The Delay Extends

This blog will return to its regular schedule on Monday, 20 October. Patreon billing has been canceled for October and November.

See you soon,

Chet 

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." Inside 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 

 

Ishar 2: Messengers of Doom: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

Dr. Doom cameos to set up the next game.

         

Ishar 2: Messengers of Doom

France

Silmarils (developer and publisher)
Released 1993 for DOS, Amiga, and Atari ST; 1994 for Macintosh 

Date Started: 28 July 2025  

Date Ended: 4 September 2025

Total Hours: 20

Difficulty: Easy-Moderate (2.5/5)
Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)

      

Here I go for the second time in a row, trying to reconstruct what happened in a game I played weeks ago. My first screenshot shows the party in a richly-decorated room, taking something off a table. The best I can figure, this is the commander-in-chief's office, which we opened with the key that we got from Zeldy's neck. I believe the item that we're taking is an air amulet stolen from the temple on Zach's Island. No . . . wait. I guess we're taking an idol stolen from the temple, which we then returned to the temple, for which we were rewarded with the air amulet. Forgive me if I have something messed up there.

         

I never got to kill the guard captain. We saved the world but didn't solve the corruption of Zach's Island.

        

My next note is: "Tossed $40,000 worth of evening clothes in the trash." This seems to be about the Blue Velvet club. The first time we visited, we were arrested and tossed in prison, an event that simply repeated when we visited again. There's a hint somewhere in one of the taverns that the club expects you to show up dressed to the nines and wearing pendants, which was supposed to be a clue to spend $8,000 each on five sets of evening wear from one of the shops in town. I don't think I figured this out for myself. I wrote down that there were two places in which I used a walkthrough, and I'm pretty sure this is one of them.

         

Zuburan dons some fancy clothes.

     

Our attire let us join the party, which apparently led us to a sad old man named Olbar who gave us the map to the final island—his island, as he was one of the original companions in Crystals of Arborea. Only he didn't "give" us the map; he put it on the table for us to take. This is different from all of the other maps in the game, which led us to leave the bar thinking we'd received the map, throw away $40,000 worth of clothing, realize later that we didn't have the map, and have to re-buy the clothing and re-visit the club.

        

Look at that goblin gettin' all funky.

      

Before visiting the new island, we returned to Akeer's Island, as I felt that the amulet was the key to getting past the invulnerable air spirit. It was; the creature simply wasn't there. We fought our way through skeletons and mummies and some kind of lion-headed beast ("Paralyze" worked very well on him) and ultimately made our way to a series of prison cells.

        

Nice skirt, Simba.

     

A girl named Grimzel was in one of them. "Take me back to my father," she ordered. To get her into the party, I had to dump Yornh, the priest, which fortunately everyone else was cool with. Grimzel had pretty miserable statistics, but her spells at least replicated what I lost in Yornh (which didn't make sense to me, as she was a scholar, not a priest, but even as she leveled, she never gained the other spells that my scholar gained). She couldn't wear or wield anything useful, and I didn't really bother to equip her. For the rest of the game, I kept her in the back and just had her heal other characters.

        

I just now noticed that she's blind.

       

It took me forever to find a secret door that had to be opened with a button—a mechanic the game does not introduce until this point. A puzzle involved using the skulls we'd been finding to weigh down platters suspended from the ceiling by chains. We had to fight a guard dressed in blue (again, "Paralyze" was a god-send). I believe he was guarding a room with the last glass-encased bone belonging to Grimzel's father.

     

Bluer than velvet were his eyes . . .

      

We returned to Jon's Island, moving fast and frequently healing to avoid having to buy furs again. Yes, I had also thrown away those clothes, even though I should have realized I'd have to return. We put the bones on the five pillars, and with a resounding "Dwilgelindildong!," the druid Grimz was standing before us.

     

I hope the order doesn't matter.

      

I now had to make another space in my party. I tried expelling Grimzel, but Grimz wouldn't join without her. (And to make a full confession, none of my party members would countenance her expulsion, so I had to murder her just to see if Grimz would join without her.) Thus, with reluctance I gave up Karorn, my only good warrior after Zubaran. There was no way I was giving up Eliandr or Khalin's spells. I was way over-relying on "Change of Timescale" by this point. 

   

Grimz was about as useless as his daughter. He also promptly went into the back rank. He couldn't equip or carry anything, and he only came with four spells. Fortunately, one of them was "Fireproofing," which turned out to be vital for the endgame. I believe Grimz is the only druid character, and thus the only character with this spell. Otherwise, the player could skip a decent part of the game.

