Kelandon

You must have not been sycophantic enough, because as far as I can tell, only what you say to Redbeard matters for your career options in the ending. Also, that map is troublingly accurate.

Just FYI, Moses wandered for 40 years in the desert, not 40 days. The 40 days and 40 nights business was him hanging out on a mountain receiving the Ten Commandments (which was at the beginning of the exile). The Lava Ocean sort of parallels the initial bit of wandering in the desert when everyone was starving. After that, God provided manna (what-is-it food, sort of) to the Jews so that they wouldn't starve, and the Jews built the tabernacle (a kind of mobile temple which housed the Ark of the Covenant). I assume that's more or less where you are now. I suppose I drift away from the source a bit after that; Leviticus isn't really represented at all, and Numbers is only sort of represented in the Peninsula Camp. There is a lot of "sort of" in this description because I was going for similarity, not exactness; Exodus is meant to be reminiscent of the Old Testament but not precisely so. (In the same way that much of the setting is meant to be reminiscent of the periphery of the 5th century Roman Empire, but not precisely so.) The differences are in themselves intended to be interesting, for those who want to play that game. Also, you've been wondering about Bonnie's Dexterity. As a nephil, she automatically gains Dexterity as she gains levels. And yes, those bonus points don't count toward the prereqs for special skills.

Because the combats are relatively easy? Yeah, just wait. Dalaghant and the Berekh Hive are coming. Just be glad I dramatically toned down the Berekh Hive during beta; the first person who beta tested it said that it took him four hours to get through the original version. Not because of reloading — he apparently didn't reload once. Because it was just that damned long.

Random thoughts: * If you want a timely response to a question — e.g., what are the prereqs for Blademaster — you'll get a faster response if you post your question here than if you mention it in the videos and wait about two weeks for people to see it. * Just out of curiosity: a couple of episodes ago, you bought extra levels in Return Life, which you never use, as far as I can tell. Why? * The person you couldn't remember in Thassaka was Ethass. She's with Legare in that room you couldn't get into. (Kass is also there.) Make of that what you will. * I'm continually surprised at how your allies end up dying, but it seems to be because you fight these large battles — well, every battle, really — very differently from how I would. (One example: because of the combat slowdown, you don't need to be at 100% health all the time. So I'd have started this outdoor fight by getting buffs out on everyone immediately — Major Haste, then within two turns put Bless on all three of your melee fighters and also cast Radiant Shield. And obviously I would rely a lot less on Arcane Summon, even though it's not as nerfed in Exodus. And I would focus less on fighting enemy summons and more on the main enemies. And I would use Mass Healing to help the allies stay alive. And....) * It looks as though you missed out on a special spell (Major Healing) by not keeping enough of your allies alive during that outdoor battle. If at least two survive, you get the special spell instead of the measly 50 coins. * I am baffled at the fact that Inferno doesn't appear to use action points. There's a deduct_ap() call in the script in the right place. Now that I consult the docs, they say that it should only work in a creature script, but on Mac BoA, it works just fine where it is. If you're on Windows, maybe this is yet another difference between Mac BoA and Windows BoA. (An annoying one, if so.) Looking forward to the Lava Ocean! Some of the plot points from early on begin to develop into something here.

"Sisyphus?" Lol, yes. There's a lot of ancient Greek and Roman stuff in Exodus, too, along with all the Biblical references. Nearly every scene, nearly every dialog, has some kind of reference to something from either the Old Testament or antiquity. And yes, as you probably have figured out by where you are now, the snippets of conversations that you overhear as you approach the leaders of the expedition (Kass just outside of Vasskolis, speaking to Legare: "... a Darkling! He can't be trusted!" and Kass on the beach just south of Nakhtha, speaking to Legare and Pithoss: "... faith is wavering. We must act.") are small hints of what is to come.

I'm not surprised. Exodus was extremely ambitious and also extremely buggy as originally designed. My beta testers were very helpful, but as it turns out, Windows BoA is a lot more buggy than Mac BoA, so I spent a lot of time hunting down things that I couldn't reproduce on my own computer. At the end of the day, even after extensive testing, some things snuck through. (A lot of Unhandled Exceptions, in particular, which exist only on Windows BoA — although I think I've found the reasons for some of them now.) An eagle-eyed player a couple years ago noticed that two of the highest-level versions of spells are impossible to get within the scenario, one because I deleted a dungeon (for reasons I can't remember) and one because I set a flag wrong. I suppose I should release a bug fix at some point. I have enough accumulated on my personal version at this point that it would be worth doing.

