Betrayal at Krondor: The Real Betrayal

 

The party learns how to automate things in Excel.

       

This session starts in Chapter V: "When Rivers Run Blood." The Moredhel attack on Northwarden is imminent. James and Locklear have teamed up with Patrus, Baron Gabot's magician, to run a bunch of missions prior to the battle. As this session opens, the three of them are attempting to convince the baron's minstrel, Tamney, to return to the court and help boost morale. Tamney is afraid of death, but he says he'll do it if we recover some Geomancy Stones from the nearby dungeon called Diviner's Halls.

    

This turns out to be the same dungeon that James, Owyn, and Gorath partly explored in Chapter III. It's not very big, and the battles don't seem like they should be very hard, but the game keeps starting Patrus by himself on the right side of the screen. The other two have trouble reaching him to defend him, and Patrus can only move two squares at a time. The consequence is that enemies are constantly moving into Patrus's periphery, preventing him from casting. Because of this, the battles (Moredhel, hounds, ogres) are tougher than they should be, leaving characters constantly wounded and sometimes near death. Fortunately, I bought a ton of herb packs and restoratives during the last session.

         

A battle rages with some "ogres."

     

Perhaps one of the reasons that the enemies seem extra difficult is that they all have buffs on their weapons. I keep finding blessed, poisoned, and otherwise treated weapons on their corpses. I try to load up on them for resale, but I can only carry so much.

    

I encounter the same fairy chests that I wrote about a few weeks ago, but this time I have all the passwords. One of the chests has the Geomancy Stones. 

            

This game is definitely getting a couple of extra points for these item descriptions.

       

We return the stones to Tamney, who in turn says he'll return to Northwarden. "I think [the baron] will be rather more relieved than you might imagine," he says. He goes on to explain that before he fled, he tricked a treasury guard into leaving his post, then slipped into the treasury and snatched a pouch. He just wanted some gold for the road. After he left, he opened the pouch and found that it held precious diamonds worth hundreds of sovereigns each. "I became terrified of going back." Now, Tamney is worried about getting both himself and the treasury guard in trouble. He plans to use the Geomancy Stones to make a wedding band for the guard to give to his sweetheart, and he wants us to return the stones to Gabot without explaining where we got them.

   

We have bigger fish to fry in the meantime. After a quick run to Northwarden to sell our extra gear, replenish our supplies, and buy some Silverthorn Extract to cure poison, we return to Duke Martin. He tells us about the goblins stationed in the pass to the north of Northwarden. He wants us to find their battle plans, but we have to do it without seizing or killing their leader, because if we do that, the enemy will just change the plans. "No, what I need is the big plan and I'll be willing to bet that it's still in Raglam," a Moredhel city just beyond the border. 

    

This is not a million light years from what James actually does.

       

There's no way through the pass without walking right through the goblin horde. As we do, their leader, Gulla, approaches. He offers to not only let us pass but also to switch sides and fight the upcoming battle on behalf of Baron Gabot if we give him 2,000 sovereigns. 

   

In retrospect, the diamonds are clearly meant to supply us with the means to raise that much cash, but I don't like the idea of breaking our promise to return them, so I try to raise the money (I already have about half of it) by looting enemy corpses first. And what do you know—in contrast to every other moment in the game, the enemies I've slain along the road suddenly have no items. I can't even find any dead enemies when I return to Diviner's Halls. Thus, I'm forced to sell the diamonds, although I wonder what happens if you just refuse and attack the goblins. Someone please enlighten me if you know.

       

It also feels like we should have been able to just requisition the funds from Gabot.

       

Gulla tells us to use his name to pass any other goblin patrols. "We will fight for your Baron."

     

We move to a small northern map with an east-west road passing through the Moredhel city of Raglam. There are some battles on the road with Moredhel and giants, plus a few tents and chests to loot. Outside Raglam, we find an abandoned, broken catapult, curiously loaded and pointed at the city. James theorizes that it was left that way by some rogue Moredhel. 

    

Either way, we'll use it.

       

James has the party brazenly waltz into Raglam, pretending to be mercenaries working for Delekhan. No one really questions this. We check out the tavern, sell some crossbows at a shop, and have a weird encounter with a resident who thinks we were sent by "Eron the Minstrel" to play music for him. (Patrus doesn't have Owyn's skill, and we get thrown out of the house.) We cannot get into the residence occupied by the Moredhel leader, Captain Kroldech.

         

Moredhel don't seem like the types to use "ain't."

       

West of the city, we find some chests, one of which has a gear needed to repair the broken catapult. We return to the device and launch a few stones at the city. We then head back to the city and find Kroldech's residence destroyed, Kroldech dead on the floor, the battle plans on his desk. He also has the Sword of Lims-Kragma, which judging by its statistics is the best sword in the game, at least so far.

