Triumph

The buttons along the bottom of the screen change between regular mode and combat mode. Specifically, the buttons for spells like Firebolt and Searer are only present while you're in combat (and likewise, the keyboard letters that set those spells to be your default attack only do that while you're in combat mode). You should at least be able to able to cast Firebolt at this point. I don't remember if Searer needs more than 1 level of Battle Magic. Now, if you go into combat mode and the buttons *don't* appear, then I'm stumped.

Rebel Endgame: The Geneforge: Weird business here. If I click on Litalia to talk to her, the dialogue indicates I’m a rebel. But if I walk up near her, dialogue pops up that her talking to me as if I’m a Shaper. If I carry on that conversation, she becomes hostile, but if I just hit the Escape button to close out the dialogue box, she remains friendly. Chadwick Prison: Be sneaky. Avoid the enemies, steal Chadwick’s key, and boom, you’re free. Dhonal’s Keep version 2.0: it’ll really help if you messed up the Golems earlier in the game so that they won't bother you. It’s also helpful to enter the zone from the south gate; run east and follow the back alley north. Enter the door at the far northeast corner, and use the trap door to sneak into the Inner Keep. Inner Keep version 2.0: take the corridor along the eastern side. Slip into the prison area by the side door. And that’s it. Apparently my game is bugged? Because the imprisoned drakon that I was counting on to kill Rahul for me…isn’t there. I assume that if he were, I’d be able to lead him to Rahul, buff him, slay the foe, and escape. Since he's glitched out (?), there is literally no way for me kill Rahul that would be in keeping with the parameters of this play-through. Has anyone else ever used the drakon imprisoned in the inner keep to help them kill Rahul? If you have, that would confirm that issue is just my save and not a problem with the game itself. This brings my pacifist challenge G3 experiment to a close.

I understand that on higher difficulties, the enemies are more powerful (thus the reason Mental Magic, which uses their strength against them, scales especially well on higher difficulties). Do friendly NPCs not experience a similar buffing process when you raise the difficulty setting?

Rebel Endgame Spears East Dock: auto-cleared. I skipped the arrival fight by just running west to Icy End. Icy End: auto-cleared. You needed to talk to Nazar to advance further with the Rebels, but Leadership will solve your problem with him. Breeding Valley: auto-cleared. Besieged Camp: you can walk around here fairly easily. I was able to poke my head into the Shaper cave and lure them out, leading them to the patrolling cryoas who killed them. You have to be careful that they don’t kill you before they get distracted by the cryoas, but it’s doable. Getting the three named shapers killed clears the zone. Southern Gates: Just as dangerous as when you’re a Shaper. You can get here through Benerii-Eo Labs, unlock the gate, and thus clear the area. Spire Forest: you can talk Khossos into leaving you alone, and for some reason although this didn’t clear the zone when I was a Shaper, it does clear the zone as a Rebel. Mushroom Cave: I think this is cleared after you talk to the servant mind and tell it to open the doors to the next zone. Benerii-Eo Gates: Pass the tests and you’ll clear the zone. You can use Leadership to satisfy the requirements. Oddly enough, when you swear loyalty to the Rebels, you can select truth or lie, and satisfy the test either way. Which is weird since you’re already locked into being a rebel. Benerii-Eo Labs: well, this is a lot more pleasant as a Rebel. Cross the area to clear it. You can talk Tigh-Eye into letting you pass. And you should. I thought about using the Purification Crystal to kill rogue golem…but the golem basically kills me on sight, and I never get the chance to lead it anywhere. Benerii-Eo Vat Core: You clear this area easily by entering from the Labs and using the machine to turn off the alarms / golems. And that's it for tonight. Hopefully one more session will let me polish this off. Tangent: I wish the idea of defecting Shapers hadn’t dropped from the series after G3. In G2 you had several Shapers who joined either the Barzites (including Barzhal himself) or the Awakened. In G3, you had Litalia, Hoge, Mooralas, that smith-guy on Gull whose name I forget, Greta, and potentially the PC. All these were Shaper characters who for a variety of motivations joined another side. Some are idealists, some are purely selfish, some actively serve the cause, some are passive collaborators. All the defectors represented, or had the potential to represent, interesting points of view, people who began from a foundation of Shaper orthodoxy and then made some accommodation to rebellious attitudes and actions. After G3, the only Shaper-turned-rebel characters to appear are holdovers from G3 (Greta, Litalia, and I guess Khyryk). The PC even ceased to be a Shaper, being instead either an avowed rebel or some rogue monstrosity of sketchy alignment.