If you come to Spiderweb for custom art and music, I think you're coming for the wrong reasons, because the art and music have never been the high points. The gameplay and the writing have always been the high points. I hope that will continue to be so in the new game.

Crap, that's a bug. That message isn't supposed to say that. What happened is that I originally had an Orb of Thralni-like item that would get you across the river, and the message changed depending on whether you had the item. I then switched it to the spell Flight, but I forgot to change the message to depend on whether you had the spell — so you always get the "you don't have the right item" dialog.

It seems as though you've had issues with Forcecages. The BoA Manual says that Mass Curing "weakens" Forcecages; if I remember correctly, that means that it dispels them entirely. Also, it's not clear to me whether you know this, so I'll just point out that the limitation is one spellbook of each type per PC. You probably should make spellbooks for Bonnie, too. (Maybe you haven't yet because you don't know many special spells for priests, but you will soon.) It looks as though I should've tagged the third event in the Multiple Heal and Summon script to a higher level of health; it looks like it's pretty easy to kill the monster before the third summon happens. Oh well. Enjoy the Lava Ocean. It's tied for my favorite part of Exodus (tied with the Peninsula Camp sequence, much later).

This episode reminded me: I've always prepared for combat in combat mode. It makes the buffs last longer. Outside of combat mode, if you're casting four Blesses, four Hastes, and Radiant Shield, then from the time you cast the first spell to when you actually enter the combat, you've let nine turns elapse. If you do it in combat mode, you might let about about three or four turns elapse. That five or six turns can actually make a little difference in a longer fight, and with the combat slowdown in Exodus, many fights will be longer fights. Also, what you've been doing the past couple of episodes is the reason that there's no food in the HLPM (or anywhere else in my scenarios, except as junk). I wasn't aware that anybody actually rested in the outdoors. Running back and forth seems more efficient to me. Finally, just FYI (because I wasn't sure if you know this, based on the most recent episode), multiple Slows just make the Slow last longer. They don't actually make the effect any greater.

Totally separately from the above, I had forgotten about the "combat slowdown" that I devised in Exodus — your fights with the frost lizards reminded me. The impetus for the combat slowdown was that at the time that I was designing the combat for Exodus — more or less the year following Bahssikava — a lot of scenarios, especially TM scenarios, had combat that was extremely difficult for about two or three turns, and if you could survive those turns (and kill off whatever you needed to), then you could make it the rest of the way basically just mopping up. There were few combats that were interesting all the way through. But I liked Avernums 1 and 2 a lot more than Avernum 3/default BoA, and the combat progressed more slowly in the earlier Avernums: monsters did less damage, the PCs did less damage, etc. So I tried to slow the combat down, to keep it interesting over the course of more turns. Less reloading, more discovering stuff as the combat evolves — which puts you at some risk, but doesn't instantly kill you. The way I tried to pull this off was to give monsters considerable resistances to pretty much everything (including melee — which is why Cloud of Blades isn't quite as good in this scenario) but also to make them less able to do damage. You will find lots of high-level monsters, but you probably won't need to reload nearly as often as in Bahssikava; you can try things and, if they don't work, you won't immediately die. (Most of the time.) This does mean that Blessing and Hasting is still important for almost every fight, because at the end of the day, if you don't, you may go so slowly through the fight that you end up using so many Heals that you might as well have Blessed in the first place. It also means that resistances are an even more interesting phenomenon here, because something with 50% resistance to melee but 0% resistance to fire (which are the stats of a frost lizard) is something that you want to slam with fire as much and as hard as you can. Inferno is a good spell for this. Later, if you should happen to come across a lizard that has 30% resistance to melee but 0% resistance to cold (e.g., a lava lizard), a spell like Bonechill might be useful.

