Zaego

And even if it's not underground prison, it's the Empire that's about to chop your head off, like in Skyrim.

I know this is kind of quazi-off-topic, but is it just me or is it in the SWS Forums' unwritten etiquette to not use (many) smileys-face-logo-things? Not that I mind, because in my personal opinion the threads look a lot tidier and neater (read that in GIFTS voice) with just plain text.

I love the tags of this thread.

Honestly, I had the exact same feeling when I was in the Blackreach, myself. It was one the most memorable things in a very memorable game. Moreover, if some big gaming company could create Avernum in something like that'd resemble Skyrim's engine -- because I feel like that'd make it the most justice -- that'd be some GOTY material right there. There would just be a huge problem, concerning the game-mechanics, because the charm in Avernum and Avadon and Geneforge is that they're all more or less turn-based. You have time to think, while a first- or third person game should have to be real-time.

Also, maybe it was much more reasonable to send something big through the portal, if and when the Empire officials decided to throw down something, instead of seeing all kinds of trouble of transporting the animals to the portal, going through the bureaucracy (which Empire seems *really* fond of) just for the sake of little chickens.

In all fairness, I was more referring to how the quest markers in some games point directly to a character on the map (like a quest, find a random person in 10 square mile forest, and the person is shown on the map...) In Avernum, while it is certainly still a thing, it's not as bad; but I do see your point there. Fortunately I haven't found this to be a feature in Avadon, and I hope it continues to be like that. (About 15 hours in at this point.) As for the adjusted difficulty, yes, we are in agreement. Especially the Torment mode feels much harder than it did in the original ones. Or maybe it's just the nostalgia. One of the things that kept me sane during last year's spring was the fact that I had a Torment run in Avernum 2: Crystal Souls, the new one. Man... the hours I spent trying something and loading over and over again.

Not only that, but now you can download 6 different character sprites by either paying 500 averbucks to get the whole package, or by paying them individually, 80 averbucks per piece! You can also get yourself the disk-locke...downloadable content, "Generic Farlands of Doom" and "Wrath of Grah-Hoth"! All new enemies, exciting weapons and danger at every corner, only for 16,000 averbucks! Yay! If you sign up right now, we'll also throw in "Let's Hold You By Your Hand" -bonus! Markers all over the map, so you don't need to ever think about those pesky quests or their descriptions, again! The world might appear wide and large, but there's really only one corridor that you can progress, so you won't need to worry about getting lost either! (Finally, if you want to give up 50,000 averbucks, you can get the Demonslayer and level up your party right up to level 30. You could've done that with the party-editor anyway but... we'll just cut that out, shall we?)

Yes, the Vahnatai did domesticate giant lizards. There was a Vahnatai farming town to the east of the Vahnatai Lands that are accessibe during Avernum 2. I think there were lizards in a pen-house there, but I can't be sure. Oh and yes, the Vahnatai greeter near Formello on the small island had a pet lizard, too.

Anytime, mate. As for what to be used in place of our eggs, I feel like Avernite giant lizards might lay eggs large enough to be enough for large quantities of dough. While you'd need, say, 4 chicken eggs for one bread-pancake, you could easily do 4 bread-pancakes with just 1 giant lizard egg (just as an example, I don't know the exact figures). If the lizard eggs would behave in a similar manner as to those of chickens', I could imagine that a single lizard egg could stay fresh for a month if preserved in a cold and dry place. Also, it's a good question, the one you asked if it's possible to bake with their eggs at all. Maybe the eggs should have to be really fresh? EDIT: No, wait, nevermind.

