Star Trail: Sweet Is the Swamp with Its Secrets

They're kind of cute.

          

I started this session by replaying a lot of Lowangen. As commenters figured out after my last narration, I had obtained a fake Salamander Stone when I attacked and pillaged Vindaria Leechbroon's house. When I followed and accosted Gavron, who had stolen the stone from me in the first place, he misdirected me to Leechbroon's house. It was really in the house of his friend, Ailian Sevensprings. Unlike Vindaria's house, the player cannot force his way into Ailian's house prematurely. But once the player has confronted Gavron, even if Gavron lies, new options become available at Ailian's house.

   

All the options seem to end in a battle of roughly the same composition as Vindaria's house: about eight warriors and elves. When it was over, we had a second, identical, Salamander Stone. We also got some nice armor.

      

A lucrative battle. The "plate armors" and "chainmail armor" were actually plate and chainmail greaves. Toadskins are a light armor, and "orc hooks" are axes.

     

Also, Mahasim was sick with battlefield fever, so I took him to a healer. I paid the healer three times, but she couldn't cure it. I had to consult the manual to see that the treatment is a combination of joruga root and gulmond leaves. I don't know if I had both of those items before I was stripped of all my equipment when entering the city, but I sure didn't have it now. Moreover, I couldn't find any herbalist in town who had both. Finally, I took him to a different healer, and finally it worked. I owe you a rundown of the herb, potion, and healing system in general, but this is the wrong entry in which to do it, as herbs in Lowangen (like everything else) cost a fortune.

       

That doesn't seem fair.

        

While I was exploring some other things in Lowangen, I decided to take a tour of the temples, donate a substantial amount of money, ask for a miracle, and see what happened. I reloaded after each one because I couldn't afford the totality of the financial drain. This is what I got:

  

• Tsa: Healed one character for 7 hit points.

• Rahja: Made us all "enchanting dancers." This took me almost 100 gold pieces. Presumably, we could have made some of it back by dancing in taverns. 

     

I'd pay for this in real life. I'd even settle for "competent."

       

• Peraine: Healed one character for 5 hit points. 

• Ingerimm: Donated everything I had and got nothing. He's clearly still sore. 

• Phex: "Elates all thieving hearts." I guess maybe this would have been a good stop before burgling the Exhibition Hall.

• Hesinde: Could not get anything out of her, no matter what I donated.

• Travia: Filled our stomachs. I wish we could tell the populace about this trick. That's one way to outlast a siege. 

• Boron: Granted protection from undead.  

      

All I can say is, this world has an interesting definition of the word "miracle." (Granted, my party didn't need much. I assume if one of my characters had been dead, one of these gods would have resurrected him.) Also, the same woman's face appeared when granting us the miracle in each temple. Maybe the gods use a common messenger.

            

Surely, that was the work of a god.

      

Some other bits about Lowangen, mostly clued by commenters:

   

• There's a smith named Roglima the Great who, if you pester her a few times about STAR TRAIL, tells a long and (probably because of translation issue) somewhat confusing story. It concerns an ancient dwarven prince named Tordol who set out to find the perfect alloy. In his quest, he conquered the Great Peaks from the orcs in a massacre so violent they were renamed the Blood Peaks. Eventually, he found the ore he sought (called "Dark Soil"; we'll let that go) on the highest mountain in the Finsterkamm range, and he built the forge we've already visited in Finterkoppen Pit. His son, Thiondasch, in an effort to surpass him, stole ore from the elves, for which the god Ingerimm punished him by imprisoning his soul in the golem that we fought there.

• Meanwhile, the god of trickery, Phex, made some kind of a deal with Ingerimm that he could keep the first thing that Thiondasch forged with the stolen ore. Ingerimm agreed, not knowing that there was only enough ore to forge one item. So he told Thiondasch to make Star Trail, a throwing axe, knowing that (for reasons I don't understand) it would be useless to Phex.

• This story prompted me to ask about Star Trail at the Temple of Phex. "You should ask again in Tiefhusen," the priestess said. "Everybody does if they are looking for Star Trail." I see it on the map pretty far to the northwest. 

      

How many people are we talking about?

      

• I got options to buy magic amulets two more times from strangers. I said yes to both of them, and both turned out to be authentic. 

• If you haven't found the Salamander Stone after seven days, a party member speaks up—which would have been my clue that Vindaria's stone wasn't the "real" one (if I didn't just assume the game was bugged). If another four days pass without the party recovering the stone, a scripted death screen appears.

     

If it depended on a stone, it was never there to begin with.

       

• The spell "Respondami" prompts NPC companions to tell the truth about their intentions.

      

In fairness, that's what we planned to do to him.

       

• I got lucky when I broke into the Exhibition Hall the first time. The game rolls skill checks for various stealth and thieving skills behind the scenes, and there are several places where bad rolls can summon the guards and see the party tossed in prison, with a corresponding loss of health and items. 