    

Plans in hand, we return to Martin, who gives us another mission to find six Moredhel illusionists who slipped through our lines and are hiding somewhere in the area. It takes us a while to find them in an abandoned house southeast of Dencamp. They make the mistake of not crowding Patrus during the first round, and Patrus manages to get out a full-strength "Evil Seek," which kills four of them immediately. The other two quickly fall to swords. On their bodies, they have a couple of spell scrolls that go into Patrus's book, plus a device called an Infinity Pool. I'm not sure what it does.

      

Mission accomplished.

       

Duke Martin sends us back to Northwarden, where things are grim. Baron Gabot and three of his captains have been assassinated by Nighthawks (guess we won't be needing to return that last diamond!), and the Moredhel attack is upon us. James takes command of the defense. A series of chapter-ending title cards explains how the defenders fight to the point of exhaustion. All hope seems lost. James is just about to be slain by an enemy warrior . . .

         

Serves you right for that mustache.

     

. . . when the Moredhel takes an arrow to the throat. It was fired by Prince Arutha, who has arrived at the last second, with his army, to save the day.

    

Arutha apologizes for taking so long, explaining how Owyn and Gorath were delayed in bringing him the message. Arutha further relates that while four of six Moredhel companies attacked Northwarden, another two marched southwest towards Highcastle. Half of Arutha's army has gone there, and he intends to march there as soon as the battle for Northwarden is finished.

        

Hey, there was no point at which we "nearly didn't win ourselves free."

        

Thus ends the chapter. Chapter VI, "Betrayal," starts immediately. I can't believe I've managed to avoid spoilers this long. I can't wait to see what the betrayal is.

        

But where is it going to happen?!

       

The chapter opens with the longest title card sequence so far. It begins with Pug in Krondor, using his magic to take some of the strength out of a supernaturally-strong storm that has been beating at the coast.

    

A rift suddenly opens in Pug's tower and the Tsurani Mage, Makala, steps through. A lot of the subsequent dialogue is hard to penetrate if you haven't read the books. Pug, you may recall, is a main character in the original Riftwar trilogy. He starts off as an apprentice mage in Duke Borric's (Arutha's and Martin's father's) court, gets kidnapped and brought to Kelewan as a slave, and accidentally manifests his magical ability. On Kelewan, magicians are called Great Ones, revered and immune to most laws. Pug is trained as a Great One, adopts the name Milamber, and becomes a servant of the Tsurani Empire. But he becomes disgusted at the barbarity of some gladiatorial games, goes nuts, unleashes catastrophic magic on the imperial court, and flees back to Midkemia, leaving the Tsurani Empire in ruin. These actions ultimately lead to the fall of the empire and peace between Midkemia and Kelewan. In Silverthorn, Pug returns to Kelewan and, after some misadventures, establishes an uneasy peace with the new emperor.

         

"Yeah, when you destroyed my capital" -- Makala's actual response.

         

Makala has come to chastise Pug for his neglect of his duties to the Tsurani Empire, and in particular Pug's fostering of magical abilities in his adopted daughter, Gamina. In the Empire, women cannot be magicians, and women with magical abilities are killed. Makala worries that the Empire will be further destabilized if one of their most famous Great Ones openly flaunts convention in this way. "I have acted on your behalf," Makala concludes, "and placed [Gamina] in exile until such a time as we can agree upon her ultimate fate." Pug naturally rails at this betrayal—oh, please tell me that this isn't the betrayal—and demands his daughter, but Makala warns that "your further interference will likely ensure that the Assembly will carry out its order of death."

 

(Makala seems to have been created for this game; I can't find his name in any of the pre-game books. This is slightly confusing because there are any number of canonical Great Ones who could have served in this role.) 

    

I'm not sure this was worth the suspense.

      

Makala heads back to Kelewan. Pug rants for a bit and then disappears, leaving words written in fire on the wall of his room: "THE BOOK OF MACROS." His wife, Katala, later discovers the message and relays it to Owyn and Gorath, Macros refers to an ancient mage who helps Pug's journey in the trilogy and closes the rift that led to the Riftwar in the first place. Pug inherits his island and library at the conclusion of the books. I might be getting some stuff wrong. I honestly can't remember whether Macros is alive or dead. All Katala will say is: "Macros left Midkemia long ago and all he left behind were his writings." She doesn't know which of those books might be the Book of Macros.
    

Katala says that she'll head to Pug's academy at Stardock and look for the book there. But she mentions an odd episode recently in which Pug paused at a sewer grate in Krondor and said, "Not all of the sheep are in our fold." Based on this cryptic clue, Gorath and Owyn decide to search the sewers.

