Student of Trinity

Ah, but 'putting safeguards in place' seems easier said than done. The power seems so tempting, and even if the knowledge itself could be concealed, the fact that it exists to be rediscovered is now common knowledge to a continent full of magicians. Apparently, you cannot unring a bell.

Ha! A good point. The odd illicit necromancer here and there, the high incidence of reckless Shaper eccentrics, and the seemingly wilder mores of the historical Shaper mainstream, all seem to indicate that uncontrolled magic is a very real danger in the Shaper world. The Shapers have some reason to feel that they have a tiger by the tail, and can't let go. Indeed, G2 showed that the Awakened themselves got into dangerous augmentations, and even summoning demons, almost as soon as they got the slightest opportunity, out from under the ruthless Shaper vigilance.

If some serviles can become entitled to freedom just by becoming uppity enough to request it, then the basis for servile servitude becomes servile incapacity, and not the fact that the Shapers created the serviles. That admission would destabilize Shaper society, so that thereafter it could avoid drastic change only if it avoided stress of any kind.

For example, the fact that the Takers and the Awakened have arisen seems to indicate that many serviles, if not most or even all, do have an innate capacity for freedom. Perhaps at first it would be only a few serviles who demanded freedom; but if the Shapers let these go, how many more would follow? Even if servile defections remained small, Shaper society would be hanging by a thread, and Shaper society doesn't seem keen on that.

That's just it: you leave your goods out in plain view. So whenever one of the patrolling Battle Betas is tempted by your loot, it sees the big NY against every item, realizes that it's crime could not be unseen, and so remains honest.

I don't think it would be really be possible for the Shapers to just lighten up a bit. Their whole advanced civilization runs on servile labor, and many of their projects would cease to be viable if serviles had to be treated as human beings.

Moreover, even if they were to refrain from abusing serviles arbitrarily, they would need to retain the principle that they would be allowed to abuse serviles if they wanted to. Decency to serviles must remain a Shaper virtue, not a servile right, because freedom is inherently a slippery slope.

If I can't make my servile mine for crystals in a rogue-infested arctic waste, how can I even make him blacken my boots and wash my dishes? Only the servile himself could say whether the cold and the rogues were worse than the shoepolish and the dishwater. And if today I accept his assertion that the cold and the rogues are so bad that I may not compel him to them, then what will I be able to say to him tomorrow, when he decides that the dishwater is also too much to bear?

As to the Shapers placating waverers with restraint, it is an old political chestnut that the most dangerous time for a repressive government is when it begins to reform. Every concession undermines the government's legitimacy, by admitting that its principles are invalid; and every liberty granted emboldens the people to demand more.

Only if the Shapers retained complete control would it be possible for the Shaper regime to liberalize slowly enough for the change to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary. So pursuing that vision would amount, in the short term, to thorough Loyalism -- crush the rebels, so that the Shapers alone will decide how their society evolve.

I'm not saying that an Awakened-style middle road is completely impossible. But I think it is so problematic, so unlikely to deliver more good for less evil, that the middle road ends up being no more morally attractive than the two extremes.

Yeah, the golems are bad news. At quite a bit higher level I took them all out with my Agent, but this involved high speed and dashing back out the door. To take the last stage of the test I had a running battle all the way back down the corridor to the essence pool.

(Well, a running battle from my point of view. The poor golems just kept getting zapped by this blurry attacker who was always popping back out of sight before they could land a blow.)

But the non-aligned path was Loyalist, just bypassing Zakary.

Double posting because this is (small) news.

After the Shapers regain control of Gull Island, they send a golem to clean up the Crumbling Lab, and you can indeed get into that NW room. There are a few minor goodies there, but nothing remarkable.

When you haste your AP gets multiplied by 1.5. The upper limit seems to be 19.5, hasting from a base of 13. But 18 is plenty.

Loyalist singleton Agent, on Torment. I'm leaving the Monastery Caves to last; I just finished The Geneforge.

Litalia was easy, but not really disappointing -- she took a lot of Kills, and there's just not much that could survive against 18 AP, a high Quick Action, and a convenient doorway nearby.

I didn't have enough mechanics to turn Akhari Blaze's creatures against him; I just turned them off. But Akhari Blaze himself was by far the toughest monster so far, because he was fast. If I had forged the Avenger's Ring before meeting him he might have been a lot easier, but as it was he had me beat on Quick Action, and I had to do a lot of running back and forth to keep him from killing me.

I thought he was quite a decent final boss (not counting the Caves) -- much more impressive than Easss, who went down to straight Kills even on Torment, because he got so stunned.

I liked just pouring the Geneforge down the drain. After all that explosive fuss in G2, as the improbable effect of tossing in the special gloves, this was unexpectedly neat and sensible.

If I used the Quicksilver Bulwark I could get 19.5 AP, but I don't think it's worth it. The Essence Aegis is more help to me.

I didn't have enough Leadership for that option, but while we're talking about Geneforge dialog problems:

You kick away Akhari Blaze's claw as he reaches for the Geneforge, even if you kill him many rooms away from it. This doesn't make sense.

He's pretty cool, though. Makes Easss look like a wimp.

The Lightning Girdle is indeed made with a Solidified Flame instead of a Deep Focus Orb. The problem is that the recipe you find in the game seems to agree with Drakefyre's Recipes topic: it calls for an 'orb'. This amounts to a serious bug.

I got a second Drakon Skin from Orois Blaze (spelling?) -- the merchant drakon.

I haven't found a second Purified Essence yet, though, or a second Deep Focus Orb. I believe I've been everywhere except Monastery Caves. Where did I miss it?

This weirdness starts small, but it grows.

