EFFORTPOST Darklands LP XIII: Detour

Darklands Series

1 - Darklands LP Part I

2 - Darklands LP Part II: Charles Bronson Edition

3 - Darklands LP III: Nuns and Coins

4 - Darklands LP Ep IV: Introduction to Equipment & Combat

5 - Darklands LP Part V: We finally briefly go out into the dark lands

6 - Darklands LP VI: We actually start a quest!

7 - Darklands LP VII: We reach our destination

8 - Darklands LP VIII: Raubritter confrontation & learning how combat works

9 - Darklands LP IX: I'm not giving you my goddarn alchemical materials

10 - Darklands LP X: We actually do some alchemy!

11 - Darklands LP XI: The Main Plot

12 - Darklands LP XII: Halloween Edition

Episode XIII

Welcome back. I know it's been a while. I apologize. Last time we slaughtered the Satanists at their sabbat (at least the ones we couldn't save) and found out where their base is. We now have a clearly defined mission: Assault the Fortress Monastery in Denmark and break the next seal. (Or Schleswig-Holstein or something, I'm not opening up that can of worms.)

That means hiking across the entire Empire from Teschen nearly at the border of Hungary all the way to Denmark. No doubt we'll run into a few adventures along the way.

At least that was the plan until we had to make a detour.

Long story short, I had written a whole episode but I was wondering why my guys were suddenly getting hurt so bad in fights. It turns out their armor had burned up. For most of them, it was down to very low quality. Poor Nathan was completely naked. This has got to be from the potions that the witches threw at us at the sabbat. They didn't do much immediate damage but they've derailed our plans for months. Now we've got to make enough money to replace that armor. Which means I have to grind.

All the stuff I've showed you about how the game works, I gotta go back and do more of that. Kill bad guys, make potions, travel around, learn about new saints and alchemical formulas, trade. I'm not complaining. I love doing this. But in this episode we won't be following the main plot and hitting the Fortress Monastery yet. So instead I'll focus on the random encounters.

Did I ever mention that about half of the game is random encounters? These pop up when you're traveling on the world map. There's, I dunno, at least a hundred of them. You never know which one will hit next which is what keeps you on your toes. That's why "grinding" never gets boring. I haven't mentioned many of them yet because each episode was designed to teach about specific gameplay mechanics and it would be distracting. So I guess this is going to be the episode about random encounters and the smaller less important places you run into on the map. I'm still cutting a lot out and just including the more interesting ones.

Our new goal: Go wander around and do Darklands stuff until we've got a lot of money and then go back to Dresden and buy high-quality armor for everyone.

Let's Go!

Uh oh. Looks like we pissed off the wrong people. The Wild Hunt isn't a DLC for some game about a dour gray man collecting s*x cards, it's what the witches send to hunt you down when they identify you as a threat. Those b-words are pissed off about what we did at the sabbat. I guess we'll have to deal with them eventually.

Well I'm not gonna let this sod hut just sit there looking sinister at me. Let's have Yuna ask St. Dorothy of Montau for some insight. She lived in this region, dying just recently in 1394 as an anchoress in the land of the Teutonic Order. She'll know what to do.

Well that's pretty bad. I don't consider even Yorkies and Cavaliers to be "slavering hounds from heck" but they can come pretty close when they want attention. Time to kick down this door.

She has some potions, so she might be some threat. But as we've seen before, wolf teeth can't penetrate chainmail. Sure enough, her alchemy degrades our abilities a lot but the wolves aren't able to take advantage and she goes down fast.

What would Satan not want us to do? What would really piss him off? We're going to forgive her.

Let's hope this works out better than every time I've ever tried to save a woman from herself IRL amirite.

We come across a cave. This is one of those sites where somebody sent us on a fetch quest long ago. Nathan uses his agility to climb up a cliff and throw the rope down to bring the rest of the party up. Now we've got to deal with the dwarf who has the item. I got 16 gold florins, which is a lot more than we'll get paid for the quest, but who cares? It will give me a little bit of fame which is worth more to me now. If I need money I've got a bunch of dead guys' armor and surplus alchemical potions.

Redactor is making some serious fricking money at this point. He can reliably make potions and sell them at a profit. The only problem is that the materials required are scattered all over the country so I've got to keep traveling to keep him supplied.

Ugh, one of these guys. He seems pretty sketchy to me. In the past we had to pay these guys off because they really will curse you if you don't and you can't just kill a friar because you think he's bullpooping you. But not this time, pal. You're a Dominican? Let's see what St. Dominic has to say about this.

