Part 1: Arachne's Bogus Vacation

Update 01: Arachne's Bogus Vacation



Dear diary... you're probably wondering what happened to my other diary, and while I don't want to worry you, he had a pretty bad accident. When the volcano went off, I was near the beach and got swamped, I lost all my luggage and, well, the seawater ruined the entire section about how my parents sent me to study on Antagarich, the chapter about how I resolved to show them up and rebel by studying at the Temple of the Sun instead of with the Necromancers of the Pit and the bit where I was surprised to find out some adventurers had done enough damage to both to ruin my plans.




What seemed like a good idea in the aftermath was to take a holiday to Jadame. I didn't even know ships went that way until that nice dwarf at Harmondale with the big crown sold me the tickets!




When I made my way back up from the beach, one of the locals seemed convinced I was a caravan guard! Well, I didn't want to disappoint him or seem rude, so I asked some questions that seemed pertinent to figure out what was going on.




I'd assumed those white-clad fellows who chased me up from the beach were just the usual tourist trap riffraff trying to sell me cheap tat and souvenirs, but it turns out they were actual Regnan Pirates! Imagine that. It also seemed like everyone was very confused and no one else was going to see the caravan master... perhaps this was a challenge sent from the Gods themselves. Perhaps I could still become a follower of the Sun if I accepted this virtuous quest!





Now there was just the matter of finding the caravan master. Everyone was very excited and not being super helpful. Which I think I could understand.



On the bright side, that also made for an excellent excuse to look around a bit! This lizardman architecture was very exciting, nothing like this on Enroth, or Antagarich even! Though I suppose it did look a bit like the Tomb of VARN. I visited it once with my parents after the Richmond Foundation turned it into a museum, the animatronic Guardians and Genies were pretty interesting.






After a bit of sightseeing I supposed it was time to bite the arrow and ask someone off the street. Hopefully the lizards would be like people back on the other continents, happy to entertain anyone who barged into their homes.




While I didn't get what I wanted I diiiiiiid happen to pick up another quest. I'm sure that handing out medical supplies in the wake of a pirate invasion and natural disaster couldn't be too hard. The same goes for finding those supplies. You'd probably get those at the... magical medical supply store? They have one of those in lizardman villages, right?




I mean, they had banks. This place was practically civilized.





Then I rounded a corner and... wow! There were the brave lizardman defenders holding off the Regnan invaders! I wish I could draw, diary, because it was worth immortalizing. I snuck a bit closer and asked the local in charge how things were going...




While it wasn't the holiday I was expecting, visiting Dagger Wound Island was really starting to look like a good decision.





After making a circuit of half the village I was starting to feel a bit footsore and I hadn't gotten any further, thankfully there was a lovely picturesque inn with a view of the sea. Certainly the Dagger Wound Islands could hold out for another hour or two while I took a brief lunch, dried my clothes and updated you, journal.




Okay! So as the first OOC bit of text here, it must be obvious that Arachne was the audience favourite.




She's a Necromancer, which means she's a Sorcerer that starts out knowing Dark Magic, which rules. I also pick up Air Magic to start with because Wizard's Eye saves lives, by which I mean my life, because otherwise I'd stress about not picking up all the corpses and junk on the ground, learning's also always worth having since even if you invest no points in it whatsoever it's something like a +10% XP boost, which really stacks up over time and helps you beat the power curve some. I'm also not sure why female necromancers without body armor are just strutting around wearing nothing but a full-body spider tattoo, but it's probably the horniest thing I've ever seen out of a Might and Magic game, but I still think it's on the SFW side of NSFW.

What she's found here is the Adventurers' Inn, there's one in each town which houses a few goobers looking for a job. You can also find recruits in town houses, in dungeons and sometimes as quest rewards. Anyone you don't recruit usually bails for the nearest Adventurers' Inn. I leave Devlin behind because we already have a Necromancer, and pick up Elsbeth Lamentia because Vampires are reasonably roguelike and we need someone who can open chests without getting melted. Another important thing about recruits...




Is that they don't level-match you, so Elsbeth here is already four levels ahead of Arachne. Another nice thing is that most of her skill points start out un-invested, even if she knows the skills, so you can build her mostly as you like. I forget if this pattern continues for all recruitables, but it does for all of the early game ones. The downside to this, if it continues, is that higher-level characters need hauling around to trainers to get their Expert, Mastery and Grandmastery ranks.



