Part 11: Regnarok
Update 11: Regnarokhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnIA6Cdz3Q0
Interacting with the submarine triggers this cutscene where a party with absolutely zero resemblance to the actual party do their thing. They could kind of get away with this in MM6 and MM7 where they could at least count on no one being a skeleton, everyone being humanoid and everyone having mostly human dimensions. MM8 has no provisions for having a dragon, a skeleton, a minotaur, etc. as part of the party, so it stands out even more.
Despite the novelty of the trip to Regna, it wasn't very exciting. We weren't assailed by any giant sealife or the like, and passing under the waves meant we didn't get to enjoy the view outside either. Of course, the moment we do arrive, a group of Regnans are already sitting atop the submarine, offering to wash our windows for just a few coins.
Please don't give them the time of day, Arachne, you'll never be rid of them if you make yourself an easy mark.It's worth noting that while the Regnans in the outpost on Dagger Wound were trivial and made of tissue paper, these are not. They've got hit points in the hundreds and can actually do some damage, though they're still unthreatening when compared to, say, Efreets and Dragons. Also while clearing them out, I got a screenshot of one of the funnier "injured" faces for a Lich.
In any case, the Regnan effort to keep the party from disembarking doesn't amount to a great deal.
Interestingly enough, while there's no screen for leaving the Sub Pen, just a prompt, there's one for re-entering it, I suppose in case you don't have access to a Town Portal/Lloyd's Beacon caster to shuttle everyone back and forth.
Welcome to scenic Regna, everyone! If you've ever heard of a famous pirate, they've almost certainly stopped by one of the island's historical taverns to spend their ill-gotten booty before burying the rest in some unmarked hole for adventurers to find.
Oh! Oh! Is there a souvenir shop? Better! There are souvenir drops!
I think this may be the first tourist trap designed to appeal to me.
It feels a bit off that the generic Regnan peasants are all wandering around in rags and looking like they just survived a nuclear apocalypse.
Now, brace yourselves for authentic carousing at a real Regnan tavern!
Are those genuine marble countertops? I expected something more... thuggish. Are they serving grog? Arachne can I order some grog? Just one mug! I've never seen such a high treasure quotient in a single tavern, everyone in here has a rare drop! Amzing! Thank you, thank you, I thought you'd all enjoy it. How about you, Arachne? Being in a Regnan tavern was amazing, when I was a little girl, the only thing I wanted to be more than an Evil Eye was a pirate. It wasn't till I got older that my interests were mostly coloured by what would annoy my parents. My one regret was that I wouldn't be able to taste the grog, it'd just fall out through my ribcage and stain the floor. So I let Ithilgore have a mug. He was probably a legal adult by this point. I rather hoped his mother wouldn't find out.
The only unique thing about this tavern is that Dread Pirate Stanley hangs around. You may remember he was holding Arion Hunter's family hostage and needed to be handed false documents? This is now done. It feels like a very low-key end to a quest that's just about the only one that takes longer from getting to completing than the main quest. He just accepts the hand-in, passes out some XP and then goes back to his rum.
This tavern also hosts the last Arcomage game in MM8 which... sucks, it really sucks. It starts off with both players having dogshit resource income and just discarding cards until they store some up, then praying for increased resource generation cards to play. I do, however, eventually grind through it(thankfully I got lucky draws on my first time around, if I had to replay it, I would've been tempted to just turn the damn game off). It does mean we can finally cash in when we get back to Ravenshore.
Regna also has a Town Portal fountain, which is a bit odd considering how relatively little content it has, it really just has the one main quest thing to do. Another thing about Regna is that it hosts a large number of Grandmaster trainers.
These are the ones we make use of, but in addition it also hosts GM Sword, Armsmaster, Chainmail and Disarm Trap. In terms of GM trainers, we now have access to almost all of them, including Body, Spirit and Mind in the Murmurwoods. The ones we're missing are the elemental GM trainers and... whoof. I have something to say about their locations when we get to them. Because goddamn it's one of the more dogshit decisions involved in making the game.
And now that everyone's refreshed and had a taste of the local cuisine- Does drinking grog make me a pirate? -I think it's absolutely time we enjoy the historical Harecksburg shopping district!
I don't exactly have a lot of purchasing to do, but I do love most of the shop screens on Regna.
Psst. Arachne, Infaustus, over here. What do you think of this? Oh my, that's PERFECT. It was perfect as a souvenir, certainly, great over the mantlepiece, but for its intended use...? What are you three whispering about? Oh, we were just thinking of buying you a present, Leland.
