Let's Play Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire (Thread 2: Götterdämmerung)

[VoxRationis]

At long last, I’m back, continuing the tale of Ryndara, Vailian moon godlike wizard, in Pillars of Eternity: Deadfire. (Link to original thread)


When last we left our heroes, we were journeying through the dungeons and archives in service to the god Wael, seeking a way to release Bekarna from the enchantment that befuddles her mind. You may recall that Ryndara has been horrified by all the revelations she’s had about the deities and is resolved to destroy them. This facility in particular is repugnant to her, dedicated as it is to maintaining Wael’s supremacy over information by imprisoning those who threaten the status quo.

We creep down to the lower levels and find a chamber describing a girl who can only sing, and slays those who hear her. Maia (whose voice is strange to hear now that I have been bingeing Critical Role for the past month) creeps through her chamber and steals all the valuable weapons and armor laying about, and then we move on. Then we use the construct regulator to turn the flesh constructs in the lower levels to our side. With both the flesh constructs and the vithrack warden suborned, the level becomes trivial to move through, observing the librarians at their work. We move on to the lower level.

There we meet a wizard, Fyonlecg, who seems to believe that he has been stricken from the memories of others. Certainly, we have not heard of him. We also find a charnel house and a horrible monstrosity, the Memory Hoarder, which is at least partially composed of the collected personalities and memories of the victims of this place. It becomes hostile and attacks. The fight would have been difficult had I not previously turned the flesh constructs in the room to my side, given that the party started off clumped in the center of difficult terrain, surrounded by the Hoarder, librarians, and flesh constructs. They helped fight off the librarians it summoned while I wore the Hoarder down with ranged fire. With it dead, the screaming that fills this place abates, and the horrified crew of the Caed Nua reflects for a moment on the victory. Ryndara sees that there is some way into the titan, the body of Wael which lies at the bottom of this facility, and that some memory, unknown to her but known to Fyonlecg, is the key to activating it. She gets the sense that a confrontation with Fyonlecg is brewing, even though they don’t know each other and she tried to be diplomatic with him.

We also see the device that pipes the screaming of the Hoarder into the rest of the facility. It could be used to read either Llengrath’s scroll, killing the prisoners of this place, or Tayn’s, restoring memories to them (but not necessarily theirs). Ryndara, considering both options suboptimal and not desiring to use them unless necessary, elects to wait and see how things have changed in the upper levels before taking either course of action. However, she investigates the strange, half-organic device more, and it produces an egg for her.

A force field prevents us from returning back directly, so we move down to the next level of the dungeon.

[Morty]

The fight with the singing girl was brutal, even compared to other endgame ones. Of course, I went in with an unoptimized team. Which is sadly a problem by the end: it's hard to keep everyone relevant. At least it results in a unique crossbow... for all the good it does, since the game is probably almost over by then.

[VoxRationis]

Part 30:

The party finds itself in a massive library, the Scriptorium, and note the eyes and tentacles of Wael growing throughout its endless stacks. Talking to the librarian, we find that Maura has had a working relationship with the Hand Occult for some time, preceding the crisis with Eothas. The party’s view of her immediately sours. The chief librarian seems to pay us little mind and says that we pose no threat to Wael’s plans, and therefore is forthright.

When we return to the entrance level, we are greeted with a vision of the Oracle of Wael, a creature not quite infringing upon D&D product identity, but fairly close to it, and an entity which has been referred to as the ultimate authority in this place. It dislikes that we have been roaming about and touching everything, and warns us to leave, lest we lose ourselves. It also reinforces what we heard before about Fyonlecg trying to get access to the titan.

Now we are in a position to explore the Collections again, and so we roam about until we find an astronomical tome, whose ordered patterns help quell the chaos in Bekarna’s mind and set her free of the hold this place has on her. She thanks us and heads for the surface. We then look around the Collections for other individuals who might be saved. The results of the search are not promising. It seems likely that the best choice would be to use Llengrath’s scroll and put them all out of their misery. However, we’re a little wary of the consequences of this action. As Fassina has pointed out, the archmages are untrustworthy. It’s well possible that Llengrath has misrepresented either the direct effect of the scroll or the subsequent consequences of killing the prisoners in the Collections. Still, our examinations of the scroll seem to suggest that it does have the slaying effect. Ryndara elects to use it.

After doing so, we roam back through the Collections, and are surprised and slain when the frightened child with the deadly song turns out to have survived, catching us completely off-guard in a cluster that is easily stunned and petrified to the point of ineffectiveness. (That said, it was pretty close. After a certain point, after it seemed like all was lost, I forewent defensive efforts and crowd control and just threw as many AoE effects against the enemy as possible, which did good work on the imaginary friends. Nothing I did had any meaningful impact on the frightened child, however; her resilience was baffling.)

