holoz0r plays pillars of Eternity: Part six

I'm in the catacombs. There's a great big sewer running down the middle, and I'm not sure if my combat prowess is going to be up to scratch in this new, scary environment. I press on. I'm challenged shortly thereafter by the king of all spores, the Dank Spore. It doesn't tell me any memes, and it doesn't subject me to a poor quality EA game that masquerades as an early prototype for No Man's Sky.

Instead, it does a good job at wiping out half my party.

I recover quickly enough, and kill some more sporelings. I wonder if in true spore form, there will be an airborne ailment for me to have to deal with later in life, once I'm retired, and filthy rich in my stronghold, with a prison full of ... well, prisoners.

Note to self, start an olde-time 401k, or retirement fund or something for my adventurers. The last thing I would want is some good-for-nothing wizard taking me to tribunal for spore inhalation later on down the track. As I explore the map, I find one of the exits (the one I didn't enter the map from, surprisingly) is the temple of Woedica, or something, which is where one of the main quests needed me to go!

This means that I will extract sweet sweet experience, and progression from the game; which is what I'm after from this quick gameplay session.

There's some guards out the front. One of my options to bribe them, the other is to beat their sorry arses into oblivion. I choose the later. I fight my way through, and eventually reach a chamber full of shrouded men and women who attack me without any words or dialogue, presumably due to the fact that I attacked their guards.

I kill them, in a tense battle, where I lose half my party. Its a tense battle full of me thinking, 'shit', there's going to be another one of those THE PARTY HAS DIED screens again. Thankfully, there isn't. Once they're dead, I enter watcher mode, and learn about the story line some more. I find myself in possession of the lead key, or the leaden key, and armed with some more information regarding the queen I was meant to track down. I exit, stage left, and note that I have further infiltrated the town.

I have arrived and the 'First Fires' and this means that there's a whole lot more exploring to do!

I've got two options, an embassy, or a palace. I choose the embassy first. Embassies are usually not the people who live in the city, and maybe they want me to kill the person at the palace. I could do that, for XP, and gold. Maybe. Let's see...

The Embassy is a bust. There's a boring diplomat who tells me about his homelands. I crack open one of the chests with my poor lockpicking skills, and steal some coin. I move onto the palace to see what riches are there to take. It's very palace-y, I notice immediately upon my arrival. I could get rich here.

I talk to the person who claims they are the page of the palace. For all I know, they could be a spy. They probably are. They tell me that there's some secret discussions going on about animancy which is the thing that involves raising the dead into husks or something. I can't get into the meeting. So, I steal some gold and get caught in front of the guards. They don't seem to do anything other than mark down my reputation a tiny bit.

I carry on, and go and intimidate the record keeper in order to try and get some more information. I get very little from him, but a quest update. I've done a good job today intimidating people. The big city is a pretty overwhelming place, and my characters go weary. I'm going back to the pub to read my journal and figure out what to do next.