We get out of paying him a little bit. More importantly we may have saved his soul. This guy has been led pretty far astray but hopefully they can get his shit sorted out down in Rome. (You can also pray to saints who specialize in calling out liars with the same effect except the text is completely different. In that he admits that his curses are from the power of Satan, not God.)

Against the Wild Hunt we all gotta stick together. My party is pretty weak at Woodwise and especially Stealth, so I have no confidence in our ability to use subterfuge here. We are really good at fighting though. I'll just take them on head-on.

Bigfoot is from Oregon, so this is just my ordinary day to day life. We defeat the hellhounds and rescue him of course.

I've got a hunch that this fruit will permanently increase someone's strength by a few points. Who to give it to? Both of the girls are at 32 strength (we already upgraded Sasha this way) and I'm at a mere 31. This is an intolerable situation. Girls can't be stronger than me. Redactor gets the apple and a bump up to 35 strength.

I go to Prag and ask if the King of Bohemia needs me to do any quests for him. This is Wenceslsaus (Vaclvav) IV, a really important guy. Prague had a golden age when his father and him were ruling. Both were also the Holy Roman Emperor and made it their capital. This is when the famous Charles University was founded for example. But soon the situation will spin out of control. He was deposed as Emperor a few years ago. Disputes about religion, nationality, and plain old factionalism are debstabilizing the kingdom and he is barely holding on to power. His death in 1419 will be the start of the Hussite Wars.

A Hussite wagenburg. Wagons were lashed together into a defensive wall and defended by guys with crossbows and guns. Apparently it was a pretty effective tactic because they repeatedly defeated the combined forces of all of Europe.

(One part of the game that never ended up getting implemented but still has vestigial traces of it in the data files is the Hussites. They're suspicious of you because you're German, but if you can talk them down from violence they'll warn you about the Knights Templar. I guess we're all on the same side after all. The game's designer told me that there was supposed to be a lot more regional content like this but they didn't have enough time to include much of it, so the whole game world is pretty much based on the mythology of western Germany between the Rhine and the Elbe. It's too bad. There's so much more you could do with this setting.)

Anyway, the Emperor's aides at least consider giving me an audience before telling me to frick off. I guess at 123 fame ("slight reputation") it's hard to get a face to face meeting with one of the most important people in the world.

After a lot of grinding I get, I dunno, maybe 100 florins from quests and selling dead people's armor. Back to Dresden. It's enough to finally get everyone fully fitted with 34-quality chainmail. Nathan is even strong enough (barely) to wear partial plate armor without encumbrance penalties, at least if he's not wounded. I've got some backup armor in case ours gets burned up again.

We can carry that around because while Darklands has harsh penalties for weighing down your people with equipment too heavy for them in battle, outside of combat you can carry as much as you want. I routinely end up carrying around 30 sets of armor after a jaunt through the countryside killing a few people as I go along. It might seem surprising that this is allowed given the extreme attention to detail and realism in other parts of the game, down to measuring the time of day using medieval units instead of hours. But I'm not complaining.

Compare it to Bethesda games. In Bethesda games I spend probably 1/3 of my time either hauling loot back to the store to sell or deciding which loot is worth picking up. And of course you can't just go directly to the store. You go to the city and then walk down the same goddarn street you have a million times before to go to the store. Why? What in God's name would justify wasting my time like that? Why can't I just walk up to a city and immediately access the trading screen? This isn't cutting edge technology. Betrayal at Krondor came out a year after this. In that when you reach a city it switches from 3D mode to a picture of the city and you just click on the shop and bam, you're there. Why can't that evil little leprechaun Todd Howard do the same for us 30 years later?

Meta

Anyway, I think we're ready for the Fortress Monastery now. TBQH it's been many years since I actually played the game to this point. (It's taken me something like 50 hours to get this far.) So I can't remember how tough the Monastery is, but I believe it's supposed to be mid-game content.

There's a couple big mid-game quests that I wanted to show you first, but they only spawned in distant places like Aachen, so if I tried to go there it would probably have disappeared by the time I got there. I guess I'll do those after the Monastery.

BTW I am playing pretty much optimally here using every trick I know. I'm trying to go into everything way overpowered because if I lose it means I have to savescum and that wastes a lot of time. There's a lot of stuff that I'm skipping over because the game has so much content and so many features that I'm afraid I'd die of old age before I got to the end. My plan is that after I win I'll go back and show you this stuff, at least if @kaamrev badgers me enough.