Kelandon

Stuns! Interesting. I didn't think of trying that, but it makes sense. I think you're right about luck. I think the fundamental problem with the fight is that too much depends on chance. Even a high mental resistance character will succumb to the terrify spells occasionally, and only some classes can build up high mental resistance (notably SW and SO). There are a few items that boost your mental resistance a lot, too (Dreadnought Helm, Mica Ring, among others). So you could conceivably have three characters who were decently likely to resist. But even if you have one with a 90% chance to resist, another with a 80% chance to resist, and a third with a 70% chance to resist (which is pretty generous), you'll still have at least one character terrified on every other round. But a party member getting terrified on his own turn is pretty much a loss, because you need a wall to block off Gryfyn, and most summons aren't strong enough to withstand the infernals. Well-placed turrets might do it, but that's finicky work. This means that you probably need to have your first-acting character also be high resistance (probably a Dexterity-based SW) who's ready with a group mental cure scarab to clean up your terrified party members. But you have to get lucky enough that you don't get the wrong character terrified on any turn (out of probably five or six). Even if your top mental resistance is 90%, if the fight lasts 6 turns, that's about a fifty-fifty chance of losing the first-acting character (who's supposed to cure everyone else). The combat is relatively short, so having it depend almost entirely on luck is not all that bad, but it still seems like a bad design decision.

You're not kidding. After giving up in frustration on Gryfyn, I went and killed Vardegras. It took three tries and loading up on the right scarabs and burning through some (but frankly not a lot) of consumables, but it wasn't particularly hard. In contrast, Gryfyn seems impossible. But if anyone who's succeeded cares to share some details as to how it's done, I'd be curious.

I'm sure that's true. But how? My characters with 35+ Dexterity move after he does. I can form a wall, but my characters get terrified or occasionally killed enough that the wall doesn't hold for more than a couple of turns. I guess I'll go do some other stuff and come back. I'll stack up on mental and elemental resistance items, and I'll see what happens.

I haven't the faintest clue how to deal with Gryfyn. I have a pair of difficulties. First, the terrify-the-whole-party-every-round attack; I have two characters (Yoshiria and Yannick) who have decent mental resistance, but my main character (a Tinkermage) doesn't and succumbs to the terrify every time. This isn't exactly a fight where I can lose a whole character for the entire fight, because... I can't figure out how to block Gryfyn so that he doesn't just escape within two or three turns, and there doesn't seem to be any conceivable way that I can do enough damage to him in two or three rounds to kill him. I can get him down to maybe half-health. Only one or two characters die, and then he escapes. What gives? I have all the characters at level 30, probably all the scarabs in the game, most of the top artifacts in the game, and I frankly have no idea how to retrain the party or use items to win this fight. How is it done?

Seems likely, given the screwed up way that BoA handles probabilities. I may be mis-remembering, but can't you give the item to the character, also? That makes it 100%. I think you've forgotten to set an item name. There may be a long name or a short name you've omitted. Check the docs. I'm just saying this off the top of my head without looking anything up. If you check the docs and still can't find an answer, I can actually put in the effort to find the specifics.

I don't know a great deal about the subject, but my guess is that it would require quite a lot of new code. All of the networking stuff would have to be built from scratch, and that's not a trivial task. And since we don't have the source code for anything but BoE, integrating the code would be basically impossible. It's one thing to change scripts or lightly edit the terrains or something, and it's quite another to reprogram the existing game. A multi-player BoE would be interesting (but probably not worth the effort).

Endings are generally hard-coded. Back up your files before doing anything crazy.

"Much of the content"? Very, very little of the content actually changed. I can't recall there having been a situation in which it mattered which of the two was canonical. I don't think any of the plot of any of the BoE/A scenarios ever came up in the later Avernum games (A4-6), except that I think there may have been a passing reference to the Second Slith War (from ZKR) in at least one of them. I think someone once said that Jeff said that he doesn't feel bound by them (i.e. they're not canonical), but they've never been contradicted, either. EDIT: Oh, except I think some years changed from Exile to Avernum — the First Expedition was a different number of years before E1 than it was before A1, if I remember correctly, and some things like that. For that, I'd expect that the later supersedes the former.

