Part 23: Do the Crime, Do the Time, Part 1

Update 23: Do the Crime, Do the Time, Part 1





First question: Is everyone in the Northlands insane?
No.
Second question: Where's all our stuff?!

So, Chapter 4 starts by dropping us in a large square room with all of our gear(keys excepted) and gold missing, but because they're good hosts, Delekhan's murderous hordes have left all of Gorath and Owyn's equipment and backpack contents lying in two convenient chests in the same room... except for the gold, which is gone, hence why I exchanged it all for high-value gems before ending chapter 5. Not that we'll need a lot of gold from here on out, but it's the principle of the thing. You also get some special dialogue if you try to leave without picking up your stuff.


As expected, we're in the dungeons under Sar-Sargoth, Delekhan's(formerly Murmandamus') fortress and... they're big.



We start in the central purple section and our goal is to reach the "Upper Level"(yes, it has two levels, too!) exit at the end of the blue path. However, two out of the three doors we can exit through are locked! Access to the blue section requires a special unique key which we lack for now and access to the red section requires a Guildis Thorn key(or 40-something Lockpicking which you COULD get at this point by getting the Lockpicking trainer in Hawk's Hollow, the train-everything book and then bringing an Amulet of the Upright Man or two, but not expecting to lose James at the end of Chapter 3, you probably did not think to slap those amulets on someone not him).

The green section is unlocked and contains a Guildis Thorn, but it has nothing else of interest and these idiots forgot to take our keys away.





Did I mention the dungeon is heavily guarded at all points and that without Weed Walkers, Gorath and Owyn won't reliably get the drop on enemy groups which can hurt real fucking bad since they also tend to carry less rations than surface enemies and thus give you less of a chance to recover if you didn't come here with fully supplied packs like I cleverly did?





The dungeon also has Ogres, which don't exist in canon Midkemia. They're basically just bald dudes with big swords and no armor, but since they at least drop their swords on death, they suck less than trolls. They also have a nifty special feature that will become relevant in a few moments.





Aside from the key needed to escape, this chest, this chest, also contains a vital tool needed to make said escape feasible.



Even with ambush, I need to drop Skin of the Dragon on Gorath and have him chase the Witch Hag around like a Benny Hill skit to prevent her dropping save-or-die bullshit on the team, and Owyn only got that one cast in before the Moredhel warriors started chasing him around.




I miss having Locklear around to distract enemies.




I miss having James around to disarm traps. Help me pick these splinters out of my forehead, would you?

Don't even bother casting Scent of Sarig for this chest, it deals a piddling 25 damage and it's unlikely the party actually can disarm it anyway. We want to break it open because it'll help accelerate Owyn being a completely busted magical powerhouse.



Oh and if James was carrying all your rope, get that rope, too, since even on the most direct path out of the dungeon you'll need to hop two or three pits. More if you get lost or do a bit of exploring off to the sides. That spell, though, is Evil Seek, which is an absolutely awesome name for a spell that kills things.

Stop blueballing everyone, and also me, and let's go test this thing out.

Before we do that, though, it's also worth noting this is finally where enemies take off the kid gloves in terms of gear. Most enemies here are wearing either Elven or Dragon Plate armor and are thus either slightly well-defended or EXTREMELY well-defended, and the main weapons are Goblin Stickers, Two-Handed Swords and Swords of Kinnur. Kingdom Broadswords and Moredhel Lampreys are completely off the menu, and practically every crossbow we see will be a Tsurani Crossbow of some variety.

Another chest in the same room is locked and requires either 80(!) Lockpicking or a Guildis Thorn instead. Technically you could softlock yourself here if you get unlucky, test out the Thorn on a special key door and snap it without having a backup, so don't do that.



It contains the special key that opens nine out of ten dungeon doors and is called the Interdictor Key.


If anyone's playing along at home, this cache is the large room in the upper part of the Red dungeon section. If you want to tap out the rest, though, there are a couple of items to find at the end of the Red corridors to the south.






Time to try out Evil Seek!



It hurls out a big star-shaped projectile like Bane, but only gives you 2 points of damage per point of stamina/health paid out. So why is this still an awesome spell?



Because it chains to any number of targets, ignoring line-of-sight blocks as it does so, each bounce losing 20% damage. It should rapidly be obvious why this outdamages pretty much every damaging spell option we have so far, and it absolutely tears ass through enemy ranks. The first target hit is almost guaranteed to, if not die, at least be severely wounded and unable to be much of a threat. It also inexplicably does no damage to human Rogues and Rogue Mages, don't ask me why. I guess only everything else, including dogs and spiders, is Evil enought to be Sought.