     

You'd hardly know Gorath was a Moredhel anymore.

      

The game finally lets us play for the first time in like half an hour. Owyn and Gorath are this chapter's dynamic duo again, I guess. They begin with all of their equipment from Chapter IV.

      

I explored the sewers at the end of Chapter I, and the automap remains filled in here. Although some enemies have been restocked, the chests remain looted. Accordingly, the sewers do not give us a great reward for the effort, at least not the first level. It's a good five minutes of wandering rooms and hallways before I find anything to do—a battle with four rogues. We surprise them and make quick work of them. 

   

We run into Limm, a member of the Guild of Thieves, who says that the recent storm flooded the sewers, killed a lot of thieves, and destroyed their headquarters. To make it worse, the thieves are dealing with a rival guild, led by someone named the Crawler, who seems to have actually killed the Upright Man, the former leader of the Thieves' Guild and probably James's father. This is a major character, and any fan of the books would be surprised to find him killed off in the game. It adds to the game's gravitas as part of the Riftwar canon. Anyway, Limm offers that "some of the Crawler's men are magic types," and that they're occupying a lower level of the sewer, which became accessible when "a portion of the seawall collapsed."

      

I'm surprised the Upright Man died off-screen.

        

For 100 gold, he sells us some things he took from one of the Crawler's men: some torches, 24 restoratives, and a note from the Crawler that chastises the recipient for not dealing with the Guild of Thieves yet: "You are to locate the Amulet of the Upright Man and the Idol of Lassur and load them aboard the Night Crawler immediately! We have pressing business with our serpentine clients in the Sunset Isles." Limm has heard of the Idol of Lassur: "About a whizit or other what gives you the power over the Goddess of Death or some such silliness."

   

In the southeast corner of the sewers, we run into a woman named Kat who asks if we're disciples of Pug. We say no. It develops that she's an agent of the Crawler, searching the sewers for the Idol of Lassur. She agrees to tell us "anything we want to know" if we bring her the idol. I don't know. While talking to Limm, I immediately started thinking of the Crawler as our enemy, but I guess there's no particular reason that he should be. Still, I don't like the idea of giving a powerful magical artifact to an unknown entity.

           

Nothing says "medieval" like a track suit and a headband.

       

The entrance to the lower level is in the middle of the dungeon, and not on a route that you would find if you just followed one wall, so it takes me a while to locate it. There are a couple of insultingly easy battles with rouges (I honestly don't know whether they're Mockers or the Crawler's men) in the meantime. 

   

The lower level has a lot more action. In order, we find:

    

• A battle with two rogues and a rogue mage. Owyn hits the mage with "Fetters of Rime" in the first round and everything after that is mop-up. They're guarding a chest with a Sword of Lims-Kragma and the Idol of Lassur. I honestly didn't expect to find it in the first room. I'm not sure what it does—it has 8 "uses"—but having it in his inventory lowers all of Gorath's skills by 20 points. So any reservations I have about giving it to Kat are out the window. I don't go back right away, though, so the rest of these encounters are faced with Gorath's reduced statistics.

• A dead body at the end of a corridor with 11 gold and 4 rations.

• A locked door that none of our keys or picks would open.

• A post that says that "transport through these sewers is strictly prohibited," signed by "Swordmaster Corby." 

       

Is this an ancient sign or did Swordmaster Corby erect it after the storm?

       

• Two rogues, two rogue mages.

• Two rogue mages, two Quegian pirates. This one goes poorly. I try to take out both mages with "Flamecast" the first round, and I end up killing neither of them. They get off some powerful spells, and one leaves Owyn so weak that he gets knocked out by a pirate. I have to use up a lot of restoratives to get rid of his "near death" status.

• A locked door that opens to one of the keys we have. Inside the room is just a dead body with some armor and a shell.

• A Quegian pirate with three rogues. No mages, fortunately. What should be an easy battle is rendered moderately difficult by Gorath's diminished abilities. I guess I could just drop the idol during battle. I'll try that next time. Owyn is poisoned but has some anti-venom.

      

This should have been a cakewalk.

       

• At the end of a corridor, a body with three vials of Flame Root Oil (protects armor from frost weapons).

• Across a pit (we have plenty of rope) and behind a locked door, a battle with two Quegian pirates, two rogues, and a rogue mage. Owyn kills the mage and damages the others with a full-powered "Flamecast." They're guarding a locked chest that none of our keys or picks will open. Dropping the idol doesn't help. I hate to leave it because it seems like it's significant.

• Behind a final locked door, a chest with 28 gold pieces and a shell. This is an oddly large room to have so little in it.

   

So unless I missed something behind one locked door or in that locked chest, most of the level was superfluous.

