Star Trail: Because It's There

 

This world really doesn't like elves.

      

Commenters on my last entry suggested that I should know where to go next from in-game hints. But that didn't change the fact that I didn't. With nothing more than the vague idea that dwarves were somewhere to the south in the enormous Finsterkamm range, and thus the "Dwarven Pits" must be nearby, we leave Gashok heading south. We're well-stocked with food and water, but none of the shops in town sold arrows, so my little green elf will have to fight with magic or get in melee range.

    

Two days into the trip, I can continue on the road to the southwest or go east or west along a river that originates in a mountain range. We head east, toward the head of the river. Unless I say otherwise, we take the game's recommendation to camp each evening, send someone out to find food and water (we fail often enough that we have to carry a lot with us), and send Lyra out to find herbs. We post two guards per night and fight anything that attacks.

       

This seems like a leading question.

       

In case it wasn't clear from earlier entries, simply surviving overland travel is a big part of the game. It was in Blade of Destiny, too, but there were more cities in that region, and the travel distances were shorter. In Star Trail, you could easily spend two weeks on the road between destinations. You have to be prepared for multiple hardships, including starvation, thirst, poison, disease, flooding, dangerous cliffs, and dense forests. I don't know if quicksand is a problem anywhere, but this is absolutely the type of game in which it would be. To deal with all of this, the player has to prepare the party as much as possible with equipment, spells, herbs, and healing skills. Thus, as we discussed in previous entries, my party is carrying rations, ropes, waterskins, sleeping bags, cutlery, nets, fishing hooks, tinder boxes, rope ladders, blankets, hammers, crowbars, grappling hooks, shovels, charcoal, writing utensils, and torches. This whole mechanic inevitably goes back to tabletop RPG gaming with its ropes, 10-foot poles, iron rations, and such. I doubt there's a direct connection, but I'm reminded a bit of Robert Clardy's Wilderness Campaign (1979) and its requirement that the party be prepared with every possible item for every possible eventuality. 

  

Here are some random encounters and troubles I had on the road during this session: 

     

• A forest gnome attacks in the night, strikes one character before I can react, and flees before I can engage.

• A druid of Travia asks to join our fire one night. He wants to make a soup with some herbs he found, and we let him. It turns out to be delicious, although it gives the party vivid dreams and for some reason reduces our strength for 72 hours. He's gone in the morning.

     

Even in retrospect, I don't know whether this was a good encounter or a bad one.

      

• We find a strange woman named Susan Heder sitting on the side of the road. We're curious about her, but the game has no basic "hello" in its dialogue options; you have to immediately start asking about FINSTERKOPPEN or SALAMANDER STONE or something. We try a few subjects, but she offers nothing on anything before she cuts the dialogue short, leaving us wondering what the encounter was all about.

• Mahasim's boots wear out, and he has to walk barefoot, which causes damage every day (though usually healed at night). 

     

That was a bit dramatic, Mahasim.

       

• Walking through a mountain pass, we have the option to "rope up" to prevent any individual from falling to his death. We take it. 

     

There doesn't really seem to be a downside.

        

• Random battles at night: tusk tigers, an orc patrol, harpies, and ogres. They go all right. I lose health and mana, but I generally regenerate what I've lost before the next battle. I'm saving an analysis of combat for when I've gained a few more levels.  

           

This orc battle goes relatively well.

        

I don't mind these encounters, but the frequency at which the party has to stop for the night, and the repetitiveness of the things I have to do each time, starts to annoy me. I would also note here that I have found two different world maps for the game, neither of which show the exact same territory, and neither of which show all of the territory in the game. I spend much of this session east of the edges of both maps. Furthermore, neither map shows all the roads. I spend a lot of time confused about where I am.

       

At the river's headwaters, I have choices to go northeast and south. I choose northeast, even though it takes me back in the direction I came from. I hit a crossroads with movement in all four cardinal directions. I go north for a bit, but when it becomes clear that if I continue in that direction, I'll be back in Gashok, I turn to the southeast and eventually enter the town of Reichsend, which unlike the other two towns I've visited is purely a menu town. All we can do is visit the Temple of Praios and the inn.

   

At the temple, Gordal Namir tells us the Finsterkamm range is full of evil, and Finsterkopp, the highest mountain, is the "center of all that is evil." The inn, the Pride of the Emperor, is run by Ilvina Endares. She says that Finsterkoppen is a town rather than a mountain, but she calls it a "stupid fairy tale." She gives us a couple of solid leads, though. She says we can ask about a dwarven mine in Nordhag, quite a bit to the south of Reichsend. When we ask about the Dwarven Pit, however, the specific dungeon we need, she directs us to some place called Hiltorp, "halfway down the road to Lowangen." We have a disgusting meal (something's crawling in it, the game says)  and spend the night.

          

Did you imagine that was helpful?

       

Even though I trust the Lowangen rumor more, I decide to loop there through Nordhag, mostly because it avoids backtracking, which I hate in both real life and RPGs. Even when I make a quick trip to the grocery store, I'm always looking to "make a loop out of it," sometimes at double the length. 

