Part 18: The Spider and the Sidequest, Part 1

Update 18: The Spider and the Sidequest, Part 1



I was gonna start off by saying that this update was gonna be a bit different because it was going to be concerned almost purely with cleaning up new chapter 3 sidequest content and a small amount of chapter 2 sidequest content that I missed(but which is still available in chapter 3), but I realized that was just gonna make this update like... basically every update so far(also despite spending about two hours doing this I still missed some side content, but I'll write that up when I get to where I missed it). When we last left off, the party had just travelled to Romney, where they expected that Bas-Tyra's soldiers would have some cool clues for them, but whoopsey-doodle, turns out they all happened to get super-murdered, which is a damn shame. Guess the crew now has to pick up where the soldiers left off. First thing they do is to loot the soldiers' corpses for any clues, which is where they come up with the titular Spider and Spyglass.



There they are, in the inventory, and they're both kind of handy items! The spider is an infinite-use item that can poison any sword or non-burning, non-enchanted quarrel(actually part of another infinite money trick which involves buying normal quarrels at rock bottom prices, poisoning them so they're worth more and selling them at a store with higher prices. since it's not available till chapter 3, though, which is rather late to break the game, I'm not a big fan of it). Any time you're not applying another modifier to the party's swords, you might as well poison them with the spider. The spyglass, meanwhile, is an infinite-use item that casts Eyes of Ishap any time its used, thus revealing all containers in the party's general area, which includes dirt mounds, corpses or just about anything, really, thus completely obviating the need for any other "see things"-spell and being super handy if you don't already know this game like the inside of your own shoes or have a guide.

In any case, that score aside, we actually have a few things to do in Romney before turning out to the rest of the world, first off... we should poke our heads into the local shop.




Note that Grey Tower Plate. It cost 750 gold back in Chapter 2, meaning it's shot up to 600% of its initial price, this is because the Guild War in Romney has finally kicked into full gear and now everything costs assloads here, as they will until we complete a sidequest. The smart money, though, is really on never completing it so you have a town where you can sell gems and equipment at insane markups. Books, staves and magic items are about the only things they won't buy, which means they'll still buy just about anything that's actually worth a lot of money. At this stage, it's not worth abusing since this party is already well set for the rest of the game, but it would be worth it to, say, keep any gems and rubies you find until Chapter 3.

Additionally, if we poke our heads inside the room where the Duke is trying to bust heads until everyone stops fighting now...


Completing this quest will reset Romney's prices to normal, which would be great if it was like... a supply hub you needed to revisit for the rest of the game, or if it had rare gear but... no, it's pretty much entirely shooting yourself in the foot to do so. It does score the party 300 gold and a key that opens a whole... 1 wells(no, really) and 2 doors in the game if they complete the quest.

Once that quest's picked up, maybe we should visit the tavern for clues! I mean, just in case this team of exceptional geniuses missed something while rifling through dead people's pockets.



I will concede that for all humans' shortcomings, you really have some efficient janitors.

Place cleaned up surprisingly quickly and nicely for having been the location of 30-something grisly axe murders. Anyway, it already has all the usual tavern functions, the murders didn't even keep the fucking gamblers away or the patrons who tip you for playing the lute, and the kid in the foreground can be interrogated about what happened.



Why should we want to do that?

Because when I broke things, master always told me that someone would come and take me away someplace bad and someplace dark where they would never feed me and I'd never see the light of day. I knew when all those people got killed in here that someone would come for me and take me to the bad place.

You don't have anything to be afraid of, Jason. You didn't kill those men. It's not your fault.

Master says anybody that stays under our roof is our respont...respono...responsibility and I was here when they were killed! That means it was my fault.

Then you saw the murders?

No, but they come in and told me to leave or they'd hurt me real bad. They didn't tell me what they were going to do.

What did the men who told you to leave look like?

They were big and they had birds on their chests, like eagles. And they smelled funny, like sometimes the sailors from Kesh smell like. Like flowers...

