Part 3: Caves, Traps and Laundry

Update 03: Caves, Traps and Laundry





So that's one vote for charging down the coast road, collecting the skulls of our enemies and raising them as a gruesome banner to march before the gates of Krondor-
It's what we would have done back in the good old days.
-and one vote for fleeing to the Free Cities, changing our names to Xygox, Darksmoke and Steve, and living our lives in obscurity as crab fishermen-
But we'd secretly be master criminals! I'd be the brains of the operation.
-cute. But all your votes are invalid. Gorath can go to Krondor all he wants, but without me they'll just throw him in chains. And you have to do what I say, or I'll tell Gorath to snap your neck and leave you in a ditch.
If it helps I'd pause for a split second to think about how bad I felt.



Well fine, but what's the plan if you're so smart?
Step one, we find somewhere the moredhel would never think to look for us and hide out for a while.





A bit south of LaMut, along the western border of the map, there's a small side path leading off the road.




Ugh, a cave?
No, a mine.

Interacting with the mine produces a bit of dialogue from Locklear and a yes/no prompt.






Popping a torch indoors has no gameplay benefit, but it'll give you a chance at spotting enemies in the distance, loot on the floor and eventually other... features... that it would be bad luck to stumble upon unaware. The moment we take a few steps farther in, though...




Beastie?
Beastie, aye! 'alf a week ago we 'eard something fierce a'bayin' in the mine, terrible cold like. Of course a dwarf knows the sound instant whether he's heard it before or not - Brak Nurr. Curse of every hole delver since first dwarves took up hammers.
I've never heard of them.
No one has in quite a while, laddie. There 'asn't been a Brak Nurr in the upper mines for well on since Delong the Great laid claim to the Kingdom of the Isles. We thought we'd laid low the lot o' them but the kobolds are stirring them up on their quest.
Kobolds?
Your folk call them gnomes. They used to worship a dragon what lived down here, but when the dragon disappeared, they thought the dwarven folk 'id him away. Every now and again their leader Feydhir takes a notion to undertake a holy quest to find him. This time they must've woke up a clutch of Brak Nurr. Now the Nurr have collapsed the main passage an' kilt thirty of our kin. We've a reward to whomever can do it in - if you're of a mind and 'ave the spirit that is.
I'm not saying we're interested in killing your Brak Nurr, but if we were looking for it, what would it be like?
'alf again your height, and a'made of stone, like living rock they are. From out their nostrils they breath a green mist but I'd be wary of getting too close to look, for they'll drop a boulder on your head sure enow. We've already 'ad a few bravos what's come in to try a hand at killing the beastie, but there's not much they've been able to do themselves beyond get themselves so mangled they needed the help of a temple. I'd be as wary of them though as I would be of the beastie. They, none of them, want else but then to claim the gold that we've offered to the creature's slayer.
Thank you for your time, Naddur. I hope you can get things straightened out down here.
We'll be fine, soon as we're through some o' this rock and the Brak Nurr is laid low. Ya canna keep us down.
I didn't think so. Perhaps we'll meet again.




It's entirely possible to stumble in here without talking to Dubal in LaMut about it, especially if you're of the "do anything BUT the main plot first"-school of gaming style, like I am, because I'm a dick and I like making game designers cry. Owyn even starts with a few torches in his pack so you won't be stumble around in here blind, as well as a spell to replicate their effect, though there's no reason to spend good Stamina when you've got pieces of wood to burn instead.

From a first person perspective, trying to keep track of where I'm going and what the hell is happening is rough, especially when it's all screenshots, so allow me to furnish the good readers with... a map!



The party enters from the east, the yellow numbers indicate enemy encounters and in the lower left there's an exit into a deeper tier of the Mac Mordain Cadal that we won't be able to access for the moment. This mine actually features in the first Midkemia book, Magician: Apprentice. Travelling from the far West of the Kingdom of the Isles(there's a whole section of human settlements along the coast west of Elvandar, missing on our current map of the region), to the central Kingdom to report on the Tsurani invasion, the Tsurani have secured all the major passes(and the sea is too rough at the time of year), forcing Tomas, Pug and several other characters to instead travel through the Mac Mordain Cadal.

While travelling through the mines, they find themselves ambushed by a Wraith, and Tomas is cut off from the rest of the party. Wandering the tunnels, he ends up in the deepest chambers where he meets Rhuagh, an ancient and peaceful dragon who's about to die. As she dies, she grants Tomas a seemingly innocuous suit of armor, sword and shield from her hoard, and eventually he's found by Dolgan, a dwarf, who escorts him back to the surface on the Western side of the mountains(not wanting to risk the Wraith again).

