The Temple of Elemental Evil

The Temple of Elemental Evil is one of the first games I bought from GOG back in 2010, and my initial attempt at playing it determined that I was not yet ready for such an excellent, hardcore game. 

I found this game extremely confusing when I first tried to play it about 2 years ago.  First of all, I was more or less unfamiliar with the D&D 3.x ruleset.  In the intervening time, I've played both Neverwinter Nights games and pen and paper Pathfinder, so now I have a much better idea of what I'm doing.

Another stumbling block was that I had no idea where I should go or what I should do first.  I made the mistake of heading straight for the moat house after delivering news to the head priest at the local temple, since it seemed like that's where I was supposed to go next.  When the head priest told me about this moat house quest, the dialogue included an option to head out to the moat house immediately, and so naturally I thought that it would be designed for a level 1 party.

In this first attempt, on the way to the moat house, my party was ambushed by two giant frogs.  Aside from the opening vignette, this was my first taste of combat in ToEE.  I did my best with the unfamiliar controls and the inadequate gear, but things clearly weren't going well, and I knew we were doomed when I saw two more giant frogs join the fray.  I couldn't do anything but watch helplessly as, one by one, the whole party was grappled by the tongues of the giant frogs and then swallowed.  TPK.

Let me tell you, this party was in no position to be going to the moat house.  After trying a few in-town quests instead, I learned just how pathetic and vulnerable we were.  There's a quest to find out who's poisoning a farmer's sheep.  I found the person doing it (he was just standing around out there for hours all night, so it wasn't hard), but I couldn't get any information out of him, so I tried pickpocketing him to see if I could get some evidence that way.  Apparently that doesn't work at all, because I was successful multiple times, but never found anything new in my inventory, but when he spotted me and entered combat, this somehow aggroed the sheep on the farm, and they attacked.  My party was then wiped by sheep.

I checked online for some advice on where to begin, and a couple of places recommended going to Deklo Grove (which required finding someone in town to give me the quest, which I don't think I ever would have found) and just grinding on random spawns there until level 2.  Not very fun.  I did get to level 2 that way, but it took a while.  When I did, I ended up taking the Toughness feat on several of my characters, which in retrospect was an unwise choice.  It grants you a meagre 3 extra hit points, which seemed like a lot at the time, when the health of all of us could be measured in single digits, but after just a few more levels, 3 HP is rather insignificant, as I discovered when I hit level 2, and saw my HP nearly double!  Really, when I made this first attempt about 2 years ago, I didn't even understand that each level added another die's worth of HP.

Anyway, I checked the Circle of Eight site, and saw that they had released a new version of their mod since I last checked.  It wasn't compatible with the previous one, but it had some new content that I wanted, so I had to start over.  But maybe that wasn't so unfortunate, because with my new understanding of the D&D rules, I could now understand that some of the pregenerated characters I was using were not very well suited to their roles.  For instance, I had a wizard whose intelligence was rather average, but who had very high dexterity, which wasn't doing her any good.  I had just assumed that the pregenerated characters that came with the game would have been ideal characters, but now I believe they were made with intentionally random ability scores, just to make it that much more hardcore.

So I started again with a new party of six members (the mod pack allows party sizes up to 7), some of whom were custom made, to use in the Co8 mod pack version 7.0, which includes several new areas, including one designed for level 1 characters.  Perfect!  I went through the process of obtaining the quest, which was rather verbose but well-written, and ironically played up as something extremely dangerous, when it was in fact the most level-appropriate thing I could be doing, unless you count the social quests in town.  When I got to the new place, Welkwood Bog, the first creatures I encountered were...kobolds!  Whew!  After giant frogs and giant spiders, I found the kobolds quite reassuring.

The Welkwood quest was fairly short, but gave my party a much-needed level increase and gave me some spell scrolls and some better starting gear.  It had an interesting story behind it, too.  Ordinarily I like social quests, but I think the awkward interface in this game, as well as the dull, low-saturation art design contributes to the lack of fun in that regard.  I was happy to take this alternate route.

Interface and game information

The Temple of Elemental Evil has the most detailed, in-depth set of options for a player's actions in any computer RPG I've ever seen.  Stances, grappling, trips, attacks of opportunity and more!  Unfortunately, these are arranged inside a horrible radial menu with layers within layers of flyout "spokes".  Remember me complaining about the inscrutable icons in the NWN radial menu, and how I wished for a simple text menu?  This has text, but it rotates it to match the angle of the item on the menu, making it unnecessarily awkward.  Please, please, give me my spells in a nice simple list where I can get to them without having to delve through multiple levels of flyouts on a radial menu!  I liked the way NWN2 did this, with all of my spells available at a glance, with descriptions, grouped by spell level, with the touch of a single key.  I did eventually get used to the interface, but I would never call it a "good design", and I really wish I could change it.

One thing that partially mitigates the awkwardness of the radial menu is the ability to assign shortcut keys to individual commands (for instance, I assigned keys for Coup de Grace, 5-foot Step, and Charge Attack), though many of the keys I wanted to use were reserved.

The font they chose for all of the in-game text is a boldfaced sans-serif font like Helvetica or Arial, and is rather small.  Sans-serif is not as readable at small sizes as serif fonts, because the serifs aid the eye in interpreting the letters.  (Likewise, mixed-case is easier to read than all-caps, due to the relative distinctiveness of the letterforms, but fortunately this game used mixed-case.)  The font cannot be changed, nor increased in size -- at least not easily.  I saw a hack out there somewhere that was supposed to increase it, but I think it said I'd have to start the game over again, and I wasn't ready for that.  Instead, I settled on playing at a lower resolution than I prefer, since the text doesn't scale.  This means poor-quality screenshots, I'm afraid.

The game contains a wealth of information on game rules, rolls and modifiers, and what things do.  If you open the combat log, it describes the actions of each turn, with highlighted words that can be clicked on for more detail.  There, you can see exactly what number you rolled for your attack/save, what items, effects, or feats may be modifying that roll and by how much, and what number you had to beat in order to succeed.

I used this information screen in one of the few instances I've come across where picking a lock was necessary: in this case it was a chest added by the Circle of 8 mod.  Of course, my wizard knows the Knock spell, but this chest turned out to be spell resistant.  I no longer had a rogue in my party, and my ranger wasn't able to pick a lock even though she had some points in the open lock skill.  (Due to the level caps on skill point distribution, I sometimes had extra points left over, and spent them on cross-class skills.)  So I temporarily hired Furnok, a rogue NPC staying at the nearby tavern, and had him try to pick the lock.  He failed several times, so I checked the log, and saw that even though it was awarding him rolls of 20 (the maximum), the modifiers weren't high enough for him ever to succeed.  So I lent him the Gloves of Dexterity I had crafted, which I saw added a little to his modifiers, but still not enough.  I had my druid cast Cat's Grace on him, and tried again.  Almost there, but 1 point shy!  Finally, I had one of my clerics cast Prayer on the party, which added 1 more point, and he was then able to pick the lock. 

