Easter Eggs

[Slawbug]

I'm trying to compile a list of all the easter eggs in all SW games. Some of them I have already, others I have probably forgotten, and there are a number of games I don't have anything down for. Any help filling in the gaps, or confirming of question marks, would be appreciated.

 

---

 

Exile 1:

- Brothel in Silvar in original version (rumour???)

 

Exile 2:

- Eas ter egg (different versions in 1.0 and 2.0, I believe)

- "The turgid fleshy sex drones of Almaria sweep down upon you, hauling you away to pleasure-soaked realms beyond human comprehension. You immediately forget about Exile and its troubles, and well you should!"*

- "Joyously, you succumb to evil. Soon, all of Exile will knuckle under to your vicious rule. None of that wussy Ultima moral stuff here. Well done!"*

- "Delicatessen is a majorly cool movie."*

- "Exposed at last, King Micah rips off his face, to reveal...."*

- "You rapidly convert to Catholicism. The demons flee in horror."* (*?)

- "You gently succumb to death's sweet embrace. Your last thought: you never thought goldfish could be so vicious."*

 

Exile 3:

- Pants dungeon (A dark, embittered man sits at the bar, waiting for you. / "Jeff. What's it to you?" / "I'm here to tell you my whole life story. What'd you expect?" / "Yeah. Isn't that what everyone's supposed to do? You walk in, some random weird looking heavily armed people from the Empire's enemy, and I'm supposed to just spill my guts to you. Right?"' / "It's so implausible it makes me sick." / "I didn't want to be in this game. It's shareware, for God's sake! I wanted to be in a nice commercial game." / "Like Daggerfall! That would be awesome! Not much dialogue, but high exposure! Great for good roles! Or Diablo! Or even Ultima Online! Anything with a nice shiny box." / "Whatever. Blah, blah, blah." / "Oh, just go on and finish the game. You're close. I'm going to work on my resume." / "Betrayal in Antara. Love to be in that!" You leave him to his daydream.)

- "Anaximander unzips his robe and steps from it. His body is much better developed than you would have thought. The reward for your long, hard adventures is at hand!"*

- "She slowly unzips her skin tight leather jumpsuit. "Oh boy", you think."*

- &*() : "If Valorim..." / "You want to save..." / "Back up your save file... / "Burma Shave."

- Road signs: "Before they send us..." / "To the grave..." / "The Alien Beasts use..." / "Burma Shave."

- Monastery of Madness: "Disclaimer:  With the exceptions of the phrases 'Feisty Slap of Pain' and 'Tae Kwan Leap' (which came from other sources) all martial arts terms/concepts were taken from actual Hong Kong Kung-Fu movies. Or the TV series 'Kung Fu.'  Disclaimer, Pt. 2: |Remember - friends don't let friends watch Kung-Fu movies. They'll make your brain hurt."

 

BoE:

- &*() : "If Valorim..." / "You want to save..." / "Back up your save file... / "Burma Shave."

 

Nethergate:

- Alternate chapter titles and quotes

- &*() : "Happy Celt says: Visit spidweb.com!"

 

Avernum 1 (new):

- ?

 

Avernum 2 (new):

- Eas ter egg (new)

- "Delicatessen is a majorly cool movie. [This Easter Egg secret message was added in 1995. Still totally true.]"*

 

Avernum 3 (new):

- Pants dungeon (Avernum 3 / Cynical rewrite of Exile 3 / A portly, embittered man sits at the bar, waiting for you. He looks up at you with bleary eyes. "I'm Jeff. What's it to you?" / Jeff grumbles."I'm here to tell you my whole life story. What'd you expect?" / "Yeah. Isn't that what everyone's supposed to do? You walk in, some random weird looking heavily armed people from the Empire's enemy, and I'm supposed to just spill my guts to you. Right?" / "It's so implausible it makes me sick." / "I didn't want to be in this game. It's shareware, for God's sake! I wanted to be in a nice commercial game." / "Like Baldur's Gate! That would be awesome! Not much dialogue, but high exposure! Great for good roles! Or Diablo! Everquest! Even, if I had to, Asheron's Call. Anything with a nice shiny box." / "Whatever. Blah, blah, blah." / "Oh, just go on and finish the game. You're close. I'm going to work on my resume." / "Bah. Now, one of the Final Fantasy games? Love to be in them!" / You leave him to his dreams.)