    

We're battered from an orc attack by the time we arrive at Nordhag. It's another menu town, with nothing but an inn (Gryphon's Fordian), run by a woman named Zuliana Saldek. She tells us that there are two roads across Finsterkamm, a well-traveled one that goes to Yrramis, south of Lowanden. The other goes more directly to Lowanden, but travelers have been avoiding it for some reason. Lowanden looks from the map like a big city, likely with a full set of services, and I'm starting to get low on rations and water. Moreover, she tells me that the pass to Lowanden goes past the dwarven town of Finsterkopp.

            

Later, in the mountain pass.

      

We take this less-traveled path, getting attacked by harpies at several points. Eventually, we reach the town and mountain of Finsterkopp. (Sometimes. Other times it's Finsterkopper and still other times, it's Finsterkoppen. I'm sure there's some German reason for the inconsistency.) As rumors had it, it's populated exclusively by dwarves. We make the rounds:

    

• We have to knock on most doors twice, once regularly, and once "with vigor." Most of the time, no one comes to the door no matter what. At several houses, old dwarves offer us their sheds for lodging. This turns out to be good, as there are no inns. But there are so many of these houses that it's frankly annoying.

     

If the game had offered a setting to "always knock with vigor," I could have shaved an hour off this entry.

      

• A random dwarf disparages Xamidimura's Sword of Artherion as "elvish work." 

     

Tough talk from a town that doesn't even sell weapons.

      

• Ogrim, son of Olgosch, runs a smithy. We have him repair Mahasim's sword, which involves leaving for a few hours.

• Blackbeard's Tavern. The bartender, the eponymous Blackbeard, gives us nothing. None of the other patrons want to speak to us. But Toliman earns a couple of gold pieces with his lute.

     

That's not bad considering how they feel about elves.

        

• The Red Earth Tavern, run by Dragoran, son of Denderan. He won't even talk to us. Despite the graphic showing a lot of other revelers, the game indicates there's no one else in the tavern.

 

A couple of guards block a tall passage leading to what I assume are the mines, possibly the Dwarven Pit I'm supposed to find. They won't let us pass because we have Toliman, an elf, in the party. I back off and try the "Camouflage" spell, which I was just reading about in the manual. Even though my best character (Toliman) has only a -3 skill with the spell, it works. It makes him look like a small child (the source of the bugged party portraits I talked about in the first entry) for 15 minutes. 

      

Great. Now we look like a party of traffickers.

     

We head back for the entry way, and now they have a problem with druids. We repeat the process on Lyra and finally make it through.

   

We enter a large, open, roofed area, which at first I think is a dungeon, particularly since the name is "Finsterkopp Pit," but it's just more town. There are another couple dozen houses, complete with the "knock vigorously" nonsense.

     

The graphics are kind of cool here.

       

This part of the town has a few more services, though:

   

• Arombolosch Ironarm, a smith. We don't need anything else fixed.

• The Hammer and Anvil tavern, run by Vothan Dengeler. Toliman makes a few silvers doing somersaults.

• Xagula, daughter of Xebrima, runs yet another smithy. 

• A general goods store (finally) run by Gundgrima. I'm able to restock my ration packages and buy a new pair of boots for Mahasim.

• A healer named Thoram, son of Cadrima.  

• A Temple of Ingerimm, where the high priest is Inradon Xermosch. I start to wonder if some kind of random combination of syllabus isn't responsible for all of the game's proper names. In response to DWARVEN PIT, he says: "We do not enter there. It's definitely not forbidden, you understand, but it is a holy place." This gives me a little hope that I'm in the right place.

       

I still don't know if this is where I want to be.

      

The area has a stairway descending deeper. Even though it still says "Finsterkopp Pit" when I arrive, I'm hoping it's the so-called Dwarven Pit. Unfortunately, I don't get very far. Lacking lockpicks or a key, we bash in the front door to the dungeon. We find ourselves in a square room with four braziers and a door locked solidly. The game tells us we'll need a key to open it. We have options to search the braziers or shift them out of place, but doing this with each of them only causes us to dirty our hands and jam our fingers.

     

Well, that seems pretty conclusive.

     

Having explored all we can of Finsterkopp for now, still not knowing if its "Pit" is the dungeon with the Serpent Stone, we leave town headed for our original destination of Lowangen. I figure there's probably a hint or a key there, maybe from the dwarf Ingramosch.

   

We backtrack to the main road. Two days into the journey, we're attacked by a large patrol of orcs. It does not go well. In contrast to the easier battles we've been enjoying lately, in this one, we seem to fumble every spell and miss every attack. They're gone on a reload, but as I look at the game map, I realize that Lowangen is farther away than I thought. Weeks, probably. I completely lose heart in the thought of all of those rote foraging and sleeping cycles, only to perhaps have to turn around and head back to where I came from. I end the session early.

       

The party is swarmed by orcs.

         

I still have a lot of game to go, but I have to tell you, I'm finding Star Trail boring. Weird and boring. Blade of Destiny had so much more vigor, with clearer direction (though still not very clear) and more interesting things between locations. I like some of the random encounters here, but so many are just baffling. What was that druid about? What was Susan Heder about? I also don't know why the authors decided to make Star Trail so spread out, to turn it into a hiking simulation, and to make key services so inconsistently found. I'm looking forward to seeing what dungeons are like, but not much else.

   

Time so far: 14 hours 

The Results Are In (Part 1)

 

Readers validated my preference.