In any case, the door immediately south of the entrance is locked at the moment, and beyond our lockpicking, so instead we head to Encounter 02 and the trapped chest. Along the way, the party whines about being sleepy, which they will occasionally do, forcing me to spend a few hours having them roast sausages and marshmallows in the corridors. Generally they can go about a day and a half without sleep before they start complaining.





Must be some of those "bravos" Naddur mentioned.
Right everyone, keep quiet and approach them slowly.
...so we can sneak peacefully past them and avoid conflict, right?
Hell no, they're camping out in our hiding spot.




Meet human rogues. They're not much more threatening than blue-cloaked Moredhel one on one, they're a bit sturdier, but aren't any better at hitting or doing damage for the most part, though Betrayal doesn't trade much in "standard" enemies. Enemies with the same sprite tend to be similar, but they'll almost always have slight stat variations, health variations, gear variations, and even AI thresholds for when to retreat. So you can never expect two encounters to be entirely similar. It's just a shame most of these differences are hidden from the player until a rogue suddenly whips out a crossbow and plonks Gorath in the head with a bolt.



Not being complete idiots, these rogues recognize that the guy in a nightshirt and holding a staff is probably a wizard and immediately attempt to mob Owyn. Since they won initiative, this is a pro move and prevents him from neutering any of them with magic on round one.



Except for magic and some consumables, it's generally pretty hard to prevent an enemy going somewhere they want to go. There are no threat zones or attacks of opportunity, so usually the only way to keep Owyn from getting beat like a pinata is to mob the nearest bully with swords until he falls down and stops moving.



Once he's down, Owyn blinds the survivor and he has a very poor time of it. Since almost no enemies in the game are immune to Despair Thy Eyes, any single enemy that isn't in that category(and which doesn't win init and rush Owyn right away), tends to be a complete non-issue to defeat.




And then the looting begins.



One of them has a new type of sword!




It has slightly better damage and slightly worse accuracy than our default broadswords, but note the racial modifier for elves. It means that Gorath gets a minor bonus to hit with it, which he wouldn't get with the broadsword, which negates the penalty entirely and means its a pure upgrade for him. Plus kind of thematic for him to be wielding it since the sword is a "Moredhel Lamprey."




Past them is a dead end room with a single chest. Before interacting with them I cast "Scent of Sarig," you'll notice it appears as a small red icon at the top of the screen.




Eh, what's the worst that could happen? It's just a chest trap that you can encounter right out of the first city. I'm sure it'll just mildly poke us or s-




You pricks! I warned you it was trapped!
In my defense, you're a weenie, so I assumed it was just you being a coward. Lesson learned.

So, two important things here. First, what did we earn?



Good news! We more than doubled the party's money reserves AND we got a shovel for looting graves with!

I mean, we probably won't loot any graves.
...
While anyone's looking. It may be a matter of life or death!
We're never going to make it to Krondor, are we?

Second thing, how badly did we get fucked up?





Completely ignoring all defenses, it blasted about 80 points of life off everyone. For Owyn, it was mortal since he'd already spent a bit of Stamina on spellcasting, but thankfully Locklear and Gorath are still mostly alright. The big problem for Owyn is the near-death condition which makes it supremely hard to heal him back to full life again, camping won't do it except over geological time scales, and the nearest temple is REALLY far away. Thankfully, I have exactly 20 Restoratives(green potions), and in addition to restoring Health and Stamina, they each cut 5% off of all negative conditions. So between them and some camping, everyone's okay again! It's just cost, uh, literally all of my emergency medical reserves!





This is coming in from the east of encounter 03, where you can actually snag the chest and then continue north without getting in the fight. It's a plain Locked chest, which is slightly more interesting than just being Locked. Most things that are Locked can be lockpicked, but some of them also have a generic key that open them(if they use a unique key, they cannot be picked), though figuring out which key has really no in-game guides and keys that are used "wrong" will often break permanently(though if used correctly they will never break, so if you have, say, a comprehensive FAQ, you only ever need one of each key. Sadly I don't think you're able to sell spare keys.).




The lock graphic on the left is usually your hint in terms of key requirement/lockpicking difficulty, since it upgrades to less shoddy-looking locks for the tougher ones. This one is pickable even by Locklear, so I grab the contents and turn north to encounter 01.






