Another impractical wine cellar

Having completed my test-drive phase, it's time to anoint my main. Of the four options, I rule out Elderwulf first, being less than impressed with his performance. Neira goes next, for essentially being redundant. She doesn't seem to do more damage than Ferrion, and lacks the additional benefit of Cleaving. That leaves Ferrion and Kalixia, and after thinking on it a while, I've decided as Kalixia for my main, and Ferrion as my major alt. While she's weaker, I like the extra challenge and fringe benefits that the Finesse template provides, particularly the increased run speed. With that decided, I go about getting her a little upgrade:

Ta-dah! Explorer armor is, in my opinion, terribly underrated. No, it's not uber, but it looks great and provides an excellent set of level III buffs. (I actually thought it provided a full suite of creature and life buffs. No such luck, but it's still a good deal for a player who's struggling to bring his Arcane Lore up.) Getting it is a bit more trouble than I figured, though. I had plenty enough Lucky Gold Letters from the key dungeons, but they were spread around all my characters. To mule them safely, I decided to buy a house, but that required a Writ of Refuge. The only writ-granting items I felt I had a chance of getting at this point were the Minor Atlan Stones. It turned out that getting to those stones is a lot harder than I remember, with level 50 spawns guarding them. After Ferrion got killed once and sent running once, I decided "eff this" and muled my stuff the old-fashioned way instead: Find abandoned dungeon, drop stuff on ground, log out log in. No need for drama.

The stamps weren't trouble at all. Once I'd checked the chart on the wiki I was able to plan a route to get everything I needed in two trips: one at the end of one session and the beginning of the next. I hit a snag late in the game when the info on obtaining the Ring of Quickness turned out to be wrong. The wiki says Samsur/Nanto, but it's actually Samsur/Yanshi. Fortunately I could correct that without waiting another day. Despite these snags, I got a full set of gear and, thus armed, set off for my next destination: the facility hub and it's wellspring of low-level questing.

The hub's design is practical rather than aesthetic. The corridor branches out in three directions. Center takes you to three grind-heavy but rewarding questlines. Left and right each take you to a series of rooms, each holding 3 portals to quest dungeons appropriate to a low-level character. The above picture, for example, is taken from the level 10+ room. There's also the 15+ room, the 20+ room, and so on. Before each portal is a Warden that explains the quest to you. First up is the Ice Tachi quest:

It's so simple as to be barely worth mentioning, but it's a good tutorial for how the Facility Hub works: you get the quest reward, turn it in to the warden for an experience bonus, then keep it for your own use. In this case, the Tachi is a decent lowbie weapon with multiple level II enchants, but since it's Heavy and I'm Finesse, I make a note to give it to an Ivory Crafter for some extra exp.

From here, I move straight on to the Folthid Cellar quest, which is a lot more substantial. The objective is the Dagger of Tikola, although the warden will also accept the Dull Dagger as proof of my success. (I thought the Dull Dagger was a red herring that existed to fake out people at the halfway point, but this turns out to not be the case.) The quest starts off with me visiting Lady Raxanza Folthid (there's a mouthful of a name), who gives me a key and asks me to bring back a drink for her. What is it with these nobles and their exotic drinks? Aleval, Lubziklan, that guy from Al-Arqas, and now Lady Folthid have all asked me to retrieve liquors they foolishly keep stored in dens full of monsters. Can't they go to the bar or something? Or maybe, you know, not store their spirits in effing dungeons?

In any case, the Folthid Cellar is very well-designed. It's twisty, but not to the extent that you get confused. The first half takes place in a series of tunnels around the central room shown above. You have to pull the lever (visible on the left), to open a door on the bottom floor. A skilled jumper could probably take a few leaps and cut the quest time way down, but I take the long and simple path in the hopes of finding more loot along the way. The enemies are Mosswarts to start, with a few Golems thrown in along the way. Mosswarts are a bit of a problem since their weakness is fire, the one element I don't have access to. But they're weak, so I manage pretty well.