         

I waited until I didn't get a response for 24 hours to analyze the results. Overall, I got 615 responses, which is about half of the unique visitors per day, but about two-thirds of unique visitors who stay for more than two minutes. That's not a bad response rate. Shame on the rest of you.

   

Here are some top-level results:

   

Game of the Year 

    

Betrayal at Krondor fans may have been vocal in the comments, but on the survey, it got fewer votes than "no opinion." The plurality went to Dark Sun, with 40% of total votes and 49% of those voting for one of the four nominees. The second-highest number of votes were from those who wanted me to award "Game of the Year" two years in a row to the Ultima Underworld series. I get the sentiment; the games are that ground-breaking.

       

Votes for "Game of the Year."

        

There were impassioned write-ins for Quest for Glory: Shadows of Darkness, Lands of Lore, Perihelion, Ultima VII, Part Two, and Unlimited Adventures. I agree these were all good games, but I think I covered why I felt they were not GOTY-worthy.

   

In the end, I'm going to go with my original inclination to give the award to Dark Sun. It is what I like most in a role-playing game: Lots of statistics, tactical combat, inventory upgrades, dialogue options, meaningful encounters, and a setting that fires the imagination. To get a perfect 100, a game just needs to do more of these things. 

 

Where You Come From 

 

Okay, mea culpa: I should not have conflated "where do you live?" with "where are you from?" Nor should I have conflated "country" with "nation" (man, are some people sensitive about that).

   

There were some surprises here. I figured at least half of my readership was from the United States, but it's only 38%. The second-highest number of readers are from Germany (13%); that article in Der Spiegel really paid off. The expected succession of English-speaking countries follows, with Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia all between 3% and 5%. Finland, Poland, Spain Austria, Italy, Brazil, Sweden, and France all contributed between 10 and 20 readers and 1-3% each. There's a very long tail of countries with less than 10 readers and less than 2% of total readership. On the entire continent of Africa, I have one reader in South Africa. I also have very little readership in Asia, aside from four in Japan, one in Singapore, one in Malaysia, and perhaps one in Türkiye depending on where he is.

         

I need billboards along the silk road.

            

Here's something that I thought was an oddity: Except for one reader from Peru who insisted on the grave [Ed. My error: the acute] over the "u," not a single reader rendered the name of their country in native form. That is, I didn't get a single Deutschland, Polska, or España, with or without the tilde. Now, I know that you all knew that you were responding to an American survey, but it makes me curious how often the natives of a country use exonyms even to themselves. In the United States, no American would ever think of his country as Los Estados Unidos unless he grew up speaking Spanish, nor would he say Les États-Unis in conversation with another American unless he was making some sort of affectation. I would bet that fewer than 5% of Americans are even aware of Měiguó, Yhdysvallat, or Bandaríkin, among many others. Is this the same in your country, or do Germans casually use "Germany" even to other Germans?

    

I remember saying this before in a random entry, but it has continually surprised me, in this era of personally-defined pronouns, person-first language, and land acknowledgements that some movement hasn't arisen to eliminate exonyms. Other than Türkiye, I've never even heard of a country that seems to care.

      

That's why I write my blog in Tennessee.

       

In the United States, I have readers in all states except Arkansas, Connecticut, Mississippi, North Dakota, and Rhode Island. The totals mostly follow population trends, with Texas and California at the highest (which is impressive, as I forgot to add it to the selection list for the first 25% of results). None of our territories are represented except for one reader in American Samoa. I have only one respondent each from the two states that matter most to me, Maine and Louisiana.

      

Sex

    

Well, there's no avoiding it: the CRPG Addict may as well be a frat house. At least 92% of readers are men. I have fewer women than those who didn't want to give their gender at all. I have almost as many readers who identify as non-binary than I have women.

    

This imbalance raises two possibilities. One is that my readership is simply reflective of the overall RPG gamer population. I went searching for statistics on the issue and found various sources that estimated the overall computer gaming population at about 50% women but the population of RPG players specifically closer to 18-25%. (I put this aside to research more later; I'm declining to cite sources because I don't want to get into a long argument about validity right now.) Either way, that's a lot more than the 3% who responded to my survey.

       

However you look at it, this blog is a sausage party.

       

I'd be interested in any follow-up comments (feel free to email directly) from women readers regarding their thoughts on the disparity. I feel like the commenting system successfully hides the commenter's sex (unless you're commenting with an account that includes your actual name), and in 16 years of doing this, I've never seen any gender-based comments between readers, certainly nothing that would rise to the level of harassment or "toxic masculinity" or whatever. I like to think my own writing is relatively free of anything that would turn away women specifically, but let me know if I'm fooling myself.

 

The relationship between player sex and chosen character is interesting. Of the 17 women who responded to my survey, 15 preferred to play a female character (one didn't care, and one preferred a male character). Male respondents, on the other hand, were 21% likely to prefer a female avatar, and another 34% were at least open to it (the remaining 44% preferred men). Non-binary respondents generally preferred "the opposite sex" (67%), which I don't quite know how to interpret. (The fault is mine, of course, for not leaving enough options on the question.)

 

Your Favorite RPGs

       

This one took a lot of data-cleaning, as I made it a free-text field. If you put two games, I counted them both, but if you put more than that, I just counted the first one. In the end, I'm pleased to say that Baldur's Gate was the clear winner with 38 votes, followed by its sequel with 37. Number three was also an Infinity Engine game: Planescape: Torment. The Top 10 list includes only one game that I've never played (the original Fallout) and otherwise aligns well with my own idea of the best RPGs.

