Part 16: BaK on Track, Part 1

Update 16: BaK on Track, Part 1





When we last left off, the party had just cleared up some unfinished business and is now about to approach Silden, the southeasternmost point of the map. Before we actually do this, though, we're going to run off the road again, since as usual someone's stashed their treasures in the treeline next to some random hill.





Each time the game starts, the battlefield grid option is turned off, so at first glance, this one doesn't even look like a trap, because Gorath's huge fucking bulk is hiding one of the zappy pillars.



Once the lines are on, it makes a bit more sense, and looks unbeatable if you haven't realized you can do diagonal movement. But there's a neat path in between that you can just slip your right-most party member through easily.




They're protecting three chests hidden in the woods well enough that you might, from the wrong angle, only see two of them.



RIVER



SWORD



ICE

While none of these chests have any gear upgrades, not even really for a less min/maxed party, the value of the contents of the eastern chests is higher than what we found previously, they contain both a decent bunch of gold, and also the third chest contains a ruby and a Ring of Prandur(one of the light rings), which both sell for decent amounts if you don't just hit the first shop you find and wait for one with a decent resell value.



Anyway, now that we're back on the r-



Goddammit.



Impossible. A Webber lock cannot be picked.

Perhaps not by you, but one skilled in the arts of subtlety, he may know how to penetrate even the most difficult of locks. It is a matter of patience.

I don't care how patient you are, a Webber lock cannot be picked. You're making idle boasts.

And what would Abuk gain telling strangers a fact that was not true, eh? I merely say these things so I may advertise my services and you might make use of them one day. I state simple fact. There is no lock in this Kingdom of yours that Abuk cannot pick. None.

Is that so? Perhaps you could teach us how to pick Webber locks...

It would take more time than I think you would care to spend. I spent five years at the foot of my master Caliphad in the shadow of mount Ashunta learning the art. But I could perhaps improve whatever skill you may already possess. A small fee of seventy gold sovereigns should pay for my time.

Seventy gold pieces for a lesson in lockpicking? That's nothing short of robbery.

You are wise. I should not cheat myself in this fashion. Eighty sovereigns, but I cannot raise my price any higher, despite the great deference you show to my person. Is the arrangement to be sealed?

[YES]

All right, Keshian. Eighty sovereigns, but I am warning you...I doubt there's anything you can teach me.

You must open yourself to new things. This is the first learning. Without this opening you will not be complete. Opening your self is like opening a lock. If you cannot open, then the lock may not open. You should understand that there is no difference between yourself and the lock that you pick. All these things I will demonstrate with a test lock that I carry with me. Now I want you to observe.

Keshian double...talk. Wait a minute...how did you do that? I couldn't see... Do that again.

That is it. You have received your first lesson, darkeyes.

That was too fast. I couldn't catch what you were doing.

In time you shall realize what was done. In your mind, the events will unlock and thus your hands will unlock as well. I must go now. Good bye.

Wait...



The worst part about that encounter was that it actually made me better at lockpicking.

It's not a big upgrade, only about 6 points, but considering that this still puts James at 88 Lockpicking, this means he's very little training shy of being able to pick every last damn lock in the game. Canonically, the party neither heads for Silden at this point, or meets Abuk at this point, though of course we can also meet him here if we go the long way around with Locklear in chapter 1. If we do, Abuk warns the party to stay the fuck away from Silden since it's now apparently the Crawler's playground. In said encounter he refers to the Crawler's servants as having "great cajunlo," which sounds like some sort of appropriated voodoo term, but at a quick googling I only get food hits, so it might just sound that way but actually be entirely innocent.

Like any travelling weirdo is going to keep us away from Silden.
...so why are we going to Silden?
Because in an alternate timeline we might have been warned not to, which means there's clearly something there someone doesn't want us to interact with.

There's not actually much reason to go to Silden until chapter 3, but it's the principle of the matter.





The approach to Silden is mostly calm and unexceptional, except that this area has a bunch of chests, not quite as many as in the Dimwood where we were tripping over the fucking things, but it's worth scraping your face against the hills like you're playing Wolfenstein 3D and looking for secret doors.






THORN

This one contains a Virtue Key, a key type we don't have yet, and which opens a whole three things throughout the game(so of course you can find 13 of them in the wild and buy them in 4 places, Christ.), and also a note!


This one seems completely irrelevant but actually triggers extra dialogue at one point later in the game, though I think you may actually need to physically bring the note along, not just have read it(will test it when I get that far), which would be a bit counterintuitive since almost no other notes work that way(I think it's one or two others, tops). And in fact most notes are just fluff text and don't tell you anything useful or trigger anything gameplay-wise.



