Part 10: The Flaying Happens Off-Screen

Update 10: The Flaying Happens Off-Screen

Apologies in advance for the delayed nature of this update, I got my second covid vaccine shot around when I got started on it and it just completely fucked me sideways, most of this was attempted written while suffering from a fever and needed a lot of rewriting to be even tolerable, plus this part of the game, the "cleanup"-phase, was hard to make interesting or say anything interesting about.



As much as I wanted to see Regna sooner rather than later, I'd probably be the first tourist to set foot on the island in over a century, it wouldn't do me much good if I ended up in a watery grave immediately afterwards. It was definitely time to get a move on with the lich thing. Idly I wondered how much it would hurt, as it supposedly involved the complete removal of all your skin.
I think a fair bet is on "very painful." Now, who do we know that's an expert in the undead? A lich transformation isn't simple.
It would need to be some sort of necromancer... or perhaps someone who was undead already...
Oh, maybe a vampire! A vampire would be cool!




Since the vote seemed to be primarily in favour of replacing Flamdring, I decided to see if any new Vampire recruits had become accessible in Shadowspire, and I did find a couple new locals we could bring along.



A decent option if you don't already have a Necromancer, though Necromancers are one of the less important classes once you have a promoted Cleric.




Finding a vampire willing to come with us wasn't the tough part... the tough part was deciding who'd have to give up their spot in the party to let us bring her along.
You know, we've met like... a dozen people so far. Why can't we just bring all of them? Then nothing could stop us!
Adventurers' Union rulebook, it took us years just to be allowed a fifth party member.
Well, Deftclaw wanted more dragons to scout out Regna, I suppose I could take him up on that. Take care, youngsters.



Infaustus is pretty decent, not too far behind in levels and, with this party composition her main task is hitting things, so having her at Master Dagger already is a good start. In any other party, though, she'd be too behind in terms of her misc. skills to really be worth recruiting.



I'm so excited to be part of the team! I overheard you talking about how you were looking for the lost Book of Khel and some Lich Jars to turn Arachne into a Lich, so I went ahead and planned us an itinerary for the trip!
What suspicious eagerness! When has anyone been this happy to join a party of murderous cut-throats with violence in their future before?
I like to think I've always been pretty positive about it. Adventuring gives life spice and also pays the bills.
What's a cut-throat? I just joined a party of the best friends I've ever had!
Looking over the plan Infaustus had whipped up, it looked quite watertight. First it took us to Dagger Wound Island and the Library of Khel, then back to Shadowspire to procure the Lich Jars, and it even had little breaks to enjoy the scenic countryside pencilled in!




Dagger Wound hasn't changed much since we were last here, there aren't really any new things to engage with, except that now we can fly...





It was a completely gratuitous detour, but getting some revenge on the pirates who helped ruin the first decent vacation I'd had in years felt good.

The pirate captains are pretty high level, 500HP or so, but not particularly challenging to the party, and killing them is neither tied to a quest, nor do they drop anything. Their ships don't even contain any pirate loot.




So, diary, I've been on a few beaches in my time, and something you never quite forget is when a lot of seaweed has washed ashore and is rotting. It's an exceptional smell. Now imagine that an entire beach full of rotting seaweed and fish had just emerged from the depths of the sea and you'll have an idea of what this island smelled like.
By all that is... this is the worst thing I've ever smelled!
It's like when Deftclaw forgets to brush his teeth after eating Dragon Hunters, but worse!

This island hosts the local obelisk(at the very peak), the portal to the plane of Earth(the little brown circle up ahead) and the Uplifted Library.




Another sign of how rushed this game is that while in MM6, every single location except for the "just a single room"-type dungeons(like the one dragon lair and the devil outpost) had an animated entrance screen, and MM7 was almost the same, but MM8 has multiple actual dungeons(even if they're generally shorter than in the previous two games) that lack an entrance screen, even though they have a blurb.



Well, that's a rude welcome.

The Uplifted Library is designed in a very simple, cheap and effective manner. It has three rooms that have the same layout, but only one entrance. Starting off with a couple of Tritons to hold you in place, and then a cluster of Boulders to blow you up. There's no maneuvering, no dodging, no cheesing and no thinking. You either have the stats to not die instantly, or you die instantly.




Wow! That was bracing! Excuse me while I pencil in a visit to the Temple after this!




While the devs don't have a lot of real estate to play with here, it does feel like they did their best with what they had, it gives a decent sense of having been wrecked a little bit, despite the rough tools they had to work with.





