HMagellan

In the Nephil Castle (the dungeon you get sent to as part of your first quest to kill the Nephar chief), there is a book in one of the rooms on the right side of the map guarded by a Nephil Shaman. Destroying the book gives your party members 5xp each, but reading it will subtract 5xp from each of your party members. However, when you read it, a text box pops up saying that "you can't help but feel that the book did something wonderful for you," implying a positive effect in addition to the xp drain. I was not able to find anything that reading the book changes besides making you lose xp, even after reading it repeatedly. Does this book actually do "something wonderful" or is that message there just to mislead you?

I'm new to these forums, but I just beat Avernum 1 for the third time yesterday, so several of these answers are fresh in my mind. Here are the ones I know: Elizabeth is actually in Cotra, rather than Silvar, despite Matthias's hint. She runs the inn there. If you interact with the altar rather than destroying it, it will set your characters' spell points to 99, or totally refill them if their spell point max is less than 99. I believe that if one of your party members has a sufficiently high Priest Spells skill, you can get past the altar. Just a funny reference to the delta-epsilon definition of limits. I always took it to mean that, in the world of Avernum, Motrax invented calculus 😄