: Before we can go to the Don, we have to talk to Rachel again. I’m not entirely sure why they felt this was necessary.
: It gets us 400 EXP and also wraps up the Brogar plot line.
: “That’s amazing! You can’t even tell it was broken. Oscar certainly knows his metals.”
: “Surely this is enough to get me an audience with the Don.”
: “Are you kidding? He’ll probably divorce me and marry you!”
: “By the way… you were right. Brogar folded.”
: “Thank you. That will help calm things for now. Don’t worry, that’s not an end to it. When he’s least expecting it, I’ll slip something into his food. I know poisons that will work slowly to turn a person inside out over several weeks.”
: “Hmm.. I might just stay away from your cooking in the future.”
: “Here. You’ve earned a reward. Oh, and one more thing.. don’t let Esteban know about this. He’d just blame me.”
: The Golden Sword is a slight upgrade from our Skullsplitter, but we have to give it up to progress with the game. I also found out that what we want to do in terms of whether we level strength first or swords first is that we want to level strength. The reason for this is that while levelling swords will eventually allow you to one-hand a bastard sword or two-handed sword, all of the good swords of those types have insane strength requirements. We’re probably going to want to level strength to 50 or 60 before we do anything else.
: One perk we get for exiling Brogar is the right to use his house. Brogar has a chest with some vendor trash in it, but more importantly..
: We are now officially a weedlord. All we have to do now is walk right in and meet the Don.
: “Who are you?”
: “A castaway. I’ve come to offer you my services.”
: “A castaway? I need true men, lucky men! You saw your ship wrecked beneath you. Do you see that as luck?”
: “When all but one other died and I lived? I call that luck.”
: “Hmm.. well, I suppose we are all castaways on this island. Castaway by life, now cast away by those storms. I’ll give you a chance, castaway. Prove your luck to me.”
: At this point, we have no choice but to give up the golden sword. Not that it matters: 2 attack points won’t make any dramatic changes to how we fight. The 1000 EXP is also nice. By the time we get done here, I believe we were within a few hundred EXP of level 8.
: “This is Oscar’s work. We both sought this sword since we heard of it. Now, here it is in my hands.”
: “Pride gets eaten alive in this damn swamp. It gets swallowed by anger. Poisoned by idleness. Sometimes I think Fincher is the only man jack of them left with any self-worth and Fincher told me that you have pride. I am in need of pride, so I shall give you a chance to prove yourself.”
: I should mention that apart from that last sentence being badly translated - this game was originally in German - Fincher is the only person on the island who can train us in sword fighting up to the maximum level. If you go the wizard route, you are forever locked out of that. This is NOT, by the way, the point at which we choose which route we’re on. That happens in Harbor Town, meaning you can get this scene and then completely fuck over the bandits for the rest of the game.
: “I’d like to know more about what’s happening here. Why are you and your men in this swamp?”
: We already know the answer to this: it’s because they got chased out of Harbor Town by the Inquisition. I’m gonna skip ahead a little bit.
: “What do you plan to do?”
: “I want my town back. It is our town. It belongs to the people of this island, not the mainland. For that reason, I left some of my men there when we withdrew. Gathering intelligence, frustrating the plans of the inquisition.”
: “They were supposed to be sending me information. But I have heard little recently. These aren’t times when plans run smoothly.”
: “How can I help you?”
: “Find out what is happening in Harbor Town. Find my men. I have no idea if they are alive, imprisoned.. dead. Or worse, if they have defected. Go there. Discover the truth for me.”
: “The town’s rear gate is guarded by the old town watch. They are men without a master and their loyalty can be bought with a little gold.”
: This is the main reason we did the swamp first, apart from the good EXP. If you go straight to Harbor Town and wind up at the back gate - which is pretty likely given that there’s a guy in front of that one Inquisition dig site we snuck through when we went to get the leather helm who will automatically approach you if you don’t take steps to avoid him who will tell you the same thing - you’ll probably wind up there having little to no idea what the fuck you’re supposed to be doing.
: On the way out, Domingo stops us because Oscar hired him to kill us because we took the golden sword without paying. Domingo’s weed powers are weak, and we quickly beat the shit out of him.
: I also remembered to do that quest with Lorenzo where he tries to lure you to some ruins only to try and kill you. We kick his ass with little fanfare.
: One other minor side thing I did before heading off to Harbor Town was stop by the Inquisition-held ruins outside the bandit camp. We are definitely strong enough to kick the guard’s ass now, and there’s a pretty decent item inside if you have lockpicking.
: This ruin has a very simple puzzle. There’s a couple of grave moths guarding a locked portcullis that’s opened via a switch on the ceiling.
: The game gives you a scroll of the Telekinesis spell, which you can use to hit that switch, but we want to save this for a required quest in Harbor Town. Instead, we can equip a bow and use that to hit the switch.
: There’s only two things in here we give a shit about, and one of them is that scroll. This bookstand is special, but only if you’re going the wizard route. Bookstands will give you 3 wisdom the first time you look at them.