So, a few cosmetic changes, but ultimately still a round room where you get fucked before you can even get off the elevator. Also the reason that Ithilgore keeps getting beat up so bad is because of a bug/feature where Shared Life gathers up everyone's life, calculates the average for redistribution and then if anything is over anyone's max HP, it just throws that excess away, rather than redistributing it to the characters with a higher max. With dragons having so much more HP than the rest, it actually ends up damaging them quite a lot.



Despite all the shelves, there are at most a few scrolls to collect in here. I suppose it makes sense since, I mean, it's been under the sea, so most of them would be severely waterlogged, but still a bit of a disappointment.





Here I feel real smart because I manage to squeeze around the Tritons, work my way up the ladder and find a blind spot because the projectile from the Boulders emerges from the bottom of their sprite.




Of course the Boulders still explode on death and near-kill most of the party. I am a tactical genius.





Once the last floor is cleared... there's no Book of Khel! Good thing there's a very conspicuous button.





Again, I really feel like more was intended for this, because it's extremely the simplest elevator they could possibly have made. Literally just a floating square that descends from the ceiling and then rises up again, and the button is so obvious that I feel like originally it was maybe intended to have been hidden or... something, anything.

I'd expected a bit more, you know, a sunken library... don't those usually have traps? Ferocious guardians? Mysterious puzzles?
We did almost get killed by those rocks, and there was a button. Not every dungeon can be a big-budget production.



The chest also contains this artifact that will likely go unused for the remainder of the game, but it's pretty decent for Minotaurs since they have literally no use for Intellect or Personality as they can't cast any kind of magic.




So, next on the agenda is Zanthora's lab and then, because I was feeling cheeky, just a little bit of Shadowspire sightseeing!
Despite hardly having been on the team for more than a day, Infaustus was quickly becoming my favourite member of the team. She really got our priorities.




Interesting fact: 90% of the surface water in Shadowspire is in fact tar. Not a lot of people know this.
How does anything survive here?

...I think I'll just ration my bottled water, thank you.





Oooooh, I didn't know Shadowspire had any dragons! They look awful skinny, though.
...are those skeleton dragons?


Skeletal dragons are in the mid-range in terms of HP, but have two big things going for them. Firstly, all their attacks are Dark, and thus unresistable(and even if the damage values are lower than living dragons', not having them cut in half or quarters most of the time makes a big difference), and secondly they can cause conditions. First-tier ones make you Afraid, second-tier ones Curse you(fuck that condition so hard) and third-tier ones can make your characters Insane(still rather have than than the being Cursed). As being both flying enemies AND enemies with ranged attacks, they're pretty much what every non-dungeon enemy should be at this stage of the game, because otherwise they're largely irrelevant.




Here we are: Zanthora's Lab! Flash photography is not only permitted, but encouraged, since it may briefly blind the horrible guardians within, giving you a chance to strike a telling blow!

Looking at the minimap, the shape of Zanthora's Lab is kind of suggestive, to me, of a pair of lungs and some of the nearby esophagus. But that may just be me.




The lab is primarily guarded by yet more Bone Dragons and also Necromancers, which are actually a reasonably formidable duo. Despite coming here late, they do manage to take some chunks out of the party from time to time.




Though the Necromancers are the scarier of the two. Dark damage attacks, big damage spells and the tier 3 ones can cast fucking Pain Reflection. If that comes up at the wrong time, your party can easily brain themselves in short order.



Oh, I know how this works. There's a tasty-looking well in the dungeon, but it curses you or kills you if you drink from it.
Oh no no! Since Shadowspire passed the Safe Waters Act, all sources of potable water have been free of curses, eradications and poison!

If this was MM6, even going near this water would've done something horrible to us, but in MM8? It just has the "Mmm... Refreshing!"-message and does nothing either good or weird. In general I think I've only found one negative well in all of MM8 so far, a single poison well in the Murmurwoods. The only thing about this well is that it's sort of a shortcut that you neither need or want if you decide to jump into it for some reason.





From the left path of the main atrium we bust through two labs filled with necromancers, the shelves bursting with alchemical reagents and mid-tier potions. Imagine if we ever used alchemy, this would be real cool. Good thing we're not that stupid.



I had to double-take when I saw these "dragon turtle fangs" on the shelves. Distinct flashbacks to the fucking "Tusk of Lust" from Wizards & Warriors.