By comparison, Neverwinter Nights 2 shows the rolls right in the main window, and tells you if success is possible, but doesn't break down exactly where your modifiers are coming from like ToEE does.

Similar to these skill check reports, you can also get a detailed breakdown of your character's attack bonus or armour bonus, which is immensely helpful in intelligently building and outfitting a character, so that you know which feats, enhancements, and other bonuses are in effect, and which don't stack, and why.

Other aspects of the game and interface are quite unhelpful by comparison.  There are signs outside the buildings, but they're just decoration, and aren't readable like in other games, where you might hover the mouse over them to see what they are.  At least the map screen allows you to place notes on it.  Also, there's a key to highlight usable objects on screen like in Baldur's Gate, but most of the time it doesn't highlight anything!  I couldn't find anything highlighted in Hommlet, and only a few things (dead bodies with loot and doors) highlighted in one of the interiors.  The quest journal is also extremely terse and lacking in detail, and it doesn't change to reflect new information, so you may need to take your own notes.

Spell descriptions are likewise laconic, including none of the flavour text from the sourcebooks which the other D&D CRPGs included.  They also occasionally omit very relevant information.  For instance, near the end of the game, I had been using the Raise Dead spell several times, but at some point it told me that I couldn't use it, because I didn't have enough gold.  I checked, and sure enough, it had drained my party funds dry!  I checked the spell description again, and it said nothing about costing gold to cast it, whereas other spells like stoneskin and identify did mention that.  I checked the manual, and in the manual it mentions that Raise Dead requires 5000 gp's worth of diamonds as material components.  That's something that it really should have mentioned in the game itself.  I shouldn't have to consult the manual before casting a spell to see if it has requirements not listed in the game itself.

This is not a complaint about the spell being expensive, though.  I really like that some spells, especially powerful ones like this, require expensive material components.  It raises the stakes in fights, unlike in other D&D-based games, where raising the dead is free or even automatic.  The only complaint is that I wasn't warned about the expense in-game.

Other nice inclusions are such things as a druid's Reincarnation spell being mentioned as not being guaranteed to bring the character back as their original race, and the fact that paladins can fall from grace due to their actions.  Fallen paladins must seek atonement, which is prohibitively expensive to discourage casual out-of-character behaviour.  However, my paladin fell from grace unexpectedly when I spared the drow priest when he begged for mercy, and accepted his offer to escort me to a back entrance of the Temple of Elemental Evil.  It was not adequately telegraphed that this would entail the chaotic evil drow joining my party.  My solution was to kick the paladin out of the party and roll up a dwarven fighter.

Also nice is the inclusion of nonlethal damage in addition to the normal sort.  Things like fistfights and drinking contests involve nonlethal damage on a separate health bar.  When your nonlethal hit points run out, you fall unconscious.  This provides an alternate way of dealing with trolls, incidentally, who can normally only be hurt with fire or acid damage.  Everything else deals nonlethal damage for them, but the interesting thing is that once they fall unconscious, you can choose a coup de grace attack which kills them instantly.

I also appreciated the pop-up boxes of DM-text that appear when you enter significant new areas, describing the area to set the mood, much as a dungeon master would do in a pen & paper game.

The crafting menu has its pros and cons.  On the pro side, it gives you a full list of crafting recipes, and shows you what is required to craft them, such as level, spell, items, gold, and XP cost for Craft Wondrous Items.  You can easily add effects to items with Craft Magic Arms and Armour, and rename your items.  On the minus side, it's sometimes unclear why some of the effects can't be added (it doesn't tell you which condition isn't met), and many of the wondrous items are missing descriptions, or have inadequate descriptions, so I can't tell what they're supposed to do!  The game manual is excellent and extensive, but doesn't include descriptions of these wondrous items either.  I have to look them up in the online d20 System Reference Document to find out.

Speaking of recipes, this is the second Troika game I've seen that includes an actual food recipe in the manual, at the end.  Arcanum has "Grandma Cookhill's Three Bowl Bread", a halfling's banana bread.  This one has a recipe for "Chocolate Chip Cookies of the Gods", whose description indicates it also probably came from a halfling, though it was stolen by an orc.  I especially like the bit where it stresses the importance of waiting for the dough to chill thoroughly, saying "If you cannot wait, do not expect cookies of the gods."

Bugs

I've heard that the game was very buggy when it was released, as per usual for a Troika game.  The Circle of 8 mod pack appears to have fixed most of those bugs, and provided workarounds for most of the few that remained.  I only encountered three, myself.

One was when one of my characters walked across the Spike Growth I had cast, and acquired it as a permanent effect.  Even after resting more than 24 hours and performing heals on her, she still had the debuff, and the timer countdown never changed.  Periodically she would get hit as if she were still walking across the spikes.  I found this addressed in the Co8 guide, which said to go to the druid Jaroo in Hommlet, and ask to be healed of permanent spell effects.  This fixed the problem.

Another bug was inside the moathouse dungeon.  When fighting the big crowd of fighters, I ran into a game-breaking problem where there were two foes that didn't seem to actually exist, but they were in the queue for combat turns.  The game paused for a while when reaching one of them, and moved on to the next one, but it just never recovered from the second one, leaving me stuck in combat forever.  I tried fixing it with some console commands, which seemed like it might help at first, but just led to more problems.  I reloaded to a save before fighting the group, and tried again, and this time there was no trouble.

Lastly, there was a game-breaking bug on exiting the Welcome Wench tavern in South Hommlet, in which the party (and all NPCs) would be frozen once we got outside.  Effects like smoke from chimneys still functioned, and I could toggle in and out of combat, but none of us could move.  This bug occured twice from that saved game (when I did the same thing both times).  I evaded it somehow when I instead did a tavern brawl quest and then rested some more before leaving the tavern.  The Co8 guide says that freezes like this become more common in South Hommlet as the game progresses, and that players should avoid that area when possible.  I got through the rest of the game without any more such freezes, though, although there were other, unrelated freezes that were fortunately temporary in some places.

Storm of Zehir inspiration

I noticed that there were some elements in this game that I also noticed in the later-released Storm of Zehir, the NWN2 expansion.  One was the use of the Survival skill allowing the party to detect and avoid random encounters on the overland map.

Sometimes there were friendly encounters, such as when I encountered messengers who wanted to reward me for rescuing some of the people I found in the titular Temple of Elemental Evil, and sometimes there were encounters which were ambiguous.  One of them listed the encounter participants as "a party of adventurers", with their names and portraits in the list, so I was curious enough to hail them.  Sure enough, it was just a party of adventurers like mine, who at first mistook us for "another bandit encounter", to comedic effect.

There were some others like that, and it's nice when a game that includes random encounters takes the care to make them diverse, and not all about combat.

