Triumph

339. No sad sunny day nor any frightful bright place - Hymn in praise of Magus This one was a lot more straightforward than I realized. It’s just a quote from the Ode to Magus in the timeless classic, Chrono Trigger.

360. Cloaca of Uncertainty and Error - The glory and shame of the universe, or at least the compiler This riffs off a quote by mathematician/philosopher Blaise Pascal.

Wait, that says "Qaking." Somehow I've been misreading that as an O all this time. Then the game being reference is Final Fantasy, which used that idiosyncratic spelling. Still not sure how teleportation is involved, though.

Not sure about this one: 355. Dam Canals - Natural for a liquid Dams and canals are both structures used for controlling liquids. This one I’m more confident about: 354. FEAR and QAKEing - Existential spell options (you can't teleport) I knew this seemed familiar – it’s a reference to Fear and Trembling, the book by the Existentialist philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. It’s also probably a reference to a pair of video game spells, but Fear is generic and I’m stumped by “Oake,” so I have no idea which game he has in mind.

341. Break on Through (To the Other Sidhe) - Open the Doors with Sever Seal One uses Sever Seal, a spell from Nethergate (a game populated by the sidhe), to break through doors

349. Mombi & Jinjur & old Tippetarius - Ways to battle the patriarchy, way up high This one is marvelous. "Way up high" is an allusion to the song "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," (most famously sung by Judy Garland in the The Wizard of Oz), and the three names are all female characters from L. Frank Baum's Oz books. Jinjur in particular is something of a parody of the women's suffrage movement active in Baum's day.

356. Twelve Angry Entwives of Mechanical Failure - DELIBERATE, GREMLIN First, mechanical failures are sometimes called and / or attributed to gremlins. Second, the Ents are well know for their very deliberate approach to life. Third, Twelve Angry Men is a movie about jurors deliberating.

351. Pestilence for the Rest of Ents - Passover alternative for the Romans This is a reference the TV show Seinfeld and the “holiday” Festivus, modifying the phrase "Festivus for the rest of us" to create a similar rhyme and talking about an alternative to a better known holiday

Wait, what? I'm a defending champion of something?! 338. Faster PDN Null Null - Russ Meyer, by any invalid name This is a reference to a movie named Faster Pussycat Kill Kill by some dude named Russ Meyer.

Aha. It turns out that telling us you're in the the Vale of the Sould when you're not would go a long way toward explaining why advice about Vale of the Sould is not helping you advance. The map I posted is for Vale of the Sould in N:R, FYI. If, as Randomizer hypothesizes, you are at the Hall of the Lamp instead... In Hall of the Lamp, you can access only one side of the zone, contingent on whether you are Celt or Roman. The Celts can get into the west side (you'll have to cast the Sever Seal spell to do so), the Romans get into the east side. If you fully explore whichever side your party has access to, you'll find and kill an enemy who will give you another key. With it, you may pass through gate at the north end of the central hall. If you've explored one side and gotten into the north area, you've done all you can do. Based on what you say, it sounds like you're playing playing Celt, you've cleared the western side and the northern area, and now you're done. You can't get into the eastern side unless you're the Romans. If you're not at Hall of the Lamp, please double check exactly where you are and exactly what quest you're trying to fulfill. Wherever you are, it's not Vale of the Sould.

I'm not sure what you're talking about. Like Randomizer, it's been quite a while since I played through (probably too long...I ought to play N:R again sometime!), and what you're saying doesn't ring any bells. Let's try to figure out where you are stuck exactly. I'll attach a screenshot of the zone's automap (so yeah, kind of a spoiler, I guess). Can you narrow down where you're getting stuck? [spoileralt=Map of Vale of the Sould] [/spoileralt]

In talking about the Avadon skill trees leading to a perception of fewer options, I believe something is being left out: the class system, which is different than any previous SW game. Geneforge had a class system, but it only nudged you in certain directions; all skills were still technically available to any character. Exile / Avernum are class-less (and Nethergate has the Celt / Roman distinction but is basically class-less too). Avadon has a much more developed class system, and an essential part of an effective, interesting, balanced class system is specialization. No class gets to do everything. Chances of do-it-all hybridization must be cut back in order to make class choices meaningful and strategic. In that sense, then, there are fewer options for any one character, but it's a function of the class system, not of the skill tree structure.

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I believe the quest to make a mess in Vale of the Sould comes from the Bazaar Master at the Faerie Bazaar, and I believe he only offers it to the Celts.

So the dream of no Dedrik is still alive! Huzzah! Khalida and Alcander were definitely my favorites from Ava2. Contrary to Slarty, I would like see Nathalie return. She was fun.

Ooh! I wonder if this means we'll get any kind of follow-up to the fates of the Ava1 NPC party members?

Breeding Valley: you can pretty easily run across this map; can’t clear it, though. Icy End: it’s not too hard to dash around the town, either. Can’t clear it, though. You can chat up Mooralas, though, if you’re interested in hearing his story. Beneri-Eo Gates: You run up to the end of the valley and talk to Litalia, but then you’ve got to hustle back out before the enemies trap you from behind. Southern Gates: You can’t get inside Beneri-Eo from here, but you can run around a bit; some of the monsters here seem to actively come looking for you, instead of just saying put until you visit them, making stealth exploration more challenging than usual. Spire Forest: You can talk Khossos into not fighting you. You can Mechanic your way through the trapped cave. You apparently can’t clear the zone, though. Mushroom Cave: this zone is meant for sneaking – sneak through, get the servant mind to unlock the door (you’ll need high leadership or some mind food you could have found on Gull), and you’ll gain access to the zone in this path. You should remember to go report this entrance to the shaper camp, though, and tell them to go that way to attack (since you’ll be using them to do a lot of the dirty work in the final zone). Oddly, you DO clear this zone by passing through it (unlike most of the others on Isle of Spears).