    

I stop by Limm before returning to Kat, but he has nothing new to say. With no other leads, we take the idol to Kat, although Owyn is cautious: "Aren't you concerned that the Crawler will abuse the Idol? With it he might kill hundreds of people, the Prince, or maybe even the King." Kat replies that she's counting on him using it, since what he doesn't know is that anyone who possesses the Idol will die within a month. Apparently, she's only pretending to work for the Crawler: "I intend to put his plans to ruin."

    

Owyn questions her further. She believes the head of the Crawler's magicians is Abbot Graves in Malac's Cross, who Pug kicked out of the Stardock academy. The implication is that he might know something of the Book of Macros. 

        

What did he discover was happening?

       

We exit the sewers and head back to Krondor for supplies. Gorath gets his new sword blessed at the Shrine of Astalon; I'm really not sure how to determine what different temple blessings do.

     

We hit the road for Malac's Cross, which is not far to the east of Krondor. Almost immediately, we find a dead body on the road with a  new type of key called Nivek's Key. I'm tempted to turn around and try it in the sewers, but I decide I can always do it later. 

        

Finally outdoors. I like the mountains in the distance.

         

On the way to Malac's Cross, Owyn makes 62 sovereigns playing the lute at Darkmoor's Rest. East of Darkmoor, we run into an old woman named Petrumh, who alerts us: "You're not thinking of going into Malac's Cross are you?!" She continues that Abbot Graves has betrayed his students and the town is besieged by "snakemen." She's heading to Darkmoor to drink until the problem goes away, but she laments that she left her ale behind in Malac's Cross and wants us to get it for her, as if Darkmoor's Rest doesn't have any ale.

   

We're attacked by two Pantathians (serpent men) just outside the city. They immediately nail us both with "Fetters of Rime" and then spend two rounds dismembering us. The only way to survive this is to get a jump on them, which takes us a couple of reloads and still leaves Owyn in bad shape. And then we have the exact same problem with a group of three. I don't know what the problem is—"Stealth" for both characters is at around 80%—but I fail to surprise them just about every time. 

           

The Pantathians have managed to "Fetter" us both. It's only a matter of time.

       

Finally, on about my fifth reload, I surprise the group—which hardly helps, since they have about 120 hit points. It takes three full-strength "Evil Seek" spells to destroy them, leaving Owyn exhausted and Gorath near-death from the Pantathians' spells. And guess what's beyond them? A battle with five of the bastards. Naturally, we don't make it even one round.

        

Which they do.

       

Miscellaneous notes:

    

• Games and movies really need to learn what "sewers" are. 

     

Not "sewers."

       

• I was challenged for inventory space throughout this session. I left a lot of valuable equipment on rotting corpses. 

• Gorath has plenty of things to apply to his weapons. After just about every battle, I reapplied Silverthorn, Naphtha, or Killian's Root Oil.

     

Gorath's inventory as Chapter 5 began.

       

• While casting a different spell, I happened to notice "Dragon's Breath" in Owyn's spellbook. I acquired it a couple chapters ago and never cast it. It's not an offensive spell. Rather, it creates a fog throughout the area. I assume this is used for sneaking past encounters on the road. It didn't help at all with the Pantathians, though.

       

And it's as annoying to the party as it is to the enemy.

         

• "Evil Seek" failed on me a few times this session. I'm not sure why. I still got a lot of mileage out of "Fetters of Rime."

• A lot of the game text seems to suggest that Owyn is leading the pair.

    

Owyn is "barking" orders to Gorath?

       

• Even this late in the game, it insists on some tortured narration every time we go to loot a dead body.

      

Get over it.

      

I don't like to leave the game with a tough battle unresolved, but I'm going to have to come back to it later with better strategy or some new assets. 

I don't know if Makala's betrayal of Pug is THE betrayal, but let's address what I think is the real betrayal: that in 12 years of commenters telling me how awesome this game was, none of them mentioned that I should set aside time to read the Riftwar books first. Thank the gods I came to that conclusion on my own, or most of this game would be utterly incomprehensible, even with the summaries in the manual. If Makala's actions are the "betrayal," you'd never know it as a player unversed in the intricacies of Pug's history with the Tsurani Empire. Much of the Moredhel story would be pretty impenetrable, too. It's odd to find a game so deeply embedded in the canon of a book series that it could leave players thoroughly confused; the only other examples that come to mind are Circuit's Edge (1990) and The Witcher 3 (2015), although I'm sure commenters will tell me of many more. Commenters will also tell me that they played Betrayal at Krondor without reading the books and didn't have any problem, but I suspect they just have a higher tolerance for being confused than I do.

     

At least Gorath didn't turn out to be a double agent. This entry would have been a lot of swearing and a hasty GIMLET.