 

BoA:

- Nothing?

 

Nethergate: Resurrection

- ??? (#1 a small patch of yellow mushrooms near the far west side of the valley in the woods north of the riven and south of the town / #2 just north of Shadow walley fort. It is in the wood near the stone pillar by the north wall / #3 in the corner behind the entrance to the Goagh-Nar)

 

Geneforge 1:

- "If he goes to Vietnam, I want a Sholai in a bowl of rice ready to bust a cap in his ass."*

- Create Ornk

- Messages for 8 of a creation type on title screen

 

Geneforge 2:

- Create Ornk

 

Geneforge 3:

- Create Ornk (someone remind me what was involved in G3)

- Messages for 8 of a creation type on title screen

 

Geneforge 4:

- Create Ornk (Uberoozebeast)

 

Geneforge 5:

- Create Ornk

 

Avernum 4-6:

- ?

 

Avadon 1-3:

- ?

 

A:EFTP, A2:CS, A3:RW (new):

- ?

 

Queen's Wish:

- ?

[Dintiradan]

I can confirm the "eas ter egg" dungeon in A2, and the Pants Dungeon in A3. I can't think of any Easter Eggs in BoA (in the Vogel scenarios, at least). There are some encounters that are very difficult to trigger, but none are there for humour, just optional fights.

 

EDIT: I'm not familiar with "woman in jumpsuit". Elucidate SVP.

[Dikiyoba]

The Uberoozebeast should be under Geneforge 4, not Avernum 4 (although that would be quite the easter egg). And of course, Geneforge 5 has a create ornk canister too, hidden in the Lost Dera Vault behind about a million hidden switches.

 

Dikiyoba.

[Triumph]

The Create Ornk canister in G3 lurks in a hidden chamber in Khor's Deeps; you must pull a hard-to-spot lever to get in.

[Slawbug]

Originally Posted By: E/A 3

Anaximander unzips his robe and steps from it. His body is much better developed than you would have thought. The reward for your long, hard adventures is at hand!

She slowly unzips her skin tight leather jumpsuit. "Oh boy", you think.

The first one is in the list of special Anaximander dialogues. I have no idea if you can actually trigger it in-game. The second one is in the list of conditional encounter dialogues. I have no idea what encounter it is part of, or if you can actually trigger it in-game.

[Slawbug]

Originally Posted By: Lilith, loooong ago

Typing &, *, ( or ) (Shift-7, 8, 9 or 0) also produces hidden messages in many Spiderweb games, including Nethergate.

Does anyone know what these messages are? Presumably, this applies only to the older engines (Exile, Nethergate, Blades, First Trilogy).

[keira]

(Blades of Exile)

 

If Valorim ...

You want to save ...

Back up your save files ...

Burma Shave.

 

 

 

I remember E3's being different, though.

[Slawbug]

Could you be thinking of E2's? It seems unlikely that BoE -- but not E3 -- would have discussed saving Valorim.

[keira]

Pretty sure I'm thinking of BoE.

[Slawbug]

No, I meant could you be thinking of E2's being different. Since that rhyme was reported for E3 earlier, and you reported it for BoE but think there was another, maybe the other one was in E2.

[keira]

Oh. That makes more sense.

[Lilith]

Avernum 3 did have a different version: Before they send us / To the grave / Alien beasts use / Burma Shave.

[Slawbug]

Those are road signs, not the &*() message.

[Quazicore]

Can someone define how to obtain the easter eggs that dont have explanations?

[Khoth]

Most of them are buried in scripts or in the program itself, with no way to actually trigger them in-game.

[Milla]

I think with the original Nethergate to get the easter egg you had to go to one corner of the world map then go to it's opposite.

 

Apparently no one found that one until Jeff mentioned it.

 

At least that is what I remember of that story.

