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Part 38: Let's Dress Up as Pilgrims Today, we shall set sail for Nisir. While we have our own ship, it is unable to reach Nisir, due to Smuggler's Cove being too far away. This means we'll have to head for the Old Dock on King's Isle.  You may remember, the last time we were here, we could have hopped on the pilgrim ferry to Nisir. But at the time, Namtar was still in Kingshome, so we didn't have much reason to go there.  The only way to get on this boat is by using the Pilgrim Garb to blend in. You'd think drawing our swords and comandeering the ship would also be a possibility, but I guess that wouldn't be very heroic.  Paragraph 85 posted:It is several days' sail to Nisir, the Mountain of Salvation, but the route is easy to follow. The great mountain Nisir seems to rise from the roots of Oceana and reach to the heavens - it is easily the tallest mountain on the planet, and you are in sight of your destination for most of the journey.  Paragraph 82 posted:Nisir, the Mountain of Salvation, rises above you to an impossibly great height, seeming to rip the sky. Although it is daytime, when you look up you can see stars near where you guess the summit of the mighty mountain must be. It seems to you the mountain must push through the very atmosphere of Oceana to produce such a sight. Note that we cannot sail back to Old Dock from here. We're going through that door one way or another.  There are three ways to get past these guards. 1. If every member of the party is wearing a Pilgrim Garb, the guards "eye you suspiciously but allow you to pass." There is an unlimited supply of Pilgrim Garb in Kingshome, but carrying seven of them is too much of a burden on our inventory. 2. Fight them and win. 3. Fight them and lose or run away, get thrown in prison, and then break out of prison. What shall we do? Piers: Tell me, what would Old Jack do in this situation? Would he run and hide? No! He would stand and fight!  That's right, we're going to take on these guards with the power of Brute Force! And by "brute force" I obviously mean we're going to spam attack magic, because that's pretty much the only reasonable strategy for hard fights. I mean, I could try to use debuff spells or something, but I've found that the best debuff status in this game is "dead."  Of course, even if we throw all of our AoE magic at them, we can still get lovely damage rolls. We just have to hope that at least one of our mages manages to hit hard.  Piers is back to using the Sword of Freedom. Generally it's a better option than a Dragon Tooth due to higher damage output, and after Dragon Valley there's less need for meleeing at 60'.  One thing I've found during this playthrough: Fire Storm is actually still quite good. While the damage/MP ratio is lower than that of Inferno, having 60' range means it just hits more stuff than Inferno or Big Chill. 20 MP is still a lot to spend for a spell, but it provides an amount of reach that nothing else does. Insert about a half dozen more shots of Inferno, Fire Blast, etc. here. You get the idea.  Oh and a bunch of people gain levels here. Everyone is at level 10-11 by now.  Also we went through our MP supply pretty quickly. Good thing we picked up so many Dragon Eyes. With those guards out of the way, we don't have to worry about breaking out of prison. We can just make a left here and march on toward Nisir, completely ignoring the prison area. But you know what's even more fun than breaking out of prison? Breaking into prison.   Of course, the "alarm" indicates that we'd normally be fighting these guys on our way out of prison, but they're just as unhappy to see us regardless of which direction we're going. This is a bit trickier than the other battle. The enemy groups are spread out just enough that we can't easily hit them all with one giant Inferno or Big Chill right away. It's a pretty similar strategy though. Inferno is cost-efficient enough that we can just about use it every turn here. The Stosstrupen, as always, will stun us in one hit but won't do any permanent damage, so if we can deal with the Guards quickly, there won't be any real danger here, though we'll still have to throw a healing spell every turn to keep everyone awake.  As you can see, getting stunned by Stosstrupen messed up my party order a bit, but everyone is at full health (the red bar on top) despite being low on stun points (the green bar underneath), and we've taken out the majority of the attack force.  Yeah, it's not looking good for this one remaining guard.   There are three cells in the prison. The first two can be unlocked easily, but are empty (one is the cell we would have broken out of, had we been captured). As we walk up to the cell at the end of the hall, we hear someone crying. Madrick attempts to pick the lock.  This prison cell is one of the few "hard" locks in the game. A character with Lockpick 1 cannot open it. I'm not sure why one cell would be harder to open than the other ones, but in any case, Dolph has a higher Lockpick skill, so he can open it.  