     

Time so far: 53 hours

 

Game 535: Star Saga: Two - The Clathran Menace (1989)

 

         

Star Saga: Two - The Clathran Menace

United States

Masterplay (developer and publisher)

Released 1989 for DOS

Date Started: 7 December 2024

                

The oddly-punctuated Star Saga: Two is of course a sequel to a 1988 game that I reviewed in a single entry in 2022. As you'll see from that entry, I've struggled with these titles for definitional reasons—not as to whether they are RPGs (although that itself is a bit doubtful) but more whether they are "computer" games. The computer in Star Saga occupies a purely mechanical role; the story is found in the verbose books that accompany the software disks—nearly 1,000 pages worth of material. That the small development team managed to produce such a sequel in a single year is beyond impressive.

     

As I related in that earlier entry, that development team initially consisted of Rick Dutton, Walt Freitag, and Mike Massimilla, three Harvard University students who periodically engaged in a live-action role-playing game called "Rekon." They happened to meet Andrew "Werdna" Greenberg, co-creator of Wizardry, at a bridge tournament and invited him to participate. Greenberg (who passed away in August at age 67) saw enough promise in the LARP plot to turn it into a viable product. As Mr. Massimilla reported to me in several email exchanges, Dutton and Freitag handled most of the game design and text, Massimilla handled most of the programming, and Greenberg handled the business and production. Massimilla also credits Sheila McDonald, Greenberg's (then-) wife, for editing the text ("she added a lot of the humor") and Gerry Seixas for quality assurance.

    

The game came in a large box with lots of paperwork. Image courtesy of Black Gate: Adventures in Fantasy Literature.

     

The Star Saga games are meant to be played by groups. When I played the first one, I misunderstood some of the game instructions that said players shouldn't talk about what they encountered. This apparently only applied to the first few turns. Players otherwise were encouraged to discuss the game and their findings liberally and to help each other out by trading unneeded items when the characters met, a mechanic that the game offers an interface for. To mimic that experience as thoroughly as possible in 2024, I convinced Irene to play along with me. 

        

Star Saga: Two takes place in 2821, six years after the beginning of the first game. Humanity has colonized a local cluster of planets that, together with Earth, are known as the Nine Worlds. The invention of the dual-axis hyperdrive in 2257 made faster-than-light travel possible, and it kicked off an era of great expansion. This era came to a crashing end in 2490, when the Space Plague killed more than half of the human population. The interstellar government responded by creating the Boundary, a border around the Nine Worlds protected by constant scanning and rigid enforcement by the Space Patrol. Humans may pass through the Boundary on the way out, but no one outside of the Boundary is allowed into the Nine Worlds' territory.

       

Each character has a booklet explaining his or her backstory and motivations.

      

One had the players choose from among six characters, all carefully named as to be androgynous, all with their own motivations for going, as the game's subtitle had it, Beyond the Boundary. Because they all read (mostly) the same paragraphs and have the same encounters, however, the bulk of the game is not individualized to the characters. They all accomplish their original mission during the game, but in service of a much larger shared plot.

    

That plot involves the greatest of the pre-plague explorers, Vanessa Chang, whose ship, The Lockerbait, the player finds on the planet Outpost at the Arm of the galaxy. Chang had managed to achieve not just dual but tri-axis drive technology, which she used to explore areas beyond the known galaxy called The Fringe. There, they were captured by a reptilian species called the Clathrans who found humanity inexplicably disgusting. Chang and her crew managed to escape the Clathrans, then created the Boundary as a way to keep the Clathrans from finding the location of the Nine Worlds long enough for humanity to rival them in technology.

       

Choosing the active characters for the game.

     

Each character is given a slightly updated mission for the sequel:

 

• Corin Stoneseeker, a descendant of a comrade of Chang's named Soulsinger. In his travels, Soulsinger found an alien artifact called the Core Stone that has a variety of mystical properties. It was taken from him, and Soulsinger was killed, by a Clathran. His son escaped and founded a clan dedicated to finding the stone. Corin (who I played) accomplishes this quest in the first game and is now setting out to find the origin and purpose of the stone, hoping it can counter The Clathran Menace.

• Laran Darkwatch, a member of the Final Church of Man. Laran grew up reading the Six Holy Text Files but heard rumors of a secret Seventh, lost to the stars in previous generations. Laran defied church dogma to search beyond the Boundary in the ship Jihad. Finding Chang's ship on Outpost, Laran is now convinced that the Seventh Holy Text File must be on the planet Golgotha, somewhere in the galactic Arm. To find it, Laran will have to avoid The Clathran Menace. Okay, I won't keep doing that.