I forgot about this; I meant to ask: what game has THAT as its ending?!

Finishing Gull Island as a Shaper: The Maker’s Road: you can talk your way past some servile guards on the road. Unlike the weird group on the Cultist Road zone, these guys will stay friendly when you come back. Zone is not cleared until you free Agatha (shaper route). I assume there’s a way to clear this zone as a Rebel, but I’m not sure what that would be. Maker’s End (zone nested within The Maker’s Road): do some Mechanics, some sneaking, and then be patient – the pylons will eventually kill Omen Eye, but they are really poky about it and inflict relatively little damage at a time. Khor’s Deep: I cleared this zone by running through it, past all the enemies, to the boat. This allowed me to spare Hoge; we’ll see if that affects the ending. Okay, on to the endgame (as a Shaper): Spears East Dock: I think this is automatically cleared. Besieged Camp: As a Shaper, this is cleared when you reach Shapers’ camp.

Khyryk’s Tower, continued: I apparently did something wrong. The game script shows an option to tell Khyryk you’ve come to kill him. I must have clicked something wrong at some point because that option doesn’t show up for me. If I had to guess, maybe the option to tell Khyryk you want to kill him goes away after you do a quest for him (investigating Agatha’s mansion or something)? I know I saw it when I first met Khyryk, but it's gone now. For the sake of my experiment, I "cheated" on my rules and hit Khyryk once to start the fight (since I was supposed to be able to start that fight via dialogue). After you’ve initiated the conflict with Khyryk, you can recruit Zyoss the drayk to help you, and you can overload the big crystal pillar to hurt Khyryk (or at least I presume it has that effect). It took me several tries, but with careful use of healing and buffing items to help Zyoss, the drayk was able to kill Khyryk. Khor's Deep: after I killed Khyryk, I reported to Elek in Stonespire and got orders to go to Spears. If you visit Khor's Deep before you're a committed Rebel, everyone is hostile, but now I'm able to waltz right through, and reaching the boat clears the zone.

And the last experiment: played through Gull like a Shaper, then, before clicking the boat to Spears, went and killed Rahul. Showed up on Spears and the endgame regards me as a Shaper. So it appears that the one and only decision point for your endgame is whether you kill Khyryk before going Spears. You can, however, get a Shaper ending with dead Khyryk if you return from Spears and kill him later. It's also interesting to realize you can do the Shaper endgame AND kill Rahul. I guess that somehow yields the 1c ending mentioned above? I wonder if there's a way to get the Rebel endgame and then kill Akhari / destroy the Geneforge, and if so, what chaos does that yield for the ending? Related question: I noticed you list in the sided-with-Shapers ending the possibility that Hoge is alive? Any idea how to pull that off? I thought the only way to turn him non-hostile was to take the Rebel route on Gull (i.e. kill Khyryk and get the Rebels' permission to go to the boat there).

Next experiment: I did Gull the Shaper way, visited Isle of Spears, then went back and killed Khyryk. The game clearly doesn't expect this sort of duplicity - the rebel servile guards in Khor's Deep (whom I ran past on my way to the boat) are now allied to me, while the Shapers in Stonespire are hostile. However, the shapers on Spears are still friendly and Icy End is still hostile. Thus, it appears that one could, by this goofy method, finish the game as a Shaper yet have a dead Khyryk.

It seems really curious that Jeff would have created such a complex / opaque ending system for G4 - it's so different from the norm in almost all his other work, which are both less complicated and more obvious what actions might shape the ending. I wonder why he did it this way for this one game.

Woah. I had no idea G4 was so complex. I had the impression is it was pretty similar to G3, except with the option to sabotage the Unbound and go Trakovite. It looks like most of the ending-affecting factors occur in (or can be left until) the end of the game (i.e. they deal with the endgame sequence or with stuff you can go back and do easily, like use canisters or kill Litalia). "Reputation," whatever that means (is there any way to narrow down for sure what that is?) presumably depends on earlier activities, and stealing the Unbound Specs is a one-time opportunity. The rest of it, though, it looks like you could get all the way to Northforge Citadel while keeping your options open, create a save, and then start experimenting. Actually, if you made the save at Quessa-Uss, at the decision point of whether to grab the Unbound Specs, you wouldn't be adding that much to your endgame drudgery, but could keep that option open too. Surely there's some way to figure out this "reputation" thing?

I remembered that G3 has an editor available, so I tried using that pump my abilities and then went and killed Rahul. Elek doesn’t acknowledge it, however, and demands I kill Khyryk. (Oddly, Khyryk also doesn’t acknowledge it, though all the friendly towns on Dhonal's Isle turn against me for it.) So, offing Rahul does not enable one to skip the step of killing Khyryk to become a rebel and go to Isle of Spears. Using this powered-up save, I still plan to experiment with a couple of the other possible routes we’ve discussed here. Also, odd thing: Elek says you can go to Khor’s Deep and get help for killing Khyryk from a fellow traitorous shaper…but when I go there, Hoge attacks me. Is that supposed to happen? Also, sad thing: apparently helping the creator results in General Greiner’s death – when you tell Rahul that you fixed the Dhonal Creator, he says he had just learned that Greiner had been killed, too. OUCH. Some of the Shapers in G3 are nasty jerks, but a fair number of them seem like decent people. It's hard to embrace the Shaper cause as a whole, but it's much harder to turn against many of the actual people you encounter on the shaper side of things. I think one of the great deficiencies of G3 is the total failure to generate sympathy for rebels. As I've said before, the first and really only place that lets you see the rebels in a sympathetic light in G3 is Icy End, and you don't get to see it that way unless you're already committed to the rebels.