Speaking of which, it was interesting how sociable the denizens of the temple were.  Although the majority of monsters attacked us on sight, there was a significant number of characters who were willing to negotiate, join up with me, or allow to join up with their factions.  Some even offered quests!  There were numerous factions within the temple, working against each other even as they seemed to be working toward a common goal.

End game

The game got much, much easier as I gained levels and added enchantments to my weapons and armour with crafting.  I noticed that my dwarven fighter tended to score a lot more hits than my human barbarian, who missed against higher level enemies much more frequently, despite having near-identical enchantments and appropriate weapon focuses.  Encounters were almost always of the "tank & spank" variety, except that in this case, this tank was also the one dishing out the most damage.

There were two really tough fights, though.  Well, only one was really tough (others, like the group of beholder-kin on the ice plane and the group of fireball-flinging noble salamanders on the fire plane were tough, but not really tough), and that was the Balor on the fire plane (the D&D equivalent of the Balrog from LotR).  I had to retry that fight maybe 10 times, and most of the fights ended with the Balor having taken no damage at all.  By contrast, Zuggtmoy was only average!

I even sought tips online for beating the Balor, but they mostly didn't work with the Co8 mod.  Several posts recommended using Cloudkill against him, but when I tried it, it said "Target is immune!" so I guess the Co8 team figured the Balor wasn't hard enough.

Summoning the bosses from the other elemental nodes didn't seem to help either, aside from providing more targets to distract the boss.  More often than not, these summons cast AoE effects that resulted in friendly fire, dispelling my buffs, sickening my fighters, causing my party members to flee in terror, etc.

The fear was the biggest problem.  I read that "circle of protection against evil" is supposed to make party members immune to fear, but it didn't.  They were all within the protective circle, and they all ran away.  I had a bit better luck with the individual (non-circle) "protection from evil" spell, though, and I think that was instrumental to my eventual victory.  My fighter resisted fear the entire time, though my barbarian succumbed a couple of times, and had a problem with missing the enemy.  Regardless, the rest of my party (who were mostly useless against the Balor except to help cast buffs) dealt with the trash spawns while my dwarven fighter steadily whittled down the Balor's HP until finally, finally, it was dead.  After that, I went to face Zuggtmoy.

As stated, Zuggtmoy was much easier than the Balor, though I thought the rendering of her character was beautiful, as was the surrounding area of the lower temple.  Again, it was mainly my fighter who beat her up, while the others dealt with buffs and summons (and fear).  Great Cleave and weapons of Mighty Cleaving were a great help against these spawns.  Hasted, my fighter dealt four attacks each turn, at around 25 HP each, when she didn't miss.

Zuggy interrupted the fight at some point to try to make a deal, and I took my time in answering, but while I was considering it, I was surprised when one of the spawns started moving again, and the dialogue box disappeared before I had a chance to choose anything!  I wasn't going to make any deal, but I still wanted to see what she had to say about it.

This level of the temple has many rooms, but is empty except for one room of mushrooms.  Word has it that Troika ran out of time and couldn't put any of the encounters in that location that they had planned.  I haven't seen the original P&P module, so I don't know what was supposed to be there.  I'm surprised the Co8 pack didn't put anything in there.

Co8 does hold off the game from ending with the death of Zuggtmoy, so that you can go on to play some higher-level content in a new town.  I haven't done that yet, but I will eventually.  To end the game with the Co8 mod, you have to choose it specifically from the dialogue of Brother Smyth, so I went and did that to see the ending slides that I would have seen after killing Zuggtmoy originally.  The ending slides were better done than the ones in the NWN2 OC -- I can say that much.

Conclusion

The game is intimidating to a new player, and very tough and unforgiving at low levels.  It also includes many pre-generated characters with poorly-assigned ability scores for their classes, which can cripple a player unfamiliar with the rules.  Its art design is adequate, but bland, at least until you get to the Temple, and also very dark, requiring me to turn up the gamma to see.  It could have been improved with a larger number of interesting characters and interactions, because the ones that were there were quite fun.

Despite this, once I got through the first few levels, I found it to be an extremely fun game with rewarding challenges, plenty of quests, and a variety of environment styles.  Once I started playing it, I didn't play any other games until I finished it.  I think it's the best turn-based RPG engine available, despite the non-optimal interface.

Extra screenshot gallery

• Detected pickpocketing attempt
• Undercover construction site quest
• Fancy sailboat in Nulb
• Fight with a gelatinous cube
• Large pile of monster bodies
• Rescued gnome notices gnome-friend ring
• Priest in the water temple
• Another room of the water temple
• Big trouble with a supreme commander
• Lost sorceress in the Fire Node
• Moathouse
• Moathouse basement
• Enemy requests mercy
• Swampy Nulb houses
• Dead end

Obsidian, Kickstarter, and the bright future of gaming

I'm very happy.

At the time I'm writing this on the 15th of September, less than 24 hours since it was unveiled, Obsidian's new Kickstarter-funded game called Project Eternity has not yet reached the $1.1 million of pledges that it requires to receive its funding. But it will. There's no doubt about that. It has raised 87% of that goal so far, in less than a day.

The game will be an isometric, realtime-with-pause RPG in a similar style as the Infinity Engine games, such as the Baldur's Gate series, the Icewind Dale series, and Planescape: Torment. This is exactly what I foresaw in my bright future when I saw the Wasteland 2 project, and why I was so happy to see it happening. The genre is being reborn!

I'm also pleased by what I hear in their pitch video. Free from the restrictions of the publishers and IP holders, which they say is the reason they could not include mature themes and content, they're looking forward to making an M-rated game (aka PEGI-18). I wholeheartedly approve. It will be extremely refreshing to see more games in a fantasy setting that aren't restricted to child-friendly content.

I have only two concerns. One is that since it will be a new, original IP, it might not have the amount of depth, detail, and variety as licensed properties. I saw that in Bioware's move from D&D to their original Dragon Age setting. I really want a complex, detailed, and difficult game. Obsidian has good, creative people, though. Some of the best in the genre, in fact! So I think there's reason to be optimistic that they can create not only a solid, detailed fantasy world, but also a solid ruleset that'll satisfy fans of those Infinity Engine games.

And with their emphasis on mature content, I'd like to think they won't treat us gamers like the fragile-egoed children that publishers seem to think we are, making games so easy they've become hardly worth playing. A casualty of the crass pursuit of the mass market. Not so with a project like this, where they can focus on a hardcore niche audience.

The other thing is not so much a concern, but a small disappointment. I wish it would be turn-based rather than realtime-with-pause. RWP has always been a compromise -- better than nothing, but with its own problems and annoyances (wizards having to "lead" their AoE spells, for instance, or trying to wrangle the actions of a full party of characters who are all acting at the same time).

Still, it's better than pure realtime. I'd guess that decision was made to ensure that all the Infinity Engine fans were strongly on board, but with the phenomenally fast funding (it's gone up to 88% in the short time I've been writing this), they probably could have taken the chance. I notice that they list the Temple of Elemental Evil in the credits of the works of some of their members, which has the most detailed turn-based RPG engine I've ever seen.

