Part 5: Stonekeep 2
Despite my best hopes, the game’s intended sequel never got far out of the conceptual stages. What surfaced from that suggests we’d have been looking at a very different game set several hundreds of years after the events of the first Stonekeep, but promisingly, a name mentioned as working on the game was Black Isle Studios. The same who handled such titles as Planescape: Torment, Baldur’s Gate and Fallout. So that may be a shame. On the dark side of that, a Stonekeep title was recently, and very quietly, released as a crappy kid-friendly Wii game that has practically nothing to do with its PC predecessor. It seems odd that someone spent money for the rights to tack the Stonekeep name on a game destined to stink up bargain bins from its birth, but maybe it was just a move to keep the rights to the Stonekeep name.
Stonekeep 2 concept sketches: upper class citizen, port city prisoner, soldier, and cover art of Ulger the Cruel, main villain for the game. Note the title art's similarity to Planescape: Torment's style!
Though Stonekeep 2 (GameFAQs listed its title as Stonekeep 2: Godmaker for a while) was never made, its supposed story was published as a small novel as well. I expended a great deal of effort hunting down a copy of "The Oath Of Stonekeep", only to find that it’s little more than a forceful snooze, full of mustache-twirling villains, a dumb cardboard hero, an abundancy of scowling, sneering and much raising of brows, all peppered with just enough names and references to Stonekeep so you remember what game it’s supposed to be about. I plodded through the whole thing hoping it would get better, only to moan and groan to the last page. If you’re curious, a quick overview (warning: might slightly spoil the ending of the first game for you):
quote:
Five hundred years after the events of the first game, Stonekeep is capital to a great realm. One of its provinces, Kural, is invaded by a host of undead and mutated Throgs, Shargas and wacky new creatures called Ogares and Galoks. Wahooka, here adopting his human disguise as the greedy wizard Pendaran Tremayne, chooses the young duke Cassius of Kural to relay his warning to Stonekeep’s lords. In typical schlock plotting fashion, the lords of Stonekeep are super snooty and pompous and hopelessly preoccupied with bickering amongst themselves.
Wahooka/Pendaran gathers some dragon scales from Vermatrix Goldenhide and acquires the legendary Sun Sword from the Faerie Realm. Using these, he creates some kind of knockoff dragon eggs. Cassius, meanwhile, learns that the leader of the invading horde is one Ulger the Cruel, evil brother of King Drake’s grandson, who ruled as regent until his nephew came of age. Ulger then wanted to keep the throne and started a war that he narrowly lost due to Thera’s intervention. Banding together with the never-before-heard-of Fire Sorcerers of Ys, he somehow became an undead wizard-king with power over the weather, able to command storms and clouds of concealing mist.
Stonekeep has sent a small band of soldiers to save Kural, but these start ransacking castle Kural instead because they are of course greedy and evil and cowardly. Cassius rallies his own troops against them, making him an enemy of Stonekeep. Pendaran appears and directs Cassius towards the Faerie Realm, where he accidentally takes up the Sun Sword to open the dragon eggs. The eggs hatch to reveal retarded half-dragon men that bear the word scramble name “enkavs.” Also, that ‘retarded’ is not meant to be derisive, the enkavs follow Cassius because he carries the Sun Sword, but during multiple confrontations with enemies, they stand around, drooling, while they get slaughtered. They become slightly more intelligent by eating every single faerie in the Faerie Realm, at the conclusion of which Cassius finds himself back in Stonekeep.
At this time Pendaran and Cassius realize that Ulger is in cahoots with Khull-Khuum, whose orb prison is present within the city, in the Shadow King’s own temple which he for some reason still has. Ulger means to free Khull-Khuum. When the plot finally calls for it, the enkavs start being good for something. In one of the most tediously tiresome descriptions of battle I’ve ever read, Cassius and the enkavs blunt themselves on the enemy for a long time. Despite Cassius’s victory, Ulger continues to advance on the city. The remaining Lords of Stonekeep urge Cassius to help them, and with Pendaran’s manipulative advice, Cassius bargains emperorship over all of Stonekeep’s provinces for saving the city. He nevertheless fails to hold back the tide of enemies and eventually decides to re-sink the city of Stonekeep by dropping Khull-Khuum’s prison orb on the ground. Here the book ends, and, I imagine, the game would have begun.