Let's see who's inside!  Paragraph 83 posted:A prisoner lies babbling in the corner. "A secret tunnel connects this prison to the Nisir", he says. ...Well, okay. See, the one other empty cell contains a secret door, which leads to the tunnel. So if you're not strong enough to beat the guards, you can go that way. Of course, if you can't beat the guards, you're probably not ready for this part of the game yet. Anyway, we don't need the secret tunnel. We've massacred the entire guard for this area (the hundreds of pilgrims do not seem to care about any of this or interact with us in any way) so we can just walk outside and take the normal path to Nisir.  Hmm, what's that statue over there? Let's take a look at it.  Paragraph 84 posted:The pilgrims stop one-by-one to kneel before this elaborate shrine before continuing. The shrine depicts the image ofthe Universal God, a faceless deity that looks in all directions at once, and raises its arms to encompass both earth, heaven, and underworld. You note with relief that not even Namtar has dared to undermine the basic faith of Oceana. drat right. Namtar's going down. The Universal God has been mentioned a few times before among other religious figures in Dilmun, and we've seen other shrines of him. But while we've personally met and obtained the aid of Enkidu, Zaton, and Irkalla, we know little about the land's most popular diety. Shouldn't he really be more of a factor at this point? More on that later.  That's all there is to the dock. It's time to make our way up the great mountain of Nisir. Remember, this is "easily the tallest mountain on the planet," it reaches "to the heavens" and is not only the site of Salvation for all residents of Dilmun, but the setting for the final showdown with Namtar, Mystalvision, and whatever literal beasts of hell they have in store for us. There's no turning back now. The only thing to do now, is to begin our ascension. Bring on the giant mountain!   ... Yeah, this is how they represent "tallest mountain on the planet" in Dragon Wars graphics apparently. Even for a 1989 game, this is pretty weak. We'll just have to use our imagination.  Paragraph 98 posted:You climb the Mountain of Salvation for several hours, but the summit seems to draw no closer. Several pilgrims drop from exhaustion along the path...the road to salvation is not for the weak of heart. Instead of going straight ahead, we'll start by taking a left here. This is actually the path the pilgrims are following, not that the paragraph gives us any indication of that.  We can encounter pilgrims along the way. There's not much point to this, they just run away immediately. I guess it's to show that there are other people on the mountain, but it's generally pointless.  The path ends here. What could be behind the door to our left?  Paragraph 97 posted:The long line of white-robed pilgrims ends at this rocky shrine. One by one the pilgrims pass before a huge and powerful image of the Universal God. There are no guards here. None are required. The God keeps its own order beneath its own roof. Well now. God stands before us, seeking the sign of the destined hero. What next?  Piers: My name is Piers Paardersen. I wield the mighty Sword of Freedom, forged in the great Clan Hall of the Dwarves, from the very skull of Roba of Freeport. I have bested Enkidu in hand-to-hand Combat. Together with my companions, we have liberated Byzanople, slayed dragons and demons, freed Zaton and Irkalla, and travelled the world. We have come to destroy Namtar and his army. We are the destined heroes you seek.   We are now officially on a mission from God to kill Namtar. And a few other things just happened.  All party members gain 500 Exp, as is normal for this sort of event. All party members gain +3 Str, +3 Dex, +3 Int, and +3 Spr. Remember, 1 Spr = 2 MP. You'll notice that Piers's Power (MP) is still at 24, but if we go into the skill point distribution menu, it will update to 30. That's right, all spellcasters get an extra 6 MP out of this. This is a permanent buff and is the equivalent of adding 18 skill points, or nine level-ups. Our actual level and skill points are unaffected by this, so it's not even slowing our experience curve or anything. This is massive. And one final thing. See that #40 next to the Sword of Freedom? The Sword just got a new ability. What does it do? Surely after the bonuses our entire party received, this can't possibly top that, can it? Can it?   There really is a God folks. And he's on our side. Next Time: More Nisir
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Feb 4, 2016 06:26
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Well, if Namtar wants to be the last god standing, killing god's chosen champions would be the first logical step. Let's see how it works out for him...
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Feb 4, 2016 20:19
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They couldn't even spring for a new skybox for the final confrontation? Well, I suppose games were drastically smaller back then, both in space allotted and in dev team.