         

Grimz is smart but nothing else.

       

After we revisited the Blue Velvet club and properly got the map, we set sail for Olbar's Island. The only landing point immediately took us into the final dungeon, where the first foe was some kind of fire elemental, capable of blasting most of us to smithereens without "Fireproofing" refreshed every minute or so. Even with the spell active, he took a long time to kill. Only Zubaran and his Living Sword +20 were capable of doing any serious damage.

     

I haven't figured out the spell yet.

        

Not long after the fire elemental, we had to repeat the process with a dragon. I couldn't get the timing right on how often I needed to cast "Fireproofing," so I just ducked out of combat and saved every so often, reloading if anyone died. I should mention that Zubaran didn't need "Fireproofing," as he had the shield that Griml had enchanted. I started to wonder if a single character with that shield could just solo the game and skip a ton of content that involved finding the various pieces of Grimz. The problem is that unless you were prepared to return to Zach's Island a lot to rest and heal, you'd need a magician to cast "Change of Timescale" or at least someone to cast "Heal." Maybe the knight could do it. I don't think the magician, who can wield a shield, could do it on her own, as she can't wield a weapon powerful enough to do any damage to the late-game enemies in melee combat. It's possible I'm missing something, though. Could that "Invulnerability" potion substitute for "Fireproofing?" I never tried it and have no idea how long it lasts.

          

This dragon looks very uncomfortable.

       

We fought through skeletons, mummies, liches, some kind of crone with horse legs, and more lion-ogres, picking up piles of cash that we wouldn't spend. We had to find a few more secret doors and trigger several pressure plates to open the way forward. Finally, we made it to the door outside Shandar's chambers. Here, again, I needed a walkthrough. To open the door, I had to click on it with the parrot, which we had purchased ages ago. I think the rationale is that we had previously come upon an unnamed sorcerer practicing some kind of password, and the idea was that the parrot repeated the password. Why one of us couldn't have repeated the password, I don't have any idea, particularly since it's the same mysterious goofy word that I've been making fun of for half the game.

         

Is it possible that this word doesn't sound as idiotic in French?

             

With the baboon, mouse, and man-eating plant still unused in our packs (do any of them do anything?), we entered the final chambers. Shandar was a bit of a pushover, although I did have to keep "Global Psychic Protection" and "Fireproofing" going constantly. I nailed him with a bunch of offensive spells, moved in, and just had Zubaran hammer him until he died. He was capable of casting "Inversion," so I had to be careful that Zubaran wasn't hitting other party members instead of Shandar. I think this is how I lost Grimz at some point, but I didn't really care, since the final cut scene took over as soon as Shandar lost his last hit point.

     

Shandar hits us with a spell.

     

The unsatisfying endgame showed the fortress of Ishar from the outside as day transitioned to night. There was an absolutely pathetic volley of like three fireworks, barely visible. As the words "The End" appeared, an ominous cloaked figure wandered into the frame, his gaze fixed on the fortress. Or maybe he was just watching the fireworks.

 

This is the extent of the "fireworks."

       

The GIMLET is not going to be great for this one. I really didn't like anything about it except the graphics. I found the difficulty extremely unbalanced (admittedly, I contributed to that by over-grinding at one point) and the puzzles a bit too obscure.

       

The text and dialogue were either unnecessarily obtuse or poorly translated. For instance, if you try to enter the club before 20:00 or any of the shops after the same hour, a message comes up that says, "Shut up over there!!! Haven't you seen the time!?" I don't know what it says in the original French, but why couldn't it just say, "We're closed!"? "I think this place is bewitched" isn't really the clue that you need to cast "Exorcism." (Oh, yeah, we had to do that once in Shandar's place.) Did the translators not know the word "cursed," or were they trying to make it harder for the player? I have the same question about the "Ent Alarm" potion. There are countless such examples.

     

We were supposed to get from this that he was practicing a password.

      

Let's give it a go:

     

• 3 points for the game world. There's a bit of lore, but most of it is derivative of Tolkien or unnecessarily vague. Early in the game, I didn't really understand what the story was about. By the end, I did, but I still found it incompetently told, mostly through sparse, poorly-translated text.

• 3 points for character creation and development. I rather like the idea of selecting party members from NPCs, but the game ruins its own ideas here by failing to fully develop them. The "voting" system is just silly, and I didn't find any consequences whatsoever from the party affinity score. There's no point in having good and evil characters when there are no role-playing choices in the game. Character development is mostly important for the acquisition of spells.

