Star Trail: Road Warriors

In real life, maybe wait a few minutes before concluding that there's "no hunter or predator anywhere."

         

Based on comments from the first entry, I decided to start this game with the new characters I previously rolled. Thus, the next step was to see about my equipment and explore the starting town, Kvirasim, which unintentionally rhymes with the name of my Thorwalian and looks like it rhymes with the name of my warrior, Xamidimura, which the game abbreviates.

   

We start our explorations at the Lovely Meadow tavern, which probably offers more options than any other tavern in RPG history. The player first has to decide where to sit (at the bar—always my preference, at an empty table, or at an occupied table), then what to do there, including ordering food, ordering drinks, buying a round for the house, or performing feats of music or acrobatics for money. Add a little more complexity, and you could make an RPG set entirely within a bar.

      

Just like my first visit to a British pub.

      

I can't say I accomplished much. Talking to the bartender, Gilbert of Norburg, brought us to a full dialogue screen, but he had nothing to say about any of the keywords, and he ended the conversation after three of them. Most NPCs do this, making it all the more annoying that "Salamander Stone" and "Salamanderstones" appear as two separate options. We bought a round of drinks, which earned us some temporary good will but no intelligence. Toliman made back some of the money by doing somersaults or whatever. 

   

As we headed back into the world, I noted that the automap automatically labels commercial establishments, although apparently only if you've gone inside or faced the front door or something. Still, it's a nice feature. The player can write his own labels for other locations, including key NPCs. The detail of the automap meant that I didn't feel compelled to make my own map.

       

A shop labeled by the automap.

      

It was dark when we exited the tavern, and most businesses were closed, but I still made a circuit of the town and tried to enter each building. Some notes:

    

• Most houses are occupied by generic NPCs who dismiss you with comments like: "Go visit some inns and taverns and leave me alone!" or "Go look somewhere else." What I like is that the images of these NPCs depict them as confronting the party at the front door. The party is just knocking, not barging into their houses. 

• There were a couple of frames indicating uncompleted houses under construction.

• A harlot propositioned us randomly. We said no. 

• Fladim Peterman: "When Elves and Dwarves are fighting, there will be Orcs delightin.'" Sounds prophetic.

        

You're a poet, and you were not aware of this fact.

       

• Marje from Thorwal: Bring a net when you go into swamps. "You can catch all sorts of things in swamps."

• There was an inn run by Mariaka Windbreker. I didn't get anything out of her. I was going to stay the night, but the interface suggested that the rest periods were in 24-hour blocks, which would have left me no better than when I started, timewise.

• Daleone Moringdew, the healer, agreed to treat us, but "it'll cost you more if you still want to be treated at this late hour." Fortunately, we didn't need anything.

• Asgrim Kollberg: Suggests we hide out from the evil in the mountains.

• Eida Matjus: "Anyone who's allied with Rondra need fear no Orc in the long run." Rondra is the goddess of battle in Das Schwarze Auge setting.

      

That's quite a difference between the large screen image and the mini-portrait.

     

• Heralja Olafsen: "The Elven king will come to our aid. But will even his power be sufficient against these Orcs?" 

• Rumhild Rohalsdottir: Suggests we prepare for bad weather lest we get diseased by it. 

• Ingram Son of Utzlesch: "It's always better to spend the night in an inn than under the stars." Amen. I haven't been camping for a single night in my adult life and have no interest in doing so.  

    

We had to wait until morning for Jadwina Greenston's general store to open. Each character started the game with a blanket, a waterskin, and two ration packages. Gnomon (dwarf) had a prybar and a hammer. Remembering the "environmental simulation" aspects of the first game, we loaded up with additional rations, waterskins, oil, a key ring, a net, two coils of rope, a rope ladder, a mattock, charcoal, a few torches, a fishing hook, a shovel, a whetstone, writing utensils, and a grappling hook. 

       

Trying to plan for every contingency.

    

If there was an armory in town, I didn't find it. I was a bit disappointed, as I wanted to swap out some of the default weapons to better match the skills I had given each player. But finding no such options, we exited the town, which in this game you do by walking into a signpost.