Wow, what's that on the shelf?
...how old are you again, Ithilgore?
Six... two... carry the ten... probably fifty-nine!
You'll get it when you're older, just don't tell your mom!



The second lab room also has a staircase leading to the basement of Zanthora's Lab which is where most of the chances of dying horribly are tucked away.





It's a bit like the Maze from MM7 but with less dangerous enemies and a maze layout that mildly works because the level on top is layered over it on the minimap, making it hard to make out. It's also like a quarter of the size and no way to get lost, so that kind of sabotages it.




We also, once again, get that enemy level mismatch thing where a bunch of skeleton archers are hanging out with the skeleton dragons despite their being infinitely weaker and hardly a challenge back when we started the game.




After fighting what felt like a legion of necromancers and skeletal dragons, we waited with bated breath as Cauri jimmied open the lock on a chest deep in Zanthora's basement and crowded close as the lid slowly opened. I'd heard tales of Lich Jars from Erathia. Strange, crystalline containers, filled with ethereal lights, reflecting the soul contained within...
I think I drank out of one of these at a tavern once. Where are the Lich Jars?
The sticker on the bottom says these are the Lich Jars.
I was having second thoughts about leaving my soul forever stored in what looked like a novelty drinking tankard, but I'd committed to this now, and I had to keep the advantages in mind. Without any flesh to get sick, I wouldn't need to shell out for expensive travellers' insurance every time I took a holiday in the future.





On the north side of the labyrinth is about the only gameplay-wise unique parts of it, a little corridor where walking down the middle gets you hit in the ass from spell launchers set at either end. Oh yeah, and that face Leland has on is his Insane face, sadly I don't think there's any way to make everyone insane with like a well or anything, only conditions from enemies, so I probably won't be able to show off everyone's funny faces as easily as in MM6 and 7.




The last room of any interest in the basement is just jam-packed with necros and dragons, they're guarding two chests containing yet more lich jars(I think there's a total of six or eight in the basement, which is already twice more than the potential maximum number of non-Lich necromancers in the game) and a couple of quest items.




The Rubik's Cube for that one guy in Shadowspire(it's the same fucking control cube sprite AGAIN), and a spear that the Dragon Hunters won't ever see. Not because they're dead, mind you, it's still quite returnable, all their NPC's still exist even if some of the shop NPC's will no longer talk to you.

So what do we do with this... spear? None of us use spears and it makes me feel icky to look at.
Ithilgore, dear, take us over a tar pit on the way out, we'll drop this thing in.



The lab on the other side of the main hall just has some bone dragons and nothing else, so we're checking out the upstairs before heading out.




Diary, I'll never understand some of these villainous types. Who keeps a swarm of bone dragons in their bedroom?

Zanthora's(presumably hers, who else's would it be?) bed is literally just on top of the entrance hall, and filled with bone dragons who stick Ithilgore with some insanity, which is pretty hilarious-looking. It contains some more shelves of potions that we'll never care about(except for one, we got real lucky and rolled a single Potion of Pure Luck) and one door that doesn't lead onwards.



Gather around, everyone! We've hit upon a rare treat during our tour!
Is that a... dragon hunter? Is he stuck?
Indeed! He's stuck and no longer any danger to anyone, this is a natural phenomenon known as "dragon hunters are very foolish." Now, if you listen very carefully, you can hear him tell us the sad story of how he screwed up and got stuck in this closet.





Anyone in favour of helping this idiot out?
...
Anyone in favour of leaving him here to be Zanthora's next experiment?


From a gameplay perspective, helping out Blazen is absolutely the right thing to do. He's a level 50 Knight, and once you've freed him that automatically unlocks a level 50 Cleric of the Sun for recruitment in Ravenshore as well. However, this party has a strict policy of not helping dickheads, and Blazen is unfortunately a dickhead by definition since he's a Dragon Hunter, and also a moron since skeleton dragons are actually less dangerous than living dragons in almost every respect except for the conditions they can cause.



The tour's not over yet, folks! You've still yet to see the delightful and charming northeastern regions of Shadowspire!





I almost missed this small structure in the mountains while looking for a different one, only spotting it because the geometry was slightly more regular than the rest.





It's another dragon cave! In this case the owner is Yaardrake, who promptly shows up with his head clipping through the ceiling. Improperly-sized areas for the enemy sprites within seem to be a returning issue in MM8, though at least in this case he can still move and attack despite it, not like the tramplers who got stuck on the geometry and were made easy prey as a result. He's still easy prey, but that's mostly due to this party being well-built and slightly overlevelled.






