Part 11: Apparently Worldbuilding is Code For Stereotypes

Apparently Worldbuilding is Code For Stereotypes


Dingdingding!

Welcome back! Last time on Black Geyser, we got the Best Traitor Ever award from Lord Frelsi and were sent to negotiate a deal with the Eastern Empire for humanitarian assistance - you know, the Rillow empire that invaded Isilmerald in the backstory that literally no one brings up, ever?



Be sure to install the game on an SSD!



The Garden of Delights is a failed kickstarter goal that describes itself as "where corruption festers over a delectable veneer". It's the most stereotypical shit ever.

Case in point, A'postrophe the Mystic here. If you take the first option she goes into a spiel about enlightenment or whatever. She's also apparently a backer goal for getting enough likes on Facebook.



Of course, because everything here is just an amazing failure of imagination it's a stereotypical drug den...



That also sells Oriental magic. Cool, game, real cool.



There's also a tent of belly dancers and a blood pool because why not? Also an alchemist for various fetch quests, I guess.



We walk into the Great Pavilion and are immediately accosted by a small, annoying child.

: Why is the cat's life in danger?

Leon: A bunch of scary rillows cornered her. They've got huge weapons and weird, foreign clothes. I'm scared even to talk to them.



So I guess we're murdering a bunch of people over a cat.

: How did Dio get in trouble?



...accurate.



: I'll save your cat, one way or another.






Trying to talk to the mercenaries gets them all to turn hostile.



This gets them all killed like chumps while the actual guards outside the tent there sit around and try to figure out their motivation.



Dio the cat, at least, is happy.



: The RIllow have been dealt with, but you'll have to collect Dio yourself. She's around here somewhere.



Of course, there were guards and the high matriarch ten feet away and they might have been more qualified to deal with this than some random kid. Hell, I can't imagine any political leader wants random mercenaries swinging weapons around her...embassy? Pleasure palace? Sex dungeon? What even is this place?

: Okay, thanks. You and Dio behave yourselves, you hear?

I can't tell if this is supposed to be comedic because we just killed five men over a cat. Also, Dio was a girl cat like three screens ago, but that awful fourth option says "he". The reward is a magic ring that raises accuracy, a thing we used to be swimming in until a shittastical quest last update.






The world's most boring gladiator fight is going on in the tent while 2 random firebreathers spew fire over where people would walk. Don't worry about it! Black Geyser!

: I am a fellow Rillow acting as an intermediary between our people and Deron-Guld. I've come with a letter of introduction to Alumu.

I like how none of the options allow us to refer to Alumu by her title, even as we insist on our own.



Huh. I am shocked this actually happened. It doesn't happen if you don't bring Siracca with you, obviously, but I am legitimately shocked these writers actually had something logical follow from an existing plot point.

: Her presence is an insult to the High Matriach, and to me for that matter.



Oh shut up. Literally every party dialog is you bitching about Rillow culture and how much the Rillow suck. Wah wah wah.



: Give me a few minutes to consider this.

: As you wish.




It's really weird because Elenuator is explicitly a djinni and not a god, but it's also completely nonsensical because as far as I can tell he does the exact same shit as the "real" gods. Unnatural magic (necromancy) comes from Rothgor, natural is from Tilindia, Spiritual is from Je - er, Alnarius, Summoning is from both Alnarius and Tilindia as they taught a bunch of wizards in some lore battle you don't care about, and the Oriental (sigh) class comes about because "Elenuator the Djinni is singularly responsible for the art. As one of the strongest demigods, Elenuator established his own spell class by combining the elements of the Natural, Spiritual, and Summoning classes."

It's supposed to have illusions and deceit and shit and I think all it has is a couple invisibility spells. Moving on!



Siracca is going to get her wish very, very soon. I think we're supposed to sympathize with her because she was called by Jesus or whatever and the Elenuatorians are bad zealot Muslims fanatics who dispatch the world's most easily cowed assassins to kill her outside the temple of the state religion of Isilmerald - you know, the one that grants the right of kingship? Unfortunately due to her constant whining and general uselessness I don't feel bad about what's going to happen next.



Anyway, remember Sea Hag? The lady who had a whole quest where she couldn't hear Tilindia's voice but Tilindia demanded an offering anyway?



: Can we talk about the Sea Hag's offering?



I guess we can just ask Chrysante to tell us what to do because the writers wrote us into another corner. We're a warrior, not a druid.

: You know the Sea Hag serves the sea god rather than Tilindia. Could you perhaps listen to the wind on her behalf? (Bargain and Persuasion)






: Chrysante says she's heard the wind whisper "the answer is scattered on the path to her father's house."

: Well, what do you make of it?