At least Wasteland 2 will be turn-based. And with the assured success of this game, I look forward to a future project -- a party-based, fantasy-themed, turn-based, isometric RPG. So far we've gotten two games with 3 out of 4 of those elements each! Not bad at all! The future is bright for gaming!

Path of Exile

Earlier this year, I signed up for a weekend stress-test of the upcoming game Path of Exile, a hack & slash game in the tradition of games like Diablo and Torchlight. I played it for the full weekend, and enjoyed it. It has good gameplay, fun loot, a nice visual style, and an extremely large skill bush (the view that you see there is not the full image. Drag it around to see the rest of it). The quests had a good amount of flavour, as well. I played as the Witch.

I mention it because I just got an email that says they're having another free stress test this coming weekend, from the 14th to the 16th, so if you want to try it out, that would be a good time. I won't be participating in the second stress test, since I don't want to repeat the early content at this time, and I'm low on hard drive space, and also busy with my modding and other playing, but I thought others might like to know, if they weren't aware of it.

Kickstarter: This is the way.

Another lost, lamented genre of classic gaming is now primed to rise from the ashes, as we saw a few days ago in the realm of point & click adventure games, from Double Fine Adventure's funding success.

Now, we can have Wasteland 2, a turn-based, top-down, party-based RPG made by Interplay veterans.

Fund this! This is the harbinger of the new golden age of good games being made by people who care, without the meddling of publishers!

More Dragon Age: Origins

I mentioned earlier that I was planning on going through the rest of the origins in Dragon Age: Origins that I hadn't played through yet, as well as trying out some quest mods. I started up a Dalish elf rogue, and enjoyed the origin story very much. And it makes me realise how much more depth this game has than DA2. Each origin that I play reveals more about the world and how it all fits together. I had no idea until now, for instance, that Merrill from Dragon Age 2 was also in DA:O. The focus of the origin was the discovery of some ruins which contained some kind of portal/communication device in the form of a large mirror. Is this the same kind of mirror that I've heard is involved in the Witch Hunt DLC?

The only origin left for me to play is the dwarf commoner, and I wonder what new perspective I might gain from that one.

But in the meantime, I've discovered I really like playing as a rogue, and ended up playing beyond the end of the origin at Ostagar, and have actually gone through Redcliffe, stopping after fending off the undead attacks. From there I headed to Denerim, because that's where the Community Contest 7 quest mods begin. But before I began those, I found an NPC I'd never seen before, named Slim Couldry, offering rogue-specific quests! As a mage in my first playthrough, I had never encountered this character, and I'm not sure if it's because I was a mage, or because I hadn't had Leliana pick any pockets until after getting to Denerim. In this playthrough, I had picked some pockets in Lothering, so it could have been either that or just the fact that I'm a rogue that triggered his quests.

His quests were pretty simple for the most part. Pay him increasing amounts of money for increasingly lucrative thieving opportunities that simply don't exist unless you have the quest. I went through all that he had available, though he said he was planning on getting more. I don't know if he'll really have any more in the future, but I'll check. They may be related to my level, since the last one was actually very tough -- fighting a warehouse full of Arl Howe's men to get the cargo they were guarding. It's the first of the thieft quests that actually involved violent crime, but it is Arl Howe's crowd we're talking about. When I say this one was tough, I mean it took me 4 or 5 tries to do it successfully (without being wiped). This was the toughest fight I've experienced yet in this playthrough, and I'm playing on Hard with two dual-wielding dagger rogues (Leliana and myself, with Leliana specialised as Ranger for the animal summoning), Morrigan respecced to mostly entropy plus the ice line, and Alistair on sword and board. The first time around, I used Sten as the tank, and had 2 mages (myself and Morrigan), and Leliana using bow and arrow.

Not all roses

Despite how much I like DA:O compared to its limited competition in the current market, there are still some issues which are very annoying. I mentioned the frequent crashing in my last Dragon Age post, which had not been a problem during my first playthrough. That's a strange development that I don't understand, but I have found a couple of workarounds that dramatically reduce the number of crashes.

First thing is to add a command switch to the game shortcut to force it to use DirectX 9. The switch is "-dx9". I'm not sure how much this helps, but it doesn't seem to hurt, and I use it combined with the second fix. The second fix apparently must be done while the game is running, each time you run it. Start the game, then switch to Windows task manager, find the "daorigins.exe" process under the Processes tab, right-click it, choose "Set affinity", and set it to use only one core (like "CPU 0"). It doesn't seem to reduce the performance of the game (most processing is probably in the GPU anyway), but the game's stability is markedly increased.

On my last session, I forgot about doing this, and I loaded up a game as normal. When it loaded, the first thing I did was to check the inventory to see what I had equipped, and it crashed immediately on trying to show the inventory. Starting the game again, and doing the same thing resulted in another instant crash. Then I remembered to set the CPU affinity to a single core, and it worked without crashing again.

I'd love to know of a way to force it to always run like this without having to manually change it each time while it's running.

The other, non-technical issue with the game is perhaps a design choice. There are many combat encounters that force you into dialogue before the hostilities begin, once you get close enough. This happens regardless of whether you're in stealth mode, and/or have the rest of your party waiting back down the hall in another room. Suddenly, the game teleports everyone right into the middle of the ambush, kicks your rogue(s) out of stealth, cancels any spells that were in progress, and shows you walking casually up to talk to the clearly dangerous, threatening NPC and his army (or showing you and your party charging in recklessly and stopping short in apparent surprise at the enemy, as if you hadn't been scouting ahead in stealth mode). Forget positioning! Forget preemptive tactical strikes! Forget even having your weapons out and ready! If the game decides you should have a little chat first, there's nothing you can do about it. You can't even use a preemptive ranged AoE attack against the group, because they're immortal until you talk to them!

Contrast that to the Baldur's Gate games, which don't restrict your attacks in this way. If you're sneaking around in a dungeon, and you find the boss, and the default action when you click on him is to initiate conversation, you don't have to. You can instead sneak up behind him, click the "attack" button, and make a preemptive strike. You might miss out on interesting information or even a quest if you do that, but so be it! It should be your choice.

Not having looked into the settings in the toolset, I don't know if this is hard-coded into the game engine, or if there's a flag the quest designer can set to prevent forced dialogue from happening if the player is invisible, or prevent it from teleporting everyone else into the room, etc. Seeing how well some mod quest designers have been able to script encounters, though, I'm pretty certain there must be a way around it, even if it is hard-coded.

Combat issues

Speaking of problems with stealth, I'm also not happy with the mechanic that rogues can't enter stealth if the game thinks they're in combat, unless you get the "combat stealth" talent. I'm not talking about situations in the heat of battle, where you'd just vanish in front of an enemy's eyes, but a situation where you've cleared out a whole room full of enemies, but you find you're still "in combat", because there are some enemies in another room behind a closed door that's never been opened, who can't see you and do not suggest they're alert to your presence! (This is possibly caused by the enemies in both rooms being defined as part of the same "team", which all aggro at once.) I think you should be able to enter stealth mode whenever you're out of view of enemies, like in Baldur's Gate, where if you could just get around a corner, you could lose a pursuing attacker.