An amazing thing has happened, journal! While enjoying a leisurely brunch at the adventurers' guild, I struck up a conversation with a tall, pale stranger. Turns out, she was very interested in the quest I'd accidentally picked up, since she wanted to leave the islands herself.
You know you can just talk to me, right? I'm standing right here.
I had to explain to her, though, that updating my journal was very vital. After all, what if I wanted to tell someone about my journey later and couldn't remember something?
I should've just taken that part time job with the tobersk farmer...




And thus we were off, to interview more colourful locals!
Oh this guy. He used to stand on the beach every morning preaching that the end of the world was here. Figures he'd have to be right one of these times.




His speech seemed a bit rehearsed, I had a feeling like he shared this story with everyone who came to visit. I had to wonder whether no one had returned to fulfill the quest because he was a crazy old coot or because they'd all died.







Journal, I'm starting to think we could learn a lot from these lizardmen back home. They've got cannons and public transportation.
One's failing to save them from pirates and the other's fallen into disrepair.
I was learning that Elsbeth sometimes had a bit of a negative streak to her. I was sure that our adventure would restore her positive, adventurous spirit!




We finally tracked down Fredrick Talimere... though we were haunted by a feeling that we were meant to be doing something else... and the rumours were true! He really was quite rude.
Is she like this all the time?
I'm afraid so.
Will you two leave me alone if I exposit at you?
Grand news, journal: Elsbeth's vampiric charms and diplomatic skills convinced the rude priest to help us in the end!




Then we waited with bated breath for Fredrick to say that he would join us and guide us to the Temple!
Get out before I call the guards.





The nerve of him, huh? Kicking us out after wander into his house at random. And now here you are, picking up a rebound quest to feel better about yourself. Are you sure you're just a tourist and not an adventurer?
After getting thrown out by Talimere, we went to his neighbour to talk to someone less mean.
Being less venomous than Talimere isn't a high bar.




Ultimately it took the better part of a day, but I found the chieftain's residence. I figure that's pretty good for a first quest!
Yeah, who could've foreseen it would be the biggest building in the village, right?








I really did my best, journal, I tried to explain to him that I was simply a tourist, here to see the sights and maybe get inducted as a Priest of the Sun to upset my parents, but it quickly became clear that no one else would be doing this if we didn't. And I do so hate to disappoint people, so I volunteered Elsbeth and myself to help save Dagger Wound Island! For the fifth time that day. I hope this isn't about to become a dangerous habit or something.
No it's cool, thanks for volunteering me to risk my life for these lizards.






It turns out even the caravan master, Dadeross, thought I was one of his guards. I suppose there must have been another necromancer in the crew and he mistook me for her because she also had a very cool full-body spider tattoo that she absolutely didn't get while out drinking after graduating top of her class at Kriegspire U.
Wait, that's a tattoo? I thought that was a swimsuit. We have got to get you some armor. Or at least a shirt.



I'm sure Talimere will be so happy to see us again.






Another first for the books, journal, I was swiftly turning from tourist to tourist guide! Or perhaps Talimere would be the guide, since he's supposed to be the one who's studying these islands.
Yes, thank you. In this party I'm the only one who's both alive and consistently speaking in first person, the only sane one.
Oh, this is going to be good.



It's nice of the game to ensure that you can access at least one Necromancer and Cleric at the start of the game, so you can't really paint yourself into a corner in the early game. Elsbeth also has some basic cleric magic which helps make sure we aren't missing out on anything vital. Sadly, though, Dagger Wound Island doesn't actually have a Guild of Self, so we're stuck with a very shallow selection of their spells, and only basic Elemental magic, not even Expert.

Right, we should start out by heading southwest, hopefully without getting embroiled in the fighting.
Talimere offered up a lot of complicated tactical advice, but I had absolute faith that the lizardmen could keep us safe from the Regnans. Elsbeth kept eyeing the corpses from the fighting, though. I wasn't sure what she had in mind, you do hear stories about some necromancers, and I hoped it wasn't anything like that.
I was just thinking I might rob 'em, nothing weird.