We head upstairs to talk to the archmages. Bekarna is grateful for freeing her, and Llengrath for euthanizing the prisoners. Tayn is put off by it, and spitefully pays us 500 copper. Bekarna’s grimoire that we found requires starlight to work; she suggests that we find a chamber in the upper levels which might be exposed to it. Fortunately, we are headed upwards anyway, to the Oratory of Wael in the Archives. Once we enter, we are confronted by a spore-infested Maura, many sets of enchanted armor, and spore tendrils. It is a very, very long fight, in which all except Fassina fall. Pallegina got caught off-guard by a giant energy beam produced by the security system, which knocked her out and prevented her from reviving anybody. Fortunately, Maura, unlike seemingly everything else in this place, does not have significant pierce resistance, and so Maia was able to get some good hits in before she fell as well. In the end, the fight came down to a battle of attrition between the regeneration of a spore-infested librarian monk and Fassina’s ability to keep ogre summons up.

After the fight, which depleted many healing potions, Ryndara sees a vision of Maura looking for the “sacrifice” memory which would allow access to the titan and then being ambushed by Fyonlecg. We manage to find the tome which describes such a memory, as well as a place where we can restore Bekarna’s grimoire (though we must spend a fraught and expensive rest doing so). We give Bekarna the grimoire; she says that with it, she can scribe a spell of her very own and share it with us, but that she will first need a piece of star metal, which she believes to be somewhere in the facility. Ryndara agrees, for reasons both selfish and altruistic, to keep an eye out for such an item. Afterwards, we proceed again into the Scriptorium, only to find Tayn and Llengrath here, arguing in front of all the librarians. Llengrath desires to destroy Wael’s body, thinking it too dangerous to be left for others to use, while Tayn, as one might have expected, desires to find and use it. Moreover, the two archmages discovered in the Scriptorium a tome describing a device somehow core to the generation of Wael’s titan body. Both desire this device, which they believe to be inside the body still. Aloth, Pallegina, Fassina, and Ryndara quite forthrightly state that no members of the Circle can really be trusted with such power. Undaunted, Llengrath provides us with the description of the device and says that it should be split into three pieces before sending us on our way. Ryndara approaches the doorway device, sacrifices her knowledge of how to use it, and opens the passageway down.

[Morty]

It is funny that Maura is generally the least dangerous part of her fight. Unlike most everything else in that place, she doesn't have stacks of concentration, so Eder could reliably prevent her from casting, but her monk and barbarian buddies tore the rest of my party to bits.

[VoxRationis]

I've come to really hate barbarians in PoE, on account of their ability to stun most or all of the casters at once if you haven't spread the party out properly.

Edit: I think that situation is really a specific instance of the general tendency of the game to play fair with humanoid opponents. Most of your kith enemies tend to be leveled and classed opponents who can use the same tricks you do (with the exception of the Watcher/Herald abilities) and rely on the same equipment rules you do. I like that, but it can be rather harrowing when trying to keep on top of a 5v5 encounter.

In addition, I'm grappling with my opinion that my party is really not optimal for this mission. It's very caster-heavy, and while Fassina and Aloth can summon things to act as road blocks, all the summoning spells take a while to cast, so it's a little difficult to keep everyone safe in the opening moments of battle. Moreover, our healing is slow and our attack damage basically all comes from Aloth. I picked the roster based on roleplaying reasons and the desire to give Maia some screen time (since I tend to keep her in the background during the main campaign so I don't feel constrained by her politics). I'm contemplating switching her out for Eder or Xoti before going forward.

[Morty]

In addition, I'm grappling with my opinion that my party is really not optimal for this mission. It's very caster-heavy, and while Fassina and Aloth can summon things to act as road blocks, all the summoning spells take a while to cast, so it's a little difficult to keep everyone safe in the opening moments of battle. Moreover, our healing is slow and our attack damage basically all comes from Aloth. I picked the roster based on roleplaying reasons and the desire to give Maia some screen time (since I tend to keep her in the background during the main campaign so I don't feel constrained by her politics). I'm contemplating switching her out for Eder or Xoti before going forward.

The DLCs definitely encourage a more optimal party composition. My Fighter/Rogue went there with Eder (Fighter), Serafen (Cipher) Fassina (Wizard/Chanter) and Konstanten (Barbarian). The lack of a priest was notable. Poor Konstanten is also not very optimal in general, since his low Intellect gets in the way of both Barbarian and Chanter abilities.