But perhaps it wouldn't be a problem if we could just tell the game that we're not in combat anymore, in those situations. Or, it would cancel combat mode if you got far enough away from the enemies. It's especially annoying since the game doesn't let you save if you're "in combat" either.

Summons

Rangers can summon animal minions, and mages can summon skeletal warriors, but these summons disappear on any area transition. This ranges from entering or exiting a building, to simply walking from one section of a forest into another. This shouldn't happen (especially in the latter case).

Even worse, the forced unsummoning causes the summon ability to trigger a cooldown period. Ridiculous! Not only has my minion been taken away for no reason, but now I have to sit around waiting for the cooldown to expire so I can summon it again! Either that, or I have to look out for area transitions coming up, and unsummon my minion ahead of time so it'll be off its cooldown by the time I cross the threshold.

This works all right for the ranger, but the mage can only raise a skeleton from the remains of a recently killed enemy, so it really screws the mage.

Dungeon design

Did they hire the ghost of Sarah Winchester as house designer?

In general, Dragon Age dungeons seem rather uninspired, at least in the vanilla game without DLC. Instead of being unique spaces with personality and purpose, they rather seem to be just a jumble of tileset corridors with an occasional large room for bosses. No regard for architecture, no logic in design, and almost no spaces that make you stop and simply admire the place. Not having seen any of the DLC aside from the Stone Prisoner, I can't say whether this is improved elsewhere.

I'll highlight a typical example, as shown in this screenshot. This isn't a cave or a mine, which could have such a rambling structure, but a supposedly abandoned house, with a badly-hidden secret door leading to this random sequence of rooms and hallways. Imagine how much real estate this building must occupy! Is land that cheap in the heart of Denerim?

Bioware used to be pretty good at making unique, interesting interiors which had believeable floor plans, as I highlighted in some of my Baldur's Gate posts. When I say "unique", I mean that each "dungeon" should be a noticeably different experience from another, with its own special flavour, to make these places appeal to the players' sense of exploration and discovery.

Nevertheless, despite all of these various criticisms, I still consider DA:O to be the best overall choice for designing a Baldur's Gate-style quest/adventure mod in a modern engine. I must say, though, that I've very recently become aware that Neverwinter Nights 2 has the elements that I found missing in Neverwinter Nights 1, and I understand it has a very large set of resources to build with, so I'll be investigating that soon, as well.

Quest mods

Speaking of which, I'm also enjoying some excellent quest mods, including the two quest mods from Community Contest 7. Spiders and Knives is a good one to start with, since it's pretty short and straightforward, adding a couple of new quests and locations and an NPC with a fun personality to Lothering. Eye and Shadow is good for Mengtzu's creatively orchestrated and challenging boss fights, set in a beautiful new location from one of the previous community contests.

Now I'm playing an even bigger treat: Dark Times: The Confederacy of Malkuth, Act 1. I'm not sure exactly how large this mod is, but if I take the new world map as an indication, I should call this an unofficial expansion pack, or even a sequel! I had many hours of play time racked up doing quests around the first town before the world map was unlocked, and when I saw it for the first time, a huge smile came to my face at the prospect of more hours of enjoyable gaming to come.

I don't think I can adequately communicate how enthusiastic I am about this mod. It has everything you could possibly want in a Dragon Age expansion. 32 new locations, many new NPCs and 3 new party members, lots of personal stories and side quests, new factions to join or fight, new loot and artifacts with background stories, new unlockable character specialisations, possible new romance(s), and some really heavy-duty moral choices to make.

Some areas need some polish -- mostly in spelling, a missing mesh or two, and some various bugs, but this in no way casts a shadow over the incredible overall job this team did with what I've seen of it so far. They've accomplished a great deal, and I'm very happy to know that they're working on a second act.

One very interesting thing here is that they seem to have cracked the 4-member party limit. Multiple times I've been joined by one or more NPCs, and although they don't get their own portraits on the side of the screen like other party members, I am nevertheless able to access their character screens, level them up as I like, add and remove equipment, adjust their tactics, and even directly control them. I wonder if the Baldur's Gate Redux team could use this kind of system to allow a full Baldur's Gate 6-member party in their mod.

There are numerous other quest mods that I've saved and I'm eager to try out, from some well-respected names in the modding field. It's also been somewhat inspiring to try my own hand at it.

Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn, part 2

There was only one place in the Promenade that sold things other than weapons and armour (though they sold that as well), and that was a shop just to the left of the crumbled remains of the exit to Irenicus' dungeon. It had a nice look to it, with interesting curios in the multi-level décor, and a surprisingly obvious dig at the old Dungeons and Dragons cartoon series, with pictures of two characters from that show on the wall, with text describing their deaths.

In front of those posters was a woman who sold some special items that made more reference jokes. I'm not sure how many of them were specifically references to Planescape: Torment and which were just integrating the Planescape campaign setting in general, but she was selling Dak'kon's Zerth blade and Vhailor's helm, both of which specifically mentioned the Nameless One in their descriptions, and there were items referring to the Sensates and the Mercykillers. I believe this vendor is one of the "bonus merchants" included in one of the patches I installed. The items are very expensive, but that's good, because this game needs a money sink.

There's a great deal of humour in this game, in dialogue and absurd situations, and I love it.

The circus tent

The circus tent was undergoing renovations as a TARDIS, apparently, containing a caverous space with an elegant bridge over a bottomless chasm, leading to a lavish arabesque building. There was another genie there to greet us. Three genies already! If doppelgangers were the big recurring theme in BG1, it's looking like genies are the theme in BG2. Amn seems to be the D&D equivalent of Arabia (and, unless I miss my guess, Minsc's descriptions of Rashemen sound like that's the D&D equivalent of Russia). This genie asked us a riddle, and unfortunately this riddle was actually a mathematics problem (a weakness of mine), and I apparently miscalculated and got it wrong, but surprisingly enough he gave us a second chance with another, much easier riddle, then let us pass.

A character named Aerie was there, in the form of an ogre, inside the main building. I already knew the name before playing the game, so there was no doubt that I should believe her when she said she wasn't really an ogre (because the master of this place is an illusionist), but even if I didn't know her already, she sounded so earnest I'm sure I would have believed her anyway.

The way everyone in this place was talking, I was preparing for a major boss fight, especially when one creature explicitly offered my party time to rest after a fight, and prepare for the final room. It was a surprise when the supposedly powerful wizard (who had supposedly created all this architecture in this pocket plane, and bound all these slaves) went down so quickly and easily. I guess it was all sound and fury, signifying nothing.