ALCOHOL

I somehow missed a screenshot of the third chest but here's the riddle:

"Death to our Enemies!
no Living adversary shall
Escape the new King of
these isles. He will lead us
to glory And provide New
lands for our people!"

DELEKHAN

Neither of the other two chests contain anything of note, just generic items and a bit of money.




The last stretch of the road to Silden has a special, non-visible encounter...




Aside from the intro, these three goons are nothing special.



And they go down adorably quickly, which somewhat makes you wonder what's up with their "battle tactic."



See, it drops plagued on everyone. Which is bad! But as far as I can tell, being Plagued by itself doesn't actually impact the party's skills in a meaningful way, it just slowly kills them. This means that while sure, it's a useful tactic, it's specifically a useful tactic if you then run the fuck away and let the plague victims die of the plague, not if you hang around and let them run you through. Morons.



How nostalgic, we caught the plague with Locklear, too.
I could do with us catching the plague a bit less, myself. What are the odds there's a cut-rate plague-curer in this area, too?
Since you humans seem to breed like rats and live like rats, I'd assume they'd be in high demand and omnipresent.
Sadly, no, but there's supposed to be a temple just off Silden... let's crack these chests and hope it's true.

The chest these guys almost died on top of isn't locked, and all it contains is a single note(though only in chapter 2, so if you came here in chapter 1, you may well miss it):



Looks like we ruined one of the Crawler's plans.
There's no possible way you could have known that was one of the Crawler's plots when you broke into that barn.
Good luck proving it.



There's also a scarecrow alongside the road into town, for some reason. Enjoy those crisp graphics.




For the moment, Silden isn't super interesting to us. It has a magic store(Hakha's Cajunlo, there's that name again), of all things, where I buy a couple of spells I don't really need or want, but which I grabbed for the sake of completionism and because the party has an assload of gold. It has a background location we can't interact with(a door that James wants a closer look at, but there's too much traffic for him to do so). It has an inn.



But the innkeeper complains that the party's bad for business and chases them out(he won't be useful for anything until chapter 3).

What matters at the moment, though, is the ship on the right, the Mist Devil, because it'll take us to the island temple of the dead god Eortis.


Interestingly enough, they won't even let us get on the boat if we aren't diseased, though it doesn't get referenced at all when we are diseased. Thankfully there's nothing super-unique or important on the isle, so if you go get healed at a less broken-down temple that worships a non-dead god, you won't be missing out on anything super-cool. Still, now we're here...




But that's why we've come. The shipmaster in Silden said we could find a healer on this island who could help us.

You have been misinformed. I am not a priestess of Sung and Eortis concerns himself solely with the denizens of his kingdom of the sea. He may act only on their behalf. Thus is his purpose as deigned by the will of Ishap, the One Above All.

When I was young, I was fortunate enough to have learned something about how the temples all worked. I thought I remembered that a god can sometimes be compelled outside his purpose in return for a duty of obeisance.

That is true, but Eortis is but a shadow of what he once was. Upon a time, before the Valheru warred with the gods of Midkemia, his influence was as the depth and breadth of the seas and all that moved across them. When at last he vanished, Killian assumed control of his realm but here some essence of what he was still survives. We can not communicate with a god that is lost.

But if we were to act on his behalf, do you think he would grant us favor?

I cannot know. If there were more than an essence of him in this place, perhaps we could commune with him and learn his thoughts, but we of the order of Eortis are the servants of a vanished god. We see his will only in very small ways.

Perhaps we are here to serve that will. What can we do to help you?

I can see no harm in your request, but I can guarantee you no measure of success or failure in your efforts. I can depend only on what the omens may tell me. Perhaps Eortis will stir from his slumber to grant his favor. Until then, the Mist Devil will bring you no longer to this Isle.

Could you at least give us an idea of where to start? You may be able to read the god's will in the falling of a sparrow, but some of us are not half so clever.

Of late, we have had many tell us the rusalki who sometimes linger near the rivers have become disturbed. If you may find them all and lay them to rest, it might serve your purposes. I will warn you however that many of these sisters of Eliaem are wily and will find ways to hide their presence. Many do not wish to be sent into the halls of Lims-Kragma. You will need to be clever in finding them... This is my advice.


So, you might notice that at no point does this in any way hint that anything actually happened to us. But something did! We're actually cured of our plague now! We also now can't come back to the temple unless we find five Rusalki encounters on the mainland and clear them out, at which point the Temple of Eortis starts to provide free healing for anything.