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Feb 6, 2016 05:16
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Glazius posted:They couldn't even spring for a new skybox for the final confrontation? The "dev team" for this game was literally one person, "Burger" Becky Heineman. The instruction manual for the PC version also says, "Artwork by: Todd J. Camasta" so I'm guessing he did the animated enemy portraits. The PC version just managed to fit on a 720KB 3.5" diskette. So yeah, I'm not going to rag on them too much for the lack of visuals.
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Feb 6, 2016 08:40
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Rujasu, you can't leave us hanging! Namtar's rear end hasn't been kicked yet!!
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Mar 12, 2016 15:41
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Been a bit busy lately, but rest assured Namtar's rear end will not go un-kicked!
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Mar 12, 2016 17:46
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Part 39: Nisir (Not Quite the Last Dungeon Yet) So, to recap, we now have pretty much every major diety of Oceana in our corner. We have every possible magic spell and almost all of the best equipment. But we still have one thing to do. Namtar, your day of reckoning has come! ...almost. There isn't all that much to do in Nisir. We already visited the principal shrine of the Universal God, and that's the main reason people come to Nisir. But there's one other temple here. Let's check that out.  Paragraph 100 posted:Off the beaten path you find this is a temple to the Magan Underworld. This seems a considerably older place than the other structures on this plateau. The Underworld was before there was a was, and doubtless it will still thrive when all of Oceana has long since burned off into the void. A temple to the Underworld you say? Does that mean stairs to the Underworld? You betcha! Conveniently, this gives us a nice route back to the Underworld, allowing us to recharge our MP. We could have used this route to get here in the first place, and in fact it's a bit easier. We took the "scenic" route, killing off a dozen or so of Namtar's henchmen at the Pilgrim Dock. This isn't technically our last chance to visit the Underworld, but this is as good of a time as any to take a trip downstairs, recharge, and check out a couple of things we may have missed in the Underworld.  The pit where Namtar came from? Not exactly what we're looking for, but let's remember that. What else is around here?  We can follow this bridge to the main part of the Underworld, but there's a catch.  In order to pass, we have to say Yes here. We can't just fight the spirits; selecting No just sends us backwards. What is the "price of life" then?   That's right: everyone goes down to a single HP. A steep price to pay indeed... ...except for the fact that we can completely negate that problem by using the Bandage skill. And then walk over to the recharge fountain to take care of our MP as well. There's one other thing we should do while we're down here. Now, most things up to this point, we've had a reason to do. There's a crack in the wall and mud is leaking through? Sure, use the Create Wall spell to seal it up. That makes logical sense. But this time, we're going to do something that makes no sense at all!   See that chasm in front of us? We're just going to walk right into it. Why? No reason. There's no hint that we should do this. Nobody tells us to. We're just going to do it, because... reasons.    This is +5 skill points to every character in the party. It's a significant bonus. You can actually get here very early in the game, immediately after escaping Purgatory. And there's no way you'd know about it without accidentally walking onto this one specfic tile! I take this opportunity to boost Dexterity for the front-liners, MP and Sun/High Magic skills for the back row. There's not too much else to do with the extra points. Having 40 or more MP for all of our primary magic users is the real key here. Casting spells is pretty much the best thing we can do at this point in the game, so the more MP, the better. Also, once we've walked out into the abyss, it's possible to just keep walking around. We can even encounter random enemies in mid-air!  Enough detouring. Let's get back to Nisir. (The spirits don't bother us on the way back over the bridge, by the way. It happens once per visit to the Underworld.)  Off to the side of the temple, these guys are guarding something. We'll leave them alone for now.  We can go one of two ways here. The door on the left, or what looks like a wall on the right. The door has a simple lock on it, and leads to...  Hmm. We could take these guys out fairly easily, but let's try the other route.  The "wise man" bit means using the Intelligence attribute (the only time we ever have to do so). You don't need someone with a high IQ: Ulrik's meager 11 rating is good enough.  Obviously we use the Climb ability here, and we only need to have a 1 in it. Having an alternate path where you don't need to fight is cool, but this is a really easy obstacle for being so late in the game.   Paragraph 55 posted:A yawning chasm stretches before you. A violent gust of hot wind rises from the chasm...the void must reach to the very roots of the world, below even the Underworld. Out of the chasm, starting an unknowable distance beneath you and stretching as far as the eye can see, you view a vomitous mass of irregular black stone. The tower stands piled atop itself and is at once designed and chaotic...from one angle it looks like a sorcerer's stronghold, while from another it seems like the exposed spine of a fantastic beast. Perhaps it is not really there at all. More likely it exists in more than one dimension at the same time, and is thus difficult to see in its entirety. There it is, just a couple of tiles away! Now all we have to do is cross that chasm there. Well, we did just walk out onto a chasm in the Underworld... Piers: We've got this. The Universal God will carry us over the chasm. Everyone follow me!  Shiiiiiit... Next up: Will our heroes make it to the Tower of Namtar, or plummet to their doom?