You mentioned not being sure which skills were prereqs for other special skills, so here's a list: http://kppp.webs.com/skills.html

"Holy crap, he's Moses!" LOL! That is exactly the response I was going for. It's always entertaining to see when/how people respond to the realization that Exodus is, you know, the Exodus. I still always treasure one of the comments that one player made to the effect of, "I was put off by all the religious allegory. I wasn't expecting that." You know, in a scenario entitled 'Exodus.' Also, more generally, it is striking how much cleaner and better the design is as soon as we hit Exodus. I actually knew how to script and what the plot was going to be as soon as I started Exodus, whereas Bahs was really me trying to figure all of that out.

It's probably a flaw in BoA (less than optimal design) that you can't tell what's going on with statuses by looking at the main screen — you have to look down at the text. But that is how BoA works. Watching the Galthrax fight, I was struck by how Cloud of Blades is what won the battle. You won on the last try because you cast it on Galthrax twice right before the end. This will continue to be significant going forward; Cloud of Blades not only is the only spell that does melee damage, but also it's the only spell that does damage as a percent of the creature's health rather than as a specific number of dice. So as creatures get higher and higher level, other spells become less and less useful, but Cloud of Blades continues to work well.

I fell off for a while, but I started watching again. I'm not quite caught up, but I'm getting there. Man, there is so much whining in these episodes! It makes it less fun to watch. There are a few fairly important things that have screwed you up from time to time in Mount Galthrax (although you do still seem to be improving, e.g., the Vishanth fight!). One of them is spacing. Phaedra is far and away your best tank, but you keep blocking the path for her to get to the enemies! You also start combat with her behind walls so that she can't see the enemies. One bug in BoA generally is that joined NPCs use their default scripts rather than any custom scripts they're given, so joined NPCs all have the same behavior. Generally, they join combat when they can see an enemy and have a path to get to it. If you block them or leave them behind a wall, they'll hang back and do nothing. I don't think many scenarios have joined NPCs, but a few others do, so it's worth learning how to use them well. Also, on spacing, there's no reason to have your healer — who is an incredibly weak melee fighter — run up to be next to your other characters. If your healer keeps getting forcecaged, keep your healer back behind a wall. Your healer won't get forcecaged if she's out of range. (This will continue to be important in Exodus, but for somewhat different reasons.) You also fairly frequently put yourself in positions where only one or two people can attack when you want three or four to be attacking. Pay attention to the shape of the room! Don't box people out, or else you'll be half as strong as you want to be. Another fairly fundamental thing is that you keep getting distracted by weak summons and not fighting the main enemies. You're high-level at this point; cave giants can't do anything to you. But a level-edited spirit (these undead are generally at least level 50!) can still do some serious damage. Unless the summons are literally blocking your way to the main enemy, you really ought to just ignore them. Focusing on them and ignoring the main enemy can get you killed or, just as bad, cause you to use up a ton of spell energy healing/whatever as the main enemy keeps blasting you while you ignore the relevant enemy. Besides, you kill a few summons and the mage will just summon more, so it becomes this never-ending onslaught of killing meaningless monsters. A third thing is that if you're going to be reloading so much — and in BoA, you're going to be reloading a lot — you need to save more frequently. I save after pretty much every fight, before opening any door, before talking to anyone, before pressing any buttons or pulling any levers, etc. You had to fight the same fight around the Mount Galthrax farms three times in episode 102 because you didn't save after you finished the first part of it! A few other random thoughts: I did like the sporadic use of Arcane Shield and Heroic Brews when you were up against something that was doing a ton of damage, but only for one turn (the exploding golems, for example). That's definitely something to keep in mind as you go forward in BoA. Those few times when you did cast Haste on Phaedra, she became much, much more effective. I'm surprised that you didn't make use of that more frequently. It's also sort of weird when you say things like, "Let's see if a Slow will work," and then you don't check whether it actually worked or not. (The printed text actually tells you this.) That fits with my advice earlier to check things' immunities; magic-resistant monsters (i.e., those who also resist Lightning Spray and Arcane Blow) will resist Slow, and non-magic-resistant monsters won't, and you'll have an easier time if you determine which is which. More generally, it's worth watching the text that gets printed to see what pops up — you were surprised when Phaedra was paralyzed, but the printed text explicitly said that she had been paralyzed. In episode 101, in the northeast corner of Mount Galthrax L2, you didn't read one of the dialogs that was supposed to help you! It told you that you were supposed to talk to the frozen lich that you didn't try to talk to. Oh well. At about 2:10 of episode 102, you ask how you're supposed to know that there are undead behind the barriers. That's what the dialog box that you just read was warning you about! It talked about "dangerous undead" nearby! Right after this, though, you made use of the room shape in a useful way — you stood in such a way that only one ghoul could attack you at a time. This is handy — keep doing this kind of thing. Hilariously, right after that, you say that the narrow tunnels don't help, even though they just helped you! Oh well again.

