Part 4: How To Shame Your Dragon

Update 03: How To Shame Your Dragon



Dear diary... today, disaster has struck! When we woke up this morning, we awoke to a terrible discovery-



Hey, uh, where'd Rohani go?
More importantly, where'd my wallet go! Son of a bitch!
Oh, wow, are we allowed to use bad words? Can I say bad words, too? I've always wanted to say-





Before we'd even had time to finish breakfast properly, Elsbeth was herding us out of the door and down the road, something was clearly bothering her, and I asked her to explain what.
Did you see how eager Rohani was to join us? I'll be damned if she was just an "eager adventurer," she was planted there to watch for someone like us.
A, um, generally well-meaning and ethnically diverse group of adv-
No, a group that was a danger to her master. You know who we've been talking shit about for a while now?




I listed the ones foremost at my mind, the Dragon Hunters of Garotte Gorge, Arius mentioned-
I think I complained about my ex-boss once, there was never enough mop water around-
_{Hey guys? You noticing these ogres? No? Alright, I'll take care of them!}
I mean Zog, which means we've only got one choice, we've got to deal with him before Rohani tips him off and he comes for us. Thankfully, he's got one of his forts just down the road.





The plain ogres are no real problem to us any longer, especially if we can keep them at arm's length and Ithilgore has time to take shots at them. Having a dragon at this point which is, honestly, a good while before I think the game expected us to have one, does kind of break some encounters, but not all. Especially not dungeon encounters.




I thought you said this was an ogre fort.
Hey, I hate Zog, but the guy does attempt to keep his organization diverse.




What a fight it was, diary! Hardened mercenaries and ogres kept coming at us from every side, falling back cleft in twain by Arius, skewered by Elsbeth, burning from Ithilgore's draconic flames and occasionally battered by yours truly. The battle reached a fever pitch until-



Hey, guys, Arachne stopped narrating, I think one of those ogres managed to hit her pretty bad. Should we, uh, back out or something?
Calm down, you coward cow, I'll just heal her after- urk.



Hey, Ith, help me drag them out the door!
Wait, I think I've got this, I've got this!



...I don't got this.





Don't worry, friends, I'll get you back on your feet! Now where was that temple?





Is everyone okay? I'm so sorry! Are we still friends?
Ask Arius, he's the one who got turned into a pair of boots. Pfeh. Anyway, let's look at what went wrong there...

Okay, so, the main issue is that this is where I realized the turn-based function for MM8 doesn't function. That's right, pressing Enter does not turn things turn-based. Perhaps it's a keybinding issue but... switching to turn-based is the one keybind you can't change, so I can't try rebinding it. It might be a Grayface patch issue, but I can't see anyone else having the issue. Maybe a GOG version issue? I figured it'd be fixed if it was. But I'll have to be dealing with it. This means things happen very fast.

Part of it is also the surprise of suddenly going from Ogres to also dealing with Ogre Mages and Mercenaries.


Mercenaries are basically just weaker Ogres. They have less hit points, and slightly better max damage done, but they can't break equipment and their minimum damage is also notably lower. They are not the issue except how many come flooding on to the party from all angles in a position where you can't back off.


Ogre Mages are a lot worse. They do more damage than Ogres, they hit have more hit points than Ogres(close to 50% more, in fact), they have a ranged attack that hurts a hell of a lot and the tier 2 and 3 versions can curse us. Ithilgore's funny face when everyone else got KO'ed is in fact his cursed face. Springing them on you like this, with no warning, is in fact kind of a dick move, NWC.



-and I figure that's why we got our asses kicked.
Because the gods are cruel and unfair and hate us?
Pretty much, but we're going to do this anyway. Fuck 'em.



Anyway, back inside, now not being swarmed by 50 enemies right away, the immediate objective is to remove those bars so we can get down the shaft in the center of them. Take either passage out of the room, they both lead to the same place.





Either just running up the stairs so you don't get hit, or walking on the inside edge, helps you dodge these projectiles coming down from above. Of more immediate threat are the enemies on the second floor, which are awake now you've gotten up here.



The solution? Simple.