The dragons beyond aren't a great challenge either, the party almost has more health coming out of this fight than going into it, because of the Regeneration buffs that Leland's dropped on them. None of them drop anything interesting, and they aren't guarding much, just a single chest and a single cave. The chest...



Contains a single artifact weapon that's great for blowing yourself up with when your arrows accidentally wing a small chunk of the geometry on the way downrange.





Brimstone uses Ithilgore's face, but is a level 30 dragon recruit, so potentially an upgrade by the time you get this far depending on whether you put it off or come here as soon as he's recruitable. He's recruitable as soon as you've finished all the alliances and honestly that can be done pretty early, though if you're trying to speedrun it, you might want to side with the Clerics instead of the Necromancers, since the fighting inside the Necromancers' Guild can be partitioned out slightly more, unlike in the Murmurwoods where you're basically getting surrounded by all the clerics and attacked at once whether you like it or not, and thus requires bigger numbers to handle.





Last stop on the tour is the Vampire Crypt! Please ignore the locals if they try to solicit any donations, they'll drain you dry, ha ha.
...
It's a vampire joke, you see.
Yes, thank you, I got it, I just didn't like it.



Predictably, the only enemies in the Vampire Crypt are vampires.


They're not very scary on their own, since the worst thing they can do to you in general is to punch you, disease you and maybe drain your spell points. Their access to spells like Bless and Heroism, however, means that, once again, if the game featured more mixed enemy groups, they could potentially have been scary force multipliers for smaller enemies. The third-tier vampires also have a chance of casting the only offensive Spirit magic spell in the game, Spirit Lash which, like Dark and Light magic, player characters can't gain any resistance to, so it'll always do full damage.




The dungeon itself is, as expected, somewhat crypty. Large, vaulted chambers with catafalques and skulls tucked away in niches, very gothic, though it could use some better texturework, the wood textures don't quite fit as well as a stone texture would have.





I'm slightly conflicted about this particular bier. On the one hand it's not marked as a secret by Perception, on the other hand, the minimap makes it super obvious that there's a path underneath it. And on the third hand jutting out of my forehead, it's a "secret" passage required to be found to progress to a quest item, which I'm just generally not a fan of. I prefer that to be for alternate paths or bonuses.





Past the bier is a network of earthen tunnels filled with yet more vampires, slightly higher density of bloodsuckers than above, but ultimately not really a step up in challenge. Even if they were, you'd now have decent space to backstep and split them up by retreating into the aboveground crypt section.




I feel like Ciatlen's story was originally intended to have the vampires who wanted the sarcophagus/body to point you to the crypt, with the player then following the trail of clues around Jadame, hunting for the elusive Ciatlen and Korbu's earthly remains.




Ah, monster closets, a classic. It's been a while since I last saw some of these.
Does anyone ever come by and let them out so they can have a break?

Approaching the final room, a single vampire draws you in before the walls on either side drop down and you get "ambushed" by more vampires. Unfortunately they drop so slowly that you have to be blind and deaf to not notice it happening before the vampires are on you, giving you plenty of time to run past or back up and pound them full of arrows and breath weapons before they get to you. It's definitely nowhere near as cruel as some of the ambushes in MM6 and MM7.




This is why I have absolutely no idea how they manage to kill Arachne. I presume they somehow all decided to priority target her.




This is for the vampire back in Shadowspire who wanted to prevent Korbu's resurrection, something we helped the other vampires accomplish. Again, I feel like those two were meant to be mutually exclusive choices. Anyway, back to town!





Um, good luck, Arachne! Hope it goes okay!
You're going to have a blast being one of the undead, let me tell you.
Diary, it was with no small trepidation that I entered Taleshire's home to become a Lich, carrying the Book of Khel and a Lich Jar. Thankfully he reassured me that it wouldn't hurt, that I wouldn't feel a thing as my soul would already be in the jar by the time he peeled off my skin, my flesh and my soft tissues.



It's done diary, and let me tell you, Taleshire is such a liar. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-



A quick look at Arachne's new paperdoll. I think it looks rather cool, though I don't understand why a female skeleton needs an ornate bra.



-aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-
...is she just writing the same letter in her diary over and over?
I think it's meant to be a protracted scream of agony, let's get her to the temple.