[Milla]

Just found this in Exile 2:

 

...Joyously, you succumb to evil. Soon, all of

Exile will knuckle under to your vicious rule. None of that wussy Ultima moral stuff here.

[Slawbug]

I've added some new Exile II hidden text that Ess-Eschas found (as well as some others that I apparently found years ago and then forgot about).

 

Anyone have other easter eggs that should go on the list?  I'm sure I've heard others that aren't here...

[Ess-Eschas]

I have a few more to add to the list! I have a feeling there might be some more that I’ve forgotten, but here’s what I have for now:

 

Exile II:

 

– This game also has a &*() message. It reads:

 

If Exile ...
You want to save ...
Back up your save slots ...
Burma Shave.

 

– At least in version 1.0.1, pressing B beings up this this in the log:

 

'Hmmm.'

 

Maybe this used to be a debug command at one time?

 

– There’s a very well hidden secret room in the Trapped Halls. You can find this by going to the library/dining area in the living quarters. The walls next to location x = 10, y = 35 can be broken using Move Mountains, but there’s no way to know this, since they look identical to normal walls. Inside is nothing of any importance – except the word HI, written boldly in white walls. See here:

https://imgur.com/a/vGsH5GE

 

Exile III:

 

– Here’s another hidden string:

 

‘Your head gone, the creature sews the head of a small dog on the stump in its place. Boy, do you feel silly.’

 

– Find the tiny lizard that’s running around the main hall of Fort Emergence. If you say the following to it, something interesting will happen:

 

‘hoho’

 

Specifically:

 

Spoiler

"Sss! You know the secret lizard password! Who told you? Ssssss! The other lizards must know!" The lizard runs off, tail twitching in agitation.

 

– There are some nice responses if you talk back to animals. Of particular note, perhaps, is that if you give a garbled comment to a normal cow, it will reply:

 

‘Mooo. Never heard of it. Mooo.’

 

– This is definitely a feature, so I’m not sure if it counts, but the ‘About Exile III’ dialogue contains a ‘Thought for the day’ box at the bottom. This thought is randomised, and is taken from a selection of tongue-in-cheek comments. Examples include:

 

‘This fine program was brought to you by coffee. "Coffee - it's what's for dinner."’

 

‘No Vahnatai were harmed during the making of Exile III: Ruined World.’

 

‘Exile III: Ruined World is a work of fiction. Any similarity between its characters and persons living or dead is coincidental. Unless, of course, it isn't.’

 

‘Thirty Helens Agree: Honesty is the best policy.’

 

‘Many thanks to all the fine role-playing games that preceded the Exile series, for providing many wonderful ideas to steal.’

 

‘Over 200 double tall iced lattes were consumed during the making of Exile III: Ruined World. Chemical dependence can be your friend too!’

 

‘A friendly warning. If you leave a message on Spiderweb Software, Inc's answering machine, don't leave a phone number or E-mail address, and mumble your name, please don't be surprised if I don't get back to you.’

 

Blades of Exile – The Valley of Dying Things

 

– There’s a secret special hidden in the very southwest corner of the vale. You can get to it, but it requires some rather careful flying – and more range than the normal Flight spell, I believe. It reads:

 

‘Sorry, no Easter Eggs in this game.’

 

Avernum Remakes:

 

– Just to confirm, all the major easter eggs in the second and third games return in the recent remakes: the Eas Ter Egg location of Exile/Avernum II appears once again, as does the Generic Dungeon of Exile/Avernum III. The ways of accessing these are essentially unchanged. Some additional bits of text have been added to take account of the release dates of the remakes.

 

– The Eas Ter Egg location has some additional content in Crystal Souls. There’s a further room included which spells out ‘Miranda’ and ‘Cordelia’ on the floor. Hidden further back is an alcove containing a super special, priceless item for each of your four characters. This can only be accessed with the maximum level of Dispel Barrier and Move Mountains. You will find the mystic, invaluable:

 

Spoiler

Cake!