Now going through a second time, again on Hard. I'm at the beginning of the first trek into the Tawon. As with Avadon 1, the second playthrough is a lot more fun. I'm not exactly sure why this is; maybe it's because I'm more familiar with the people, so I can appreciate the details a lot better. Maybe the same is true of the game mechanics. I decided to go with a different lineup: Tinkermage main character, mostly backed in the early game by Khalida and Dedrick. Everyone is going a lot up the middle column, and the non-magic characters are focusing on range (except Alcander, who I figured I'd try to make a melee-er). I played the way that I did on the first try because I wanted — as is tremendously successful in Avadon 1 — for my base attacks to be the strongest thing I had, with little or no ability use. Fatigue appears to be a real thing in Avadon 2 — I actually run out of vitality from time to time — and I didn't want to have to deal with that. But to my surprise, I ended up with a much stronger party, at least when I bring all of my power to bear. Fairly early on, I had two turrets and a Shaman summon all going at once, and it was pretty effective at distracting the opponents enough and taking damage enough (and getting healed enough) that I could stand back at range and just fire away. It's really coming into its own now that I have a summoning scarab and can have a whole mob of turrets and pets in front of me before anybody can get to my main characters. I feel extremely strong. The first Miranda fight was no problem (one reload when I got a little sloppy). Nimah, who gave me a lot of grief before, was no problem at all. I'm trying to make more use of the other characters, but there are certain abilities that really complement each other well, and it's hard not to use them together. I'm forcing myself to bring Yoshiria and Yannick into Tawon with me just so that I can make some use of them, but I'm seriously lacking in healing power when I do that. I may go back and fetch Dedrick if things get too out of hand, because Dedrick can at least be a summoner/healer, where neither Yoshiria nor Yannick are all that great for that. I'm also finding it hard to have a lot of characters who use the same weapons in the party. Had I not made Alcander a melee fighter, I would've had three razordiskers. I don't know if that works. I can buy titansteel razordisks in Tawon, but meh. So far, quite interesting. I'll report back when I make a little more progress.

Obscure grammar minutia! I think this is not quite right. As I understand it, "who" takes the person of its referent. In your example, "I am the one who knocks," "who" refers to "one," and "one" is third-person. But if you were to say, "I, who am your worst nightmare, have come," the "who" refers to "I" and therefore is first-person. At least, that formerly was the rule, but I don't think that very many people use the sentence structure that would call for the rule anymore, much less apply the rule correctly. (I can't even find a website that mentions this rule, after some quick Googling.) So probably now most people just use a third-person "who" regardless. Alorael mentions his name in the third person because it's a simulation of a signature. You sign your name at the end of a letter, email, or, in Alo's case, a post. And, oddly, because the name is in the third-person, the "who" presumably is in the third person as well. —Kelandon, who really enjoys stepping on Alo's toes, especially now that Alo is all high and might and running the place.

I believe that you were warned to run as hard as you could. ("The caldera begins to bubble. The ground vibrates under your feet. _I warn you. Flee now, flee fast, and you live._) As far as I know, you're not supposed to fight the Purity Constructs; you're supposed to run away from them as evasively as you can. Someone else probably has better advice about exactly how to do that, though, because I ran fast enough not to get to that point. EDIT: Sniped by Lilith. If it is actually true that "no matter where I go there is 4 Purity Constructs," you may be in some trouble, though. Look for another way.

I think that's a pretty safe bet. We don't have a lot of images that are official and depict the glowing fungus.

I felt the same way. Given how complex and challenging the companion quests in Avadon 1 were, I felt as though most of them in Avadon 2 were a letdown.

Remaking the Geneforge series is baffling. What would he do to it? The graphics are not very different from those he uses today. The skill and spell system stayed more or less the same throughout, and Geneforge 5 came out just a few years ago, so it's not as though he has some radically different preferred way of doing things now. As far as I know, there are no compatibility problems. So why remake the games?

Not sure why this is, but my corescendata2 doesn't correspond to the list above at those item numbers. For me, it's: 364 Aspskin Gloves 365 Gloves of the Fae 367 Boots of Apollo 368 Slippers of Speed 369 Wyrmsbane So I'd try item 367.

Oh hey, it's Bruce Mitchell. Long time no see! If anyone could beat a Spiderweb game with a low-level character, it'd make sense that it'd be you. (Or Lilith, I guess, but I think we've established that I don't consider Lilith "anyone.") Level 17, huh? That's lower than I would've thought, but not implausibly low. Sure, but presumably not while trying to maintain as low level as possible.

I don't know about you, but if ogres want to breed in a pit, I'm probably not going to try to stop them.

If I remember correctly, you can't go there until later, when you have a specific quest to take care of a particular pest.

Right. Fixed. By the way, the spoiler tags were just for length; I assume the title suffices for spoiler tags for the whole thread. I'll add that the part of this that I found surprising is that you don't have to give the satchel to the scout in order to get a kiss. As long as you tell Silke that you're going to give her the satchel, but then you don't do it, and you otherwise are nice to her, you can still get a kiss. I also found a little surprising how easy it was to get on Protus's good side, but then, I ended up doing that completely by accident in my first game. Then, too, you don't have to do a lot to get up to 5 of the 9 sidequests completed. Some of those quests (kill two of the optional super-enemies) are much harder than others (do the Callan quests).