So the lizardmen guards are in fact incredibly superior to the Regnans and will leave a swathe of corpses around the edges of the main village on Dagger Would Island. Both sides endlessly spawn, too, at intervals, so you could technically farm infinite gold here if you had a lot of patience. In general, though, it's a bit difficult to convey how confusing this start is compared to MM6 and MM7. You're basically dropped off in the middle of a fight, with no intro cinematic or dialogue scroll to tell you who you are and what's going on. There's barely a paragraph in the manual explaining why you start where you start, for that matter. So pretty much all you have to go on is context and very little explicit exposition.

It's also worth keeping your distance from the charred ground, with some regularity Meteor Shower spells go off above them, presumably to simulate rocks thrown by the nearby volcano erupting.



We start slightly above and to the right of the 2, and now our goal is to get down to the 5.

Also while I didn't show it off, the inns here still have Arcomage. It even has a few new cards added, and now the journal tracks which taverns you've won in!





The detail on the environment has also taken another step up since MM7. Even just minor stuff like this makes the world feel a bit more believable compared to the very barren world of MM6.



Having hiked about half the length of the main Dagger Wound Island, I suggested that we stop at a small village spared the worst of the recent warring.
You've got worse stamina than me, and I'm dead.





And I believe I might have said yes to solving the same medical emergency I already said I'd deal with once. No one at this village seemed to be sick, though, so I still had time to find some more random scrolls of Cure Disease! Then it occurred to me, perhaps Talimere could cast that spell?
I left to pursue my true calling before I advanced that far in the ranks of the Church of the Sun.
I was somewhat surprised to learn that Fredrick was a Cleric of the Sun, I had always expected them to be mild-mannered, scholarly and possessed of infinite amounts of goodwill for all men and animals. True heroes of the world. Fredrick, meanwhile, was sort of a mildly sunburned grouchy man in rusty chainmail.
Hah! Oh, you'll see if we ever visit a Church of the Sun.



Hang on, why are we heading past the teleporter?

You never need to fight any Regnans while dealing with Dagger Wound, but I wanted to take a crack at one non-respawning group to see if we could handle it.





Well, diary, I really just wanted to go see if my pack was still lying in the surf somewhere, but suddenly we got jumped by Regnans! It was probably the first time I was happy my parents made me get a BSc in Dark Magic, one single blast of Toxic Cloud knocked one of them over in a way he wasn't getting up from! I suppose this was my first time ever killing someone, some sort of deep and personal moment. But before I had a chance to really think about it...
Nice shot! Now, you can do that another seven times, right?
...
...right?

Toxic Cloud is an amazing ace in the hole for Necromancers to start with, since it'll usually roll high enough to blast most things out of the water even with just 3 or 4 ranks in Dark Magic. The downside is that until your Necromancer gets more ranks, one cast eats up a literal third of your spell points. This means that Elsbeth and Frederick need to actually lift their weight by casting Bless on everyone and throwing punches. In the early days before Heroism to beef up damage, that means a lot of attacking, turning around and running some distance to avoid getting surrounded, turning back and attacking again.


Pirates, meanwhile, are classic generic starter enemies with no special attributes, attacks or resistances. The only notable thing about them is that they're oddly tough to kill. Damage values are much the same as in MM6 and 7, but the Dragonflies on Emerald Isle had single-digit HP, and even MM6's goblins had about half of what the pirates have.





They were guarding some chests which, thankfully, like Emerald Isle in MM7, have a difficulty of 0. I think that still requires that a character actually have Disarm Traps to avoid getting exploded, but means that even the 1 or 2 points of Basic Disarm Trap that Elsbeth has is enough to avoid anyone losing their face.



They also made finding the three Cure Disease scrolls we're missing for that one quest pretty easy. Almost every single wilderness chest contains one, and since nothing on the islands can Disease you, you're in no risk of accidentally painting yourself into a corner by using them on your own guys.



Another one of those pirate ships out to sea...





Each of them has a high-level, like quite high-level, Captain at the wheel who can cast spells if you get close to the shore. In addition to that, the ships themselves sometimes throw fireballs at the shoreline with no obvious targetting I can tell. They seem mostly for show since they're not aimed at you and tend to miss the locals, too. Even if we could get out to the pirate captains and fight them right now, it would be a bad idea since they can one-shot any member of the party almost guaranteed and have hundreds of HP.




