Betrayal at Krondor: Completely Irrational

 

James, displaying a talent for extreme sarcasm.

      

At the end of the last entry, I expressed a desire to start wrapping up Betrayal at Krondor, and I was happy to see that the game agreed with me in the opening moments of Chapter VII: "The Long Ride." The action switches to Locklear, James, and Patrus, but they're not just outside Northwarden. They're all the way down in Dimwood Forest (and for some reason, it's the middle of the night). If I try to go north, I end up in endless battles with large groups of pirates and Moredhel spellcasters. At least, I assume they're endless. I can only survive a couple in a row, and none of the figures in the landscape seem to diminish.

I guess I won't be going this way.

      

(It's interesting how the game doesn't settle on just one way to signal "you can't go this way." Sometimes it does it with a text message, sometimes with a physical barrier, sometimes with a single impossible combat, and sometimes with a series of endless combats.) 

 

My explorations this session. Again, I didn't look at the online map until I finished the chapter.

 

      

This party lacks the spyglass, so I don't even attempt to explore off-road. I just follow the path. It winds southwest past a battle with two Moredhel and a spellcaster, then ends at a closed tavern called the Fife and Laurel. 

      

"If you are looking for something to eat, look literally anywhere on this map."

     

Lacking any road as a guide, we do what I usually do with open maps and work on exploring the perimeter first. I go north until I hit the mountainous border, then start working west. I go around a ridge into a little hollow in the northwest corner of the map, hit a river, follow the river far to the southeast until it ends in a point, then work my way northeast until I find a bridge. Along the way, we find:

    

• A fairy chest. Again, Patrus has to cast "Union" to understand it: "What goes down to the cellar with four legs but comes up with eight?" My first thought, no joke, is "my cat when it catches a mouse." MOUSER does turn out to be the answer. The chest has a sword, some armor, 177 gold, a dose of silverthorn antivenom (which is good because everyone on this map seems to have poison), and two doses of silverthorn venom.

• A group of four fairy chests. I think I'm done typing out the riddles. I'm sure they're on spoiler sites. I get them all. None of the treasures are life-changing. 

    

The moment I kind of got sick of fairy chests.

   

• Various non-fairy chests or holes with minor treasures.

• A battle with a rusalka.  

• Several dead deer (or something) caught in a trap, from which we are able to obtain rations.

• 33 rations in a tree stump. What's with this game and rations lately?

• Three Moredhel and two spellcasters, who killed me on the first attempt--this party sucks. James misses most of his attacks and Patrus takes 80% damage from every crossbow bolt. On a reload, Patrus gets off an "Evil Seek" that kills two of them, but he still takes a bolt to the chest and has to be nursed back to health with herbs and potions.

• A fairly complex trap. I haven't been describing those very well. They all involve the same elements: lines between pillars, cannons, hollow prisms, and solid prisms. Stepping through a line or in front of a cannon causes you to take massive damage. Pushing a solid prism in front of a cannon blocks it. Pushing a hollow prism in front of a cannon causes it to fire but doesn't block the shot. You have to figure out the right combination to get the cannons to shoot the pillars (sometimes), taking down the lines between them and/or blocking the cannons to get at least one character safely to the far side of the map. I get most of them; worst case, you take some damage just running to the other side, and you have to heal.

       

The solution here was to push the hollow prism in front of the left cannon, causing it to fire and deactivate the line between the two leftmost pillars, then push a solid prism in front of the same cannon, then walk through those pillars to freedom. Everything else is a distraction. Locklear doesn't have to escape his "trap" because only one character needs to make it to the other side.

     

• Two Moredhel spellcasters. They surprise us and manage to kill us all with "Fetters of Rime." On a reload, when James finally attacks first, he does 14 damage. 14. What has made him suddenly suck so bad? His statistics don't look any worse. Meanwhile, both fighters are whiffing 60% of their attacks, and Patrus manages to hit Locklear with a "Fetters" aimed at an enemy. In my third reload, not even poison on their blades and Fadamor's formula in their systems helps. I finally kill them on my fifth try by having Patrus exhaust himself with "Evil Seek" and then blast them with his Staff of Lightning. James and Locklear contribute almost nothing. When did my party members turn into the Three Stooges? Thank the gods I have plenty of healing items from the last chapter.

      

At one point along this journey—this becomes important later—while following the edge of a mountain ridge, we go into the ridge and come out the other side. It's an illusion. But we find nothing on the other side except the trap and the battle with Moredhel spellcasters described above.

