroys the ice walls that block the chambers as well as the ice pillars that contain bodies. After flinging a bunch of hapless dead Gwani from their final rests, I find the chamber with the pillar containing Gwenno. Her body comes tumbling out. I activate my Hourglass of Fate and Thoxa appears. Seeing Gwenno's body, she immediately performs a resurrection, raising the question of why the monks won't resurrect every dead NPC that I find in the game. Clearly it's not a "recency" issue; Gwenno has been dead for months.

     

But everyone else dead all across the island isn't a problem?

      

Gwenno pops back to life and Thoxa gates out. Then the Great Earth Serpent appears again. "Bane of Chaos . . . Chaos Bane . . . twisted her soul." This explains why instead of joining me, Gwenno is running around the cavern shouting, "Blood! Blood everywhere!" and "I must sate mine hunger!" (Then again, that latter message is no worse than I got from the other party members every day.) Where have I seen that before? Cantra! So Gwenno was possessed by a bane, too. That explains why she massacred all those trappers, although when I originally heard that story, I assumed it was just regular Gwenno expressing moral outrage.

   

Now I don't know what to do. I need to figure out how to heal her, but I don't want  to leave her here in the meantime. I particularly don't want to deal with that ice floe again. Thus, I reluctantly raise my axe and bury it in her torso, then heft her body over my shoulder and carry it back to civilization.

       

This is going to be a fun trip.

     

Once I get back to the mainland, I figure I might as well deal with the Trapper while I'm here. I tuck Gwenno's corpse in a niche in the mountains and then head for the Trapper's caves. This time, his door is unlocked. It leads to a disgusting cavern full of dead, skinned Gwani and various pelts. Hazard the Trapper shows up while I'm retching and tries to justify his slaughter by saying that the Gwani are "merely animals." He also says they're so guileless and innocent that it isn't even hard to hunt and kill them. I suggest that he stop anyway, and he says, "No one tells me what to do" and attacks.

       

I want an origin story for Hazard in which we find out what the Gwani did to him.

      

I use the opportunity to try out "Paralyze," which (as below) just bounces off him. He has a magic throwing axe, but it's not much of a danger to my overly-buffed Avatar. I whack him with the axe a few times, and he's gone. 

He has a key which opens a chest, where I find my glass sword--the last missing object unless those torches are still sitting in a pumpkin patch somewhere. He also has a Gwani amulet. I head back to the leader of the Gwani, who rewards me with another tooth--I'm only missing one now.

          

I ditch the pinecone and, thus, the last of the mystery objects.

        

I return to Skullcrusher to find a way into the Serpent Gate room. On the way, I happen into a building where there are three bodies that look a lot like Iolo, Shamino, and Dupre. Is this where the game stashes their regular bodies while the Banes inhabit the duplicates? Or is it just a coincidence?

        

It's possible that these are just three guys I killed 40 hours ago and forgot about.

     

I find the Serpent Gate room, and the solution to entering is . . . to open a curtain. That's it. When I was "stuck" in the room earlier, I must have regarded the curtain as a tapestry. I think I'm losing my grip on this game a bit.

          

I warp to Monk Isle and speak to the monks about Gwenno. They resurrect her again and confirm that she's suffering damage from her possession by a Bane of Chaos. Karnax says that to understand the condition, he'll need the Scroll of the Serpent from Fedabiblio in Moonshade. I'm way ahead of you, Karnax. He studies the scroll and figures out why Gwenno and Cantra (and presumably some third fool out there) are suffering. He reminds me of the Ophidian virtue system by which the three Order virtues are balanced by the three Chaos virtues. An imbalance leads to an expression of "anti-virtue." For instance, if Enthusiasm is not balanced by Discipline, it leads to Wantonness. To cure them, if I understand him correctly, I'll need to instill them with the virtue that they lack. Cantra seems to be suffering from Wantonness, so she'll need a dose of Discipline. I assume that Gwenno is suffering Insanity (unbound Emotion) and thus needs some Logic. Karnax says the way to instill these virtues is to fetch water from their associated temples. At least I have a fast way to get there.

       

Karnax writes it all out for me.

      

I assume that I'll have to then go to the Castle of the White Dragon, kill my three friends, resurrect them, and give them the waters they need, too, but we'll see. Please let this game be over soon.

   

Time so far: 89 hours

 

Comments on Level 3 Spells

 

Chill. One of the many "puzzle solving" spells in the game, this one keeps you from dying of the heat in Furnace. I don't believe it has any other uses.

Curse. "Hampers subjects' abilities in combat," the manual promises. I played with it against goblins, ice trolls, and Hazard, and I didn't really notice any different. Combat doesn't last long enough for debuffing spells to be a priority.

      

I just cast "Curse" on the lead ice troll. Not that you can tell--making this a somewhat worthless screenshot.

    

Enchant Missiles. The magic bow is a reasonably powerful weapon. I haven't been prioritizing it, but perhaps that's to my detriment. If you did have a magic bow, this would be an extremely useful spell, especially coupled with the sixth-level spell "Create Missiles." On the other hand, you do find a lot of already-enchanted missiles in this game.

   

Columna's Intuition. This one is named after a mage in Moonshade, and according to the manual, it "identifies sources of possible danger by imbuing the source with radiant luminescence." It suggests that it's more effective "away from populated areas." I've never cast it before experimenting with it this session. It's theoretically somewhat useful, and it may have helped me with a couple of puzzles if I'd tried it earlier. "Source of possible danger" is not quite what it seems to identify, though. It makes certain features on the map sparkle, including some of the interactive altars and floor traps, but also random doorways and stairways. It makes the iron maiden with the hidden staircase sparkle in the Abandoned Outpost, for instance, and it outlines the hallway full of traps (with the parallel secret passage) in Skullcrusher. In Serpent's Fang, it lights up the ale keg that the secret button moves but not the secret button itself. I'll try to get in the habit of casting it in every room from now on. 

       

"Columna's Intuition" alerts me that there's something to find in the iron maiden.

      

Protect All. Casts the second-level "Protection" on the whole party. I may use it more often when I have a party again. Now that I don't have to worry about reagents, it can't really hurt.

Paralyze. I tried it three times this session, and it did nothing every single time. Maybe it only works on lesser foes. 

     

But who's lesser than a goblin?

      

Sleep. Puts a foe to sleep. Seems to work on everyone, so it's theoretically useful if you're fighting multiple enemies and you want to take one or more out of the equation. Blue potions and sleeping powder do the same thing, though, so I generally use those.

Translation. Another puzzle-solving spell, and a damned essential one unless you want to decipher 26 varieties of the letter "S" one-by-one when reading Ophidian scrolls. 

         

Enjoy deciphering that with the code key in the book.

      

Incidentally, how does spell point regeneration work in this game? I started looking into it for the first time, and I can't figure it out. I cast a spell that uses 6 points of mana, bringing me down to 17. I wait 30 seconds, look at my stat sheet expecting to see 18 or 19, but it's still 17. Another 30 seconds, still 17. Another 30 seconds--completely restored back to 23.