Cool, I guess we're divine hitmen now. I always wanted that job as a kid.



Also, high-effect plagues aren't something to fuck with. This is how much damage it did in the couple of minutes it took me to loot that one chest outside of town, walk into town, and then come back out. I guess Eortis just saw fit to remove the plague, not remove the weeping lesions or whatever it caused.

That's Silden sorted until chapter 3, however, now we can head northwards to yet more distractions! I mean plot progress!





You know you're out of the boonies when even random dirt mounds in the woods are full of rubies. During this update, the party will collect enough rubies that I actually have to start tossing drugs and ammunition into temporary cold storage just to carry all the rubies.

I can't believe someone would force us to make such hard choices.
I vote for keeping the rubies.
I vote for keeping the crossbow bolts.




About half of the rusalki we need to fight are opt-in, plus I think they only spawn at night, but a couple of them are on the main road and avoiding them requires a detour. Thankfully, they're like budget Shades, and we've already dealt with as nasty a Shade situation as the game can throw at us.



Also because I'm absolutely an easily-amused child, I still find it funny that they're using the exact same bit of dialogue text for every time you examine an enemy with a right-click. Yes, James, I'm sure these ghosts are just out for a peaceful walk, that's super reasonable to assume.



A few battle types have special battle start dialogues, rusalki and shades being among them. Oddly enough they seem to be the only type of text that's not stored on the Betrayal at Krondor supersite.



Stat-wise, rusalki and shades are pretty similar, as I think I've mentioned before. The main difference is that rusalki have no melee attack and thus can be negated in the same way as casters, i.e. by vaguely invading their personal space. They also tend to have less health than shades. Anyway, let's solve this in the simplest way possible.



Explain how more ghosts is going to solve things.
I mean, that's how we've dealt with most battles so far.
I can't tell them apart! Which one do I hit?!

Still, the battle goes pretty easily because we can largely prevent them from doing anything. I briefly considered hitting them with Grief of 1000 Nights, but thought that, logically, it wouldn't affect ghosts. It turns out that I'm right and it doesn't affect Shades, but should still affect Rusalki. Look forward to me completely forgetting this by the next time I fight a sizeable number of them.



They get special battle-over text, too!





A bit farther up the road is another encounter with three rusalki. In general, single-enemy-type encounters aren't very interesting unless they're enemies with multiple tricks, like Shades, or something else that makes them really hard to clown on, so just trust me when I say that the party hits them with swords until they go away.





I have absolutely no idea what's up with this text. Nothing prevents you from then stomping onwards and actually fighting the rogues guarding the road, and as far as I can tell you have no way to learn "what they're guarding" except by actually attacking them and then getting like 25% of an explanation for what's going on if you hit the... I think it's the failed ambush dialogue that does it?



In that one, "Crenard" mentions he has a deal with the owner of the "Riverpilot's Folly," and nothing else.



One of these three chucklefucks is Crenard, possibly the Whizzard on the left. He doesn't get any spells off, since James just walks up and glares at him while stabbing him. If he did, though, he wouldn't be too scary, since he only has Flamecast, Skyfire and Unfortunate Flux with which to fuck us.




So what were Crenard and his buddies guarding? Apparently just this side path containing two ripoff taverns!




The only noteworthy thing about them, except that they try to charge me fucking 70 gold for a night's stay, is that they excuse it by claiming that Rusalki are making the roads unsafe. Supposedly the prices go back to normal if you kill them all for the Temples of Eortis, but then what was Crenard's deal with the inn owner about?

Ugh. Probably cut content. Anyway, in a patch of trees behind one of the inns there are also some chests.





BARD



BRIARS

The third one doesn't have a code, but is instead locked with a hefty 76-difficulty pickable lock. In total the three of them contain about 200 gold, which is a really nice score, especially as it is not exactly a huge effort to see James able to pick the locked one this early in the game(since it contains about 3/4's of the gold).




Inexplicably, a random houseowner about two minutes' walk from the inns that already sell food at normal prices also sells food for the same prices.





I almost completely missed this guy hanging out next to this field because he didn't aggro until I practically bumped into him, I'm not sure if he just had a really small aggro radius or if the party's stealth rating just made him not notice us. Let's see what's up with him.




Well, looks like it's just one guy who completely lost his shit. There's nothing special about his abilities or his drops, or even what's buried in that dirt next to him. I guess he's kind of an easter egg? I don't think I need to reveal any secret super-strats I use, Gorath and James just hit him over the head with swords repeatedly while Owyn takes a smoke break.