 

[Thaluikhain]

On 10/12/2019 at 9:29 AM, Ess-Eschas said:

 

– There are some nice responses if you talk back to animals. Of particular note, perhaps, is that if you give a garbled comment to a normal cow, it will reply:

 

 

‘Mooo. Never heard of it. Mooo.’

 

– This is definitely a feature, so I’m not sure if it counts, but the ‘About Exile III’ dialogue contains a ‘Thought for the day’ box at the bottom. This thought is randomised, and is taken from a selection of tongue-in-cheek comments. Examples include:

 

 

Not sure if the first counts, talking to animals is something you are probably going to try (and some animals are worth talking to).  Wizard's familiar off the Isle of Bigail, and a monster in the Slime Caverns in the lab.

 

IIRC, Thought for the Day has serious thoughts in there as well as the random stuff.

[Slawbug]

On 10/11/2019 at 6:29 PM, Ess-Eschas said:

Exile II:

 

– This game also has a &*() message. It reads:

 

If Exile ...
You want to save ...
Back up your save slots ...
Burma Shave.

 

The really confusing thing about this one is that Exile II didn't have save slots.  It just had save files...

[The Almighty Doer of Stuff]

I used to accidentally trigger "You want to save..." out of context without knowing what I did, and I'd get nervous what happened or was about to happen. I thought something had changed but I wasn't being told what.

[Ess-Eschas]

12 hours ago, Thaluikhain said:

Not sure if the first counts, talking to animals is something you are probably going to try (and some animals are worth talking to).  Wizard's familiar off the Isle of Bigail, and a monster in the Slime Caverns in the lab.

 

Yes, this point is something of a borderline case. With something like this, the dividing line between an actual Easter Egg and general game humour is probably a little thin, or at least open to some interpretation!

 

My reasoning behind classing this particular response as an Easter Egg is that it requires you to manually type an unrecognised response to a cow. Given the way Exile III runs its dialogue, the player very rarely ever needs to actually type in a response, since most of the dialogue flows naturally by clicking on relevant words. Typing in a response is reserved for special situations (such as asking about the special artifacts), and there’s certainly no reason to expect to do this for perfectly normal cows. So, in that sense, I would be tempted to class this as an Easter Egg.

 

Incidentally, the little side comment I made there was specifically referring to making animal sounds back at animals (so, for instance, saying ‘moo’ to cows, or ‘baa’ to sheep). By contrast, I don’t think this constitutes an Easter Egg, but there are some fun little comments hidden away in there. I rather enjoy the little scene with dogs, where you can subvert the narrator by keeping on playing with them even after the game suggests that you have better things to do.

 

12 hours ago, Thaluikhain said:

IIRC, Thought for the Day has serious thoughts in there as well as the random stuff.

 

Yes, it does! Most of the comments are humour, but there are a few that are more conventional. I've just included the more interesting comments in the post above, since there are quite a few, but you can see some of the more serious comments by opening and closing the dialogue box repeatedly.

 

6 hours ago, The Rural Abjurer said:

The really confusing thing about this one is that Exile II didn't have save slots.  It just had save files...

 

Yes, that is odd, isn’t it? Perhaps Jeff was anticipating his Crystal Souls remake, a mere 19 years in the future

 

On 10/11/2019 at 11:29 PM, Ess-Eschas said:

– At least in version 1.0.1, pressing B beings up this this in the log:

 

'Hmmm.'

 

Maybe this used to be a debug command at one time?

 

Never mind me. I'm being forgetful, here. Pressing B is a debug command in Exile II: it refreshes the items sold in random shops.

 

Speaking of which, here's one more item which I think constitutes an Easter Egg. I think this qualifies, since there's no way to figure this out within the game, at least that I am aware of.

 

Exile II:

 

- Saying 'fish' to Waldby in his Bazaar (south of the Aranea Web) brings up a second random item shop.

[Slawbug]

Does fish actually bring up a second shop, or is it just another way to access the first?  In the data it's coded with the same shop number.

 

(It looks like it ended up there as an artifact leftover from, apparently, Goosenargh's dialogue data.  On that basis I'd lean towards saying it's an unintended option rather than an easter egg.)