        

Your favorite games.

       

The list is definitely biased towards older games; the only candidates in the last decade are Baldur's Gate 3 (10) and Disco Elysium (6). Having just finished Pillars of Eternity, I was surprised that I didn't get a single vote for it, although there is one for its sequel. I really enjoyed the first game, particularly the depth of its lore, its replayability, and its role-playing options. (I looked at a walkthrough when I was finished and discovered that I had missed three joinable NPCs.) I confess I didn't know half of what was happening in combat. 

 

     

Other Findings

    

• The average (mean and median) age of readers is 45, which makes sense given my content. 87% are between the ages of 37 and 56. Only 13% are at or above my own age of 53. I have no readers under the age of 19 and only one over the age of 68. I would like to hear from that 81-year-old reader. You would have already been an adult when the first commercial RPGs were released; how did you get into what was, at the time, a young person's hobby?

        

Our heavily-clustered age distribution.

       

• Most of my readers are long-time readers. Half of them started reading before 2015. The mode (71 readers) was 2012. 62 people (the third-highest total) have been with me since the first year. I gained only 14 new readers in 2024 and only 13 in 2025. I wonder if I should do something to ease new readers into the blog; comments are welcome there.

• Well over half of readers check in every 1-3 days, though they're divided by those who read everything (34%) and those who pick only the ones they care about (22%). I guess an awful lot of people are still getting the blog via RSS, which I should have asked about.

• Only 4 respondents use a translator to read the blog. For 52%, English is your first language, and for 47%, you read the blog in English anyway. 

• Not a lot of duplication on favorite entries. The highest-voted was 6, for my winning entry on Ultima VII: The Black Gate; another four voted for the "Summary and Rating." Fate: Gates of Dawn showed up a lot, but for different entries. 

• A third of respondents have never commented, and half commented only "very rarely." I enjoy my frequent visitors, but it's a sign of a healthy blog to have a diversity of comments. I encourage those of you who never or rarely post a comment to do so occasionally, if only to highlight something you agree with. No blogger can get enough of those.

• People overwhelmingly (74%) felt that my standard goal of one entry every 2.5 days was just fine. Part of me wants to hear more from the dozen or so respondents who think that goal is "far too little." You have time to read 2,500 words a day?

• Respondents were supportive of occasional guest entries, which corresponds well with my plan.

• Of respondents who even knew what I was talking about, 79% of them were perfectly okay with taking a filet mignon, putting it in a blender, and serving it as a shake. Well, technically, the question was about soft-serve ice cream, but it's basically the same thing. Here's a good article for you soft-serve lovers, by the way.

• 38% of my readers prefer sweat to sweaters. 

• Among my readership, I have 44 game developers and 7 game producers or executives. I assume we're just waiting for the ink to dry on those consulting contracts. 

• Most of my readers are non-religious of one type or another, to a far greater extent than population demographics would predict. I wonder if I've just scared away most of the believers with my ungodliness.

• I'm saving responses on virtue, ethics, and religion for a juicier posting later on. 

• My default character is usually a paladin, which was the second-highest vote-getter among respondents (111). Mages were first (199); druids (23) and priests (24) were lowest. My apologies for not including a "ranger" option, though. 

• Readers are well-adjusted when it comes to the amount of time they spend on games. 43% would like to spend more time gaming, and 38% are comfortable with the time they currently spend.

     

I'm still working on some of the more complex questions, but I thought I give this to you to chew on in the meantime. 

Game 567: Dark Designs: Passage to Oblivion

Softdisk misses out on the opportunity to emphasize the "IV" in "oblivion."

        

Dark Designs: Passage to Oblivion

United States 

Softdisk (developer and publisher)

Released 1994 for Apple II GS, possible Apple II release unconfirmed

Date Started: 25 January 2026

           

The original Dark Designs trilogy (Grelminar's Staff, Closing the Gate, and Retribution), all from 1990-1991, were competently-programmed "afternoon RPGs" that drew inspiration from Wizardry, Might and Magic, and Phantasie. They were published by Softdisk, one of several disk magazines available at the time. When you're getting new games every month for a flat subscription fee, you don't really expect them to be epic, and in that sense, the original trilogy's 4-7 hour playing times and 30-31 ratings on the GIMLET are actually quite good.

     

The first three games are all the more notable for having been written by a young John Carmack. He was long gone from Softdisk by 1994, enjoying the accolade and profits from Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, but he remains credited for the engine. During the three-year gap, Softdisk apparently received hundreds of letters from fans demanding more Dark Designs games. Development was taken on by Peter Rokitski, who had been hired as the magazine's principal programmer after Cormack's departure. He had already resurrected a previous Carmack trilogy, Catacomb (a third-person shooter), with Sylvan Idyll (1992), Ether Quest (1993), and Sand Trap (1994). By the end of the second Dark Designs trilogy, as bulletin boards and the Internet brought the diskmag era to a close, Rokitski was essentially Softdisk's only employee, handling the duties of programmer, editor, quality tester, and assembler.

    

That was us! Only it was "Agamon."