Once I get through the door, though, it's a slightly different story. The Old Nectar Lady Folthid requested is in a chest here, but there's also a window into the lower levels of the dungeon. Back in the old days, the quest didn't tell you about the dagger, and this would have been the hint that there was more to this errand than meets the eye. In any event, the way forward is to jump down into the green tunnels. The tunnels are inhabited by Mosswart Shamans and Undeads, nothing special. Then comes the big trouble:

Liches. Their weapons aren't so tough, but their War Magic is brutal. Plus, their only big weakness is fire which, again, I don't have. I wind up fighting three at once (forgetting about my Lugian gems, AGAIN), and it's just too much. I die.

Those who have been paying attention will remember that I picked up a rare gem back in Holtburg. When I die, I drop it. Further, since it's late and I'm tired, I'm not able to go back for it tonight, which means that by the time I do get to it, the corpse has decayed. I'm not terribly put out, though. Honestly, the gem was kind of fools gold. It's so awesome that you don't want to use it unless you're in a really bad bind, but if you're in a situation that bad it probably won't help. I suppose I could have hopped over to the marketplace and traded it for something uber, but what's that going to do other than make the lowbie game boring and tedious. Although now that I think of it, I could have traded it for a writ to solve my housing problem...

Um, anyway! After logging in the next day I decide to go in better prepared this time. I hop through the town network to Cragstone, where I offload my loot and turn in the Ice Tachi to an Ivory Collector. The lion's share of the experience goes into Magic Resist. I also visit the Healer and invest in Health Tinctures and Stamina Elixirs, because 25 health per potion is not going to cut it anymore. Thus prepared, I head back into the dungeon, bull through the first half, then use my gems before jumping down into the tunnels.

With the preparations I've made, the Liches are much easier, although I still have to keep on my toes. I resist more often, and chug more efficiently when I don't. Problem is, they still come in groups of two and three, sometime accompanied by Mosswart Shamans. I also have no idea where I'm supposed to be going. I bumble around a lot, finding a lever, and then another, and then a blind leap into a pit. At this point I've only got 2 health tinctures left (Gotta bring more next time.) I consider turning back, but since I've come this far, I figure might as well try to finish it up. At the pit's bottom is a path leading to the final fight: neither Liches nor Mosswarts nor Golems, but a quartet of Sclavus.

Sclavus are essentially lizardmen (or maybe snakemen, whatever) that have made the BlackMire Swamp south of old Yanshi their personal fiefdom. They're predisposed to throwing weapons and Life Magic. I can't remember their vulnerabilities, so I go with lightning. (Later I check the wiki and see it's cold, which makes perfect sense because cold-blooded reptiles can't maintain their body heat, duh.) The battle is tense since I'm so low on potions, but if they have War Magic they don't use it, and in the end my melee skills are better than theirs. The chest in the room contains the Dull Dagger and an Ancient Shard of Metal.

The prize I'm after, the Dagger of Tikola, is on one of the Sclavus bodies, along with a key leading to the exit portal. I whoop on seeing that the dagger is a fire weapon... then boo when it's Light instead of Finesse. Damn. I show it to the Warden to prove my awesomeness, then toss it to the vendor for a few hundred pyreals. On the other hand, the Dull Dagger looks like it might be useful. No enchants or multi-strike, but an absurdly high max damage. I decide to give it a test drive next quest.

Before calling it a night, I check the wiki and discover that this Metal Shard is supposed to be given to an NPC on the surface. Doing so nets me a big experience reward and an infodump about an unrelated quest:

I suspect I'll be following up on this lead later.

I'm quite satisfied with Folthid Cellar, which is one of the better quests I've run thus far. It's a meaty dungeon with a good variety of enemies and not too high a challenge level, plus some decent flavor with the levers and the secret window. I especially like the implied lore in the dungeon: At first it seems to be a simple mosswart infestation, then it turns out the shamans are conspiring with a group of liches, and then the Sclavus turn out to be behind it all. And finally, the sequel hook. Fun. Next up is the Glendon Wood Dungeon, which I can't remember doing before. We'll see if it's as interesting.