Star Trail: Won!

       

I won Star Trail in a long, frustrating final session in which I had to peek at spoilers a couple of times. I do not entirely blame the game for it being so long and frustrating. If there's one thing that Star Trail has hammered home over and over, it's that the player must Be Prepared. Granted, I didn't know at the end of the last session that I was about to embark on a six-hour, three-level dungeon adventure, but the moment the wall closed behind me, I should have recognized the possibility.

   

I had prepared a little bit by ensuring that I had plenty of rations and what I thought was a reasonable number of herbs and potions. But knowing what I know now, I should have left Ingramosch's house and done the following:

     

• Stashed a bunch of my exploration gear at the warehouse. That's clearly what it's for. There's no need to carry all the outdoor gear into the dungeon.

• Bought a lot more arrows for my one missile character, Toliman. He only had about a dozen left when this session started.

• Figured out Lyra's weapon situation. I had been putting her combat points into "polearms," but she hasn't carried any kind of polearm for most of the game. She had a quarterstaff at one point, but I think it immediately broke. I had her equipped with a cudgel at this point, for which she had a skill of -3.

• Bought an extra weapon or two, particularly for Gnomon, as his favored weapon (the axe) is hard to find.

• Spent the 500 ducats I was carrying for no reason on even more potions. If I was worried about space, I could have traded regular healing potions for their "strong" variety.

• Doubled or tripled-up on waterskins.

        

This felt like enough.

       

Instead, I foolishly pressed forward, trusting that the Dungeon Would Provide. Dumb.

      

What the game called the "Vault Beneath Tjolmar" began with a puzzle. After the battle in Ingramosch's foyer, I had recovered a document that read "2L, 4R, 4L." This seemed to refer to the walls of the small room, which were covered with foliage decorations that could be manipulated. Manipulating the second wall to the left of the entrance resulted in a grating sound somewhere. I then tried the fourth wall to the right of that and got nothing, which reset the whole puzzle. It turned out that all three of the directions were based on the entrance, not each other. Once I worked that out, I got the three walls in the right sequence, and the way forward opened.

   

Only one step into the new area, the wall crashed shut behind me. That should have been my cue to reload.

     

"I'm sure it will be fine." — some idiot who has played far fewer than 573 RPGs.

           

The Vault was a large level in which I had to find multiple keys to advance through the corridors. Movement was strange in this dungeon. Even though I had continuous movement turned off, the game kept moving the party in half-steps. Some encounters:

   

• A "tree" of thorns and spines concealing a key. While trying to reach in and get the key, both Gnomon and Toliman were pricked and poisoned by the thorns. Fortunately, Lyra was able to cure them.

     

I should have put more into dexterity.

       

• An elevated area in which we were trapped by a door crashing behind us. There were some death's head murals that allowed us to manipulate some kind of mechanism, but nothing I did got the door open. I had to look this one up. The solution involved splitting the party and sending one person to lift the grate while someone else manipulated the mechanism. Even though several puzzles have required it, I never really came to grips with party-splitting as a puzzle-solving mechanism.

• A chest offered writing utensils, a brass mirror, a lute, a net, and an Elixir of Wisdom. I tried to imagine an encounter that this was possibly setting us up for. Nothing really came along.

• A chest at the end of a hallway was guarded by a chained troll. The troll stood up and broke his chains as we approached. The resulting battle was pretty easy. We just cast "Lightning" to blind the troll, then hacked him to death. 

    

This spell is almost unfair.

      

• A couple of other chests offered blue rings, green rings, and a red amulet. I never really found out what they did. They didn't seem to affect our statistics.

• There was a room in which several pillars had the face of Hesinde on them. Running into one of them led to an encounter in which Hesinde asked if we would sacrifice four points of astral energy permanently. We said no. Oddly, Mahasim leveled immediately after that. If he hadn't, I wouldn't have noticed that we got about 1,000 experience points just for saying no to the question. The thing is, this was repeatable. We could have stood there, bumping into the pillar, saying no, until we hit the game's maximum level. I resisted the temptation and moved on.

     

The game makes it clear what I'll lose, but not what I'll gain.

      

• A block of ice next to a water basin. There was a key in the basin and a warrior woman encased in the block of ice. Lilli had the "Melt Solid" spell at Level -2 (I had never put any points into it), but she cast it until it worked. Out of the ice came a Level 5 fighter named Helen. We welcomed her into our party. She stayed for a while but ran off when we went down to Level 3. 

      

Him may not have a name, but apparently Him at least has a sex.

        

• There were shields hanging on a lot of the walls. If we walked up to any of them, the game asked: "How about hitting it a really hard blow just to see what'll happen?" If we said yes, most of the shields rang out like gongs, but nothing happened. One of them made only a soft thud, and we had the chance to investigate it further, but the game kept saying we didn't find anything worth noting.