    

Looking at a river junction from the peninsula.

     

We finally reach a bridge and cross a river, then have a chest blow up in our faces and have to reload. (Patrus has the spell that detects traps, but I . . . somehow miss it until later. It's too hard to explain.) We move south along the riverbank to another bridge, encountering two Moredhel warriors and two pirates on the way, but again the battle seems a lot tougher than it ought to be.

    

We come to a bridge guarded by goblins. James tries to bluff past them by pretending to be Quegian mercenaries sent by Delekhan to guard the rift machine, but they attack us since we don't have the password. There are six of them, and two immediately swarm Patrus, so he can't get off a spell. The others pelt us with poisoned quarrels. James soon goes down, since on this map enemies are doing more damage with quarrels than they do with melee weapons during the rest of the game. The only way we win is through Patrus's Staff of Lightning. I have to use up an entire stack of 24 restoratives to get James away from "near-death."

      

We cannot get a break.

     

We cross the bridge. I'll later determine that the river network divides the forest into four areas, and the southwest one, which I've just entered, is the largest, accounting for about 40% of the total map. I work my way northwest along the riverbank, around a couple of ridges, until the river ends in the northwest mountains. Along the way:

   

• Chests with more rations. Come on. What I really need—for the first time in this game—are buffing items.

• Three goblins. No major problems, but again I get poisoned. I'm down to three silverthorn antidotes.

• The game exploits my need for buffing items by luring me with two treasure chests that both explode, requiring another reload.

     

Some developer thought this was funny.

     

• A fairy chest has a "Grief of 1000 Night" scroll, some money, and 10 restoratives. An adjacent one has "The Unseen" spell, the "Mad God's Rage" spell, 4 doses of Naphtha, and 20 restoratives. Nice.

• Four Moredhel warriors and a spellcaster. Again, two of the warriors swarm Patrus, so I'm forced to take them out with melee attacks (which, as is par for the chapter, usually miss and hardly do any damage) and Patrus's Staff of Lightning, which has swiftly become the MVP of the chapter. When the battle ends, I only have 14 charges left, though. Patrus gets some Dragon Plate from the battle. 

     

I follow the mountains west and south, where we soon encounter the western road leading out of the forest, but again the exit is blocked by too many figures to fight. We follow the road east and stop by an abandoned house, where we find a wooden chest with 24 "uses." I try using it, and it sends us flying up above the house, levitating in the air! That's a cool mechanic that I wouldn't have expected from a game of this era, until I remember that the engine was based on a flight simulator. In any event, if we move or even turn while in the air, we just fall back to the ground again, so I'm not sure what I'm supposed to use it for. Scouting? That would only help if there was a way to look down while in the air.

      

The view from a mountaintop.

    

In a nearby tree hollow are 33 rations. You've got to be kidding me.

     

I give up.

      

Farther along the road, we meet 3 giant scorpions, and suddenly the characters don't suck so bad—James and Locklear kill the first two in one hit each—so perhaps the goblins and Moredhel on this map just have better weapons and armor. Two seconds later, we're attacked and slaughtered by 7 goblins, so my cockiness doesn't last long. It takes me three tries to kill them, and that's with Patrus and Locklear both knocked out and at near-death, so I waste a few more restoratives and then, since we have plenty of rations, rest until healed.

     

With the scorpions, the game makes it really hard to tell the square that they actually occupy.

      

The road soon comes to an end, just like the northern one did, so I return west to the mountains, follow the border south, then east until we hit the road coming from the south (again, blocked by numerous enemies). Along the way:

    

• Some dirt piles and fairy chests give us some miscellaneous treasures.

• Six goblins attack and cost me another silverthorn antidote. I become convinced that the reason these battles are so much harder is because of equipment. Almost everyone has blessed or poisoned swords, enchanted armor of the highest type (Dragon Plate), and magic arrows. What temple is blessing Moredhel swords, I'd like to know.

      

The loot on the body of a typical regular enemy in this area.

     

• I find 8 more silverthorn antidotes in a fairy chest, so I guess we're good.

• Near the southern road, a body with 5 rations next to a stump with 19 rations. The game is just screwing with me at this point.

• A house occupied by a sad man named Craig who says while exploring to the east, he ran into some kind of magic that weakened him and doubled his age. He needs his iron jaw trap back to be able to catch food to feed himself.