From here on out, the first move in practically every battle is that Owyn pops a max-cost Evil Seek on any high-value target he sees and then Gorath starts cleaning up. I'll also be spending an Icer, Killian's Root Oil or Clerical Oilcloth before almost every fight since I need Gorath on his A-game in terms of cutting enemies to chunks.

These goons are guarding the two interesting chunks of the Red tunnels, one's a chest...




CANE

Which contains a couple of crossbows and some much-needed herbal packs. Feel free to imagine why. The other thing the goblins were guarding is just a bit of world fluff.





So Delekhan made a monument to how cool he is.
Hugely arrogant, but indeed.
And then he hid it in a dark corner of his basement where not even the patrolling goblins would see it.
If it was outside, I imagine every passing commoner would pelt it with dung.
I'm mostly just saying that it's funny imagining he creeps down here and gushes over his own monument to himself. What a loser.

In any case, pathetic self-indulgent monuments aside, we now have the Interdictor key and can proceed to the Blue part of the dungeon. The yellow part contains some loot, but frankly nothing either unique or memorable. If you came here with full supplies, you won't need it, and if you came here with low supplies, you'll just want to crunch the first fight inside as it contains a lot of rations and a free emerald. Instead, we start taking the Blue section loop up to the exit.





So, generally encounters down here are hard-countered by getting surprise and casting Evil Seek at full power, but it generally won't kill all the enemies in one blast.



Which means that even if you leave a carpet of dead enemies, just one of them plunking Owen with a single poisoned bolt can rocket him up to 75% or 90% poison which consumes 1 Herbal Pack per 25% cured(or one Restorative per 5% cured) if you're not carrying around Antivenom. This both drains your healing supplies and, if you use the herbal packs, also your rations real quickly. And I think it's close to 50% of the enemies in this dungeon who're archers(if they're an enemy type who CAN be archers, like goblins and moredhel), and almost all of them are bringing poisoned quarrels.

What I'm trying to communicate is that getting out of here consumes close to three weeks' worth of in-game time just because of all the resting involved.






Eventually the encounters start petering out as you head towards the north end of the Blue dungeon section, but towards the final section we come across two coded chests!




TOWEL

This one contains a suit of elven armor, some of those scare-enemies-away green goop potions and a spare bowstring. Oddly low level for this point in the game.





The second one is right on the exit from the lower level of the dungeon.



PRIEST

This one's a bit more rewarding, containing a ruby, some Killian's Root Oil and a rare Euliliko Armor(the yellow-and-blue kind we got from Northwarden in Chapter 2).


Interacting with the staircase also gets us a bit of additional dialogue.





I'm starting to feel like we could just hang out here and murder all of Delekhan's groupies when they come at us in packs of three or four and give us plenty of time to rest in between each fight.





The upper level of the Sar-Sargoth dungeons is about 1/8th of the size of the lower level Owyn and Gorath started out on, and slows the party down less since there are less crossbow assholes hanging around up here.




ALPHABET

Spare coins and a few restoratives.






ECHO

A Guilder's Passkey(of which we have like, ten at this point), some spare change and some crossbow repair juice. This clears out the last of the code chests in Sar-Sargoth and we can bail for the exit.





On the way out, though, we run into this battle which can be be cleared by a single Evil Seek. How, you might ask, is such a wonder possible? It's possible because Ogres take double damage from Evil Seek, so if you start out hitting an Ogre, your initial damage is 120 rather than 60, and if it then bounces to, say, a Moredhel Warrior, it's still 120-20%, which is enough to flatten him. The fight also features an oddity in that the third ogre from the left has zero health and stamina when the battle starts and flat zeroes in all skills as a result. I suspect it's an oversight or fat-finger on the developers' part, but any amount of damage will instantly drop him dead. There are a few other enemies in the game like that, with no rhyme or reason to them.







(Skirled, really? Put the thesaurus away, Dynamix, you're drunk)

Welcome to scenic Sar-Sargoth! It's got a shop where the team instantly drops by to sell all their gems. The exchange of gold, to gems, back to gold again at a poor store wipes out about 70% of the party's liquidity, but without a trick like that, they'd be emerging from Sar-Sargoth with barely 300 gold to their name rather than, as it turns out, about 2200 gold which means finances will be a very minor issue for the rest of the game. There's also a tavern where Owyn still gets tips for playing Kingdom songs(I kind of wish they had a different barding dialogue bit for playing in the Northlands) and... crusty as the image is, you might notice there are some poles with heads on them in the foreground. Let's fiddle with one.