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Mar 30, 2016 03:57
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Well, that answers the question of if falling is a thing. In dramatic fashion!
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Mar 31, 2016 01:51
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Glazius posted:Well, that answers the question of if falling is a thing. In dramatic fashion! It's actually a bit inconsistent. There are many places in the game where there's a chasm and you just can't walk into it. That's true of everywhere in the Underworld other than that one specific tile. It's just treated like a wall. Mostly this is just idiot-proofing the game; the pits in the Underworld are either bottomless, or have "sharp rocks" at the bottom, and either way it would not be a good time for your party. But Nisir just allows us to walk right off cliffs apparently.
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Mar 31, 2016 03:48
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If anyone is wondering what happened to this LP, well, it's A CONSPIRACY! Blame it on the lizard people! (Been busy/distracted/lazy/etc. for a while, but I'm working on the next part, it's coming soon.)
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Jun 7, 2016 05:18
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Part 40: The Fall Last time, on Let's Play Dragon Wars... This time, on Let's Play Dragon Wars...  Yep, falling down the chasm just puts us in the Underworld. We don't even take any damage. Boring! Let's rewind a bit.  Obviously, walking right out into the chasm isn't the move here. Instead, we should do what we always do when we encounter such an obstacle: Use the Golden Boots.  This, by the way, is the specific reason we need the Boots to beat the game. All of the other things we've used them for? Yep, all of that was optional. In fact, the vast majority of the game up to this point has been optional content. However, crossing this chasm is absolutely necessary for beating the game, and the only way to do it is with the Boots. If you accidentally discard the Boots, you can't get another pair, so you're screwed. And if you couldn't figure out that you had to create a wall to stop the fissure to save the city to get the boots, well you'll be spending a lot of time wandering around Dilmun trying to figure out what exactly you missed. But enough about that. Into the tower we go!  Well uh, we'll just keep going...  I'm sure it's fine, and this is totally not a trap...  DAMMIT IT'S A TRAP WHY DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING  I don't know how we manage to fall for "miles" and land without losing a single point of health, nor do I know why we should care about the air smelling musty, but here we are.  Welcome to the Depths of Nisir. We are officially in the endgame now. There is no turning back.  ...Oh, okay, actually we can turn back whenever we want. These stairs are a one-way route up to the Underworld. That's right, up to the Underworld. We are currently below Hell. There's another problem: we have hit a complete dead end.  This is the map of the area. There are no secret doors here, nor teleport traps, nor anything else to get us out of this area, other than the stairs leading up and out. Let's think about this a bit. This is actually an amazing plan. RPG villains love to guard their evil castles with demons, puzzles, traps, locked doors, and all sorts of nefarious obstacles, but why gently caress around with that stuff when you can just put up a wall? After all, in an RPG, you can be level 99, wield the legendary swords of the gods, and cast spells that summon Godzilla to level an entire city in the name of dealing a few thousand damage to an enemy group, but no matter how great your powers, you can't go through a wall. Hell, you're lucky if you can jump in most RPG's. Couldn't they just give us some sort of spell that lets you go through a wall or something? Oh, right, we do have that. Soften Stone. But there's no way a spell like that would work here in the endgame dungeon, right?  Well, there you go. So that's two things required for the final dungeon. Golden Boots (from Mud Toad) and Soften Stone (from Freeport). This also means killing Ugly and his crew is required for beating the game (on a single playthrough, anyway).  Now we can just walk through our makeshift doorway and explore the area...  Oh, poo poo. Those who have played The Bard's Tale may recognize this. It's a "darkness trap." As you might have guessed, it takes out our light source and makes it impossible to create a new one. That's bad. But the even worse part is that the "icy winds of despair" deal damage to our entire party. If you don't know where you're going, you'll keep taking damage as you wander around, and eventually die. Now, if you look at a guide or already know the area, this is easy. Otherwise, if you saved before casting Soften, you can do some trial and error to figure this out. It's not too bad, but it's brutal if you're not expecting it. You may have noticed, when we cast Soften earlier, we could see another wall right behind the one we removed. We need to go through that one to safely get out of the "icy winds" area. Once we do that, we can just use the Magic Lamp again to reactivate our infinite light source, and use Bandage to heal up.  