Cowardice. Jump off the ledge and they get stuck up there and can't path to you, there are almost no ogre mages on the second floor, so you can pretty much bombard them to your heart's content, though without a dragon or a lot of SP for Dark Magic and Fireballs, that's going to take a while. Thankfully we have a dragon, so that handles the worst of it.




This little throne room upstairs actually has some quite nice loot, possibly we're here a bit early, but we've already gotten the relevant quest, so it can't be too early.



Look at this beautiful loot, there's also a little flavour scroll in there.



It's a bit oddly located since why would a vampire have been hanging around Zog's fort and left their diary behind?

Well this vampire is here because of those delightful chests.

Now be confused because you don't see a button for the bars down below, run in circles a few times, return to the throne room and...




It was right behind you all along, you fool, you cretin, you miserable blind idiot.




This ogre fortress is quite the adventure so far, diary. Hidden buttons, traps, overwhelming odds, and now we're descending into the bowels of the earth where we hope to find Arion Hunter's daughter, Irabelle, and hopefully free him from his obligations to the monster Zog. What horrors and torments await us below? Time will tell!
Wait, uh, torments? Sure we shouldn't leave a guard up here? I volunteer me.
Move it, beef haunch, or I'll make Ithilgore carry you.
...well it does actually look kind of spooky.
Move.






The basement is much like the fort above, except with more space to back off while Ithilgore roasts the ogres.





...is she going to be alright getting home?
What's going to stop her? We killed every ogre, wolf and rat person between here and her dad. Maybe if she trips and breaks a leg getting there.



An odd thing is that Irabelle also exists physically. Prior, they've always just popped up to talk to us when we entered their cell or clicked their cell door, but here she's around physically and... I'm not sure why! Was it originally planned that we could, I don't know, kill her instead?





There's also another cell which contains nothing but bones, not even a chest or barrel, considering that both cells have unique keys that are recovered from enemies, this again feels like they cut out another prisoner that needed rescuing. I think there's a bit of that left over in Arion's dialogue later but... we'll get there eventually.

Wow, this actually felt pretty good. We didn't just do this for the treasure, we helped someone!
Is this what being a hero feels like? I like it!
Shame we didn't catch Zog himself, but at least now he'll know not to mess with us.
I could tell Elsbeth was more excited about what she gathered from the chests upstairs than the good deeds we did down below, but that didn't matter, as long as we all found something to make us happy about ourselves, it was time to go back and tell someone about our good deeds! First, we figured the Dark Elves would appreciate hearing that the ogres were no longer a threat...





Now, note, I have killed EVERYONE in the "Ogre Raiding Fort" and I have killed every ogre on the floor of the canyons of Alvar, which means...





Yeah, there are ogres up here, quite a few, in fact. The insane thing about it is that there's no way up here by just walking, I don't think you can even climb this hillside without at least Jump(which Arachne has), Fly or a dragon's Flight.




This place also seems to have all the trees that the rest of Alvar doesn't have, which makes them even harder to deal with as while they block your vision, the trunks will also block your arrows and spells AND you can't maneuver much because the map edge is just next to you and the edge of the cliff is in the other direction.





And then the best part is, when you finally kill them all... you probably won't know it for sure because all you get is this little brief text blip on the bar above your characters, which is super easy to miss, in fact I didn't even see it until I was checking over footage for screenshots.

Having just rooted out a few ogres who had escaped our righteous wrath(and Elsbeth's greed) and hidden in the cliff's above their fort, we were gripped with doubt. Had we truly dealt with all the ogres in the region? It would be incredibly awkward to be told, again, that we missed some, so we decided to go over the remainder of Alvar with a fine-toothed comb just to be on the safe side...





Maybe we really did get them all, I haven't seen any ogres in hours.
Hey, can we have a lunch break? I think my blood sugar might be low, I keep hearing this loud buzzing noise.
...huh, you too? I thought it was just my tinnitus.




Soon, we were all hearing it, a persistent buzzing noise that set our teeth on edge and made none of us feel very good. On the bright side, at least ogres didn't make any buzzing sounds, so it probably wasn't any of them!




From the cliffs of eastern Alvar, we scouted out the valleys and saw that we weren't the only tourists around, someone else had gone camping, and wouldn't you know it? They'd had to deal with bugs.