      

What was the point of this?

      

• We met ghouls in a hallway. Mahasim failed some attribute check and fled the party in a panic. We had to find him after killing the ghouls. 

• A flame key opened a chest with a "Dragon Slayer" sword. It was a two-handed sword, which in this game's classification system is a "two-handed weapon" and not a sword, so none of my characters were proficient with it.

• Multiple secret doors, including one that led to a large black statue with a small black statuette (a replica of the larger one) in a compartment. I never found out what it did, if anything.

     

What are the downsides?

       

• A stairway going down was a fake. Instead, it scattered the party across the previous dungeon level. I had to reunite them and find the real staircase, which was behind a secret door. 

            

There were numerous battles with cultists, warriors, and cave spiders. In combat, early in the level, the battle started with only a single cultist. I nailed him with "Lightning" in the first round and then put the battle into computer mode to finish him off. To my surprise, three of my characters ended up dead. I reloaded and tried again, this time in manual mode, and it turned out that additional enemies joined after the first round. I can't remember that happening elsewhere in the game. Anyway, Xamidimura hit Level 6 after that battle, so at last, in this final dungeon, my characters reached the levels they would have had if I'd just imported a party from Blades.

       

One of the more difficult battles during this session.

       

At the end of the level, I went down to the next one, and the name of the dungeon changed to the Temple of the One Without Name. I continued having the same sorts of encounters, plus undead (skeletons and zombies). A well early in this level was the first and last water I found in the dungeon. 

       

The skulls are a nice touch.

      

It wasn't long before I reached a stretch of corridor in which I got the same message multiple times:

        

Not only does the game insult me for failing to avoid an unavoidable trap, but it also insinuates that we're drunk.

      

With most traps, you have a chance of detecting and disarming. Not this one. I tried every possible spell to boost detection or to protect the party, but nothing worked. A few of these messages could kill several of my characters, so I ended up having to sleep for practically a week in the middle of the corridor in order to get through. Oh, and triggering these traps didn't disable them. They were happy to keep shooting if I had to go back through the same stretch of corridor, or indeed even if I stood in the same square too long. 

   

On the other side of these traps was the way down to the third level, but it was protected by a door that wanted a four-part key to open. These four parts—amulet pieces—were each carried by skeleton warriors in a maze in the southwest corner. The kicker was, the pieces disappeared from my inventory and reappeared with the resurrected skeleton warriors if I let too much time pass. By the time I had initially recovered all four pieces, I checked my inventory and only had two. By the time I re-recovered those two, another one had disappeared. Finally, I got all four at once and was able to head downward.

     

The battles themselves were pretty easy.

      

At the bottom of the stairs, in a scripted event we could do nothing about, some hooded jackass managed to lift the Salamander Stone from Lilii Borea's backpack. He gloated that we "should have brought the Salamander Stone to Lowangen" (which we absolutely were in the process of doing when it was stolen the first time). He further explained that "it would be against [his temple's] interests for Elves and Dwarves to ally." His master, he concluded, wanted the stone for himself. He then disappeared. I guess maybe it was supposed to be Sudran Alatzer, the "wealthy businessman" who gave us the alternate quest to find the Salamander Stone after Elsurion Starlight asked us to find it for the Elves.

      

Of course. Whatever. Sure.

       

We had no choice but to keep moving. At the bottom of the stairs, we found a message on the wall that read: "Close in—I can hear your pounding hearts." Nearby was a large battle with cultists and druids. On their bodies, we recovered a piece of paper that said CULT. Finally, we hit a secret door with a combination lock, looking for four digits.

      

I think this is a direct quote from Hannibal Lecter.

      

I almost figured it out. I guessed correctly that the piece of paper and the message on the wall must mean something. I noted that the letters in CULT were also in the message. But I rejected the idea that the answer could have anything to do with the position of the letters, since the first three letters in CULT are right at the beginning of the message, "C" and "U" appear multiple times, and then the "T" is somewhere between positions 31 and 42 depending on whether spaces and punctuation are to be counted. If the combination were five digits, positioning might work. I thought it might be the number of each letter and tried 2311 but didn't get it.

      

I don't know what Toliman is so happy about.

         

I had to look it up. Apparently, it was the positions, only just in the relevant word and not in the message as a whole. What I didn't appreciate is that while "C" and "U" appear more than once, they always appear at the same position in their words. I thus wanted 1325. But wait! The hint I looked up said that 1725, 2325, and 2725 were also acceptable, I can't figure out the logic behind these. There aren't even seven letters in the first word. [Ed. Right after I published this, I figured it out. The alternate numbers are if you count from the beginning of the line rather than the word.]