[VoxRationis]

Part 31:

Concerned about the lack of staying power and healing in the group, we head back to the Caed Nua and switch out Maia for Xoti before heading into the body of Wael. Roaming through it, we notice that the spore infection has already started to set in. We haven’t much time, relatively speaking, to effect the destruction of this body. Ryndara orders the group to scout carefully and use ranged attacks to draw enemies outside the supporting range of the spores, and we then mop up the spore with Wall of Many Colors. Afterwards, we find ourselves in a room with another set of empty lecterns to be matched with books. The books themselves speak of things like Yehuza judging the rest of society, the end of everything by Rymrgand, and the first call to empire by the Woedican queen of Aedyr. All are foreboding, but one hits Ryndara most sharply, being a description of the gods claiming the souls of the godlike to enact their works. The lectern that seems to match it continues the dread that this inspires: “They think their difference is a blessing when it is but a brand.”

Ryndara assigns the books to their appropriate lecterns, opening a door that grants us access to an alchemical laboratory. We fight our way through and find a medicine that, when mixed with the fungus infecting this level, would block Wael’s bile ducts and allow us passage further down. We note this but resolve to fully explore the level first. Doing so, we find a piece of star metal and give it to Bekarna, who pens a grimoire with a spell of her own.

Completing this quest grants enough experience to push Ryndara, Fassina, and Aloth to 19th level. Hello, 9th level spells (well, for Ryndara, anyway, as the others are multiclass). We test our new abilities on a group of flesh creatures in another room. Minoletta’s Missile Salvo is immensely satisfying to have on one’s side. Unfortunately, Xoti is injured in the fight, as a couple of latecomers hid behind the user interface, sniping at her with spells until it was too late to save her.

After clearing out the level, we proceed down to the heart of the titan. (It’s unclear how the passage became filled with bile without completely flooding the lower chamber.) There we encounter Fyonlecg as he completes a spell of communion, abandoning his body to inhabit that of the Oracle of Wael. He rants for a time about being remembered again (apparently, he wrote all the wall spells), reveals that he got to this position by becoming head of the Hand Occult (so we can't really feel too sorry for him) and talks about how we, who also know “the great lie,” will not silence him as the Engwithans silenced their contemporary civilizations. Before Ryndara can protest that she has no desire to hide that particular secret, the Oracle speaks, apparently distinctly from Fyonlecg, speaking of how we, like him, have been tainted by the secret and need to be silenced.

(This prompts a difficult fight which I have now lost three times, filled with enemies that don’t seem to follow the rules properly. The Oracle can continue using its eye rays after being paralyzed and the Summoners of Visions can run around being untargetable while casting spells. The ghostly caster units seem to follow the rules, but just have such high resistances that they can’t be shut down. The Oracle by itself is reasonably manageable, especially since it's easy to hit with Wall of Many Colors, but once the chamber becomes filled with enemy casters that can't be effectively interrupted, the fight goes south quickly. That said, I do have ideas for how to go about this fight. First, when the Oracle becomes hostile, combat doesn’t actually start. There’s an opportunity to go into stealth mode and set things up to one’s advantage first. I had noticed that previously, but either failed in stealth, starting combat, or didn’t understand things properly and broke the arterial polyps, flooding the chamber and making things more difficult rather than easier. The next time, I will try attacking the spirit channeling items, and will split the party north and south so as to alternate the attacks and preventing the Oracle from successfully investigating us as we perform the attacks. My hope is that breaking these channeling items will stop the spirit casters from spawning. Secondly, the Oracle is vulnerable to piercing damage; simply changing weapon selection to account for this should provide good results. I find it ironic that after switching Maia out, we find that what appears to be the final boss would be quite vulnerable to her attack routine.)

[VoxRationis]

Part 32:

The fight against the Oracle was arduous and difficult. Xoti and Pallegina’s healing abilities were strained to the utmost. Every available summon ability was used. The winning formula seemed to be using Aloth to hunt down isolated enemies that appeared around the periphery and wearing down the Oracle using the animated bow summoned by Fassina while everyone else just tried to keep alive. At one immensely satisfying moment, Ryndara was withdrawn from the fight to save her, and a wave of summoned ghosts and monsters came up as a second line, ready to bombard the desperate party with spells from out of reach, only for Ryndara to come back in the nick of time with Minoletta’s Missile Salvo and wipe them all out. Once the last of the Oracle’s supporting elements were eliminated, victory, though fraught with danger, became not just possible but likely.

