Last episode, I screwed up a bunch of stuff in my Arcanum playthrough. Some of it, like pissing off the whole town by throwing a bomb in the wrong place, was fixable by a saved-game reload. Some of it ended up being a double negative turned positive; more on that in a bit. But some of it, like my dumping a bunch of points into Explosives training in a vain hope it'd let me manufacture Fuel, would be hard to reverse.
So I started over! I... do this a lot in Arcanum, dear readers. I promise I won't do it again for this Let's Play, but it is probably the #2 reason for my not having ever completed the game. (#1 being the game's poor flagging of crucial quest items.) Given the sharp opportunity cost of each spent character point, mistakes there trip my perfectionist impulse, prompting "aargh! burn it all down! try again!"
On this go, I decided to pursue experience points a bit harder. I discovered from flipping through the game's manual that I could tell my AI companions to hold off stealing my kills with a single keystroke, so optimizing early trivial fights to get me more eeps was a smoother process than I'd thought. (This game hails from an era where perusing the handbook is all but mandatory. There's no tutorial, no key bindings menu, and no contextual help for UI elements or game-mechanical terms.) And the payoff was greater than I'd thought, too: I'm now 6th level before even leaving the intro town of Shrouded Hills, when on my previous run I'd only attained 5th after reaching the main quest hub of Tarant.
The build so far, for Amaira Grayson II:
- DX +1 (to 6; Throwing prereq)
- ST +1 (to 6; to avoid penalties with boomerang)
- Chemistry 3 (for that Fuel recipe)
- Explosives 1 (Molotov Cocktails)
- Haggle 1 (the earlier you take ranks here, the better, as it makes your money go farther all game)
- Herbology 2 (cash crops and healing items)
- Therapeutics 1 (uh... see below)
- Throwing 1 (early game main combat skill)
About that Therapeutics. It turns out Caelyn did mean Herbology when she said to take Therapeutics! I learned this just barely too late to skip it on the restart, so that's one burnt point I'll have to live with. I'd hoped the Elixir of Persuasion would prove to be helpful anyway, but it turns out it gives you such a tiny boost to your skill that it's effectively useless. Consolation prize: it's one more thing I can cook up cheaply and sell to vendors.
Two miscellaneous things that differ between this restart and the prior attempt: (1) I didn't get scarred by wolves, and (2) the Magick Chests were much less generous, so my companions aren't kitted out in badass armor yet. That business taken care of, back to the LP! Today we quest in Shrouded Hills.
Main Story: Stay Alert. Trust No One. Keep Your Flintlock Handy.
When we arrive in Shrouded Hills, Virgil informs us that Joachim is staying at the local inn. Heading there, however, we find the room inhabited only by a pair of corpses. A note left on the floor says that Joachim slew these would-be assassins and withdrew to Tarant. We're to avoid talking about the fiery blimp incident, in order to avoid leaking information to our enemies, and head to the Tarant telegraph office to find out how to contact Joachim.
Following his advice, when a random gnome in town begs for news about the crash, we blow him off. I'm pretty sure this doesn't change anything significant, but hey, roleplaying points?
Recruiting a Bruiser
At said inn, there's a half-ogre wearing tattered rags, drinking himself into a stupor. We chat him up, and he's grouchy at first, but when we offer to buy him a drink (even though we don't actually seem to get around to doing so..?), he warms to us and expresses a desire to get out of this boring town. What luck! We, too, want to leave this boring town. Let's team up!
You need a certain threshold of CHarisma to be able to recruit this fellow--the aptly named Sogg Mead Mug--but thanks to the CH bonus from our Miracle Operation background, we clear the bar. Sogg is a big sack of hit points with a punch like a backhoe, who will help keep our brittle-boned miracle girl alive in tough fights. Speaking of tough fights, Sogg mentions that there's a pack of bandits blocking the way out of town, which we'll contend with in a bit.
To Rob or Not to Rob
Also hanging out in the inn is a sketchy half-orc who offers us the combination to the local bank's safe in exchange for a cut of the haul from cleaning it out. I take him up on it, given I'd love to take this town of racist fuckwaffles for every penny they have. But I have no actual skill at lockpicking or prowling, so I change my mind and report the chump to Doc Roberts, the town physician and de facto lawman.