Once we've done that much, the dungeon becomes relatively straightforward.  It has a ton of annoying spinner and teleport traps, so it pays to check the automap regularly. The spinners aren't much of an issue, you see a message saying "The floor moved!" and you change direction, and then you can just turn to face in the direction you were facing before. This is trivial if you have a compass active. The teleport traps are nasty because you don't get any indication that you teleported unless you constantly check the map. There aren't all that many of them though; it's managable. Also, there are a bunch of enemies to encounter down here, but they're generally easy to avoid. In most cases, it's actually easiest to just run away and use Soften Stone to navigate around them, since that sucks up less MP than fighting them. These guys don't look too tough, but the Lizard Warriors hit for a ton of stun damage and KO our front-liners in one shot, then the Namtar Guards get into range and hit hard enough to kill in one or two hits. By using healing every turn, I can take them down safely, but it takes a while and that MP goes fast.  As you might guess, even one of these is pretty fearsome. It uses a breath attack every turn and has over 200 HP. With my fully-loaded endgame party, I can dispatch it in a few rounds by attacking with Dragon Teeth, using at least one Cure All variant per turn, and throwing some high-cost Rage of Mithras spells at it, but again, it's really not worth spending MP. It's not like they're guarding anything important. Let's explore the dungeon a bit. Right in the middle of the dungeon is another large chasm/pit area.  (Note that there are no paragraphs in this dungeon. You can't leaf through the Dragon Wars manual and find spoilers for the endgame dungeon.)  There are a ton of doors and it's not obvious which ones we should follow, but this one looks promising. Let's check it out.  A guard barracks? That sounds pretty mundane for an endgame dungeon that is meant to be more or less actual Hell with actual Satan. Or maybe Hell being mundane is the punchline here, and it will turn out that Namtar is really a sadistic bureaucrat from the Lansk overcity. The final boss will be a stack of papers which must be stamped by over 200 different officials, with each one directing you to a different office... Nah, there's actually a valid reason for this. Let's continue in a bit deeper. There are several rooms in the guard barracks, and behind each door is another encounter with Lizard Warriors and Namtar Guards. Fighting through them will chew through enough MP that we're better off just using a few Soften Stones to dodge the encounters and get to the main event...  Oh poo poo, it's boss time! Remember Buck? He was the guy from Siege Camp, we had to fight his giant army to save Byzanople, it was one of the most awesome and climactic quests in the whole game. Now he's back, and it's time for the rematch with the general himself! He's probably got an even more fearsome army for us to tear through, so it's a good thing we saved up all of that MP! Let's do this!  Oh, okay, it's just him and his sword. All right then. But I'm sure he's really tough and powerful!  Welp. One round. We killed him in one round. He didn't even land a hit. There's no secret area or hidden arms cache or anything that Buck is guarding. That 85 experience is the only thing we get for beating him. Still, we did just take out Namtar's top general. And he was a dick to us earlier, before we crushed his entire army and stuff. So I guess that was pretty satisfying. Who's next? Next time: More Depths of Nisir
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Jun 8, 2016 04:36
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Looking forward to this finally finishing - love the ending sequence of this game.
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Jun 11, 2016 11:36
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Man, what's it like to be the general for a dude who's turning into a force capable of eating the universe? You can probably feel your job slipping away.
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Jun 12, 2016 11:30
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He did say he wasn't sure what he could do, and being a general doesn't necessarily mean you have to be any good at fighting personally... I actually like that he wasn't, honestly.
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Jun 13, 2016 01:34
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Buck actually does hit pretty hard if he connects. Even with a fully-prepared party, he can stun in one hit and could potentially kill a weakened ally. But overall, he's easier and less dangerous than the standard encounters at this point.