• In addition to helping with Gavron and getting out of town, Dragan Escht will offer what he knows about the Salamander Stone, where to find food, and where to find lodging. He has a different mini-quest for each favor that the party asks. 

• I mentioned last time that one of the buildings has a note that says, "Eat more cheese toast." Reader M. N. sent me an email alerting me to a podcast in which developer Guido Henkel explained that while the game was in production, the developers were so poor that they subsisted mostly on cheese toast. One of them bucked this trend and brought mostly salads for lunch, but his salads started to disappear. He angrily admonished the others to "eat more cheese toast and leave my salad alone!" 

       

Having finished the city for the second time, I again approached the Order of the Grey Wands, reshuffled some inventory, left Toliman and Lyra behind with both Salamander Stones (I don't even know which is which), and headed into the Netherswamps. As we did, the game asked if we wanted to sacrifice anything to our patrons. I had Mahasim sacrifice 5 gold. I'm curious how we did that. Toss it into the river?

          

I'm getting very familiar with this tunnel.

         

We weren't in the swamps for more than a few steps before we were attacked by half a dozen apelike creatures called "swamp rantzies." The battle left the party rather battered. 

    

I began circling the rather large map, which featured a lot of boardwalks through squares of mire that the party is otherwise unable to step on. The map also has a lot of water squares, requiring swimming to get to various areas, and here Lilii Borea was a constant liability. Her "Swim" skill of 3, compared to 4-6 for the rest of the party, was just low enough that she occasionally took damage and drowned, forcing me to save and reload frequently.

    

This kept happening. I guess I could have split her off from the party, but I needed every person I had in combat.

      

There was sort of a field in the middle of the swamp and an area of weird walls to the southwest. My exploration pattern (following the rightmost "wall") led me to explore the outer edges before the middle. I ran into multiple battles with orcs and goblins, so many that I just started letting the computer fight. Gnomon leveled up.

        

This battle wasn't as hard as it looks.

       

Various encounters:

      

• A building where no one answers the door. 

• A chest buried in the mire that the game wouldn't acknowledge.

      

I'd like to know what this is all about.

       

• At least one exit on each "wall" of the swamp. 

• A single swamp rantzy sitting in a corner, holding something in its paw that glittered. He didn't act in combat, so I just had everyone retreat.

• A tower in the middle of a lake in the northwest corner. It was magically locked.

      

No, Star Trail is the name of the game.

       

• A gulmond bush that the game said we pulled out of the ground.

     

But why?

     

• Some salamander creatures living in some earthen mounds in the middle of the swamps. They said we were unwelcome, but they didn't attack. They told us to go to the "ruins" to the west if we wanted to rest.

    

The accumulation of combats got to be a problem, and we used up all of our healing potions. I made the amateur mistake of using only one saved game while in the swamps, and I made the further mistake of saving after Gnomon got bitten by a snake. His face didn't register poison until about a dozen moves after the event, so I didn't notice that he was, in fact, poisoned. I was unable to cure it through any means, and he inevitably died within a few more moves. 

      

Summer's treason.

         

I thus had to reload from back in Lowangen, where I resolved to take a character with better "Swim" ability, check into buying some more potions, and perhaps spend as much time at the inn in New Lowangen as necessary to fully heal the party before entering the swamps again. 

        

The reload was beneficial in at least one way: While re-exploring some parts of Lowangen, I realized I'd missed an armorer. This is the one place in town where you can buy and sell weapons and armor. I didn't really need to buy any armaments, but thanks to the battle at Ailian's, boy did I have a lot to sell. And with the inflated prices caused by the siege, I made a killing. I soon had more than 600 gold pieces, about 10 times what I had when I started. Even with all this money, however, I couldn't bring myself to pay the inflated prices for more than a few healing potions.

     

I did stop in New Lowangen on the way out and tried to generate a couple of new characters named "Pack" and "Mule" to join the party, but the game pulled the rug out from under me and said that I would have to go all the way back to Kvirasim to add them to my party. I assume this is true of all temples. So this was never really an option.

            

Why not just say "all characters"?

       

A few minutes later, I was back in the Netherswamp again. This time, I sacrificed even more money to my gods on the way in, and I think it may have made a difference. Gnomon identified and killed a couple of snakes before they bit him, and some of the battles seemed to have fewer monsters. 

           

Ha! Take that, you little bastard. (And yes, I realize that comment clashes with something I say later.)

        

I adopted a different exploration pattern on my second visit, following the left path instead of the right. This time I brought Toliman, whose "Swim" skill of 6 didn't cause as many problems in the water, so I was able to go to places that I ignored when I had Lilii. Some findings:

   

• An overturned cart with 10 ration packets, 3 water skins, 20 arrows, a short bow, a long bow, and 15 gold pieces. Because of the armor I'd found at Ailian's, my characters were near their weight limits, and I had to do quite a bit of shuffling around to grab everything.

• An herb garden with one of every herb in the game. See the second sentence in the previous bullet point.

      

I guess I could do that herb/potion analysis now, but I think I'll wait until I have more than one of each.