  

More battles with undead, cultists, druids, and sorcerers followed in the subsequent sections of hallway. One of them cast "Iron Rust" on Gnomon and destroyed his axe. Lyra's cudgel also broke, but I think that one was wear-and-tear. I had no weapons to replace Gnomon's axe with; he was better by far with "Unarmed" than with two-handed weapons, so I didn't give him the Dragon Slayer sword. I kept hoping I'd find a replacement axe to no avail.

         

"Don't 'Fulminictus' me, bro!"

      

We reached an area with demonic visages on the pillars. Four of them had two-letters: AR, OR, ND, and KA. A fifth wanted the "name of the lord of these walls," which  the very title of the dungeon had been telling me was nothing at all. But I guessed correctly that the demon was looking for some combination of those syllables. I guessed something like KANDORAR the first time and had to fight two fire spirits. After that, I saved and reloaded if I got it wrong. It took a few more guesses before I got it right with ARKANDOR.

        

This would have been a better riddle if the answer had been a blank.

       

The way opened to the final area, in which I had to navigate a series of teleporters. The only major encounter in this area, other than the teleporters and battles, came when we found a magic helmet and a 500-year-old dragon claw. Lilii Borea started to freak out for some reason and threatened to leave the party. We had some odd role-playing choices.

     

None of these sound very nice.

        

It was right about this time that I started to get messages that my characters were dying of thirst. I had found no water after the fountain mentioned earlier, and each character had only brought one waterskin. I rested too often between battles and after that disastrous trap corridor. The worst part was, there was no way I could go back at this point. Resting would have killed the entire party, and I didn't think at the time that I could make it back through that "Good show!" corridor without resting. Later, I realized I probably could have made it with potions, but for now, I just kept moving forward, hoping I'd find water somewhere.

   

There were more battles with cultists, druids, and some kind of demon called a "heshthot." Finally, I reached a large chamber. In the middle, I was taken to what turned out to be the last battle. Once I realized what was happening, I reloaded and prepared a bit by chugging healing potions (why don't they do anything for thirst?) and magic restoration potions. I thought I had a lot of the latter, but they weren't enough to restore more than about half of my magic points. That had ramifications for the final battle.

         

That should be worth one more spell.

      

This final area depicted a cavern with stalagmites jutting from the floor and a large stone mound with the bones and equipment of previous adventurers at its base. A robed man who I assumed was the same one who stole the Salamander Stone, stood in the center alongside a petrified version of what turned out to be Ingramosch. The robed man gloated: "Huh, you must be thinking you cornered me? Far from it! You have walked into my trap. Arkandor will take care of you!"

       

The man disappeared in a puff of smoke and an enormous dragon crawled out of the dark corner of the cavern and perched himself on the mound. "How sweet," it roared. "Fresh meat!" The battle began.

        

You're not going to find it very juicy.

          

(I should mention that with the speech pack, the cultist's and the dragon's speeches are fully voiced, and the dragon's voice is particularly well done. I'd encourage you to watch it on YouTube: Here's the beginning of the battle, and here's the end, only I experienced it without the relentless pulse of inappropriately upbeat music practically overwhelming everything else.) 

    

We've already covered all of the mistakes that I'd made up to this point. My party was on death's door from thirst (although admittedly this didn't have any effect yet on our statistics); Gnomon and Lyra had no weapons; Toliman had only a few arrows; and my mages were all at half-mast with their astral points. Then it turns out I made three more major errors before and during the battle:

   

1. I don't know how much of a difference the Dragon Slayer sword would have made, but it was in Xamidimura's possession. Her regular weapon was a longsword. She carried a shield in her left hand. Someone will tell me if I missed something, but I don't think there's any way to change from a one-handed weapon to a two-handed weapon in battle. If you try to simply switch weapons, the game says you can't do it with something in your other hand. There's a "Drop" command, but you cannot drop what's in your left hand, only what's in your inventory. You can switch the shield in your left hand for something else, but that still doesn't free up both hands. The only way it would work is if you switched the shield for something you could then "Use," leaving the hand free, but I had nothing that would work for this purpose. Thus, I fought the battle without Dragon Slayer.

       

Aaaargh!

       

2. I assumed Ingramosch was the dragon's ally. I mean, after all, this temple is under his house. I also didn't perceive that he was stoned/paralyzed/whatever. So I wasted time and spell points nailing him with "Lightning" for several rounds before I realized he was inert. When I tried to turn him to my side with "Evil Eye," the game told me that he was already on my side. I guess there was probably no way to cure his condition during battle, but I could have at least avoided wasting time on him.

     

Toliman adds insult to injury.