So Aerie joined my party after talking to her dear uncle Quayle, the gnome wizard I never picked up from BG1, and she seems like a cheerful, upbeat girl, and romanceable. And a cleric! So I'm concerned that she might make Viconia superfluous, and I really want to have Viconia, since I liked her so much in BG1.

The genie from the tent showed up again when I investigated the magic lamp I acquired during the adventure and obtained the control word from a malicious "man" named Jafir. Jafir seemed certain that if I got a wish from this genie, I would end up in as much trouble as the one who used it to create the things in the pocket plane, but perhaps this is where my high wisdom comes in. The genie offered a selection of quest-specific wishes, as well as a secondary list which appears to be the usual list you'd get if you used the Wish spell, all of which seem to be combat-focused, and disappointingly limited, but it is one of the larger lists of options, and it's understandable given the nature of this medium, as opposed to the free-form wishes I imagine you could make in a pen & paper session.

The combat wishes weren't useful in this situation, of course, so that left the quest wishes. Perhaps my wisdom wasn't quite high enough to give me a really good wish option, though, because none of the options were very satisfying. I could free the genie, attempt (and fail) to wish for more wishes, resurrect the insane gnome who caused all those deaths to "give him a second chance" (but no option to resurrect the people he killed), send the genie to kill Jafir, or try (and fail) to kill Irenicus and rescue Imoen -- the genie claimed something was interfering with his powers on those last two options. I love the fact that the genie uses the classic line, "Your wish is my command!" when granting a wish! I ended up freeing the genie, for lack of any better options.

Chapter 2, and names again

Chapter 2 began surprisingly enough shortly after I left Waukeen's Promenade. I hadn't even taken two steps when some rogue named Gaelan approached with a vocal tic causing him to exclaim "Coo!" every few sentences, and said he could help me find Imoen. And although I was wary of following a vaguely shady rogue into his house, which he suggested, the game actually transported me into it automatically, despite him saying "You can decide for yourself if you want to come in when we get there."

But despite the forced action, it set out the goals of the next chapter nicely, telling me to raise 20k gold, and suggesting a few places to look for work (or in other words, quests).

Then Chapter 2 began, and to my dismay I learned through both the chapter narrator's speech and one of the voiced cowled wizards that Irenicus is meant to be pronounced "eye-REH-ni-cus", which doesn't sound anywhere near as good as "eye-ruh-NYE-cus".

Now, Gaelan advised me to not spend any money until I've raised the necessary amount, but by this time I had raised enough to pay off the government to allow me to cast spells in the city, and that was priority one for me, as a sorcerer, so I went as quickly as possible to the Government District, through several minor encounters on the streets.

Companions

I actually came across my old friend Viconia upon entering the district, being treated to the same kind of hospitality she was enjoying when I found her in the first game, except that instead of the firing squad, they had set up a cosy stake to roast her on.

After the fanatics were dead, she said she would wait for me in the graveyard after I'd freed up some party space. I'll probably have some space soon. One of the mod-added party members (Chloe) is starting to wear out her welcome. There's just the issue I mentioned before, that I already have a cleric, and I like her. Then again, Aerie's also a mage, and Viconia is a much more powerful cleric, so perhaps I'll try it out with both of them. I really have a lot of party members with healing spells this time. Even Minsc can cast a minor heal now, unlike in BG1.

Speaking of Aerie, though, she's suddenly started bringing up her handicap rather often. She's a winged elf, but she was crippled by her former captors, who kept her in a cage so long her wings started getting necrotic, and they sawed them off. But I got the impression that this had happened quite a while ago, since she said she'd been under the protection of Quayle for some time, and the wounds had clearly long since healed over, so why is she suddenly getting more and more upset about them? I'm being nice to her about it, but I'm having trouble believing this aspect of her character. Jaheira, on the other hand, is being quite cruel to her about it, and it's clearly because she was getting interested in me herself, though she hadn't said so yet. Her attraction was clear from the little hints given in her interjections, but I'm not interested in romancing Jaheira. Her personality is rather abrasive and domineering, and she shouldn't be falling for someone so soon after finding her husband dead, in my opinion.

Anyway, after finding the person to bribe to allow me to cast magic and asking around to see if anyone had more leads on Imoen (unsurprisingly, they didn't, though I did pick up a rather vague quest from them to find a missing outlaw named Valygar), I spoke to a boy named Delon outside who was begging for some help with some strange creatures attacking his village of Imnesvale, with rumours of an ancient witch returning to curse the place. Ah, just the sort of thing I wanted! As much as I like exploring the city and talking to people, I was looking forward to some regular adventuring again. I guess I didn't need to spend that money on a magic license yet after all, if I'm going outside of the city. Ah well, no matter. I expect an excursion out there will make all that money back pretty quickly anyway.

The Umar Hills

Imnesvale was an interesting place with its own side quests, and plenty of people to talk to. Opinions differed amongst the townspeople as to what kind of creatures were attacking them. The bartender promoted the ancient witch hypothesis, and was only too happy to provide me with a copy of his book about it, which was a reference to the Blair Witch Project. What made it really funny was when I snooped around in the containers behind his bar, I found that they were all filled with dozens of copies of that book!

Other villagers blamed a band of ogres for the killings, and still others believed a pack of large wolves was responsible. I did a little scouting around, and found the ogres, but they convinced me they were peaceful, so I left them alone. I found some caves, as well. One of them contained an unexpected monster -- a mimic. They're the monsters that disguise themselves as treasure chests to lure unsuspecting adventurers close and catch them off guard. On killing it, I obtained a vial of its blood, but it had no obvious use, and the description mentioned uses that weren't immediately applicable, but I kept it in case there was a use for it later.

In the other cave was a werewolf, gnawing on some human bones. Mystery solved, eh? Except she said that there was someone worse that was controlling her kin, and he's the one responsible for the recent killings. My experience with werewolves is rocky, to put it mildly, but I know from Tales of the Sword Coast that werewolves aren't automatically evil, so I gave her the benefit of the doubt.

A diary from a fighter named Mazzy was in one of the houses, and I recognised the name as a potential party member, but from the sound of it she was some kind of fighter, and I don't need any more of those. I explored just up to the point where I found the temple that the town quest seemed to be leading to, and turned back, because I didn't feel up to the challenge of a dungeon crawl at the moment. I went back to town to report all this.

In town, I found a few side quests that I'd missed when I went on the scouting run. Simple local concerns such as paying a man for a lucrative secret involving some chickens, and buying some ale for a small group of teenagers. There was the option of also buying them some weapons, but that had the potential to end badly, so I stuck with the ale.

It's strange that they'd need someone to buy it for them, though. What else is there to drink in these towns? For much of human history, in many regions, fermented beverages were the standard drink for everyone, children included. Fermentation renders the drinks sterile, and thus wines and beers were safer to consume than water in places with poor sanitation. The only other things I can think of that they might have drunk would be fruit juices or fresh milk, but in a society without refrigeration, both would have to be obtained fresh, since fruit juice would quickly ferment into cider or wine anyway, and milk into cheese.