Isn't this your offering? The writers desperately want the Sea Hag to be an old prophetic font of wisdom, but then they run into their own writing ability like a cartoon character stepping on a rake.



Now, you might be asking a lot of questions. Like "if Omeyrenon is a major god with control over the seas, why has he never come up in this narrative?" How about "how is Sea Hag the daughter of Omeyrenon? Is that a common form of address in their faith?"



This also raises the question of "why is Omeyrenon allowing poaching", but I don't think any of that shit gets answered ever.




Now, the game gives you no idea of where to look for sand but what it wants you to do is run halfway across the map to one specific point in Dalkivar, aka the lair of the greed infested peasants.



These random encounters literally add nothing except checking that you have the game installed on an SSD.



They're no challenge. They're not interesting. They drop nothing. At least when Pathfinder Kingmaker dropped a mammoth on my level three ass it was memorable. Stupid, but memorable.



By the power of Google we make it to the only sand mound - as far as I'm aware - in the game.



Thus by doing the offering for Sea Hag we clear up all the divine trouble and the game continues shrinking back in terror from having anything remotely interesting happen.



: Of course! I traveled far and wide to find the perfect handful, just for the occasion!



Ah, more badly handled class nonsense.

: I am Inta Rume.



: The Sea Hag?



: How did you come to be known as the Sea Hag, anyway?



: All right, let's go. Care to accompany me?

: At last.

: My eyes might be bad, but I do see you are accompanied by quite some friends already. Come back to me, should there be more space.

Admittedly bullshit party limits are a genre staple, but I always enjoy the excuses that the war party has just too many warriors and having an extra sword arm or miracle worker is just... too much.



Siracca gets the boot after all her gear is mysteriously taken by me.



: Yes, come along.

: At last.

We nope out of the woods of boring.




Sea Hag is.. undead. Huh. She also has the same Abolish Curses ability Siracca has, so we can have her deal with all the cursed items.



You might think Sea Hag is like Tekehu from Pillars of Eternity 2 where Tekehu gets a unique sea druid discipline the player can't learn. You'd be fuckin wrong! Despite being chosen of the sea god, she gets all the same plant and animal spells the rest of the druids get and doesn't get any ice or anything. They made her a whole other race you can't be but were apparently too lazy to give her wintermage spells. Argh!



On the plus side she can still just shit out summoning spells which makes her automatically better than Siracca.



See what I mean? She gets Entangle (ok, there's seaweed and sea plants, fine) and summon wolf... and "Glare of the Djinni", which is an Oriental () spell that stuns people. I don't know what wolves have to do with the sea, and I wouldn't make a big deal about it except that the game has her entire plot thing being that she serves the sea god, not Tilindia.



We dodge another fucking fetch quest.



This also triggers a flurry of party dialog, which I will sum up in a few sentences: Sea Hag remembers nothing. Nature is dying and elves are running out of woods. Things bad.



Now we can actually talk to Sea Hag. She's got a lot to say, but as far as I can tell that was her whole quest.

: Why do you want to be called the Sea Hag? Surely that can't be your given name.



: What do you seek, Sea Hag?



So Sea Hag being the high priestess of Omeyrenon seems like kind of a big deal, but because nothing is logically considered we never go anywhere with this. Does Tilindia have the right to force Omeyrenon's chosen to do things? Are they antagonistic? If so does that make Omeyrenon a dark god? I forgot to ask Sea Hag about the gods, so who knows?

: A sea voyage? That sounds exciting.

We are railroaded into being dumb, although I guess the Crone told us we were the Chosen One like Ash in Pokemon 2000.



Of course, no one else in this supposedly polytheistic society believes in omens or visions or any of that crap, but again, the only god who gets temples is Alnarius. The druids all worship Tilindia except when they don't. None of this was considered at all.

: But how did you come to be called the Sea Hag?



The undead are associated with Rothgor the devil-god, but also the resurrection spell is in the Unnatural school of magic... but you can buy resurrection at the Alnarius temples, so who the fuck knows?

: Tell me something about yourself. Where are you from?



: Can we talk about your undead nature?



: There must be some advantages to your altered being...



We end the talk there. I don't know why you would take option three, considering that Hamlin is much more of a dick and we keep him around, but it's not like anything in this game makes sense.


Sea Hag is probably our most interesting party member, although there's far more fan art of Bjalla and Jade because we live in an age of sin. She's literally a drowned undead returned to life by the sea god to do his bidding, sent here by visions of disaster and change and uh... that's it! She doesn't have any more quests or anything! There's one moment later in the game that goes off based on party choices, but as far as I can tell the undead high priest of a major faith doesn't have anything for us except one idiotically designed fetch quest.