After defeating the Oracle, we are brought face to face with Wael, who claims that this place had been hidden even to them. They float the possibility that Ondra had made them forget, but neither Ryndara nor Wael really believe that. Ryndara appears to be able to convince the god of this place that having the body around is a liability even if, as Wael suggests, the other deities have not done away with their physical forms. Wael tells Ryndara that killing the Oracle will kill the body, and Ryndara does so without hesitation, for the party is currently weakened, and it would not do to allow the Oracle to get in a final attack.

We leave the heart of Wael and find Tayn and Llengrath, who seem delighted to see us. Tayn is disappointed somewhat that the body is dead, but Llengrath is pleased. She inquires as to what we would do now, and Ryndara puts forth the idea of joining the Circle, though any moves in that direction would have to wait after Eothas, in her mind. Then comes the notion of the god-seed that Llengrath had us look for. She explains that she intends to use it to build a body for the original Llengrath, or the fragments of him from the book. This is worrisome to Ryndara. As far as she’s concerned, and it seems like Aloth and Fassina are inclined to agree with her, Llengrath, though more reasonable than Tayn, can’t be trusted to always share goals or values with the party (after all, she did try to kill us). Moreover, though Llengrath claims she does not want to grow a titan-size body, the godseed doesn’t appear to have a size setting dial or the like, and it’s not clear that she knows a way to actually exert fine-tuned control over it. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of room given for nuance here in the dialogue options. One’s not allowed to say, for example, “I will give you this if I can supervise the body-growing process in case something goes wrong,” or even ask why Llengrath believes she can use the device for something other than its core function. The only thing we have to weigh on Llengrath’s side is her unusual apparent earnestness, which is surprisingly convincing, but looking at it in light of potential long-term consequences, it just doesn’t seem prudent to give it to her. This makes the archmage cross with Ryndara, and she shuns us from this point forward. It’s heartbreaking to have alienated the one friendly member of the Circle, but faced with a binary like that, it’s all we could do.

With that bitter moment marring her otherwise laudable victory, Ryndara leads the tired, wounded party back up to the Caed Nua. Once there, she answers the call she’s getting from Woedica. She rapidly recounts everything that Ryndara has done before warning that her conduct has not been up to Woedican standards. Ryndara replies defiantly, leading Woedica to warn her not to call again. We then proceed back to Neketaka, glad to be done with eldritch horrors and back to the tropical theme. Ryndara goes to check up on the animancers, as she wants them ready to repair the Wheel, and finds one Ydwin, a pale elf who turns out also to be a (high-functioning) fampyr. Ydwin asks to join the party, figuring that we are likely to encounter luminous adra, and Ryndara accepts. (Fortunately, she’s recruited at the party level. Unfortunately, her build is terrible and I’ll have to retrain her post-haste. For some reason, she doesn’t come with Deathblows, which seems like a natural synergy with a cipher.)

[Morty]

The Oracle fight is really, really brutal. I had to turn down the difficulty to easy, I think. I normally play on veteran or normal. Using easy difficulty makes enemies swarm the party a little less, so there's more breathing room. It's disappointing but not unusual that viable tactics get more narrow on higher levels.

[Keltest]

I highly recommend finding a good build for Ydwen and getting that out of the way posthaste. She's a freaking beast in combat, combining crowd control cipher abilities with nasty single target damage from the rogue (or specializing in one of them, if you prefer) and is a generally nice character to have should you go to the Beast of Winter content, much like Fassina was for FS. Plus, her voice actress is nice (and the narrator) and her story is kind of interesting.

Had the kickstarter gotten more funding, Ydwen being a full companion would have been the next tier of reward i believe, but it fell just short.

[VoxRationis]

I was thinking I'd build her for stacking debuffs and then abusing those for sneak attack damage with Deathblows. I suppose I should take a look at her Dexterity score before I do so, to make sure that she can actually act quickly enough to make that count.

Also, I'm not sure I really want to do Beast of Winter. FS took so long and was just such a departure from what I wanted to do, which was to roam the seas and handle political intrigue in alternation. (This is not to say it was wholly unenjoyable; I loved having conversations where Concelhaut weighed in, and it was refreshing to see the whole party react in more or less the same fashion to something.) I feel like going straight into another major DLC would probably be unsatisfying.

[GloatingSwine]

I was thinking I'd build her for stacking debuffs and then abusing those for sneak attack damage with Deathblows. I suppose I should take a look at her Dexterity score before I do so, to make sure that she can actually act quickly enough to make that count.

Also, I'm not sure I really want to do Beast of Winter. FS took so long and was just such a departure from what I wanted to do, which was to roam the seas and handle political intrigue in alternation. (This is not to say it was wholly unenjoyable; I loved having conversations where Concelhaut weighed in, and it was refreshing to see the whole party react in more or less the same fashion to something.) I feel like going straight into another major DLC would probably be unsatisfying.