Hawks on their chests. That at least confirms the Nighthawks' involvement... Do you know any thing about a spider made of silver or a brass spyglass that one of the men that were killed might have carried? It's very important. Think hard...

I...I don't know anything about the spider, but I remember that one of the King's Men had a brass tube with little pieces of glass in the ends of it and I could see things that were far away with it. He said that he and one of the other men had brought it back from Silden.

Did he say where in Silden he got it?

No...just in Silden.

Can you think of anything else? Did anyone else come into the Black Sheep before the murderers?

A carrying man brought in some wine from the Upside Down Keg for the soldiers. Told me it was sent special, but besides that, I can't think of anything.

Thanks, Jason. We may be back later to ask you more questions, so don't go anywhere.

Once again I want to point out that the Nighthawks are so damn bad at concealing themselves that even a literal child spots their huge "yo we're assassin mans"-pendants. Oh, and if we come here in chapter 1, Locklear can talk to Jason, too, which, uh, is certainly a conversation.


Sadly there's no sidequest where Locklear punches Jason's "employer" until he's vomiting up his own internal organs. Because goddamn, that's pretty grim. At least we get confirmation that Locklear's not a completely bad sort as he seems to at least give a fuck that Jason is being abused.

That's about it for Romney content, though. Jason has provided us with two clues, firstly that they received a suspicious shipment of booze from Sloop and that our fancy new items might have come from Silden. These are valid clues, and the party does pursue them in the book where they pay off slightly more(but only very slightly more) than in the game, but it's entirely possible to skip over them if you're doing some sort of speedrun and just head straight north to the Prank's Stone/Kenting Rush/Cavall Keep area that we've so far mostly been avoiding.




Now, we barely get out of the gate before we run into our first encounter, because chapter 3 is the first big repopulation of the main world map area that showers almost every single zone with new enemies, often...



Nighthawks! Predictably two single Nighthawks go down like chumps, but I wanted to show that there were a few more popping up while we head down to Sloop to check out the brewery that maybe had something to do with all the dead soldiers at the end of Chapter 2.





While we're here we can also harass Mitchell Waylander, but let's hit up the brewery first.


If Nighthawks were already delivering the booze, why not just fill it with actual poison? Why fill it with something that makes them drunk and THEN kill them physically risking further discovery? And why the fuck would this brewery just go along with it? In the book, they work this a bit differently and the Nighthawks send along their own tarweed-filled booze instead. Though, again, why not just poison it.

Now, let's go harass Mitchel Waylander. He's not here in chapters 1 or 2 because he's busy hanging around Romney, but in this case we can interact with his house which gets us jumped by several Nighthawks(who have a poor time of it), if we then try to interact with his house again...


I don't know who sent you, but I'm very thankful for your help.

Let's just say that anyone on the business end of a Nighthawk sword is of interest to me these days. It's not like them to send multiple assassins unless the target is considered a danger to the guild.

But I'm a merchant! I don't know anything about the Guild of Assassins!

You wouldn't necessarily have to know anything about them. You might have witnessed something they preferred unseen, perhaps they think you've wronged them in some way. Where were you the night the King's men from Bas-Tyra regiment were assassinated?

What?! I hadn't heard... Gods, they were good men! If it hadn't been for them, we never would have broken the Riverpullers' siege at Romney. How did they die?

Nighthawks set up on them in the Black Sheep Tavern. Killed every last man. The only thing I found strange was the fact there were few signs of resistance. I was told by the boy who tends the bar a few casks of Keshian Ale were delivered the night before, but the Bas-Tyra men are very disciplined men. Does it seem reasonable to you a detachment of men trailing the Nighthawks would get drunk in the town where they suspect the Guild of Assassins have their headquarters?

It does sound a bit odd.