    

Travel in Blade of Destiny was handled by selecting a destination from a menu, much like Curse of the Azure Bonds. In the sequel, the party moves across the landscape in segments, either by planning a route in advance or by handling it one segment at a time. The manual curiously makes this choice about gender: "Male characters do not need to [plan in advance] because they always insist they know where they're going." I think this is probably just a joke, but in a game that makes distinctions between "warriors" and "she-warriors," you never know. In any event, even though a woman leads my party, I did the stereotypical male thing and chose to do one segment at a time, even though you really don't have any choices: only one road leads out of Kvirasim.

       

Being a man, I simply commence marching.

       

No sooner had I pressed the direction for south than a special encounter game upon me: the sounds of fighting from "somewhere to the left of the road." We chose to investigate, and found a priestess of Rondra beset by five orcs. We had options to intervene (even though she explicitly did not ask for our help) or let her fight alone. We chose the former and soon found ourselves in our first battle.

     

The battle starts well enough.

       

Combat is mostly unchanged since Blade of Destiny. Both games use a turn-based system on a tactical grid, rotated 45 degrees and inclined, a perspective almost unique to British games until Arkania. Characters act in initiative order and can move, guard, attack, cast a spell, and change weapons. One significant improvement between the games is that missile attacks and spells no longer must be targeted along direct lines (which in Blade was impossible if another character stood in between). They work from anywhere.

    

Combat options (from a later battle).

      

I used the occasion to try out a couple of spells, like "Lightning" (which is not the lightning bolt of D&D but rather a blinding spell) and "Iron Rust." But the battle overall went mysteriously horribly. My warrior and Thorwalian, with the highest strength and highest scores in their chosen weapons (which they had equipped) couldn't seem to land an attack to (literally) save their lives. Gnomon the dwarf, meanwhile, did the most damage despite being equipped with an edged weapon (a mace; we'll talk about whether that should be an "edged" weapon later) and not his favored axe. Toliman the elf did respectably with his bow, until an orc decided to make him a target. 

   

Overall, my first battle ended in a full-party death, which is accompanied by a cute poem.

         

That is some nice artwork.

         

On a reload, I decided to see what the computer would do. The game has several different modes of computer-controlled battle. You can put individual party members under the computer's control, deciding as you do so whether they will use magic. You can also have the computer fight the entire battle in front of you, controlling every party member. Finally, you can have the computer engage in a kind of "quick combat" on a summary screen.

       

Options for computer control.

      

The computer prioritized different spells, including "Evil Eye" (turning one of the orcs to my side) and "Fulminctus" (an attack spell). It seemed to have more luck with melee attacks, so I'm not sure what I was doing wrong there. But Gnomon was still killed, a fact I didn't notice until after I had spent a good 20 minutes manually leveling my first two characters' skills. I killed everything and started over.

   

On the third attempt, I used the "computer combat" option, and it delivered a victory with no party members lost, although my warrior was at death's door. The only lesson I can take from that is that in the aggregate, my party should have done well, but my particular tactics just sucked. I'll try to get better. I've used auto-combat occasionally in Gold Box games when the outcome was inevitable, but using it too often feels like abdicating a responsibility. I might as well just let the computer play the whole game. (The issue becomes confusing with games that have scripts, like the Infinity Engine titles, but that's a problem for Future CRPG Addict.)

      

The "computer combat" option.

      

We tended to the priestess after the battle. Some god or supernatural entity spoke through her, noting that we had proved our courage but had little experience. "You would be going to your death," it said, "But we cannot allow this to happen to such upstanding heroes." The spirit then "loaned" some of its experience to us, enough to raise us to Level 3.  

     

Some gold would have been nice, too.

        

It would have been nice to save after the computer-controlled "victory" and then try it a few additional times the long way, but Star Trail follows its predecessor's policy of immediately leveling-up characters who have earned enough experience in the preceding combat. This means if you bollix something during the allocation of skill or spell points (which isn't hard to do when leveling six characters in a row), you either have to suck it up or kill the game and fight the battle again. I didn't feel like going through the leveling process twice, so I sucked it up and accepted the victory. It took me almost an hour to then allocate all the spell and skill points across six characters for two levels each.

