EFFORTPOST Darklands LP Part II: Charles Bronson edition

[Sorry, I forgot to make it so the screenshots get blown up to fill the screen again. Just pls zoom in (you'll see the same thing) and bear with me.]

When we left off I had just gotten through the grueling process of character of generation. Now it's time to start going on some adventures!

Inventory

The first thing we do is find out what goodies our characters have brought with them from their civilian lives. Besides skills and attributes, their previous occupations have provided them with equipment and knowledge of saints and alchemical formulas.

We do pretty badly for equipment. Sasha has a short sword. Redactor and Yuna have clubs. None of them has armor. But what can you expect? A merchant, an alchemist, and a nun aren't going to be walking around with a lot of firepower in their daily life. Nathan was a recruit soldier when he joined us so he has good leather armor and a short spear. He at least is ready for some low-level adventuring. (Note that the game gave everyone an appropriate weapon based on their highest weapon skill.)

If we want to be making moves on the street, this is okay but he still doesn't even have a shield or any missile weapon. We need to upgrade everyone else to at least this level.

When it comes to alchemical formulae, obviously Redactor is the only one who has any. You either are an alchemist or you're not, and there's not much point in having more than one in the party. He knows "Breath of Death" (poison gas), "Arabian Fire" (napalm), and "Quickmove" (agility buff). These are all very useful and having them will be good in the mid game. The problem is, this is pretty high tech stuff. The components to make these are expensive and hard to find and in the early game we will (hopefully) not be running into enemies dangerous enough to actually be worth using these on. I'll be trying to find some low-end formulae that are more appropriate for our party.

Each potion has different versions. Our Arabian Fire formula is the one from Geber, AKA Abū Mūsā Jābir ibn Ḥayyān. If you subscribe to the "Muslims never invented anything" school of Incelist history, I have to warn you, this game is set in the 1400s so you will be disappointed.

Finally let's see the knowledge of saints we have. This is the 1400s so the intercession of saints is especially important. But you can't just be like "hey, some saint, help me out with this pls". You need a saint who is the patron of the activity you're doing, or the place you're in, or something like that. You need to actually know who they are and what their story is, because they're the patron of something that happened in their life. So a character can only implore that saint for aid if they have studied and understood their life. (This got me as a kid reading medieval hagiography. What other game can claim that?) It's the closest thing in this game to a wizard knowing spells, except it comes from a totally different place than Gary Gygax's belief system about elf nonsense. If you feel like any of this might be anti-Catholic then pls, again, remember this is about the 1400s not about you. I'll go into detail about the saint mechanics in a later episode.

If you remember, Redactor is mainly an alchemist but we had him be a hermit for his last 5 years before he joined the party. He's got knowledge of one saint but it's an important one: St. Anthony. He was a Franciscan friar in the 1200s originally from Portugal who... well he did all kinds of stuff, he was basically the ideal of what you should be like if you're doing that. In the game he's extremely useful. He can heal us a bit. He increases Charisma and Speak Common, vital for any time we've got to talk to anyone. Also Latin and Read/Write which will help in certain situations like dealing with university professors. And he can banish demons, which is important because we're gonna run into some of those.

The saint will always hear you on their day. Saints' days are still a big deal, like the Greeks celebrate the day of the saint you were named after kind of like a birthday. In game I've never used this because you'd really need to have a calendar with you.

Yuna is our nun. Everyone in the party is a Christian of course, that's our whole purpose for going on these adventures, but she's the specialist here. She knows St. Dorothy of Somewhere. I'm not familiar with her. Apparently she's only hears prayers from people with very high Virtue because she won't even consider listening to us. Then we've got St. Jude. One of the apostles but I don't know him well. Patron of hopeless causes, which will be useful because we'll end up in that situation at some point. Then there's St. Longinus. This is the Roman soldier who when they crucified Jesus was like "guys, I think we made a mistake". He also thinks he's too good for us, but perhaps if Yuna gains more Virtue during our adventures he will listen to us.

Plans

I gotta go with Nathan here. We got three members of the party who are running around naked. The core mechanic of the combat system (will explain in detail in a later episode) is about whether a weapon penetrates armor. Our people need at least the most basic level of armor if they're going to fight even the lowest level enemies. Sasha and Nathan have adequate weapons for now, but Redactor and Yuna just have simple clubs, basically tree branches. It would be nice to get them something better.

But how are we going to afford all this? I look in our purse and we only have 10 groschen (money in Darklands will be explained later). Remember how Redactor started out with those formulae for high-end potions? He also started out carrying one of each. These are overkill for any enemy we meet and they're worth a lot of money. So we're going to sell them so we can afford armor and hopefully better weapons.

I go to the local craftsmen, sell our potions (6 florins, wow!) and buy some basic armor for everyone. Redactor and Yuna get cuirboulli, the best kind of leather armor. Sasha gets regular leather and a shield. I'd like to have more (better weapons, some javelins) but I'm feeling fairly confident about our chances in a fight now. We only have 11 pfennigs left, which is basically nothing. So let's try getting into one.

Sasha with her new gear.

First we'll have to kill time until nightfall.

It's worth mentioning here how incredibly outstanding the music is. They did their best to recreate authentic music from the period as MIDIs (this was high tech at the time) and play it through our Soundblaster cards and terrible little speakers.

We wait in the park until nightfall. Then we go out in the streets like Charles Bronson in Death Wish hoping that nobody tries to mug us.

Tbf we don't shoot these guys in the back when they were running away. That always seemed a little much for me. Always kind of left me unsettled like maybe there is a racial thing going on here.

Of course we're immediately set upon by four thugs. They're armed with falchions, these are short machete-like blades.

We don't have a lot of tactical options here since we've only got our own personal weapons. (Later on combat gets more interesting but this admittedly is a persistent problem, that your tactics don't really matter that much.) Most of our people don't do great in this fight, but Nathan quickly turns his opponent into a red streak on the ground. Then he can start stabbing the rest of them in the back. You're at a huge disadvantage trying to dodge two guys' attacks at the same time, so he makes short work of the rest of them.

Conclusion

We pick up a little cash and their weapons and armor. Notice those are 5-quality falchions and 10-quality leather. Every item used in combat has a quality level, with 25 being the baseline. So this is really bad equipment, one of the reasons we were able to beat them. But we can at least sell it for a little money. Unfortunately we're going to need it. Redactor and Yuna got hurt and Sasha lost half her strength. That is, in addition to being the strength she uses while fighting, her long term hit point pool. When strength gets down to 0 you're dead, so if she goes into battle again she risks getting killed.

Our biggest gain from this is that now our local reputation is up to Respected. In Duisburg we will get a little bit better prices and just generally more respect in terms of people cooperating when we ask for jobs or skill training.

Next episode we find out how to heal our party after a tough fight, and hopefully get to see some of the other attractions of the town besides robbers.