• 3 points for NPC interaction. Most of the NPCs in the game offer a couple of lines of hints. The ones occupying the streets of the cities have no purpose whatsoever, and I later learned that they can simply be slaughtered with no consequences. I liked that you could have NPCs join the party.

• 4 points for encounters and foes. I never like games that don't name their enemies. The foes that the game offers have a decent number of strengths and weaknesses that require mostly spell solutions. I give a couple of points for the puzzles. I found a couple of them too obtuse, but a few were well-clued by NPC dialogue if I paid attention, and I always like when Dungeon Master descendants go beyond purely mechanical puzzles like levers and pressure plates.

     

The "skull puzzle" on Akeer's Island.

         

• 3 points for magic and combat. The game messes up its Dungeon Master roots by making the "cool down" period so short that you really just need one character to repeatedly attack. That leaves all tactics associated with spells, and I admit that the game offers a decent variety of these, requiring the player to carefully experiment to find the right tactics. The grid for assigning positions is unnecessarily complicated (or, to look at it another way, doesn't use its full potential). It really only matters whether the character is in the front rank or not.

        

Some of the enemies in Shandar's place. Note that I have all the spell panels open.

          

• 4 points for equipment. The system is all right. You have a satisfying number of slots among five characters, and it's pretty easy to tell what's best via cost and the name of the item. The reagent and potion system could have been better developed, for instance by allowing the player to mix potions before he needs them.

• 4 points for the economy. I can't complain that it runs out of utility. You need money for equipment, food, lodging, and even certain plot points. I ended the game well before equipping my party with all of the best stuff. But it's somewhat absurd that the only respawning enemies who drop gold are found on Zach's Island in just a couple locations, and it's ridiculous that you cannot sell items.

       

I could have spent a lot more time in here.

       

• 2 points for a main quest. I don't really see any side quests. There are a couple of ways to solve some of the puzzles, and I give credit for that in "Encounters and Foes," but there are no real role-playing choices to make in the quest.

• 5 points for graphics, sound, and interface. It gets most of that for the graphics, which offer more detail and artistic quality than 90% of the games in its era. However, looking over my entries for the first Ishar, I almost prefer its graphics for monsters. They were far more straightforward and less stylized. As for sound effects, it has a few, mostly in combat, nothing worth getting excited about. I do, however, give it some extra credit for its use of ambient sound, which we still aren't seeing in the average game. I was not a fan of the mouse-driven interface (it has some keyboard backups, but not many).

        

I love that Shandar took the time to decorate his dungeon with stained-glass windows of himself.

        

• 5 points for gameplay. I give it some credit for some nonlinearity, a small amount of replayability (trying different party members), a modest difficulty, and a short playing time.

   

That gives us a final score of 36. In years past, I would have said that it was on the cusp of what I call "Recommended," but as we get deeper into the 1990s, I think that the "Recommended" threshold has to be raised. I can't find the entry where I offered a more complicated formula, but it was something like the game year minus 1952, which would put the "Recommended" threshold at about 35 for 1987, but more like 41 for 1993.

     

I ranked the original Ishar at 38, which goes with my memory that I liked it a bit better, although the differences in specific GIMLET categories are slight enough that I may have just been in a better mood on that day in 2020.

    

I still don't know how we were "messengers of doom."

      

If MobyGames and Wikipedia are to be believed, Ishar 2 never had a North American release, which explains why Computer Gaming World never got to it. The magazine did offer a preview, in a larger article about European games, in the January 1994 issue. Calling the two previous titles "pretty grim" and "very continental in approach," it didn't predict good things from Messengers of Doom. MobyGames's round-up of reviews shows a lot of them, ranging from 54% in the German Power Play to 93% in the English CU Amiga. The average is about 80%, but wow is there a bifurcation, with almost all the German reviews below that mean and almost all of the English ones above it. The English reviews, particularly the Amiga ones, are predictably in love with the graphics ("among the most breathtaking seen on the Amiga" says CU Amiga), which I've already agreed with, but they're not, you know, everything, particularly when it comes to RPGs. The German ones are more in line with my own feelings, still praising the graphics but noting weaknesses in the gameplay and story. The one French review on the site, from the December 1993 Tilt, weighs in at exactly 80%, which I find refreshingly non-jingoistic. 

    

A modest review in the July 1993 The One (86%) has an important insight: "It's still very easy to lose the thread of the plot and end up wandering around without a clue as to what you're meant to be doing." This is exactly what I mean by the relative incompetence of the storytelling and game world.  