[Thaluikhain]

11 hours ago, Ess-Eschas said:

 

Yes, this point is something of a borderline case. With something like this, the dividing line between an actual Easter Egg and general game humour is probably a little thin, or at least open to some interpretation!

 

My reasoning behind classing this particular response as an Easter Egg is that it requires you to manually type an unrecognised response to a cow. Given the way Exile III runs its dialogue, the player very rarely ever needs to actually type in a response, since most of the dialogue flows naturally by clicking on relevant words. Typing in a response is reserved for special situations (such as asking about the special artifacts), and there’s certainly no reason to expect to do this for perfectly normal cows. So, in that sense, I would be tempted to class this as an Easter Egg.

 

Incidentally, the little side comment I made there was specifically referring to making animal sounds back at animals (so, for instance, saying ‘moo’ to cows, or ‘baa’ to sheep). By contrast, I don’t think this constitutes an Easter Egg, but there are some fun little comments hidden away in there. I rather enjoy the little scene with dogs, where you can subvert the narrator by keeping on playing with them even after the game suggests that you have better things to do.

 

 

Do you have to type in a response for those?  Been ages since I played the game, so I might be totally wrong, but I thought you could get there by asking about "buy" or "sell".

[Ess-Eschas]

12 hours ago, The Rural Abjurer said:

Does fish actually bring up a second shop, or is it just another way to access the first?

 

It does indeed bring up a second shop! The shop has the same description as the first, explaining the shop number, but the sets of random items found in both shops are different.

 

This is actually really useful, since you effectively have access to a random shop that’s twice the size of a normal shop. This doubles your chances of finding something particularly nice. Given that random shops can sport some very nice items, this is no bad thing. Using both shops, and visiting Waldby repeatedly (recall, he’s close to the exit point of Word of Recall) can result in some particularly satisfying inventory boosts – if you’re inclined to use the response of course!

 

12 hours ago, The Rural Abjurer said:

It looks like it ended up there as an artifact leftover from, apparently, Goosenargh's dialogue data.

 

That’s a good explanation, but I have my doubts. I don’t have anything conclusive on this, but I do have a few observations.

 

The Lava Dome, which features Goosenargh, is town 34, while the Little Vale, featuring Waldby’s Bazaar, is town number 117. If Jeff were copying resources from town to town, which is entirely reasonable, I would have expected the fish response to have been overwritten many, many towns ago. This of course assumes that Jeff was writing the towns in the order present in the data file, but that seems not unreasonable to me – particularly because Waldby’s Bazaar is found amongst a bunch of tiny towns that might have been added after the main bulk were completed. And if he copied files just for these, wouldn’t he have copied something a little closer to home number-wise?

 

Also, Goosenargh’s fish response is string number 60, while Waldby’s fish response is string number 84. If this were the result of a dialogue artifact, I would have expected the string numbers to be the same – or else for the fish response to be overwritten.

 

Finally, Goosenargh’s fish response calls, for want of a better term, a scenario special, while Waldby calls a fully functional shop script. The coding of these two responses is quite different, and must have required some input from Jeff – rather than merely being a copying artifact.

 

So, why do I think there’s a fish response here? I have two thoughts. Firstly, it could be an in-joke from Jeff. After all, there are already two joking fish references in this game (Goosenargh and the goldfish string). Perhaps Waldby is a reference to one of Jeff’s friends, someone to whom the word ‘fish’ was especially important for some reason?

 

Alternatively, it might be that it was originally intended to be linked directly from Waldby’s dialogue, but that this was never coded for some reason. For instance, Waldby asks about the Empire caches, and you can give him the password for accessing them – but you get no reward for doing so. Could it be that this was supposed to give you the fish command, so that you could have a greater selection of items to choose from? This is how the Bazaar is coded in both Avernum remakes, by the way: giving Waldby the password gives you access to a second shop.

 

On 4/21/2012 at 5:50 PM, The Rural Abjurer said:

- Eas ter egg (different versions in 1.0 and 2.0, I believe)

 

I had a quick check of this over the weekend, comparing v1.0.1 and v2.0.3, and these areas seem to be identical – even down to the text responses (which, incidentally, are hard-coded into the Exile II application)

 

2 hours ago, Thaluikhain said:

Do you have to type in a response for those?  Been ages since I played the game, so I might be totally wrong, but I thought you could get there by asking about "buy" or "sell".