As per usual, I attempt to gain ambush status, so I try to click on the opponents on the far side of the door, but accidentally interact with the door sprite instead while standing in it... unlike in some games, this does not lead to a physkill, instead it leads to the game making fun of me.



Assuming that Locklear tried to close the door while standing in it, and just mindlessly smashed it into his own head.

Anyway, ahem. Battling ensues.




Fights against just one or two enemies are in no way the norm in BaK, most fights number between 3 and 6 opponents, and since the party caps out at 3 members, that means you're often at risk of getting outmaneuvered and drowned in quantity of enemy actions, especially if they can lock down your mages by standing threateningly next to them.




As usual, Owyn leads by blinding the guy on the right, but then, unexpectedly, the guy in the middle whips out a crossbow and starts sniping at Gorath. It does middling damage(8 compared to the 13 or so from a sword hit), but it's still something to avoid since later enemies will absolutely do more damage, but also risk bringing stuff like poisoned crossbow bolts that make your dudes start slowly melting.



Eventually the AI gets back on point and starts mobbing Owyn again, though for some strange reason he keeps dodging practically everything they throw at him.



And he even gets to land a killing blow!

This is almost as fun as financial crime.



Locklear, meanwhile, gets bullied out of all his stamina. For some reason the enemies have a lot more luck hitting him in most of these fights than anyone else.



Still, a win without any deaths. As long as everyone survives and you have spare rations, situations are rarely dire since a nap cures almost anything. Now it's time to root through the corpses and see if they dropped anything good...



Hell yeah, an early armor upgrade! Usually it's a while before we see elven armor, which Gorath gets in this case since he also gets the racial benefit from it. In general you don't want to be too concerned with the racial boosts, since usually just the raw stats of better swords, crossbows and armor matters more, but if you only get the one upgrade, you may as well slap it on whoever will benefit the most from it. As an oddity, some items are tagged with a Tsurani or Dwarven racial modifier, but there are no Tsurani or Dwarf player characters in the game, so I wonder if that's just for verisimillitude or a sign of cut content. They also have some light crossbows, which I pick up just in case I need some ranged action, but will likely not see any use until I upgrade to better stuff.



All their rations are, sadly, spoiled, which I only noticed because they didn't stack with my normal rations. If I hadn't kept a sharp eye out, I would've fed the team a bunch of rotten ham.



Everyone consumes about one ration per day, and a full heal from nothing while resting in the wilderness will usually require several full days of napping if not boosted by healing herbs. Inns are slightly better, and the only way to cure really quickly is temples. Unless you're fucked by Near-Death or other nasty conditions, though, it's almost always more cost-effective to just spend a week at the nearest inn instead, however, plus, if I didn't mention it already, it has the side effect that sufficient sleeping actually boosts the party's base Health and Stamina.




Next up is encounter 04 in the upper left. Three goons guarding a chest, hmmmm... I wonder...

You fellows mind if we bust open this chest in front of you?
: Go right ahead, partner, we're just guarding this corner.

Thanks to interaction ranges, it's entirely possible to crack the chest, turn around and leave.




This one always baffled me some because who the hell calls a wheelbarrow just a barrow? I understand they probably had a character limit, but I feel like I wasn't the only one confused by this one.



It contains several items of interest, though! From top to bottom they are...

A Ring of Prandur, which just casts a light-creating spell. Owyn can already do this, so very niche application, though there IS one late-game area we'll want some of these for, if I remember right...
Some spare change.
A rope, which we desperately need to hoard some of since ropes are necessary for fully tapping out some of the game's dungeons, though I don't remember if any of them are necessary for actually completing the game.
A vial of Dalatail Milk, which boosts a character's Defense. Since consumables can be swigged down in fights without spending your turn, it's entirely viable to toss this to someone who finds themselves surrounded and having them chug it.

: Nice work with that chest, folks. You gonna head out now?
Actually, no, we're gonna kill you and take your stuff, too.




Scoring ambush when outnumbered is INCREDIBLY vital since it's necessary to get off crippling/killing spells from turn one before your mages get mobbed and prevented from participating.



Even when Gorath and Locklear rushing in to lock the rogues down, you have one slipping past to Owyn a couple of turns into the fight while his buddy hangs around in the corner peppering everyone with crossbow bolts.



Which gets even worse in short order.