Ha ha, very funny, my mace is bigger than I am. Now where's my actual weapon? Oh, that was the trade-in. You're gonna have to keep using this one.I was largely just amused by the fact that the sprite for the mace is tall enough to clip out of the top of his paperdoll screen.
I also go out back behind the store and do something very important.
That is, tossing Ebonest in the fucking ocean.
Looping around the back of the main island, it feels a bit odd that there's a moored Dark Elf ship here ready to haul people back to Dagger Wound or Ravenshore. I can understand it from a gameplay perspective, but it feels a bit out of place from a lore perspective.
Now that everyone has their commemorative Hareckburg mugs and collectible plates, it's time for the last part of the tour! I bet it's going to be some kind of show, these things always end with a show. Oh ye of little faith. This is the part of the tour where we blow up a bunch of pirates for fun!
Regna consists of a crescent-shaped island with a smaller island in the middle. The smaller island is the one the party arrives on by default, and the one that hosts Harecksburg and is completely non-hostile. The crescent, on the other hand, hosts a few lone houses, two towers and every single angry pirate on Regna which, frankly, isn't all that many despite their ostensibly being an ocean-going imperial power.
Outdoors, the white-clad pirates are no threat whatsoever, since they have no ranged attacks at all. This is lucky since they're actually the most asskicking-capable of the three types and can break our gear. Unfortunately the asshole crossbow-ladies can also bust our gear, but at least they do less damage. The mages can't cause conditions, do less damage and do elemental damage(which our resistances negate a lot of), so their main thing is that they have the most HP of the three types and actually take like five or six hits from Ithilgore to put down.
The villagers outside of the main island usually just have lore to share, but some of it's pretty entertaining lore, like that last bit. It's odd that there are so many lore NPC's on Regna when there are so comparatively few in the rest of the game world.
The pirates just do not get tired of showing up and dying, they keep on charging in and getting deep-fried by Ithilgore's breath weapon.
Why are the lich expressions so goofy? Liches are very serious and epic! Honest!
I pondered whether to tell him that we had, in fact, most likely looted the "Dread" Pirate Stanley's treasure some months ago and spent most of it on new swords and training in how to use said swords, but I decided to stay quiet. He seemed to be having so much fun sending anyone he met careening off into the wilds on a mad quest, and probably he started more than his share of adventuring careers that way.
...not that this one was any better. We'd rid the world of Zog, too. Strange how the Regnans apparently hadn't noticed it, but then again, I could imagine their chances to send messages to the Ravage Roaming were rare.
One of the last houses on the crescent has about the only Regnan who isn't completely loyal to the cause, which is kind of a shame, because assisting some sort of Regnan underclass revolution would have been a pretty cool and fun twist.
And at last we're coming up on, um. Actually I'm not sure what this is. Maybe it's an art installation! Mmm, yes, I can just imagine an abstract Regnan sculpture called "Tears of Sand" which has very deep things to say about self-acceptance. Ooooooh, yeah! That was sarcasm.
While Ithilgore and Leland debated the meaning of the "art installation," I started to have a suspicion. It looked rather like a weapon, and a very elaborate and destructive type at that. But surely, surely no one would leave an experimental artillery piece overlooking the bulk of their own military fleet, would they?
Very kind of the Regnans to leave us a weapon to annihilate them with. Something tells me they're also going to have left the ammo around somewhere.
Hmmm... Oh dear, Ith, what's on your mind? Well, the big gun, right? Ammo for it would be real dangerous? Stands to reason. And real dangerous things kill people, killed people leave bones around. Oh, I see, you think this is where they might be hiding it. I've heard worse logic, let's have a look.
This is actually the game's third dragon cave! Old Loeb's lair. It's not notably tougher than the one in Ironsands, though Yaardrake's was clearly less scary than either.
For once I have the party stand off while Arachne throws in some Dark Magic(may as well us that GM Dark for something) before rushing in. GM Light means that Leland's buffs are even stronger than before, nudging most of them from x3 modifiers up to x4 modifiers, allowing breath weapons to slide off the party's skin like water off a duck while even Arachne swinging her staff around almost breaks the triple digits on damage. It's further boosted by an adjustment to Infaustus' loadout. While Vampires get GM Dagger, they also get Master Sword, and despite the theoretical 3x damage on daggers, it's rare enough that swords usually come out on top, especially if they're artifacts.
I mostly bring this up because Infaustus running around with Terminus looks hilariously cartoony. It's like a fucking Buster Sword in terms of detail and dimensions.