Using the portals is as simple as having a Power Stone in your inventory and walking on to one. Then that portal and its destination are permanently active at the cost of the power stone being eaten out of your inventory. Since we need to use two portals to get out of here, I suppose that recruiting Talimere is technically a requisite to progressing in the game.

This seems like a bad idea, we're dinged up, Arache's out of spellpower and here are more pirates.
Then start motoring, there's no reason to fight a fight we don't have to.

Yeah you can just walk around these guys.





And they're "guarding" an amazing four chests which give us all the Cure Disease scrolls we need to complete the quest. Let's hurry down to the village with the pirates in tow, chat them up and then pop into the portal.





This clears up three of the six we need to hand in, and there's one more interesting NPC here.



I'm not sure this one even gives any XP reward, but at least I suppose you did something nice for some locals.





And then it's off to the last (main) island before the pirates catch up. Good thing they're too stupid to walk on to a piece of stone.




Hitting the last lizard with a Cure Disease scroll completes the quest, which is a good time to return to town before handling the first real dungeon of the game.




This is enough to get Arachne up to level three(and the trainer here caps at level 5, so Elsbeth and Fredrick can't get any training done until we get back to civilization) and in more important news...



Dear diary, I'm finally wearing a shirt again! And pants! Sure, they smell a little bit like dead pirate, but that beats Elsbeth's disapproving headshakes.

I'm also amused by how chunky her staff is, it's like a log full of rivets. Imagine getting hit by that thing. And then it's back to the big lump on the map that I ignored last time.




You think we should maybe do something about those pirates chasing the peasants?
Ehn. I'm sure it'll work out.




So go on, tell us about this temple.
Ancients built it. Can you imagine the lizardmen doing this? All they've got is stick huts.
You're telling me they're not advanced enough to put two rocks on top of each other?
...yes.
I've started tuning out Elsbeth and Fredrick's arguments, diary, but at least they're having fun with each other.




Exciting news, diary! We've made yet another friend! Fredrick is no longer the ruddiest member of the party, or the rustiest, but at least he's still the crankiest. Our new friend is Simon Templar who accidentally got locked inside the temple!



Simon's just a plain Knight, nothing exceptional about him, but he's very useful since a chunk of extra meat is just what we need right now. Someone who can get hit a few times without falling over and ideally instead of Arachne.

Can we stop off somewhere and get me a shave? It feels like I'm lookin' out of a bush.
Suck it up, cave boy. We'll get you a mirror and a knife after we get out of here.





Even with my Torchlight spell, the interior of the temple was a morass of shadows, and sibilant hissing was audible from every corner. What would we find inside? Treasure? Curses? Doom? Fredrick's ancient aliens? Perhaps a suspiciously buff snake person with a touching backstory? We tightened our formation as the shadows crawled ever closer, as we descended ever deeper towards the temple floor.
Man, I'm getting the chills just hearing her narrate this. Can you guys make her stop?
Pretty sure even if we broke her fingers, she'd just hold the quill between her teeth.




When we get to the bottom of the stairs, our enemies immediately rush out of the darkness and...




Promptly get stuck on the staircase geometry while the party beats them to a paste by throwing rocks and over the side or flailing wildly with Arachne's staff. While hard to see, this introduces us to the first enemy of the Temple.


Couatls! They're almost indistinguishable from Emerald Island dragonflies from MM7, except for not flying, which is incredibly weird since they're a completely negligible threat compared to the pirates outside on the islands which we already had a chance to get into a scrap with. Extremely fragile, pretty fast, high level ones have some minor ranged attacks and no status effects.





Having defeated a swarm of perilous Couatl, we took heart, for the terrors of the pyramid were entirely mundane. Mere flesh-eating beasts, and perhaps some terrible traps, no curses or wraiths! ...as far as we knew.
Tone it down a bit, I think you're about to make Simon wet himself.




This room looks pretty simple. Jump from platform to platform to get to the other side.




Except they start sinking the instant you land on them, so if you're moving too slowly, you end up too low for the next jump and having to move on to the floor, which...