I finished off my Shaper run at Level 28. I could probably have gotten a little higher, had I made more effort to chase down some quests in the latter half of the game, but I really didn't need anything. You need Mechanics, Leadership, and beyond that your healing and blessing magic skills can be useful (the buffing and healing spells can let you help out friendly NPCs, or keep yourself alive if you need to run through a group of enemies, for example). Also, getting the Crystalline Shroud was HUGE. The +2 action points makes a massive difference in your ability to run around dodging enemies.

"Indeed, Daniel Jackson." That was the entire point of this thread. I never hit an enemy, used a creation, or cast a spell on an enemy.* Relying entirely on Leadership, Mechanics, stealth, and friendly NPCs or other environmental features, I completed the game as a Shaper. I plan to complete the game as a Rebel, too, I just haven't gotten around to that yet. Jeff fulfilled his promise and *really did* make it possible that if any point in the game you got stuck and the enemies were too hard, there would be an alternative path, a way to advance without without depending on your personal fighting ability. Of course there are plenty of quests and zones that you cannot clear or complete, if you play the way I did. *The one exception to this so far is in my Rebel game. When you first visit Khyryk, there is a speech option to say you came to kill him. I wasn't ready to kill him right then, however. When I came to actually kill him, that speech option had vanished, meaningful I was forced to hit him once myself in order to initiate the fight sequence. I relied on other things to actually defeat Khyryk, but I had to poke him once just to turn him hostile. I assume the later games work the same. I'm pretty sure they all share a promise, issued somewhere in the tutorial section or on the loading screens or wherever, that there are multiple paths to your goal, including one that doesn't rely on fighting. I am actually more confident that pacifist runs are possible in the later games, and a lot less sure about the first two games. I know G1 and G2 provide mechanical or leadership paths around some problems, but there are also points in those games where I can't recall any non-combat solutions to some situations. I enjoyed this play-through. It turned the game into a very interesting puzzle, forcing me to look at elements within the game differently than I ever did before.

Weirdness: I made it to Spears and locked myself in to the Shaper endgame. Then I went back to Gull and killed Khyryk before proceeding to finish the game. The Shapers in the ending take note of how I fixed the Dhonal Creator and murdered Khyryk, with the result that they end up killing me and I get eaten by a drayk. However, in the Gull Island ending, Khyryk still emerges from his tower and takes charge of the island. The game doesn't seem to have been designed for my loophole exploitation, muddling the ending. Note that I did NOT help the Harmony rebels, so I can confirm that helping the rebels on all three islands is not necessary get ending 1c. It does seem, however, that you cannot get the Greta-brokers-peace Gull ending if you were a Shaper. Since I already established that it is impossible to get the Rebel endgame unless you kill Khyryk, it would seem that each side effectively has only one Gull Island ending.

Shaper Endgame, continued: Benerii-Eo Vat Core: First you’ll meet some noxious vats which you can just run past, with the added bonus of deactivating them if you want. Then you’ll find two paths, both of which require you to trip an alarm to proceed. These activate golems that start patrolling and require sneakiness to avoid. In the southwest corner, there two controls you need to use – one deactivates the alarms / the golems, the other opens the door to the zone. Using both will clear the zone. Benerii-Eo Labs: don’t bother going here. Bad, bad place. Stay away if you’re playing pacifist. The Geneforge: First step, you’ll need 16 (I think?) Leadership to talk your way past Litalia. Then run around all sneaky through the back tunnels and use mechanics to sabotage Akhari’s machinery. Run over some hot pads, find levers to deactivate others. There are three sets of machinery that make creations of Akhari that you can sabotage. From Litalia, you’ll need to go west to find the shapers, south and then east through the tunnels to get to two of the machines. But you’ll need to go back to Litalia, go a little south of her and loop back east to get to the other machine. If the hot pads do major damage to you, you’ve missed a lever somewhere. If they do just a little damage, you’re probably on the right track. Then just let the shapers and the creations from the meddled machinery do the dirty work for you. BOOM. Geneforge 3 completed as a Shaper without ever having to strike a blow or make a creation.