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Jun 13, 2016 03:36
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Part 41: Depths of Nisir Continued If you don't know your way around the Depths of Nisir, it can be a real slog. There are tough enemies in every room, and while you can avoid them with Soften Stone, you don't have enough MP to just blow through every single wall in the dungeon, and it's not clear where you need to go. I do know where we need to go. In fact, we could go knock on Namtar's door right now. But we're not going to do that today. There is one more piece of business to take care of first.  This way.  Much like the icy winds of despair earlier, this damages our party every step we take. Fortunately, it does not blow out our light. It's still annoying, of course.  You know what this means.  Much like our encounter with Buck Ironhead, Mystalvision is on his own, there's no mob of Stosstrupen protecting him this time around, it's just a one-on-one showdown. Well, actually seven-on-one. No problem, right?   I suppose I should have seen that coming. The Sun Magic boss comes at us with the best Sun Magic spell. That said, we're pretty well prepared for him. Inferno has a range of 40', so Mystalvision will have to advance 20' to get within range. Meanwhile, our Dragon Teeth with their 60' range can hit him right from the beginning of the fight.    Have I mentioned that Dragon Teeth are ridiculous? Without them, we'd either have to take him down purely with magic, which is costly, or advance several times to get into melee range while he rains damage on us with multiple Infernos. It's much easier this way.    This is also a spot for Rage of Mithras and Ice Chill to shine. There's only one enemy and he's really far away. Round 2:    And, we did it! This is it for Mystalvision. That 100 experience isn't going to help us at all, but at least we got him back for what happened in Phoebus.  Oh, crap. Are we going to get thrown in another dungeon or something?  ... This game hates me. Next time: NAMTAR
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Sep 5, 2016 01:10
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Is it normal that Inferno does single-digit damage, or did we just get really lucky?
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Sep 5, 2016 05:13
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That's normal. However, keep in mind, when a character takes damage, they take twice that much in stun (I think that's how it works anyway, it's hard to tell). The stun bar is equal to the HP bar. Nobody in the party has 20 or more HP, so a couple shots of Inferno will stun half of the party. Mystalvision goes first every turn, so if you're not taking him down quickly, he'll cast Inferno, stunning your healers, then the next turn he goes first and casts it again, stunning everyone. Since this is one of the rare battles you can't run from, if your party is stunned, the battle just starts over again, with Mystal at full HP and the party at very low HP (because they've been hit by mutiple Infernos by now). If this happens, you're likely to get wiped or lose at least one party member. If we had lost even one person, we'd have to either reload or leave and visit Necropolis, because there is no way we're going after Namtar with less than a full roster. You'll soon see why that is. Other than the Dragon Queen's breath, which is basically meant to be an instant Game Over, I don't think any enemy in the game can deal double-digit damage to the whole party in one shot. It would be far too difficult to beat.
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Sep 5, 2016 16:45
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Aw man, backtracking! The greatest curse of the RPG, and it endures to this day!
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Sep 8, 2016 05:23
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I know this is a pretty big bump but this has to be close to the end by now, right? This game feels like it has a lot of extra hidden side quests and enemies you could easily miss entirely.
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Dec 20, 2016 22:54
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Yeah, I'm like one or two updates from the finish line here; I have just been putting it off for way too long. One of the challenges for me in doing this LP is that I'm easily prone to both procrastination and writer's block, so uh... crap now how am I going to finish this sentence I did almost all of the side quests in the game already, for what it's worth. There are a couple of other things I want to cover, I'll do an epilogue update to handle those. You know, after I actually write an ending to even have an epilogue for... Will any of this happen before 2016 is over? That's a good question!