Beast of Winter is most directly tied to the conflict of the main story, so I would say you should do it (and it was the first one and is much easier combat)

Spoiler

Show

A large part of it is seeing what happened when the gods were made and how that screwed over the Deadfire.

[Morty]

I feel like BoW is a little shorter than FS, with fewer brutal fights and some very cool locations. Including a vision of the past to see Waidwen's demise. So I recommend trying it. Seeker, Slayer, Survivor is a lot more skippable, but I can't remember if you've done that already.

[VoxRationis]

I started doing it, but realized it didn't have what I was searching for, and so stopped.

[Keltest]

SSS is pretty strictly and explicitly for people who like the combat and want more of the tactical challenge.

[VoxRationis]

It's not that I don't like the combat or the tactical challenge, but it needs to be in service of something, and solving the problems of a bunch of psychos who violently object to my helping them doesn't seem like a good cause to spring for, especially since this is already a long game and we supposedly have other pressing matters to attend to (I say "supposedly" since Ryndara intends to just let Eothas break the Wheel, so it's not actually like she cares if she's late to the show or not).

[Morty]

One thing I do appreciate about SSS is that several of the fights have more creative challenges than just "really tough enemies with high numbers". But it also does have plenty of those. So I'm not sure if I'll play it again myself.

[VoxRationis]

My build for Ydwin works as follows. I screwed up building it the first time because I was a little too short-sighted and picked some low- and mid-level abilities that were redundant with higher-level abilities. There's little point in taking Crippling Strike if one intends on taking Persistent Distraction and Sap. The final build needed to take into account that it was already late in the game and that the viability of the build at low levels was a non-factor. Technically, I still need to implement the build in game.

Skill-wise, she's mostly a trap monkey, with Mechanics pumped up well above everything else. I wasn't quite sure what to do with her passive skills, so I mostly put points into Metaphysics. I considered putting points into Diplomacy/Intimidate so as to work with the upgraded Artezzo's Cane and lower enemy Deflection after crits, but I have weapons which I think work better for her.

The rogue side of her, as I said before, relies on a combination of Sneak Attack/Backstab (when available)/Deathblows and various critical enhancements (Aldris Blade/Dirty Fighting/One-Handed Style) to drastically increase per-hit damage to a given target. 45% of her hits are upgraded to crits (70% if the target is paralyzed), and those crits inflict bonus shock damage and heal Ydwin. Ydwin starts qualifying for Sneak Attack immediately upon engaging with the target, thanks to Persistent Distraction. Shadowing Beyond and Smoke Veil provide various methods of invisibility to allow for escape or to set up Backstab (they're a mite redundant, but Shadowing Beyond is a whopping 3 Guile, so I thought it probably best to keep the cheaper option in reserve). Sap can be used to interrupt and set her up for Deathblows, and Devastating Blow can be used as the coup de grace.

The cipher side mostly exists to support the rogue side, throwing various afflictions on the enemy. I took Draining Whip to drastically increase focus regeneration and Lingering Echoes to keep the afflictions going longer, as well as the cipher talent that increases action speed with spells. Mental Binding (Paralysis), Secret Horrors, Wild Leech, and Borrowed Instinct either provide afflictions to proc Deathblows or provide other bonuses to hit. In addition, I got Ringleader to provide a little in the way of numbers support. At the highest level, the build has Ancestor's Memory, with the idea being that she can help our spellcasters' longevity in drawn-out fights.

[Morty]

Ancestor's Memory is indeed very good, because the Brilliant inspiration isn't otherwise easy to get, from what I remember. It's not just casters who benefit from it, either. I had Ydwin support Konstanten this way, since barbarians are a very resource-hungry class.

[VoxRationis]

Part 33:

Ryndara elects to travel to the south to investigate the strange missive she received, purportedly from worshipers of Rymrgand, but first, we have business in Neketaka. Minorly, there is the quest to delve into the catacombs near the temple of Berath, which will provide good opportunity to test out Ydwin's role in the group. More significantly, Ryndara has come to the conclusion that she will want to assist the Vailians against the Royal Deadfire Company. Ryndara's plan requires the state of animancy to progress quickly enough to repair or replace the Wheel once it has been broken by Eothas, and the RDC was responsible for the recent attack on the animancers. A neutral approach to the endgame here seems likely to leave the animancers vulnerable to future such interference.