Shortly afterwards, there's a loop of side road leading in among the hills, with a big "KEEP OUT!" sign out front. Obviously this means we need to see what's in there eventually, though sadly it's not something we can interact with yet.




Approaching this house further up the north/south road that forms the eastern edge of the gameplay area, there's a hidden Shade ambush. Just a single one, nothing too threatening. But maybe that means there's something worth checking out about the house!




There is in a fact a lot of shit to do about this house. I think this is where like 90% of the update's text is gonna be.


You can then choose to accept or reject her prophecy. If you accept it, nothing happens. If you reject it...


Which lead to some oddity. This dumps you outside the house and it's clearly intended that the moment you take a step, the rusalki attacks you. But, because the party's stealth is too high, the rusalki somehow overlooks them and I end up running in circles around the house for two minutes until the party eventually screws up their stealth check and gets into a fight with a single Rusalki. Once again, a fight so underwhelming it's not worth showing off. Maybe we should go back to the house again and see what happens, though?


This is actually a really relevant clue and the one you can get in any of chapters 1 through 3, though it's not really relevant until chapter 3. In Chapter 6, Haphra updates with a new true prophecy which actually has a hint necessary to winning the game, though you can also get it elsewhere because the designers weren't total dicks.




Immediately opposite the house is a tiny riverside path which you totally need to follow. It's guarded by two rogues and a single quegan, absolute pushovers since they're not super strong, not magicians and don't outnumber us. However, they are guarding an absolute shitload of chests. In addition to the immediately visible one, if you turn the corner around the hill there are a further four. Five chests!



Thankfully the place where the battle exit drops you makes it almost impossible to miss the rest. Two of them are code chests, two are locked and one is trapped(though with only a 19 difficulty, no character could fail it. Though I think that if you don't have Scent of Sarig active, you will always trigger traps).



HAIR



HOLES

This one remains one of my favourite code chests because it feels like it's playing a trick on your expectations of what adding something can be.

Anyway, what does cracking these five chests yield us?

THREE rubies, which is between 500 and 700 gold depending on where you sell them.
Several blessed swords.
Eyes of Ishap and Steelfire scrolls if you don't already have the spells.
Two Clerical Oilcloths, you know the things that double attack damage for a battle(and also sell for a lot of money)

And various other minor supplies. If you don't walk past this side road, I would go out on a limb and say it is one of the biggest single-location hauls, money-wise, in the entire game. I mean there's probably more in the Dimwood if you go through there, but that also requires hauling ass across close to fifteen separate caches scattered across like a fifth of the area of the entire game world. It is, in fact, a kind of problematic haul since this is where I start having to make some hard choices about what to grab and leave behind, especially since not every shop buys every sort of item, and while they can be worth a lot, armor, weapons and magic items are only accepted by a minority of stores(a few of them cross over categories, though, like Rings of Prandur are accepted by both jewelry type stores and magic type stores, and some stores accept more than one category of item).





Further up the road we come to the weirdly named town of "Sloop," the last town before we reach Romney coming from the south. In addition to having a jewel trader, who pays top gold for our piles of gems, it also has, of course, a tavern and an astounding number of its houses actually contain encounters rather than just being empty houses or getting a "no one's around"-response when interacted with.

Let's just start listing them all off, because they actually make Sloop kind of feel like a living little place.


Now, if you can fucking believe it, this cat actually does damage! Rather a lot of it, in fact! A whole fifteen points of it, which, in the early game, is only slightly less than eating a nice whack from a moredhel sword. Either this game's enemies are giving us light, gentle taps with their weapons or Midkemia's cats are more like fucking cougars.

The Nighthawk amulet thing just makes me think, again, of how fucking incompetent the Nighthawks are. Just the most incompetent squad of wannabe-murderers in existence.

Also, something worth noting is that the reason some of the game's characterization might occasionally seem a bit sloppy is that most dialogues that can feature James, will feature Locklear instead if you come here in the first chapter and it's the same dialogue in the first chapter, and vice versa if we hauled James up north to Yabon and LaMut. Others are triggered by whoever has the highest skill value in something, so with a hex editor, we could ensure that it was Gorath rather than Owyn who crooned out bad songs at every inn across the Kingdom. I can absolutely understand why they did it this way, but it does hurt the character writing a bit when the party doesn't really have a consistent "protagonist."

The town also has a temple, but it's the only temple-type structure in the game that's "abandoned" and doesn't actually contain at least some temple services.