Back in the cave, the only noteworthy drop is this big honking axe. If the party had a minotaur in it, it definitely would be a very good weapon for said minotaur.
And at the very back of the cave is Regna's recruitable dragon, Duroth the Eternal, who uses the same face and paperdoll as Flamdring and is level 50. Quite possibly the optimal end-game party is one Priest of the Sun and four dragons, and it's possible to bring that. Or if you're not suicidal, three dragons and a dark elf to pick locks and cast Torchlight, since I find the dungeons much too dark without it, and it's the one elemental buff that the Light magic "package" boosts Day of Protection and Hour of Power don't replicate.
The last outdoor feature on Regna's big crescent is the last reachable obelisk in the game. I'm actually still one short because I forgot the one in Ravenshore, but we'll review the puzzle once we're done with Regna.
Sadly, Ithilgore's puzzle-solving skills had failed us, and we had to fall back on brute force. Regna's central island hosted a nasty-looking fortress, bristling with weaponry and clearly well-guarded. It was exactly the sort of place where any vaguely sane regional power would store their cannonball of mass destruction.
The entrance to under-Regna is guarded by a few pirates who suffer unfortunate work-related accidents in short order.
Which elevator you then choose is immaterial since they both lead to the same lower level, and the sections serviced by each elevator are connected. If you just wanna run through, though, the right elevator is technically faster.
With all the killing the party does down here, you'd think the Regnans would lack anyone to crew their ships, thus making the whole fleet-destroying part of the quest irrelevant. There's also the occasional small group of mercenaries, long-outdated enemies, interspersed with the pirates. Perhaps they were originally, like the pirates, intended to have more power tiers? Or maybe someone just fat-fingered the keyboard while placing them.
The one thing about this section that annoyed me was that they have a whole room of crates and not a single one of them is interactible. Instead they just dropped a few generic swords on the ground. Where's my damn loot, Jon?
The exit is a secret door which leads to a cave network.
I presume the design of this section is in case someone comes to Regna with no access to Flight, Fly, Water Walking or Float. Some sort of pure Knight or Cleric challenge perhaps, as the tunnels down here are crammed with ogres, pirates and pirate wizards and have three exits(aside from the one we came in through).
Two of them surface in the towers at either end of the Regnan crescent, since the towers don't contain anything other than a couple chests full of low-level loot each, we leave them be. They don't have any tower interiors either, they just drop you at the ground floor in the overworld.
Instead the part that matters is the third branch, which leads through slightly wider tunnels to the fort next to the sci-fi-looking, poorly-placed Regnan super-cannon.
It's no more densely populated or challenging than the rest, but it features a few secret walls to give you something to pay attention to.
And in this chest I almost miss an artifact, because some dickhead developer decided to give the artifact in the box the same sprite as a perfectly plain and by now mildly-outdated Mace of the Sun.
This sucker gets saved since, as anyone might well have guessed, the later parts of the game will involve bonking more than a few elementals on the head to make them stop it with their world-wrecking bullshit.
This section also has a lot of ogre mages, since this is apparently where they were provided with barracks while the non-mage ogres just got sent down to live in a warren of tunnels under Regna.
Aside from the Mace of the Sun, though, there's nothing of any real interest in any of the storerooms or barracks. No interesting battles, no clever ambushes, traps or puzzles, just piles and piles of dead enemies until you get to this slightly more ornate store room containing a couple of chests. Two with randomly generated loot and one...
I think we were all thinking it, diary: what an awful shame it would be if someone loaded this cannonball into the experimental cannon outside and fired it at the Regnan fleet, destroying their imperial ambitions for decades to come.
Why would they make the exit a secret door? It's right under one of their own forts, even!
Why not make it a secret door? They add a certain sense of class to any home. I'd be afraid of forgetting where my own secret doors were. Imagine if you couldn't find your way out any longer!
Everyone keep your arms and legs inside the ride!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2-vmXjYEQ0
Firing the cannon is a bit odd since it launches the party backwards and upwards, out over a hill. If they weren't Feather Falling and didn't have Ithilgore's Flight active, they might well have suffered some severe falling damage(falling damage is surprisingly grim in the M&M games since it's percentage-based, not flat damage amounts based on distance fallen, so it's actually one of the bigger threats to a high-level party if you don't have your defenses properly raised). Thankfully I do have Flight on and arrest my fall in time to see the carnage unfold. I think the reason it kicks you back is to hide the way the attacked ships just suddenly switch over to their damaged conditions.
We should probably get out of here before someone comes to investigate this.