If by regularly you mean "Every five years or so."

It's the explanations that really make it fun. Blindly guessing is easy but boring. Contrariwise, trying figure out your wordplay / cultural references is an entertaining puzzle.

ALL YOUR PDN ARE BELONG TO US

MASSIVE IGUANA! My day is now improved. Thank you, Diki.

361. Displacer Iguana - Ironic art and translation mix-ups [EDIT: sniped by owenrus] 337. Devoid Man Devoid - An unhappy beginning These are the only ones left, so I might as well just blindly guess. If this isn't correct, then they must be 361. Displacer Iguana - An unhappy beginning 337. Devoid Man Devoid - Ironic art and translation mix-ups It seems sort of poetic that "An unhappy beginning" should be one of the last two clues to remain unsolved.

345. Heart like swords and pool on the - In context, an expression of overintellectualized pain Process of elimination; nothing else it could go with (this PDN has been guessed with the other two remaining clues already).

345. Heart like swords and pool on the - Ironic art and translation mix-ups Because in addition to the lyrical meaning of the PDN when it occurred with its preceding and succeeding PDNs, it could be misinterpreted in a vacuum to talk about swords shaped like hearts and the game played with cues and colored, numbered balls? 334. Angel of Cacophony??/? - Other side of my secret identity, maybe Is there a connection to Slartifer here, with an allusion to Milton's Pandemonium or something like that? Or else an allusion to being the "Demon of Good Taste," where the "other side" is, A. angelic, and B. something usually considered in bad taste (cacophony)?

I'll just award myself an A for Effort and move on...

362. Oracle of the Pills and Raves - Paper airplane domination? Oracle is a company known for creating applications that deal with "the cloud," thus metaphorically putting them in the sky where airplanes would be. Doing things electronically also tends to reduce the use of paper. Together, then, one could stretch and see how that is "paper [and] airplane domination." The question mark in the clue shows how unsure I am about this explanation. The PDN also seems to be a reference to the Matrix movies, which had the famous Red / Blue Pill choice, weird rave scenes, and an Oracle character (who was a computer program, probably not coincidentally). I keep thinking of different oracles, present, past, and fictional, and this is the best I've got.

"Just a pile of unhappy words" - I keep wanting to find way to make this a reference to the goofy Castlevania quote "What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets." Unfortunately none of your PDNs seem to have anything to do with Castlevania. Alas. "A Miserable Little Pile of Secrets" *would* be a good PDN, though...

364. Dongan kasakuyan indo muu - Plea from the Cosmos The PDN is a quote from the Mothra Song; it talks about calling for help, and is sung two faerie characters sometimes called the Cosmos.

Then: 335. To Protect and Serve Man - Solving two humanitarian crises with one expatriation program Again, drawing on the police motto and the Twilight Zone ep.: the expatriation program is a reference to the aliens taking people away. "Humanitarian" may also be a clue that it's linked to the PDN with "man" in it. There are a couple of other PDNs like this - I know what the PDN is about, but I have no idea what clue goes with it.

335. To Protect and Serve Man - Ironic art and translation mix-ups A translation problem re: "serve" is key to the plot of the old Twilight Zone ep. To Serve Man. The PDN also refers to the famous police motto To Protect and To Serve. I’m not sure how art fits in, though.

Thinking about words... 334. Angel of Cacophony??/? - Beats fall apart Cacophony refers to discordant noise...such as might happen when musical beats get messed up.

348. And this one was much shorter. - A small rebellion rebellion It's a pun - alluding to the BoE scenerio - juxtaposing "small" and "short."

Aww. I was really proud of that connection. It at least seemed plausible...

340. Crouching Ihrno Sleeping Dragon - Elf queen of Glastonbury Grove The Ihrno (mage) is Morgan le Fay, sometimes referred to as queen of Avalon, which is sometimes identified with Glastonbury Tor. According to the tale, King Arthur (surname Pendragon) went there to rest and heal (hence Sleeping Dragon). The title is also a reference to the film Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.