I killed Drixiss as soon as I stepped off the boat on the Isle of Spears. (Quite a cool surprise to be challenged by such a formidable enemy right at the dock.) But I didn't meet Swanwick's party at the south edge of that screen. I only found them later when I found my own way to their Besieged Camp.

Then, much later, I happened to enter that eastern dock screen from the south, and I ran into Swanwick and friends, telling me to hurry south after them to get warm.

Okayyyy ... but then immediately there pops up a conversation with the Mage that is with Swanwick. It's his picture and name 'Mage' at the top, but his lines are those spoken by the late Drixiss when he met me at the dock to the north several days before. We repeat that dialog, which is now quite surreal. The dialog ends, and the Mage is hostile. The other Shapers baton the Mage after he zaps them, so I help them out with a couple of Kills on their poor deranged comrade. When the Mage is dead, Swanwick and the others immediately leave to the south.

Then when I get back to the Besieged Camp after running a few errands, the shapers are all hostile to me, presumably for attacking their Mage.

I guess the strain of being besieged on the Isle of Spears just got to everyone. Fortunately I had a fairly recent save file, so I just went back to it, and avoided re-entering the dock screen from the south.

I always liked the Awakened, because they sounded humane and decent. But the more I thought about them, the more problematic they began to seem.

When they started getting some real power in G2, they were also clearly losing their original moral compass, and I found myself missing the noble days of old Ellrah back on Sucia. But now I compare Dhonal's Keep to Ellrah's Fort, and Ellrah's dream just seems ludicrous -- something that could only ever seem plausible to ignorant serviles, or apprentices, in the isolation of a place like Sucia Island, where the reality of Shaper power was a fading memory.

Dhonal's Keep is a cultural backwater, but it still makes the Awakened ideal look ridiculous. Serviles are something the Shapers make, the way they make wands and crystals. They are not going to negotiate with them as equals, at least not without such a fundamental change in outlook as to be tantamount to ceasing to be Shapers.

Quixotic folly is not moral high ground, especially when it gets a lot of people killed. The Awakened are an understandably attractive sect for serviles, but should not seem any more moral to a disillusioned Shaper than any of the other sects.

In G2 the EC was far and away the best item, but in G3 I have found something I like slightly better. So right now I'm actually wishing I had saved my components and held off forging the EC.

I'd agree completely, except:

Vast slaughter still happens if you support the Shapers. The Shapers are powerless to prevent the periodic emergence of Litalias, and indeed their recurrently reckless research spawns them. Hence as far as pragmatism goes, Shaper Loyalism still brings massive violence, but makes it be all for nothing.

That is, you can't only count the cost of rebellion against the Rebels. By failing to be supremely competent, the Loyalists enable this and future rebellions, and should bear some of the shame, in a pragmatic morality.

I don't know if you can really finish the game without fighting at all, but you can definitely do an awful lot, if you're prepared to run away a lot. Much easier if you don't count Dazing as fighting. Most of the major objectives can be accomplished indirectly by stealth. I'd say it's well worth a try, and I would be very happy to hear of your progress.

It would be cool if you could be a Sholai. Since they have warriors and mages you could end up with Guardian-like and Agent-like classes, and perhaps some kind of Sholai shaman would find themselves good at storing essence, once they had picked up some training and/or canisters. We already know from G1 that Sholai can use canisters.

Plotwise, I think it would be nice if the GF series introduced some prospect for resolving the power paradox which has been its main theme so far. It might be that the resolution would fail, or it might succeed or fail depending on the player's actions.

By the 'power paradox' I mean the fact that you can only gain enough power to change the Shaper world by becoming something at least as bad as the Shapers in the process. The problem has been pretty thoroughly presented by the end of G3. Just to keep harping on it would get monotonous. To try to do something about it, this time, would be very interesting.

According to one of the G1 endings that the G2-3 history line doesn't take, the Sholai leader Trajkov basically manages it, while the Shaper PC cannot. So perhaps the Sholai have something the Shapers lack.

For some reason Khryk sells me Kill and Major Heal as Shaping training, not magic. My Agent was happy with this deal, but I thought it was odd. Chalk it up to his 'eccentricity'?

It seems that in G3 you can still train twice in a skill after you have canistered it. This is good because in G2 you were tempted into some weird and tedious strategies to postpone canisters until after training. If you were really serious this even meant pushing yourself right through Outer Gazak-Uss at foolhardily low levels just so you didn't miss out on the training. While that was good for getting some adrenaline after you've beaten the game a few times, it didn't really make sense in the game world. (Puny Shaper runs gauntlet of deadly horrors on hunch that at the end there'll be a servile hermit with a really good Powerpoint show ...)

Display Warrens basement, northeast corner.

I kind of hate the boats, too, and yet I think they are right. The slight annoyance I have as a player in getting between islands makes me actually think of them as islands separated by difficult waters, and I think this contributes to the atmosphere of the game.

Wait till your cellmate dies, then conceal yourself in his shroud. After they throw you into the sea, escape before you drown.

Oh, wait, that's the Chateau d'If. Sorry, can't help.

I have the same feelings - as both Mike and Zorro.

I believe that in a time of crisis moderation can sometimes be very immoral. GF3 seems to portray such a situation, where the only available choice is a choice between evils. I don't feel that the game loses its ethical standards, though: to me the least of evils is always an entirely right choice. The question is, which one really is the least of evils?

It isn't easy to tell. But I submit that it should not really have been so easy to tell in the earlier games, either. There were serious problems with the Awakened, in my opinion. And the nonaligned option was really a Loyalist path.

"Wi' a hundred vlishes and a', and a' ..."

Ach, the tunes, the tunes of glory!