It sounded odd to me as well, so I decided the ale had been tainted in some way. I thought if I found the man who sent the ale, I might be on the trail of the Nighthawks. Then I visited the tavern here in town and I discovered something very disturbing. The arrangements for the ale delivery were made here and the keeper was instructed to add a significant amount of tarweed to the mixture, a mixture that while not poisonous, induces the drinker to become excessively thirsty, ensuring that he will continue to drink until quite drunk. But that was not the shocking information. You see, it seems the local chief reeve of a prestigious guild arranged for the delivery of the Ale...Mitchel Waylander!

I never made that order! I would have been in Romney when the arrangement was made. I couldn't have made that order!

I realize that as well. The Nighthawks have gone to extreme trouble to implicate you and that tells me they want revenge for something. The men that were sent here to kill you would undoubtedly have planted the final evidence on your corpse. So, what could you have done to them?

Truly, I don't know...

Do you know anything about a silver spider or a brass spyglass?

A brass spyglass? Oh dear gods! But that man couldn't have been a Nighthawk... He was so, so regal looking...

What did you do to this man? Is the spyglass involved?

There is a place north of Romney known as Prank's Stone. When people approach it, they often discover that items on their person disappear. A business partner and I discovered where the disappeared items go to and we sell the items we find. Any way, one night I was drinking in the town of the same name and I saw this man who had a very marvelous brass spyglass. My guild was having difficulties at the time and I was low on cash so I conspired to achieve the spyglass for my own. I had noticed the attention he was paying to a rather fetching barmaid and I arranged that a note was sent to his table telling him to meet her near the Prank's Stone. The spyglass became ours...

If the man you snatched the spyglass from learned what happened, I could see how he would want revenge. Where did you sell it?

I don't sell the items. My partner does and we split the profits. I don't know anything about him other than the fact that he is a native of Silden. We decided early on that we would share only our booty so that if one of us was caught, the other would be safe.

Then it seems we have business in Silden. Lay low. It may be the only thing that keeps you alive, Mitchel. The Nighthawks are not men that should be angered.

Now this exchange is extremely different in the book. Similarly, the party is looking for Mitchell and Nighthawks are staking out his house when they arrive, but it turns out that he actually is working with them, or was. Someone came to him with the idea of instigating the guild war in Romney, to profit off it, and Mitchell, being a greedy fuck, went along with it. By the time he realized they were planning to have several people killed, not just drive up prices and knock over his competitors, it was too late to back out. Thankfully, unlike a lot of fictional characters, book-Mitchell is smart enough to turn himself in rather than dig himself a deeper hole or try to fight two armed men and a wizard.

I would also like to point out that here, after barely ten minutes of actual gameplay time, I have already produced a post which is at over 20k characters of text.

In any case, this is our first clue pointing northwards, towards Prank's Stone, but we've still got clues to investigate in Silden, so we're gonna keep heading south. We're skipping Arlie Steelsoul's residence until the end of the update, mostly because I misunderstood the triggers needed for ending the Guild War in Romney and thought I could still profit off it later, but whatever, the party's already loaded.





Along the way are some more Nighthawk ambushes, but as they're all two or three Nighthawks, they're mostly irrelevant, and I also clear out the remaining Rusalki fights for the Temple of Eortis quest, which are trivialized by applying Skin of the Dragon to James and Gorath, then powering them up with Steelfire casts so they can clear out all the ghosts before the defensive buffs expire. I agree with the people who prefer Skin of the Dragon as probably the most powerful option in most fights, but it's still not my favourite strat. Sadly, returning to the Temple of Eortis at this point gets barely a line of text acknowledging what the party did.



Back in Silden, we now have a reason to go to the tavern.




As the keeper of a tavern, I imagine you get quite a bit of traffic through here, lots of people wanting to buy or sell items that were - shall we say - indiscriminately acquired? Who would I speak to if my interests lay in that direction?



I need to find out about the possible purchase of two very special items that might have been picked up here in Silden. I'm looking for whoever might have sold them.

If an item is sold in Silden then I am the only man that you should speak to. Any other transactions are done the Silden way.

Very well, Joftaz. I need to find out what you may know about either a brass spyglass or a silver spider. I would be willing pay in gold.

