EFFORTPOST Darklands LP VII: We reach our destination

Let's drop into this little village along the way. Who knows what we might find there?

I have a chat with the village chief.

Ye shall be as the gods, knowing good from evil.

Where have I heard that before? I know it's in Genesis, but who said it?

Let's head over to the church as long as we're here. Redactor's Divine Favor is depleted, but through some intensive prayer he can regain it.

Umm... wtf is going on here?

St. Simon Magus and St. Elymas. Have you figured it out yet?

There were a lot of them but they were poor unskilled villagers and they attacked us piecemeal so we made short work of them. The village chief had some armor slightly better than ours so I'll equip one of our people with it. (It's a good thing nobody complains about wearing the armor of a guy we just killed.) Now let's see what we can do about their demonic shrine.

Nice one Yuna. This is why we put so many points into her Religion skill. It really comes in handy sometimes. Sasha picks up a small increase to Virtue.

Now our cross country navigation is going to get complicated here because we're supposed to go "North of Bremen" but North of Bremen is the North Sea. So presumably we're looking for a place close by.

Oh frick. We're not just gonna die, we're gonna be dragged down into heck. Dying isn't such a big deal since ordinarily we'd just go to heaven and I'd have to create a new replacement character, but these bastards will steal our souls. There's no way we can beat them at this point. This is an utterly hopeless situation. Fortunately Redactor knows St. Anthony, the patron of hopeless causes.

Thanks for the intervention, bro!

We find Bremen. It's actually a little bit inland up the river. That explains a lot. We'll pop in for a bit to learn a new saint, maybe grab some bratwurst. The four choices we have are St. Francis and three extremely obscure ones. I remember that Francis is very generous in listening to you even if you aren't terribly virtuous, so he's a good one to pick for the early game.

Oh sweet. He's totally overpowed. He can increase our Virtue, which will let us supplicate some of those more difficult saints.

They make decent bows here so I pick one up for Nathan. It won't make a huge difference in most battles, but sometimes you can shoot down an enemy right at the start of the battle. Since fighting an enemy two vs. one gives you a huge advantage, anything you can do to reduce their numbers early on helps greatly.

I go quite a ways to the North past flooded marshes and finally find what I believe our destination is.

We haven't gotten around to buying a rope yet, but our people are only using light armor and weapons so fortunately with a little luck we're all able to climb up. Now we run into this darn dwarf. They're not necessarily bad people but they can be infuriating to deal with.

Here I'm confused because we've obviously run into a bug. Redactor has a mace. Sasha has the sword sword. Either way, it's a good trade. We only have pretty cheap basic weapons right now. When we finish this quest, we'll get paid more than enough to replace them. (Later in the game we would have to guess this a lot of thought if he was asking for something like a high-quality brass handgun.) Now let's just hope we can get back to Bremen without a fight and buy a replacement weapon quick.

We have to run away from some giant spiders but other than that have no trouble. At Bremen we buy Sasha a long sword. It's not quite as good at penetrating armor as her short sword was but does considerably more damage. That should be better because we're avoiding heavily armored enemies so far.

Now we need to get back to Wesel (I think it was?) and deliver the history scroll to complete our quest and get paid. I've been writing this for a long time and I still gotta upload the screenshots, so I'm gonna dash through this without recording every random encounter along the way.

It's November now and the snow has begun to fall.

We run into the infuriating problem that I can't remember who hired me for this quest and it doesn't show you in game. Fortunately some kind soul made an external program to read your saved game file and tell you all the quests you have going on. It's the Fugger in Wesel.

A mere 4 florins isn't that much, but it's a good start for us. Next time we can buy some more equipment and maybe even some skill training. Our people's combat skills are good enough now that with a little bit better armor I think we can try taking on a tougher quest next time: A robber knight!

We picked up 10 Fame points! This is basically your score in the game. It's how much recognition you get from people across the Empire, not just in one town. People take you way more seriously and it's an end unto itself.

When I look at the illuminated manuscript I want to see me staring right back at me.