Despite Owyn being the one surrounded, though, Locklear is the one who almost eats shit.



I only just luck out and bring him away from the fight in time, leaving Owyn and Gorath to clean up while he relaxes in the corner.

Rah rah go team! I'll make sure to offer moral support!
Not. Helping.



Is it a bad sign that I don't feel anything after my second time caving someone's skull in with my staff?



It's one hell of a haul, though. Aside from some gold, rations and sellables, they all drop weapon repair items(the blue lozenge is a whetstone) and this Clerical Oilcloth, which provides the "type 1" weapon enchantment for the entirety of the next fight of a weapon. The "type 1" enchantment doubles damage done, which can make a huge difference if a high-damage fighter, like, say, Gorath, is using it, since it'd allow him to flatten human/elf opponents in sometimes just a single swing.





I feel like we've been down here for days. I don't even remember what the sun looks like.
That was the point of this, Owyn. If Delekhan's agents don't see us topside for days, they'll think we're dead or have gone to ground and disperse.
Maybe we should just stay down here. It's warm. It's safe. It's-
It's a room with a seven-foot titan made entirely of stone up ahead. Why are we fighting this thing again?
If we help the dwarves out with their "little" problem, we can use the money to pay for things I want.

I slap the Clerical Oilcloth on Gorath's sword, scout out the Brak Nurr and move ahead...




Now, you might expect a single large enemy to hit like a freight truck(it does), and have tons of health(it does, almost as much as 50% over Gorath's total) and be immune to trivial, start-of-the-game save-or-suck spells like Despair Thy Eyes. But you'd be absolutely wrong on the third point.





Owyn blinds the Brak Nurr and then Gorath reduces it to rubble in short order. It's slightly anticlimactic.



You've doone it! I 'eard the conflagration down the shaft but I 'ad no idea what was a'happenin'! Congratulations!
Right now, I think we all could just use a rest...
A rest you'll have and you'll be a'needin' it! You'll 'ave to 'ave your strength to be carryin' about all the gold in rewards! Well done!

After this, Naddur vanishes into thin air again, but what the game doesn't point out is that he left us with 150 gold extra, which is huge at this stage of the game. It'll afford us some well-deserved upgrades. A chest in the corner of the room has a few more green potions and some more rope, but otherwise there's no real loot in the room itself, the bounty is the reward we were here for.




The last fight in here is the encounter marked 03 on the map, the one that's easily bypassed, but they might have interesting things to pick up OR Gorath might learn something useful from carving them open.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV8V2o8FNB8



The most interesting part about this fight is the guy with the yellow pants, he's a rogue mage rather than a rogue fighter and he could insanely ruin our day if he chose to, since has three spells:

Despair Thy Eyes, which is Owyn's trick.
Dragon's Skin, which renders an ally of the caster's invincible for a while.
Hocho's Haven, which gives a coating of ablative extra HP to an ally of the caster's for a while.

It should go without saying that with only three characters, having one of them taken out of action for two rounds would be really bad news. In any case, the fight is prevented from getting too interesting by having Owyn constantly chase the mage around so he can't cast anything. It also prevents ME from casting anything, but Gorath and Locklear can whittle down the enemy fighters without Owyn's help for the most part. It earns them a few dents, but it works out in the end.



There's one interesting piece of loot on the dead rogues.



This ugly blue brick is an armor booster, something I rarely use, since most boosts for armor are just one-battle counters to weapon boosts. In this case, this dragon stone is like a nice asbestos covering for your armor, so that if an enemy has set his sword on fire, you don't take extra damage. Unfortunately, you won't know an enemy has a boosted weapon until he hits you with it, or unless you read a guide, so I mostly find these items to be vendor trash.

Now the only remaining thing is to loot the two chests in the lower right, since we've got a key that opens the door to them. There's no reasonable way to have the lockpicking skill to get in there without said key, but the Brak Nurr's chest also has it, and with Owyn blinding him he's easy to take out, AND you can get to him without fighting any of the rogues if you know where he is.







The drum one used to puzzle me, because I feel like I'd generally associate drums with pig skin rather than leather, but I don't know, maybe some sort of deep drum lore expert can tell me how wrong I am on that point. So what does cracking these chests get us?



The first one contains two spare swords, a pretty shell for selling and a little lore book.




It has no real purpose except to remind you that these are the caves where Rhuagh once had her lair, sadly that lair is in the deeper Mac Mordain Cadal which we won't be able to access in this chapter.