You will pay, most undoubtedly for that information, but I am not interested in your Kingdom coins. If it were gold I could come up with the sum I want myself. No, what I require is the assistance of a thief.

Why do you think I would be of any help?

I live in a city of thieves. I have spent my life knowing how to sense them and I know most assuredly that you have a thief's instincts. This is the bargain. I will tell you about the silver spiders that I sell on occasion, and you will find a bag of powder that was stolen by the Crawler. It has most likely been taken to his house near here. The house is locked and I suspect that the pouch will be hidden away in a chest or cabinet or such.

Any thief could do that for you. Why would we be especially qualified for this?

Because all the thieves in this place - they all are the hands and eyes of the Crawler. To be working for me, that would be death for them.

Why? What is it that is in this powder bag?

I have made my offer. The information for the pouch. Do we have a deal?

[YES]

My bump of trouble is telling me that I shouldn't be agreeing to this, but you have a deal, Joftaz. I'll get your pouch. A straight exchange, the information for the item.

Consider it a deal then. I will wait for you here in the Anchorhead until you return with the item.

We will be back. Do not leave this place.

Now, the door on the main Silden screen that previously produced a "nothing to do or see here!"-message, allows the party to interact with it instead...


The "powder" item produced by this quest is a stack of eight of the paralysis powder items that Owyn tosses in the face of overly inquisitive enemy melee fighters, but the smart move is to split the stack so you only leave one of them with James and he can just hand that over, since it's enough to trigger the completion. In the books it is, of course, not magic powder, but instead a large amount of uncut drugs.

So, the honorable seigneur from Krondor returns. Have you brought along the pouch I asked you for?

It seems that today Banath has smiled on the both of us. I have what you want, and you apparently know what I need to know. The pouch in exchange for the story. That was the deal. I want to hear a story about a silver spider.

Heh. Yes, Banath has gifted you most certainly. I wouldn't have thought anyone wily enough to defeat the Crawler, but if the Happy Prankster has given you the knack then I'll happily help you as best I can. Now - the silver spider is a rare item so I remember when I get one and am most assuredly pleased when I can turn a profit from one. They are heartily sought here in the Kingdom. It's been several months since last I sold one.

Can you describe the last man who bought one?

Oh, aye, I can describe him. Stoop backed, crass, hard bartering fellow. He was wearing a black cloak and a bird - an eagle - was blazed across his chest.

You mean a hawk? A golden hawk?

I have lived the greater part of my days here in Silden. It might have been a hawk or it could have been a gull. All I know is that I lost a great deal that day between he and the trader named Abuk who brought in some sailor's trinkets he appropriated from Prank's Stone. As for the man with the bird on his chest, the last I heard of him he was asking to purchase a ticket on a ship called the Mocker's Folly bound for Krondor.

A Nighthawk bound for Krondor? Where could I find the ship's captain?

Krondor, I suspect, though I don't see why that would be important to you.

I will decide what is important or unimportant. Now, what about the brass spyglass? Would you know anything about that?

As I told you before, sailor's trinkets are common here in Silden. If it is a special glass you covet I would urge you to seek out the trader, Abuk. I could hope only to make five, perhaps ten gold sovereigns from such an item so I decided they were not really worth my time bothering with them.

You may find that bothering with silver spiders has cost you more than imagined, Joftaz. If I find that any of the Prince's family have died of poisoning when I return there, you'll have a great deal more to worry about than turning a profit.

So, a couple of notes here, now that Joftaz has pointed us towards Abuk(canonically this is the first time the party meets Abuk, in the book). Firstly, in the books, it's less about recovering stolen property, and instead that Joftaz wants James to steal a ton of uncut drugs from two of the Crawler's agents, after which Joftaz then spreads word that the agents themselves sold it for their own profits(rather than the Crawler's profits), so the Crawler will spark an internal war trying to punish them for it. Secondly... someone forgot to look at a map when writing this, you obviously cannot take a ship from Silden to Krondor, as the Kingdom and Bitter seas do not connect(except possibly on a very long east-around-the-world trip). The game attempting to point you towards Krondor with that tip is also a false lead as there is nothing plot-related to do in Krondor at this point.