       

The original Dark Designs trilogy concerned an invasion of demons through a planar gate. In Grelminar's Staff, the party searched the ruins of Castle Grelminar for the artifact that would close the gate. In Closing the Gate, they, well, did that. In Retribution!, they pursued the archmage who had opened the gate through a portal and into a hell dimension to get revenge. That archmage was called Agamon in the original series but is for some reason called Agamol here. The author likely got confused between "Agamon" (the wizard) and "Agamal" (the castle where he lived).

      

Ah, the problems faced by fantastical worlds.

        

The sequel series picks up "many years later" in the city of Tarador, where "good Queen Victoria has suddenly begun to act very strangely." She has ignored her duties and has created an army of strange creatures. "Whispers . . . have it that she has been possessed by the spirit of Agamol." The main PC is an adventurer with a friend who works at the royal palace. His friend appears on his doorstep one day, dying, saying that "the only hope for Tarador is the legendary Potion of Salvation." Legend has it that the potion is in Oblivion, "from which no one has returned (alive)." To get there, the party has to arrange passage from a "travel agent," who is demanding 50,000 gold pieces and the Bones of a Saint.

   

Gameplay begins in Tarador with a default party, but of course I dumped them and created my own. Character creation involves rolling five numbers between 3 and 18 and allocating them to strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, and piety. From there, you choose one of four classes: fighter, thief, priest, and wizard. Although the party can hold only four characters, there is room for 15 on the roster. The game instructions suggest that if the combined experience of the characters on the roster exceeds a certain value, prestige or multi-class characters become possible.

        

Creating a new party.

        

New characters start with nothing but staves, and the early game is brutal. It reminds me of the first Might and Magic, where you have to either keep reloading or keep remaking characters as you ever-so-slowly amass experience, gold, and equipment. Random encounters are frequent and deadly; no place is safe, and enemies might attack on any movement, including turning and winning a previous battle. Of particular difficulty is poison, which many enemies can deliver and no Level 1 party can possibly cure. You have to return to the inn frequently to restore hit points, which costs 50 gold every time (fortunately, most battles produce more than that). You can save anywhere, which makes it a little easier than Might and Magic, but character deaths are written to the disk immediately after battle. The game even deletes all your gold as battle begins and doesn't restore it to you until it ends. That way, if you open the disk drive (or kill the emulator) to prevent a character death from saving, the party has no gold when you reload.

      

Carefully exiting the inn.

      

As with the first trilogy, exploration and combat mix Wizardry and Phantasie elements. Instead of a wireframe first-person view or a top-down view, the game offers both, side-by-side. The top-down view shows an 18 x 11 grid, with unvisited squares obscured. A marker indicates special encounters or treasures. You get frequent atmospheric messages as you explore, the text making up to some degree for a lack of graphics.

      

Text offers what graphics cannot.

              

All controls are handled via intuitive keyboard commands. The options are usually on the screen in case you forget. You can bring up an in-game help menu with the ? key in case you forget anything. Until late in this session, I didn't notice that there was a S)earch command for secret doors.

      

But it was pretty obvious that one was here.

         

For combat, I've faced giant spiders, cottonmouth snakes, rats, fighters, wizards, bards, thaumaturges, necromancers, samurai, paladins (!), and ninjas. Gods know why the city is so violent. Battle shows the characters facing each other in ranks. It suggests a tactical map, but the only movement characters and enemies can do is between the front rank and the rear rank. The rank determines whom you can attack and who can attack you.

        

You specify an action for each character—attack, cast a spell, use an item, change weapons, move forward, or move backwards—and then execute. The game threads your actions with the enemies' in initiative order. It's basically Phantasie with the battle screen rotated sideways so the line between the parties is vertical rather than horizontal.

      

Bob has chosen to attack and now must specify the target of his attack.

      

Battle is rewarded with experience, and if the enemies aren't animals, gold and items, which you can then equip or sell at the item shop. My characters slowly amassed better weapons, armor, potions, mana pills, and attribute-boosting rings. 

     

Battle against a larger group. 

     

Running from combat only has about a 50% success rate, and if you fail, the enemy gets a free round of attacks. Every time I met a spider or snake, it was an agonizing decision whether to stay and almost assuredly get poisoned (even if I won) or try to flee. 

      

Eventually, I stabilized my party at Level 3 and started doing more than just shuttling between the inn and the weapon/armor shop. The opening map, the "Old Quarter" of the town, appears to be 32 x 32. You can't leave the map to the north, east, or west, but to the south is a new map, the "Palace Quarter," and gods know how many others from there. Some of the encounters I found in the Old Quarter were:

    

• Ivanna's Inn, where the party can rest and restore spells. The inn has several locked rooms, which my thief opened with a lockpick. Some of them had chests of gold. Some chests are trapped, but I think the only way to remove them is with a spell I don't have yet.

       

0.764% closer to my goal.

        

• Alain's Armor and All. They sell basic weapons and armor, potions (including one-use antidotes for a hefty 250 gold), speed and strength rings, recall scrolls (100% escape from battle), and horns, which I have no idea how to use. They don't seem to work in combat or out of combat. Anyway, since you can find most of these items in battle, the store is more useful for selling than buying, at least after an initial visit.

      

Getting equipped.