: There’s a crystal ball inside the portcullis that gives you infinite telekinesis spells, so we use this to open the portcullis that came down over the door outside by toggling the switch again.
: The other item we want is this. This potion increases our max HP by 10, which is a not insignificant boost. I also haven’t eaten the 17 Druid’s Hemlocks we have, so we could get an even bigger boost that way.
: Here’s our current stat loadout. We have 16 wisdom because there’s a second bookstand in the farm we were in earlier that I looked at. I’m probably going to back and make a quick Rhobart run to get enough gold to get our strength up to 60, and then we can start putting points in sword fighting.
: Now we’re on our way to Harbor Town. There’s two ways we can get in: one that is intentional, and one that as it turns out is very unintentional. You can see that there’s two roads that lead there. One leads to the back gate, while the other leads to the Inquisition-held front gate.
: We’re going to head to the front gate first, because there’s a rather useful item there. The road is pretty clogged with stingrats and sea vultures, the latter of which are still annoying as fuck to fight.
: This is the front gate itself. We could head right in, but..
: There’s weed here, bringing us up to a total of 41 weed. We can now farm Rhobart that much more effectively, and we definitely want to do so because our training bill is going to be rather high, no pun intended.
: Nearby is Harbor Town’s.. harbor.. which has a few gold coins and some mussels in the water. There’s also a little camp nearby that’s not important right now, but will be once we leave Harbor Town.
: This little ramp-like area off to the side of the gate is where we want to go. There’s a single stingrat guarding it, but at this point stingrats are nothing to us.
: It’s hard to see because of this tree that’s in the way, but if we jump right here..
: We wind up on a rock formation right next to a low spot in the town’s gate. This is not an intentional way into the town - you’re supposed to use this spot to leave town rather than enter - but you can just barely make the jump up if you hit it at the right spot.
: This puts us right next to a guard who doesn’t seem to care that we’re just jumping into town. We’re actually entering the town right near the main Inquisition headquarters, which has a very important item just outside of it.
: To the right of the Inquisition building is this little bush. It doesn’t look like you should be able to get past it, but you can.
: Behind it is a skeleton who happens to be right next to a dig point.
: The treasure chest here contains one of the best free items in this game: the Ring of Stealth. This gives us the Sneak skill without us having to waste learning points on it. Sneak is used to get into people’s houses or other private buildings, which is outright necessary for doing a few of the quests here and still useful for stealing people’s shit with lockpicking otherwise.
: I jumped back out of Harbor Town, which is a lot harder than you’d think, and went back to the swamp to train. There is a place to train in Harbor Town, but I wanted to beat Rhobart up some more. We had just over 2,000 gold and it cost us 1,700 to put strength up by 20 and get two levels of sword fighting. We now have the counter parry (though it does not do damage) and a useless skill called the “lateral blow” that basically gives you a different attack animation if you attack immediately after dropping your guard. I also went and farmed Rhobart to get back to 2,000 gold.
: Side note, we’re now strong enough that we can kill Rhobart in a single hit, assuming we finagle it so he gets hit with the third hit of our combo chain.
: Other side note, I robbed Tristan’s farm because I could. As it turns out, he has a chest in his house with a set of “seaman’s clothes” which are basically a worse version of the worker’s clothes. They look like this and have no shoes. There’s also a Hero’s Crown behind his house that I missed, which means that we are DEFINITELY going into Alchemy sometime in Chapter 2.
: Right past the farm, on the way to the back door to Harbor Town, is a pretty good item that we can grab now that we’re strong enough. I stumbled upon it while grinding enemies, since we’re pretty close to a level up and I wanted to make sure we had enough points for alchemy.
: If you’re not using the Rhobart exploit or are using the fan patch, you probably won’t be strong enough to kill everything on the way to Harbor Town. The developers did this really insidious thing where most of the enemies on the way to the back gate are tutorial enemies, but they have one or two regular ones mixed in that will probably fuck you up. Just past where those wolves were is another one of these things. They’re called Thunder Lizards.
: There’s a chest past it which I was able to get to without aggroing it, and inside..
: Is the first amulet we can find that doesn’t totally suck. I know on my first run I found an amulet of frost resistance or some bullshit, but this will put us at over 200 HP when we started with like 90. We could get even higher if I remembered to eat all those Druid Hemlocks.
: I wasn’t able to get OUT without aggroing it, however. I dragged it to an Inquisition camp to see how many NPCs I could kill with it, but found out that while Thunder Lizards move very quickly and have tons of HP, they don’t hit very hard.
: The rest of the way there is pretty uneventful. There is an exit to a ghoul cave on the left side, but even with our loadout we’re not strong enough to kill them.
: This is the back door to Harbor Town. I took a slight detour because there’s a beach down below and I couldn’t remember if there was weed there or not.
: The answer is no. There’s a couple of those recolored grave moths meant to keep you from going to that island, which has nothing good on it. There’s a buried chest on it we can’t open, an ogreroot, and a hero’s crown guarded by a giant scorpion that can kill us in like three hits.
: For reference, I did manage to fuck with the scorpion’s AI and grab the crown without it doing anything.