• Jean G. Clerc, an engineer who required alien technology to build the Ultimate Spaceship. Now in possession of such a ship (Run Amok), he or she seeks to improve it to fight the Clathrans, specifically by building or acquiring a Jump Engine.

      

The Nine Worlds celebrate Clerc's return from the first game.

   

• Professor Lee Dambroke, a xenobiologist interested in alien civilizations and abilities. He or she found out a lot about them—acquired them, even—during the first game. Back at Harvard, Dambroke and a colleague theorize about where the energy for these special abilities comes from. The colleague calls it "Dual Space" and suggests that it may be the key to fighting the Clathrans. Dambroke sets out again to research this phenomenon.

• Valentine Stewart, the scion of a wealthy family embroiled in a quasi-legal trading and smuggling empire. He or she decided to seek a little adventure before settling into a life of bureaucracy and paperwork, and accordingly stole one of the family's ships, renaming it Holly Roger. This theft screwed up a trading contract, and Valentine spent much of One assembling unusual trade goods to make up for it. He or she now seeks the source of Flame Jewels, which make tri-axis drives possible.

• M. J. Turner, a hotshot Space Patrol pilot who bent the rules once too often and was given the choice of resigning or accepting a secret mission to leave the Boundary and destroy a notorious space pirate. This turned out to be Silverbeard, the insane former helmsman of Vanessa Chang, who all characters had to kill to get access to Outpost. Back in the Nine Worlds, Turner has just been named the first captain of the Space Navy, a new branch designed specifically to address The Clathran Menace. Turner embarks on a mission to gather intelligence on the hostile Clathrans.

          

M.J. Turner's starting game status.

       

I decided to play Turner for this game, but Irene took up my former character, Corin Stoneseeker. I envisioned Corin as a woman, and Irene agreed. Turner is a man. This is only important because I'll be using the relevant pronouns in my coverage. Turner starts with an empty hold, plasma beams and stress fields on his ship, and "Telekinesis" and "Levitation" abilities. Corin has all the same stuff but also has the Core Stone. The game gave me the option to import Corin from One, and I assume if I did, she'd have several other abilities that I acquired in that game. I'll have to check later.

It took us a while to get things set up in an optimal way. Our first three-hour session eventually used three computers. One, attached to the television in our den, showed us the application (running in DOSBox) and the game map. But Irene and I also had our own laptops in front of us for reading the paragraphs while the other person was entering his or her inputs.

        

After you choose the characters, the game takes you to the first turn screen. Each turn, players can go in any order. Characters specify a number of actions, like moving from one sector to another, landing, trading, and exploring. You get 7 "phases" per turn; if your last action costs more than your remaining phases, you end up borrowing them from the next turn. As in the first game, the manual walks you through the first couple of turns, and the program won't let you deviate from what the manual tells you to do. 

     

 I tried to "go rogue" during the first few turns and got this.

      

As in One, the galaxy is divided into a bunch of triangular sectors, each color-coded, each touching no more than three adjacent sectors, all of which have a different color. To move across the galaxy, you specify a sequence of colors. Some sectors have "space walls" (which in the game's lore exist only in hyperspace) preventing you from moving to those adjacent sectors.

    

A small part of the galaxy. Black dots indicate planets.

      

Both characters start in the same sector of space, and both are instructed to navigate to the planet Outpost and land, which takes up all phases and borrows two from the next turn. Turner went first and, upon landing at Outpost, was told to read paragraphs 26 and 30 from Book A. The first paragraph summarizes the planet's history, including Vanessa Chang and Silverbeard. There are five other ships here—the other characters. The rest of the paragraph runs through the options available on the planet and provides a series of unique codes that you enter into the game interface to choose those options. Paragraph 30 instructs the player how to take notes about what's available on each planet and instructs him what to do for the next turn.

    

Options for Outpost, from the paragraph books.

      

Irene enters her actions and gets two different paragraphs, but oddly the first one has the exact same text, including the codes to use on Outpost. I guess maybe they replicated some of them so two people could read at once? The second paragraph is mostly the same, but where Turner is instructed to explore the planet (6 phases), Stoneseeker is instructed to visit the spaceport (2 phases) and search some nearby storage facilities for things Silverbeard might have left behind (3 phases).

      

The codes turn out to be unnecessary; you can choose the same options that are given in the book from a menu. I know there are times when the codes won't be on the screen and we'll have to type them in, but I'm not sure why they're necessary for the other times.

       

Choosing actions from the game menu.