       

• Pat's Pub. It costs 20 gold to get in. There's a kitchen in the back with a few storerooms. One hallway has a fixed encounter with three fighters, a hierophant, and an illusionist. Elsewhere, a beautiful belly dancer named Natasha will offer hints if you buy her a drink. From her, I've learned that holy symbols cast the "Bless" spell; "Mark" and "Teleport" will be useful in getting back to Crytus, which is an island of "excarnation"; saints have been interred on Crytus; smugglers use the island in the Meriwyn as a treasure trove; and when you use a travel agent, you are sent immediately. 

     

Could I at least know what kind of drink I'm buying?

      

• Vyzap's Vault of Knowledge. They sell spells. This has been my biggest expense so far. At one point, I was up to nearly half of the 50,000 gold I would need, but I spent it all on spells (including, finally, "Cure Poison"). The store starts with only a couple of selections and then sells more and more as time goes by. I don't know whether the offerings are tied to character levels. So far, there haven't been a lot of great mage spells—no mass-damage, for instance.

• The Bent River occupies some space in the north part of the quarter. The game says we can't swim. I don't know whether there's another way to navigate it.

• The Temple of the Dog offers healing (at a reasonable rate of 1 point per hit point) and services to cure paralysis, stoning, and death—all way too expensive for the party at this point. 

• A warehouse north of the river has an encounter with 11 water spiders, the biggest single party I've faced so far. 

       

I hope you all enjoy being poisoned.

      

• Many houses with multiple rooms and treasure chests.  

            

I still have quite a bit to explore, even on the first map. I keep running into parties that are slightly too high in level for me, even though by the end of this session, my characters were between Levels 5 and 8. As I prepared to wrap up, I tried creating a new character, and suddenly I had a bunch of new options: paladin (fighter-priest), ranger (fighter-wizard), sorcerer (wizard-priest), yakuza (fighter-thief), hierophant (priest-thief), and illusionist (wizard-thief). So now the game has me questioning whether it's possible to win with the bland starting party. Certainly, I don't think there's enough for a thief to do that it's worth having a pure thief. 

       

A bunch of new classes become available. I wonder whether this is all, or whether combinations of three classes become available later.

        

It's clear that Oblivion is going to take longer than any of the previous three Dark Designs games, primarily because of the grind factor, but in that it at least provides an experience closer to the games it's emulating.

    

Time so far: 4 hours 

 

Star Trail: Midnight Mass

 

"Star Trail" is a throwing axe!? "Banallure" strikes again.

                

Of the various experiences common to multiple RPGs, one that I almost never fail to enjoy is arriving at a new city and making the rounds. A new city generally offers some combination of new clues, new equipment, new quests, and the resolution (or at least the next stage) of existing quests. It's a time to rest, heal, and restock. I particularly like games in which resting in a proper bed and/or eating a hot, full meal makes a big difference (e.g., Betrayal at Krondor, Star Trail, Pillars of Eternity). It engages the role-playing imagination more than just camping anywhere and getting all your hit points back. Skyrim is a game that could have done more with all its taverns and beds.

       

My party arrives in Gashok at night, wounded and exhausted from the road, so we immediately seek a place to stay. We find a bar first, called Second Home. "It doesn't seem to be one of the more high-class establishments in town," the game warns. It's all the more surprising, then, when the bartender tells us that they don't serve alcohol. We order a pot of tea and meals, but there are spiders in the food, so our trip isn't off to a good start.

     

It's protein-enhanced.

      

The bartender, Menchegal the Older, has nothing to offer about any subject, including whoever fired a crossbow bolt at us when we arrived. At a table, Eilif Windorn suggests that it was an "accident." We leave the bar having not accomplished much.

         

"We intended to kill you."

       

We keep exploring and find an inn called All Roads run by Elliane Sevenstones. She offers nothing in response to the keywords we ask. We try again with a meal and get a much better one, then splurge on a suite for a day. Commenters were right: the amount of time you choose to sleep is separate from the length of the stay that you pay for. We rest for 8 hours and heal nicely. The next morning, we set about our typical circuit of the town.

   

• From the comments on my last entry, I guess the house frames are not houses under construction but empty market stalls. They're empty here, too, but there's a pile of white ash nearby. When I ask anyone about it, they cancel conversation immediately.

• A woman named Gerlanje runs a potion and herb shop in a tent. We don't buy anything just yet.

• As we walk down the street, some sort of weird procession of moaning people walks by. 

      

This town has problems.

     

• A woman named Praiadne Oldenstein runs an equipment shop. As commenters suggested, I buy a sleeping bag for everyone.

• An NPC named Dietgel Fridgard offers that "the bright things of life" are "often not too far away."

       

Eric Idle, I hope you have a pencil.

      

• Another equipment shop run by Raoul Zumendick. Like everyone else, he clams up immediately when I ask about the ashes.

• Moria the Wise (NPC in a house) suggests I stay off the streets at night. "You'll meet some doubtful guys."

• A Temple of Boron. 

• Urja Naloth (NPC in a house): "If Elvish blood runs through your veins, get out of here. Otherwise, you'll suffer the same fate as our miller, in the south of town." Aha! That crossbow bolt was fired at Toliman. This is a sundown town for elves. This was around the same time that I remembered Toliman is supposed to be my leader in towns.

• Heroja Inhar (NPC in house): Gashok used to be quiet, but there have been strange incidents since strangers arrived.

      

Exploring the city.

        

• Another potion and herb shop, run by Ginya Ingborn.