I feel like you're burying the lede a bit by not mentioning that these "bugs" have swords.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa bugs aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa buuuuuuuuugs aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Also Ithilgore doesn't like bugs, uh, worth keeping in mind before he wings us with friendly fire.


Despite the swords, the game just feels like calling these guys wasps. I guess this is what bugs are like in Jadame, hope we never see the mosquitoes. In practice, they're like flying ogres that are a bit more fragile but can deal up to twice as much damage per attack, and come in bigger groups, are harder to dodge, etc. generally they're nasty glass cannons and you don't want to let them surround you. If you can keep them at arm's length and stay firing, they're easily handled. Strangely enough the devs even resisted the temptation to give their attacks a chance of causing poison.





Jackpot, these tourists were loaded.
Gazing upon the treasures of fallen tourists, their abandoned tents, made me dwell upon the sights they had certainly never had the chance to see, the tourist attractions they had never visited, the souvenirs they had never bought... could such a fate be in store for us, too?



These chests contain some random loot, but they also contain a lot of fixed scrolls of Jump, I think about fifteen or twenty of them, a ton, in other words.



...
Uh oh, she's thinking.
Say, Arachne, if you're so worried about missing out on local tourist attractions, why don't we go see one right now? I have it on good authority that the World's Biggest Wasp Nest is just around the corner and isn't even charging admission.



After a brief search of the environs, we had failed to find the wasp nest immediately. Arius suggested that we get some altitude to perhaps spot it.




Hey, is that a wasp nest? Are they always pointy like that?
What happened to being mortally afraid of bugs? Also, no and no.
I don't know! They're just not as scary when they're big and have swords.
Let me know when you start making sense, dragon.



While Ithilgore and Elsbeth debated the merit of being more afraid of large bugs with swords, or small ones, I investigated the obelisk. I'd heard of structures like these on Enroth and Antagarich, supposedly in those places, when all of them were found, they pointed the way to a fabulous treasure! I resolved to keep an eye out for more of them, but not to tell Elsbeth for now, I had a feeling that if I did, we'd soon be looking for nothing but the obelisks.
Folks, I think, uh, there's something over here. Big enough that I think Ith is gonna be fine with it.






The devs did a great job of making the exterior of the hive have a slightly alien and unsettling look, not unlike sufficiently large real world wasp hives, which do absolutely feel like they don't quite belong, like they're some otherworldly growth. It's also one of the completely optional dungeons, it doesn't even have an attached quest, just the note in the tents telling you to pack plenty of Jump scrolls and get ready to make it rich.

Elsbeth hadn't been pulling my leg, this was almost certainly the world's biggest wasp nest! I wondered if they had a gift shop.




You like this room? I hope you do, because this is what every room in the hive looks like. One of these ceiling holes is a way up(sometimes it's in the floor and a way down instead), the other holes are just for decoration except when an enemy drops down through them. I don't know how this works since they're barely 1/10th of the sprite's height in depth, but I think either the game spawns them in there occasionally OR they accidentally clip through the floor from above. The rooms in general have a lot more enemies than you'd expect.




And without turn-based mode, they do that thing I mentioned would be bad, you know, them rushing us in a swarm and getting us pinned in a corner! Thankfully the corner is the exit, so I manage to whittle down this first group by popping in, killing a few, popping back out, etc. several times it KO's everyone but Ithilgore, but as long as they at least stay alive an evening camping outside near the Murder Blob makes them all better.




Now, with all the enemies cleared out of this floor, it's time to approach the hole to the next one and- ohfuck. If you're lucky, you can just sort of run past the hole and only a few enemies drop down at once, here they've all balled up and they're coming for us at once, clipped on top of each other as a hostile murder singularity.

Well, this is definitely a way to go. Bury me with my mop.
Ithilgore you dumb lizard, do something.
Um, um, um, right! Behold! My dragon breath!



Yes, the icon for Dragon Breath is in fact a bundle of garlic.



Ha ha ha! Wow! It worked! Guys, did you see that? I got them all I... guys? ...guys?




It's alright, Ithilgore, they'll understand. They'll just be glad you cared about them so much you brought them back to the temple!




Elsbeth will say I did real good, and Arius will pat me on the head, and Arachne will write an entire chapter in her journal just about me and how I'm their best friend!