The second chest has some spare change and a pair of green booties which give a +30% Stealth to whoever's carrying them. One thing that always felt unintuitive to me is that non-armor, non-weapon "equippable" items like said boots, rings, amulets, etc. have their effect just by rattling around in the character's backpack, as a kid I could absolutely never grok it. It's also worth noting that they're all cumulative.





I never thought I'd be so glad to see the open sky again.
Pointless as this side trip otherwise was, it should have thoroughly confused Delekhan's agents. What now?
No reason leave a job half done, let's utterly confuse them. We're headed back north.

On the way north, we stop by LaMut to sell some trash, and on the way there we also stumble across a well-hidden little graveyard.





And, I mean, we do have a shovel now...

Digging graves is usually a good idea! There are a few standard responses to doing it.


These are the replies you get if you carve into a grave with no contents. Some of them have... surprises, and others contain some actual loot. There's nothing too interesting here outside LaMut except for a single grave containing a mysterious note:

"Please relay our thanks to the Six for the shipment of magical traps. The Witch we have employed has been informed NOT to step between them. She has promised she shall test them at her leisure." Who are the Six?
A group of mysterious magicians who have been destroying Delekhan's enemies, I only barely escaped the Northlands before I was next on their list.




Since the party's spectacularly flush with money, I also decide to take Sumani up on his offer of combat training while we're here.



I'm going to need you to kick our asses until we learn something from it.

I shall meet you by the river in five minutes time. I should forewarn you, however, I sometimes seem quite different when I am armored for battle. I apologize in advance for any harm that I should do you.


With no tagged skills, this is a +5% to Melee Accuracy and Defense for everyone, which is actually a pretty nice boost, especially this early on. Now we can leave LaMut behind and not see it again for, probably, several chapters worth of game.





There are actually no road encounters or hidden gear on the way north to the next town, Yabon. Despite canonically being a sizeable settlement, in-game it's represented by five houses and a shop on a side road.




Most houses, when interacted with, just produce this generic "no one's home"-response, so the party heads straight to the store to see if there's anything good and oh man, is there ever some stuff they're badly in need of.




Locklear gets a two-handed Broadsword, which is both more accurate and harder hitting than his basic one(when using the Swing attack it gets another +5% chance to hit and has an extra 14 base damage. Considering that his normal damage when doing a Thrust is about 16 and most enemies at this stage of the game have generally about a total of 50 Health+Stamina, that means he'll be able to drop most non-special enemies in one hit less, and it wouldn't have been possible at all without our side trip into the Mac Mordain Cadal.



Additionally the party stocks up on repair items, because lower-level gear also decays faster than the better stuff, so at the moment their armor and weapons are threadbare after just a few hits exchanged.

Lastly, there are a couple of non-generic houses at the northern edge of Yabon.




Two things about this amuse me: Firstly that this guy just calmly admits he's spent the night trying to break into a locked building, and secondly that the Kingdom of the Isles apparently has armor laundry businesses.

The second non-generic building is said business at the north end of town, all it contains is a suit of basic Kingdom armor, the brown stuff everyone started with, and thus is really only good for selling unless you come here first thing in the game and slap it on Owyn.





At this stage of the game, going north is, oddly enough, actually a pretty safe move, since a lot of the tougher encounters meant to populate the area don't spawn until chapter 2 or later.





Which occasionally means you can pick up some intended-for-later stuff early from various out-of-the-way chests.




This one is just more money and vendor trash, though I still appreciate seeing some non-standard riddles on these chests.




A duo of moredhel fighters don't pose a threat to the party, they go down without even landing a single blow.





Travelling by night, the party comes across this seemingly abandoned house, but I happen to know that if you attempt to disturb the owner during the day rather than the dead of night, he'll actually have something useful to say, meaning everyone gets to nap on his doorstep until he's ready to give us the time of day.




Among other amusing things is the way that random loot chests in the wilderness are apparently something the NPC's acknowledge, rather than it just being handwaved as a gameplay thing. This is a very good quest to complete, though, as the book he's talking about gives +5% to all skills for a character(though is sadly single-use).





Almost back to Tyr-Sog now, they'd never expect this.
I'd never have expected us to do something so stupid, either.
Say, was that corpse there last time you came this way?

As far as I remember there are only one or two actual purple-cloaked moredhel as enemies you fight, mostly they're used as decorative corpses, but this one is actually a warning. When we get too close...