For main courses one would have to go with mushrooms, algae, beef, herbs, moss, fish, roe, eggs, and the other ingredients that Lilith described above. For tea or coffee one would have to go with lichens and leaves. About 70 years ago, during times of great shortages, people used grinded tree-bark, rye, barley, turnips, dandelion roots and a small amount of coffee to mix a powder that served as a substitute for coffee. Concerning the mushroom bread, it's a bit tricky. The thing about the bread is that you need the dough to be sticky, which is something that the mushrooms as a flour doesn't possess. It's doable, but your mushroom breads would be more like flat rolls or pancakes. To get the whole mushroom flour to stick together, you'd need to knead eggs and stick that to the mushroom-flour. (You'd get mushroom flour by drying them and then grinding them to a fine flour.) Adding salt and yeast would be necessary, as well as having something that includes sugars for the yeast to use as a catalyst. The fact that the Exile caverns have luminescent fungi might imply that there could be photosynthetic algae, as well, which use sugars and light to metabolize energy for themselves. Hence, using algae or something similar that uses monosaccharides as a component for the mushroom dough should work. You could also grind some cleansed tree-bark (pine- and spruce-trees; also make sure the tree doesn't get damaged when you pry some off!) and add it to the mix. The tree-bark was used, just like the surrogates for coffee (read above) during the times of shortages, and could act just like any fungal tree's bark in Avernum. As for the alcohol brewed from mushrooms, I did some reseach. The mushrooms of Earth seem to have very small contents of fat, carbohydrates and mono-, di-, and oligosaccharides, which means that there is no sugars for the yeast to turn into alcohol, hence making the fermenting process otiose. In this sense, the best surrogate we can come up with is to just drink really bad (or if you're feeling fancy: good) tasting alcohol and pretend that it's made from mushrooms... In short; the mushroom bread.

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No harm done. :-) Let us hope that Jeff secretly reads these forums in his spare times when he's not rolling about in piles of cash and notices our nostalgic desire for continuation of the old series... :-P

Jar Jar / Rentar-Ihrno is scaringly fitting; I love it. Could we bind any other characters together? Like, Lord Sidious and Gladwell?

In Avernum 3, there is actually a book that is labeled "Magic for Dummies". I do remember that the book described simple spells that included doing something benevolent (?) to one's grandparents, and spaying a pet.

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Oh yes, that's very much true. Thankyou, Tyranicus, I thought I had missed some blog-post or an announcement of three more Avernum games. In hindsight, that would be a bit silly, seeing as how Avernum 6 basically concludes everything. At least I can defend with the fact that I was 75% asleep by the time I wrote that.

Oh my good lord. I haven't laughed this hard in a long time, not with tears in my eyes. Thankyou. Thankyou so very much for this.

Avadon 3, ok. Avernum 9, excuse me what? Have I missed something?

I second Owenrus' comment. The character development and interaction between party-members would be quite troublesome to create, if not done in a similar fashion to Avadon's style. You'd pick one of the characters as yourself as a player (should you decide to create a party of more than one heroes), and you could assign a few of character relations and backstories to each character, much like traits but with the difference that they don't actually affect anything but the party-members' dialogue with one another; or in case of simpletons (parties comprised of only 1 member), moments of reflection or conversations with strangers. For the sake of simplicity there should have to be a limited amount of such character interactions taking place; possibly some pre-defined and some might be random, but not too much either because there is a lot of reading in the first place in Spidweb's games. The interaction with outside characters is more or less commendable in the series, but I'd like to see just a little bit more small things like: you go to Island of Bigail and you choose to take the quest to return the charm to the nephil. Once the quest is complete, the nephil disappears and you're happy that you've helped a brother out. Imagine how cool would it be if you actually got to visit some random nephil clan and found the quest-charm-nephil as a clan chieftain or a weaponsmith. Things like that. If those things should happen, I'd do nothing but play Avernum 3 until I'd die of old age.

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Concerning the fact that you, Lordhoff, tried your hand at Avadon first and thus went with the newer game-series, I do see where you're coming from (the point about Gothic I and II). Returning to older interfaces and controls after experiencing the newer ones can be a bit tricky in some games, but personally I don't think that the differences are all that jarring in Spiderweb's games. The core-mechanics remain largely the same, but as we go further into the past in SW's games, the lack of smoothness may make itself obvious; while in games like Dark Souls 1 / 2 and The Elder Scrolls III Morrowind / V Skyrim the differences are much, much steeper and thus make it more difficult for players who try out the newer first, enjoy the older later. If you are so willing, you may even try out playing the games in a reverse order; many of the games are stand-alones and do not require you to have played the predecessors, although playing the games from first to last may help you in understanding the game-series' universes better. I'm a bit tired at the time of writing this and thus my answer may have been a bit incoherent or rambly (or at least so it seems to my fatigued mind) and thus I'll throw in a shortened finale: I don't think that playing Avadon first will make it unbearably difficult to play the older games, because the soul remains unchanged throughout the production line. It may be a bit difficult to adjust to the oldest games because of the lack of aforementioned smoothness and polish one may have accustomed to in the newer games, but as I said before, one may skip some of the oldest games* and play the sequels and return to the skipped ones later if one is so inclined. *In the Avernum's case, you might even go for the Remakes (1: Escape from the Pit and 2: Crystal Souls) since they are essentially the same games with minor discrepancies in lore in comparison to the originals; but the interfaces and graphics are newer, on par with Avadon. The third one is smooth enough to feel like the newest games but with old graphics, with the same going for Blades of Avernum, comprising of smaller scenarios set in the Avernum-universe. EDIT: How typical of me... My shortened answer winds up being even longer than the original text. Silly me.

