Daemonsgate: The Legend of Yelda

The next phase of the quest.

    

I start this session in the ruined city of Tan-Eldorith, looking for the research notes belonging to Dorovan, the sorcerer who opened the titular daemonsgate. He was trying to figure out how to teleport across distances, but his experiments were sabotaged by the Pilots' Guild, which wanted to maintain their monopoly on teleportation-based travel. Said sabotage caused demons to flood into the world and destroy the cities of Elsopea, including the Pilots' Guild, so I hope they feel it was worth it.

      

As I load, the party is outside the city. I must have escaped to rest after the last session; it's not like there are any inns in the demon-infested ruins. Every time I re-enter, I have to fight several battles with demon guards. They look enormous and intimidating when I approach them, but they're not too hard in battle. However, all battles sap fatigue, and if the battles go poorly, I might start getting messages that the party is tired and needs to rest almost immediately, requiring me to head back outside again.

    

The large city is surrounded by a high (intact) wall, and the only way to penetrate is through a destroyed gate to the south. Like most cities in the game, it is annoyingly large. I mean, I can't fault it for realism. Imagine being told that you need to collect some "research notes" from an unnamed building in Manhattan. It would take a long time to search them all. It just doesn't necessarily make for a fun game.

           

        

Most of the buildings here are obviously destroyed from the outside. The intact ones are ransacked on the inside or have their doors fused shut. Some buildings have been converted to barracks and are full of beds, but we cannot rest there. Demon patrols are everywhere. It gets old constantly leaving the city to rest, so I end up saving near the middle of the city, exploring, and reloading when I don't find anything.

    

Eventually, in the northwest quadrant (but not the corner), I find a building that was "once the center for the study of the magikal arts," but now "home to foul daemons and other filth." Insider are a number of pentagrams drawn on the ground, a couple of them occupied by huge demons. After killing one of them, something like a book is revealed beneath where he stood, and I snap it up: Dorovan's Notes.

         

This guy is standing on the quest item. He was easier than he looks.

       

I spent a lot of time looking for the Pilots' Guild building that will supposedly let me teleport out of here, but I don't find anything. I'd love to know where it was supposed to be—maybe in a different Elsopean city? The closest thing I find is a central building with a "plinth upon which the city's energy gem sat," but I don't find the gem, and there's no obvious sign of a teleportation mechanism.

          

Kudos for the grammatically accurate sentence.

        

Thus, I reluctantly leave the city and settle in for the long track back to the northern end of the map. It takes about 45 minutes of real time to walk all the way up there, crossing rivers, camping when we get tired, fighting random battles, meeting random NPCs, and so forth. We enter Dryleaf, go to the tavern, pay Captain East to take us to Joruli Point, enter that city, find the place where Alathon was staying . . . only to be handed a note by a maid. Alathon has moved on to Trade Town, the city north of Dryleaf.

        

Growling at having wasted 300 gold in passage for this information, we return to the mainland and walk north to Trade Town. Alathon is in the bar, and it takes me a while to figure out how to hand him the notes. It's the same set of commands as if you want to trade items among party members; as long as you're standing near NPCs, you get their portraits in the interface after you cycle through all the party.

           

Giving an item to an NPC.

       

"This is a good start," Alathon says, dashing my hopes of a quick game. "But I will need time to peruse the notes, time that the civilized kingdom does not have." He goes on to suggest that while he tries to figure out how to close the gate, we at least stop more daemons from joining the existing horde. The Kzzir, the ancient lizard-like people who were the first inhabitants of Hestor, built a barrier during their time that confined the daemons to Elsopea. If I want to activate it, I need to find the old Kzzir city of Yelda.

    

I'm not sure that your reaction sufficiently acknowledges that we just traversed the entire continent and back.

        

True to its name, Trade Town has a bunch of shops. There, I soon discover that most of the stuff I looted from the daemons in Elsopea has no value. No one wants to buy Doomblades, Daemon Axes, or Darkness Amulets. But I did make enough gold during my travels to upgrade everyone's armor to plate (the best I've found so far). I also sell about half of the reagents I've accumulated because I haven't found any recipes that use them. The manual only lists three potion recipes, and none of them use the reagents (e.g., blackroot, blackheart, lightning seed, diamond dust) that I've been finding.

     

The obvious place to go to learn about the location of Yelda is back to Joruli Point. I resist the idea for a while because I just came from there, but when I can't find any responses to "Yelda" in Trade Town or Dryleaf, I once again pay for passage. It pays off. Several scholars have something to say about it, though most of them just think that it's a legend. They tell me that Roberto Zildir, a scholar in Vorsai, has studied the Kzzir and might know something about the city. 

   

What do you suppose has to happen for someone to get the nickname "fiveshanks"?

            

We head south to Vorsai, which we visited before, and find our way to the Library of Vorsai, supposedly founded by Zildir. We don't find Zildir, and no one seems to know anything about him, but a scholar named Udo in the library tells us that a book called Examinations of Old Races gave hints as to the location of Yelda. They don't have a copy in the library, but there may be one in the private collection of Ludovic Gruber. I previously visited Gruber's house and stole a book about daemonology. There were hints that Gruber had gotten himself killed trying to summon a daemon.

        

No one is home in Gruber's manor, and there are no books, but there is a trap door that I don't remember from my last visit. It leads to a basement laboratory with smashed bottles everywhere and a summoning circle on the floor.