• An old woman approaches us on the street and offers an amulet "which will protect you from evil magic" for 10 ducats. We decline.

• In the southwest corner of town, we find the charred remains of a mill. We spend some time searching the building but find nothing. Lyra figures the fire didn't start inside. 

      

I feel like the game is trying to influence my choice.

      

• Erhild Hesindel (NPC in house): "There are a lot of odd people here at Gashok. Not for long. There's a lot rumored. Watch your step." Well, that's ominous.

• Tronde Ismanson (NPC in house): The herb woman in the market (Gerlanje) is a witch.

     

I mean, yeah, it's a fantasy setting. There are lots of witches.

       

• A Temple of Praios. We ask about elves: "A godforsaken lot; one day, they will disappear from the face of Threa." That doesn't sound very clerical.

• Rogullf the Obese runs an inn called Safe Harbor. He tells us that the mill was owned by someone named Artherion, and he suggests we ask Gerlanje. We rent another room (it's dark already). Around midnight, we're awakened by voices. "Something is going on in the market square." We come across a meeting of figures in tan robes and armbands showing the symbol of the sun. They start a bonfire, which roars for a while before scattering white ash everywhere. That explains the ash that we found earlier. 

       

I don't know what the symbol on their robes is, but it doesn't look like the sun.

       

• We go back to bed and are treated to a cinematic of a man in a black robe creeping into our chambers. We awaken. "I wish to propose a business arrangement," he says. He tells us that the "famous throwing axe," Star Trail, was stolen from the temple of the God of Thieves and is being held in an Orcish fortress. He offers us our choice of temple treasure if we return it. 

       

I could have sworn I paid for individual rooms.

        

• We get more elf racism at the smithy, where Rowena Pauspiarken "won't work for prickears." We temporarily split Toliman off into a new party so that she'll talk to us, but she kicks us out when we ask about the "shrouded figures."

    

This town has a lot of taboo subjects.

       

• A tavern called Night and Day.

• An old woman stumbles into Toliman's arms, then pretends that her blindness has been cured. I suspect she pickpocketed us, but the game doesn't explicitly say so.

     

On the other hand, Toliman does have some healing skills.

       

• Back at Gerlanje's tent, she confirms that Artherion owned the mill and that it burned down. "He left town to the east and now lives in a small wood near town." 

         

People in this game could stand to get better at directions.

     

For the second city in a row, I haven't found a place selling weapons or armor. Commenters suggested that the market buildings occasionally host traveling merchants, so I decide to stick around the area until one appears there. I think maybe I'll look around for Artherion. Unfortunately, the nature of the outdoor map doesn't really let you "stick around in the area." Once you leave town, you can't even change your mind and re-enter; you have to march off in some direction, and even turning around the next point means multiple days on the road. 

   

There's also no going east from Gashok. The best I can do is north, then east, or south, then east. I save the game and try the former. Each night, I have Mahasim hunt for food and water (to avoid spending my rations) and have Lyra hunt for herbs. I don't have any recipes, nor an alchemy set, but herbs are useful on their own. Many are poisons, which can be rubbed on weapons. Some heal; some increase skills. More on this subject later. I also have Lilii perform a "wand ritual" to get her wand to Level 2, which causes it to act as a permanent torch (but saps all her magic points for the time being). A couple of lions attack one night.

         

 I skipped right over Number 1.

       

We eventually find a trail heading east. We're attacked by goblins on the second day, which again saps our hit points and spell points. We barely make any progress day to day as we travel east and then south until we're practically back at Gashok again. Almost everyone takes some damage tumbling down a hill as we try to negotiate a landslide, and everyone loses 2 charisma for a day after we're attacked by some dragonflies. A couple of forest gnomes attack outside Gashok.

        

That was deliberate.

       

Soon we're back at the city, having spent a couple of weeks on the road doing nothing more than making a giant loop. After we enter the city, I figure out the problem. Apparently, it makes a difference which signpost you choose when you want to leave the city. I had chosen the one on the north side, so my only option was to go north. Lesson learned. Probably re-learned, because I think it must have been the same way in Blade of Destiny.

   

We head out again on the eastern road, poke around for a bit, fight a battle against a couple of spiders, and eventually find Artherion's cabin. Artherion greets us with an arrow pointed at us. "We're friends!" we announce. He relates how he woke up one night with his mill on fire. When he tried to escape, cloaked figures shoved him back inside his burning property. He frightened them with magic and escaped. He says that Gerlanje is the only decent person in town.

       

Got some bad news for you, Artherion.

       

"The whole trouble started when two men came to Gashok. One of them seems to be the leader." He asks us to kill that man, "so all folks will again be able to live together in peace."

      

Atherion has a harrowing story.

        

We return to town and ask Gerlanje about the strangers. She says that two of them moved to town in the same spring. One of them, Valpor of Kuslik, lives two houses away from Night and Day tavern.

   

As we prepare to head for that location, we see that the market buildings have been converted from wooden frames to tents. Hallelujah. But no sooner have we entered the arms shop than the 19:00 hour rolls around and the market closes. 

    

Goddamn it.

        

Several places could plausibly be "two houses" from Night and Day. We knock on a few and meet Valpor. He claims he's not a murderer, but he tells us of two other strangers:: Erholt of Tiefhusen (northeast of market square) and Deregorn of Thunderbrook (next to the temple of Praios).