If you, OP, have played Avernum-series, Avadon does have a slightly different approach to itself, more akin to that of the Geneforge-series. While I was turned off by that, myself, it's still very much a distinct Spiderweb game and does seem to have a good plot so far (I'm about 10-20 hours in). There's a lot to explore and if you pick all of the side-quests it doesn't feel too linear. The combat has received a nice overhaul, as well, and warriors can finally act like proper warriors, taking the focus of the enemies and mages can keep hitting the enemies with their basics attacks which drains no mana, but result in less damage (which I personally like), or use heavy-hitting spells that have cooldowns, so you have to keep thinking about what you're doing -- no more fireblast-spam like in Avernums' end-games. About how the maps work in Avadon, as compared to Avernum... There are a lot of improvements over the predecessors, like more fluid party-movement although even that isn't always without its' issues since the AI can bug sometimes and leave a party member stuck on a bunch of bushes but other than that, I can recommend it. It's a good, solid Spiderwebsoftware game.

Wait.. what? What? *perks up in the chair* I never noticed that, actually. I had a weird tendency of gathering all sorts of malevolent items like Searing Balms and Poison Elixirs, even these scrolls, but the descriptions just slipped past my attention. I haven't played Avernum 3 in a long time; thus I wonder if the XP loss drains levels? For example, if you have level 50 character who has 2999 XP accumulated towards the next level, does the -3000 XP drain a level, resulting the character gaining +10 Skill Points but winding up being level 49? EDIT: Yep, at end-game consuming even five Searing Balms didn't affect my parties' characters in the slightest... And even if one is unfortunate enough to have characters with low endurance, there's nothing that Divine Restoration wouldn't fix.

Now, this raises an interesting question. Should we consider the Remakes as the overriding canon because they are more recent; or should the Originals be the canon because they represent Jeff's original ideas; or should both Original Avernums and Remake Avernums be handled as their own separate canons? (Just like with Exile / Avernum discrepancies.)

That's a fair enough point, I didn't remember that. Hmmh. Now we'll have to check if there are any pillows at all in the Vahnatai lands. I'm almost certain that the meditation chambers in Egli have pillows in them for sitting purposes. It could be that the Vahnatai use the natural fibrous lichens for these. ... (some time later). I got curious, actually, and I went to check. (For the sake of clarification, I fired up the new Remake Avernum 2.) In Olgai, most bedrooms do display the usage of pillows. My time is running short and I couldn't check the other cities quite yet, but I'd imagine that the Vahnatai do use pillows. Well that's an interesting thing to learn, I didn't know that, actually. Very interesting indeed. Thanks for sharing the knowledge. --- In Olgai, there is a Vahnatai merchant called Riditas who reveals that the preserved mushrooms in stone jars are expected to last for at least three centuries. If this kind of craftsmanship is practiced in other Vahnatai cities, (which seems quite likely, considering the need for supplies for Vahnatai warriors who wake before others to awake entire colonies from Resting) then that implies that the Vahnatai are well prepared for lasting extended periods of time after Resting without fresh food, as their farming culture is re-awakened and the fields are cleansed of noxious weeds. Also, I'd imagine that even if the Vahnatai did have enhanced strains of fungi that lasted against weeds and undesired flora, the hostile creatures such as the hydras and chitratches might still pose a problem to the crops. Thus the best course of action should be to simply abandon the crops before Resting and reclaim them afterwards. Well, that's just my humble opinion, anyway.