I might just stay up here if it's normal for Moredhel heads to be stuffed full of gems. What's this note say?
I feel like I'm going to regret translating this for you...


...c'mon, c'mon, c'mon.
I'm not letting you invoke something called the "Lord of the Void," Owyn.
But it sounds dope as hell.
...okay, yes, it does, and it'll probably cause more trouble for Delekhan than for us. Probably.

There's also a bit of unique dialogue in the tavern.




I'm starting to feel like Owyn may be going slightly crazed with power and wealth. Let's dip out of Sar-Sargoth before any further trouble pursues the team. Also, regarding the canonicity of this whole thing... basically none. Delekhan doesn't visit them in their cells, though they are freed by magic, after which they just sneak out after looting the corpses of the guards while trying to attract as little attention as possible. In the book there's also an army encamped around Sar-Sargoth, and they hide in the camp.



And the Northlands... actually get a new palette compared to the Kingdom! This is a nice touch. We're now at the northernmost part of the map, Sar-Sargoth. There's a large semi-open plain to our south, while the road curves southwest to Yabon and southeast to Highcastle and Northwarden. Our first objective, though, is to dip slightly east off the road since there's an encounter here which I think you can miss if you just stick to the road, I'm not sure how large the activation zone for it is.






Something about the poor quality of Liallan's sprite always makes it seem to me like she's got a big underbite of some sort. Maybe it's just me. The book goes to great lengths to describe what a badass she looks like and how tough and confident she seems. In the book she's in a political marriage with Delekhan and is one of the extremely few characters created for Betrayal at Krondor to actually re-appear in later books!

You sound imminently pleased at that prospect. Why this charade, Liallan? You can't believe in Delekhan's activities any more than I, and yet you support his cause. You command a respectable tribe and have almost as much power.

Almost? Do you forget who engineered your escape from Sar-Sargoth all those months ago? Who do you think directed Delekhan's rats into the snowplains while Obkhar's family scrambled to safety. That was my doing. If not for my help, the Six would surely have crushed your tribes from the Green Heart.

Were you responsible for...

...No, I had nothing to do with your escape this time. Whatever you may have done, you have achieved on your own. Your first escape served my purposes, but your continued survival is as nothing to me. It neither threatens or advances my cause.

Then you will help me again?

I will consider my efforts an investment against the future of the Northlands, Gorath. They will gain me little now, but perhaps at a later day your help may be useful. I will alert my spies to whatever your needs may be. To be honest, I don't believe you will achieve much beyond your own survival, but even that may prove to be my boon.

[DELEKHAN]

You consort with a monster, Liallan. Tell us a way and we shall murder him in his sleep. Show us a secret passage and we shall drink his blood and buy the moredhel out of their pact of blood.

And what shall become of us? Moraeulf will then step into his father's place and use our treachery to light the fires under our pursuers. Delekhan must fight this battle and our kin die with him on foreign soil for futile cause. Only then will the other clans who wait to join him know that we cannot unify under a banner of death.

Their failure taught them no lesson after Murmandamus betrayed us in the field and this shall come to no new conclusion!

We want the same things, Gorath, though I intend to claim what you fear. I will take the throne of the Nations of the North when Delekhan has fallen to Kingdom blades. I will lead...

...I don't know whether I should laugh or weep at that suggestion, Liallan, but I favor you over his bastard get Moraeulf.

Holy shit Gorath, that's some fucking blood-thirst, LITERALLY! Also, here it's stated more openly that Gorath had the potential to lead the Moredhel as a whole nation rather than scattered tribes. In the book it's more hinted at, but it feels suggested that he was so generally well-regarded for being impartial, neutral and patient that he was a threat to Delekhan's dominion in that others might have favoured him as leader(or his patient advice might have been "don't attack the Kingdom, you morons").

[NALAR'S RIB]

There have been few occasions I have had to visit Nalar's Rib. I forget its location.

It lies south of here, as the crow flies, a few minutes from the front gates of Sar-Sargoth. I have not been there in a long while.

We only get the Nalar's Rib keyword if we read the note hidden inside the severed head outside Sar-Sargoth.