Enjoying these most recent episodes immensely. I have a soft spot for huge battles with many allies and many foes, like the Nolagh-Khar fight. More of those are coming. Also enjoying your concerns about Legare and this "Goddess" of his. You are very much having the right thoughts. Doubts are appropriate at the moment.

In relation to one of your more recently posted diatribes: Yes, I am watching, but I essentially disagree with your complaints. Bahssikava is meant to challenge expert players. If you don't like that, then you probably won't like the combats, but they are what they are, and they do what they are meant to do. Many of my other scenarios (Nobody's Heroes, The Magic) are nowhere near as challenging, and you might like them better (when you get to them). I have to admit, I was surprised that you struggled so much with the Flamer haakai. (Flamer is the name of the script that he uses. It's essentially a generalized version of the script of Kimzahn from The Za-Khazi Run.) I remember thinking that the fight was sort of uninterestingly easy when I played it for the first time; I think I stayed farther back from him until I was ready to engage him specifically, so I didn't take as many explosions as you did, and I probably had more resistance to fire at the time. If I remember correctly, I used the Flamer script more than once in Bahssikava/Exodus, so you may want to reconsider your tactics the next time around. Also, I imagine you've figured this out by now, but if you want Phaedra to come fight alongside you, you have to make sure she has a clear path to do so. She won't charge through your priest and mage. Even then, she sometimes might not, though. Bahssikava is my only scenario with joined NPCs, partly because it was hard to get them to do what you wanted. (And yes, the reappearance of the slaves in the mine is a bug; that's not supposed to happen.)

The Nolagh-Khar quest is probably my favorite part of the scenario. I enjoyed the most recent episode a lot. It occurred to me during this episode that the community consensus, more or less circa 2005 or 2006, was that the default BoA combat system was probably the worst that Spiderweb has ever designed. If a scenario designer just creates a few dungeons and progresses characters through the normal level progression, the game kind of sucks. It's a little hard to explain why; part of it has to do with a lack of balance (the Divinely Touched ability is way overpowered, the Spray Acid spell is way underpowered, etc.), but that's not really the key. I'm sure one of the other Blades designers of the era could articulate it better than I could. Anyway, I dealt with this in a few ways in my scenarios. Most of them — LP, Exodus, The Magic — dramatically change the combat system so as to make it more interesting. (LP and The Magic basically trash the existing system entirely and create new systems.) One — Nobody's Heroes — has almost no combat at all, just to avoid the issue. Bahssikava handled things somewhat differently; up to more or less the Catacombs, it just made fights really hard, so that you have to figure out high-level exploits and such in order to make it through. Starting with the Nolagh-Khar quest, though, Bahssikava ties puzzles and sidequests to combats so that a combat is essentially unbeatable unless you explore in the right places thoroughly, and if you've explored thoroughly, it's pretty easy. (Which seems more like your style, so you may like the second and third parts of Bahs more than the first.) Anyway, it reminds me of how, a decade ago, I realized that BoE combat was, by default, pretty good, but BoA combat was, by default, pretty awful. All scenario designers had to face this one way or another.

Eh, the reason I didn't put in a lot of arrows is that I never used archery much myself. I could've sworn that I added somewhere to buy arrows in v1.0.6, because not having enough ranged stuff was a complaint from early players, but I honestly can't remember where and I can't find it now. Maybe I didn't. There are a bajillion razordisks, though, and slings (like Adlerauge from Canopy) don't need ammo. EDIT: Just watched the most recent episode. Lol, total immunity to melee is a good gimmick. I should've used that more.

You know, I really should've put in some ghosts or demons somewhere that were immune to all damage types so that you had to use Repel Spirit because it's the only spell that does unblockable damage. That would've been a good puzzle.