 

Ah yes, you’re quite right. My memory is not doing me much justice in comparison! For those reading the topic, this is because ‘buy’ and ‘sell’ give garbage responses for creatures that don’t have something explicitly coded for those responses.

 

I’d like like to argue that this is on the Easter Egg side, though. After all, why would you try to buy something from a generic cow character? The game never suggests that you do so, after all ...

[Slawbug]

They key thing linking Waldby and Goosenargh is that the "fish" response is in exactly the same place in their dialogue data -- at the end.  It just looks like it defaulted there for whatever reason (quite plausible as a copy-paste accident, especially with the likelihood that an interface like ResEdit was used to compile some of this text; and I think the chance that Jeff kept 150 different text files for all the town dialogue, given that the engine did not use that structure, is close to zero), and Waldby didn't end up with quite enough sets of dialogue to overwrite it.  The coding is similar, but Goosenargh has a hardcoded reaction for that keyword (i.e., you get different responses depending on a flag) while Waldby does not.

 

There's zero evidence of intent here.  It's not a joke, not a reference.  And as you point out, functionality already existed to get a new set of items with a keypress.  So I have a hard time seeing this as an intentional easter egg, rather than basically just a typo.

 

1 hour ago, Ess-Eschas said:

This is how the Bazaar is coded in both Avernum remakes, by the way: giving Waldby the password gives you access to a second shop.

 

It's certainly plausible that passing on 'skulls' was intended to offer a reward.  That would only strengthen the case that it is not intended for 'fish' to have that effect.  Since what 'fish' triggers is clearly not an easter egg when it is triggered in the remakes.

 

Furthermore, the "second shop" in both remakes is not accessed by the word 'fish' or anything related in any way to fish.  This is to be contrasted with all the actual easter eggs, references, and in-jokes, that were overwhelmingly left in the remakes; see also easter eggs whose form changed but whose trigger remained the same.  

[Ess-Eschas]

9 hours ago, The Rural Abjurer said:

They key thing linking Waldby and Goosenargh is that the "fish" response is in exactly the same place in their dialogue data -- at the end.

 

This is a good point, and I’d definitely buy it if this were a more modern Spiderweb engine. With the Exile engine, though, I’m not so sure.

 

I appreciate that making analogies to Blades of Exile is dangerous, since Blades is a distinctly modified version of the Exile engine. However, my experience with Blades tells me that, when transferring dialogue from one place to another, the absolute position of a dialogue string is more important than its relative position. At least in Blades, if you are presented with a template dialogue chain, it’s not very easy to add information between pre-existing nodes in the chain. The engine is much more favourable to just overwriting what’s already there, or to adding dialogue nodes on to the end of the chain.

 

As such, the only way I can really see this response being a copy-paste error is if Walby has fewer dialogue nodes than Goosenargh, with Jeff just overwriting one chain with another.

 

However, perhaps surprisingly, Waldby has more dialogue nodes than the entirety of the Lava Dome put together, let alone Goosenargh. As things stand, I can’t see how this could be a simple copying error. From my perspective, it seems more likely that it was added deliberately.

 

9 hours ago, The Rural Abjurer said:

It's certainly plausible that passing on 'skulls' was intended to offer a reward.  That would only strengthen the case that it is not intended for 'fish' to have that effect.

 

Herein’s a problem, I think. In order to have this proposed setup work in the Exile engine, the player has to report the password to Waldby, who then explains that he has a reward in the form of a second shop. This is fine so far.

 

But how does the player access this second shop? The ‘skulls’ command (i.e. the password) has already been used to convey this information, and the ‘buy’ command is tied up with the first shop, so the player has to do something else to activate this second shop. Another response is needed.

 

Here’s how I see it. Waldby’s intended response to receiving the password was to say that he will acquire more items in future and that, if the player or any of their friends wishes to see them, they should give him Waldby’s own special password: fish. Jeff had to think up something on the spot that would work, and chose something that he found funny, or related to the real-world Waldby in some way.