[FREEDOM]

Again, I must seek help in the Kingdom. Prince Arutha's army must be there to meet Delekhan.

It may prove more difficult than you imagine. Delekhan has called for Narab's head.

Why should that be? If not for Narab, I would still be loose in the Kingdom...

I do not know what fires burn in his mind, but they smoke like madness to me. Narab has called on his clan to surround us, though they can be little threat to us here. The Six will crush them hopelessly, but they can restrict us for a time.

The more that Narab plays the fool, the more time it will gain us, though I could wish he were doing it elsewhere. Is there no way past his clan?

Not unless you may know how to bring down the dark god's wrath from Nalar's Rib, I can't imagine a way until the Six arrive.

Note, it's entirely possible to just smash your way through the Moredhel surrounding Sar-Sargoth, though possibly less so if you came into chapter 4 poorly prepared. Though even a poorly prepared Owyn and Gorath with Evil Seek should be able to handle most of what gets thrown at them. It's also true to the book that Narab, pissed that Delekhan isn't happy he finally did as he's told, calls on his clan to rebel openly against Delekhan which takes some time for Delekhan and the Six to put down.

[THE BATTLE]

For what goal does Delekhan do this? There can be nothing gained by attacking a single castle on the frontier of the Kingdom.

He tells those who rally to him that Murmandamus lives, that he is captive within the Kingdom and that he intends to free him from captivity. None saw him die at Sethanon.

And what advantage is there in that for Delekhan? Step aside and let Murmandamus retake his place on the throne? I would easier believe you the mistress of death than Delekhan one who longs for his ancient master.

It would seem then there is one among the moredhel who thinks. I too have wondered at what he wishes to gain and I may only conclude he plots to get something from Murmandamus in exchange for freeing him. He had great powers, greater even than the Six who now work for Delekhan. Perhaps he believes he can learn the secrets of our former leader's powers.

[THE SIX]

Whence did Delekhan's magicians come? They were spoken of in Harlech before first I left the Northlands. Do they advise?

And more. They plan great schemes into the night with him, meetings to which even I am no longer privy. They are the ones who recommended the extermination of your tribe. They speak of the low born as if their lives are without value. It is as if they live for the complexities of intrigue. Little else seems to matter to them.

When they buy their wine, with what coins do they bargain?

None. They carry only gems, rubies of low quality. They toss them about as if they were as common as seeds.

They abide in Sar-Sargoth?

When they are with Delekhan. At the moment they have gone south with Moraeulf to Harlech. I believe they mean to round up others of your tribe who have been reluctant to join Delekhan's throng.

Rubies of low quality... hmmm... reminds me of something, but not sure what.

(If it reminds you of something, too, please don't let everyone know, because it's meant to be a big reveal)

A thing I missed while I was here is that there's a well-hidden graveyard outside of Sar-Sargoth that can be poked at, though it can't be looted it does have some unique text when approached.





So, let's talk numbers. In the area around Sar-Sargoth there are a whopping 98 enemies scattered through a bit more than a dozen battles, and if we're light on our feet, agile(and read a FAQ), we can reach Nalar's Rib south of the city after bumping into only one or two of those, so let's do that. Our only clue that heading to the Rib is a good idea really is that it's posited as an option at all and that Liallan suggests it might get us through Narab's encirclement of the city.




Additionally, there are a number of chests and other small points of interest scattered throughout the plain between the city and the Rib. Some of them are Locked chests that it would take an Amulet of the Upright Man(or multiple) for these two goons to crack, but most of them are coded. For instance, this nearest one...




PADDLE

It contains yet another Emerald, a Glory Hand which I'm absolutely going to ignore and some Restoratives.


Good instincts, Owyn, don't handle dead bodies unless it's for looting purposes.





I kind of like the Northlands. Chilly, beautiful, full of angry elves trying to kill me. Oh look, here comes another group!



This fight almost goes badly since the Moredhel get ambush on Owyn and Gorath.



Ha ha, I'm in danger.



Owyn manages to dust two of them while Gorath desperately cleaves his way through the rest, trying to make his way to Owyn, meanwhile that one clever jackass in the back ranks plunks like three bolts into Owyn, all of them, of course, poisoned, meaning that Owyn is slowly melting as the fight goes on.



Yeah, he's, uh, not in a good place. Thankfully Gorath comes through at the last possible moment.





After which the two of them settle down for a nice calm rest in the corpse pile they just created until Owyn's arms and legs work again and he stops bleeding from his eyes.