      

That seems low, but I'm not going to fight the entire battle again just to get a better roll.

      

We kept marching south after the encounter. I was prompted to camp three times in a row, each time restoring a few hit points and spell points. The morning of the fourth day, we encountered a man laden with all kinds of weapons. His name was Iwain Basiliskslayer. He had a few things to say about elves (they've been driven into the Salamander Stones by orcs) and dwarves (they have little influence on the north), but nothing that explained his load of weapons.

         

I expected more from this encounter, especially given his name.

      

After the encounter, the game said we'd reached the next crossroads. The road continued southwest towards the city of Gashok, but there was a path to the south heading towards a river, which I took. A number of messages popped up indicating that my characters ate and drank; I guess if you don't feed them manually, they'll handle it automatically eventually. I was alarmed to find that our water skins were mostly empty already. I guess maybe I needed more than two each.

  

I played with some of the camp options, which include hunting (Toliman found some water and game) and foraging (Lyra found a few herbs). Lilii Borea treated Xamindimura's wounds. 

      

Isn't that cute?

     

The next day, we continued to follow the river. The game noted that we filled our waterskins, which is a nice touch of realism. Then, we were attacked by a dozen goblins, and I had my second chance at battle. This time, I experimented a bit more with spells. "Acceleratus" turns out to be a nice buffing spell, and "Evil Eye" (charm) works better here than it ever did in a Gold Box game. "Fulminictus," a damaging spell, is so effective that it's hard not to cast it exclusively, though it takes a lot of spell points. Anyway, goblins are a lot easier than orcs, and it wasn't long before I was mopping up the dregs. It felt good to win a battle legitimately. They dropped a bunch of sabres. I didn't lose many hit points, though almost all my magic was gone.

     

Towards the end of the goblin battle.

     

I continued following the river even though the map suggested it was going to dead-end in the mountains, and I might have to trek all the way back. Fortunately, an unmarked western path took us towards the road again.

   

After a few more days of rest—over a week on the road at this point—we came across a bear cub playing in a field. We had options to kill it for food, capture it to sell in town, or leave it alone. I left it alone. I wonder if these little encounters are location-specific or drawn from a random pool.

       

Which of you sociopaths would choose the first two options?

       

Toliman contracted a disease at some point (I didn't notice), but Lyra was able to heal it. Gnomon caught another disease getting his feet wet while crossing a brook, but Lyra was able to heal that, too. By now, I had rested about six nights since the goblin fight, and the characters were still recovering hit points and spell points from that fight. I'd better learn potions, and fast. 

       

A couple of my characters are a bit cuddlier than I would have desired. I guess we'll say that's Toliman and Lilii?

       

I had been hoping to find the so-called "Dwarven Pit" during my explorations; it's still possible it's in those mountains. There was an eastern path I didn't take. But by now, I was anxious just to get to the next town, rest up, and hopefully find some weapons and armor. By taking the river route, I think I missed some towns on the main road. The next big town on the map, at a major crossroads, was Gashok. 

   

A wounded antelope came bounding from the trees and collapsed dead in front of us. Thinking waste not, want not, we gutted it. This put us in battle with three forest lions. I blinded them with "Lightning" and did my best. I got through it, but my warrior fell unconscious and contracted some disease, and my druid suffered significant hit point loss. My spell points, never recovered from the last battle, were almost gone. Xamindimura lost 2 strength points from the disease, which I trust isn't permanent. The next night, Lyra was able to heal the disease (rabies). I hope we threw away that antelope meat.

       

Could armored warriors prevail against lions? Discuss.

       

A few more nights of this, and we finally reached Gashok, where we were "greeted" by a crossbow bolt, fired from an ambush, that halved Toliman's hit points. But overall, I was happy to be on safe ground again.

      

It's almost like we admire the guy who fired it.

     

This session reminded me that traveling between cities in the Arkania series is a frightful undertaking in which all kinds of horrible things can happen, and you'd better be prepared. I think I did all right with my equipment purchases overall, but I needed to bring greater quantities of food and water, and I need to learn about herbs and potions sooner rather than later.

   

Hopefully, someone in this town will know about that Dwarven Pit.

   

Time so far: 6 hours