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Dec 20, 2016 23:34
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Update 42: NAMTAR (maybe) So, remember how last time, after killing Mystalvision, he warps us back to the beginning of the dungeon? Well, it's not actually the beginning of the dungeon. Instead, it's a different completely-walled-off room which requires you to Soften Stone your way out of it. Oh, and there are encounters in all of the tiles in the room. But you can just cast Soften on the wall right next to you and avoid all of that crap, so whatever. Now that we've taken out Buck and Mystal, there's nothing else noteworthy in this dungeon, so we might as well head straight for the boss room. On the way, we'll go through a few rooms which don't have encounters, but are certainly foreboding:     Actually, I kinda wish the whole Depths of Nisir dungeon was stuff like this. It's more interesting and less annoying than the spinner traps and gently caress-you encounters that make up the rest of the Depths. But that sort of thing was par for the course in this era of gaming.  This is a damage tile, and it's not loving around. The amount of damage dealt seems to be random, but it can easily be more than half of a character's HP. So if we step on two of these without bandaging, someone in the party will die, just like that. So let's not step on these. One more cast of Soften Stone will get us where we need to be. Time for the final battle!    Wait, did that just say there were a million of them?!  Piers: Let's do it! We've beaten an army before! Follow me everyone! CHAAAAAAARGE!  This seems like it may or may not be a good idea...  Okay, this is just some mobs, there are only 50 of th-  OH gently caress WE ARE GOING TO DIE  This battle isn't technically impossible, but there are 50 enemies, most of them will act before anyone in our party, and they can stun in one hit. It's clearly not meant to be winnable. Mercifully, the game does allow us to run from it (or get stunned and stumble back one tile). In fact, we can leave the dungeon by going up the flight of stairs directly behind us. This is a nice out for anyone who saves right before the fight, then realizes they are completely screwed. (Back in the day, the first time Dad and I got to this part of the game, that's pretty much what we had to do. I think we gave up on the game for a while, because making it all the way through the game, then through the Depths of Nisir only to get here and be completely outclassed by the first wave of Namtar's forces... well, it's a bit demoralizing.) The game is kind of beating us over the head with the fact that we need help to beat Namtar's army. But how are we going to get help here? Let's think back a bit... ...possibly over an entire year ago... Some time ago, rujasu posted:
This seems like an appropriate "sacrifice."      drat. Well, that was impressive. Shame we didn't get to have a real battle with Namtar and had to watch a dragon take him out for us, but hey, I'll take it. I suppose, after months of anticipation, this may seem like a bit of a letdown. I suppose it is. All this talk about Namtar being such a formidable foe, all the buildup to a big, challenging endgame battle where we need all of the best gear and magic to survive... all for just a few paragraphs of exposition, and that's it. He got burnt to a crisp before we could even touch him. I can't help but feel it's a letdown for this LP. Not much of an ending really. ... Eh, you know what? That's okay. This was a long and challenging journey, we got through it, we defeated Namtar, we saved Dilmun. Job well done. Thanks to everyone who stuck around to read this LP to the end despite the delays. This was my first LP, and it was a little tougher than I thought but I think it went OK. I might post one or two more updates for stuff I missed, but clearly the important stuff is wrapped up now, so I think I'll sign off for now. Again, thanks everyone! Really, this is totally definitely the end of the LP! No need to hang around any longer, that's it! Thanks for reading, and see you around! ... What? Why are you still here?    Aw, nuts. TO BE CONTINUED
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Feb 18, 2017 06:34
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Okay, that was a quality fakeout ending. The gently caress did this idea of faerie lizardmen come from, though? I don't think we've ever seen those two words together before.
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Feb 19, 2017 16:23
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Glazius posted:The gently caress did this idea of faerie lizardmen come from, though? I don't think we've ever seen those two words together before. Yeah I have no god drat idea what that was about. Also holy poo poo that dragon doesn't mess around.
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Feb 19, 2017 20:30
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Yeah, I have no idea what a faerie lizardman is supposed to be. Also, I'll point out that Namtar's army had a group of Young Dragons in it, and they were taken out by the Dragon Queen. Why do I mention this? Because it is the closest thing to a "Dragon War" we will ever see in this game!
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Feb 20, 2017 19:25
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You know, I get the idea Namtar must be a pretty strong guy now. I mean, he just got vaporized by a Dragon that oneshots your party pretty much. And he didn't even care. Just gets up and dusts himself off and goes to "DO THIS THING" with you. It didn't even bother him! All this from a guy we first met waking up from a nap and shaking our hand.
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Feb 20, 2017 22:34
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Working on the next update. I'm maybe half-way through at this point. Hoping to get it posted in the next few days. Let's just say this one has been particularly tricky.
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Apr 10, 2017 04:56
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Knowing Interplay and RPGs of the 80s, I'm betting Namtar's got one really evil trick up his sleeve when combat rolls around. That, or the fight's gonna bug out halfway through.
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Apr 10, 2017 05:08
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