It's hard to capture, but the priest perpetually spins while surrounded by a swarm of bats. It's kind of comical. In any case, with Arachne lichified, now we can hand in the two spare sidequests we had in Shadowspire.






Also showcasing what I think may be the only NPC "lore" entry that updates as you advance the state of the game. I can kind of see why they didn't invest much effort in more, similar updates, though, since generally the player would have little reason to return to most NPC's, and thus it would be a lot of wasted effort that most players would probably miss.




Well, diary. I'm a skeleton now, so I guess I never need to worry about a tan or how to get rid of poorly-chosen tattoos again. Once the pain from the transformation had settled down, I sent us all to the Dagger Wound Islands so we could get to the business of repulsing the Regnans from Jadame.
I can't believe I'll get to be the first person to give a tour of Regna in decades.
Oh! You know Regna well?
Nope! But that sure won't stop me trying!




A few generic Regnan Pirates, i.e. the kind that were our first enemy in the game, ever, are patrolling the outside of the outpost. A single breath attack from Ithilgore wipes out almost all of them in one shot.





Let's see what sinister tricks the Regnans have up their sleeves. We should all stay on our toes.



Firstly, they've got a whole new kind of pirate!


Despite literally not being encounterable until the near-endgame, Regnan crossbowmen have stats almost completely identical to the start-of-game Regnan pirates. The team could sit here eating shots to the face and having lunch for like an hour before Leland would have to heal them.



Oh no, I'm so sorry! I think I hit the wrong people! I didn't mean to, this building is just so cramped!
On closer examination, no, these were absolutely pirates. Why would Ithilgore think he hit the wrong people?
They just came apart so easily, I thought maybe they were peasants or something. Phew! Good to know I didn't hurt anyone innocent!



Upstairs is a small office with a second type of new pirate.


Pirate mages are similarly insanely weak. I feel like someone super fucked up and they were meant to originally be the first enemies in the game because their tiers have 3, 6 and 9 HP. I love that you come in expecting something insane because everyone's talked up the Regnans as a huge evil empire since the start of the game AND you're definitely heading past the midway point. And then you just get... this. Something that wouldn't be scary to a lone character at game start.



The room also has a little desk with a map of Dagger Wound that's literally a crusty .jpg copied from the in-game maps and...



I took stock of the Regnan trap in front of us. Perhaps it was a trick, intended to lull invaders into a sense of false security by making the solution seem extremely obvious?



It's not a trick, though, literally just don't pull the levers under big "FUCK YOU"-pipes and you open up a, sadly locked, wall safe. Mind, that's another thing that's largely been missing from MM8, in-dungeon keys. MM6 had a ton of them, MM7 had some, MM8 has almost none.




Downstairs, a button on a crate that I overlooked for an embarrassingly long time(I thought it was the shipping label some of the crates in-game have attached) moves a set of crates to the side and allows access to the subterranean parts of the outpost.




I can't even pretend that what awaits is an interesting challenge.



Please, just run away. This is embarrassing for everyone.



All three paths out of the first room are these "unmarked" secret doors which makes me wonder if they were accidentally mistextured, because A) they don't show up as secret(and Ithilgore has enough Perception to spot every secret in the game at this point) and B) they're sunk slightly into the wall which makes them completely impossible to miss for anyone with relatively normal eyesight.





The north and south passages lead to a bunkroom and a kitchen respectively, both effortlessly rolled.




Though the kitchen does have a hidden button on the cabinets to open a small closet full of disappointing, mid-level loot.




Oddly enough, the approach to the last room has a hole in the wall, usually a launcher for any traps the player might activate, but the corridor itself has no traps. Presumably either the hole being left behind or the corridor having no traps was an oversight in the rush to ship the game.




The last room in the outpost features Blackwell Cooper, who, being named, is presumably stronger than the generic Regnan mages, but unfortunately he's statted in neither the strategy guide nor any of the fansites I can find, so I have no idea if it's a meaningful difference or not.



He drops a key both for progress and the safe above. The safe only really contains one thing of note.



This sword, which is pretty good and one of the few artifacts with no drawbacks. As a one-handed sword, it's a clear pro choice for any Knight you might have along, especially since the Armsmaster bonus will boost their other weapon as well(because no, you won't be using a shield, you'll be dual-wielding for the damage boost).




The other thing the key opens is the door at the back of Blackwell's conference room, revealing his personal submarine docks.




Is it too late to mention I get seasick really easily?

Absolutely it is, because we're going to Regna next time.