    

I put Ishar 3 on the 1994 game list, I guess mostly because it seemed silly to play two games in a trilogy and not the third, but I can't say I'm looking forward to more warm tears and ding-dong-dings. YouTube videos suggest that it has the same engine as Ishar 2. It appears to let you both import and create party members. The graphics seem mostly as nice as ever, but reviews appear to be even worse than for Ishar 2.

     

It's nice to have won a game. It's been a couple of months. I'm going to need you to be patient for just a bit longer, though. One calamity after another has rolled right into the busy opening month of the fall semester, and as you can see from the dates on this entry, I've been having trouble finding time to write about game sessions that have already taken place, let alone playing new games. Things always improve by Columbus Day. 

Daemonsgate: Miles to Go Before We Sleep

This session involved a lot of travel.

          

I deleted the temporary announcement, but hopefully you all saw the reason I haven't posted in over a week. I went to a conference and forgot to bring the AC adapter for my laptop. "One of my AC adapters," I should say, as I keep one at home and one at work, given that it weighs about seven pounds. Because I don't have to take it back and forth each day, I got accustomed to never having to pack it at all. The upshot is that I now have a third adapter, which will remain permanently in my suitcase. Now that I own more than $200 in adapters, I'll probably have to ensure that I get another computer that uses them when I'm ready to replace this Alienware monstrosity.

      

This entry may be a little clinical, as I'm reconstructing a session that took place nearly two weeks ago. I'll do my best.

     

Travels this session.

         

An army of demons has come boiling out of the southern nation of Elsopea and has surrounded the free city of Tormis. The captain of the guard of Tormis (my lead character, Gustavus) was charged with sneaking out of the city and finding his way to the city of Atteia, where it is rumored that an Elsopean refugee has arrived. The thinking is apparently that this refugee might know something about the source of the demon horde and how to stop them.

    

We learned that the refugee, Alathon, was being held by the city's dictator, Hellast. Working with a revolutionary group, we infiltrated Hellast's palace and killed him. Alathon told us to meet him in Joruli Point and took off. We determined we could only reach Joruli point via a ferry from Dryleaf. The last session ended with us heading there.

          

From a later point in the game, daemons could be either of those things.

          

We were attacked as soon as we entered, by a party led by an assassin named Flea. "You have troubled my master for too long!" he screamed as he attacked. Thanks to all the buffing we did last session, we made short work of them. On Flea's body, we found his orders, signed by "Warmaster Edric," the same person who had been corresponding with Hellast. Edric told Flea that Gustavus had become "a thorn in the side of our mutual cause" and that he should assassinate both Gustavus and Alathon. Later, we were attacked by someone named Brutus who said that, "Flea was weak and failed in his task. I will not." He was incorrect.

     

As usual, Dryleaf had a lot of interesting-sounding buildings, some of which we could enter, some of which we couldn't, none of which seemed to have anything interesting. We stopped by an herb shop but balked at the costs of the herbs. I guess if I really want to explore herb lore, I'll have a perpetual money sink.

    

That's as much as a suit of armor.

        

An NPC named Hank the Tall praised our killing of Hellast and offered to join the party, but I didn't feel like shuffling items around to kick someone out. Plus, I'd spent all that time training them. Hank ended up chasing us all around town and even outside of town, begging to join the group. That made me more suspicious of him and strengthened my resolve to leave him behind. I can't think of any other game that allows NPCs to transition between towns and wilderness like this, though.

        

Boundaries, dude.

       

The people talked about a leader named Ragnik, who recently departed on a voyage to discover a "western passage to the eastlands." They anticipate that if he's successful, it will greatly improve Dryleaf's economy and status among the civilized kingdoms. They also mentioned rumors that "the mines at Cooltags Rest have been closed due to a huge daemon running free around the deep seams." 

      

We found a ship captain named East who agreed to take us to Joruli Point, but I felt that I had to check out Cooltags Rest first. That seemed like a side quest. Side quests are so important to my conception of a good RPG that I figured I couldn't let a hint of one go without at least investigating.  

     

Does "150 gold" look like interactable text to you?

        

From the game map, we found Cooltags Rest and entered. The town was all set up as if it supported the side quest we'd been given. We found the house of Johan Schultsmonger, the manager of the mine. We found the building that stored mine safety equipment, a warehouse (with a locked door we couldn't open), lots of mine tracks, and NPCs who talked about the mine. We followed the tracks to the locked entrance which did not offer "Pick" and "Unlock" options like most doors. We couldn't find a key or anyone who explicitly asked us to clear out the demon.