• A stump with 15 more rations.

     

A Moredhel NPC—the first NPC on the map so far—named Obkhar. He turns out to be one of the dissenters, Moredhel who oppose Delekhan, and he warns us about what we already know: that Delekhan is going to use the rift device to bring his army to the area and capture Sethanon. He says that we can find it "on a peninsula where the rivers meet, accessible only by passing through the illusion of a mountain created by the Six." We've been there! It was the first place we visited! I'm pretty sure there was no rift device.

     

This is literally the only character in the game who looks halfway decent.

   

Anyway, Obkhar says that the rift gate can be disrupted by throwing something made from Waani, a foreign wood, through the gate. If anyone would have any Waani, he says, it would be the commander of the rear guard, Moraeulf, who is preparing his troops "near the southern tip of this wood." James suggests that we pose as Quegians—is that his only play?

   

I'm not sure what he means by "southern tip," as we're in the southern part of the map and there isn't really a "tip," but we continue east along the southern border, kill three Moredhel warriors, and then run into Moraeulf almost immediately. He's not even surrounded by any other Moredhel, just hanging out by himself near a hill. James puts his plan into motion, claiming that we're Quegians, recently ambushed, having come from the rift gate, where the mages in charge need "one of the parts they had stored away." He told us that it's hidden in a box in the southwest corner of the woods, with the password VICTORY.

    

What a moron.

      

The game gives us no option to kill him, so we head back to the southwest, looking for any chests that we missed. We find it near two fairy chests we already opened. It seems impossible we missed it before, so I suspect it didn't spawn until we talked to Moraeulf. 

   

The chest has 98 rations. And a note. It's signed by Phillip of the Dimwood, who found the device and worried that someone would steal it, so he brought it to his house to the north.

    

Nothing like telling the enemy exactly where they can find you.

      

The "house to the north" is guarded by 7 goblins, who we defeat mostly with "Evil Seek."

     

Aftermath.

   

Squire Phillip runs out after our victory. He appears to be a member of Arutha's military, and he begs us to aid in the fight, "whether you've sworn an oath to the secret garrison at Sethanon or not." When James expresses confusion, instead of saying, "oops, I shouldn't have said that," Phillip presses on: "Has [Arutha] ever explained to you why there is an absolute ban on visitation to Sethanon? Can you recall any other occasion in which Prince Arutha or King Lyam have forbidden people to visit battle sites?" But he doesn't disclose the final mystery, just says that he needs to get a message to the garrison. He also knows Craig and recommends that we stay away from the eastern woods until some scouts can find out what's happening. Before we leave, he gives us something made of Waani, which the game says is a metal rather than a wood. 

    

And for some reason a mushroom.

     

The house that Phillip occupied has—you guessed it—84 rations, along with lots of arrows, healing powders, restoratives, silverthorn poison and antidotes, plus a shovel, a hammer, and some bow strings. Clearly, the game wants us to be prepared for what's next.

    

Crossing through the illusory mountain range.

      

At this point, we've explored virtually nothing of the eastern half of the map, but that's the type of thing I worry about with games I haven't been playing for half a year already. Instead, I retrace my steps back across the two bridges, through the illusory mountain barrier, and to the peninsula I already visited. I prepare myself for battle with buffing items, but there's nobody there. Apparently, the two spellcasters who gave me so much trouble earlier in the session were the final battle. Well, at least it was hard.

       

The "rift device."

     

The "rift device" turns out to be two stubby stakes with globes on top. It's possible it was here before and I just overlooked it. We walk up and click on it to activate it. The end-of-chapter narration takes over from here.

   

We toss the Waani through the posts, which causes an energy storm to burst out of the machine, creating a vortex that pulls in everything.

    

I know it's supposed to be serious, but I guffawed a bit here.

This actor did a decent job, I have to say.

         

Locklear and James grab onto a tree, but Patrus isn't near anything he can grab. He gets sucked through a red gateway. Afterwards, for reasons I don't quite understand, Locklear shouts, "Spellweavers!" The end. I'm not sure if something went horribly wrong or horribly right.

      

Whatever that means.

    

We'll pick up Chapter VIII: "Of Lands Afar" next time. In the meantime, you can tell me everything I missed on the east side of the map. Also, I'm curious how many of these things I might have encountered had I visited the forest in an earlier chapter.

    

Time so far: 65 hours