: Back at the gate, we run into Leto, who wants 100 gold to let us into the town - but won’t let us out if we go in. The only reason I’m doing this is because it gives us the map for Harbor Town.
: We also had about 780 gold of random crap lying around, a lot of it discarded weapons from beating up Rhobart. Leto will let you sell stuff to him to get enough money to enter the town.
: This is Harbor Town.. or more precisely, the “gutter” section of Harbor Town.
: To our right is a farm that we’re going to have to come back to later if we want to do all the quests in Harbor Town.
: Underneath him is Arno, who is going to give us a hint as to what to do.. if we wanted to be a nerd-ass wizard.
: “How can I help?”
: “My wife is so sick. I fear the worst.”
: “What’s wrong with her?”
: “She’s feverish. I blame these cursed bloody ruins.”
: “Why? How did they make her ill?”
: “They came out of the ground right next to my damn farm. Next day, Martha caught this fever, and she’s got sicker since then. I don’t know what to do. Her only hope is Master Belschwur.”
: Belschwur is the NPC you’d talk to if we were planning on becoming a wizard, but fuck that shit. In fact, we’ll probably knock him unconscious at some point.
: “Who is Master Belschwur?”
: “A mage from the monastery. He spends his time at the Shrine of the Flame, back in the Gutters. He cares about poor farmers like us. No one else does.”
: His wife uses the same model and face as Rachel in the bandit camp. Hilariously enough, you can attack her and she’ll get out of bed and be ready to fight - in fact, I think if you do that she won’t go back to bed.
: Right away, we run into the first person who’s obviously with the Don - Delgado. He’s wearing bandit armor and has a sword.
: “Leto let you in, huh?”
: “Yes, I’m from outside.”
: “You’re breaking the Inquisitor’s new laws, you know that? You should be more careful. You tell the wrong people.. you could get yourself in trouble.”
: “You’ve had trouble with the law?”
: “Hah! The law is just an excuse to lock us all in the town. The Order wants to loot the ruins in peace. Once they’ve taken the last crumb of gold out of the ruins, they’ll let us out again. Don Esteban figured that out right away.”
: “What’s the order doing about the Don’s men?”
: “They’ll stop us where they can. Since they came here with their fancy white uniforms, they’ve never taken their eyes off us. They’re just waiting for us to step out of line then they’ll take us to the monastery.”
: “Keep your eye out for Sebastian. He’s always around, watching.”
: “We could. I have to scrape together a lot of gold for the Don. If I don’t send him something soon.. if I don’t get some gold in.. I’ll have problems with my own boys. If you help me, I can cut you in for a slice.”
: “What can I do?”
: “Hmm.. Costa the pawnbroker’s doing good business here in the Gutters. He’s preying on the farmers and stuffing his pockets with gold.”
: “So what do you need doing?”
: “Since the Order has been here, he hasn’t been paying his dues to the Don. Hired himself a bodyguard he has, and he pays the Inquisition’s taxes. What about the Don’s taxes, ey? Where’s our slice? Someone needs to make sure we get paid.”
: And now we’re on a quest to collect protection money. Again. This time though, it’s significantly harder and much, much shorter.
: Just past Delgado is Sebastian, a monk who automatically stops us if we talked to Delgado. He wants us to to the Order side of this quest, which is exactly the same except we give the gold to Sebastian and Delgado is forced out of Harbor Town. I should mention that Delgado is a trainer for Dexterity and Pickpocket, as well as Lockpicking.. but we’re already beyond what he can teach in that and Pickpocket is a useless skill that’s basically just a more roundabout way of knocking people out.
: The Order are a bunch of nerds who hate weed, and we’re now officially a weedlord, so let’s just beat Sebastian’s face in.
: The main reason we want to do this is for this staff he has, which does a whopping 46 damage compared to our current weapon’s 26. The Executioner’s Staff is a good weapon even though staves suck as a whole, simply because of how easy it is to get.
: One thing I should mention is that Sebastian and all Order NPCs have a very unique quirk to them. In most cases, if an NPC knocks you out, they’ll steal most of the gold you have on you. Order NPCs won’t. This, combined with the fact that NPCs regenerate health very slowly, can be abused to hell in several spots in Harbor Town. As you can see, Executioner Staves also sell for a good amount.
: Sebastian stands probably five feet away from Costa and his bodyguard. Costa is the one on the left. We COULD talk to the bodyguard first to lure him away and fight him alone, but fuck that shit, we’re a goddamn weedlord.
: We then turn the quest in to Delgado, putting us 1/4th of the way to being on the Don’s side. This is the overall objective of Harbor Town: doing certain quests either for the Order or for the Don. We’re going with the Don because the Don has weed.
: Anyway, before I finish this update off, I ate all of the Druid’s Hemlocks to get our HP up to 239. This is more than enough to ensure that we can handle anything in Harbor Town. I also found out that Eggs are a key food.. as it turns out, if you eat 10 of them you get a free point of strength, up to 5 at 50 eggs eaten. I’ll look into our egg supply next time.