So, I bought the boys their ale. There'll be no cholera deaths on my watch!

Outside a house, I met a young man who wanted me to convince a girl's overprotective father to let them go out together. The father turned out to be a Cowled Wizard who was working on building a big stone golem to use as a guardian. He was unreceptive to my speaking on the boy's behalf, despite the pleas of his daughter, but he offered me a fetch quest to get him a needed ingredient for the golem. As it happened, it was the blood of a mimic, which I already had with me, so it was a quick and easy bit of XP and reward.

Now, it was pretty obvious that this was a thinly-veiled Frankenstein plot in the making, so I began positioning my party strategically as the wizard began to activate the golem. Surprise, surprise, it woke up hostile and out of control, and we managed to beat it down without the wizard or his daughter getting hurt.

He was shaken and relieved at the narrowly averted tragedy, and decided that perhaps he was wrong about knowing what was best for his daughter. It ended with the two lovers joyfully running off together with the wizard's blessing, and all was fine. I imagine there were different endings if one or the other or both were killed in the golem's rampage. This was one of the more enjoyable quests in this town.

I happened to find Valygar in this area, too, from the other quest given at the government building, and in a little plot twist it turned out he was being framed because of his anti-magic stance. His story sounded genuine, and it seems the Cowled Wizards just wanted his dead body to use as some kind of genetic key to open up a sealed sphere that had teleported into town recently. So, to finish up that questline, it looked like I'd have to add him to my party and go on another dungeon crawl. Again, I decided to put it on hold for now, and head back to Athkatla for a while.

Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn, part 1

I think most people interested in reading this have probably already played the game, and are just curious to see someone else experiencing it for the first time, so for the most part I'm going to leave my spoilers unhidden. But first a brief hidden list of what I already know, since I had encountered a number of spoilers myself just from reading about this game series, I know that Sarevok somehow reappears in this game (even though he crumbled to dust last time I saw him), there's some kind of betrayal to expect from Yoshimo, there's a vampire named Bodhi, Irenicus is doing something that involves stealing souls, and that a couple of characters from BG1 have died offscreen between the last game and this one.

For BG2, I imported my character from the final save of BG1, but I realised too late that I hadn't been carrying the Golden Pantaloons that I had been advised to bring along, along with a few other items that are supposed to follow you into BG2. I did find the Helm of Balduran after all, though, which Minsc had been wearing. Oh well, I'm not going to worry about the pantaloons. From what I understand, all they did was eventually give you some cheat/god gear which I wouldn't use anyway.

I did have to make some edits to my character after importing her, though. Firstly I redistributed some of my stats using Shadowkeeper (no cheating either -- I removed as many points from some stats as I added to others) so that I'd have a decent amount of wisdom for the Wish spell. But even after reading up on stats for sorcerers, I'm confused about which stats are good for the class, if any. Later D&D editions say that charisma is the main stat for sorcerers, and that intelligence and wisdom do nothing (aside from the aforementioned Wish spell). But elsewhere I've read that charisma doesn't do anything for sorcerers in BG2, so I'm left thinking that sorcerers don't actually have a stat that affects their magic ability. I also went ahead and changed my name to a more classic fantasy name (after briefly experimenting with a comedy name which appears in most of these screenshots), and also picked a different voice set -- one of the few imported from Icewind Dale that worked (the sultry one). It's still Theseus' ship, right?

Next, the portraits. As much as I liked the cartoony style of the portraits I used for BG1, they didn't exist for all characters, and there just wasn't as much variety as there are for more realistic portraits, so I decided to go all-realistic this time. I changed almost all of the portraits. You can see some of the alternate portraits I'm using in that character record screenshot, a couple of which I collaged together myself. Minsc is the only one in my current party that remains unchanged. I don't really see any reason to change it, anyway, though it could benefit from better contrast and more colour saturation to better match the other custom portraits.

Finally, mods. I'm using quite a few mods, some of which are even new companion mods. Perhaps I should have opted to play it without extra companions the first time, but I have a feeling I'll be playing this game several times through anyway, so why not? I'll still keep at least half of my party occupied by default characters, and I'm sure if I don't like some of these new NPCs, I can uninstall them, thanks to WeiDU.

So, my installed mods are: Disable Startup Movies; Widescreen Mod v2.2; BG2 Fixpack; Banter Accelerator; NPC Flirt Pack; Unfinished Business; IEP Banters; Separate Avatars for Female Dwarves; Ascension v1.41; NPC Friendships; BG2 Tweaks.

And new NPCs: Allison, Alora, Auren Aseph, Chloe, Fade, Keto, Saerileth, Sarah, and Tashia. Alora is a recreation of my favourite thief from BG1, though I should really swap her out with someone else once I find another thief, since I'm currently without Imoen.

I also started with the Imoen Romance mod, but I quickly found it to be...unwelcome in my game, and uninstalled it before I reached the end of the dungeon.

"Just like old times! Well, except for the torture and all..."

Imoen showed up to join me, just like in Baldur's Gate 1, except she's a bit more shaken and disturbed by whatever torture Irenicus was putting her through. Probably something similar to what he'd been doing to me in the first cutscene, but the narrative suggests that my character doesn't remember any of it aside from that last interrupted one. Irenicus' monologue is a bit ambiguous about how much I'd gone through, since he says at the beginning "It is time for more experiments" (emphasis mine), and yet he also seems to be discovering my untapped power and potential for the first time. Possibly when he says "more" experiments, he's talking about the experiments that he's been doing on everyone else, and this is the first time he's started working on me.

Minsc and Jaheira were in cages in the same room, and they both hailed me automatically. Some of this seems like concessions to people who may not have played the first game, with all the dialogue explaining (if you claim not to remember) that they're old adventuring friends, and what happens with Minsc. It seems that no matter what you do or say, Minsc will take it to mean you're intending to abandon him, making him angry enough to go berserk and bend the bars open just so he can strangle you. He recovers quickly, though, and comes to the conclusion that you must have intentionally made him angry so as to get him out of the cage. This is a bit of a forced "choice" on Bioware's part, and I'm not sure why they thought it was necessary. There is an option to dismiss him from the group after this, but I didn't try it to see if he would actually leave or if he would refuse.

Jaheira's cage at least required a key. She said "If you're strong enough, maybe you can break it open", but even with Minsc in the party, I couldn't find any way to attack or bash the lock as you can in Planescape: Torment, and it was one of those "unconventional locks" that Imoen can't pick. The key was easy enough to find, and I freed her and invited her into my party. I didn't run with her in the first game, but that was mostly because I didn't like Khalid. Besides, even if Khalid were with her this time, it would be cruel to just leave her in the cage, and it would be stupid to not accept her into the currently shorthanded party once she's free.