  

We make it to Deregorn's house first and fight a six-on-one battle against a "warrior." He dies quickly. Afterwards, we have the opportunity to search his house. We find documents linking Deregorn to an "order" that has eight members in Gashok. I assume this order is the same group of shrouded figures we found in the market at night. Maybe they're performing some kind of ritual that makes everyone else in town hostile? 

        

If it doesn't give names or addresses, in what way is it a "list"?

      

An old man answers our knock at a house northeast of market square. We have several options to accuse him or attack him, but we leave it for now. When we can't find anyone else in the area, we return, and the man thanks us for "sending Deregorn of Thunderbrook to Boron's realm." So I'm not sure whether we found Erholt of Tiefhusen or not, or even whether we needed to.

    

I take a save and the party heads back out on the road to return to Artherion. We defeat some goblins on the way, but Lyra is killed, so I have to reload. We reach Artherion, and I guess we did the right thing, as he thanks us and invites us into his place. Unlike most NPCs I've encountered so far, he has a lot to say, although I don't understand some of it. He thinks the Salamander Stone belongs to Ingerimm, which I thought was originally a corruption of "Ingramosch," the dwarf I'm supposed to take it to, but turns out to be the god of smiths in this universe. He doesn't know where the Dwarven Pit (where we're supposed to search for the stone) is, but he says the dwarves have a bunch of mines around Finsterkamm.

       

You don't need to tell me, buddy. I'm from Maine.

     

He ends the visit by giving us a Sword of Artherion and a Bow of Artherion, both of which I'm going to assume are better than our starting gear. I give the sword to Xamidimura the warrior and the bow to Toliman the elf.

   

I return to Gashok, this time determined to stay until the weapon-seller is in the market, even if I have to rest multiple days away. On our first night in the inn, an angry mob breaks in and hauls us out to the street (this is told in a cinematic), accusing us of murder. When we're able to produce evidence that Deregorn was the "leader of the Anathematizers," they let us go, but with a warning not to show our faces in Gashok again.

      

Okay, you're going on my list.

      

Despite the warning, we don't seem to have any problem resuming our stay at the inn. We note the passing of the days: Windsday, Earthday, Marketday (oddly, the market isn't open), Praiosday. Finally, the market is back. Unfortunately, the weapon/armor shop has no metal armor, but I get leather harnesses for Gnomon and Toliman (who had no armor), replace everyone's shoes with leather boots, replace Gnomon's mace with an axe (his preferred weapon), and get shields for my two warriors.

     

My party leader at the end of this session.

         

After that, I guess it's time to move on. I'm not sure we really solved the city's problems, but I can't figure anything else to do. I have two major quests now: find the Salamander Stone in the Dwarven Pit, and find Star Trail (I still haven't come to terms with that yet) from an orc fortress. I have no real leads on either location except a vague hint that there are dwarves around Finsterkamm. I check the game map, and Finsterkamm turns out to be an enormous mountain range stretching across half the map, from the southwest to the northeast. Not only is it going to be a huge pain to search, but it's also pretty far away from Kvirasim, where I was told that the Dwarven Pits were "not too far" to the south.

     

Miscellaneous notes:

   

• When I created the characters, I could have sworn I made Mahasim as a Thorwallian, but he's a warrior instead. I guess it probably doesn't matter.

• When characters change their footwear, the game marks the occasion with a little animation. It doesn't do this for any other change of equipment. That's . . . weird. 

       

Those are some nice calves.

       

• As commenters in my last entry pointed out, if you take off a character's pants, it has some consequences. It doesn't seem to affect interactions in shops or with scripted NPCs, but there's an escalating series of random encounters. First, someone simply points it out and calls you a "sicko." Then, some creep molests the party member in question. Finally, the townspeople start attacking the party (including those that are fully dressed), doing roughly 1-10 hit points of damage each time. That third encounter keeps repeating until you get dressed.

      

Wow, they hate nudists even worse than elves.

      

• Am I crazy, or is there no way, when buying items, to specify which character is receiving the items? They just seem to always go to the character who has the first available room.

• I'm a bit confused about whether it's important for certain characters to carry certain items. For instance, is it enough that the party possesses six sleeping bags, or does each character need to have the sleeping bag in his inventory? If I send Gnomon out to look for food, does he need the fishing hook in his inventory if he hopes to employ it?

• I do wish the authors had enlisted the help of better translators. The misplaced open quotation bothers me a lot more than one would think, as do the over-use of ellipses and misplaced commas. There are many times, particularly in what is supposed to be PC dialogue options, where the writing is bizarre or amateur. The developers did a decent job creating a realistic world in which the player must carefully watch conditions and manage resources; it's jarring to be taken out of it with juvenile or slangy responses.

        

I don't want to say any of those things.

      

I head out to start doing some open exploration, but in my first battle, I realize that Toliman is out of arrows, so I need to reload back in Gashok and get some more. I guess I'll wrap up here. I have two primary questions at this stage, and I almost hesitate to write them down, as I want to find the answers for myself, but I suppose I can just not read comments for a few days. The two questions are:

   

• Does the game reward open exploration? Will I find interesting encounters and side quests if I just wander the roads?

• Should I already know where to go next from in-game resources?

     

Hopefully, by the next entry, I'll have my own answers.

   

Time so far: 10 hours