    

Turn 2: Turner explores the planet and is given two new paragraphs to read. The first is quite long. He finds a hill that has been smoothed into a flat face on one side. He discovers it is a memorial built by Vanessa Chang. It reads: "In memory of humankind and her achievements. We will be avenged. V. Chang, May 30, 2519." This is odd because humankind was not destroyed, and that date is 26 years after Chang's final departure from the planet. Turner's computer suggests that it's a ruse to convince the Clathran's that they succeeded in wiping out our species. The computer notes that after returning to the Nine Worlds and setting in motion the Boundary and the Space Patrol, Chang disappeared in 2519, as did a ship called Fool's Errand. Turner insists that the computer spend a day analyzing the thing, and the computer determines that at exactly midnight (Earth time) on 30 May 2519, the tip of the memorial pointed directly at Earth.

  

The next paragraph instructs the player to search the spaceport and the storage area on Turn 3. That's what Irene is already doing with Corin Stoneseeker, so we turn to her. She finds a memorial to Silverbeard and wonders how he lived so long, whether he was really Chang's navigator, and why he went insane. Inside a hangar is a half-finished ship.

      

Inside the storage facility is an unlimited quantity of crystals, culture, fiber, food, medicine, munitions, radioactives, and tools. The paragraphs say that Corin can load any of those items into her ship, up to cargo capacity. The program takes her to an interface where she can do this. She has 10 cargo bays, so she loads one of each, plus one extra food, medicine, and radioactives. In the first game, all these items were for trading or solving puzzles, not for personal use, and I assume that's true here.

      

Loading up on trade goods.

      

In Turn 3, the two characters mirror each other's interactions in Turn 2, finishing with both of them meeting the other pilots on the planet. For that final action, the authors wrote five paragraphs, one for each character. The only thing that differs among them is the list of "other" ships that the character sees. This is exactly the sort of thing I meant when I said, in my Star Saga: One entry: "I have long been of the opinion that the computer is a better place for [passages of text] since they can be informed by in-game variables without requiring the publisher to have printed multiple paragraphs with only slight variations." Witness the text-heavy Betrayal at Krondor for an example.

     

But this "meeting" paragraph is more collaborative than anything we got in One. There, the characters could have been aware of each other through the players' sharing of information, but they weren't explicitly. This paragraph makes all the characters aware that six people simultaneously found Flame Jewels, constructed tri-axis drives, and followed Vanessa Chang's trail to Outpost. The paragraph elides how all six of them have memories of individually defeating Silverbeard. Anyway, all the characters agree to delete any mention of Earth from their databases, including of course its location. If they want to go home, they'll have to return to Outpost and figure out the direction from Chang's memorial. The last sentences instruct each player to "introduce yourself in character" to the other players and to share experiences and ideas, but it notes "you are not required to tell anybody anything, nor are you required to always tell the truth." I tell Irene that I found the coolest laser rifle at the Chang memorial, but she must not have found it because I got there first. She believed it. She was very upset and vowed to beat me to the other two options on Outpost: visit where Silverbeard used to build his weapons and visit the ancient hangar where Chang's most famous spaceship "is enshrined."

    

At this point, the game lets us plot our own turns. We both decide to finish exploring Outpost before blasting off, since we have no clues about where to go. The game notes that we were already at the weapons workshop, since that's where we got the plasma weapons and stress field. The game says that we take some time to repair our ships, which weren't damaged, but we can come back later if they are.

    

The game offers feedback on Irene's actions this turn.

       

At Chang's ship, Lockerbait, the game gives us the option to spend the next turn reading Chang's message to future explorers, which I got in One but Irene didn't. I choose it anyway to refresh my memory. The message is quite long, but it recaps the following points:

      

• Chang's Engineer, Miller, hypothesized the tri-axis drive, but they needed a special crystal for it.

• They found the crystal, a Flame Jewel, in the possession of an alien race. The aliens gave it to them in exchange for one of the crew volunteering to help test an experimental Jump Engine. Science Officer Sherin Mosswell insisted on doing it and disappeared during the test.

• Using the tri-axis drive, the crew found Outpost and used it for supply missions deeper into the Arm.

• After a few years of exploration, they encountered the Clathrans, who were immediately and inexplicably hostile. The Clathrans boarded Chang's ship and took them prisoner, holding them on the planet Morikor.

• The Clathrans are a large, humanoid species covered in green scales. They pride themselves on knowing about every species in the galaxy, so they were angry that they knew nothing about humans.

• The crew managed to keep the location of the Nine Worlds a secret. They eventually escaped, stole a ship, and fled, leaving helmsman John Silverbeard behind.

• Their ship's axis drive failed, so they were forced to make their way slowly home while in hibernation, enduring some crash landings on the way. When they got home, they learned about the plague, which seemed poised to kill every last human but eventually weakened. 

• When Chang and her crew returned to Outpost, they met a number of other explorers, including organizations to which all the characters in this game belong.