Hello mister! Please resurrect my friends! Again!



I am at a loss for words.
It's okay Elsbeth, I can tell you're proud of me!

I hadn't expected to be visiting the temple again already, but while I did feel somewhat peeved about it, I realized that if left to Elsbeth, something might be said that couldn't be unsaid. So even as I saw the words "moron dragon" starting to slip out of her mouth, I delegated the task of disciplining Ithilgore to Arius. I was sure he was more than ready for the task.



Buddy, Ith, I'm not mad at you, I'm just disappointed.
W-what?
You kind of got us all killed. So I'm going to make sure you never forget what you did.
No, no, nooooooooooooooooo!
Briefly I wondered if, perhaps, I had delivered Ithilgore to an even more merciless disciplinarian and then I saw it.



Right, now do you feel sorry for what you did?
I feel the sorriest I've ever felt! Can I take this off now?
Hm, well, if you really feel sorry, I guess you can.
...this is the sorriest display of "discipline" I've ever seen.




Back me up here, Arachne, he didn't even threaten to send Ithilgore to his room or to take away his allowance.
I pointed out to Elsbeth that Ithilgore had neither a room nor an allowance and that, as far as I could tell, his share of our treasure had ended up in her backpack.
Well what's he gonna spend it on? He's a dragon. Not like he can buy a nice pair of boots. I, on the other hand, could definitely use nice things.





Anyway, like I was saying, these jars of royal wasp jelly are the big score in here, since they'll be worth about 1000 gold a piece shortly. The wasps themselves are also a relatively big payday since about 1 in 3 of them drop their stingers, which can be exchanged for 500 gold a piece. This hive rather solves the party's money issues for the foreseeable future, even after loading Arachne up on Master and Grandmaster-level elemental spellbooks she can't learn yet, but which I don't want to backtrack for when she can learn them.





When I can manage to use it without fragging three-quarters of the party with friendly fire, Ithilgore's breath spell kicks ass. The AoE is pretty small, but some enemies, like the wasps, really like clustering together and making sure I get the maximum bang for my buck. Despite what the numbers in-game say, though, it tends to roll lower damage than his plain breath weapon attack, which is odd. I suppose it could be if the breath spell is coded to do Fire damage which enemies might resist, rather than being Energy damage like Ithilgore's breath weapon.




After going up one side of the hive, you then go down the other side, which is the rough part since you can't lure the wasps up out of the hole in the same way as you could lure them down(because they get stuck in the ceiling dents), and instead have to drop down and engage them all whether you like it or not. But there really isn't a lot more to say, since literally every room is the same. There are no traps, no buttons, no levers, no doors, no keys, no chests and not even some sort of unique hive queen enemy or anything. Just wasps. So lets get out of here after collecting enough Royal Jelly to satisfy Elsbeth's greed.



Was this really worth it just for maybe making some money?
...wait, that's not a rhetorical question? Of course it was.





Oh, are we headed to Ironsand now? Are we gonna see the lake of fire? I've never seen a lake of fire before.
I appreciated Ithilgore's enthusiasm for seeing new things, he was truly worthy of the title of tourist, but a couple of things had been nagging at my mind. Firstly, it would make me happy to know that Irabelle Hunter had gotten back safely. And secondly, there was that minor issue of the disease outbreak on the Dagger Wound Islands and us having had the cure in our backpacks for... hm, at least a couple of weeks now. I hoped it didn't have a best-by date.




Good old Ravenshore, at least there's nothing left to try and kill us here.
Hold on, I think I saw something in that tree.
...if the Dire Wolves have learned to climb trees, I'm retiring.




So, completely without any hints, this one particular willow tree is, in fact, a container. MM6 had a few things like that, but usually they stood out enough, like a lone boulder on a shoreline, to attract your attention. Here it's literally a tree in a forest. Guides say that it contains "a useful weapon" which to me suggests that the contents are randomized, now let's just-



By the gods who would put a trap in a tree branch?



Oooooh, it's a hat! Must be special if they put down a trap to protect it, right?
Either that or someone just decided to be a real prick.
Oh, wow, another bad word! Can I say some, too? Darn! Frick! Heck!