As we leave Periki's Overlook, Pallegina and Xoti are sniping at one another over their differences of philosophy. Things come to a head as we reach the Sacred Stair, with Xoti ranting about Pallegina's arrogant blasphemies and saying that Ryndara will have to choose between the two of them. Xoti seems oblivious to the fact that Ryndara's worldview aligns closely with Pallegina's. In particular, the diplomatic answer (the one that looks, based on the UI, to be the most likely to smooth things over) is something that Ryndara doesn't actually agree with: "Each of your experiences and worldviews are valid." Instead, Ryndara just tries to get them to go easy on one another. Amazingly, this works for the moment, though every word in the exchange only deepens their hatred of one another. After alienating Llengrath so recently, it pains Ryndara to see the party suffering from such tension, but there's nothing to be done.

We proceed to the Hanging Sepulchres, where we carve our way through undead with ease. Seeing the old Aedyran architecture and dialect here is strange, but Ryndara recalls that Yseyr was a traveler to the Deadfire. When we get to Yseyr's tomb, we find the old Berathian, animated through devotion and determination not to die. Ryndara explains that all she desires is the last piece of the eulogy, which Yseyr is happy to give. It seems, based on Ryndara's tortured reading of the Hylspeak in the eulogy, that Yseyr did not actually kill the undead he sought to end, but was so driven not to fail that he became animated himself. When we return the eulogy to the high priest of Berath, he rewards us and goes on about how he seeks to become a death guard as well, and hopes that sufficient "duress" at the moment of death will do the trick; hence, he is going to have his followers cut out his heart as part of a ritual. Ryndara is quite confident that this will fail, but doesn't particularly want to bring up the subject of the rewards given for service to the gods, lest she open up the argument between Pallegina and Xoti again. We then head off to the Vailian embassy.

The party's travel to Queen's Berth is interrupted by an ambush by members of the Steel Garrote. They prove somewhat more resilient than we had first supposed, but ultimately, they fall. Ryndara initially surmises that this is retribution for telling Woedica off the last time she saw her, but a search of the would-be assassins' bodies reveals a letter instructing them to kill Ryndara and retrieve the scorched metal shards she carries (which, if I recall correctly, are pieces of the Godhammer). The letter also mentions a woman in Periki's Overlook who can do something with them. Ryndara seeks out the woman, who professes no knowledge of the assassins but freely mentions that she received a dream as a child of a woman giving her shards of metal to be joined anew, and shows great excitement over the shards Ryndara has. This makes Ryndara suspicious that Magran is playing some game here, but for the moment, no harm, no foul.

We head to the Vailian embassy and speak to Governor Alvari, who explains that she has summoned the shareholders of the company in an attempt to oust Castol. We are to speak as witnesses. Ryndara wants Castol, who carries a long-term, animancy-focused approach to the company, over Alvari, in light of her plans, and carefully words her responses to deflate Alvari even as she admits to Castol's faults. Pallegina gives a stirring speech in favor of longer-term investment in animancy, and Alvari ends up exiled to the Living Lands. Castol then proceeds to explain that we need to strike against the RDC before we can safely move for Ukaizo, and that we are to teleport inside their powderhouse and set it alight. Ryndara quietly notes that since such an action will likely drive Maia into a rage, she should bring the crew to the south and handle that Rymrgand business beforehand, in the hopes of ingratiating ourselves enough to Maia that she would think twice about attacking the party. The last thing Ryndara wants is to have to tell Kana that she killed his sister. (I figure it's probably not going to work, but I feel compelled to try.)

[Keltest]

Spoiler: Maia's role in the upcoming conflict

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It is actually possible to convince Maia to stand down support you and the party against the RDC if she likes you enough. Unsurprisingly, this affects her ending and station as a Gunhawk in the Rauatai Navy. Otherwise, if the RDC is the faction that likes you the least, she shows up at the end to fight you.

[VoxRationis]

Part 34:
We sail southward to Harbinger’s Watch, disembarking with a crew of Ryndara, Maia, Eder, Pallegina, and Ydwin. We are greeted almost immediately by an excited villager who names Ryndara the Duskspeaker and is bizarrely cheerful about nihilism and the approaching doom of everything. Still, it’s nice to hear a different accent for a change. (Between the comically self-destructive NPCs and the Scandinavian accents, I’m reminded of Magicka.)

While the party is exploring the village, Ydwin gets into an argument with a fishwife regarding her (optimistic?) belief that the world is about to end. Ydwin believes that this is nonsensical superstition of the sort that drove her to leave the White that Wends in the first place. She also mentions that the priesthood intentionally hides writing so as to keep the rest of the culture illiterate.