      

              

We soon run into a "lab daemon" who attacks us alone. I assume it's going to be an easy battle, but it turns out that none of our weapons can wound it, so we have to flee. This—as is one of the oddities of the game—makes the enemy completely disappear, allowing us to enter the door he was presumably guarding. 

        

Notice that the game itself can't decide between "demon" and "daemon," so don't get on my case.

        

There, on the floor, we find the book we came seeking. It has a different title, The Eldar Races, but it's clearly the same book. The author, Helmut Cooltag, says that he discovered Yelda on a visit to The Stumps. The Stumps is a region of hills south of The Wall and east of Dryleaf. There's a city there called Cooltag's Rest that seems like as good a place as any to start.

    

Cooltag's Rest is a town centered around a gold mine. I've been here before, chasing rumors of a demon in the mine. I thought it was a side quest at the time, but it soon becomes clear that it's part of the main quest. The town is, as always, too large and difficult to explore. Nonetheless, I again have to hand it to the author for his world-building. This is believably a mining town. There are barracks for miners and their families. There are cart tracks crisscrossing the town, and buildings explicitly dedicated for mining equipment, storage of mining carts, repair of mining carts, and storage of gold dust. I didn't mention it before, but there was a similar situation in Dryleaf, which is supposed to be a logging town, and has rivers with logs floating along (well, not "floating" because there's no animation, but you get the idea). If only there were more to do in these places.

      

The author thought of everything.

         

Everyone in Cooltag's Rest is talking about the closure of the mine, which apparently happened after the miners broke through to the third level and unleashed something horrid. The only other gossip is that the mine foreman, Johan Schultzmonger, is having an affair with Francisca Whiplash, a local prostitute. As for Helmut Cooltag, he was lost in the mine while "on the verge of a great discovery." 

    

I find Johan Schultzmonger in his office where he insists that he can't give me the key to the mine and that Francisca Whiplash and he are: "Aah, business associates. Yes, associates." Nonetheless, I must have rattled him, because when we end the conversation, he slips me the key.

        

You probably should have negotiated terms first, man.

       

We spend about half an hour wandering three unnecessarily large levels, connected by an elevator that does not scream "elevator" at first glance. There is absolutely nothing to do on these levels except follow track after track and hit dead end after dead end. There aren't even any nuggets to pick up.

     

This is the supposed elevator.

       

Finally, we find an illusory wall on Level 3. Just on the other side, we destroy a couple groups of stone guardians. The walls in this section are lined with what looks like computer equipment, but it's hard to tell. Past a few more battles, we find a heavy door. "The hinges on this heavy door have seized up," the game says. "Also the cistern that counterweighed the opening mechanism is empty." Attempting to pick the door just breaks my thieves' tools.

          

I'm having trouble picturing the mechanism here.

        

We had seen and ignored some lubricant and lead weights in the mining supply buildings, so I have to head all the way back there, grab some of both, and return. The two items do the job, and the door opens.

    

The ancient library beyond has one book on the floor, the diary of Helmut Cooltag, who was trapped here and decided to translate as many of the books as possible before he ran out of supplies or the stone guardians killed him. The book mentions the barrier that Alathon talked about. Known as the "Matrix Configuration," the barrier involved a beam of energy connected through five temples built into something called "Skull Mountains." They have to be activated in a certain order, and the first is on the island of Scaeth. I check the map, and Scaeith, or "Sgaith" as the map has it, is an island off the coast to the northeast. The closest mainland cities are Helm and Pestur's Wake.

      

I think The Matrix: Configuration was one of the sequels.

           

Desperately hoping I've hit 2,500 words by now, I do a check and find that I'm 700 short. Sighing, I retrace my steps out of the mines and head east. You understand that as I travel across the world, I'm eliding every night spent in camp, trying to rest, having to fight random battles (which at this point pose no threat at all; my characters basically kill enemies the moment they come in contact with them), and reloading after the game crashes, which it does just about every time I forget to exit an NPC screen via the "Control" menu rather than hitting ESC (which works reliably on every other screen). 

 

I intend to try Helm first, but for some reason, the game has me keep running into dozens of identical-looking NPCs in the wilderness. I try asking one about SCAETH, and he suggests that the way to get there is from Pestur's Wake. I thus head for the more northern city.

       

A random wilderness NPC.

        

You're sick of me saying this, but again Pestur's Wake is an obscenely large city with multiple walled keeps surrounded by pointless expanses of pavement and grassland. A large open-air market has a bunch of merchants who seem to sell one thing each. It takes us forever to find an inn that we desperately need, and once we find it, we discover that for some reason the "Buy/Sell" menu won't activate, so we can't stay there. 

      

Again, some fun world-building that's mostly wasted.

        

There are a number of shops, a mercenary guild, and a town hall. In the latter, we find Councilor Pestur, the ruler of the town, but he has nothing to offer. NPCs keep telling me that Scaeth is to the east but not how to get there. Practically every other NPC in town, when asked about themselves, says, "I am the master of this guild." I tell you, I'm not a fan of the proliferation of quest markers in modern games, but this is an RPG that needs them.

        

We are not in a guild. Maybe in this city, every person is her own guild?

             

Anyway, word count or no, I'm out of things to talk about. I can't find any leads in Pestur's Gate, so I'll try Helm next, unless I just abandon the game. I've already verified that the Internet does not need me to document its ending, and it's just starting to feel like a real slog.

       

Time so far: 25 hours