Amazing.



Anyway, now that Siracca has gone back to the bar to drink her sorrows away and be surprisingly vulnerable to assassins, we can enter with no incident. We're not going to bring up Siracca's exile because we don't care, and the third option is... honestly, there's not much there? There's A'postrophe and her drug den, a respectable looking blacksmith, some belly dancers, firebreathers, and a gladiator fight. The whole debauchery nonsense makes it sound like people are fucking in the streets!

: I am acting as emissary on behalf of Deron-Guld. Please accept this letter of introduction.



: Lord Frelsi sent me with an urgent request...

: Ah, let's see it then.



: Whatever happened to good, old-fashioned altruism?

I love how minimal this reply is. Remember, Deron-Guld is literally filled with corpses on the streets.


They're modeled and everything! So instead of having the logical option to get mad at Alumu and yelling at her for playing politics while people die screaming in agony, we have this pathetically mild rebuke. Of course, Alumu has all the leverage as we have literally nothing to offer, so...



She takes it surprisingly well.



This entire exchange is weird to me. Alumu is supposed to be an experienced politician served by fanatically loyal people who take pride in freedom from authority... ok, that's nonsense. Alumu is smart enough to realize that she has Deron-Guld by the balls and can demand ridiculous bullshit in exchange for sending over a lone healer.

Yet here she is claiming we're an upcoming lady of the court...despite us literally working for the head of the traitors leading the rebellion. Frelsi's friend even said he'd tell everyone we were a friend to Deron-Guld. Now, the logical conclusion for anyone to draw is that we defected and went over to the rebels, because, once again, we were doing Lord Frelsi's bidding openly for no discernable reason. Lord Frelsi explicitly used us to solidify rebel control over the city.


It's important to note that the king's terms were "you will surrender most of your posessions and disband your army, or I will crush you." The note explicitly said that there was going to be no negotiation on any of the terms.

Is Alumu just fucking with us?

: The odds of His Majesty agreeing to lower taxes, any taxes, is about the same as me sprouting wings and flying back to Isilbright.

: Wings or no, I wish you every success.

Also, how exactly is the king collecting a tithe on crops? Alumu works for the Eastern Empires (they're plural even though they're ruled by a djinni not-god). The Rillow have their own embassy, they're not a subject power and the best Velianrick could do was restore the original borders in The Rillow War Referenced In One Page Of The Manual. I get the trade taxes on imports, but how is the king collecting a tithe? The Rillow don't even follow the church of Alnarius! None of this makes any sense!



What? Huh?


I want you all to know that was the end of Chapter 3. There are five chapters in this game. We are 3/5 of the way through this game and we still don't know:

-What is the Black Geyser, and who are Couriers of Darkness?
-What exactly is our motivation?
-What are we trying to achieve? Supposedly we're chosen of the gods, but to do what?

Let's compare this to an actually good game, Baldur's Gate II. That game opens with Irenicus holding your entire party in jail. You escape but he kidnaps your sister after ranting about the power you could wield. This gives you a clear goal - find Irenicus, acquire allies to fight Irenicus, raise money to pay off the people who can take you to Irenicus - and Irenicus is the main villain throughout the entire main game. There's a whole open world full of quests and allies, and many of them have nothing to do with the main plot - but still have a lot going on, such as Firkraag's quest where he frames you for murder because he's an immortal dragon asshole.

Meanwhile the Black Geyser team desperately wanted to remind you of Baldur's Gate and desperately wanted to ape an open world, but they have a nonsensical main quest and an empty and lifeless world of pointless fetch quests. It's terrible!



I'll cut this guy's dialogue short: the fort belonged to an evil greedy dude named Lord Amanuel and no one has ever returned, there is a "darkness" in the monastery that no one has ever returned from, and the trading town is full of merchants and I have no idea how that becomes our stronghold because presumably someone already controls it.

Of course, the stronghold feature for the game isn't actually implemented, so these guys are all just optional locations. The only one I've actually done is Amanuel's Hoard, but it sets us up for how Bjalla's going to screw us over later.



The game throws more dialogue at us. Helg wants to know why Sea Hag knows dwarven sea shanties. Sea Hag can't remember anything. I want to know why the lyrics of a sea shanty are "doo doo dee doo."



We get attacked by... bald black men in boxers? What the hell?



Oh. So these are apparently what the "Zoria Moon Horrors" look like without their particle effects. They get the little star blurry thing around them once they hit the party, but I thought that was silly enough to show off.



I decide to stop the update here. We'll be doing the bonus dungeons before going back to the king, but this next section is a long tedious slog where the game starts spamming enemy mages.

Next time: You know what this game was really missing? A sexy hot goth BDSM necromancer.