We wander into the main hall, where we find Vatnir, the leader of this village, preaching to his flock. He greets Ryndara and then introduces her with a series of questionable interpretations about her history (including the notion that she was the cause of the Hollowborn Plague, rather than the end of it). Just when Ryndara is is starting to entertain the possibility (from this and from certain other things, such as the innkeeper’s insistence that the cycle of life and death doesn’t exist or the villagers’ tendency as a whole to have a functioning society that builds infrastructure and harvests food while being convinced that their doom is imminent, which isn’t a great condition for capital investment) that the Harbingers are just a pack of lunatics who can be safely ignored (at least after shutting down whatever device is causing the growth of the iceberg), a heavy impact shakes the hall, and everyone rushes out, clamoring to see the Messenger.

The Messenger turns out to be a (possibly undead) dragon which attacks us with only a moment’s hesitation to finish its meal of one of the Harbingers. (The first time, the fight went very poorly, so poorly, in fact, that I was wondering whether it was a scripted defeat. It seemed to hit the entire party with draining attacks at once, healing through every scrap of damage we could throw at it. The second time, by contrast, was simple and quick. Ryndara threw down Meteor Storm, Wall of Many Colors, and Wilting Wind while Maia and Eder shot it up from a safe distance.) After the brief fight, one of the few surviving Harbingers goes to find Vatnir.

We find Vatnir first as he cowers in a secret room in his quarters. Some quick interrogation reveals that his dedication to nihilism is considerably more limited than he preaches to his followers. Never a true believer, he has been largely forced into his role by the superstitions of his fellows. He says he wrote to us specifically so we could kill the Messenger and seal the Vytmadh as we did the rift in Eir Glanfath. The party is somewhat irked with his deception but strong-arms him into coming with us as we journey up the iceberg to investigate further. We note with disappointment that when we exit the hall, the Messenger reanimates itself and is yanked up into the heavens by some force.

We, however, have to take the long way up, Using Vatnir’s ice picks, we climb up to the top of the ice-covered Engwithan temple at the core of the iceberg and cut our way through the dangers there without much difficulty (though Ryndara notes with dismay that Vatnir’s magics are largely ice-focused, with little effect against the creatures here, and lack much in the way of healing). We cut our way through the (strangely hostile) pilgrims here and delve into the temple. Once there, Ryndara sees visions of worshipers here, long ago, being slain by the dragon as it arrived. It appeared to have ice powers then, which it did not display in our fight against it. (Incidentally, it turns out to be rather fortunate that we came here before doing something that might drive Maia away and not after, because all of the many traps in this place can only be seen by her.)

When we reach the Vytmadh, we see the dragon sucked into the Beyond, seemingly against its will. Ryndara leads the group to investigate the portal after we loot the room. When we approach, Rymrgand appears to Ryndara, menacing and cruel. In the ensuing tense conversation, he explains that the dragon has bound her soul to a relic in his realm which prevents her from permanently dying. Each time the dragon dies, she breaks out of the Beyond through the Vytmadh, opening it wider and spreading the ice farther.

(Since the game conveniently autosaves moments before the conversation, I took the time to explore some of the conversational options which result in you dying. I very much enjoyed mouthing off to him. The one thing I didn’t like is that after you laugh at his inability to kill the dragon himself and he starts freezing you, you have a binary option between meek submission and fatal defiance. You can’t say what I would like to say, which is something along the lines of “If you kill me here over a failure of decorum, you’re going to be stuck with the dragon for a very long time. Your Harbingers aren’t going to be able to do this; it turns out that they very literally couldn’t kill her if their lives depended on it.”)

In the conversation, we also bring up the Harbingers, and he dismisses them with a disdainful line about how this place is not theirs and they aren’t his concern. This raises another point: even if one accepts the premise that Rymrgand needed to be a part of the pantheon, there’s no reason that anyone should actually worship him. His utter disdain for his worshipers and refusal to do anything whatsoever to help them utterly ruins the do ut des aspect of polytheistic worship. Sure, Rymrgand will show his wrath if you defy him to his face, but devotion to him gets you nothing and ignoring him costs you nothing.

Rymrgand explains that he is incapable of killing the dragon himself, and that therefore, he would like us to enter his realm and destroy her once and for all. If we do this, he will close the Vytmadh.

[Morty]

Vatnir is a pretty entertaining character. Poor guy really wants nothing to do with any of it, but he's stuck in his role because he happened to be born Rymrgand's godlike. Which is a raw deal at the best of times, just look at his face.

[GloatingSwine]

Yeah, I liked Vatnir. Also I liked Priest/Chanter as a multiclass option.

[Morty]

Priest/Chanter is solid, though there's a very good reason to have access to Dismissal in Beast of Winter.

