First on the itinerary is Renald the Eldest, of Holtburg. The name's kind of a joke. Since release Holtburg has been home to two shopkeepers, Renald the Younger and Renald the Elder. Guess this is the head honcho. He's a cantakerous old coot, and wants me to fetch a mug that some drudges stole before he'll consider my reply. He gives me coordinates, which makes finding the place easy, but finding my way to it is a little trickier. Overland travel tends to annoy me. There always seems to be a cluster of enemies too powerful for me between here and there. This forces me to take long detours, get lost, and occasionally run for my life.
Fortunately, I don't meet anything too tough on my way to retrieve the mug. It's in a bunker, not a dungeon, but I do have to rough up a bunch of brown drudges outside before getting in.
I return the mug to Renald, who says, essentially, "Thanks for the offer, but I'm actually a racist and there's no way I'll do business with that effing smurf." Well thanks, asshole. At least he has the decency to give me a 15K trade note for my trouble.
Hoping for more luck in Shoushi, I hop a portal there and talk to the herbalist Gonjoku Dan. He wants me to find him a certain rare herb.
The cave is not really worth mentioning: generic twisty tunnels populated by Mosswarts. The herb is on a big spike of rock in the final room, and annoyingly blends into the scenery. If I hadn't been cycling the targets with [ and ] out of habit, I would have never even noticed it. The fighting is good, though. I find a Swamp Stone among the corpses, which would have been foreshadowing for my next post, but isn't.
In exchange for my help, Dan gives me his agreement and a unique potion. This would be good, if it wasn't a one-use potion with a crappy effect. So, I move on to Yaraq and my old friend, Lubziklan al-Luq.
Lubby still doesn't see the wisdom in security, and thus I'm off to another dungeon to bash drudges and retrieve stolen goods. This dungeon, however, turns out to be exceptionally well-designed. It's drudges all the way, but every room is interesting. One especially impressive one has a mesh floor, through which you can see the room below.
Later, down a spiral staircase, I find a series of corridors where I fight a lot of drudges.
Navigating the corridors, I eventually reach a multi-level room with drudges perched on the upper level. They actually do a decent job tactically. One jumps down to fight me, while the other snipes me with throwing daggers. Further in, taking shortcuts via lockpicking, I run into a room with an obvious secret door:
Somewhat obnoxiously, the secret passage is simply a longer route to the final room, although I do get to beat up some Red Rats for their tails.
The final room is a suitably epic finale to AC newbiedom: A battle royale in a room with at least a dozen drudges of all colors, some of which snipe me with throwing daggers et al while their companions engage in melee. Despite challenging odds and needing to use a few potions, I prevail and return to the al-Luq estate with not only the needed wine, but a Glorious Apple as well.
His reaction to the apple is a bit troubling. I mean, given that his business is apples, you'd think he'd know that apple trees are grown from clippings, not seeds. Between him and his party-girl, aduterating daughter, I worry about the economic future of Yaraq. The al-Luqs are set up to run the whole town into the ground. Occupy Yaraq, anyone? Before that can happen, I get my Slaving-for-the-Man ass out of town and back to Sanamar, where I turn in the agreements, and Renald's insult, for some exp, some money, and a pack that I already have.
And that wraps up newbiedom. Now it's on to... LOWBIEDOM!
Love the blog Bellos! My apologies if I missed it, but what is your plan moving forward in terms of which charater(s) you will play?
ReplyDeleteAre you going to choose one of the four that you started and only play that character?
Are you going to shuffle between multiple characters?
If your goal is to see all of the content in Asheron's Call, I would think that you would have to continue the kind of multi-character playstyle that you began with because if you only play one character you will out level much of the content.
I guess it just depends on your methodology: whether you are going to broadly sweep across all content in each level range before progressing to the next tier (newbie, lowbie, midbie, highbie, etc), or if you are going to go for more of a trail-blazing on one character approach.
However you choose to go about it, good luck!