Inspired by Lillith's general description of what matters in the game, I did an extensive check of which conversation options set flags that matter for endgame (or other) purposes. I can't immediately see which flags are needed to give different text endings at the very end of the game, or else I'd report that, too. Anyone know how to tell this? The following is what I found (and, interestingly, it is true that pretty much nothing else has consequences down the line — notably, I think that this means that you can report on everyone to Callan): AVADON’S STRENGTH The game counts how many of the following 9 things you’ve done: If you’ve done at least 2 of the 9, you can become an Eye. If you’ve done at least 5 of the 9, you can become a Heart. These are the only things that influence this. [EDIT: With two exceptions! Apparently — "in main code," according to script comments — you lose a point for betraying Odil in the Titan Lands (for Silke or otherwise) and you lose a point for bringing enough arcane notes and Pact records (12 total, of either) to Cybele to get a halberd from her, if you actually ask her for the extra reward and get the halberd. (That is, it's getting the halberd, not bringing the notes and records that gives you the demerit.)] SILKE/RAINER The flag (100,18) tracks your relationship with the scout, and it must be less than 3 (heh, <3) to reach a successful culmination. The counter tracks how many times (and how badly) you’ve upset the scout. As far as I can tell, nothing before the Ogre Thicket matters for the counter. You can be as friendly or as rude as you want in the early game and none of it matters. The following options in the Ogre Thicket matter: At the end of this conversation, if you tell the scout to wait and ask, “Will I see you again?”, you can verify that you’re still below 3. The scout will reply, “And, to be honest, I hope we do meet again,” if the counter is below 3. Otherwise, the scout will reply, “Yet, to be honest, I hope we do not.” The next time you see the scout is in the Titan Lands. I think — although I can’t find this easily in the scripts — that if you get the counter to 10 (e.g., by threatening to kill the scout in the Ogre Thicket), there is no additional dialogue in Titan Lands. The scout simply does not appear. Otherwise, though, you get one more chance to influence the counter: In Titan Lands, when you encounter the scout and are told that the scout has joined the rebels: “So now you are fully a traitor.” (Increases the counter by 1.) In addition to keeping the counter below 3, you must also follow a specific path in the Titan Lands. There are frankly quite a lot of other flags involved in certain options in the final dialogue, and I can’t tell what all of them are doing. Nothing of significance, I think, but there may be something else going on here. DHELESS If you helped Konstina against Odil, you can also side with Dheless in Fort Rockfall. The following describes the exact steps: PROTUS Protus also works on a counter, which you have to get to at least 3 in order to get his help to defeat Redbeard. It’s (0,16). The following options change the counter: You can verify the value of the counter by asking Protus, “And what do you think of Redbeard?” If he says Redbeard is the best, then the counter is less than 4. Otherwise, he’ll say something critical. Also, there are a bunch of other places throughout the dialogues where you get different responses (and occasionally greater cash rewards) if Protus likes you, too. Ultimately, the payoff is right before the endgame, when Protus asks you what you think of Redbeard being outside of Avadon. You have to say, “I think that he should be removed from power, and this is the time to do it.” Then you have to say, “I think you would stay in your current position, but well rewarded.” (Either truth or lie — tracked by flag (0,23), where 1 is truth and 2 is lie. You get special item 4.)

Bob. EDIT: And Iffy below confirms what I believed ADOS's mistake was.

That's not really true. You just have to do something a little more complicated than in Avadon 1 (pump Dexterity forever!!). A high-Dexterity, high-Endurance Blademaster with decent parry/evasion skills/items will generally survive most kinds of damage pretty well. For reasons I'm not entirely clear on, my Sorcerer ended up able to absorb virtually all magical/elemental damage with almost no hit point loss. In this fight, I struggled quite a lot, but big area of effect and cone spells/abilities helped to keep from getting swarmed. I don't think I used significant items much, if at all, but I did eat some food, I think, to heal some damage while doing attacks. And you can always turn the difficulty down.

Eh. Given the timing, I'd say that you may as well start with Avernum 1. The Avernum 2 remake won't be released in time to continue the story smoothly, so you'd have to do A:EftP and then the original Avernum 2, and I think backtracking on the engine is not great. I say this not having played A:EftP, but just on general principle.

Added to Strategy Central.

Doing the right thing and doing the things that get you the most options in the endgame are not always the same thing. (Indeed, they often are not.)