[VoxRationis]

I'm kind of surprised Vatnir manages to be a priest at all. He seems too utterly uninterested in the philosophy and teachings of his god for it to work. That's very different from Durance, who hated his deity, but was devoted to her in a strange way, and never abandoned the philosophies behind his faith.

Part 35:
We journey into the Vytmadh and find a broken realm full of various thematically appropriate monsters. The dragon meets us and taunts us for a bit before descending to a lower realm, apparently even more conducive to destroying souls. If it is to be believed, even with Rymrgand’s token which allows us to continue existing in this place, we would be destroyed below. Ryndara, of course, notes the self-interest in such warnings, but reckless experimentation in this place would bear a high cost.

Exploration of the Beyond finds the soul of the priestess of Rymrgand whose frozen body we found outside the Vytmadh. She, in the interest of aiding our quest, argues that if we learned things from the souls who have remained here for particularly long periods of time without being ablated by the effects of this place, we might be able to retain enough of ourselves to finish off the dragon and return. We therefore continue exploring.

We come to a shackled soul who appears to be the victim of the Inquisition. Her sense of identity is weak after so long, but she informs us that she is the prisoner of an inquisitor in the labyrinth of Engwithan ruins here. As we seek this inquisitor, we find iterations of a trial, though the charges change from heresy to apostasy to identity. The whole things is rather fluid, with Ryndara able to swap places between accused, witness, and prosecution. The last iteration shows that one of the accusations is that the accused was operating in opposition to her soul’s purpose. Thus, when we return to the soul, we raise the possibility that she and the inquisitor are the same entity. This proves true in the end, though how that resulted in her ending up here is never fully explained (did she die riven by doubt or something?), and the soul, reconciled with itself, helps us fight off the creatures of this place. Ryndara offers it a place in the Wheel again before we move on. Privately, she entertains her own doubts about rescuing an inquisitor to potentially serve Woedica again in another incarnation, as well as the usefulness of a survival technique that requires a crippling split of personality.

[Morty]

I'm kind of surprised Vatnir manages to be a priest at all. He seems too utterly uninterested in the philosophy and teachings of his god for it to work. That's very different from Durance, who hated his deity, but was devoted to her in a strange way, and never abandoned the philosophies behind his faith.

Maybe Rymrgand just finds it amusing.

[Keltest]

For that matter, you could be a priest of Eothas in the first game, where he was dead, and the second one, where you can choose an actively antagonistic relationship with him and declare him to be failing his ideals and teachings entirely. Stranger things have happened.

[Morty]

The existence of D&D-style priests has honestly never jived with the rest of the setting, to me. Feels like a concession to using mostly-D&D classes and BG-style gameplay. But it's not intrusive, so I roll with it.

[VoxRationis]

Part 36:

We continue from the Endless Queries to another place in Rymrgand’s domain after being briefly upbraided by his priestess for carrying a soul with us. This new realm is of a large, elaborate and well-fortified bridge, frozen in time, covered in dying soldiers and barrels of gunpowder. Ryndara quickly suspects that this is some sort of echo of the battle of Evon Dewr Bridge (though she had always imagined it as something smaller). We speak briefly with Waidwen, who seems to have been actively attempting to hold the scene in place, as when we break his concentration, the bridge immediately explodes. Waidwen then re-freezes the environment in the moment of the explosion, and we have a short conversation with some aspect or fragment of Eothas also trapped in this place. He expresses some regret in the death of Waidwen and the violence of the Saint’s War (there was also a description earlier which suggested that Waidwen/Eothas was rather different from either being alone), and explains to us that the fragments of Waidwen’s persona scattered over this place must be unified in order to bring him to the same place of resolution we had for the other soul. To aid us in this, he says, we can use Waidwen’s sundial to move through time, collecting the fragments of Waidwen’s soul.
We go about this process, delving into the nooks and crannies of Evon Dewr at the three closely spaced moments in time available to us. We learn that the Godhammer was forged with a piece of Waidwen (with no explanation of how they got it) for use as a trigger, and see Waidwen’s crises of faith as a boy, and how he entered into a partnership of sorts with Eothas. Lastly, we see a more significant revelation. Eothas knew about the Godhammer but pressed the attack anyway, so as to kindle the faith of kith in one another and what they could do together, and critically, he did not tell Waidwen this.
We go back to Waidwen in the instant before detonation and restore the fragments of his soul. Ryndara’s expectations of betrayal are not realized, and Waidwen, peaceful and content, drifts off to oblivion, more proud of Eothas' ability to use two means to reach the same end than hurt that he wasn't informed about the Godhammer. We are not particularly certain how the obliteration of Waidwen accomplished anything, but it’s something off the checklist. In any case, we got some neat magical items while wandering about.