While having Imoen scout ahead for traps (just like old times, if by "old" you mean "last year"!), there was an interesting but odd encounter with a genie named Attacker -- er, sorry, Aataqah -- who greeted Imoen by name, and seemed glad to see her. Interesting that the genie spoke directly to her, and expressed disappointment that I (the main character) wasn't around to talk to. Other times I've spoken with NPCs using someone other than the main character, the dialogue simply assumes that it's the main character talking, despite the name showing as the currently controlled character -- and sometimes that character will argue against herself with interjections!

Aataqah presented us with a hypothetical variation on the Prisoner's Dilemma, but he didn't seem to like my answer. His response indicated that he assumed my choice was for some other reasons than my actual ones, which is the same problem that plagues many so-called "personality tests" online, where intent and motivation are never considered. I liked Minsc's answer better, anyway.

Name pronunciations

I now know for certain how to pronounce the character's name "Khalid", since Jaheira's voiced dialogue includes her pronouncing it "ka-LEED". So far, I do not know how the name of our adversary Irenicus' name should be pronounced, but it reminds me of the name of the theologian Irenaeus of the Classical period. His name has a number of variations in English, but I'm partial to the ones that sound like "ear-uh-NAY-us" and "eye-ruh-NAY-us".

So, based on Irenaeus' name, I will assume, until/unless I hear it pronounced later in the game, that Irenicus' name should be pronounced "eye-ruh-NYE-cus", since it's the better-sounding of the possibilities.

The dungeon in general

Aside from quickly gathering more loot than my party can carry, I don't see why anyone would want to skip this dungeon. It actually seems pretty fast to go through, with a large variety in its décor, and some parts of it are entirely skippable, as I discovered by accident when I found myself outside without having used any of those trap-disarming rods I had picked up earlier. I had to reload to explore the other path (I had thought the side passage would lead me around into a control room or something) so that I wouldn't miss any of the content. I also almost entirely missed the elemental plane of air, as its doorway was not very well-distinguished from the rest of the walls around it. I probably would have missed it if not for it being marked on the map.

The encounter with the dryads was probably the most interesting part, as it seems to shed light on what's going on with Irenicus, and included some nice character development. They say that he brought them there because he wanted them to inspire emotion in him, and that he feels something missing. They also told a little about the (heavily trapped) bedroom of a woman of whom he seems to be mourning the loss. I'm guessing he trapped the room to ensure that no one disturbs the way she left it, and not because she usually preferred sleeping in a trapped room.

I'm assuming this is the same woman who was involved in the forgotten cloning experiment, in the room full of tanks containing partial and whole clones of one specific woman. That room, like many in this dungeon, was a tantalising tease, raising interesting questions and issues that I hope are foreshadowing for what's to come. Clones, vampires, and forgotten gods feature noticeably here, as well as portal travel to other planes.

I might even wonder if there was some significance to the library scene, where Imoen commented on the "dusty old tomes all over, bookcases nearly spilling..." Nearly? Books were piled up in, on, and around the bookcases, but strangely, the single desk in the room had nothing on it at all.

Earlier, I had found the room of tanks that were keeping some people alive, though most seem to have gone insane from the extended isolation. The one in the other room, Rielev, who could actually hear me and respond was the most effective in creating pity, and this is helped greatly by the voicing. He was a former servant of Irenicus, and Irenicus had been trying to find a way to cure whatever was killing him (or had killed him), and restore his youth, planning to give him immortality as a reward for his service, and keeping him alive in a tank in the meantime. But, like everyone else in that area, he had been forgotten, and was slowly going insane over an unknown number of years.

"Master! I no longer wish to come back! Let me slip into the oblivion that has been denied me! Please!"

Jaheira preached unwelcomely about how wrong and "unnatural" it is to try to preserve life, and unfortunately there was no "Shut up, Jaheira!" option. No one would want to keep enduring the situation he was in, but the problem was not that he was being kept alive; it was that he was being kept trapped in a small prison with no contact with other people. What if his tank could have been moved to the dryads' room? There, he at least would have had the company of three sympathetic creatures for as long as they were all trapped there. Regrettably, there seemed no obvious way for him to survive outside of the tank or to be moved, so death seemed to be the only option I was able to give him.

Doppelgangers again

Well, only one this time. A fat old man was imprisoned in a cell with glass windows instead of bars, and I went ahead and freed him, though I did think it was rather strange that his cell was outfitted with so much furniture, and containers that held pretty good weapons and gear. He insisted on tagging along with us to find the exit together, and I kept an eye on him.

I don't know if it was coincidental or intentionally scripted, but it turned out that he decided to drop his disguise and declare our stupidity at having fallen for his ruse at the same moment as the party encountered a group of hostile dwarves, but it worked out pretty well that it happened at that time. Jaheira had recently leveled up, and so I had just been reviewing her druid spells, and noted that she had a "charm person or mammal" spell memorised. I wasn't sure what a doppelganger qualified as (their hissing and their disdain for simians like us seems to suggest something vaguely reptilian), but I tried it out anyway.

It worked, and he was charmed, so I sent him into the group of dwarves to soften them up for a little while, before throwing a skull trap into the group, and cleaning up the weakened stragglers after that.

A nasty surprise on exiting the dungeon

So, my heavily-laden party finally emerged from Irenicus' dungeon, looking forward to selling off all the junk gear we could carry in the nearest town and to stock up on necessities. It actually took a lot less time than I was expecting, considering people have apparently found it too bothersome to keep running through on replays, judging from the existence of a popular mod that skips that part of the game. I was really expecting something more akin to the Circle Tower segment of Dragon Age: Origins, which I loved, but which was very long.

Anyway, in a scripted sequence, where my party is unable to act while events unfold, we see Irenicus fighting off the last of the invaders, and then he greets us before Imoen throws a magic missile at him. He responds with another spell (much less lethal than the ones he had just been using on the invaders), and then the bloody Ministry of Magic shows up and says they're both expelled from Hogwarts for their unauthorised use of magic!

So the result is that they took Imoen away to lock her and Irenicus up in Azkaban. I've lost one of my favourite characters, and I don't know how long it'll take to get her back. I hate that kind of plot twist! They did exactly the same thing in Planescape: Torment with Morte! Taking away a character from the party with me frozen in place unable to do anything but watch it happen.

Looking around, I found that we had actually emerged from the dungeon inside a major city. So...all this torture and hideous, Mengele-style experimentation was happening right under a busy marketplace? I'll have to see if they explain later how this had all been going on under the noses of the Cowled Wizards all these years.

So after selling off all the unnecessary loot in the many shops on Waukeen's Promenade (who all seem to sell nothing but weapons, armour, ammo, and other adventurer-centric items -- even the one in the fruit shop!), I learned that I could obtain a license to cast spells in the city if I go to the government district. As a sorcerer, I don't want to run into the same kind of trouble Imoen got into before I can rescue her. Strangely enough, I had actually cast Identify on a couple of items, and no one got angry. Maybe that one's not flashy enough to notice.

There seemed to be one major thing to do in that location other than buy/sell gear and rest up, and that was to investigate the trouble in the circus tent. And that's for another post.