       

Maybe there is no side quest. Maybe they've already dealt with it on their own.

         

I figure there's an equal chance of three possibilities:

       

• There was a key somewhere that I didn't find.
• The side quest was never finished.
• This is actually part of the main quest and will become relevant later. 

      

I reloaded from Dryleaf, a bit dispirited, and found Captain East again. There, I ran into another problem. I couldn't figure out how to agree to her price (150 gold pieces) and pay her. It turns out that you have to click the words "150 gold" in the dialogue. There's nothing that indicates that. 

          

A nice cut scene on the high seas.

      

We sailed to Joruli Point, a town of magicians and scholars. It consisted of several small islands bisected by canals and connected by bridges. We learned that sailors had reported that all of the cities of Elsopea have been reduced to smoking ruins and that Tormis isn't expected to hold out more than six months. Dean Juliene, ruler of the city and author of the lore section of the manual, gave us an Enchanted Sword and a Dragon's Eye herb. The description of the Enchanted Sword doesn't mention what the enchantment is, and I don't know how it rates against our existing Elemental Blades.

    

We found Alathon in one of the university buildings. In a series of text screens, he filled us in on the origin of the demon problem: His master, Dorovan, head of the Order of the Eye, was experimenting with dimensional travel, hoping to break the monopoly that the Pilots' Guild had on this form of magic. Agents of the Pilots' Guild sabotaged the experiment, causing Dorovan to accidentally open a Daemonsgate (take a shot!) into "the dimension to which Alkat was banished all those aeons ago."

     

Well, I'm standing in a hallway, the eight individuals who make up my party awkwardly fused into one form.

       

Alkat appears in the extensive lore section of the manual. He was the leader of a group of demonic beings who invaded Hestor from another plane when the land was still ruled by reptilian birds called Kzzir. The demons destroyed the Kzzir, took over the world, and their descendants became the progenitors of the Elsopean Empire. Infighting within the ruling houses led to the creation of an enchanted blade that banished Alkat to another plane. The Elsopean Empire later collapsed and humans, their former slaves, replaced them. Alathon believes that Alkat has returned.

     

Part of Alathon's story.

      

"The only hope for this land is to find a way to close the Daemonsgate," he said. He thinks he can accomplish this if he has his master's notes, "which lie in the smoking ruins of Tan-Eldorith," the old Elsopean capital. "If you journey first to the Pilots' Guild and activate their teleportation device," he offered, "you should be able to get straight in and out of Tan-Eldorith without too much trouble."

    

I didn't know what he meant by the latter point, but I assumed we'd have to reach Tan-Eldorith conventionally first. It was a long way to the south, and we still had the same problem where we got attacked nearly every time we tried to rest. I tried to stop at cities and towns along the way to use their inns, but half the time I couldn't find an inn in the vast cities. Even when I found one, it took me longer than simply trying to rest multiple times in the outdoors.

          

You do not want to get "desperately tired" in this game. Then you can't rest at all because you'll have no energy when you're attacked.

       

The problem with resting outdoors is that you have to do it twice—once to rest most of the party, and a second time to rest the guy who had to take watch the first time. If you want to accomplish anything else in camp (hunting, foraging, training, magic), you might have to add a third cycle. With about a 50/50 chance of getting attacked every time you try, the process gets annoying fast.

        

This is a bad idea. If enemies attack, they'll slaughter us.

       

A lot of the enemies that we met dropped expensive loot, including reagents (blackheart, diamond dust, lightning seed), gems, and weapons called Doomblades; again, I don't know how they compare to the Elemental Blades. 

     

Daemons carry Doomblades, which get their power from the imprisoned souls of other daemons. It's like daemons have no ethics at all.

      

At a stop in Vorsai, where we couldn't find an inn, we wandered into the house of a Ludovic Grueber and found a book that teaches the "Spirit Lore" skill. The manual doesn't mention this skill, but I assume it's the same thing as "Daemonology," which will let us make Doom Blades for ourselves.

             

Arion adds "Spirit Lore" to his list of skills.

      

After a long journey, we finally made it to Tan-Eldorith and started exploring its buildings. We got attacked at almost every turn by parties of daemons, but it's a measure of how much difference my training made that even they weren't much of a threat. I soon got lost in the complicated city, full of walls and guarded gates, and I ended this session having not found Dorovan's notes nor the Pilots' Guild portal that will hopefully hasten our return. I'll cover more on the city next time.

         

Time so far: 19 hours