Opens niches on either side that contain a few Couatl. It's not very high-stakes, plus inside their niches they have buttons that raise a staircase at the far end so you can just walk across the floor and up it. I appreciate it in concept, since it's a puzzle you'd fundamentally want to pass, but if you either can't or don't, you can also brute force it.




It also serves as MM8's introduction to finding secrets. While chest traps now actually have a difficulty rating(only 2, admittedly), perception checks are still 0. This marks a departure from MM7 where the check difficulties for any area were always the same for both Traps and Perception.




In addition to containing a quest item, the chests for this dungeon also have their own special model and texture. I think there were barely a handful of those in MM6 and MM7, except for furniture items you could rifle through it was pretty much only the super rare "black box" type chests like in Colony Zod that had any of that going on.

Ah-hah! It really was in here!
For the first time, I saw Fredrick take joy in something that wasn't smugly disagreeing with Elsbeth about whether the Ancients had built something or the locals had.
What's so special about this book?
Fredrick thinks it has the secrets of the fuuuuutuuuuure within its pages. In fact, let's just flip this open... huh, not a lot of actual prophecies, but the author did set down what appears to be a banging recipe for a tobersk fruit pie.
Please, it may look like a recipe to the untrained eye, but it's all allegory and metaphor. I'm sure Tisk will be able to unravel it.




The other chest contains a lore scroll. Is there any situation at all, in all of fiction, where someone's "creations" didn't end up turning on them or somehow destroying them when they fucked around with creating life or mutants or something?





This, uh, this doesn't seem right. Feels like there's gonna be a trap or somethin' in here.

There is, in fact.



Interestingly, they painted the right path on the ceiling, and since there's a number of red markers tracking the party below them, I assume the rest of the floor is illusionary or something and there's a swarm of couatls lurking down there. There's also a temple chest in each corner of the room to tempt you off the path, but since they're way off the path I strongly suspect that even attempting to go for them will drop you through and reaching them is actually impossible.





Hey, good job spottin' that path on the ceiling.
All it took was not looking in an ancient recipe book or my diary all the time.
Sometimes, it felt like Elsbeth didn't appreciate how much work it took to collect and narrate my journeys. How was I going to remember everything at the end without a record of it?!





Obviously, another trap room. Safe as you approach the other side of the room and then...




The floor opens up to a classic spike pit.



And eight buttons light up on the walls. To add extra terror, the pit doesn't stop opening when you press all the buttons, making you think that maybe you did something wrong and you're doomed, pressing all the buttons just makes it so it only stops at halfway open and then the door out opens.





I take the side corridor here, open the door, see the "feet" as it opens and instantly skedaddle backwards. This is a lot of enemies, including a new type, that calls for caution. I position myself on the far side of the pit that just opened hoping that they might navigate into it.



Thankfully, while they don't fall in, they do get stuck on the edge, giving us a good look at a new enemy...


Serpentmen are our first condition-causing enemies, predictably being able to cause Poison. Compared to MM6, though, my experience is that they seem to cause it very rarely compared to, say, the snakes and spiders back there. According to Grayface's site, the calculations are basically the same, so I'm not sure why this is, maybe I was just much less lucky back then. In practice they're otherwise no tougher than the Regnan pirates outside, i.e. easy enough to handle in small numbers.




Where they came from is this little "pyramid" of rooms. Every room has at least two buttons, to open one of the doors out of it. Thanks to the automap rendering us psychic, we can see that some are just "closets," these just contain a monster, nothing else. Instead we should preferentially head down the longer corridors, though even that has some blind paths.





Going in, Arachne gets KO'd and Simon gets poisoned, and I decide this is as good a time as any to trek back to town and collect a few quest rewards.

Then on the way out, I make a mistake...




Some of these steep stairs it's VERY possible to rush down a bit too fast and kill yourself if you have autorun on, which you should since you move slower than all enemies otherwise. So yes, so far the most dangerous enemy this party has faced is stairs.






Handing in the Prophecies of the Snake is enough XP for another level-up for Arachne. Dagger Wound Island has a lot of trainers around, so I take the chance to get Fredrick up to Expert Body Magic and Arachne to Expert Air Magic. We're obviously going to be keeping Arachne around, but in case you guys want to keep Fredrick, I might as well be prepared.

Then a straight shot back, weaving past fighting pirates and lizard guards, to reach the temple.