Sure, but only if you don't know that electricity isn't its own damage type in Spiderweb games, and Chessrook44 has done an LP of nearly all Spiderweb games (including the original Avernum Trilogy). Anyway, going forward in BoA, it's worth knowing the six immunities (fire, cold, magic, mental, poison/acid, and melee) and which spells do which type of damage. One of the reasons that Cloud of Blades is so useful throughout Bahssikava (and, to some extent, in Exodus) is that it's the only spell that does melee damage, to which almost all creatures are vulnerable. One of the reasons that Spray Acid is so terrible is that most high-level monsters are mostly or entirely immune to poison/acid. (The other reason is that it doesn't do much damage even to monsters that aren't immune.)

In hindsight, the river fights are boring, and the Catacombs was not. If I were to release an updated version of this, I would beef up the river combats (and probably the combats you're about to come to). I'm a little baffled by a moment in the most recent episode. You tried Divine Retribution on the eyebeasts. You determined that they were immune to it. You then tried Arcane Blow — which does the same type of damage as Divine Retribution. Seeing that they were immune to that, you then tried Lightning Spray — which again does the same type of damage! If something's immune to one of those spells, it will be immune to all of those spells. It would be like trying Bolt of Fire and then Divine Fire and then Fireblast — they're all fire, so an immunity to fire makes something immune to all of those.

I mean, that makes sense when you're fighting fire hydras. But it doesn't make sense when you're fighting slith avatars. Arcane Summon gives you a chance of two drakes (but more likely something weaker). Simulacrum gives you the certainty of a slith avatar. A slith avatar is much, much stronger (against sliths or anything else) than two drakes. (To be specific: A drake is level 25. Its attacks are 9d7, 9d5, and 9d5, and its health is a bit over 200. A slith avatar is level 60. Its attacks are — I think — 21d6, 21d6, and 21d6, so on each attack, it will do a good deal more than twice as much damage as a drake. It also has two bonus action points, so it can attack twice per round. Finally, its health is about 1100. I cannot imagine a situation in which two drakes would be better than a slith avatar.) I don't think this matters as much in later parts of the scenario, because you're not fighting slith avatars again. But I think it demonstrates a larger point, which is that considering choices that you don't ordinarily employ — varying your tactics by the situation, as you started to do by the end of the Catacombs — can make combats go much more smoothly.

In the previous episode, it occurred to me that it's possible that I accidentally nerfed all the major summoning spells in Bahssikava. On the back end, monsters have summoning classes in order to be summonable, and I tinkered with a few of them to fix bugs. (Some were inherent to default BoA — by default, vampires can summon vampires in an infinite loop — and some of them had to do with monster imports that I had done.) The result may be that summoning spells are weaker in Bahssikava (and, presumably, in Exodus) than in other scenarios. In relation to your five-minute rant at the end of this episode, hey, you got through the northeast of the Catacombs on the first try. Guzzling a Heroic Brew and firing off a bunch of Cloud of Blades spells works wonders! Your tactics continue to improve! Although you're still relying way, way too much on Arcane Summon and not enough on Simulacrum — Arcane Summon usually gives you sliths or lizards, but Simulacrum gives you slith avatars. Much stronger. And why would you ever cast Spray Acid, unless confronted with something that is immune to all other forms of damage? Bolt of Fire cost less spell energy and does more damage to anything not immune to fire. But presumably that will all continue to get better in the southbound quest. Looking forward to it.

It's been so long since I played BoA that I forgot about the awesome power of the Divinely Touched status. It's also very useful for high-level parties (because with Hasted and Divinely Touched you get three attacks per turn instead of two, and I think the attacks also do a lot more damage and are more likely to hit). It's hard to render the Divinely Touched status, though; characters with the Divinely Touched trait can get it with a special ability, and Heroic Brews do it, but BoA doesn't have a spell that does it, like Divine Warrior in Avernum 1 and 2. So it helps a lot when you can get it, but I didn't rely on it much as I was working through Bahs, because you either have to have created characters with the right trait in the first place or you have to burn consumables. It was at about 27:05 in Episode 80. By that point, you were in no real danger, so it didn't really matter, but it seemed emblematic of some of the shortcomings of your tactics to that point. That said, I think by Episode 81 your tactics have improved enough that you're probably not going to have serious problems getting through the rest of the Catacombs. (Although I'm expecting the next episode to be hilarious.)