Also, we can now listen to a few extra dialogues from the patrons at Joftaz' tavern.


The only things of note for these fluff conversations is that the first one gets us a small extra stock of Fadamor's Formula and that rumours of the Upright Man's demise don't actually start spreading until the interstitial book between Krondor: The Betrayal and Return to Krondor, Krondor: The Assassins, where it's a minor plot point.

Still, this makes a good reason to head west of Silden and interrogate Abuk.







It appears that you are master of more than locks. What do you know of the Prank's Stone north of Romney?

A tongue wags loose in Silden. I see my enterprises may be silenced.

I am interested only in a brass spyglass that you sold to Joftaz in Silden. Tell me about it and I will choose to forget about any other thefts you may have participated in. How did you come by it?

A year and twenty ago, I bought a box in Silden from a trader. He told me it would bring me great fortune, but I wished only for a strong chest to hold my things and I told him that he would be a fool to sell such a box. We haggled and at last I purchased it for ten sovereigns, a price that the seller seemed positively glad to receive. I too was pleased with the exchange, but began to wonder at the nature of what I had purchased. The chest was possessed of cajunlo.

Cajunlo? What does that mean?

It was a box of trickery, of magic. Objects would appear in the box, things that I had not placed there. Then one day I met a man from Romney and he told me of the true nature of my chest. When things were lost in a certain place, they came to my box and we could sell those items. We decided of course that we would never tell each other more about ourselves so our business would be safe should one of us fall into harm.

And you two would split the profits of whatever appeared in the box. I take it that the brass spyglass was one of the items he arranged for you to find?

It was one of many things.

The day you got the spyglass, did anything else appear in your box?

A few things. I keep the things whose value I do not know, so those items which arrived with the spyglass are still there as well. I believe there was a note whose contents I do not remember.

Where was this box? Is it close-by?

It lies behind a mountain with two other boxes near Silden and is locked with a special lock. You will have to spell out Thorn so that it may be opened. If you do not understand of what I speak, you shall when you find the box.

Thorn? We will remember your kindness. Thank you.

Despite this description, anything you lose to Prank's Stone won't pop up in the THORN wordchest. This entire part is also, mind you, absent from the novel. In the novel the team just interrogates Abuk about who he sold the items to and he sends them north to Kenting Rush and Cavall Keep. Now, that would be the reasonable place to head, as it's where our remaining clues, scant as they are, are pointing... but that would be boring, wouldn't it? Let's go see what's happening in the Dimwood.

May as well, it seems like Delekhan is happy to wait on whatever detours we take.
Your kind are pretty patient, I'll grant you that. Murmandamus happily gave us almost an extra year of grace so he wouldn't just overrun us completely when he invaded.





Surprisingly, the entire section of road west from Silden through Sethanon and to the southernmost entrance to the Dimwood hasn't been repopulated with any encounters at all, unless they were all off-road or I managed to stealth around them, and the party arrives there with minimal hassle aside from running into Lyton's tax men. They get to live, this time.




The Dimwood itself, though, has absolutely gotten repopulated. It's gotten repopulated with a ton of encounters, some of them potentially quite nasty, and with quite a few of them clustered around the entrances so they're unavoidable.



The first one here is no big deal, just a single Witch Hag and two Moredhel Warriors. Since she knows both Skin of the Dragon and Grief of 1000 Nights, she could be a potential threat, but I've so far yet to see an enemy actually cast Skin of the Dragon, so fingers crossed they never will. Owyn tackles her with a Rusalki and she never gets a chance to get off any spells, but she could have easily caused us a good deal of trouble.





Of course, ten paces ahead there's another damn encounter.



This one is somewhat more tricky, in part because you can easily miss that there's a damn Witch Hag hidden behind the tree there at the back of the battlefield. Like her colleague down south she also knows Skin of the Dragon, but instead of Grief she has Fetters of Rime, which is frankly just as bad except that it might miss its target.