It puzzles me a bit that Arion Hunter talks about his "family" when the only one we ever encounter is Irabell. Maybe we were originally intended to have more wererats to rescue in more locations?




As a fun note, only the ship to Dagger Wound Island is there when the game starts, once you make the deal with the Smugglers(or perhaps not until you return Irabelle, I think it may not be until you return Irabelle), a second ship pops up that can take you to the few coastal regions of Jadame. Ship travel is, aside from Dagger Wound, a lot less relevant than it was in MM6(which had a couple of regions you could ONLY reach by ship) or MM7(which had one region you could only reach by ship and only Nighon and the Land of the Giants as more than one region's walk from a place that could be reached by ship).

In any case, a short ride later...




For a quest that it takes so long to complete, compared to how early you get it, there's not much of a celebratory dialogue. But I'll certainly take the XP.



And the helmet, once ID'd, turns out to be tailor made for vampires or dark elves. Since there's no druid equivalent, though(it seems like there was originally meant to be, if not an outright druid), no class will get the full benefit from it.

Now we can get back to Alvar and continue on to Ironsand.




Just a short walk back to where the tents were and then like 30 seconds' walk east past them and we hit the region transition to...



Oh boy! Ironsand Desert! And look, the locals are here to greet us!
As much as I enjoyed Ithilgore's enthusiasm, and Ironsand Desert was quite a sight after the more lush regions of Jadame, those weren't locals, instead they were-
Gogs! Why'd it have to be Gogs?!



Yeah, the moment you enter, you're in a Gog crossfire, firebolts hurtling left and right. They're practically the exact same as in MM7, the only creature I can think of that's an outright copypaste, except that they've been renamed from Gogling, Gog and Magog to Gog, Smoke Gog and Ember Gog. Once again their biggest threat is that they explode when killed, but with Ithilgore along, he can usually snipe them from a safe distance, which mostly trivializes them.





Thankfully the Gogs proved little challenge, and soon we were striding into the stricken village of Rust. It had certainly seen better days, but there were still plenty of trolls about, so certainly we'd be able to find the witness that the Alvarian merchants wanted.







Compared to the dark elves, who're pretty much the main civilization on Jadame, the trolls get the shaft. The only "shops" present in Rust are an inn and a stable, presumably whatever services they once offered are among the burned-out husks on the edge of the Lake of Fire. Mind you, they do have a pretty great thing, which is the Water Magic trainer. I was very excited to get access to Town Portal... and then learned that for inscrutable reasons, Ravenshore isn't a Town Portal location. Alvar and Dagger Wound are, which is better than nothing, but with Ravenshore as probably the most useful place to be able to teleport to, it is a bit annoying.






Completing this quest is also how trolls get their promotion.

Huh, now he mentions it, it would kind of make sense for trolls to have come from somewhere else.
Look, every culture has a story about originally coming from somewhere else. You start buying into them too much and you'll start believing the Aaaaancients brought us all here in their magic boats or something.



And in the same house lives the guy who's willing to pay a thousand gold per jar of wasp jelly which sounds like an awful lot(and isn't a completely meaningless amount, for sure), but considering the amount of effort it takes to get the ten or so jars out of the wasp hive, you can almost certainly earn the same money in some way that'll get you killed less.

I said I was sorry! It was an accident!







I swear, everyone has some price we need to pay or task we need to do before they'll lend a helping hand. It's a disgrace.
...so you'd just drop everything to help some random people who barged into your house?
Of course not, because I'm important.
C'mon, guys, we get to do a good deed and see a neat place at the same time! It'll be my first time visiting a tomb, too, do you think we'll meet any ghosts?
Before setting off for the trolls' tomb, we took a quick peek at the lake of fire. It would have been a shame to miss it, after all.




I'm not sure what I expected, but it certainly wasn't "spicy water."
The lake of fire was a mild disappointment, though it did make cooking lunch somewhat simpler when we camped out by its shores before venturing to the tomb of the trolls! I couldn't wait to see what sort of exciting burial tradition they had.




I can't help but look at these doors and not feel like the symbols are a half dozen characters in Arabic script laid on top of each other. Is it just me? Does this mess actually mean anything or look almost like something that means something?