        

3. I didn't understand how targeting worked for the dragon. During my first few rounds, I cast "Lightning" and damage spells at the dragons, and fired at it with Toliman's last few arrows, by just clicking the dragon's center mass. But this was obviously out of melee range. It looked to me like there was only one square, way to the right, where a character could get into melee range of the dragon's tail. Only after the battle was half over did I realize that any character adjacent to the mound could target the dragon, but only by clicking on a square that was adjacent to the character (so it looks like he's targeting the mound), not the dragon's center mass.  

      

Xamidimura attacks from what I originally thought was the only square from which he could be attacked.

       

Because of these errors, two of my fighters essentially did nothing for the first dozen rounds while the third inched her way over to what I perceived as the one available melee square. Toliman, Lyra, and Lilii Borea cast damage spells on the dragon and did quite well, hitting it for a couple dozen points with each casting. But they were soon out of spellpower.

      

That's not bad for a regular arrow.

       

The dragon, meanwhile, had a fire breath attack and a smoke attack, both of which did surprisingly pathetic damage to the characters he targeted. When Xamidimura finally reached that square next to his tail, he started swatting her with the tail, but it also seemed to do very little damage.

      

Arkandor uses his breath attack.

       

Eventually, I figured out that I could target the dragon by targeting the mound, and I brought all the other characters up to adjacent squares. Unlike most enemies, the dragon seemed to be able to parry multiple times per round. Even with this, the party seemed to be doing well for a few rounds, but all of a sudden, the dragon got a lot more effective. Instead of six or eight points, he started doing like 40 points of damage with his attacks. One by one, my characters started to fall. Three of them died; two fell unconscious.

    

Then, all at once, Mahasim struck the final blow. Not the killing blow; the dragon just decided to concede: "You are fortunate, but you are honorable fighters. You shall be allowed to live." And with that, he withdrew. We got precisely nothing from the battle except experience.

       

"And by 'you,' I definitely mean the single form."

       

Three of my characters were dead, two unconscious, but for some reason Ingramosch was now in the party—and somehow he had the Salamander Stone in his possession. He had no words of explanation (I think he was still stoned or something), so we just poked around looking for the way forward.

      

The aftermath.

          

We found a stairway upward. At the top, we were met with the game's closing cinematic. In it:

   

• Elsurion Starlight, the brother of the Elf King, who had given us the main quest during the first session, came running up to us. He said the town was in "turmoil," but he had charted us a boat to escape in.

      

What about the three of us who are dead?

     

• During the boat trip, Elsurion healed Ingramosch (who he called a "prince"). We gave Ingramosch the Salamander Stone, and Ingramosch asked to see the Elf King.

• We switched from a boat to a carriage and rode into an Elven settlement in the forest. It seemed to consist of treehouses.

• More Dwarves and Elves arrived over subsequent days. 

     

Something about this image cracks me up. The dwarves just look so petulant.

       

• Two weeks later, Elsurion told us that the Elves and Dwarves had reached an agreement to attack the orcs "next year, or the year after at the latest."

• We had a big banquet in which the Elf King thanked us and announced to everyone that we were under his personal protection. "Our lands, the mountains, the rivers, and the unending forests, they are all open to you for as long as you shall live."

      

This would be more meaningful if the final game didn't take place in a single city.

      

• After the final congratulations screen at the top of this entry, we were prompted to save the game a final time. 

      

Obviously, none of this feels particularly satisfying with three of my six party members dead. Since it would be nice to have a hale party to import into Shadows over Riva, I'm toying with doing the final battle again. I think it would require me to backtrack to the last source of water. Assuming I can make it through the "Good show!" area with healing potions, and that the length of the journey doesn't make us die of thirst on the way, I can probably safely make it back. A more extreme measure would be to restart from before this session, do a better job preparing in town, and playing the entire dungeon again. A less extreme version would just be to re-fight the final battle with the characters dying of thirst but knowing how to properly attack, and having one of my characters equipped ahead of time with Dragon Slayer.

         

An appropriately Tolkienesque-looking king.

       

I'll think about it, but in the meantime, let's deal with a question that's nagging me: . . . What?

     

This question has several parts:

   

• Was the mage who stole the Salamander Stone Sudran Alatzer? If not, who was he?

• Where did he go before the final battle began?

• Why did Ingramosch have the Salamander Stone after the battle?

      

I don't even know who you are.

       

• If the cult went to so much trouble to steal the stone from us multiple times, why just let us walk away with it in the end?

• What is this cult all about, anyway?

• If the god is the "One Without Name," why does he have a name? Or is Arkandor not the god?

• If Ingramosch wasn't a part of it, why did he live in the house that had an entrance to its temple?

• What was the purpose of the black statuette and the dragon claw? 

      

While you work on those, I'll work on the "summary and rating."

     

Time so far: 60 hours

    

****

    

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04/26/2026