 

However, in the remakes, this step is no longer necessary. The Avernum engine can just plonk the new shop right on the list of dialogue questions, so no fancy fish password is needed (and it didn’t actually get coded in in Exile anyway). Jeff removes it entirely.

 

If I’m right about this, and I don’t think I can claim to have enough evidence to say anything definitive, I think I agree with you that this is probably not an Easter Egg, any more than the GIFTS’ propensity for saying ‘silly’ is an Egg. However, I do think it is a deliberate addition – even if it was left out because it slipped Jeff’s mind, or because he looked at it and thought the whole weird-password-giving-you-a-second-shop mechanic wasn’t to his liking.

 

Incidentally, you might be interested to read the very final paragraph of this Wikipedia article. Another reference from Jeff, perhaps? Douglas Adams seems like someone he'd be familiar with:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goosnargh

[Slawbug]

I strongly disagree about the intentionality here.  I don't really want to argue it ad nauseam.  You're imagining a way it could have happened, acknowledging that there is no evidence for it happening that way, and basically just declaring that you think it's most likely because... I have no idea why.  I also don't know why you're analyzing the dialogue data in terms of the BoE interface given that the high likelihood that the data was compiled either (a) directly with ResEdit or another resource editor, or (b) in a word processor.

 

The Goosnargh reference is really interesting.  I've been trying and trying to connect Sastor to anything relevant, but haven't managed to.

[Ess-Eschas]

12 hours ago, The Rural Abjurer said:

I strongly disagree about the intentionality here.  I don't really want to argue it ad nauseam.

 

I’m happy to agree to disagree! I think this a definitely a point in which neither of us has enough evidence to back up their claims. Both explanations are plausible, and neither can be proven. I don’t buy your arguments, for good reason, and you don’t buy mine, for similarly good reasons – and that’s fine! That makes debates interesting.

 

In any case, this is not hugely relevant to the topic at hand. You have convinced me that this is likely not an Easter Egg!

 

As a brief aside, I do think an analogy to BoE is helpful. Blades is essentially acting as a front-end to ResEdit in this case, so what holds true for the Blades dialogue interface also holds true for strings placed in ResEdit: adding strings inbetween pre-existing strings is awkward (and dangerous, since array sizes are important) whereas overwriting strings is trivial by contrast. If you accept this, then my refuting of your comment about fish appearing at the end of the dialogue chains follows fairly naturally, I think. That wouldn’t refute your conclusion in that case of course, merely that particular premise.

 

12 hours ago, The Rural Abjurer said:

I've been trying and trying to connect Sastor to anything relevant, but haven't managed to.

 

Perhaps an even more interesting question is this: why was Sastor (mostly) given the new name Kordaddis in the Avernum remakes?

[Slawbug]

17 minutes ago, Ess-Eschas said:

I think this a definitely a point in which neither of us has enough evidence to back up their claims.

Thanks for the attempt to "both sides" this but you're comparing apples and oranges.  You are demanding a very specific interpretation, with no evidence.  I'm saying that interpretation doesn't fit, because it's very specific and there's no evidence.  This is not a situation where we throw up our hands and say "who knows, it's 50/50 who's right."

 

18 minutes ago, Ess-Eschas said:

As a brief aside, I do think an analogy to BoE is helpful. Blades is essentially acting as a front-end to ResEdit in this case, so what holds true for the Blades dialogue interface also holds true for strings placed in ResEdit: adding strings inbetween pre-existing strings is awkward (and dangerous, since array sizes are important) whereas overwriting strings is trivial by contrast.

Basically all of that is inaccurate.  And I'm now done arguing about it.

[Ess-Eschas]

Ah well. You can't blame a slith for trying, can you? :)

[The Almighty Doer of Stuff]

I think the idea that a quest that was not completely implemented accidentally is a very elegant explanation.

[Warrior Mage]

This topic is incredibly amazing. But, I don't know why there aren't any description of Easter Eggs in the second Avernum trilogy.