So you enter this place, and almost certainly you'll be thinking "aw dang, Overdune said it was gonna be hard to navigate! are we gonna get another neat tomb like in the Barrow Downs in MM7?" The developers of MM8, however, are laughing at you right now and calling you names for suggesting something so stupid.





The troll tomb has about 15 small, circular rooms that have between 2 and 4 exits in various cardinal directions, they contain 2 to 4 gogs and maybe one(1) random item. Aside from that, the doors make a fucking godawful noise whenever they open and close, refer back to my short MM7 video on the Arena if you really want to experience it for yourself. The point is that a couple of them are above and below each other, so you can get vaguely lost on your way to the one meaningful room in the tomb.





Go in, plonk the ashes on the coffin at the end of the room, you're done. There's not even a fucking chest in here. Not a single trap. Not a single puzzle. Not a single encounter of relevance. Even in these close quarters, dealing with the gogs just means having enough patience to heal up each time they've exploded in your face.

This dungeon sucks.




So, uh, how'd everyone like the tomb? Fun, right? Right?
Not a shred of treasure.
I thought tombs were supposed to have cool skeletons, I didn't see a single one!
Personally, this tomb was the most disappointing thing I had so far witnessed on Jadame. I'll tell you what, diary, it made me want to not even help the trolls, considering that they couldn't even manage a single worthwhile tourist attraction! Not even some sort of jaunty, entertaining architecture for tourists like myself! But, in the end, I decided that it wasn't their fault, I couldn't expect everyone to be well-educated in the arts of tourism, sadly. They just didn't know any better. Maybe I should suggest they add a gift shop to their tomb?






And there we go, this is weirdly enough the party's first chance to include a Troll if you're not starting out as one. They're the only class not to have a level 5 member you can pick up almost right out of the gate, for some reason. I'm not sure why, since they're not particularly overpowered or odd in gameplay, unlike, say, dragons.




Overdune is an alright recruit, but it's a bit of an oddity of the game that every recruit of level 15 requires your main character to be at least level 20 to pick them up(sometimes explicitly, other times just gated behind quests which are hard to do at low level), which is a baffling mechanic that further ensures later recruits will almost always be lagging behind and thus a poor choice.




Town Portal back to Alvar and it's time to drop off Overdune at the merchants' guild and see what they make of him. Also note that hirelings/followers are no longer a thing, any time we want to bring an NPC somewhere, for something, we have to actually make them a party member. Imagine how annoying that would be if you already had a full party at this point(which most people would), then you'd have had to drop someone to make space for Overdune AND then they'd miss out on the XP from completing the quest by handing Overdune in.




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68ImVko4sbk





That's... an awful lot to take in. I sure hope the world doesn't end.
Oh boy, we get to be heroes! I wonder if people will write books about us, maybe paintings of what we do and oh, oh, oh! I wanna see the action figure of me!
While Arius was withdrawn and Ithilgore excited, I found myself silently enjoying this idea. Sure, I had said I wasn't going to take any more quests, but when you think about it, what is a quest but getting sponsored to go sight-seeing in places that no one else is ever likely to witness because they'd get chopped in half? Hmmm... Elsbeth was shaking and making quiet sounds I couldn't quite make out. Had this revelation unsettled her? Or... no, she was laughing?
Bwahahahaha! We're going to get rich like no one ever before us!
It was nice to see that everyone was dealing well with the news.

VOTE

I'll be dropping off Overdune since we're about to actually get access to a lot of recruits(the party's just verging on level 20, and there are a few characters unlocked through the alliance quests, too) and I want to pick up as many of them as possible to free them up for future recruitment, but let me know if there's anyone else you're tired of seeing around and I'll give them a brief vacation from the party.

Aside from that... we do have a choice to make! We've already met the Dragon Hunters and the Dragons, which of them should we support? The losers will, uh, pretty much cease to exist.

There are also the necromancers and the church of the sun to choose between, even though we haven't formally met either group yet.

And finally there are the minotaurs who apparently don't require anyone backstabbed before they'll team up with us. Nice of them.

Alternately, we've got legendary cheeses, an ancient troll homeland and some flowers to hunt down, we could focus on exploring, sidequesting and sightseeing for now.