This one feels a bit different than the others. Air's... moister? Also hissier.
Hissier is absolutely not a word.



Dear diary, upon entering the cave and seeing a veritable army of serpentine monstrosities, we ran away as soon as Talimere shrieked-
BACK, BACK, BACK.

As usual, the wise choice is to retreat since that'll naturally get the monsters to come at the party piecemeal.




It goes better than I expected, not because the party's had any gear upgrades(they haven't since Arachne got a shirt and some shoes), but levelling up gives Arachne an extra Toxic Cloud shot or two, which allows me to instantly blast some of the tier 3 serpentmen before they can do any damage.




At the far end of the room the obvious reward is a diamond with a base 3k gold value, which is a nice score! Sadly, without good Merchant skill, items sell for a lot below their theoretical value. It's hard to calculate how much Merchant you need to sell well, since each shop has a mysterious "merchant modifier" that I can't even find in the strategy guide, but as we turn to leave...




One of the walls turns out to be a hidden door. It's interesting, because it hides the promotion item for turning a Cleric into a proper Priest of the Sun. It's weird that you can find it so early, and almost certainly will, since it doesn't require any decent Perception skill or fighting anything exceptionally hard or really even going out of your way. Puzzling over that, we get back to the main path.




It's a large open room with a bunch of trap plates on the floor and what's obviously pillars that'll shit projectiles at you if you step on them. But!



On the wall there's this obvious sealed panel. But how to open it? Scroll back up to the "old scroll" in the "hidden" chest earlier, noting how the "sixth plate" is the answer. The problem is there is absolutely no labelling for these plates, where do they start counting from, and then in what order? This means that the only thing to do is run back and forth across the panels until one of them gives us what we want and hope we don't get killed. I am very intelligent.





I, uh, feel like there's got to be a more intelligent way to do this.
Oof, imagine if someone left that note there as a prank, to get idiots like us to kill themselves.
The Ancients don't do pranks, only deep and mystic wisdom, keep stomping.

Thankfully I hit the right plate before someone gets killed.




This thing takes up about as much space as a suit of armor, it must be huge. So obviously we make Simon carry it.

It's fine, I know I'm not the smartest here.

So now we can finally cross the room.






Diary, I have to tell you, I've never appreciated fresh air so much as after all the hours we spent in that musty, snake-smelling darkness. I never thought snakes would have a smell, but when they've been penned up underground for centuries? They smell! They really do! I wanted to just run for that ship, but we had some things to do first...

By which I mean we round the corner and use the now-active teleporter back to the main island, which is thankfully two-way.







I also get Arachne up to level 5 while I'm here and then hop back to the docks.






Good news, diary, I'd discharged all the quests I picked up on Dagger Wound bar one. Now all I'd need to do was sail to Ravenshore, hand the letter to Elgar, and then I'd be free to get back to my vacation!
Wait, you were serious, you were doing this just for your vacation? I thought that was a joke.
Eh, makes good sense to me. A nice vacation beats fame or money.
I'm just looking forward to getting somewhere they'll take me seriously.





Reaching Ravenshore was exciting, nothing like finally getting to see that famous Ravenshore landmark the giant... glowing... crystal?
I don't get art. What's it mean?
It isn't a sculpture, you fool, it's a mystic focus of power.
Enough gawking. Letter. To merchants.





The guild has two entrances and I, of course, pick the wrong one.




It contains a few books and pages for us to look at.




Plus I finally think to read Dadeross' letter.



Then I pop back out again and try the other door.






So funny thing, diary. Elgar looked at us and asked if I'd help with just one more thing and... I'm just not good at telling people no! So, ha ha, guess who's got another quest! I just couldn't have lived with myself if he couldn't find anyone to do it.
I can tell this won't be over any time soon, who wants to go hit up an inn before we continue?
Oooh, me me!
Hm, I wonder what he wrote to them...







Ehn, I still don't get it. Maybe somethin' about how no man is a giant crystal island?

VOTE

Arachne is a permanent fixture of the party, but is there anyone else you folks definitely want to keep or remove? Or should I just, for now, replace party members whenever I find someone of the same class so we can see as many as possible? The only non-negotiable thing is that I want to always have a Cleric in the party, for the sake of my sanity, but Fredrick obviously is not the only one of those.