        

• An old witch living in a house. We told her we were looking for a missing soldier. She said she'd help me if I would retrieve a crystal ball from a sorcerer living on the island in the northwest lake.

     

It has to be #1. #2 is a lie (we've never heard of her), and #3 is just rude.

        

• We spoke to the salamander men again but chose different dialogue options, and this time they asked us to kill a "big monsssster" living in the swamp to the east. 

          

Okay, are they lizard men or salamanders? There's a fairly significant difference.

      

When we got back to the tower in the lake, the door let us in. The subsequent encounter was weird from an interface perspective. The game switched to a combat perspective, but no battle followed. Instead, there was a scripted encounter in which the old wizard, sitting on a throne, figured out who had sent us (he called the witch "Sabrina," which—my apologies, Irene—I have always felt is the most enticing female name), and summoned some kind of fire-shrouded demon to deal with us.

        

Wherewith she sits on diamond rocks, sleeking her soft alluring locks.

      

The demon was unhappy. "Who dares to pull me from my dimension and disrupt my services to Hesinde?" Maybe he wasn't a demon. The wizard shouted that he was losing control. "Proclaim  your supplication with appropriate humility then," the demon said, "for someone here shall become the target of my divine wrath."

      

While the wizard kept shouting at the demon to destroy us, we had the opportunity to type three words into three successive dialogue boxes. If the demon liked what we said, he said something positive about it, and if he didn't, he said something negative. If we didn't get at least two positive reactions, he destroyed us. If we got at least two out of three, he destroyed the wizard.

   

I have no idea how we were supposed to know what to say to him. At first, I tried looking up Hesinde's portfolio, and I saw that she's the god of wisdom, knowledge, magic, and art. I tried each of those words, but I got nowhere. (There was a lot of reloading during this phase.) I went back and looked at his dialogue and saw that he asked for "supplication with appropriate humility," and I think I got my first positive reaction with PLEASE HELP. For a while, I couldn't get a second positive reaction until for some reason I started trying the virtues of the Avatar. Surprisingly, he responded positively to COMPASSION, VALOR, and I think JUSTICE. That was enough to win the encounter and take the crystal ball off the wizard's corpse. The wizard also had some kind of magic transformation spell that requires heather.

          

Sure, that's what I'm doing.

         

I had expected the tower to be more of a dungeon, so I was surprised by the brevity of the encounter and the odd interface that it used. I wonder if I wasn't supposed to find the demon's preferred keywords somewhere else.

        

All my characters leveled when we left the tower. Mahasim failed so many of my attempts to increase his skills that I ended up reloading. I wouldn't normally save scum this way, but five fails in a row on a single skill seems excessive.

     

Strangely, not the most infuriating part of this session.

      

You can't fast-travel in the swamp—the game thinks of it as a dungeon. As I slow-traveled, I noticed a weird thing: my party members stopped gaining hit points and spell points from rest. I'm not sure why. They had blankets, food, and water.

  

While exploring the rest of the map, we found a dinosaur-looking creature called an "engulfer." I didn't know it at the time, but I guess this was the salamanders' "big monster." Their reward, when I returned, was just to tell me about Sabrina. I went through some other keywords with the leader. On TRAVEL, he told me that a human male who recently came to the area is "still alive, though he doesn't exist anymore" (I'm leaving out the extra s's). Something clicked at this point, and I realized that the "swamp rantzy" who hadn't fought back earlier was probably the missing solider, transmogrified, and the wizard's spell was a way to reverse the effect. I'm glad I reloaded after killing him.

      

It's like a t-rex if a t-rex were human-sized.

   

I returned to Sabrina's house, where she took the crystal ball, but then decided that I was also an enemy for killing her animals. I don't know whether she was referring to the snakes, the swamp rantzies, or the engulfer. Either way, she attacked with a dire wolf companion. I had to reload a few times, mostly because the lack of restoration during sleeping meant that I was fighting the pair with no magic points. Also, she always went first and managed to take someone out of the equation with a fear or petrification spell. Finally, I think she could only be damaged by a magic weapon, and only Mahasim had one. We got absolutely nothing from the encounter when we finally killed her.

     

I went back to where I had found the swamp rantzy and tried using my net in combat. It worked and—after one of the most horrible role-playing choices in history—we got the swamp rantzy into our inventory. I still didn't know how to turn him back into a man. The document I'd found with the wizard suggested that I needed heather, but that was one plant that I hadn't found in the earlier cache.

        

What the hell, Star Trail?

          

I decided to bring the rantzy back to Lowangen to see if Master Eolan would accept him as-is or if I could find some heather at one of the shops in town. I exited the way I came in, and naturally found  myself far to the west of the swamp instead of the original entry point. When I finally made my way back to Lowangen, I had no option to re-enter the city through the secret passage and instead had to enter through the orc camp again, losing all of our stuff, including the captured rantzy.

     

I think I'm about done with this game.

   

Time so far: 33 hours