A rusalki chases the witch hag forwards so that Gorath and James can reach her, while her bodyguards whip out the crossbows and start taking pot shots at the party, though thankfully with terrible accuracy. Crossbow enemies have been somewhat of a novelty so far, generally less annoying than melee or casters, but as the game goes on, more and more of them start bringing poisoned quarrels which are small issues in battles but require healing outside of battles(there are about 110 enemy poisoned quarrel archers in total, but some either have no crossbows or no crossbow skill, probably due to oversights) as well as better crossbows and quarrels that can actually hand out a considerable amount of pain per shot.



In any case, the moredhel go down without too much trouble, though the party does pick up a few dents and scratches.

With the local moredhel resting in pieces, we can go poke around something in the south of Dimwood that only activates here in Chapter 3.






Apparently some magical dogshit happened to poor Craig here, you can find one of his friends... somewhere(I later discover that it's Squire Phillip, who's hanging around the western section of the Dimwood in Chapter 3), I forget where exactly, who will corroborate Craig's story in case you suspect it's yet another schizophrenic resident of Midkemia sending you on a wild goose chase.





I feel a bit left out here, why did you two get so worked up when that guy mentioned "a man with a snake-like face"?
Pantathians were at the second Murmandamus' side when he led us to ruin at Sethanon, I've no doubt their meddling was why he was able to pull it off.
Yes, exactly, what Gorath said and for no other reasons whatsoever.

It's for some reason a state secret that no one ever lets Gorath in on that the second Murmandamus was, in fact, a shapeshifted Pantathian. Other stuff like said Pantathian being a servant of the post-Chaos Wars remnant of the Valheru, known to the Tsurani as the Enemy, could make sense to hide. But why hide that Murmandamus 2: Escape to Africa wasn't a Moredhel? Widespread knowledge of that could've helped shortcircuit Delekhan's entire plot of claiming Murmy 2 was still alive. The Pantathians are... yet another of Feist's beloved non-human species who are always evil, though I guess they have slightly more of a reason than so many others, being controlled by an insane Theocracy convinced that their creator, the Valheru Alma-Lodaka, will uplift them to godhood if they somehow manage to bring her back.

Apparently in the later novels, the party finds a splinter faction of good snakemen that have an evolved society that the protagonists accidentally completely annihilate. Then, after discovering that Pantathians aren't doomed to pure evil, the protagonists proceed to genocide the remaining Pantathians in the world, complete with heading to their cities and destroying all their creches and eggs after eliminating their military forces.

Cool.





Once you're in the isolated southeastern part of the Dimwood, it's super easy to fuck yourself over by accident if you don't know what you're looking for. See, an invisible line has been drawn across the entire section, which, if you cross it...



There is something...very strange...about this place. For a moment I felt as though a...great force was reaching up through the ground and sapping my strength.
I felt something as well. It must be the strange force that Craig spoke of when we spoke to him. Perhaps we should turn back until we can discover the cause.

And then if we keep going...



This hits the party with 4% of the Sick condition which will slowly get worse and drain health at a rather rapid clip, in addition, bumping into trigger lines for it again will dump more of the condition on the party. You can clear it away with Healing Herbs, but if you hit the trigger too many times, it may be more than just a single serving of herbs can handle, and it'll be hurting your HP all the while.

This means that I promptly head for the encounter that will stop this trigger from killing the party, but I completely miss said encounter while hurrying through the woods and bungle into it as an ambush instead...






Welcome to Pantathians which are absolutely the toughest single enemy faced by the party so far. Like Moredhel Mages and Shades, they're Fighter/Mages, i.e. they actually carry weapons and thus aren't completely nerfed just by walking up to them and glaring at them. Secondly, they have almost double the total HP pool of any given moredhel in the game. Lastly, oof, these three fuckers have some nasty spell lists. Just listing the ones that could give me a headache...