Arriving back in Ravenshore, I decide to do a quick victory lap before I hit up the council for their congratulations.
First up, the final Obelisk. I haven't screenshotted most of them, but folks have probably noticed that the text strings they generate are more... word-like than in previous games. This is because each obelisk now provides a "horizontal" slice of text, that's also read "horizontally." Rather than in the previous games where they're "horizontal" slices of text read "vertically."
"The Unicorn King holds Old Thorn's key. Among his subjects appears while the sun shines on mid summer day." From the merchants' guild library, we knew that "Old Thorn" was the king who sealed the Vault of Time. As for the rest... You won't find unicorns anywhere other than the Murmurwoods. Awful animals, too, don't ask me why they have a reputation for purity and goodness! Shame that Midsummer's Day is in six months and we're in a bit of a hurry about saving the world. ... I said, we're in a bit of a hurry about saving the world. I mean, we could use a holiday, we've been saving the world for over a year now! I haven't seen my mom in months!
Next there's this structure in Ravenshore which you might easily miss the entire game. The "Tomb of Lord Brinne." It has no context or in-game explanations, but it's actually rather sweet. You see, "Lord Brinne" was a big poster on a lot of internet RPG forums who died while several of them were under development, and as a result he's memorialized in several games, including Morrowind and MM8.
The Dark Elf NPC's inside are named after members of his online gaming group, and his sarcophagus contains a flute, an instrument that had no use in MM6, but one of the early-age internet rumours about the game was that it had some sort of secret application. It did not, of course, have any such thing in MM6. But in MM8... we'll be hanging on to this instrument for a while yet. Ithilgore can play a few toots on it when he gets bored until then.
Lastly, we're here to cash in our Arcomage prize.
It looks like a lot of gold, but it isn't even 10k, so it's incredibly small potatoes at this stage of the game. The sword on the other hand... oh, yeah, that's a sword, not a rotten carrot attached to a stick.
This becomes Infaustus' off-hand for two reasons. Firstly, because it has busted-ass stats.
And secondly because it makes a complete and utter mockery of her paperdoll proportions. Look at that hilt compared to her hands! It's hilarious.
Brave guy to make fun of me after handing me this thing.Now we can head back to the merchants' guild and hand in the quest.
I wasn't entirely sure how to feel about the Ironfists. Sure, they were here to help, but most of their previous work involved killing liches and necromancers and anyone associated with them. I was hoping it wouldn't turn into an international incident when we walked in the door.
Funny that the game presumes raiding Quixote's fort isn't the first thing you do after defeating the Dragon Hunters.
It's pretty charming that Masul and the minotaurs never contribute anything beyond sitting around being impressed at all the cool stuff happening around him.
Meanwhile Sandro sits around offering threat advisories on potential wizardly adversaries and Deftclaw points out who needs setting on fire.
Two previously empty houses in Ravenshore, formerly just being labelled as "Hostel" when entered, now house Catherine, Roland and Xanthor. Let's go bug the royals first.
I always thought Roland Ironfist had a moustache. Maybe Catherine made him shave it. The boyish look suits him.
I'm not sure if it's interesting or merely poor characterization that Catherine is the one optimistic about the elementals while Roland is the suspicious one, when they were the other way around with regards to Archibald(Catherine wanted his head off, Roland was happy to settle for banishment).
I didn't want to bring it up, but on my travels I'd heard some strange stories about the state of Enroth. With Wilbur Humphrey aging and Nicolai Ironfist growing up, new policies had been implemented, including the Mandatory Circus Act. Apparently some group of adventurers had greatly affected young Nicolai and his interests... and not entirely for the better.
Xanthor's set up shop in a house facing the big crystal in the center of town.
...who looks at a lich, a dragon, a legendary hero and their colourful supporting cast members and goes, "oh, how unimpressive, I'm not sure you're ready to save the world"? C'mon, Cauri, don't sell yourself short, you're much more than just supporting cast!
And then Xanthor promptly ushered us out, without even giving us a chance to ask any questions.
So the next stage of our quest is to be drowned, boiled, crushed and... winded? Perhaps I'll take you all up on that six months holiday plan after all. Pessimistic as Leland could be, he rather had a point. Xanthor hadn't even suggested how we should go about surviving in planes of pure fire, water, air and earth. I'd probably be alright in most of them, but everyone else still needed to breathe. Well, we've got six months to figure it out! I'm sure some of my colleagues in the Guides' Guild will have some ideas.Next: I'm sure the world can survive for six months while we go unicorn-hunting.