This leads to the bank defense battle that went so horribly awry last post! This time I don't even have my bombs yet, thanks to my waiting to cook my own Fuel, so the fight goes in a less hilarious fashion. Doc Roberts rewards us with a nice revolver, which I have Virgil hold on to for later. More importantly, Roberts' good word improves our relations with the rest of the town, cutting down on how much white-person ego-stroking we have to do to conduct business.
A Man, A Plan, A Boot: The Bessie Toone Mine
Now that we can talk to some folks without having to weather a fusillade of racial slurs, we wander around and see what else the locals have going on. It seems that this was once a silver mining town, but the silver in the Bessie Toone mine dried up, leaving only poor quality iron ore to come out of them thar hills. The mine's current owner, Percival Toone, has creditors breathing down his neck. He'd love to just sell the mine off, but his mother's ghost is making that difficult by haunting the place. Additionally, the local "importer" (really more of a junk dealer who talks like a Khajiit), Ristezze, has an interest in the mine's historical artifacts. If we can get him a relic tied to Bessie, he'll tell us about "P. Schuyler and Sons," whose imprint is on the ring pressed on us by the dying gnome in the game's opening scene.
We fight past a bunch of ailing wolves and weirdly hard-to-squish spiders, and indeed meet Bessie's ghost, who's wandering around muttering about someone named "Sarah." We also find an old boot with Bessie's name on it, and a set of gears with a faded inscription "...groth". We report the ghost to Percival, who reveals that "Sarah" is his estranged sister. He hates her so much he won't tell us how to find or contact her, however, even if it'd help resolve the mine issue. The boot goes to Ristezze, who gives us the address of P. Schuyler & Sons in Tarant--and then sells the boot back to us for a few pennies. I guess he just wanted to hold it for a moment?
If It Ain't Broke, Break It. Then Fix It. More XP That Way.
There's one more item of curiosity in Shrouded Hills, and that's a big steam engine chugging away doing enginey things at the back of an old temple. The town enchanter, Jongle, finds it offensive because it interferes with his magicking, and asks us to destroy it. Now, normally I wouldn't agree to such a quest, being a technologist myself, but I'm milking this shithole town for every drop of XP it can give me, so why the hell not. I go find the engine and dunk on it with a stick of dynamite I found in the mine.
Jongle rewards us with some healing potions (vendor trash), but more significantly, tells us the location of the city of Dernholm. He wants us to go fetch him an alchemy ingredient from there, but it's also where Sarah lives that Percival refused to point us toward, so that's the real reward for our steam engine vandalism! Lest I manage to avoid double-crossing anyone, I proceed to pay Constable Owens a visit. He'd prefer to have the engine up and running, so we give him the "groth" sprocket to repair it with, earning some more gold and experience.
A Long Bridge to Anywhere But Here
From Owens we also get the official quest to deal with the bridge bandits Sogg mentioned earlier. There are several ways to clear these punks out. If you have high enough Persuasion, you can claim to be some sort of thieves' guild rep, and tell them to move on. Unfortunately, I haven't bought up any Persuasion, and the Therapeutics potion isn't enough to pull off such an elaborate con. If you aren't working with the constable, you can agree to go sabotage the town's efforts to build an alternative bridge. But I did talk to the constable, so that's also out. (Maybe it would have been more optimal to work with the bandits then consult Owens. Oh well.) So, fighty times it is!
With my previous, heavily armed and armored party, this would be a minimally dangerous fight. But this time Virgil is still in his starting gear, I have only a basic axe and a magic shield for Sogg, and I'm wearing a padded jacket I ripped off a dead bank guard. So I have to get a little creative. I shove an explosive grenade in the bandit leader's face (for some reason, the backblast doesn't hurt me or my companions), killing him instantly, and temporarily incapacitate his massive half-ogre bodyguards with stun grenades. The boomies came from Brehgo's cave back at the very beginning, and I'd been saving them for just such an occasion! After that it's a matter of mopping up, and we've both solved Owens' quest and found our way out of town.
Next Time: Dernholm
Up to here, I've been playing spoiled, since it's ground I've covered many times over my several false starts. Past the Shrouded Hills bridge, however, it's a whole new world, and I'm going into it--well, not quite blind, but only on half-remembered fragments of the couple times I did make it this far. I'll leave walkthroughs alone from here unless I get stuck!
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