• Chang thinks the Clathrans never learned the location of the Nine Worlds, but they engineered the Space Plague to affect only humans and released it, figuring that someone would eventually bring it to the humans.

• While on Morikor, the crew saw the Clathrans building a huge fleet. Chang things this fleet will be used to survey the galaxy in an attempt to log the locations of all species, including humans.

As we wrap up our options on Outpost, the game gives us unique paragraphs with some hints as to where to go next. Corin's computer digs up a reference to Soulsinger having visited a planet called Zyroth, with a population of peaceful aliens called Zyrans. There's no information as to where it is. Turner gets a radio call from the Institute of Space Exploration, recommending that he go to the other end of the Arm, near the galactic core, to get information about the Clathran's "survey line"--the fleet of ships the Clathrans have deployed to search the galaxy for Earth.

      

Turns 6-11 go like this:

    

M. J. Turner: 

    

• Leaves Outpost, heading "west" across the galaxy. 

     

Moving across multiple sectors in one turn.

     

• Gets a random radio call from someone named Marc Tremont on Para-Para claiming to be an ISE employee. He doesn't seem to want anything specific. Turner chastises him for potentially revealing his location to the Clathrans. Tremont happens to mention that violent crime has recently increased in the Nine Worlds.

• Discovers the planet Holoth in Sector 503. It's a crystalline planet, characterized by "glittering mountains capped by radiant clouds, chasms plunging to mysterious depths, and crags jutting out at you from bizarre angles." A polytheistic species called the Hadrakians—"a centaur-like combination of tiger and gorilla"—calls it home. Chang visited them. All Hadrakians are born male, and in their younger years are the traders, soldiers, and laborers. They earn citizenship through victories in arena battles. They change to females at 30 years old, chill out, and become teachers, administrators, and scientists.

      

Discovering a new planet. I'm not sure that planting a flag is a good idea, though.

     

• Is contacted by a Hadrakian diplomat who tells him a bit about the world and relates that when Chang visited, she won arena battles on virtually every planet in the system. She directs Turner to a port for foreigners, where he has options to visit the commodities market or fight in the arena. Turner makes the mistake of visiting the market first; as a non-citizen, he doesn't have any valid options.

• Chooses the option to fight in the arena. Only hand weapons are allowed, since missile weapons could hurt spectators. The game goes into its combat system, in which it tells you what items or abilities you're using for offense and defense, if any. In this case, I get 100 strength from my "Telekinesis" offensive ability and 100 strength from my "Levitation" defensive ability, and I only need 100 to succeed. Turner gets citizenship, explores more of the planet, and learns about a second, bat-like race that lives there, the Holots. He also learns of "The Battle, Inc.," a "Clathran resistance organization."

     

My first battle in the game. Against a homeless person.

      

Corin Stoneseeker:

 

• Decides to head "south" towards a couple of nearby planets.

• At the end of her first group of jumps, she's listening to a talk radio program from Norstar, one of the Nine Worlds. It mentions that suicides are up 15% this year over last.

• Makes her way to Worzelle, a large planet currently in the middle of a war that has lasted thousands of years. Corin lands in the only safe area and is greeted by a four-armed native with something "between fur and scales" for skin. He explains that most Worzellians spend their lives in combat, training for some ultimate battle that everyone knows is coming but no one knows anything about. There are seven options available on the planet. The first—"enroll for a two-week session of military arts training in the Academy"—takes Irene out of the game for a couple of turns.

• It turns out that Worzellians don't sleep while in training, and Corin has to take drugs to keep up with them. She learns a variety of combat strategies and tactics, and she is drilled to remember three general strategies in a particular order: oisu (sneaking), takai (bluffing), tiisai (fighting), and hurui (using mobility to evade the enemy). This order comes into play in the final test, as Corin is pitted against a much stronger, faster, dexterous Worzellian. The game asks her first, second, third, and fourth moves, and Irene chooses options consistent with the above order. (It's not that hard, but I'm proud of her for figuring it out.) She becomes an honorary Worzellian, gains the "Tactics" skill, and can use the medical facilities for free.

        

Irene works out a fairly easy puzzle.

     

I hated to wrap up this first session with still a few things to do on our respective planets, but we needed to go to bed. I understand that ship combat and a few other mechanics are a bit different from Star Saga: One, so I look forward to experiencing those things.

    

Irene enjoyed the game enough to continue for at least a couple more sessions. Having played for a little while with another person, I'm still lukewarm about the multiplayer experience. We talked a little about theories—both of us concluded immediately that we'll be meeting Vanessa Chang in the flesh at some point, for instance—but despite a little conversation, it still felt mostly like two people playing individual games while sitting next to each other. Maybe it will feel less like that as we go along.

   

Time so far: 3 hours