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSDYo4Vr1bM




Welcome to the second type of combat encounter: traps. In addition to containing some enemies, they also contain various ways for the party to get themselves killed, and I wish there were more of them as they spice the battles up some. The yellow-cloaked fellow in the middle of the field is a moredhel spellcaster, so we should really do something about him. Sadly, Gorath is just barely too slow to put him under threat and prevent him from casting anything(he knows Despair Thy Eyes, Hocho's Heaven and the rather nasty Skyfire, a single-target damage spell, so locking him down would be good).

Don't worry, I've got this one.







Trap battles don't end the moment all enemies are dead, though, they also require you to navigate a party member past the trap obstacles as well, though that's usually easy enough when no one's trying to plunk a crossbow bolt into your brain at the same time.



The remainder of the walk to Tyr-Sog is safe enough, though there are a few distractions in the form of terrain and more chests hidden in every nook and cranny.




Can't have a riddle section without at least one of them having "shadow" as the answer.



The rolled-up scroll is how spellcasters in BaK learn new spells, in this case Eyes of Ishap, an overworld spell that pops open the local map and indicates any containers(which includes corpses and holes in the dirt), saving you from hugging the mountain ranges or referring to FAQs all the time. The other is another spynote left by the moredhel...


Which tells us that the moredhel expect us to be south of our current location and therefore don't have a lot of assassins in our general area.





Practically right next to is the "candle" password chest...



And I fucking love this chest. Firstly, two new spells for Owyn: Flamecast and Stardusk. Stardusk is an ourdoors light-generating spell, Flamecast is just hurling big beach-ball sized orbs of fire at the enemy. Unlike Despair Thy Eyes, they can miss, but they also come with AoE damage, so hucking one off on the first round of combat while enemies are still clustered can be very meaningful. Secondly, a blessed Moredhel Lamprey for Gorath. Blesses are permanent boosts(from temples), and in this case it's a "type 2" bless that applies a permanent +10% to hit.


Ah, good job, genius. You lead us away from assassins and into traps.
I feel a lot more confident that we can sneak around a trap than away from a dozen moredhel with swords.




This is what Stardusk looks like in action, by the way. Not pretty, but beats everything just being a dark blur.




BaK water is also a bit odd. It's not just a uniform blue plane, but it's also non-animated, which gives the waterfall and river a sort of sense of being frozen in time.






Tyr-Sog, despite once again being one of the bigger border towns in the Kingdom, is reduced to a whole six buildings, none of them having any unique dialogue, and a pawn store with only one interesting item: a practice lute. Barding XP progresses by some weird method I don't understand, so I just burn all of the charges on Owyn, which puts him at a threadbare 51% barding skill up from his starting 42%. It's not immediately obvious, but effective barding hides probably something like a quarter or a third of the total money available to the party over the entire game.

Oh, and the place has a small tavern, where we get the piece of descriptive text someone referenced earlier...





Don't write item descriptions before you've had lunch, developers.

In any case... what happens if we try to go farther north from here?





This guy looks like a cave dweller, not a Kingdom border guard.

Where's your company, Lieutenant Finn? Why aren't they standing standard guard on this pass?
With all due respect, Seigneur, we're digging ourselves out of a pretty mess presently. Not long after you and the moredhel trounced through here, a white screamer came up out of nowhere, worst snow storm I've seen in sixteen years. Ten miles on down the dell, the pass is buried under five feet of snow. I sent out guards to help our forward positions but I'm not positive they can do much. Kind of like lighting your pipe under the Bitter Sea.
There's no way to get through the Inclindel at all?
Not unless you're a snow burrowing mole or a firedrake, no sir. Whoever may be in the Northlands or in the Kingdom, they've got a long wait on their hands if they need to get down this road.
Well that's it then. We'll have to turn back. Take care, Lieutenant.



I guess that's as far north as we're going, then. Now we just have to figure out how we're going to go south.



Now that we've shaken pursuit, the sensible thing would be to go south through Loriel and Hawk's Hollow, then skirt the Dimwood until we're just north of Krondor.
Which means it can't possibly be what Locklear has planned for us.
Mmmm... the silence may just be intended to make us drop our guard. We should head farther east before turning south again, and then we'll cut through the Dimwood, no one will stalk us through that. But how far east...

Vote

Should the party turn south at Highcastle or Northwarden?

Either way, the gem smuggler quest won't be bypassed, since if I remember right we can only do that here in chapter one.